The Flower Reader by Elizabeth Loupas Read Free Book Online Page A

the rest of the Gordons to await the queen. She arrived on a Tuesday, the nineteenth day of August, in the year of Our Lord 1561, a day or two before she was expected. The royal apartments at Holyrood Palace were not even prepared, but only a palace would do for her; so after descending upon an assemblyman’s house at Leith for her midday dinner—can you imagine the panic of the assemblyman’s wife?—to Holyrood she went.
    Edinburgh went mad with excitement.
    Alexander and I went to Holyrood that very afternoon. I told her ladies I had a gift to present to her, a relic of her own mother, who had charged me to keep it safely against the young queen’s return. I did not tell them what it was—that, I thought, could wait until I was in the queen’s own presence. Oh, but the queen was
très fatiguée
, her ladies replied. She would see me next week or the week after. She was sure that since I had kept her dear mother’s treasure safe for a year and more, I could keep it safe for a little while longer.
    I was furious. I had come all the way from Granmuir; I had quarreled with my darling Alexander and risked my precious baby to come. I was tired and aching and humiliated. Since I had been with child, my emotions seemed wilder, closer to the surface.
    I decided to fulfill my original promise and no more: I would put the casket in Mary of Guise’s secret hiding place under Saint Margaret’s. Then I would write the queen of Scots a letter telling her the whole story, and go home.
    E VEN E DINBURGH C ASTLE , high on its ancient rock over the unsettled city, was crammed with people who had come to the capital to welcome the new queen. Fortunately most of them, including the men-at-arms and the palace servants, were taking advantage of the excitement to carouse and play the pipes in the palace yard. Alexanderand I were able to slip into the great hall of the royal palace without anyone paying a blink of attention.
    A passageway,
Mary of Guise had whispered with her last breath.
From the vaults under the great hall. Never tell anyone—
    Alexander carried the casket in a saddlebag of plain leather over his shoulder; in his hands he carried two lanterns. I had a few flowers tucked in my pouch, picked from the sadly neglected knot garden in St. Anne’s Yard outside the south wall of Holyrood: roses and clove pinks, rosemary from the old queen’s overgrown topiary, and wildflowers, marguerites and yarrow and ragged robin, which had crept in as wildflowers will do. The rosemary was for the memory of the old queen, the cultivated roses for the young queen. The color was right, pale pink, but the flowers themselves were wrong—did it mean the young queen did not belong at Holyrood? The wildflowers, chance-blown, chance-found, would tell the fate of the casket itself.
    “Look here,” I said. “By the fireplace.” I crouched down, clumsy with the babe in my belly, and ran my fingers over the paneling. Up from the floor twelve what? There were no lines, no seams in the polished panelwork. No crosses evident in the rich grain of the wood. When I tapped and pressed at random, nothing happened.
    “I do not see why you think you must follow the old queen’s directions now, sweetheart,” Alexander said. He sounded sulky and restless; he had wanted to stay at Holyrood with the courtiers who were flocking about the young queen like sheep to a bellwether ewe. “And I do not want to return to Granmuir without at least being presented to the queen.”
    “I want to go home,” I said. I could see the irony—two weeks ago I had been quarreling with him because I wanted to come to Edinburgh—but I was still angry over the queen’s snub and I did not care that I was inconsistent. I began measuring up from the floor and over from the side by finger widths. Nothing. “Are you not even a little curious about a secret vault under Saint Margaret’s? The chapel is hundreds of years old and they say there were other holy placesbefore it, on