The Flower Reader (26 page)

Jennet and I, with Seilie close behind, made our way up the staircase to the queen’s private chambers in the northwest tower. Two tiny round rooms were attached to the inner chamber; from one of them there issued glowing firelight, music, and laughter. I went to the doorway.

The queen was seated in a fine carved chair heaped with cushions, plucking the strings of a rosewood-and-ivory lute. Her head was tilted and her lips parted a little with her intentness; in the light of the candles and the fireplace she was as beautiful as a goddess. Mary Livingston and Mary Beaton stood behind her; on her right was the poet Chastelard, dressed in ruby-colored damask and velvet, leaning over her shoulder and singing in his pleasant tenor voice to her playing. On her left was Nicolas de Clerac. He looked up at once, as if he sensed my presence.

“Mistress Rinette,” he said. His eyes met mine.
I am happy to see you up and about
, they said without words.
You do not look quite so thin. The red headdress becomes you
. All this passed in the space of a breath, and then he retreated behind his courtier’s mask. “Madame, shall we welcome Mistress Rinette back to life, and give her a part to sing?”

I sank into a respectful curtsy. The queen laughed and said,
“Come in, come in, Marianette. They tell me you tended me faithfully when the rest of my ladies could not, and took the New Acquaintance from me—you ended by being the sickest of us all, and I am pleased to see you better.”

It was the most genuinely friendly thing she had said to me since she had returned to Scotland, and for the first time I felt for myself her celebrated allure. I said, “Thank you, madame,” stammering a little, and then hated myself for being so easily ensnared.

She only laughed, and turned her attention to her lute again. “Do you think a chord in C for this next phrase, Sieur Pierre?” she said to Chastelard. I was surprised to hear her call him by his Christian name. “Or perhaps a passage in three-part counterpoint?”

“Sister.”

I jumped. I had not seen the Earl of Moray in the shadowy corner on the other side of the fireplace. Sir William Maitland was with him. The division between the queen’s two lives could not have been more vividly expressed—the queen herself in the golden firelight, playing her lute, with ladies to tend her and two handsome gentlemen hanging on her every word, while Moray and Maitland, the two mainstays of her existence as a political figure, were hidden away in darkness.

“We have matters of importance to discuss,” Moray went on. “Your lute playing is all very well, but it can wait until tomorrow.”

“I shall play my lute when I please,” the queen said. “You are quite free to leave our presence, brother, if you are not interested in music.”

So the Earl of Moray had not insinuated himself back into the queen’s good graces, and for the moment, at least, I was high in her favor. I might never have a better opportunity.

“Before you go, my lord Moray,” I said, “I would ask you two questions.”

The queen lifted her fingers from the lute’s strings. The room fell silent but for the crackling of the fire. They all looked at me.

“With your permission, of course, madame,” I said.

She laughed. Her eyes glinted in the firelight. “Ask what you like, Marianette.”

I stepped farther into the room, so I was facing Moray. He remained seated, looking up at me with his dark, hooded eyes, so utterly unlike the queen’s. Scots he was, down to the bone, Stewart and Erskine, without the golden strain of Guise blood that gave the queen her seductive charm. But he was royal, too, for all his bastardy, and he had his own presence.

He frightened me. I would not let it show. I could feel Seilie pressed up against my ankles and it gave me strength to know a living creature loved me.

Loved me…

Something fluttered into my mind and out again, a whisper in French, but it was gone before I could capture it. Real? Part of my fever dreams? I could not stop and try to remember it, because what was important to remember was the guard and pommel of a dagger in the shape of a falcon with a missing ruby eye, and the sound of the bells ringing the third watch.

“My lord Moray,” I said, “I would like to see your dagger, please.”

Whatever he was expecting, that was not it. His heavy brows drew together in a frown and he said, “My dagger is none of your concern, mistress.”

“Show it to her, brother,” the queen said. There was no way she could know why I wanted to see it—only Nicolas de Clerac knew that, and surely he would not be fool enough to say anything—but she was unerring in her sense for the theatrical. “I command it.”

Moray looked past me at the queen, then back at me. There was no trace of guilt in his expression, just anger that I had trapped him into a humiliating acquiescence. I had made an enemy.

I did not care. I held out my hand.

He removed his dagger from its sheath and gave it to me.

I could see at once that it was not the dagger the assassin had used. The guard was squared off at either end, and decorated with lions’
heads in gold. The pommel was gold as well, worked in the shape of a crown. It bore no jewels, and needed none.

“It was my father’s,” he said. “You, mistress, would do well to remember that the queen’s father and my father were the same.”

I handed the dagger back to him.

“Where were you, my lord, at the third watch on the night the queen arrived home from France?”

“Oh!” the queen said. She sounded delighted. “You believe James murdered your husband! Well, speak up, brother, and tell us where you were.”

Moray’s expression grew so black that he could have knocked crows from the sky with his eyes alone. “I was with you, sister, as you well know.”

“I do not know. You were at Holyrood, yes, but you could easily have gone out and come back.”

It was impossible to tell whether she remembered, did not remember, or was simply taking pleasure in taunting her brother.

“I remember,” said Mary Livingston. We all turned and looked at her.

“Well, I do.” She looked defensive. “We were all awake because of the piping. I was standing beside Lord James—he was not the Earl of Moray then, of course—and I recall him saying that he could barely hear the bells of the third watch because of the clamor.”

Mary Livingston had no reason to lie. That exonerated the Earl of Moray, although I wondered about his mother. If Lady Margaret had been thirty years younger and a few inches taller I would have suspected her of wielding the dagger herself. As it was, though, if she had hired an assassin he would have used a plain dagger, without gold and jewels.

“I beg your pardon, then, my lord Moray,” I said. “Madame, if it pleases you, I shall withdraw.”

