The Flower Reader (33 page)

Je t’aime, ma mie.

I love you, my dear one.

As I heard Nico’s words in my heart, the minister said, “The Lord sanctify and bless you; the Lord pour the riches of his grace upon you, that you may please him, and live together in holy love to your lives’ end. So be it.”

And it was done. There was no sanctification, no grace, no holy love about it. Rannoch Hamilton still held me by my arms as if I were a captive. I was a captive. I wanted to die.

“Get you to your rooms, Master Rannoch,” Rothes said, “and make this marriage complete before someone else attempts to meddle in your affairs. We shall talk later about the business of Granmuir and your new rights and title there.”

“Granmuir,” said Moray. “Yes. And of course the silver casket.”

R
annoch Hamilton was quartered in rented rooms on the upper story of a tavern on the Cowgate, down the steep south slope from the High Street. He kept hold of one of my arms and I did not resist him. All I could do now was cling to whatever dignity I had left. I prayed—why did I remember the night Mary of Guise died, the night we all prayed fine Latin prayers? It was the night she gave me the silver casket with her last breath. That night changed everything, and ended with me here, walking with Rannoch Hamilton, married to him, a man I hated and feared. The prayers the minister at Saint Giles’s had read were in Scots, not Latin. Protestant prayers. There was no help for me from either the Catholics or the Reformers; as I walked I prayed silently to the Green Lady of Granmuir.

Help me, Lady, help me.

Help me endure.

Help me forget what I should never have remembered.

We reached the tavern and went upstairs. A few early-morning drinkers stared at us. My new husband pushed me ahead of him into
his rooms, and when he came in he locked the door behind him and put the key in his pouch.

“Now,” he said.

I walked across the room to the window. It overlooked a tiny garden laid out alongside the stable block. In the garden I could see herbs, a row of berry bushes, a few flowers, and a single stunted pear tree—pear blossoms symbolized separation and loneliness, but when I reached out to them with my thoughts I could not touch them. The window faced east, toward Holyrood, and the sun was just coming up. I wondered what the queen was doing. I wondered what Nico was doing, where he had gone.

Rinette, forgive me.

Why had he said that? What did he mean?

Je t’aime, ma mie.

Heavy hands came down over my shoulders and turned me around. Not exactly rough, just hard and deliberate. “Never again,” Rannoch Hamilton said, “are you to turn your back to me when I speak to you. Do you understand?”

My mouth was still painful from where he had struck me. My lips felt swollen. I shut my mind to any thoughts of Nico and said carefully, “I understand.”

“Good.” He jerked off my cap. My hair was braided and pinned. He threw the cap on the floor. “Take down your hair. Then take off your clothes. Do it slowly.”

I looked at him. Again I was struck by the neatness and newness of his own clothes, the cleanliness of his person. He thought to rise in the world, did Rannoch Hamilton, and keep company with Rothes and Moray and even the queen. I could see only his narrow dark eyes, the deep slash between his brows, the curl of vengeful self-satisfaction at the corner of his mouth.

I said, “I would like to wash myself.”

He laughed. “You can wash yourself afterward,” he said. “Now be silent, take down your hair, and strip yourself.”

My hands felt cold. I unpinned my hair and put the pins on the
table, and then began to untwist the braids. All the time I was doing it I was thinking of ways to escape. But, of course, there was no way to escape. The door was locked and the window was mullioned into diamond-shaped panes no larger than my hand.

Rannoch Hamilton unbuckled his belt as he watched me, and put his sword and dagger aside. Then he began to unfasten his coat. His breathing had quickened.

“Go on,” he said. “The mantle, the dress. All of it.”

I unhooked the mantle, slipped it off my shoulders, and began to fold it.

“Drop it.” He took off his doublet and began to unlace his points. “Now the dress.”

“Master Hamilton,” I said. I could not bring myself to form the sounds of his Christian name. “It is morning. The sunlight is shining in. Can we not put a curtain over the window, at least?”

“No. It pleases me to look at you in the light. I would take you in the middle of the High Street for everyone to see, if I could. Now drop the damned mantle on the floor and take off your dress, or I will cut it off you.”

I dropped the mantle. “You want to shame me,” I said.

“I have dreamed of it since that day in the chapel on your godforsaken rock. You shamed me that day, Marina Leslie, in front of my men.”

“So you admit it.”

“Why would I not admit it? I would cry it from the rooftops—this woman dared to threaten me with her pagan goddess and I will make her pay for it. She belongs to me now and I will have her on her knees, crying and begging.”

“I may cry,” I said. My voice shook. “But I will never beg.”

“So you say now. The dress, wife.”

The riding habit was made in two pieces, a short, tight-fitting jacket with the sleeves attached, and a separate skirt. The jacket fastened in the front with corded loops and carved ivory buttons. I began to pull the loops free. There was no point in resisting, and if
he cut the riding habit to pieces what would I wear to leave the room?

If I would ever leave the room.

Màiri, I said to myself. My household. Granmuir. Lilidh and Seilie. I am here in this room now because I will do anything to keep them safe.

In that one year I had spent at the French court as a child, I had seen amazing mechanical devices, animals and nymphs and gods that moved their arms and legs, turned their heads, almost as if they were alive. I held that image in my mind, and moved my arms and legs to do as he asked. I kept my eyes open but I did not look out through them.

I took off the jacket and dropped it on the floor. I unhooked the skirt, let it fall, and stepped out of it. That left me in my laced bodice over a thin linen chemise tied at my neck and wrists, a full, long petticoat, my gartered stockings, and my shoes. I unlaced my bodice, took off my underskirt and chemise, crouched down, and unbuckled my shoes. Stepped out of them. Stripped off my stockings. Then, naked as a clockwork sea nymph, my hair hanging loose and the April morning sunshine warm on my bare skin, I straightened and looked at a point somewhere over Rannoch Hamilton’s shoulder.

