The Flower Reader (31 page)

W
E ALL WATCHED AS THE
queen signed both copies of the bond with her characteristic signature MARIE, all the letters separate and of an even height. Moray and Rothes had also signed it and placed their seals; I had signed my name as well. The queen dusted the papers with sand from her silver pounce-box, then handed one copy of the bond to me.

“There,” she said. She sounded smug as a child who had won a game of jig-ma-handie. “Take it, Marianette. Keep it safe. I will keep the other. Now you must do your part.”

“I will, madame.” I still felt sick. I clutched the paper tightly, thinking, This is my freedom. This is Màiri’s freedom, and Tante-Mar’s, and Jennet’s and Wat’s and everyone’s. This is Granmuir. I am sorry, Alexander. You betrayed me. Now I have betrayed you as well.

I folded the paper, taking care not to break the seals, and put it in my sleeve.

“Let us go, then.” Moray went to the door, with Rothes beside him. I wondered whether Moray thought the queen was going to share the contents of the casket with him, and whether Rothes thought he would get a share as well. I hoped the queen would keep it all to herself.

We rode up the High Street two by two, the queen with Moray, me with Rothes. The horses’ hooves made slow, hollow clops on the paving stones. People stopped what they were doing and gaped, and I felt as if I were riding to my execution. Perhaps in a way I was—execution by my own hand, the deliberate execution of the young and passionate Rinette Leslie I had once been, who believed she could checkmate a queen and bring a murderer to justice for the sake of the golden boy she loved.

When we reached the castle we rode through the gate and into the lower ward, where we left our horses. Rothes blustered and pleaded, but in the end only the queen, the Earl of Moray, and I climbed the long steps to the upper ward. The servants at the royal palace within the castle itself were sent for lanterns and then sent away, and the three of us were left alone in the great hall.

“Now,” the queen said. “Show us your secret entrance.”

I took a deep breath. I thought of Màiri, and Granmuir, and my household. I said good-bye to Alexander for good, I think, in that moment.

“Here.” I stepped over to the fireplace. My fingers went straight to the little cross saltire; this time I needed no measuring up or to the side. I pressed. The panel turned. The queen cried out with delight. The Earl of Moray swore.

“As many times as I have been in this room,” he said, “I never knew.” He took a lantern for himself and handed one to me. “Lead on, Mistress Rinette.”

I slipped through the opening easily, so easily. But of course I was thin, still recovering from the New Acquaintance and with no baby
under my heart. The stone steps spiraled down, just as they had on that night. I could see the marks of my skirt, and here and there footprints in the ancient dust. Alexander’s footprints, of course. Two years had not been long enough for the dust to thicken again.

As I looked at those marks in the dust, some of them still sharp and clean, some with a fine film of new dust beginning to soften them, all of a sudden it did not hurt anymore. Perhaps it had all hurt too much and cauterized my feelings like a hot iron pressed into an open wound. Whatever it was, I found myself without pain. My hand was perfectly steady as it held the lantern.

“We must go down,” I said. “There is no handrail—take care, madame.”

I started down. The queen followed me, exclaiming at everything, the dust, the rock, the patterns the lantern light made. The Earl of Moray followed. I could only imagine his thoughts—
the slightest slip and the queen could fall. With the queen dead and the silver casket in his hands, could he claim the crown for himself, bastard or no?

I did not care. What would that be to me?

“There are crosses,” I said. “See? They mark the turnings in the maze.”

“Who made this maze?” the queen asked. “The crosses are Christian, but the passageways seem so old.”

“It is surely older than the great hall itself,” Moray said. “Much older. There was always talk that the quadrangle was laid out over ancient vaults. The tunnels may have existed long before someone carved the crosses.”

“Lady Margaret said it was a royal secret.” The queen traced the carved cross with one elegant fingertip. “Someone should have told me.”

We passed on. I touched each cross as we turned. I had expected to feel the presence of the casket as I came close to it, or at least the presence of the flowers I had left to guard it. They would be withered now, falling to dust themselves. Even so, I should have felt them.

I did not.

We came out into the chamber.

“It is like a bubble!” the queen exclaimed. “How extraordinary! And look at the stone underfoot. It is like crackled glass, an old window or a broken mirror.”

“There are no other tunnels, Mistress Rinette,” said the Earl of Moray. His voice was cold. “This is the end of the maze. Where is the silver casket?”

“It is there,” I said. “In the niche, straight across the chamber.”

He held up his lantern. I held up my lantern. All three of us looked.

The niche was empty.

The flowers were gone.

The casket was gone, too.

I
DO NOT REMEMBER HOW WE
got out of the vaults and back up to the great hall. The Earl of Moray shouted and swore at me all the way, accusing me of having accomplices who had moved the casket to another hiding place, of having moved the casket myself and led them down to the vaults as a trick, to convince them I did not have the casket after all. The queen cried her easy tears of anger and disappointment and shouted at me that my accomplices were familiars, and that I had used witchcraft to move the casket from its hiding place. I stumbled along between them, numb with shock, protesting over and over that the casket had been there and that I did not know what had happened to it. It was a miracle I did not fall from the ancient spiral stairs. My sleeve tore as Moray pushed me back through the secret panel.

“Call my ladies at once, brother,” the queen said. She shook dust from her skirts. “Call for wine. Call the guard—I want Marianette shut up at once in the Tolbooth and charged with witchcraft. Her little hound and that white horse of hers—confiscate them. They are her familiars—we will burn them with her.”

“No!” I cried in a panic. “Oh, no, not Seilie. Not Lilidh.”

“One thing at a time, sister,” the Earl of Moray said. He had me by the arm and was holding on tightly enough to leave bruises. “Ho, ladies! To the queen!”

