The Flower Reader (24 page)

“Well, it matters, of course.” The queen tightened her reins and turned her horse back toward Aberdeen. “The Earl of Huntly would make himself head of my council, and bring back the Catholic church, and the Lords of the Congregation would be outlawed. He would try to marry me off to Lord John, but he would have a surprise there—I will never marry at anyone’s bidding but my own. I wish to go back to the city now.”

She set spurs to her horse and cantered away. Nico followed her at once with his cadre of guardsmen. Mary Livingston glanced at me and followed; I turned Lilidh and started after them. Halfway back to Aberdeen a sorrel gelding came up beside me.

“Madame Leslie.” It was Pierre de Chastelard. I looked around
for Blaise Laurentin, but could not see him. “Hold up a moment. I would like to speak to you.”

I drew up. Lilidh danced in a circle. “I hope you will write fine verses about the battle today,” I said. My voice shook. “And the queen’s bravery.”

He took my words literally and not with the bitterness I intended them. “I will,” he said. “The queen is wonderful. Her favor, however, makes it difficult for me to speak privately with other ladies.”

Holy Saint Ninian. Was he going to declare his love to me?

“You have in your possession a silver casket, do you not, that once belonged to Mary of Guise? I have a commission, from a certain important personage in France, to—”

“Stop,” I said. “Are you mad, monsieur? Men are dying in Corrichie Burn. Pray for their souls, and do not dare speak of something so meaningless as the silver casket.”

I saw a flash in his eyes, something…calculating, cruel—something one would not expect in a poet. “It is not meaningless,” he said. “And time is short. I take my opportunities where I find them.”

“I will tell you only what I have told everyone else—Mary of Guise’s silver casket is not for sale. Not to anyone.”

“Perhaps one day soon you will change your mind.”

“Perhaps one day soon these hills will cast themselves into the sea.” I wheeled Lilidh and touched her flank with my crop, and galloped away.

“I
FORBID THIS EXECUTION TO TAKE PLACE
.”

The queen was seated before a window on the first floor of the Earl Marischal’s town house on the Castle Street in Aberdeen, facing the Tolbooth. A low scaffold had been set up in the square, with a wooden block heaped all around with straw. A Protestant minister stood beside the scaffold, reciting verses of scripture from memory;
at intervals the crowd shouted responses. It was cold and rainy, but in general a holiday mood prevailed.

Mary Livingston and I sat on either side of the queen, doing our best to calm her. Her sleeves were disarranged where the Earl of Moray had held her arms to compel her to sit here at the window where everyone in the square could see her. The fact that he had actually laid hands upon her royal person showed how far he had vaulted up in his own sense of importance.

“I forbid it,” she said again. “I am the queen.”

“You are a fool, sister,” Moray said. “Now be silent.”

It had been five days since the battle by Corrichie Burn. Moray’s forces—the queen’s forces, actually, although clearly he thought of them as his own—had crushed the Gordons and their Highlanders. The great Earl of Huntly himself, the Cock of the North, had been saved from an ignominious traitor’s death only by falling down dead of an apoplexy while still in his armor—I had heard the story from Mary Livingston, who had heard it from her sweetheart, John Sempill, who had been present to see it. Young Sir John Gordon, the gallant, the dancer, the brawler, had been captured and condemned to die, here and now for everyone in Aberdeen to see, for his own rebellion and his father’s.

“I will not be silent,” the queen said. “I wish I had never made you Earl of Moray. I can unmake you, brother; remember that.”

“Try it,” Moray said. There was dismissive scorn in his voice. “You may find I can unmake you as queen just as easily.”

The queen began to cry again. Anyone could see her tears were from anger and frustration and outrage that she was being compelled to do something she did not want to do. Death at a distance, in a battle, with flags flying and faces unrecognizable, was one thing; death up close, of a handsome young man she had known and danced with and flirted with, was a different thing entirely.

“My lord Moray,” I said. I tried to sound humble. “Please be gentler with the queen. You want her here so the people can see she
condones the decision to execute Sir John, do you not? If she is in tears and hysterics, it will hardly prove your point.”

“It will in fact prove,” said Nicolas de Clerac, who was standing a little distance behind the rest of us, “that you have ordered this execution, my lord Moray, upon your own authority and without the queen’s agreement.”

“I do not agree to it,” the queen said through her sobs. “Imprison Sir John if you must, strip him of all his lands and titles, exile him—but spare him his life.”

“He took up arms against the crown,” Moray said. “People say he wished to marry you, sister, and that you encouraged him because he is a Catholic. We must show them this is not true, that you do not care for him, and that you do not intend to marry a Catholic and force them all back to the old Church.”

“Surely he does not have to be executed to prove that.”

“Surely he does. Some whisper that you lay with him.”

The queen’s tears stopped between one sob and the next. “That is a lie,” she said. “How dare you—”

At that moment there was a wail of pipes, and a company of men wearing royal badges on their coats stepped out of the Tolbooth and into the square. Sir John Gordon walked in their midst, dressed all in black and with his head bare. His hands were tied behind him with thick rope, which was also looped several times around his chest and upper arms. He looked up and immediately saw the queen at the window.

“Madame!” he cried out. “It is for you I am to suffer—for the sake of the delights we shared, will you not pardon me?”

The crowd immediately began to whisper. The queen stared at Sir John, frozen with humiliation and horror. I thought, He is using the moment to take his revenge upon her, in the only way left to him.

“There were no delights,” she said. “It is a lie. There were only dances, nothing more.”

Moray gestured to the men, who dragged Sir John up onto the
scaffold. The minister spoke more loudly than ever, exhorting the prisoner to repent of his Catholic faith and embrace the true Church of God. Sir John waved the man away—he said something we could not hear, but which left a shocked expression on the minister’s face.

