The Flower Reader (6 page)

I turned the key and put back the casket’s lid. Alexander leaned forward, his breath sweet and warm against my cheek.

There were still a few dried petals inside. I brushed them away—they clung to my fingers and I shook them off—and took out a stack of papers, sewn together with black thread into a sort of small book. There was a dark spattered drop beside the stitches—a blot of ink? Or blood, a needle thrust unwisely through the paper, a finger pricked?

“Do you recognize the handwriting?” Alexander took the packet and turned over the pages. The paper was beginning to discolor. “It is all in some sort of cipher. But look at the headings on each page.”

“It is the queen’s hand.” Was the drop of blood the queen’s blood? I read off the single words at the tops of the pages as Alexander turned them over. “‘Hamilton. Stewart. Gordon. Hepburn. Douglas.’ She is writing things about all the great lords, secret things.”

“Secrets they would rather keep hidden, I suspect.” He turned over the pages with more and more excitement. “Look, a woman’s name—Margaret Erskine. Her husband’s favorite mistress, Lord James’s mother. That is one I would like to read. Do you think we can decipher them?”

“No,” I said. “They are for the young queen, not for us. Please, Alexander, put them back.”

He laughed and laid the book of papers back in the casket. “There’s another one,” he said. “No, not a book, a packet, papers folded up tight—God’s belly-bone, sweetheart, I have never seen anything quite like this before. Red cords tied together in a net all around it, and at least a dozen red wax seals. Unbroken, so even the old queen never opened it. Do you recognize the device?”

Imprinted deeply into the wax, a sun and five stars.

Over two fixed stars, three superior planets conjuncted in opposition to the sun
.

“I recognize it,” I said.

“Well? Whose is it?”

Reluctantly I said, “A French doctor and seer with whom the queen had correspondence from time to time. Monsieur de Nostredame.”

“Nostredame—do you mean Nostradamus? The man who writes the almanacs and the books of prophecies everyone is mad to read?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why he was sending sealed packets to the queen. I thought the Médicis woman in France was his patron.”

“She is, but he wrote to the queen regent as well. Perhaps others. Alexander, put it back. I should not have opened the casket.”

“Someone has written on the outside,” he said. “It is in the same hand as the ciphers, so it must have been the queen.
Pour Marie seule—les quatre maris
. For Mary alone—the four husbands. He must have prophesied the young queen will marry four times. Well, everyone says the little king of France is a sickly stripling—perhaps she will have three more husbands.”

“Alexander, it is for the young queen alone. Please put it back.”

He grinned at me. “Not even a tiny peek? Queens’ husbands are great matters.”

“Not even a tiny peek.” A chill had run through me. “Put it back, quickly. These secrets are not for us, Alexander. I do not want to meddle in anything to do with Monsieur de Nostredame.”

He put the packet back in the casket. I could tell he was reluctant. Then he kissed me and sat back. “Put your casket away then, sweetheart. Let us have some more wine. It is almost time for supper, I think, and we had best put on some clothes.”

I closed the casket and locked it, then jumped up from the bed and carried it over to my particular hiding place, behind a loose stone in the wall under the window. I had been hiding things there for as
long as I could remember, dolls, bracelets, dried flowers, bits of poetry. Gran’auntie’s herbals were there, crammed with crumbling pressed leaves and flowers, scribbled with bits of folklore, commentary, and poetry in her tiny bird-track handwriting. I loved looking at the herbals.

I never looked at the one other thing left of my childhood treasures: my mother’s storybook. Perhaps inspired by Gran’auntie, she had written it herself and drawn the pictures, colored and gilded them; the tales, she had said, were country folktales her own mother had told her and
contes-de-fées
she had learned from other books. How I had loved it when she read to me, when she came home from the court with my father. Even though their visits were rare, I memorized the stories and knew when she left out so much as one word.

No one knew about my secret hiding place, not even Jennet or Tante-Mar. But Alexander was my heart, my husband, my own flesh. I had no secrets from him.

I put the casket and the key on top of the books, and fitted the stone back into place. Then I hurried to wrap myself in my night-gown, so I would be presentable when Jennet arrived with our supper.

F
rom that day to this, here is what happened.

The poor little French king died in December, to the surprise of no one. This left the young queen of Scots a widow at eighteen. The Lords of the Congregation were firmly in the saddle here in Scotland, and no one dreamed that Mary of Guise’s Catholic daughter would do anything but find another Catholic husband with another European crown.

At Granmuir, we were far from crowns and politics. We brought in the harvest on the mainland and sheared the sheep; I laughed at Alexander, who was happy to spend our estates’ revenues on fine clothing, horses and hawks and dogs, but looked at me with blank horror when I suggested he shear a sheep or two himself. We celebrated our first Christmastide, and around Epiphany I began to suspect I was with child. By the beginning of Lent I was certain. When I told Alexander, we cried together for the joy of it.

By Easter Day, however, he had grown restless and cross-grained. He was not used to such isolation, he said. He was not born to be a countryman. He rode to Aberdeen twice, on some matters of
business—to do with his estate at Glenlithie, he said. He began to talk of the pleasures and prestige of court life. I reminded him that with the queen in France and the Lords of the Congregation ruling the country, there was no court. We had sharp, childish quarrels and reconciled blissfully in the Mermaid Tower, with the sea roaring around us.

In June the news broke that the queen of Scots was coming back to Scotland after all. Her marriage negotiations were being thwarted at every turn by Catherine de Médicis; perhaps the queen of Scots thought that in Scotland she would have more freedom to find a new husband. Perhaps she simply wanted to be queen of her own court again. In any case, the Lords of the Congregation turned their Protestant coats and invited her back, Catholic or no, because her pretensions to the English crown gave them a bargaining chip to use with the queen of England.

