The Flower Reader (42 page)

Nico leaned back in his chair and took a sip of the wine. I was certain he found it thin and sour compared to the fine wines to which he was accustomed. “Let me tell you what the queen did not desire to commit to paper.”

I felt a tremor of uneasiness. “Very well,” I said. “Tell me.”

“First, the queen will help you obtain a divorce. Then neither Hamilton nor Knox will have any power over you.”

“A
divorce
?” It was the last thing I would ever have expected.

He smiled. “We are living in the new reformed Scotland,” he said. “A civil magistrate can pronounce a divorce, given suitable circumstances. The queen has promised to arrange it all—with Moray’s help she can smooth matters over with Knox.”

“Must I see him? Rannoch Hamilton?”

“No. The queen has discouraged him—strongly, she says—from coming to Edinburgh himself. He is to send a proxy.”

I looked at the letter again. The signature was actually the queen’s, so she had made that much effort, at least. “Why would the queen do this for me?” I asked.

“That brings me to the second thing the queen does not wish to put in writing. You remember, of course, the day the queen visited you here, on her way to Aberdeen to suppress the Earl of Huntly’s rebellion. The day you read the flowers for her.”

I remembered. I remembered her walking in the garden like a silver heron, long-legged, long-necked, and elegant. I had asked her to choose a flower and she had chosen a yellow cockscomb.

You should take care
if you meet a tall, slender, fair-haired person. It could be a woman or it could be a man, I am not sure, but the cockscomb represents a person who feeds on others for life and power, and it appears to have called to you.

“She has met the person foretold by the yellow cockscomb,” I said.

He did not seem surprised that I had grasped his meaning. He said, “She has.”

“Who is it?”

“It is Henry Stewart, Lennox’s son. Lord Darnley, he is called, by courtesy.”

“Is he here, in Scotland?” How easy it was to be sucked back into the intrigues of the court. I remembered Darnley’s name being mentioned now and again as a possible husband for the queen—he was younger than she was but he had a Tudor grandmother just as she did. The same one, in fact. “I am surprised Queen Elizabeth allowed him to leave England.”

“Perhaps she sent him deliberately. Who knows? Our queen gave him an audience three days ago, at Wemyss, and was immediately enamored of him.”

“What has any of that to do with me?”

“You predicted ill of the tall, fair-haired person the queen was to meet. She wishes to hear only good of Lord Darnley, and so she requires you to come at once to meet him and make a different prediction.”

I stared at him. “The flowers mean what they mean,” I said. “I cannot change it to something different, just because the queen wants me to.”

He put the wine cup down and for the first time he looked straight into my eyes. I started back as if he had touched me. He said, “Not even in exchange for a divorce from Rannoch Hamilton, and the confirmation of your own sole wardship of your daughters?”

I looked down at my hands. They had changed, too—they were reddened and calloused, and the nails were cut short and straight instead of being shaped and rubbed to a shine. I had thought to leave the lies and plots of the court behind. Not yet, it seemed. Not yet.

“I will do anything for Màiri and Kitte,” I said. “And you know it. Very well, I will go wherever the queen wishes me to go, meet Lord Darnley, and tell her he is a prince and an angel above all other
men. But I will not leave the rest of my household behind, not this time. We all go, or none of us.”

“It will be arranged, just as you like. Lend me that likely-looking boy Davy for a messenger, and I will give him a letter to carry to Lord Seton at Holyrood. The queen is returning from Wemyss to Edinburgh in a few days, and Lord Darnley will rejoin her there. She wishes you to be lodged at Holyrood so she can call upon you when it pleases her.”

“You yourself are not returning to Wemyss?”

He stood up and walked to the window. “If you will allow me,” he said without looking at me, “I would like to stay here for a few days, and then ride to Edinburgh with you.”

“Stay here?” That made no sense to me at all, and my first thought was that the queen had ordered him to stay to prevent me from escaping. “Why?”

“Did you ever wonder,” he said, still without looking at me, “why I did not come to Kinmeall and tear it stone from stone until I could take you away from Rannoch Hamilton?”

At first I was too surprised to say anything. Then I said, “No.” Then I felt the blood rushing up into my cheeks even though there was no one to see it. For a moment I was back in the tower at Kinmeall, alone and hungry and half-mad with fear. I whispered, “Yes. I wondered. I hoped. I prayed. Then…you did not come. No one came.”

He stood quite still, silhouetted against the light of the sun and the sea. I could not see his hands or his face and so I could not read what he was feeling. “I was arrested and put into ward that night,” he said. His voice was without any expression. “The reason given publicly was that I had drawn my dagger in the queen’s presence and endangered her. The real reason, of course, was that I had revealed my…admiration…for a lady other than the queen herself.”

“For me,” I said.

“For you,
ma mie
.”

I could not think of anything to say. After a moment he went on.
“A few days later I was taken to Leith harbor, where I was put on a French ship, under guard. When we reached France I was taken to Joinville. It was a luxurious prison, to be sure, but still a prison.”

“Joinville,” I said. It had never occurred to me that he had not been in Scotland at all throughout my ordeal at Kinmeall. “That is the home of the Guises. The queen’s grandmother lives there—Duchess Antoinette.”

“She does.”

“Why did they send you there?”

“I asked them to.”

“Why?”

He turned, and before I could even properly register the fact that he had moved, he was beside the table and grasping my upper arms with his two hands, lifting me to my feet. How did he manage to hold me so hard and at the same time so gently? I saw that he had changed after all, that there were threads of silver just like my own in the gleaming russet of his hair, and new lines like fine crescent-shaped knife cuts at the corners of his mouth. There were no jewels in his ears, and no trace of the flamboyant maquillage he had once affected.

