The Virgin's Daughter (16 page)

With his fingertips, he caressed her skin from palm to wrist, teasing touches that were both familiar and arousing. Philip had always known what to do with his hands, she remembered. Not every moment of their marriage, as he’d said, had been political. For a heartbeat of piercing pain, Elizabeth felt the loss of never again being touched by a man.

But one could not go back. Withdrawing her hands from his, Elizabeth said cautiously, “It is not unpleasant to have your company one last time. You have been a friend to England when most we needed it. I hope that friendship will continue.”

His expression darkened briefly, for no man and for certain no monarch liked rejection. “My daughter shall always have my friendship. But you must know that Spain’s interests continue to diverge from England’s with each passing year in which you keep your people from the comfort of the Church.”

Five minutes—that’s all it took for personal concerns to become political. “I think,” Elizabeth said, “that this is enough for now. No doubt we have plenty to say to each other in council with others. If it were likely that we should agree on these points, then I don’t suppose this visit would end with a divorce.”

Philip stood, a righteous sorrow evident on his still handsome face. “I am sorry for it,” he said simply. “I hope you will not object to my spending time with my daughter, at least?”

Her own smile was a thing of frosty power. “No objection at all. You will find Anne quite capable of defending her own positions without my aid. Goodnight, Philip.”

Not a bow this time, but an incline of the head and the familiar calculation had returned to his expression. “Goodnight, Elizabeth. Tomorrow, the end begins.”

And not a moment too soon
, she finished for him.

—

Julien’s worry about Lucette’s lies vanished the moment he reached his chamber still damp from the river. A courier had brought him a letter from Paris, anonymous in the address, but in a handwriting he knew instantly.

In a code that Julien could decipher almost by instinct, Cardinal Ribault had written:
There will be a man at the tavern of the Nightingale Inn tonight to receive your report. Be there by midnight
.

“Damn it,” he said under his breath, and crumpled the message in one hand.

He had no idea what he would report. The truth?
My conversations with Lucette Courtenay have been challenging and engaging and about every subject under the sun except her connection to the English royal family
. Hardly. He
would have to lie, which was no great issue. He had done little but lie to the cardinal for seven years now.

He might have encountered difficulty in getting out of the chateau unseen, but Lucette’s retreat to her chambers made things easy. Without a guest to entertain, the men of the LeClerc family reverted to type: the meal was mostly silent and they all scattered as soon as they decently could. Julien waited until well after dark and set off on foot to the village tavern. No need to alert anyone to his absence by rousing a groom or taking a horse. Dressed in subdued fashion, a cloak despite the June weather, in order to offer some concealment to his sword, he trudged to the village and thought about Lucette.

All he’d done for days now was think about Lucette—no, Lucie. Lucette was suspicious and restrained and did not like him at all. Lucie, on the other hand…Lucie laughed. Lucie teased. Lucie was no less intelligent than Lucette, but she wasn’t defined solely by her mind, and inhabited her body in an entirely different way.

Not that he should be paying attention to her body.

When Julien reached the Nightingale Inn, he still didn’t have the slightest idea what he intended to tell the cardinal’s emissary. Good thing he was used to thinking on his feet.

He couldn’t be anonymous here the way he could in Paris, but the people of the village knew enough about him to read his moods—either entertain me or, as today, leave me be. Aside from a nod from the tavern keeper, Julien made his way to a corner table and waited for the emissary to come to him. It was easy enough to pick him out—he might have been in exile in France but Englishmen moved differently than Frenchmen. The man was bearded and fiercely mustached, with a scar running across the back of his right hand.

The emissary turned a chair around and straddled it, arms resting on the chair back.
“Monsieur,”
he said in a hoarse voice that made Julien wonder in which gutter the cardinal had picked him up.

“Orders?” Julien asked softly.

“To tell me what you’ve learned of the girl.”

Julien leaned back and stretched, hands clasped behind his head, his pose of ease covering a mind working furiously.

