The Flower Reader (51 page)

The hangman dropped the noose over his head and pulled it tight.

“I curse it in the devil’s name, that silver casket—whoever touches it or anything inside it will—”

The bailies on the ground dragged away the ladder the prisoner was standing on, and he lurched off into nothingness. The rope jerked tight with a ghastly twanging sound. Rannoch Hamilton kicked and writhed, twisting slowly. I could see his powerful shoulders straining at the rope binding his wrists.

The queen screamed.

Holy Saint Ninian, he was climbing—trying to climb on air, as if he were straining for steps to support his weight. He almost seemed to be finding…something…something to stand on. His body arched and strained and he twisted, twisted, the rope quivering.

The dark man just looked at Alexander for a moment. There was utter silence in the little church. Then with one well-practiced and ringing arc
of movement he swept his sword from its scabbard, plain workmanlike steel with no jewels or fancywork. He leveled it at Alexander’s heart. The dying light of the sun through the broken door edged the glittering blade with blood-red.

He was right—if it had not been for the casket, if Rothes had never sent him after me, if he and I had never met, he would not be dying at the end of a rope under a blue, blue sky.

You’re a gey beautiful woman; I’ll give you that. Like a wild white Barbary filly with long legs and a silk mouth and a mane all brown and gold. Do you remember what you said to me, at Granmuir?

My fault, my fault.

I’ve found the hiding place where my wife was keeping your casket, madame, and I’ve burned it all—the French sorcerer’s papers, your mother’s memorandum book, all of it. Now you’ll never—

It had all been a lie. Why? To get me away from the court? So he could force the truth about the casket out of me? Or had he actually cared about me, in some twisted, terrifying, empty fashion?

Slowly Rannoch Hamilton’s jerking and thrashing became like the swimming of a man in deep water, sluggish and effortful. His muscles began to twitch; his movements became spasmodic, less purposeful. Then he seemed to…lengthen. With sick horror I watched him actually grow longer as his muscles and sinews lost their tautness and gave way, his straining gave way, his last vestige of control over his flesh gave way.

Hooded and motionless—oh, thank God, motionless at last—Rannoch Hamilton’s body turned slowly until it was still, facing the queen’s platform.

The queen fainted.

I turned away and vomited.

Darnley threw his hat in the air. “The queen’s justice is done,” he cried, his voice thin against the roar of the crowd. “God save her grace!”

* * *

N
ICO WAS HOLDING ME
. Back at the Lawnmarket he had given me a towel and wine to rinse my mouth, then made me drink a cup of wine. He had lifted me onto Lilidh and walked beside her all the way back to Holyrood, murmuring to both Lilidh and me wordlessly, comfortingly. Now we were settled in the queen’s little supper room. The queen herself had changed out of her silver costume into a loose gown, and was eating a dish of cooked almond milk and sugar, thickened with rice. She had recovered herself much more quickly than I. The wine made me drowsy and dulled the edge of the horror. Mostly I was thinking about how the gold thread worked in rows on Nico’s doublet was prickly against my cheek.

“We shall plan your wedding, Marianette,” she said. “We will have to wait for Lent to be over, but it will give the flowers time to bloom, and you can read them for me. You can find some of that yellow flower—what did you call it?—and tell me what it really means.”

The last thing I wanted to think about just now was a wedding. I would stay with Jennet and Tante-Mar, and have my precious babies with me again, and when Jennet and Tante-Mar were able to travel we would all go home. I would marry Nico in the little church of Saint Ninian when I was ready, not when the queen directed. The queen thought she still had a hold over me, but she did not.

“For your wedding gift,” the queen said, “I will send Monsieur Laurentin’s dagger to my
belle-mère
Queen Catherine in France. She will know her assassin has been unmasked.”

“Perhaps there will be a wedding, perhaps not,” said Lady Margaret Erskine in her deliberate voice. She was stirring a cup of hot mulled wine with cream and spices, and the steam might have been the breath of a witch’s cauldron. “Mistress Leslie might choose not to marry Monsieur de Clerac after all.”

I closed my eyes. “I will,” I said.

“Of course she will,” the queen said.

