The Flower Reader (52 page)

Then Nico came.

He found me in the garden, kneeling by the bed of rosemary under the plum tree. My apron was grass-stained and my gloved hands were covered with dirt. Seilie was with me, digging a hole of his own, hunting for voles.

“Jennet and Madame Loury allowed me to come in,” he said. His voice sounded worn, as if it had been scoured thin by explanations and confessions. “But I will not stay if you ask me to leave.”

I sat back on my heels and looked up at him. I opened my mouth to say,
I do not want to talk to you
. But the garden forestalled me, the little garden so newly come back to life, and to my own surprise I said, “You tried to tell me.”

“I should have told you sooner. I should have told you at Granmuir.”

“Yes. You should have.”

We looked at each other for a moment in silence.

“After you escaped from Laurentin, I should have told you,” he said. “I did try. But you had been through hell itself that day, and you were so tired. I thought…in the morning. But from that moment there was never an opportunity.”

He did not call me his
mie
. He did not even speak my name.

I thought of that day, and how I had stabbed Blaise Laurentin and then run down the alley with my little ones. I saw it all, and— Suddenly I saw it all.

“You were there,” I said. “In the alley. It was not just chance. Blaise Laurentin found out somehow you had the casket. That is why he wanted me and Màiri and Kitte. It was you he intended to trade us to, for the silver casket.”

“Yes,” he said.

“You had a saddlebag over your shoulder. You had the casket with you. You were going to give it to him.”

“Yes.”

“Despite your holy vow.”

He smiled a little. I felt a pang of the feeling I had never thought to feel again. “Yes. Despite my holy vow. I have something for you.”

He turned back the flap of the velvet pouch at his belt and took out a chain of jewels—of turquoises! My mother’s turquoises!

I blinked, and saw Blaise Laurentin again, holding my sheared hair with my bloodied veil and the blue-green stones woven and braided into the coils.

“He gave your hair to me,” Nico said. “And Màiri’s cap. As proof. I wanted to kill him then, but I did not know where he was holding you.”

I took the chain. “What did you do with my hair?” I whispered. It was a foolish question, but I was compelled to ask. “Where is Màiri’s cap?”

“I kept them,” he said. “I was afraid…I was afraid it might be all I would ever have…I was afraid he had hurt you, or would hurt you.”

For some obscure reason I was comforted to know that my poor hair was safe. I ran the turquoises through my fingers.

“I have forgiven her,” I said. “My mother. I think now I understand a little how she felt when my father died, and why she went to the Benedictines at Montmartre.”

He nodded. Seilie went over to him and sat in front of him, looking up at him with a tongue-lolling hound smile. Seilie had always loved Nico. Nico reached down and stroked Seilie’s soft ears.

After a moment he said, “I will tell you the whole thing, from the beginning, if you will allow me to.”

I stood up and brushed grass and soil and bits of rosemary from my apron. The scent of the crushed rosemary was sharp, astringent, cleansing. I breathed it in deeply. I said, “Very well. I will listen.”

“After Mary of Guise died, may God rest her soul—”

He crossed himself. I did the same.

“—I realized almost at once the casket was missing. No one
knew what had become of it. Later that year, in October, I went back to France with her body, and then to Joinville to report to Duchess Antoinette.”

“And she placed you in the young queen’s household.”

“She did. She knew the secret of the vault under Saint Margaret’s—her daughter had written it all to her, in cipher, and told her the vault was her hiding place for a special collection of papers. Duchess Antoinette also knew of her daughter’s correspondence with Nostradamus. But she did not know there was a sealed packet from Nostradamus in the casket—not until she received a letter.”

He stopped. I said, “From Alexander.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose I must forgive him, too.” It came out all in a rush. I could not stop myself. “Tante-Mar says I cannot live with such sorrow and bitterness in my heart.”

Nico took a step forward, as if he would touch me, even take me in his arms. But only one step. He did not touch me. He said, “Rinette. There are no words for me to say how sorry I am for all of it. There is no penance I can do that will ever be enough.”

“What Alexander did was not your fault. Go on, Nico.”

“We learned this Alexander Gordon of Glenlithie was married to Marina Leslie of Granmuir. I knew you from the old queen’s household, and that is how I knew she had given you the casket. I thought at first you were complicit with your husband in offering to sell it.”

“I never was. I showed it to him, showed him the hiding place. Oh, I loved him so much. I never dreamed—” I choked on tears. I thought I had cried all my tears for Alexander long ago.

“We knew he had offered it to a number of people, in order to increase the price. Duchess Antoinette required me to swear a vow, on holy relics of Saint Louis, that I would find the casket and give it to her, and that I would support Queen Mary, with my life if need be.”

“And you are monk enough to be bound by such a vow.”

He looked surprised. After a moment he said, “I suppose I am. We assumed you had it at Granmuir.”

“And that is why you befriended me. Why you offered to help me find Alexander’s murderer.”

“Yes,” he said. “At first.”

“Is that why you made an excuse to come to Granmuir when the queen rode north to confront the Earl of Huntly? Did you hope for an opportunity to search for the casket?”

“No,” he said. I was hurting him more with every question, but the questions had to be asked and answered. “I hoped you would tell me, yes. But I swear to you, Rinette, I would never have searched without your knowledge.”

“You hoped I would tell you.”

“Yes. I asked you, do you remember? In the bakeshop.”

I looked down at my gloved hands. I could almost feel his thumb running lightly over my knuckles.
You would be safest if you would give her the casket now, with no conditions
.

“I refused you.”

“You refused me. It never occurred to me to think the old queen had told you the secret of the hidden vault, or that you had put the casket there. Until that night on Lochleven, when you confessed that was where you had hidden it.”