I remembered my wedding night with Alexander. I wanted to cry—oh, how I wanted to cry.

“You’re a gey beautiful woman; I’ll give you that,” he said. “Like a wild white Barbary filly with long legs and a silk mouth and a mane all brown and gold. Do you remember what you said to me, at Granmuir?”

“No,” I said. It was a lie—I remembered every word.

“‘Take care for the goddesses.’” He repeated it word for word, with the exact tone and inflection I had used. It was eerie. How many times had he said it over and over to himself to remember it so well? “‘You take pleasure in binding? The Green Lady of Granmuir will come in your sleep and wrap her woodbine around your cock and balls and pull it tighter and tighter until they turn black and fall off.’”

He was mad. He had to be mad. I felt genuine fear melting my belly and making my knees shake. I struggled to keep the image of the mechanical devices in my mind but I could not. I felt sick with horror.

“She never did,” he said, in his own voice. He stepped closer. I did not look at him, although I could feel the animal heat of his flesh. “She never came and never bound me. I’ve still got my cock and balls, wife, and I’ve waited for two years to show you just how well and how hard I can wield them.”

W
E WERE THERE IN THAT ROOM ALL DAY
. He did things to me I knew I would never forget. I tried not to fight him because I knew he wanted me to fight, and I did not want to give him that satisfaction. Mostly I succeeded. Once or twice I did not. Those were the worst times, because although I fought like a wild thing he compelled me to do what he wanted, laughing.

About midday he called for wine and bread and meat. A boy brought them, not a ragged street urchin but a servant wearing a badge I did not know. Rannoch Hamilton called him Gill and asked after two horses by name, and I realized for the first time that Rannoch Hamilton of Kinmeall had a life of some kind outside his position as one of the Earl of Rothes’s men. Servants of his own, horses, a home. Did he have brothers and sisters? Were his father and mother still living? I was not even entirely certain where Kinmeall was.

“Eat, wife,” he said, when the boy Gill had gone. He seemed to have expended his anger and vengefulness for the moment; at the end I had hidden away inside my clockwork self and surrendered to him in everything, and it had seemed to satisfy him. “I think you need the strength of it.”

“I am not hungry.”

I saw the crease between his dark brows deepen.

“I am desperately thirsty, though,” I said. “If you would give me a little of the wine it would be very welcome.”

He refilled his own cup—he had only the one—and handed it to me. I forced down my queasiness and drank. The wine stung my bruised mouth. I handed the cup back to him.

“Thank you,” I said.

He liked that—when I thanked him. He took the cup and filled it two or three more times for himself as he ate the bread and meat. When he had finished and relieved himself, he took hold of me again.

I did cry, in the end. I cried from misery and hopelessness and shame and pain and sheer exhaustion. He licked the tears from my cheeks, reveling in them. He stroked my hair, a little awkwardly, almost gently, as I cried.

But I never begged.

Not one word.

T
he next morning I woke before he did. There was no need to slip quietly out of the bed; he was sleeping like a felled ox. I wanted to wash myself. Sweet Lady, how I wanted to wash myself.

There was something else, though, I had to do first.

I wrapped myself in my petticoat and went over to the table where Rannoch Hamilton had left his sword and dagger.

No, I did not intend to do away with myself; I was not such a coward as that. I wanted to see his dagger and examine it for a falcon’s head and a missing ruby.

It was plain workmanlike steel with a haft wrapped in leather. The leather was scuffed and the steel, though polished, was worn.

Quietly, very quietly, I searched the rest of the room, under the bed, inside the leather chest and two battered wooden trunks that contained my new husband’s worldly goods. No other dagger of any kind. So I had one piece of evidence, at least, that I was not married to Alexander’s murderer, an assassin of the
Escadron Volant
. I had not really believed it, but I had to be sure. The other piece of evidence would be credible testimony as to where Rannoch
Hamilton had been at the third watch on the night the queen came home.

The water in the jug was cold and there was no soap, but I scrubbed myself as best I could, working gently around the bruises and the reddened suck marks. It was not as bad as it could have been. Not as bad, in a physical sense, at least, as I had expected. Once he had expended his first vengefulness he had been gentler. I could not help wondering whether he thought to wheedle the casket out of me for himself, and betray Rothes and Moray.

I dressed myself quickly and quietly, in my chemise and habit only, leaving off my laced bodice and stockings. The boy Gill had to be somewhere nearby, probably in the stable block beside the garden where the horses would be kept. I stepped into my shoes and wrapped my mantle around my shoulders, concealing my face as much as I could. The key was in Rannoch Hamilton’s pouch and easy to retrieve. Downstairs the tavern was deserted—it was only just dawn. I went out the back door into the garden, and through the garden to the stable.

The horses were awake, warm and snorting. The earthy, familiar smell of horses and cut straw and oiled leather gave me a pang, thinking of Lilidh; I wondered where she had been taken when I was led off from Edinburgh Castle as a prisoner. Seilie, too—Jennet and Wat had presumably ridden south from Lochleven with the queen’s household, and I prayed they had both Lilidh and Seilie safe. I prayed they were safe themselves. The boy who had brought Rannoch Hamilton’s bread and meat and wine was down at the end of the stalls, talking quietly to a big bay with a star on his forehead. The horse seemed to be paying close attention, his ears pricked forward. I stepped through the door and stumbled, my foot sinking into a straw-covered hole in the earthen floor. My ankle twisted and I fell against the flimsy wall. The whole building shuddered, and the horse threw back its head.