The slow, calm movement of Nico’s breathing stopped. I felt him tense. It brought me back to myself.

“Do you think so?” Lady Margaret said. “I have a serving-man at Lochleven who tells a strange tale. Perhaps you can explain, Monsieur de Clerac, how it came about that you left Lochleven secretly, the very night Mistress Leslie revealed the hiding place of the silver casket. Perhaps you can tell us the reason you paid the servant to lie, and say you were in your chamber, and not well enough to ride to Edinburgh with the rest of us in the morning.”

I could hear the fire crackling, and Lady Margaret’s silver spoon going around and around and around in the cup of mulled wine. There was no other sound in the room.

Clove pinks…misfortune…an old woman with white in her hair, white she covered with jeweled coifs…

I remembered.

I had put the clove pinks in the niche with the silver casket, in the secret vault under Saint Margaret’s.

“Could it have been,” Lady Margaret went on inexorably, “that Mary of Guise told her mother how to find the secret vault under Saint Margaret’s church, and that her mother, your own grandmother, passed the secret on to you? Could it have been that you rode to Edinburgh in the night, unknown to us all, and took the casket from the vault? Could it be that you have actually had the silver casket in your possession from that moment to this?”

I sat up. My head was spinning. Of course it was a lie. Nico was too high in favor with the queen. The Earl of Moray was too deeply in disfavor. Lady Margaret would do anything, say anything, fabricate anything, for the sake of her half-royal son.

“I do not believe it,” I said.

Rinette, there is something I must tell you.

Is it good?

No.

Lady Margaret said, “My serving-man will testify that what he says is true.”

“Monsieur de Clerac,” the queen said at last. Not
mon cousin
. Not even
Sieur Nico
. She sounded genuinely shaken. “What have you to
say to this charge? Did you take my mother’s silver casket from the secret vault? Have you had it all this time?”

Nico took hold of my shoulders and gently put me apart from him. He stood up.

No, I thought. No, no.

“Yes,” he said. His voice was stark and steady. “And no. I did take the casket from the vault under Saint Margaret’s. I do have it now. I have not had it all this time—it has been in the safekeeping of your grandmother and mine, the Duchess of Guise, in France.”

“And did she open it?” Lord Darnley demanded. “Did she read the papers inside? Have you read the papers inside?”

“The casket was closed and locked when I sent it to Duchess Antoinette,” Nico said. He did not look at Darnley. “She gave it back to me locked again. Whether she looked at the papers I do not know, but I did not unlock it, or look at anything inside it.”

“You will give it to me at once,” the queen said. “I have waited to open this casket since the day I set foot back on Scottish soil, and I will have it now.”

“I cannot do that, madame,” Nico said. “Not until I have Duchess Antoinette’s permission.”

“I do not need her permission. The casket is mine.”

“I have written to her. When she replies, the casket will be yours.”

“You may leave the court until that day, then.” The queen’s eyes sparkled with anger. “And I forbid any marriage between you and Marianette.”

“That,” said Nico, with a sudden flash of answering anger, “is for Rinette herself to say.”

I was lost. The wine was making me sick and dizzy. I was not in the queen’s supper room at all, but in the kirk of Saint Giles, surrounded by Moray and Rothes and Rannoch Hamilton and a dozen men-at-arms with drawn swords.

Rinette, forgive me.

It is not your fault.

Yes. It is.

I never guessed he had meant it literally.

“Rinette,” he said again. It jolted me back. “I could not break my vow to Duchess Antoinette. Forgive me,
ma mie
.”

I stood up. The effects of the wine and the horror of Rannoch Hamilton’s death were gone. I was clear-minded and cold and utterly solitary in my bubble of stone.

“I am not your
mie
,” I said. My voice was shaking. “And I will never forgive you.”

“Y
ou must forgive him,
ma douce
,” Tante-Mar said. “You cannot live with so much sorrow and bitterness in your heart.”