The soldiers forced Sir John to his knees in the straw in front of the block. He managed to lift his head one more time and looked straight into the queen’s eyes.

“It gives me solace,” he cried loudly, “that you are here, for I am to suffer for loving you, madame. Pray the prayers of the true Church for me!”

With a grand gesture—a gallant and a showman to the last—he laid his head down upon the block. The executioner, who had come up the other side of the scaffold, swung back his ax. The crowd screamed; the blade came down in a huge gleaming arc and sank into Sir John’s shoulder, flesh and bone, with the ghastly chunking sound of a butcher’s cleaver splitting a loin of beef in half. There was no blood at first. The executioner swore and jerked the ax free and bright red blood gushed out.

The queen lurched up from her chair, her hands pressed to her mouth, screaming.

Sir John’s body shuddered and strained to one side—his eyes were open and he seemed to look directly at the queen one last time. His lips moved.

The executioner swung the ax again and it made a clean crunching slice through Sir John’s neck. The head bounced into the straw; the bound and wounded body dropped behind the block, the neck spurting thin streams of blood out over the crowd.

The queen screamed and screamed. I held her hands, trying to drag her away from the window. Nico put his own hands over her face, covering her eyes. The Earl of Moray stood impassively. The contrast between his kingly composure and the queen’s hysteria was so pronounced it might have been planned that way.

“Madame, madame,” I cried. I was so sickened myself I could hardly hold her. “Come away, madame; do not look.”

The queen fainted. Nico caught her up in his arms. I could not help remembering—he had once lifted me in the same way, when I had been screaming and fainting and covered with my husband’s blood.

“Can you make calming remedies from your flowers, Mistress Rinette?” Nico asked.

“Yes.”

“Then do so. We will need them.”

T
he best anodyne for the queen’s collapse would have been her own flowers, but needless to say there were no peonies blooming in Aberdeen in November. In the kitchen garden of the Earl Marischal’s house I found a few remaining green leaves of marjoram, thyme, and valerian; pounded together with honey and steeped in wine, they made a soothing drink.

She refused to drink it.

For two days she spent her time either crying and throwing things, or huddled under the coverlets in her bed with her eyes squeezed shut, refusing to speak to anyone. Eventually I burned the herbs in a copper warming pan, so a faint blue haze of sweet smoke filled her room, and tucked sprigs of thyme under her pillow to give her restful sleep and ward off nightmares. The leaves whispered to me that most of the queen’s frenzy was playacting, although a strange kind of playacting that she herself half believed to be real. I think she needed to convince herself that she had not been complicit in Sir John’s terrible death.

The Earl of Moray, meanwhile, calmly went about the business
of dismantling the Huntly family’s possessions and powers in the north. He stripped Strathbogie Castle of its riches and bundled it all into carts, some to be taken to Edinburgh in the queen’s name but most to be sent to his own newly acquired castle of Darnaway. The Earl of Huntly’s body was not decently entombed among his ancestors at Elgin Cathedral but packed in spices and vinegar like a ham and sent off to Edinburgh by sea. Our ancient law called for him to be present, living or dead, at his trial before Parliament for treason against the queen.

I wondered what had become of Lady Huntly and the rest of her children—the Earl Marischal, in whose town house we were staying, was her brother; presumably he had provided for her. I wondered what had become of the three witch-women. They had been right, at least, in part of their prediction—the Earl of Huntly had lain in Aberdeen the night after the battle, without a mark upon his body. Dead, of course, from his apoplexy—but unmarked.

Seilie was happily unaware of such great matters. He followed me everywhere, and he was beside me in the garden, watching me pick more thyme, at the moment Nico de Clerac came in. We had managed no chance to speak together since the execution and the queen’s collapse. I was not sure how I felt about him—we had found a strange closeness in the garden at Granmuir, and yet since then he had been distant, clearly focusing all his energies on reestablishing his influence over the queen.

I wondered whether I should tell him about Chastelard’s hasty offer on the road from Corrichie. I was not sure whether he wished to continue helping me or not.

“She seems a little better,” he said.

“I believe she is.”

“I wish you had not been forced to witness the execution. Or the battle. You have seen too much blood, Rinette.”

I crossed myself. He was right. And at the same time the way he said my name told me he still cared what became of me, still wanted to help me.

“Something happened at the battlefield,” I said. “Or at least, as we were riding back to Aberdeen.”

Nico crouched down and scratched Seilie’s silken ears. Seilie rubbed his face against Nico’s knee and made a happy little groaning sound.

“What happened?” he said. “I am sorry you were left behind—I did not dare let the queen out of my sight.”

“Chastelard. The poet. He tried to bargain for the silver casket. We were riding away from a battlefield, and he tried to bargain with me.”

Nico picked up a fallen twig and tossed it across the garden. Seilie bounded away after it. “I wonder who his patron is. There are two parties in France who have reason to want the casket—Queen Catherine de Médicis, of course, and the Huguenots. The casket would be of little value to them in itself, but Queen Catherine wants it desperately—it would give them something to bargain with.”

He did not mention the third party vying for power in France: the Guises. Of course, if he himself was a Guise agent, he would be reasonably certain that Chastelard was not.

“He said only that he represented a certain important personage,” I said. “And that time was short. The Huguenots have just lost Rouen to the Catholics, have they not? It makes sense they would be urgently in need of some way to put pressure on Queen Catherine.”

Seilie brought back the stick. Nico took it and threw it again. “You are well-informed,” he said.

“The Earl of Moray and the council have been holding their meetings at the queen’s bedside. One learns all sorts of things.”