The Flower Reader (9 page)

“I can. I must be alone. Please.”

“May the Holy Virgin walk with you,” Mary Livingston whispered, and she let go of my arm.

I took one step, and then another. The stone floor of the church
was scarred and I could see marks of fire on the pillars. I knew the tale, of course: the English protector Somerset’s men, twenty years ago, burning and looting the church, stealing the great font of solid brass, stripping the lead from the roof. But the nave remained, silent and holy, filled with the tombs of kings, smelling of ancient stone and centuries of incense. Each step took me closer to the bier. At the crossing, the ruined remains of the transepts stretched away darkly on either side. I stopped.

Alexander, Alexander…

He lay with mourning candles at his head and his feet, his hands crossed over his breast. He wore strange black clothes, borrowed clothes, just as I did; his own shirt and doublet and hose—his shirt that I had stitched with my own fingers!—would have been too bloodied. His face was uncovered, his profile serene under the vaulted roof of the church. God, how white he was. Only his hair was the same, shining in the candlelight. Its curls made me think of the petals of his golden iris. I reached out and touched it. It felt the same, silky but at the same time strong and springing away from his scalp.

His eyes were closed.

I touched his cheek.

Cold. Slack and softening, where in life it had always been warm and firm.

Alexander…

I may have cried it aloud. I know I threw myself down over his chest and clung to him even in his borrowed clothes and with his flesh beginning to dissolve away into corruption and screamed and screamed. I knew I was screaming because it hurt my throat. How could this have come to be? Why were we not at Granmuir, safe and happy beside the sea with our daughter all our own and not a queen’s godchild?

Because you insisted on going to Edinburgh.

Alexander’s voice.

Because you would not rest until you had taken the silver casket to the queen.

I scrabbled for his face, his mouth—he could not be speaking; he could not. His head fell to one side away from me. The wound across his throat had been roughly stitched together with black thread. There was still blood, dried black. Whoever had washed him had done it carelessly. Some flakes of the dried blood had cracked and come away when his head moved.

I would be alive if it were not for you and your silver casket.

“No,” I said. I felt sick with horror and guilt. “Oh no. Forgive me, forgive me.”

I put my hands on either side of his face, as I had done so often in life. He felt like an image in soft, cold clay, but I had disturbed him and I had to put him right. I turned his head and as I did the candlelight struck a spark of crimson fire from the spot under his ear where the dried blood had flaked away.

I touched it. A jewel. A ruby. My thoughts lurched to Alexander’s own dagger, jeweled and filigreed, falling to the floor of Saint Ninian’s church at Granmuir. This jewel was different, not a cabochon but cut with facets and polished to catch the light; it had nothing to do with Alexander, and if it was lodged in his terrible wound there was only one place it could have come from.

The assassin’s dagger. Something in the violence of the cut, the agony of Alexander’s convulsion, must have broken the ruby free—

“Madame.”

I started around and almost lost my balance. A man stood behind me, tall and angular, all arms and legs but for the breadth of his shoulders. I thought at first he was a ghost, but then I realized he was dressed in black and silver in a thoroughly modern style, and with red-gold hair like banked embers in the darkness. His eyes were edged with kohl, and a diamond glittered in his left ear. Where had he come from? Where had Mary Livingston and Alisoun gone, that they did not come to my aid?

“Your ladies are still in the back of the church,” the man said. His voice was familiar. “I mean you no harm; I swear it. We have met before, although you may not remember me—I am Nicolas de
Clerac, and I was in Mary of Guise’s household as one of her French secretaries. I have come back to Scotland with her daughter to serve in a similar capacity.”

“I remember you,” I said. I remembered also that I had associated him with nightshade, beautiful to the eye but deadly. “I did not like you or trust you then. What do you want with me now?”

He smiled, just a little. “I see one does not have to guess to know your true feelings,” he said. “I want nothing from you, madame, other than to know you are safe, and to offer you my
condoléances
. I went to the room where you had been lying in, and found it empty.”

I remembered him from the night of the old queen’s death, yes, but there was something more. Not just his voice and his hair and his face with its hard bones and austere features—yes, austere, for all the Frenchified cosmetics. Something more immediate. His clothes—black, like all the queen’s household, but particularly elegant, shoes of fine soft and polished leather, his long legs in silk stockings gartered with silver—

Monsieur Nicolas de Clerac carried you here—he was passing by in the High Street when you fell, and rescued you from the crowds.

“It was you,” I said. “In the street. When—” I choked on the words.

He inclined his head. “It was my good fortune to be in the street for the celebrations at just that moment. I wish I could have been there soon enough to save your husband’s life.”

“Did you see?” I reached out and grasped his doublet. I would wrinkle the pristine black figured silk. I did not care.
“Did you see who killed him?”

He took my hand. I think he meant to hold me up if I fainted. Or perhaps he was just concerned for the line of his fine clothing.

“No,” he said gently. “He was dressed in dark clothes and a hooded cloak, but so were a hundred others. It happened very quickly. He may have meant to kill you, too, madame. He made no attempt to steal your husband’s purse or dagger, so I do not believe his motive was simple thievery.”

Lady Margaret Erskine had said the same thing.
Your Alexander died because of that silver casket
.

“What, then?” I said.

He looked away for a moment, into the half-ruined choir behind the crossing. Did he see the ghosts of long-dead Augustinian canons there? I thought I heard a rustling sound, soft footfalls, as if the monks were pacing in procession. For all his elegant and elaborate clothing and cosmetics there was a contradictory sense of asceticism about Nicolas de Clerac; I could just as easily see him in a habit and cowl.

He said, “I do not know. But if you will allow me, I will make an effort to find out.”

