The Flower Reader Read Online Free Page A

farmer’s wife who caught the duke’s eye so briefly, but I suspected my mother was like her—dazzlingly beautiful, passionate, devoted to one thing and one thing alone. For my mother it had been my father, Patrick Leslie of Granmuir. After his death at the end of that terrible year in France, I might never have existed for her at all. She disappeared into the abbey of Montmartre in Paris to spend her lifein prayer for him, and I was left to the queen regent to foster, and to Tante-Mar, who loved me as my mother never did and came home to Granmuir with me for the sake of it.
    I had barely reached my tiny chamber and begun to tell them of the queen’s death when a blow on the door behind me swung it open, hard enough to crash against the wall.
    Tante-Mar screamed. Jennet knocked over the one candle; it rolled across the stone floor, making grotesque streaks and flashes of light on the face of the man in the doorway. For a moment he looked like a hobgoblin from hell; then the candle went out and in the light of the small fireplace he was an ordinary man-at-arms again, snub-nosed and ruddy, wearing the Earl of Rothes’s livery.
    Tante-Mar clutched her rosary. Jennet stared, openmouthed. I put the casket and the trailing flowers down on the table. There was a three-legged stool pushed up beside it.
    “The Earl of Rothes wants Lady Marina Leslie brought back upstairs right away,” the man said. He put one hand on his sword hilt. “To protect her, like. That’s you, am it not, my lady?”
    I caught up the stool, swung it hard by one of its legs, and knocked him stone-cold unconscious.
    “Sainte Mère de Dieu,
Rinette
!”
Tante-Mar cried. “Have you gone mad?”
    “I have not,” I said. “Get your things, whatever you want to keep. Money, too, whatever we have. We are off to Granmuir and we do not have long until the earl sends more men. Where is Wat?”
    Jennet, pragmatic as the day is long, knelt beside the unconscious soldier and began tying his wrists and ankles together with his own bootlaces. “Stables,” she said. She bounced up and began collecting a bundle of clothes for herself and one for me. “You want that frippery casket in here?”
    I handed it over—there was no time for hidden crosses and secret vaults, but would not the casket be just as safe at Granmuir?—and wrapped poor trembling Tante-Mar in her heaviest mantle. I took her bundle and muffled myself up in my own cloak. “Ready, Jennet?”
    “Ready.”
    We ran for the stables, the three of us. They were across the upper ward and past the gate, and poor Tante-Mar was half fainting by the time Jennet and I dragged her to the door of the wattle-and-daub stablemen’s hut and pounded on it vigorously.
    “Wat!” I cried. “Wat Cairnie!”
    He opened the door at once—he, too, had been awake, then, waiting for Mary of Guise to die. He was stout and sunburned summer and winter; I had grown up with him, and he was the closest thing I had to a brother.
    “The queen?” he said.
    “Dead.
Requiescat in pace
.” I crossed myself. Wat and Jennet did the same. Poor Tante-Mar just gasped and wheezed and clung to her rosary. “Rothes wants to take me now—we have to run for Granmuir.”
    “She’s already cracked one of the earl’s men over the pate with a stool,” Jennet said. “More’ll be coming.”
    “I’ll saddle the horses.” Wat, thank God, was as pragmatic as Jennet. Both their families had served the Leslies of Granmuir for generations, and not much surprised them.
    “Jennet, you take Lilidh,” I said. Lilidh, sweet-tempered namesake of white valley lilies, was my own mare, half-Andalusian and the fastest horse in Aberdeenshire. “Ride for Glenlithie and tell Alexander what has happened—beg him to ride back with you to Granmuir as fast as ever he can.”
    “Aye.”
    “Wat, take Tante-Mar pillion—she cannot manage on her own, and we have only two more horses. Bad enough the Earl of Rothes is after us without having the