Free The Flower Reader by Elizabeth Loupas

closer.
    “I will go in alone,” I said. “Please wait here.”
    “You cannot walk that far.”
    “I can. I must be alone. Please.”
    “May the Holy Virgin walk with you,” Mary Livingston whispered, and she let go of my arm.
    I took one step, and then another. The stone floor of the churchwas scarred and I could see marks of fire on the pillars. I knew the tale, of course: the English protector Somerset’s men, twenty years ago, burning and looting the church, stealing the great font of solid brass, stripping the lead from the roof. But the nave remained, silent and holy, filled with the tombs of kings, smelling of ancient stone and centuries of incense. Each step took me closer to the bier. At the crossing, the ruined remains of the transepts stretched away darkly on either side. I stopped.
    Alexander, Alexander…
    He lay with mourning candles at his head and his feet, his hands crossed over his breast. He wore strange black clothes, borrowed clothes, just as I did; his own shirt and doublet and hose—his shirt that I had stitched with my own fingers!—would have been too bloodied. His face was uncovered, his profile serene under the vaulted roof of the church. God, how white he was. Only his hair was the same, shining in the candlelight. Its curls made me think of the petals of his golden iris. I reached out and touched it. It felt the same, silky but at the same time strong and springing away from his scalp.
    His eyes were closed.
    I touched his cheek.
    Cold. Slack and softening, where in life it had always been warm and firm.
    Alexander…
    I may have cried it aloud. I know I threw myself down over his chest and clung to him even in his borrowed clothes and with his flesh beginning to dissolve away into corruption and screamed and screamed. I knew I was screaming because it hurt my throat. How could this have come to be? Why were we not at Granmuir, safe and happy beside the sea with our daughter all our own and not a queen’s godchild?
    Because you insisted on going to Edinburgh.
    Alexander’s voice.
    Because you would not rest until you had taken the silver casket to the queen.
    I scrabbled for his face, his mouth—he could not be speaking; he could not. His head fell to one side away from me. The wound across his throat had been roughly stitched together with black thread. There was still blood, dried black. Whoever had washed him had done it carelessly. Some flakes of the dried blood had cracked and come away when his head moved.
    I would be alive if it were not for you and your silver casket.
    “No,” I said. I felt sick with horror and guilt. “Oh no. Forgive me, forgive me.”
    I put my hands on either side of his face, as I had done so often in life. He felt like an image in soft, cold clay, but I had disturbed him and I had to put him right. I turned his head and as I did the candlelight struck a spark of crimson fire from the spot under his ear where the dried blood had flaked away.
    I touched it. A jewel. A ruby. My thoughts lurched to Alexander’s own dagger, jeweled and filigreed, falling to the floor of Saint Ninian’s church at Granmuir. This jewel was different, not a cabochon but cut with facets and polished to catch the light; it had nothing to do with Alexander, and if it was lodged in his terrible wound there was only one place it could have come from.
    The assassin’s dagger. Something in the violence of the cut, the agony of Alexander’s convulsion, must have broken the ruby free—
    “Madame.”
    I started around and almost lost my balance. A man stood behind me, tall and angular, all arms and legs but for the breadth of his shoulders. I thought at first he was a ghost, but then I realized he was dressed in black and silver in a thoroughly modern style, and with red-gold hair like banked embers in the darkness. His eyes were edged with kohl, and a diamond glittered in his left ear. Where had he come from? Where had Mary Livingston and Alisoun gone, that they did not come to my