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

that very spot, from the times before the Christians came. A vault underneath—it could be thousands of years old.”
    “Thousands of years of rats and spiders. And anyway, Edinburgh Castle and Saint Margaret’s are built on solid rock. Not likely the savages could have chipped a vault underneath with bones and stones.”
    I measured up with hand widths. Fingers together. Nothing. Fingers spread wide—and there it was. Worked so intricately into the grain of the wood one would never see it unless one knew exactly where to look—a tiny cross, not a double-barred
croisette de Lorraine
but a cross saltire, Saint Andrew’s cross, the mark of Scotland from the time of the Picts. The wooden paneling was comparatively new, but whoever had carved the little cross had been marking something ancient and singular.
    “I found it,” I said. Alexander leaned down to look. I pressed the spot firmly and felt the panel shift. With an eerie shrieking sound it turned and revealed a narrow opening.
    “You will never fit through, sweetheart, not with the baby.”
    “I can fit.” I began to wriggle through the opening. Hold still, I thought, my littlin, my bairnie-ba. Press close. We’re going on a great adventure. One last deep breath and I was through.
    “Light,” I said.
    Alexander passed me the lanterns and the bag with the casket, then turned and stepped sideways through the opening so easily he might have been performing a
ripresa
as part of a court dance. I could have smacked him. We both looked down: stone steps, rough-cut and thick with dust, spiraled away into what seemed the depths of the earth. There was no handrail.
    “Take care,” Alexander said. “I will go first, and manage the lanterns and the casket.”
    I kept one hand against the wall and the other stretched out in front of me, to catch Alexander’s shirt if I should slip. The shape of his shoulders was so familiar and so beloved, and at the same time with his face turned away he might have been a stranger. It seemedas if we went around and down and around and down forever. At last we reached the bottom.
    “Follow the crosses,” I said.
    The lanterns cast ghostly shapes and shadows on the rough-hewn stone. There had been vaults under the palace and the upper ward for a hundred years and more, since James Stewart, the second of the name, but this was different—this was a narrow passageway chipped out of the living rock, much older than the vaults. Every hundred steps or so I saw another cross. Seeping water and the passage of time had worn away the sharp edges of the carvings.
    “I wonder if there is treasure hidden away in the secret chamber.” At last Alexander seemed to be falling under the spell of the old queen’s secret. “Why would they do all the work of making these tunnels, if not to hide something valuable?”
    We went on. The walls of the passageway began to look different; the stone seemed molded or melted, and no longer bore any mark of tools. The rock both underfoot and overhead was curved, and there were narrow ledges like steps at the sides. Three more crosses and we came out into a chamber. The light from the lanterns flickered over rounded walls and an arched vault overhead with bubbles and drips like an upside-down pot of porridge. Under our feet the rock was smooth as polished marble, with deep cracks running at random angles. The air had been getting harder and harder to breathe, and here in the eerie empty chamber it was thick and stale and smelled of stone and rainwater and aeons of time.
    Alexander put the lanterns down and crossed himself. I wrapped my arms around the round weight of the baby. It was very still, as if it could feel awe even in my womb.
    “How did it come to be?” Alexander whispered. “It is like a bubble in a bog, only all in solid rock. The floor’s like melted sugar that’s been cooled too fast and crackled.”
    “I do not know. I wonder who made the crosses, and how they knew St. Margaret’s was