The Flower Reader (17 page)

I tried to cry. I could not.

I got up. Why lie in the queen’s bed if I could not cry? I collected her wardrobe-woman’s sewing box, took out a needle, and threaded it with pale green silk thread.

Action. Any action, however small.

It was time to stop hiding myself away in my grief, stop feeling sorry for myself, and start acting. The queen’s royal inquiry had accomplished nothing so far. The only person who had asked questions at all was Nicolas de Clerac, and I did not know whether I could trust him.

It was time for me to make my own list of the people who would have benefited from Alexander’s death. Time for me to find a way to examine every dagger in every person’s possession for a missing ruby.

I
decided to start with the Earl of Rothes. There on the stairway he had said for all to hear that he did not want Granmuir to fall to the Gordons; thus he had a perfectly good reason, from his point of view, to kill my Gordon husband. And he would be expecting an apology for my insolence.

I bided my time until we returned to Edinburgh, and then I sent Wat Cairnie with a suitably humble request for an interview. I was not surprised when Wat returned with the answer that I was to wait upon the earl after dinner at Leslie House in the High Street.

He was anticipating self-abasement, and he would get it. I had watched the queen and learned the power of a woman’s tears against a man’s self-importance. I would get nowhere if I accused Rothes outright of Alexander’s murder and demanded to see his dagger. I might well get his dagger into my own hands if I sobbed prettily and begged to show him just what Rannoch Hamilton had done to me.

I did not like some of the things I was learning at court.

I stayed in my tiny room at Holyrood and ate bread and milk for my own dinner—the queen was occupied reading Latin with Master
Buchanan, so I was free. Then, with Wat escorting me, I made my way out through the palace gardens and the Abbey Strand, into the Canongate and the High Street. It was cold and the air was dripping with mist so thick I could not see two steps ahead of me. As I walked I rehearsed to myself what I knew about Rothes—he was the fifth earl, his given name was Andrew Leslie, he was about ten years older than I was, and his grandfather and my great-grandfather had been cousins.

I left Wat at the doorway with the earl’s own man and went into the house. A dour housekeeper took my wet mantle and led me to the earl’s private chamber.

“Good day to you, my lord,” I said, with a polite curtsy.

Rothes was seated in a fine carved chair by a window, with a table placed beside him in a square of winter sunlight. There were no other chairs, and so I remained standing. He said nothing, but sat unmoving, looking at me with an expectant expression. Give him what he wants, I said to myself, however bitter it may taste. He will be potter’s-clay in your hands.

I took a breath and said, “I wish to speak with you, my lord, about what happened at Crichton.”

“I am sure you do.”

“I humbly beg your pardon for speaking to you as I did.” I did my best to copy the queen’s winsome voice. “You are the chief of my clan and I owe you all deference and respect.”

I saw him soften before my very eyes. “I understand that you are still grieving for the Gordon boy,” he said. “But if you are to live at court, you must put that aside and act with suitable respect for your betters.”

I bit down hard on my tongue. This served two purposes—it stopped my hot words of unsuitable disrespect, and brought tears to my eyes.

“Now, now, do not cry,” he said. “We shall put the matter aside and start afresh.”

“He was forcing himself upon me,” I said. I had put away my
memories of Rannoch Hamilton, his wine-sodden breath, his rough hands, his hard weight, shut them safely in the stone bubble-chamber inside me. Letting them come out, even a little, closed my throat and made my heart pound. “Lady Margaret was mistaken, my lord—it was not play between Rannoch Hamilton and me. He intended to hurt me.”

I would not accuse Lady Margaret to Rothes—he would never believe it. I would wait, and find another way to pay her out for her treachery.

“There was a great deal of drinking and carousing,” Rothes said. “And you are a very pretty girl. Master Rannoch is a man like any other, ready to steal a kiss.”

“But it was not just a kiss. Look—” I pulled down the neckline of my bodice to show the healing cut on my breast. I saw his eyes darken and knew I had won him. I swung one hand in the air, as if warding off an imaginary dagger. “I would show you—if I had a dagger of my own, my lord, I would show you exactly what he did.”

Without taking his eyes from my breasts, slowly and inevitably as a sailor charmed by a mermaid’s song, he took his dagger from its gilded and embroidered sheath and put it on the table. The blade glinted in the sunlight. I reached out just as slowly—I did not want to break the spell—and picked it up. The hilt and guard were worked with the buckles and rue-leaves of Rothes, fashioned out of silver inset in gold. It was smooth and well-worn—probably his father’s, or even his grandfather’s. Rich enough, but no missing ruby—in fact, no jewels at all. It was not the dagger that had killed Alexander.

I acted as if I were suddenly coming to my senses. I looked at the dagger as if I were surprised to see it in my hand. With a gasp I put it back on the table and rearranged my bodice.

“Oh, my lord, forgive me. It was just so terrible—when Master Rannoch drew his knife I was taken back to the moment when…when my husband—”

All my playacting evaporated as if it had never been, and to my shame and horror I began to cry in earnest.

“Hush, hush,” Rothes said. He had come back to himself as well, and I could see a faint flush of embarrassment over his cheekbones. He rose. “Here, be seated. Compose yourself. Catriona!”

The housekeeper looked in. I could see Wat Cairnie’s freckled face behind her. “Yes, my lord?”

“Another chair. And some wine.”

“Is owt amiss?” That was Wat’s voice.

“Mistress Rinette is overcome with distress over her disrespectful actions; that is all. She is perfectly safe.”

There was a flurry of activity, and at the end of it Rothes and I were both seated with a pitcher of wine and two goblets on the table between us. Wat and the earl’s housekeeper went out of the room. The earl poured some wine for me as if we were old friends.