“She’s unlikely to be of any real use,” he said negligently. “Queen’s niece or not, the girl is not a royal intimate. I’d say it’s by her own choice,” and as he spoke, Julien felt it to be true. As though putting Lucette into words helped him understand her. “She” (for he could not bring himself to use her name to such a slimy man) “is unwilling to be used by anyone, friend or family, and surely the English queen is too intelligent to think otherwise.”

“That is not what you were asked to discover,” the man said. “Surely she communicates with her sister, who is such an intimate of the young princess.”

“I have no news on that score,” Julien said bluntly. “Whatever the princess’s plans this summer, they have not, to my knowledge, been communicated to my guest.”

“How hard have you tried to learn?” The man’s very tone was a leer, and Julien wanted to smash his face.

Instead, he leaned across the table and said, “I don’t know how it’s done in your world, but gentlemen do not take advantage of young women of good family.”

“But by all accounts,
monsieur
, you are by no means a gentleman.”

Julien swung his gaze away, furious, and made himself survey the tavern simply to give his mind something to do. No, he wasn’t a gentleman and hadn’t been for years. A gentleman would not be having this conversation. A gentleman would not have quite so thorough knowledge of the intimate habits of every maid in this tavern. There was Madeleine with her tumble of red hair, and Sophie who giggled when kissed, and Blanche with her exceptionally skilled hands.

There had been a time when Nicolas would have been the one to know (in every sense) these women, but Julien had picked up his brother’s habits in an effort at staving off guilt. As though by following in Nicolas’s footsteps he could undo what had been done to his brother.

And then his uncomfortable thoughts stuttered and stopped as
his eyes skimmed over something that caught his attention. He slowly moved his gaze back, tracking, and stopped dumbfounded at a table in the corner farthest from him. It was occupied by two men and a woman. A woman in plain skirts and low-cut linen, dark hair braided tightly to her head beneath a cap, eyes modestly lowered while no doubt her brain ran along five times faster than the idiots she was listening to.

Lucette.

—

Pride might be a sin, but Lucette was undoubtedly proud of how she’d managed tonight. Anise had been heaven-sent as her maid, for the girl was all too easy to persuade to lend her clothing, and vowed to maintain the fiction that the Englishwoman was confined to her chambers with illness. Lucette also knew (thanks to Felix) the less traveled corridors of the chateau and the side gate through which she could pass at a distance from Renaud’s men at arms and not be spotted.

It was only two miles to the inn, and Lucette passed the time not, as she should, in preparing for what lay ahead, but in uncomfortable dwelling on this afternoon. Uncomfortable because she had completely lost her head and her ready tongue the moment she’d seen Julien with a damp shirt clinging to his chest, hair tousled as though he’d just risen from his bed.

We have been swimming
, Felix had announced, as though she could not see that perfectly well for herself. She had brothers—she knew men swam without any clothes—but having Julien stand so near her without the armor of doublet and stockings, brocade and silk, had given her far too vivid an impression of the body beneath the linen shirt and low-slung breeches. So she had flushed to her hairline, stuttered like a girl, and run away as soon as Felix unwittingly gave her a way out.

But once fled to her chamber, easy enough to put in motion the plan that had been swirling in her head for several days.

Before she knew it, the village appeared and the very first inn tavern that Lucette had ever entered alone. That did require a few deep breaths and a stern reminder that she knew what she was doing. (That latter phrase mostly thrown defiantly at Dominic’s imagined disapproval. Somehow, she thought her mother might understand and, if not approve, at least find it amusing.) The carved sign in the shape of a nightingale steadied her nerves, reminding her as it did of the seriousness of her purpose. As well as the likelihood of finding something provocative in a place that might well be the namesake of Walsingham’s suspected plot.

The difficulty in blending into the tavern crowd, Lucette quickly found, would be her voice. And her posture. And her white hands. She was a quick study, though, and after a half hour spent lurking in the shadowy corner, felt safe enough to drift around the room, ears open.

But it wasn’t her ears men were interested in. Lucette had thought herself prepared to be leered at, but she quickly learned that these sorts of men did not confine themselves to leering. They were free with both their hands and their comments, and she had to keep reminding herself that here she was neither the acknowledged daughter of the Duke of Exeter nor the unacknowledged niece of the Queen of England, and thus could not afford to be outraged at the liberties.