“When they threatened to force me into marriage with Rannoch Hamilton unless I confessed it.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And even so, knowing what they would do, you rode ahead and reached Edinburgh before us. You went down into the vault and took the casket. What did you do with it, Nico? Did you have it hidden at Holyrood when you came to Saint Giles’s Kirk to watch them give me to Rannoch Hamilton against my will?”

“No,” he said. His whole body had tensed, as if he were being flayed alive. “I had already sent it on to France, to Duchess Antoinette, by a special messenger. She did not want the young queen to see what was in it, not until she herself had examined it all—she feared the young queen would simply give it to Moray.”

“At that particular moment, she would have.”

“If I had still had it, Rinette, I would have given it up to them that day in the church, vow or no vow. I would have done anything to save you from being forced to marry Rannoch Hamilton.”

I remembered him telling me about his mother’s forced marriage, in the gardens at Granmuir.
Her new husband mistreated her, and less than a year later she was dead
, he had said. How had he felt, standing there in Saint Giles’s Kirk, seeing it all happening again and helpless to stop it?

Tante-Mar’s voice:
It was a terrible choice
.

It was. It had marked him.

“I did not die,” I said. Something had changed in my heart. I was not telling him that out of anger. I was telling him to reassure him.

“For which I thanked God on my knees, when Madame Loury wrote to me from Granmuir to tell me you had come home.”

“She
wrote
to you?”

He smiled. Each time he smiled, it was a little less sad and tired. Each time I felt another pang of remembered affection. “She did. Why do you think I came back to Scotland?”

“I thought Duchess Antoinette sent you.”

“She would have sent someone, because with Lennox back in Scotland she knew Darnley would be next. It was time for the young queen to see what Nostradamus had predicted, and what her mother had written. I asked her to make me her messenger, and she decided it was also time to tell the queen I was her cousin.”

“But you did not give the queen the casket, not at first.”

“No. My instructions were to observe the situation with Darnley—Duchess Antoinette has not opened the
quatre maris
prophecies, so she does not know whether Nostradamus has anything to say about Darnley, but she herself has great suspicions. I was to be certain the queen would not allow Darnley access to the casket before I gave it to her.”

“She will give it to him. She is beside herself with infatuation—she is waiting upon him with her own hands at Stirling, where he is sick with the pox.”

“So I have heard as well. Even so, after Lady Margaret forced my hand with the truth, I wrote to Duchess Antoinette. I told her everything—that I wished to leave the court, leave her service. That I would send the casket back to her, or leave it in the vault under Saint Margaret’s, or give it to the queen. Today I received her answer.”

I took a breath. “And what was it?”

He bent down and stroked Seilie’s head again. “I will never be entirely free,” he said. “I am half Guise, and I have no other blood connections. But she has released me from my vow, and asked me only one further thing: that I see the casket safely into the young queen’s hands.”

I turned and walked around the little garden. I listened to it, newly enriched and planted, whispering with life. I breathed in the scents of fennel and thyme. I stepped on the blue flowers of the borage; it smelled of honey and seawater.
Courage,
it whispered.
Courage and strength and simplicity. Truth, sharp as a knife
.

“Where is the casket now?” I asked.

“It is on the small table beside Madame Loury’s bed, in your own front room,” he said. “Mary of Guise gave it to you, and I give it back to you, so you can fulfill your own promise and give it to the queen yourself. I know it will not take away the pain and sorrow you have suffered, Rinette, but you are alive and safe with your children, and it is all I have to give.”

I bowed my head. He had defeated me. All the love I had ever felt swept back into my heart, and the power of it almost knocked me off my feet. I did not trust my voice, and so I took off my gloves and dropped them on the grass and held out my scarred hands.

He took them. He folded them between his own and pressed them to his heart.

“Je t’aime, ma mie,”
he said very softly.

We stood there in the garden, in the April sunlight, with the scents of rosemary and borage and thyme surrounding us. After a while, we went indoors. In the front room, I knelt by Tante-Mar’s
bed. I did not even look at the casket on the table. Such an insignificant thing, to have caused such pain and loss.

“You were right, Tante-Mar,” I said.

She put her hand on my head, brushing back the wisps of my hair as she might have done when I was a child. “I will write to Père Guillaume,
mes douces
,” she said to me and to Nico at once, “and ask him to send to Rome for your dispensation.”

I
was summoned to Stirling Castle on the Monday after Easter to present the silver casket to the queen.

Her finest gilded chair had been set up in the enormous hall; her greatest cloth of estate, made of golden tissue lined with red satin and embroidered with lions and crowns in red and gold silk thread, had been brought from Holyrood. It was a gray, rainy day, unexpectedly chilly for the middle of April, and hundreds of candles blazed. Fires had been built up in two of the five fireplaces, casting light and shadows over the dais. Outside the large side windows black storm clouds were gathering.

Six trumpeters and six pipers played as the queen processed in, dazzling in more cloth of gold and with a mantle and train of crimson velvet trimmed with ermine. On her brow was the crown of Scotland, Scottish gold and gemstones and freshwater pearls, worn as a circlet without the half arches,
monde
, and cross. I had not seen her since the day Rannoch Hamilton had been hanged. She was beautiful in an unearthly way, and I felt as if I did not know her at all.

Lord Darnley was with her, walking by her side as if he were
already her consort. His fevers and agues had apparently subsided, but his handsome white-skinned face was still disfigured by the lingering red marks of his illness. Edinburgh buzzed with gossip that he was suffering from the pox and only calling it measles to reassure the queen.