The Flower Reader (7 page)

Alexander passed me the lanterns and the bag with the casket, then turned and stepped sideways through the opening so easily he might have been performing a
ripresa
as part of a court dance. I could have smacked him. We both looked down: stone steps, rough-cut and thick with dust, spiraled away into what seemed the depths of the earth. There was no handrail.

“Take care,” Alexander said. “I will go first, and manage the lanterns and the casket.”

I kept one hand against the wall and the other stretched out in front of me, to catch Alexander’s shirt if I should slip. The shape of his shoulders was so familiar and so beloved, and at the same time with his face turned away he might have been a stranger. It seemed
as if we went around and down and around and down forever. At last we reached the bottom.

“Follow the crosses,” I said.

The lanterns cast ghostly shapes and shadows on the rough-hewn stone. There had been vaults under the palace and the upper ward for a hundred years and more, since James Stewart, the second of the name, but this was different—this was a narrow passageway chipped out of the living rock, much older than the vaults. Every hundred steps or so I saw another cross. Seeping water and the passage of time had worn away the sharp edges of the carvings.

“I wonder if there is treasure hidden away in the secret chamber.” At last Alexander seemed to be falling under the spell of the old queen’s secret. “Why would they do all the work of making these tunnels, if not to hide something valuable?”

We went on. The walls of the passageway began to look different; the stone seemed molded or melted, and no longer bore any mark of tools. The rock both underfoot and overhead was curved, and there were narrow ledges like steps at the sides. Three more crosses and we came out into a chamber. The light from the lanterns flickered over rounded walls and an arched vault overhead with bubbles and drips like an upside-down pot of porridge. Under our feet the rock was smooth as polished marble, with deep cracks running at random angles. The air had been getting harder and harder to breathe, and here in the eerie empty chamber it was thick and stale and smelled of stone and rainwater and aeons of time.

Alexander put the lanterns down and crossed himself. I wrapped my arms around the round weight of the baby. It was very still, as if it could feel awe even in my womb.

“How did it come to be?” Alexander whispered. “It is like a bubble in a bog, only all in solid rock. The floor’s like melted sugar that’s been cooled too fast and crackled.”

“I do not know. I wonder who made the crosses, and how they knew St. Margaret’s was overhead. Look, there is a niche in the wall.”

We crossed the chamber. The niche was clearly man-made; there
were tool marks. I took the branch of blue rosemary flowers and the pink rose blossoms out of my pouch and put them inside the niche. The rosemary had remained fresh, its scent sharp and astringent, but the roses had wilted. The young queen, then, would not have the strength and purpose of her mother.

“Put the casket in,” I said.

Alexander took the casket out of the leather saddlebag. The light from the two lanterns played over the silver—freshly polished just before we left Granmuir—and the repoussé ribbons worked into the casket’s domed lid appeared to twist and flicker. He put it in the niche, cushioned by the rosemary and the roses.

“Now let us get back aboveground, sweetheart,” he said. “I am feeling faint and the lanterns will not burn much longer. The air is dead.”

“A moment.” I took the rest of the flowers out of my pouch. Clove pinks, yarrow, and ragged robin. Half the meaning of the flowers was in which ones chose to present themselves. The other half was myth and legend, shaped and deepened by Gran’auntie’s teaching and by what the flowers themselves whispered.

The clove pinks were variegated, almost black at their hearts but with white edging their jagged red-violet petals. They had remained fresh and their distinctive spicy scent strong.
Misfortune,
they breathed.
Bad luck
. Jagged streaks of white—old age, an old woman with white in her hair, white she covered with jeweled coifs. Mary of Guise, perhaps? The young queen, many years from now? I myself, at a great age? Whoever the old woman was, she and the casket and bad luck would be folded together like the clove pinks’ petals.

And then the ragged robin, sunrise pink, its narrow, deeply lobed petals as shaggy as a moor pony. Wit and ardor—whose?
The next person who touches the casket will have a fierce heart and a clever tongue
.
Me?
I thought in return.
Not you,
the ragged robin whispered.
Not you
.

Alexander, then. Surely he has a fierce heart and a clever tongue.

The ragged robin was silent.

I turned my attention to the last blossom, the yarrow. Tight
clusters of small white flowers smelling of cabbage leaves. Some called it the devil’s nettle, but the flower itself whispered of witches—
witchcraft, spells, incantations, and fear
. And at the same time, confusingly—
a dream of one’s own true love
.

My hands shook as I packed the flowers around the casket. Misfortune, witchcraft, fear, and even possibly some unknown person taking the casket from the niche. Some other person who knew the secret of the passageway and the crosses. Perhaps not all of it was true. Sometimes the flowers were wrong. Sometimes I myself was wrong in what I heard, or how I interpreted it.

“Now we can go, my love,” I said. “I am fainting for fresh air as well.”

W
E MADE OUR WAY BACK
through the passageways. As I climbed the stairs my legs were shaking and the baby was heavy inside me. Back through the narrow secret door into the great hall of the royal palace. In the fresh air the lanterns burned brightly again. I pushed the panel shut and the hidden lock clicked.

“Listen to the pipes,” Alexander said. He had thrown his head back like a restive colt, ready to run. Clearly he was longing to be part of the excitement, to dance and eat and drink with the rest of the city. “Let us go down into the street and find a tavern with good wine and a meat pie or two. You have not eaten all day, sweetheart.”

It was true. Perhaps that was why I felt so faint and dizzy. Perhaps that was why my belly was cramping.

“Only for a little while.” I could hear the edge of a whine in my own voice and it made me angry at myself. “Some food, yes. Then I must sleep. Please, Alexander.”

“You felt well enough to wander through miles of vaults and tunnels under the castle,” he said. “I went with you. I helped you. Now you are too tired for a bit of enjoyment for me?”