She had decided she didn’t dare pass as French, so Lucette made herself into Ellen, a half-English orphan trying to get back to her mother’s Catholic family in Provence. As long as she allowed a hand to wander every now and then, she found men willing to talk about the LeClerc family.

The general tenor of the community was respect for Renaud and a deep and genuine liking of his late wife. Lucette heard more than one reference to Nicole’s kindness, her care for individuals regardless of position or—interesting in this valley—religion. There had been violence in the area (Lucette had seen that for herself at Fleury) and death, but not the wholesale slaughter seen in other communities.
“Blanclair wouldn’t stand for it,” was a phrase she heard more than once.

As for the younger members of the family, Julien was spoken of fondly as a youth, more outgoing and easy in his camaraderie than his older brother. Nicolas, for all that he’d spent the last eight years at the chateau, was spoken of more warily. Respect, she supposed, but not as instinctive as that given Renaud. There was a general sense that he’d shut himself up since his wife’s death, and the same wondering Lucette had: why had he not remarried?

One of the traveling men pronounced, half-drunkenly, “Could be taking a single wife for honour’s sake was enough. Mayhap he prefers boys.”

There was a burst of laughter at that. “No, no.” One of the villagers slapped him on the back. “Nicolas LeClerc was wild for the girls since he was a lad. In and out of more beds in the area than any six men combined. No, if he’s not married again, it’s for a damn good reason. Maybe there’s a fortune says he has to remain widowed to lay his hands on it.”

“Maybe he loved his wife,” Lucette ventured. This did not draw the same outburst of loud laughter, but she had the definite sense of amusement at her naïveté.

As the night tipped toward the witching hours, Lucette began to grow dizzy. No doubt a result of the fug of smoke and the ale and no food and trying to keep her head and speak like someone who didn’t personally know the Queen of England. She had just decided to escape back to the chateau and hopefully clear her head on the way when Julien walked in.

Lucette froze. Had he learned of her absence, tracked her down? But she realized almost at once that Julien had no idea she was here. She assumed he must have looked the room over, but she had her head tucked down so far her chin was on her chest. When she dared peek, she saw that he had settled himself at a private table that no one interrupted until a most disreputable man confidently sat down across from him.

She was torn between sneaking out and watching the encounter. Surely this was evidence—for what legitimate purpose could Julien LeClerc be meeting with a man like that in a tavern? Finally she decided to wait for Julien to leave and then tackle the unsavory man herself.

She never got the chance. On her next quick peek to the corner, Julien was looking straight at her, horror writ large on his face.

She stepped away from the table so hurriedly that she upset her chair. Julien reached her in five strides and gripped her arm above the elbow.

“Hey, now!” One of the merchants she’d been talking to protested. “Hands off, she was ours first.”

Julien glared down at him, eyes blazing, and, through the haze of drink, the man recognized the lord of the manor. Julien’s cultured voice didn’t hurt, either. “I think I’ll exercise my
droit de seigneur
,” he said cuttingly, and pulled Lucette after him out the tavern door into the inn yard.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She jerked her arm away and turned on him, half furious and half humiliated.

“You’re welcome,” Julien retorted with elaborate insult. “Those men do not care who your father is. All they saw was a likely wench who was in way over her head.”

With her arm free, Lucette reached behind her back and had her bodice dagger out of its concealment beneath her waistband and in Julien’s face before he could insult her further. “I know what I’m doing,” she said, hating that she felt so fuzzy. “I was not over my head.”

He eyed the tip of the dagger, eyes nearly crossed, then smiled that seductive, mocking grin of his youth that she’d hated. “Where, Lucie mine, did you learn to wield a dagger so handily?”

Lucie mine
. He had spoken the endearment in English.

Without moving it away, she said, “My father does not trust men with his daughters. He required us to be able to defend ourselves.”
From somewhere below the fuzziness of her brain and the sinking hollow of her stomach, she realized she’d used the word
father
.