At Granmuir I began to make plans to go to Edinburgh to meet her.

Tante-Mar and Jennet did everything they could to dissuade me. Alexander forbade me, with frightful oaths. The journey down to the capital, he said, would be exhausting, agonizing, and dangerous to me and to the baby. He would not allow me to go. He would lock me in the Mermaid Tower before he allowed it. It puzzled me that he was so determined to remain at Granmuir when all through the spring and summer he’d been pining to get away.

For the first time, we quarreled a true quarrel. I swore I would go to Edinburgh. I would go if I had no one but my mare Lilidh to accompany me. I am not sure why I was so determined. Yes, I had promised the old queen, but I had already broken my promise to her twice—once when I fled Edinburgh with the casket instead of hiding it under Saint Margaret’s, and once when I showed it to Alexander. Perhaps it was because my poor promise was so broken and tattered that I was determined to fulfill what remained of it.

I was only sure that I would go, and give Mary Stuart the silver casket. It was as simple as that. Alexander gave in eventually, and we went together.

It took ten days, because we rode slowly and rested along the way; when we finally arrived in Edinburgh I was exhausted and sore. We settled ourselves at the Earl of Huntly’s town house with the rest of the Gordons to await the queen. She arrived on a Tuesday, the nineteenth day of August, in the year of Our Lord 1561, a day or two before she was expected. The royal apartments at Holyrood Palace were not even prepared, but only a palace would do for her; so after descending upon an assemblyman’s house at Leith for her midday dinner—can you imagine the panic of the assemblyman’s wife?—to Holyrood she went.

Edinburgh went mad with excitement.

Alexander and I went to Holyrood that very afternoon. I told her ladies I had a gift to present to her, a relic of her own mother, who had charged me to keep it safely against the young queen’s return. I did not tell them what it was—that, I thought, could wait until I was in the queen’s own presence. Oh, but the queen was
très fatiguée
, her ladies replied. She would see me next week or the week after. She was sure that since I had kept her dear mother’s treasure safe for a year and more, I could keep it safe for a little while longer.

I was furious. I had come all the way from Granmuir; I had quarreled with my darling Alexander and risked my precious baby to come. I was tired and aching and humiliated. Since I had been with child, my emotions seemed wilder, closer to the surface.

I decided to fulfill my original promise and no more: I would put the casket in Mary of Guise’s secret hiding place under Saint Margaret’s. Then I would write the queen of Scots a letter telling her the whole story, and go home.

E
VEN
E
DINBURGH
C
ASTLE
, high on its ancient rock over the unsettled city, was crammed with people who had come to the capital to welcome the new queen. Fortunately most of them, including the men-at-arms and the palace servants, were taking advantage of the excitement to carouse and play the pipes in the palace yard. Alexander
and I were able to slip into the great hall of the royal palace without anyone paying a blink of attention.

A passageway,
Mary of Guise had whispered with her last breath.
From the vaults under the great hall. Never tell anyone—

Alexander carried the casket in a saddlebag of plain leather over his shoulder; in his hands he carried two lanterns. I had a few flowers tucked in my pouch, picked from the sadly neglected knot garden in St. Anne’s Yard outside the south wall of Holyrood: roses and clove pinks, rosemary from the old queen’s overgrown topiary, and wildflowers, marguerites and yarrow and ragged robin, which had crept in as wildflowers will do. The rosemary was for the memory of the old queen, the cultivated roses for the young queen. The color was right, pale pink, but the flowers themselves were wrong—did it mean the young queen did not belong at Holyrood? The wildflowers, chance-blown, chance-found, would tell the fate of the casket itself.

“Look here,” I said. “By the fireplace.” I crouched down, clumsy with the babe in my belly, and ran my fingers over the paneling. Up from the floor twelve what? There were no lines, no seams in the polished panelwork. No crosses evident in the rich grain of the wood. When I tapped and pressed at random, nothing happened.

“I do not see why you think you must follow the old queen’s directions now, sweetheart,” Alexander said. He sounded sulky and restless; he had wanted to stay at Holyrood with the courtiers who were flocking about the young queen like sheep to a bellwether ewe. “And I do not want to return to Granmuir without at least being presented to the queen.”

“I want to go home,” I said. I could see the irony—two weeks ago I had been quarreling with him because I wanted to come to Edinburgh—but I was still angry over the queen’s snub and I did not care that I was inconsistent. I began measuring up from the floor and over from the side by finger widths. Nothing. “Are you not even a little curious about a secret vault under Saint Margaret’s? The chapel is hundreds of years old and they say there were other holy places
before it, on that very spot, from the times before the Christians came. A vault underneath—it could be thousands of years old.”

“Thousands of years of rats and spiders. And anyway, Edinburgh Castle and Saint Margaret’s are built on solid rock. Not likely the savages could have chipped a vault underneath with bones and stones.”

I measured up with hand widths. Fingers together. Nothing. Fingers spread wide—and there it was. Worked so intricately into the grain of the wood one would never see it unless one knew exactly where to look—a tiny cross, not a double-barred
croisette de Lorraine
but a cross saltire, Saint Andrew’s cross, the mark of Scotland from the time of the Picts. The wooden paneling was comparatively new, but whoever had carved the little cross had been marking something ancient and singular.

“I found it,” I said. Alexander leaned down to look. I pressed the spot firmly and felt the panel shift. With an eerie shrieking sound it turned and revealed a narrow opening.

“You will never fit through, sweetheart, not with the baby.”

“I can fit.” I began to wriggle through the opening. Hold still, I thought, my littlin, my bairnie-ba. Press close. We’re going on a great adventure. One last deep breath and I was through.

“Light,” I said.