I said nothing. In silent animosity we made our way out into the upper ward. There is Saint Margaret’s, I thought, there is the
hedgerow where I picked hawthorn and woodbine and sweetbriar the night the old queen died. Hawthorn for death, woodbine for binding, sweetbriar for joy to come. What joy? Coming when?

We crossed the castle yards and went down the long steps. By the time we passed through the Lawnmarket to the High Street I was sweating. The August night was warm and humid and the street was packed with people; torches streamed fire and soot. The screeching of the pipes and rebecs and the chanting of psalms were jarring. The individual familiar smells of sweat and smoke, spilled wine and hot meat from the cookshops, combined into an overpowering and stomach-turning stench.

“Alexander,” I said. I had to scream, or try to scream, to make him understand. “I am going to be sick.”

“A fine time to be sick,” he shouted back petulantly. “All right. We will go back to Huntly’s house. There will be people there to look after you.” He didn’t say,
And then I can come back out and do some proper celebrating
, but he might as well have. “We should have stayed there in the first place, and your wretched casket be damned. Come on; it is just a little farther.”

He put one arm around me and used his other hand to push passersby aside. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to walk. The ache in my back was fierce. Just a few more steps. A few more steps.

“Make way!” Alexander said. “This lady is unwell. Make way—”

He broke off with a strange sound, half shriek, half exhalation. His arm fell away from my waist and he lurched to one side. I staggered and opened my eyes and saw the flash of a dagger’s hilt and a flood of glistening black in the torchlight, bursting from his throat. His eyes were open, shocked more than anything, not angry or frightened. Blessed Saint Ninian, it was blood, Alexander’s blood—
blood on the hawthorn, blood and death
—it was hot and sticky and smelled like salt and rust and raw meat and it was all over my breasts and arms. The spurting slowed. He tried to speak—his lips moved but there was nothing but a grunt of air and a bubbling from the nightmare slash across
his throat. The shock in his eyes hardened into blankness and he collapsed.

I caught him as he fell. His weight dragged me to the stones of the high street and pinned me there. I tried to scream but I had no breath. I heard someone laugh and say, “He’s drunk.” A filthy boot struck my cheek as another man pushed past. I sobbed and tried to curl up to protect the baby. More boots, stepping on my hair, crushing my headdress, tearing my skirt. The smell of the blood was overwhelming, and I retched in the street. My belly rippled and contracted.
Alexander, Alexander. God help me, my bairnie, I am sorry, sorry, sorry…

The boots stopped. Shouts, and the unmistakable sound of a blade being drawn, the whistle of steel against leather. A torch falling. Kicked away, but a shoe, not a boot, a shoe of fine soft and polished leather, a long leg with a silk stocking gartered in silver, standing over me and stretching up as if it would never end. Painfully I turned my head. The torch rolled and struck flashes of light off the guard and pommel of a sword, slicing through the air in a circle and creating a magic space of safety around me. Gilding, scrollwork, silver inlay. A hand in a black leather glove. Hair like fire. Angel or demon?

Somewhere a bell rang.

The pain in my belly was tearing me apart.

Nothing more.

A
lexander, Alexander…

I felt hot and sick and too light to keep my body connected to the earth. I smelled blood. Was it Alexander’s blood, glistening in the torchlight?

“We must stop the blood.” It was a man’s voice, French-accented, unfamiliar. “If she continues to bleed like this she will die.”

So no. The blood was my own. I floated higher.

When I looked down, time was wrong. It was a year ago, a lifetime ago, and there I was in the upper ward of Edinburgh Castle the night the old queen died, holding my finger over a mass of hawthorn.
A drop of blood fell, black in the moonlight. Hawthorn meant death, but there was no blood in the queen’s dying; was someone else to die as well?

Oh, Alexander. Oh, my dear love. Oh, no, oh, no—

I opened my eyes.

I had been dreaming something terrible, but it had slipped away and I felt only the lingering fear and horror. Dream, dream, only a dream. Thank God it was only a dream.

Why did I hurt so much? I felt as if I had been cleft in two with
an ax. And why did I feel…different, too small, too light? Where was I? Where was Alexander? And why was there a baby crying?

“She is awake.” A woman’s voice, soft and deliberate and at the same time chillingly cold. “Bring the babe.”

I turned my head. There was a woman standing next to the unfamiliar bed I lay on. I knew her. At least, I knew I had seen her before. I knew I did not like her, did not trust her—but I could not remember who she was.

She placed a swaddled infant on my chest. At least that explained where the crying was coming from. The poor wee bairnie screamed. I turned my face aside and pushed it away.

“Take her,” the woman said. “She is your daughter.”

“That she is not,” I said. My throat was sore and my voice sounded wrong, hoarse and scratchy. “Where is Alexander?”

“Your Alexander is dead.”

Your. Alexander. Is. Dead.

Words. They did not come together to mean anything to me.

I looked at the woman, at the way her lips hardly moved at all when she spoke, at the ruined traces of sensuous beauty in her cheekbones and eyes, and I knew her. It was Lady Margaret Erskine, onetime mistress of old King James, mother of Lord James Stewart, who was the secular leader of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation and said to be the king’s favorite bastard. What was she doing here now? Where was I?

The baby was still crying.

Your Alexander. Is dead.

“No,” I said. I felt quite calm, because clearly Lady Margaret did not know who I was. She was talking about some other Alexander. Or else she was stark daft. First she thought the crying baby was mine; then she thought Alexander—

—a flood of glistening black in the torchlight, bursting from his throat—

No. I would not remember.

“No,” I said again. “Not my Alexander. My Alexander is—is—”

My voice shook so badly I could not go on. My whole body
began to tremble. I squeezed my eyes shut as tightly as I could. The dream was coming back and I did not want to see it.