She had suffered another fainting attack, and as Jennet had healed and grown stronger, Tante-Mar had grown frailer. I was terrified she would never come home to Granmuir with us. It had been difficult enough moving her to the pretty little house in the Canongate I had taken after the terrible day of Rannoch Hamilton’s hanging and Lady Margaret Erskine’s shocking revelation in the queen’s supper room. I could not stay at Holyrood after that. I did not know where Nico had gone, although I knew Tante-Mar knew. She had been sending messages back and forth with him, with Gill’s help and Una MacAlpin’s.

“I do not have sorrow and bitterness in my heart,” I said. “I am living perfectly well.”

She smiled. “You have taken care of us all. Even so, I hear you crying in the night.”

“I do not cry in the night.” It was a lie. “Perhaps it is Seilie you hear.”

“Ah. Perhaps.”

We sat together for a while. I looked out the window into the little back garden. There was a plum tree, young and straight, and it was blossoming. I remembered the gnarled old plum tree in the churchyard of Saint Mary’s in Stoneywood, where I had rescued Seilie from Lady Huntly’s witch-women. Plum blossoms for faithfulness.

Whose faithfulness? To whom?

“I ask you only one thing,
ma douce
.” She put her thin, veined hand over mine. I no longer wore the bandages, but the knife scars on my palms and fingers were red and tender. “Imagine you had been brought up in a great religious house, with the significance of holy vows all around you every day. Imagine you had made a vow upon holy relics to someone you loved, someone to whom you owed a great debt. Imagine this vow would do good for a whole kingdom, and for a young queen who is still struggling to find her way.”

“Why are you—”

“Shh.” She patted my hand. “Let me finish. Then imagine…you are forced to choose between this vow, which has been your whole life, and doing great harm to someone you love with all your heart. It was a terrible choice, Rinette.”

“Why are you defending him?”

“He is my nephew, Rinette, just as you are my niece—have you ever thought of that? I have been working it out since we were all at Granmuir together after Christmas and he told us his true parentage. Your mother, of course, is my half sister, and the Duke of Longueville was your mother’s half brother. He married Mary of Guise, who was Duke Francois of Guise’s full sister. By marriage, then, Duke Francois was my half brother, and Monsieur Nico is my nephew.”

“I am your niece by blood. It is not the same.”

She smiled again. “No, of course it is not the same,
ma douce
. But it is the business of old women, is it not, to keep account of family ties? In fact, you and Monsieur Nico are related in the second degree
of affinity, and cannot marry without a dispensation from the Holy Father.”

“It is a good thing, then, that we will never marry.”

“Perhaps. I am not asking you to do so. Only to see him, and talk to him, and, if you can, forgive him.”

“He
knew
,” I burst out like a wounded child. “He knew all along. Tante-Mar, I
trusted
him. I trusted him so much that I—”

I could not say it. Tante-Mar would be shocked if she knew what Nico and I had done in the Mermaid Tower.

“That you took him into your bed?” she said placidly. “I am not such a dried-up old maid as you might think, Rinette, and I have eyes in my head. If you could trust him so much then, can you not trust him now, at least enough to talk to him?”

“No,” I said. “I cannot.”

T
HE PLUM TREE DROPPED ITS
blossoms and began to unfold its leaves. Everyone in Edinburgh was talking about Lord Darnley being sick with the pox at Stirling Castle, and the queen tending him with her own hands. This was a great intimacy for a queen. Did she intend to marry him? Had Nico had his letter from Duchess Antoinette in France, giving him permission at last to give the queen the casket, and had she read the prophecies of Master Nostradamus about the
quatre maris
? Was Darnley one of them?

My hair grew a little. It felt softer, not so spiky. My bitterness was softening, too, however much I tried to hold on to it. I put aside my nun’s wimple and wore a little velvet cap, like a boy. My hands continued to heal, and I began to work in the little walled garden, wearing gloves for protection. It was a city garden with worn-out soil, and it had been sadly neglected by the previous tenants of the house; with Gill’s help I enriched the planting beds with manure from the stables, chopped straw, and vegetable leavings from the kitchen. I planted marjoram and borage, fennel and thyme. I planted lilies of the valley for Tante-Mar, wild roses for Màiri, and maiden pinks for Kitte. The
garden slowly came to life. I tried to plant my own windflowers but they drooped and died. I knew I was not meant to stay in Edinburgh much longer.