Free The Flower Reader by Elizabeth Loupas Page B

close attention to…to his wound.”
    Nicolas de Clerac frowned. “What do you mean?”
    I stepped close to the bier again. With one fingertip I touchedthe ruby, still stuck in my husband’s dried blood. “This is not his. He never drew his own dagger, and he was no courtier to be wearing earrings or jewels.”
    “Where do you think it came from?” Nicolas de Clerac bent his head to look more closely; his own earring winked in the candlelight. “It is too small to have been set in a ring.”
    “It could have been set in the murderer’s dagger.”
    “If so, it would be a valuable piece, not an ordinary assassin’s weapon. Stones of that size are not usually cut with facets. May I remove it?”
    “No.” I pushed his hand aside, more violently than I intended. He stepped back instantly. “I will take it.”
    “Of course, madame.” His voice was soft and formal.
    I put one hand on Alexander’s forehead and smoothed back his golden hair. One last time, one last touch. Then I took the ruby. It came away easily. A few flakes of long-dried blood clung to my fingertips.
    I will see justice done for you, I thought. I cannot say it aloud for it is not something I wish anyone else to hear. But I will see justice done. I swear it.
    “Perhaps one day you will allow me to examine it,” Nicolas de Clerac said.
    “Perhaps.”
    My voice was beginning to sound as if it were coming from far away. I could hear the footfalls of the canons again, pacing, pacing. They sounded so real I jerked around, looking over my shoulder. I saw no one.
    “Madame, please allow me to call your women to you.”
    “I can walk. Thank you for your assistance, Monsieur de Clerac; you may go.”
    With my head high, I turned to walk down the nave again. After one step I fell face-forward into his arms.
    I heard him calling for Mary Livingston. I heard her speaking to him in French, and Alisoun’s stout Edinburgh Scots in thebackground. I felt fury and humiliation that he would see me so weak and helpless. Worst of all, in the end he picked me up like a child and carried me—carried me!—out of the abbey church.
    He smelled of bitter orange and myrrh. I knew he could not truly smell of the narcotic gold-and-purple nightshade flower, but for me he did. Through it all I clung to the ruby.
    I thought: Why did he come to the abbey church, Monsieur Nicolas de Clerac, courtier and so-called secretary and very plate of fashion that he was? Was it truly for nothing more than to offer his condolences to a grieving widow? Or did he, too, think to find some trace of evidence connected to Alexander’s death?
    Find it, or suppress it?
    Was it nothing but chance that he had been so fortuitously close at hand to fight off the assassin, once the deed was already done?
    And why did he offer to help me find out the truth?
    I should not have let him see the ruby. If he was part of a conspiracy, he could warn the true assassin to hide the jeweled dagger, or throw it into the sea. Yet Mary of Guise had loved and trusted him, and he was clever behind all the flamboyance. That was clear enough.
    I floated higher and higher, until I was far away from them all.

Chapter Seven

    I refused to call my daughter Mary. The queen had chosen that name, not I, and I resented her interference. But the christening was done, and Mary Gordon she was in the eyes of God and man. In my own mind I made it into Màiri, which meant “bitterness.” Her birth, after all, had been a bitter, bitter thing.
    She had Alexander’s hair, golden and soft as the finest silk. It curled. I had no sense of the princely golden iris for her, though, with its intimations of sun and wind and blood. She was a wild rose, pink-and-gold, sweet like the rose’s scent but also bitter like the tea made from the hips in the fall. Bitter, but bracing and healthful in the end.
    I had thought I could never love her. How wrong I had been. I loved her fiercely and completely, with every last shred and tatter of love