The Flower Reader (50 page)

There was a flash of steel and a ringing crash as Nico’s blade parried a sweeping cut from side to side. I heard him let out his breath with the effort of parrying Hamilton’s brutal strength. He stepped to one side, putting his back to the door, drawing Hamilton’s focus away from the rest of us and directing the light into Rannoch Hamilton’s eyes. My husband swung around, squinting.

“Do you mean the slut in boy’s clothes?” he said. “Knox is right about her—she is a harlot, and one of the monstrous regiment of women who have no right to rule over men.”

He attacked. He hacked and slashed with brute strength. Nico de Clerac parried—it looked easy, but I had seen enough swordplay for sport’s sake to know how much skill it took to block such a violent advance so elegantly.

“Kill him,
mon cousin
!” the queen cried. She stepped forward, and Lord Darnley caught her in his arms to hold her back.

“There’s no woman here but the Green Lady,” Rannoch Hamilton said. “And I’ll have her head off before I’m finished. Too bad the brats aren’t here as well, to be spitted—”

He jumped back, barely managing to parry Nico’s smooth thrust straight to his throat.

“No one will be spitted,” Nico said, “but you. Darnley, Riccio, for the love of God, will you get the queen out of the room? Rinette, go with them.”

He traversed and ducked under Rannoch Hamilton’s swing, high and wild. Neither Darnley nor Riccio moved. The queen was clinging to Lord Darnley, watching the two men fighting, her lips parted, her amber-colored eyes shining. As the two blades clashed and rang together in the chirurgeon’s small front room, I pushed the provost from his place at the table and picked up the stool he had been sitting on. I waited until Nico had grappled Hamilton back against the table, their arms and shoulders straining, their swords guard to guard, and then, bandaged hands and all, I swung the stool in a wide arc and, with all the strength I had, all the bitterness in my heart, I struck Rannoch Hamilton’s head from behind.

He dropped like a felled ox. The queen shrieked with delight.

“Spit him, then,” I said. My voice did not sound like my own. “Or give me your blade, Nico, and I will.”

Nico laughed, sheathing his own sword with a rasp and a clang and collecting Rannoch Hamilton’s from where it had fallen.

“Let us leave him for the hangman,” he said. “I think the queen will agree.”

“I agree,” the queen said. She was flushed with excitement. With the fight over, she clearly felt she needed no more protection, so she pushed herself free of Lord Darnley’s embrace. “He drew steel in our royal presence, and threatened our life before witnesses. A trial is not necessary.”

I looked at her. I could read it in her face, plain as plain. She was remembering Sir John Gordon, and how she had fainted at his execution. She was remembering Chastelard, and how he had gone to his death reciting Ronsard. Her half brother James Stewart had ordered their deaths in her name. This time she would give her own order.

“A trial is not necessary,” she said again. For all her doublet and hose, she was quite capable of radiating royalty when she chose to do so. “We, Mary, queen of Scotland, pass judgment upon Master Rannoch Hamilton here and now—he will hang at the Mercat Cross tomorrow.”

B
y morning I realized I did not want to watch Rannoch Hamilton hang. In the heat of the swordplay the day before, when he had raved about spitting my precious babies, I would have killed him happily with my own two hands. But my heat had cooled. I was safe. My babies were safe. Blaise Laurentin had confessed to the murders of my Alexander and Richard Wetheral and to the attack on Nico, and was dead with a pistol ball in his face. I would have been happy enough to leave Edinburgh that very morning with my children and my household, and go home to Granmuir. Nico could remain at court long enough to fulfill his mysterious vow, and then follow us.

Rinette, there is something I must tell you.

Is it good?

No.

When we were safe at Granmuir, he could tell me. High in the Mermaid Tower, with the sea breeze blowing through the shutters, just the two of us with my own ancient walls around us—there he could tell me anything, and I would love him all the same.

