The Flower Reader (41 page)

“I have flowers. Would you like to see?”

“I would love to see. Show me.”

She ran off. I sat back on my heels and looked up at Tante-Mar. My vision was watery, as if I were looking up from under the sea. I had been crying, off and on, since that first moment when we approached Granmuir.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you, thank you. I never thought to be away so long. I never meant to—”

“Hush,
ma douce
. Do you think your daughter is not as much the light of my life as you are yourself? And your new little one—she, too.”

Jennet was sitting with Kitte on her lap, playing clap-hands with her. “How different they are,” Jennet said. “Dark and fair. I’m glad you did not…did not do what I suggested, Rinette, back when we were starting out on that cursed progress to the west. This one is not responsible for her da, and we will never let him touch her, will we, hinnie?”

Kitte laughed and waved her hands for more clapping.

Màiri ran back into the room with a small carved cherrywood box in her hands. “I c’lected them,” she said. “Tante-Mar helped. We made them flat.”

“We pressed them,” Tante-Mar said. “And dried them.”

Màiri held out the box. I had a sudden vision of a silver casket decorated with hunting scenes in pouncework on the sides and intricate ribbons of repoussé sculpture on the lid. I blinked, and it was gone. I took the cherrywood box from my daughter and opened it.

And the flowers spoke.

Welcome home,
they said.
Welcome home to the gardens by the sea where you were born and where you belong and where you will die…

The box was filled with windflowers, wild roses, and maiden pinks. The windflowers were my own flower and the wild roses were Màiri’s—the maiden pinks, then, with their spicy clove scent, had to be Kitte’s. Even pressed and dried, they whispered to me,
faint, faint voices like rustling silk. My heart expanded and drank in the sound. Until I heard it again I had not realized how desperately I had missed it.

Could Màiri hear them, too? Somehow she had chosen Kitte’s flower before she even knew of Kitte’s existence.

“Pretty flowers.” She shook the box. “My favorites.”

Windflowers, wild roses, maiden pinks—and as my little daughter shook her box another spray of flowers found its way to the top, the blossoms of rich purple dried to a heathery silver color. I recognized the bell shapes of trailing nightshade.

You will see me soon,
the nightshade murmured.
I will tell you things you will not expect to hear.

“I like the purple ones,” Màiri said artlessly. “And see those rose ones? Tante-Mar says those are mine.”

I closed the box and put it back into her hands. “They are yours indeed,” I said. “My Màiri-rose, my little love. I think it is time for us to eat supper now.”

L
ITTLE BY LITTLE WE LEARNED
to know one another again. Everyone learned to know and love Kitte, who blossomed with all the attention. Wat Cairnie took Gill back under his wing in the stable, as he had done in Edinburgh; Bessie More taught Libbet Granmuir’s standards of cleanliness in the kitchen, which were far, far higher than the standards at Kinmeall. Père Guillaume celebrated the mass for us in Saint Ninian’s Chapel on the last two Sundays of Advent, and we decorated the great hall of Granmuir castle with joyous pagan evergreens from the mainland, and with holly and ivy from our own gardens.
I will protect you from poison from now to forever,
whispered the holly, the prickly green leaves and clusters of bright red berries.
I am fidelity,
sang the ivy,
good fortune and constancy, promises kept
.

The men had laid in extra stores and reinforced the castle gate in anticipation of a siege. In shifts they watched the clifftop road every
day, but there was no sign of Rannoch Hamilton coming to take Kitte or me back to Kinmeall. Was he too sodden with drink to care anymore? Or did he have some other plan?

I was content enough, although I missed Seilie.

Jennet and Wat told me that after Rannoch Hamilton dragged me away to Kinmeall, the queen herself had adopted Seilie and refused to give him up. She had a new collar made for him, soft blue leather with gold sequins and sapphires, and tried to teach him tricks. He drooped sadly, Jennet told me, from the first day. Then she and Wat were sent home to Granmuir, and after that they did not know what had happened to him.

I would find a way to get him back. I did not know how, but I would find a way.

I also found myself thinking of Alexander. I did not miss him exactly, but Màiri was such a picture of her father, my golden lover, my tattered and faulty and murdered archangel. I spent hours by myself in the Mermaid Tower, thinking about him, about how we had loved each other, how he had betrayed me, how everything that had happened had sprung from that one betrayal like a poisonous vine from a single seed. I wondered whether he had regretted what he had done, in the moment between the thrust of the assassin’s dagger and the nothingness of death.

I pulled out the loose stone and looked into my secret hiding place. I do not know what I hoped to find. The only thing in the niche was my mother’s hand-lettered and hand-drawn storybook, full of
contes-de-fées
and country folktales her own mother had told her. The silver casket was gone. It was gone from the vault under Saint Margaret’s Chapel as well. Where had it disappeared to, and who had it now? Who could have known about the secret vault, when it was Mary of Guise’s own secret? Whom else had she told?

I cannot say I forgot about the nightshade flowers in Màiri’s box. But I stopped myself and turned my thoughts whenever they came into my mind. I began to read my mother’s storybook again, curled up in my bed in the Mermaid Tower. There were fairies and witches,
unicorns and lions, queens and princes in the stories. My mother had drawn pictures with colored inks and paints and even touches of gold leaf. The pages were crumbling. I wanted to read the stories to Màiri and show her the pictures, but she would grasp at the book, and it was too fragile.

You will see me soon. I will tell you things you will not expect to hear.

O
n the twentieth day of February, a sunny day with a sky as blue and cold as ice, a single rider trotted out of the forest on the mainland and onto the causeway. Old Robinet Loury raised the alarm and we all flocked to the courtyard wrapped in our plaids like the countrypeople we were.