I thought he was going to kiss me, and I turned my face away. I had experienced too many terrible kisses. He hesitated, then bowed his head, his forehead against my shoulder, and simply held me for a moment. I could feel his hands shaking.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Have you ever wondered,” he said, without looking at me, “why I am so like the queen? In height, in coloring?”

I was not sure how to answer that. Of course I had wondered. Everyone had wondered. “Yes,” I said. “I have.”

“I told you the tale of my mother, and how she was forced to marry, and her death.”

“Yes.”

“My father was Duke Francois of Guise, the queen’s uncle. I, like the queen, am a grandchild of Duchess Antoinette of Guise.”

I was both surprised and not surprised—great dukes, like my own grandfather the Duke of Longueville, were laws unto themselves. I lifted my hand and touched his hair very lightly. It was crisp as a hawk’s ruffled feathers.

“Did you know this before?”

“Duchess Antoinette told me when I went back to France in 1562, the spring before Huntly mounted his rebellion. My…father…had just come from Vassy, where he ordered the burning of a makeshift church with some hundreds of Huguenots inside. To him it was nothing—he was a militant Catholic and truly believed he was defending his Church. To the world, it was a massacre. To me…There were women and children in that church, Rinette. And at the same time I learned he was my father.”

“Duchess Antoinette told you? Not the duke himself?”

“I did not wish to speak with him. Nor did he wish to speak with me.”

I stroked his hair again. He lifted his head and pushed me back a little, holding me at his arms’ length.

“Rinette,” he said. “It was Duchess Antoinette who placed me in Mary of Guise’s household. Duchess Antoinette who recommended me to the queen, when she was preparing to return to Scotland. She is my grandmother, and the only true family I have—she took me in when the Benedictines put me out, educated me, gave me a place in the world. She invested me with one of her own small estates at Clerac so I would have a name and an income and some standing at court. Duke Francois had seven legitimate children with the Duke of Ferrara’s daughter and God alone knows how many bastards. I meant nothing to him. He is dead now—you will remember the news of his assassination. We never spoke, not one word.”

I thought about that for a moment. “So you have been Duchess Antoinette’s agent, all along, at the Scottish court. And even the queen herself did not know that you and she are cousins?”

“Even the queen did not know. If she suspected, she said nothing. Duchess Antoinette at last gave me leave to tell her, when I returned
to Scotland two weeks ago. The Guises believe in blood ties, and Duchess Antoinette has reason to be afraid for the queen, caught between Lord Darnley and Moray with no fair-minded adviser.”

I frowned. “Reason? What reason?”

He looked away from me. There was something terrible. Something that had put those glints of silver in his hair.

“I cannot tell you,
ma mie
. Do you remember when I told you I was bound to the queen by a holy vow? The vow was to Duchess Antoinette, my grandmother, my closest living blood relative, and it is not yet fulfilled.”

“And yet you want to stay here at Granmuir? Are you here to spy on me, Nico?”

“No. I want to stay because I feel stillness and peace here.”

I looked into his eyes and I knew what he was going to say and I wanted him to say it and I was terrified he was going to say it.

“And because I love you,” he said very gently. “Surely you know that? I want a few days with you, here at Granmuir—it may be all I will ever have.”

My heart stopped.

“Oh, no,” I said. “Nico, no. Please, no.”

He let go of my arms and lifted his hands away from me. “What, do you think I am asking you for anything? I am not, other than perhaps your presence, or a chance to look at the sea with you and talk a little. And you need not do that, even, if it does not please you. My precious soul, my love, to breathe the same air that you are breathing will be enough.”

I started to cry, as much like a child as Màiri or Kitte. I could not help myself, and I put my hands up to cover my face so he could not see how contorted it was. “It pleases me,” I managed to choke out. “I am glad you are here and I want you to stay, if we can…if we can…keep apart from each other. To simply look at the sea and talk with you sounds like heaven.”

“Then that is what we shall do. Please do not cry,
ma mie
. Did you truly think I would ever hurt you or coerce you?”

“No. I am sorry, I just…I thought you were going to kiss me. I could not bear it.”

He smiled a little, with just one side of his mouth. “Well, perhaps I was,” he said. “Would it be so distasteful to you?”

I kept my face covered with my hands. I felt hot, as if I had a fever. “Yes,” I said. “No. I do not know. Oh, Nico, it is just…There were so many kisses. And I had no choice. Over and over, I had no choice.”

“You have a choice now. You will always have a choice.”

I looked at him through my fingers. Then I took my hands away from my face. “Will you…not move…if I kiss you?”

“Of course I will not.”

I put my hand against his cheek. I felt roughness. He had not stopped to shave on his ride from Wemyss. I almost stopped there, because Rannoch Hamilton had often gone days without shaving. But Nico’s whiskers glinted with gold and red in the sun. They were different. The structure of his bones under my hand was different.

He did not move.

I leaned forward. I felt the warmth of his breath. I was shaking—fear, sickness, shame, and at the same time a tiny spark of…what? I did not have a word for it.

I could not do it. I drew back.

His eyes were steady. They were darkened, but however expanded their centers were I could still see a circle of hazel-gold around the edge. No black emptiness. The trailing nightshade was there, strong and alive. It was beautiful and bittersweet.

I closed my eyes. That made it easier. Nico’s scent was different, bitter orange and myrrh. Rannoch Hamilton always smelled of sweat and iron.

“Nico,” I said.

He did not move. “Yes,” he said. “Shh. It is all right, whatever you do.”

I leaned forward again and touched my mouth lightly to his.

He did not move, did not put his arms around me, did not bite my lips or force my mouth open or—

I drew back. I was shaking. “I cannot do any more,” I said.

“You need not do any more. You need never do anything more, if it does not please you.”

“Perhaps…later.”

He nodded gravely. “Perhaps later,” he said.