I was beginning to feel dizzy and I was not quite sure I had heard him correctly. I pulled my hand away from his. “Why would you do that?”

“Perhaps because I was so close by when it happened,” he said. “Perhaps because I believe it is in the queen’s interest to discover the truth.”

“I will learn the truth for myself.”

“Madame, you may still be in danger. Come, let me escort you back to your chamber. Your husband is safe here, and your place is with your child.”

That made me angry. It was not for Monsieur Nicolas de Clerac to tell me where my place was. Nor did he have any legitimate reason to offer to help me. My legs were shaking and I was beginning to feel that too-light feeling again, but I had enough of my wits about me to pretend to accept his offer. Better to keep the devil at the door, as Jennet would say, than to turn him out of the house. I would keep Monsieur de Clerac at my door until I could find out what his motives were.

“If you wish to help me, look at this,” I said. “Whoever washed and dressed him and laid him here did not pay close attention to…to his wound.”

Nicolas de Clerac frowned. “What do you mean?”

I stepped close to the bier again. With one fingertip I touched
the ruby, still stuck in my husband’s dried blood. “This is not his. He never drew his own dagger, and he was no courtier to be wearing earrings or jewels.”

“Where do you think it came from?” Nicolas de Clerac bent his head to look more closely; his own earring winked in the candlelight. “It is too small to have been set in a ring.”

“It could have been set in the murderer’s dagger.”

“If so, it would be a valuable piece, not an ordinary assassin’s weapon. Stones of that size are not usually cut with facets. May I remove it?”

“No.” I pushed his hand aside, more violently than I intended. He stepped back instantly. “I will take it.”

“Of course, madame.” His voice was soft and formal.

I put one hand on Alexander’s forehead and smoothed back his golden hair. One last time, one last touch. Then I took the ruby. It came away easily. A few flakes of long-dried blood clung to my fingertips.

I will see justice done for you, I thought. I cannot say it aloud for it is not something I wish anyone else to hear. But I will see justice done. I swear it.

“Perhaps one day you will allow me to examine it,” Nicolas de Clerac said.

“Perhaps.”

My voice was beginning to sound as if it were coming from far away. I could hear the footfalls of the canons again, pacing, pacing. They sounded so real I jerked around, looking over my shoulder. I saw no one.

“Madame, please allow me to call your women to you.”

“I can walk. Thank you for your assistance, Monsieur de Clerac; you may go.”

With my head high, I turned to walk down the nave again. After one step I fell face-forward into his arms.

I heard him calling for Mary Livingston. I heard her speaking to him in French, and Alisoun’s stout Edinburgh Scots in the
background. I felt fury and humiliation that he would see me so weak and helpless. Worst of all, in the end he picked me up like a child and carried me—carried me!—out of the abbey church.

He smelled of bitter orange and myrrh. I knew he could not truly smell of the narcotic gold-and-purple nightshade flower, but for me he did. Through it all I clung to the ruby.

I thought: Why did he come to the abbey church, Monsieur Nicolas de Clerac, courtier and so-called secretary and very plate of fashion that he was? Was it truly for nothing more than to offer his condolences to a grieving widow? Or did he, too, think to find some trace of evidence connected to Alexander’s death?

Find it, or suppress it?

Was it nothing but chance that he had been so fortuitously close at hand to fight off the assassin, once the deed was already done?

And why did he offer to help me find out the truth?

I should not have let him see the ruby. If he was part of a conspiracy, he could warn the true assassin to hide the jeweled dagger, or throw it into the sea. Yet Mary of Guise had loved and trusted him, and he was clever behind all the flamboyance. That was clear enough.

I floated higher and higher, until I was far away from them all.

I
refused to call my daughter Mary. The queen had chosen that name, not I, and I resented her interference. But the christening was done, and Mary Gordon she was in the eyes of God and man. In my own mind I made it into Màiri, which meant “bitterness.” Her birth, after all, had been a bitter, bitter thing.

She had Alexander’s hair, golden and soft as the finest silk. It curled. I had no sense of the princely golden iris for her, though, with its intimations of sun and wind and blood. She was a wild rose, pink-and-gold, sweet like the rose’s scent but also bitter like the tea made from the hips in the fall. Bitter, but bracing and healthful in the end.

I had thought I could never love her. How wrong I had been. I loved her fiercely and completely, with every last shred and tatter of love I had left in my heart.

I was not allowed to take her with me to the requiem mass, of course. I was almost not allowed to be present myself, after my collapse in the abbey. But a week had passed and I was stronger and clearer of mind. Tante-Mar and Jennet and Wat had arrived from
Granmuir and closed ranks around me. Mary Livingston went back to the queen with many protestations of lasting friendship. I put the ruby in a silver locket Jennet bought for me in the High Street, and I wore it day and night. I was wearing it as Tante-Mar helped me to dress, on the morning of Alexander’s funeral mass.

“I want to go to the mass, Tante-Mar,” I said. “It has been a week, and I am much better and stronger.”

“A proper lady’s prayers are said in private,” Tante-Mar said. “And in any case, my Lord Huntly’s making a bear garden of the arrangements after the queen’s priest got knocked about last Sunday. You had best keep out of his way right now.”

“I am not afraid of the Earl of Huntly.”

“Nor I,” Jennet said. She was sitting with Màiri in her arms, rocking her as she slept. “I’ll go with Rinette, Mistress Margot, and you can tend to Màiri.”

“I cannot stop you.” Tante-Mar had seen me through too many escapades as a child at Granmuir to have any illusions as to my obedience. “But I warn you—you will be sorry if you go. Catholic masses are not safe places to be these days, under the best of circumstances. And Huntly is using the young master’s requiem for his own purposes.”