“No, no,” the queen said. “Let my brother withdraw if his pride is wounded by honestly giving an account of himself. Come and sing with
us—you have a pretty voice, and low enough to sing the alto part.”

The Earl of Moray stood up and left the supper room without a word. I watched him go, feeling nothing, thinking only, Very well, Rothes and Moray have been eliminated. Lady Huntly vouched for both Sir John and the earl, although now they both are dead. Next I must address the English and the French. Master Thomas Randolph will have stepped into poor Master Wetheral’s shoes. Blaise Laurentin the mercenary could be in anyone’s pay. And Chastelard—as he sang with the queen he watched me, his dark eyes uncomfortably purposeful.

He had been in Edinburgh the night Alexander was murdered, in the seigneur de Damville’s train. He had remained in Scotland for a while, then gone home to France, and then come back—why had he come back? Was he a Huguenot agent, as Nico suspected? I had never seen him attend mass.

“You have made an enemy, Mistress Rinette,” said Nicolas de Clerac. The tone of his voice was mildly jesting, but his expression was intent and serious. I had seen him before with just that expression, in my fever, but I could not remember exactly how.

“Nonsense,” the queen said. “Marianette is under my personal protection. Now, let us sing it again from the beginning.”

I
struggled to regain my strength throughout the Christmas season. The queen’s penchant for Pierre de Chastelard burgeoned; at the same time Master Knox thundered from his pulpit about the sins of the court, the dancing, the music, the lustfulness, the abomination of the mass. The queen, defiant, spent all the more hours with Chastelard, setting his poetry to music, dancing with him, resting her cheek on his shoulder. No one was surprised when he found the bean in his slice of cake on Twelfth Night and was crowned King of the Bean for the rest of the celebrations.

People began to whisper that he had dreams of becoming king of Scots as well. That was perfectly ridiculous, of course. The queen was still negotiating with the king of Spain to marry his poor mad son; her Guise uncles in Paris were putting forward the twelve-year-old King Charles IX of France, with a suitable dispensation for the fact that he was her brother-in-law. Nicolas de Clerac had been abruptly sent off to Austria to negotiate with the emperor’s brother, Archduke Karl of Austria; the court did not seem the same without him. Letters and gifts arrived from the widowed Duke of Ferrara,
who had known and admired the queen as a girl in France and whose sister was married to the queen’s beloved uncle Duke Francois of Guise. All this was fine as far as it went, but these royal suitors were far away, and Chastelard was present in the handsome, charming, poetical flesh. Surely the queen was only amusing herself and making a gesture of rebelliousness at Mr. Knox, but who could blame poor Chastelard for dreaming?

The Epiphany passed, and Candlemas Day. It was icy cold in Edinburgh, and everything was gray—the sky, the Firth of Forth, the buildings of the city with their spiky church towers, the mass of Arthur’s Seat rising up behind Holyrood and the outline of Edinburgh Castle on its rock at the other end of the High Street. When night came, it all turned black, with only a few sparks of light here and there.

I longed for Granmuir. I longed for Màiri. Every day I weighed the two things I desired—justice for Alexander? Or Granmuir and Màiri? Every day I wondered whether I was becoming like my own mother, who had abandoned me to spend her life in a French convent, praying for my father’s soul. At least someday, I told myself, I would be with Màiri again.

I felt the Earl of Moray watching me, waiting for a way to take his revenge.

I missed Nico more and more.

One night in February I was in the queen’s bedchamber, filling her silver-and-copper warming pan with coals from the fireplace. Somehow I had become the mistress of the warming pan over the past few weeks, and I welcomed the task—I welcomed any warmth, and it gave me a brief interval of solitude each day. I was grateful to Jennet and Wat for watching over me whenever I was not on duty with the queen, and I knew it was as wearing to them as it was to me. Still, I treasured that nightly quarter hour of being entirely by myself.

By myself but for Seilie, of course. As I began to pass the pan over the queen’s sheets, he whined. I was surprised. He was not a noisy dog, and had learned manners better than those of many courtiers.

“Seilie,” I said. “Hush.”

He whined again, then barked once. He had his nose under the queen’s bed. My first thought was for a rat, or some other vermin. They did find their way into the palace to escape the winter cold.

I went back to the fireplace to put the pan on its rack and collect a poker to investigate under the bed. When I turned around again, the poet Chastelard was standing beside the bed, fully dressed in hose and shirt and a luxurious velvet jacket, with a dagger at his belt. Seilie knew him, of course, and was clearly pleased to have flushed him out of his hiding place.

“Blessed Saint Ninian,” I said. “You startled me. I do not know what you think you are doing here, Monsieur de Chastelard, but you had best be off before I call the guard. This is the queen’s private bedchamber.”

To my utter astonishment he stepped closer, drew his dagger, and pressed the blade against my side. “I will go,” he said. “And you will come with me. Put down that poker, madame, and call off your little hound if you do not want his throat cut.”

“If you touch him, I will kill you.” It was all so unreal that I was more afraid for Seilie than I was for myself. I put the poker down. “What do you want with me? I thought it was the queen you loved.”

He laughed. “So she thinks as well. Oh, I grant you, there is something to be said for being a queen’s favorite. But my master in France is pressing me, and I fear it is now time to leave all that behind. Come along quietly, madame. You have no idea how difficult it has been to catch you unguarded.”

He came closer and grasped my arm. Seilie growled and backed away, the hair standing up in a ridge along his neck and back.

“But what do you want? Surely you cannot mean to ravish me in the heart of Holyrood Palace, with the queen’s guards everywhere.”

“
Dieu me sauve
, no. And in fact, madame, if you will take me to the place where you have hidden Mary of Guise’s silver casket, I will set you free entirely unharmed.”