“As we are here,” he said, “there is something else I would like to discuss with you.”

I took a sip of the wine and let it calm me. No longer was I pretending to be anything but myself. “What is that, my lord?”

“This business of the silver casket belonging to the queen regent.”

I was surprised, because I had been expecting him to start in on marriage again. Cautiously I said, “What about it, my lord?”

“You are playing a dangerous game, hiding it away and demanding an investigation into your husband’s death before you produce it again.”

I said nothing.

“You would be safest if you placed it into responsible hands. The Gordon boy was killed because of it, and you could find yourself with your throat cut as well.”

I drank another swallow of wine, and had a horrible flash of my own throat slashed as Alexander’s had been, and the wine spilling down the front of my dress with my blood.

“I do not—” My voice deserted me for a moment. I started over. “I do not understand what you mean, my lord. Why do you think the old queen’s casket had anything to do with Alexander’s death?”

I knew the answer to that, of course. But I wanted to know what Rothes knew, and how he had learned it.

“He was attempting to sell it. To my own certain knowledge he had offered it to Lord James and to Huntly here in Scotland, as the leaders of the Protestant and Catholic parties. He also offered it to Elizabeth Tudor in England, and to both the Catholic party of Catherine de Médicis and the Huguenot party of Admiral Coligny in France.”

He seemed so matter-of-fact about it. Nico de Clerac and I had guessed at Lord James, Queen Elizabeth, and Queen Catherine, but not the Earl of Huntly or the Huguenots. I swallowed and said, “How can you know all this?”

“He wrote it to Lord James in a letter, and Lord James told it to me. Each party was told of the others to increase the price, and each, I believe, was willing to kill him to keep him from selling the casket to any of the others.”

And there it was. Not just whispers and suppositions, but truth.

I had taken the casket from my childhood hiding place behind the stone in the Mermaid Tower at Granmuir, never dreaming my secret would be anything but safe with Alexander. Flesh of my flesh, heart of my heart. He had betrayed me and he had died for it.

“And which party,” I said, as steadily as I could, “actually ordered the assassination? Lord James, or the Earl of Huntly, or the English, or the French?”

“I do not know. No one knows. And there is yet another party involved.”

We looked at each other. I wondered why he was telling me this. Did he think I would break down in tears and give him the casket to save myself? Perhaps he did—with my playacting to get my hands on his dagger, I had certainly given him every reason to think I was a fool.

“Another party?” I said.

“It was Mary of Guise’s casket. Who would want it more than the Guises themselves? Not the Duke of Guise or the cardinal, but
the old duchess, Antoinette, at Joinville. She is our queen’s grandmother.”

“I know who she is. In fact, I have met her.”

And I had, in the course of that one dreamlike year in France when Mary of Guise went to visit her daughter and took all her household with her. The year I was eight years old. The year that divided my life in two and changed everything for me.

She was already old, of course. Her husband was dead and her son had succeeded him as Duke of Guise. He had a wife of his own, a daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, and so the old duchess had become the dowager. Mary of Guise was her eldest child, the first of twelve. Twelve children! I had always had my mother and my father and my household all to myself, and I could not imagine having to share with eleven brothers and sisters. She dressed like a nun, did Duchess Antoinette, and people said she kept her own coffin propped up in her bedroom at Joinville.

As a child I was in awe of her because of the twelve children and the coffin, but she had always been kind to me. She would want her daughter’s silver casket, yes, if only to keep it out of the hands of Catherine de Médicis. The Guises and the Médicis queen were bitter enemies.

“Well, then,” the Earl of Rothes was saying, “if you know her, you will know she has spies everywhere in the French court. She could well have found out about the offers to the Médicis woman and to Coligny, and taken action to prevent the casket falling into any hands other than her granddaughter’s. She has an agent here in our own court, you know.”

“No,” I said. “I do not know.”

“It is Monsieur de Clerac.”

I felt perfectly detached at first.
Well, yes, of course, who else would it be?
Then I felt an odd little quiver of denial.
No, he is not a spy; I do not want him to be a spy
. Then anger and disappointment blotted out all the other feelings. I thought: So that is why he offered to help me. That is the hidden motive I knew he had to have.

Not only that, he had been there the night Alexander was killed. Burned into my memory—flashes of torchlight off the guard and pommel of a sword, gilding, scrollwork, silver inlay. A hand in a black leather glove. Hair like fire—

“He was in the queen regent’s household.” Rothes’s voice jolted me back to the room in Leslie House, with the cold winter sun streaming in. “After her death he accompanied her body back to France. Then as if by magic he appeared in the young queen’s retinue.”

“Perhaps she simply wanted him close by, because he knew her mother.”

“And perhaps he is a spy, placed by her grandmother.”

I did not want to believe it. It made me a little sick and shaky, and at the same time irked—no, not just irked, furious—with myself that I cared one way or the other. What was Nicolas de Clerac to me, or me to him, that I should care whether he was a Guise spy or not? He had happened upon the murder of my husband and he had saved me from the trampling crowd in my terrible extremity.

Or he had murdered my husband himself with a jeweled dagger, then swept out his sword to protect me. With Alexander dead, he needed me alive, because I was the only other person who could lead him to the casket they all wanted.

“I hate the court!” I burst out. “There is no one to be trusted, no one.”

“You can trust me,” Rothes said. “I am your clan chief. Give me the casket, Mistress Rinette, and I will give it to Lord James. He will use its secrets properly, better than the queen ever could.”

And what will you gain, I thought, from Lord James’s gratitude?

“You will be safe,” he went on. “You will be allowed to go home to Granmuir with your child and your people. Huntly and his Gordons are out of favor, so he will have no power to meddle with you. I myself will not press you to marry; I promise you that.”