“Is it a king,
Maman
?” Màiri demanded. Over Epiphany-tide I had told her the story of the three great magician-kings who had visited the Christ child with their offerings of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Ever since she had been expecting kings to arrive at Granmuir. “With gold and—and frank—and those other things?”

“I don’t think so, Màiri-rose. I think I know who it is.”

You will see me soon. I will tell you things you will not expect to hear.

Norman More and Wat Cairnie opened the gates, and as I had expected it was Nicolas de Clerac who rode in on a black Friesian stallion with feathered fetlocks and a mane and tail like crimped silk. He was dressed in brown leather and mallard-green velvet and his head was bare despite the cold; with the sun striking his flame-colored hair he might well have been a king with a crown. My first
impression was that he had not changed at all in the year and a half since I had seen him last, facing Rannoch Hamilton in the queen’s supper room.

I had changed a very great deal—I had only just turned twenty-one years of age and yet there were silver threads in my hair. I had paid for Kitte’s birth and the privation that followed it with two of the four back teeth Tante-Mar called
les dents de sagesse
, the teeth of wisdom. I could not bear being in a room with all the doors and windows closed. I wondered what Nico de Clerac would see when he looked at me. I wondered why he was coming now, when he had left me to suffer at Kinmeall for fifteen terrible months.

Loping beside his great black horse was a long-legged red-and-white hound with a black spot on his back and freckled paws—

“Seilie!”

He jumped up against me, into my arms like a puppy, although he was taller and heavier than I remembered him and almost knocked me off my feet. I wrapped my arms around him, laughing and crying, as he whimpered with ecstasy and licked my face. My Seilie, my luck, my luck.

“Doggie!” Màiri said. She was jumping up and down with excitement. “A doggie for
Maman
!”

“Yes, indeed, it is a doggie for your
maman
.” At first Nico’s voice sounded affected and overprecise; then with a shock I realized it was just as it had always been. My way of listening was what had changed, after so much time in the countryside.

I wondered whether my speech had changed as well.

“Down, Seilie,” I said. “Down, my precious boy.”

Seilie let himself be placed on his own four feet again, although he remained pressed close to my skirt, trembling with delight.

“Welcome to Granmuir, Monsieur de Clerac.” I tried to make my voice formal, but it was difficult with my hair loose, my plaid askew, and Seilie’s kisses still cold and wet on my cheek. “I thank you more than I can ever say for bringing Seilie home.”

He bowed his courtier’s bow. “It is my privilege to visit your
home, Mistress Rinette, and to serve you in any way I can.” He bowed again to Tante-Mar. “Madame Loury,” he said to her. “Wat. Jennet. It is my great pleasure to see you all again.”

Màiri’s eyes were huge. In a loud whisper she said, “
Maman
, are you sure he is not a king?”

He laughed. “I am not a king,
ma petite
. I have met you before, but perhaps you were too young to remember.”

She scowled at that and drew herself up to her full height. “I am old enough,” she said. “I remember.”

I could not help but smile. “I will just remind you, then,” I said to my little daughter, “that this is Monsieur de Clerac. You must show him your very best manners, Màiri.”

She performed a curtsy with a sweet perfection that almost broke my heart. So many things Tante-Mar had taught her. “How do you do, M’sieu Declac,” she said.

Nico bowed to her, one hand over his heart. “I do very well, Mademoiselle Màiri,” he said. “Thank you for taking an interest.”

“Now come along,” Tante-Mar said briskly, taking Màiri’s hand. “Jennet, I need you to help me manage dinner. Wat, see to Monsieur de Clerac’s horse, if you please. Good day to you, monsieur. We will leave the lady of Granmuir to converse with you privately.”

Before I could stop them, they all went away.

“Come inside out of the cold,” I said. I felt awkward and did not know what else to say. “Would you like some wine?”

“I would like some hot water, if I may, to tidy myself after riding from Wemyss in three days.”

“Three days? From Wemyss, in February? Why were you there, and what could possibly be so important about coming here?”

“I was there because the queen is there, and it is the queen’s will that is important—what else? I have a letter for you, and private messages from the queen not committed to paper. Come; let us go in. I will tell you everything.”

We went in, and I called for Annis Cairnie to make arrangements for Nico’s refreshment. I myself ran up to the Mermaid Tower, where I
hastily washed my face, braided up my hair, and put on a fresh coif. The old silver mirror made my skin look blue-green, as if I were a mermaid in truth. A year and a half, I thought, since I saw him last. I look ten years older. With no court dress, no jewels, no cosmetics, with silver in my hair, I look like a different woman entirely.

I am a different woman.

A half hour later Nico and I settled in a small room on the south side of the great hall, which I half facetiously called my solar. Jennet poured two cups of wine and went away, her expression speaking volumes—
You know why he is here; he loves you; he wants you to go back to the court; he will find a way to get you away from that monster
—although she said nothing. We were left alone.

He handed me a letter. It was sealed with red wax in which was imprinted the royal lion of Scotland.

“Read it,” he said.

I was not sure whether I wanted to read it. Slowly I broke the wax wafer and unfolded the paper. The letter was only a few lines, written in what I recognized as Mary Beaton’s handwriting; it was very similar to the queen’s and the queen often dictated to Beaton in a deliberate device to make her letters appear personal while evading the effort of writing herself.

Your husband, Master Rannoch Hamilton, has written to Master John Knox of Saint Giles’s Kirk complaining that you have fled his household with his daughter. Master Knox himself demands I support your husband in his claim and require your daughter to be returned to her father. I command you to come to Edinburgh at once so that you may answer this claim.

MARIE R

“He only wants her because she is coheiress to Granmuir,” I said. My voice shook with terror and fury and the paper trembled in my
hand. “I will never give her up. Never. And I will not go back to Edinburgh.”