Mary Beaton, Margaret Beaton, and Margaret Carwood rushed in at once. They had certainly been waiting and listening at the door.

“Brush this dust off my skirts,” the queen said. She would not even look at me. “Carwood, fetch me wine, and a chair to sit on. This is proof, brother, that Marianette is a witch—she has made the casket, my casket, my prophecies, disappear, and after we went to such lengths to write and sign a bond to give her what she desired! She must suffer the penalty of the law for witchcraft, and her familiars with her. It is Master Knox’s own law, and you are bound to enforce it.”

“Woman, bring two chairs,” Moray said. When the chairs and the wine had been brought, the queen flounced into the larger chair and grasped at the golden cup. Moray let go of my arm and seated himself more sedately—I noticed he did not wait for the queen’s permission, although she was too much beside herself to notice or care. I stood there rubbing my arm, feeling sick, shaky, and cold. How could the casket be gone? Who else knew about the secret panel, the crosses, and the mysterious bubble in the rock under Saint Margaret’s?

Was it magic—not the benign white magic of my own floromancy, but an ancient power in the living rock, left over from the days of the old ones?

No. It could not be. Someone else knew about the secret passageways. Some of the footprints had been sharp and clean—too sharp and clean.

Who?

I could not think.

“Now,” said the Earl of Moray. He took a sip of his wine. “What is your explanation for this, Mistress Rinette?”

“I do not know,” I said. My voice shook and tears stung my
eyelids, but I would not, would not give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry. “I left it there the day the queen came home from France. Madame, your mother told me about the vaults and the crosses as if it were the greatest of secrets, and the only person who went into the vault with me was Alexander, and Alexander is…is—”

I choked on my own words. Alexander knew. He had written to people describing the contents of the casket, asking what they would offer in gold and land and titles. Had he also given away the secret of the vault under Saint Margaret’s, and the crosses that were the key to the maze of passageways?

No. He would not be such a fool. He had wished to sell the casket, and so he would not have given away its hiding place.

“You damn yourself with your own words,” the queen said. “No one else knew of the passageway but you and your husband, and your husband is dead. So did you move the casket to a different place with your spells? Or did you make it invisible? I know how sorcery works—I grew up as the
belle-fille
of Catherine de Médicis, and she is a mistress of the magical arts.”

“It was not sorcery,” I said. “Not witchcraft. I did not move the casket or make it invisible. Someone took it. It is
gone
.”

“Sister.” The Earl of Moray was sitting back in his chair, sipping his wine, to every appearance enjoying the queen’s ungoverned passion. “There is no magic here. There is only a deceitful girl who lied to us from the beginning. The casket was never in the secret vault at all, was it, Mistress Rinette?”

“It was.”

“I think it was not. I think you found yourself trapped by the intrigues you created, and contrived this entire elaborate charade to convince us you no longer have the casket. Did you hope we would go chasing after this imaginary thief who somehow knew Mary of Guise’s secrets? Did you imagine we would reward you for your presumed honesty and send you home to your castle by the sea?”

“No,” I said desperately. “No and no. None of that is true. The
casket was there, in the chamber under Saint Margaret’s. There were flowers there. Everything is gone.”

“It was never there.”

“There were footprints—marks in the dust. That proves Alexander and I were there.”

“It proves only that someone was there, at some time. Perhaps it was the queen regent herself, when she retrieved the casket from its hiding place. She told you the secret, and trusted you to put the casket back in the chamber, but you did not. You took it to Granmuir with you—you claim you put it in the secret chamber only after the queen returned to Scotland. But you never brought it back to Edinburgh at all, did you?”

“I did.”

“And when you were finally trapped, you remembered the queen regent’s secret, and used it to attempt to deceive us. You even coerced the queen to sign a bond, by deception. That could be construed as treason, Mistress Rinette. Certainly as lèse-majesté. Recall what happened to Monsieur de Chastelard for a similar transgression.”

I stared at him in speechless horror. I could feel the stiff folded paper of the bond inside my sleeve, lying along the skin of my forearm. I had thought it would save me. Would it now condemn me to death?

“I will give it back,” I said. “I will—”

“No.” The queen cut me off. She had finished her wine and was holding out her cup for more. In a characteristic volte-face, she said, “Brother, I cannot bear another trial and execution, and in any case, if she is executed, we will never find the casket. I want those prophecies, and I want them quickly.”

“True.” Moray was smiling a thin smile, as if he knew what she was going to say next.

“Let us instead proceed with our original plan—marry her to Rothes’s kinsman. He is a brutish-looking fellow and will have no qualms about beating the truth out of her, whether she has hidden
the casket by her sorcery or has it secreted away in some other hiding place. I will promise him a knighthood and Granmuir as a royal fief, in exchange for the casket.”

“An excellent plan, sister,” Moray said. His smile had deepened into smugness. He wanted her to have the
quatre-maris
prophecies. He wanted her married to the Spanish king’s mad son, married to some foreigner somewhere, and gone from Scotland—who else would she appoint as regent but he himself? “Much better than simply burning her as a witch, or striking off her head for treason.”

“I would rather burn,” I said. “I would rather you strike off my head. I will never marry Rannoch Hamilton and he will never, never be master of Granmuir.”

Moray finished his wine, handed the empty cup to a waiting-woman, and stood up. “We shall see about that,” he said. “Sister, let us return to Holyrood. Mistress Rinette can spend the night shut up in the Tolbooth to meditate on the stake and the block, and what might happen to her daughter and her household if she continues to be contumacious.”

The queen drank off the rest of her own wine. “I would like some music,” she said. She acted as if I were not even there. “Some dancing. A little supper. Tell the Earl of Rothes to arrange for the marriage at Saint Giles’s Kirk in the morning.”