No, I did not want to watch Rannoch Hamilton hang, but I could not leave Edinburgh, because Jennet and Tante-Mar were not well enough to travel. Nico was in attendance on the queen—he was in the highest possible favor, saving Lord Darnley, of course, after risking his own life to defend her with his sword. I had not seen him since the moment when we all streamed out of the poor chirurgeon’s house, leaving Blaise Laurentin’s faceless corpse for the coroner. Rannoch Hamilton had been imprisoned in the Tolbooth. I wondered whether he was in the same room where I had spent the night before I had been married to him.

Jennet was sitting up, and lucid enough to criticize poor Una MacAlpin’s oat porridge as cooked to a pudding. Gill and Davy ran back and forth between Holyrood and Maitland of Lethington’s house with news of Màiri and Kitte. It did not surprise me when the queen’s favorite page, Master Standen, arrived with a message commanding me to attend the queen after dinner, and accompany her to the execution of my husband, scheduled for midafternoon. The queen, Master Standen said, was still inflamed with rage over Rannoch Hamilton’s epithets addressed to her in the heat of his attack yesterday, and she was determined to see him die.

“She says,” Master Standen told me, “that if Sir John Gordon and Monsieur de Chastelard were required to die for their crimes, she will be certain Rannoch Hamilton dies for his as well.”

So I had been right.

I clearly had no choice in the matter, so I sent Master Standen on his way with my assurance I would wait upon her as she desired. I could only pray she did not have one of her sudden changes of mood and succumb to hysteria, as she had at the execution of Sir John Gordon. Rannoch Hamilton, at least, had not danced and flirted with her, and would not cry out to her that he was dying for love of her.

Una MacAlpin helped me dress, again with considerable criticism from Jennet, which she took with a good heart. I did not want to wear black or white, because I did not want anyone to think I grieved for Rannoch Hamilton’s death, but on the other hand my
blues and greens were too springlike and lighthearted for anyone’s execution. We settled on a pearl-gray bodice and sleeves with a skirt of a dark mulberry color, almost the color of dried blood.

I was beginning to feel sick and apprehensive. As Una helped me with my headdress and veil I said to myself over and over, like a litany, He married me against my will. He brutalized me. He tried to poison me at Kinmeall. He killed Wat Cairnie. He planned to kill me, and Màiri, and Kitte, too, his own daughter, as part of his twisted plot with Blaise Laurentin. He killed Blaise Laurentin and would have killed everyone in the chirurgeon’s front room, even the queen herself, if Nico had not engaged him. He deserves this death, and death a dozen times over.

Even so, I did not want to watch him die.

The queen and her party were downstairs already, gathered at the front door of the palace, while her grooms brought up the horses. She was dressed with great magnificence in cloth of silver and diamonds, and as such a gown and such jewels were entirely unsuitable for either an afternoon or an execution, she was clearly refuting Rannoch Hamilton’s words about her boy’s clothes and her right to rule. He was dying as much for his vicious tongue as he was for the murders of Blaise Laurentin and Wat Cairnie.

So be it.

“Marianette!” the queen cried. “Come along! It is time.”

They were making an entertainment out of it. Lord Darnley, of course, was at the queen’s side; he looked fretful and pale, and there were two or three pustules on his forehead. Too much fine food and wine, my lord, I thought; too much conspiracy with wineshop companions and fear for what Rannoch Hamilton might say as he stands on the ladder with the noose around his neck. Nico was there, of course, dressed in a black doublet richly embroidered with gold thread in a barred pattern, high-collared and with a narrow white ruffle framing his face; he was grave and silent, and although he smiled at me he did not leave his place at the queen’s side. David Riccio sported his usual peacock colors; the queen’s secretary, Sir William
Maitland of Lethington, and the Englishman Thomas Randolph were more sober in browns and blacks. For ladies the queen was attended by her half sister Jean Argyll, all four of the Marys—even the newly wed Mary Livingston, looking drowsy-eyed and happy—and Lady Margaret Erskine. For a moment the breeze caught her veil and revealed her hair, dark streaked with white.

Clove pinks, variegated, black at their hearts but with white edging their jagged red-violet petals. Misfortune. Bad luck. Streaks of white—old age, an old woman with white in her hair, white she covered with jeweled coifs…

I remembered thinking that, but I did not remember when or where or why.

The Earl of Moray was conspicuous by his absence. The Earl of Rothes had stayed away as well.

With the queen and Lord Darnley in the lead we rode down the Canongate and through the Netherbow Port into the High Street. The Mercat Cross stood between the High Street and the Lawnmarket, facing the Tolbooth and Saint Giles’s Kirk. The gallows had been erected, and two tall ladders leaned against it. A noisy crowd filled the square and spilled down the Lawnmarket. A platform had also been built for the queen and her party, perhaps five feet in height and draped in black cloth. Eight steps led up to it; upon it was placed a fine chair with the queen’s cloth of estate draped over it, as well as stools upon which others could sit at her pleasure. The chancy March sun had decided to shine, and the sky over the gray city was a deep saturated blue.

“We are ready,” the queen said, when she was properly situated. “Proceed, Master Sheriff.”

The sheriff went over to the Tolbooth, followed by the undersheriff, the provost—who still looked half-stunned from his experience the day before—the hangman with his rope looped over his shoulder, a Protestant minister, and two bailies. After a moment they brought Rannoch Hamilton forth. My husband’s hands were bound behind his back, but otherwise he looked much as he always looked: dark, scowling, and dangerous. He ran his eyes over the people seated on the platform and found me at once; he looked directly at me with
such hatred that it seemed to crackle in the air between us. I looked away, my stomach lurching.

“Now we shall see,” the queen said, under her breath. “Do you still think I am nothing but a slut in boy’s clothes, Master Rannoch? Do you still think I have no right to rule? Look upon your queen for your last sight in this world.”

The hangman climbed one of the ladders and threw the rope over the gallows crossbar; he had already made the noose at one end, with its thirteen coils, and it was heavy enough to drop straight and true. He nodded in satisfaction, then tied off the rope around the gallows upright and yanked the knot tight.

Rannoch Hamilton then climbed the other ladder, one rung at a time, without his hands to help him. He did not resist or struggle. When he reached the level of the hanging noose, he stopped.

The minister began to read loudly from a black leather book of scriptures.

“Prisoner,” the sheriff cried, “you may speak if you wish.”

“I will speak,” Rannoch Hamilton said. His voice was strong and unafraid and carried out over the crowd. “You, minister. Shut your clack.”

The minister stopped midpsalm.

“I repent of nothing,” my husband said. “I fear no god and no man. I fear no pagan spirits. See that woman over there on the platform behind the queen, wearing a wimple and veil like a damned nun? Her name is Marina Leslie of Granmuir, and she’s my wife. She’s not even a good Catholic—she’s the Green Lady of Granmuir in her heart and soul, and she can’t wait for me to be turned off so she can marry her lover.”

The crowd rustled and murmured as everyone gaped at me. I felt my face burning. I wanted to scream back at him that he had tried to kill me and my babies. But I had no voice. I felt as if there were a noose tightening around my own throat as well.

“The queen is no better,” Rannoch Hamilton went on. “She calls herself Mary Stuart—she’s no true Stewart, no true Scots
woman; she’s a Frenchwoman by raising and a Catholic Jezebel whore just like my wife.”

“Stop!” Lord Darnley shouted. The queen was frozen in her chair, her lips parted. When it was words and not a sword, Darnley was quick to leap to her defense. “That is enough. Silence him.”

“Hangman!” the sheriff cried. “The hood.”

The hangman reached out from his own ladder and jerked a pointed black hood over Rannoch Hamilton’s head.

“It was all about a silver casket,” my husband shouted. His voice was muffled by the hood. “A silver casket full of French witchcraft—she had it, and it disappeared, and they told me to force it out of her. Then it appeared again and I would have had it this time, but he betrayed me, the Frenchman I killed.”

I was disoriented with horror. I had always imagined Rannoch Hamilton with a black void where his face and eyes should have been, because he had no flower correspondent. Now I was staring at my nightmare in the flesh, the black hood with the voice unnaturally powerful from inside it.