The Virgin's Daughter (3 page)

—

Though Lucette had known Her Majesty, Elizabeth, Queen of England, Ireland, and France as long as she could remember, to be in
her presence was to be intimately aware of power. Who had it, and who didn’t.

Lucette had been waiting in the queen’s privy chamber for a quarter hour when the queen swept in, snapping her fingers at her attendants to leave them. Lucette curtsied, eyes lowered so that all she could see was the bottom few inches of the queen’s sapphire and gold gown, intricately wrought with embroidered scallops and whirls.

“Rise,” Elizabeth said, “and join me.”

Lucette perched on the edge of a seat and waited warily. The queen rested her expressive hands on the gilded chair arms, and pondered Lucette with a remote expression that might have concealed anything from curiosity to disdain.

Tall and slender, the pale-skinned, red-haired queen never seemed to age. Save for the fine lines around her eyes and mouth, Elizabeth looked much younger than her forty-six years. Even if the paleness of her skin owed something to art, and even though her glorious hair was more often a wig these days than not, the Queen of England seemed almost a mythical figure: a fairy queen of boundless youth and wisdom.

Elizabeth’s tone was all exaggerated patience. “Walsingham tells me you are disinclined to aid the crown. Might your monarch know why?”

“I am disinclined to repay friendship with betrayal, Your Majesty. To pretend that I am angling for a husband while following the path of mere rumours—”

“It is not rumour,” Elizabeth said flatly. “Not this time. Three men were arrested last week in Calais, attempting to cross to England. They carried coded letters that my government deciphered. A most definite plot is under way, aimed not merely at my throne but at my life.”

Lucette hesitated. “Might I ask why the government suspects the LeClerc household? I can think of no more honourable man than Renaud LeClerc, or one less likely to be embroiled in secret plots.”

“Except perhaps the Duke of Exeter?” Elizabeth asked with a touch of humour. “I agree. It is not Renaud himself we suspect.”

“Surely if one of his boys were involved in anything so dangerous, their father would know it.”

“His sons are not boys, Lucette, as you are no longer a child yourself. They are men, full-grown and tested in the service of a Catholic government. Give over any childish romantic fantasies you have and consider the matter logically!”

“Is that why you want me, for my logic? Or is it not simply because I am a woman who will not be suspected and can…what? Seduce the brothers into spilling their secrets?” She asked it plainly enough, but wondered briefly how exactly one went about seducing secrets.

Elizabeth stood up and, from a coffer on a side table, took a sheet of parchment that she handed over. “Look at this list, Lucette. Take your time. Study each word and phrase, and when you are ready, tell me what you see.”

Reluctantly, Lucette accepted the parchment, densely scrawled with distinctive handwriting that she recognized as Walsingham’s, and did as she’d been bidden. It was not an especially coherent document, nothing so useful as a complete sentence, just names and phrases and dates compiled without apparent rhyme or reason.

Despite her reluctance, Lucette’s mind began to work. She was incapable of refusing a puzzle, and John Dee had used just such apparently chaotic collections in order to teach her how to order information. How to separate the important from the useless and the critical from the merely important. Patterns were instinctive to her way of viewing the world, as natural to her as breathing, and so her eyes skimmed lightly over the sheet, hardly knowing that her breathing slowed and her attention became so inward that she appeared almost to be in a trance. In that manner, the words and phrases rearranged themselves.

“Oh, yes,” she murmured, hardly aware of speaking aloud. “There it is.”

The queen’s voice pulled her forcefully back into the physical world. “There what is?”

“The pattern that has Your Majesty and Walsingham so worried. The flashpoint of trouble that you set me looking for although you have already discerned it.”

The queen did not dispute that this had been a test of some sort, but merely raised a cool eyebrow in that smooth, white face. “And?”

“Mary Stuart and Princess Anne. France and Spain. Two foreign interests dangerous enough in themselves, but exponentially more devastating if combined in one threat. It looks very much as though a narrow web is being woven between those two interests.”

Lucette laid aside the sheet and proceeded to speak honestly; there were some privileges of the queen’s insistence on their blood relationship. “And you did not need me to tell you that. So why am I here, Your Majesty?”

She did not miss the small smile, though the queen spoke matter-of-factly. “You are here because it took Walsingham a solid week to see the pattern that you just uncovered in three minutes. A pattern that has disclosed something called the Nightingale Plot.”

“I knew that I was looking for a pattern, and all the information was gathered in one place. Much simpler than sifting through scores of seemingly unrelated letters and documents.”

“That list includes unrelated documentary material. I am quite sure you could sift out crucial information…in the field, as it were.”

“Your Majesty, with all respect, I am not suited for such an endeavour. I will be happy to consider any information you care to pass along, but I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to go about sifting intelligence as I go. People are beyond my skills.”

“Not these particular people.”

Lucette wasn’t sure if the pounding in her head was from apprehension or excitement. It was one thing to hear such a proposal from Francis Walsingham, quite another to hear the Queen of England seriously suggest that she turn intelligencer. Spying was a job for
men like Walsingham and those he employed. Men of doubtful loyalty, men of easy conscience, men who could move unnoticed…

In short, men.

Attempting indifference, Lucette asked, “Why does Walsingham believe the LeClercs are involved? Surely he is not swayed by mere rumour.”

“Among the coded letters carried by the Catholic Englishmen last week, Walsingham encountered a name, a single name of great concern. One that is not on the list you just studied.”

Lucette raised her eyebrows in query, knowing she did not do so half as smoothly as her monarch.

Elizabeth spoke the single name. “Blanclair.”

It was all she had to say, for Lucette knew that name as well as she knew that of Wynfield Mote or Tiverton. For Chateau Blanclair was the lovely Loire Valley home of Renaud LeClerc, who had sheltered Minuette Courtenay when she’d been driven out of England by the late king’s rage, and it was at Blanclair that Lucette had been born and passed nearly the first year of her life.

Though she had never been back, her mother and Dominic had been to France twice in her lifetime, and the Courtenay family had maintained close epistolary ties with the LeClercs. Lucette herself wrote to Charlotte LeClerc at least twice a month; hence Charlotte’s latest plea to come to France and see her. Lucette had not discussed the proposal with her family yet, nor had she made up her mind as to her response.

It appeared Elizabeth had preempted her.

“So that is why you want me,” Lucette answered. “Not for my mind or my skill in seeing patterns, but because I am a woman and, unlike others of Walsingham’s employ, can be sent to seduce men of their secrets.”

The queen looked amused. “I hear that both Nicolas and Julien LeClerc are fine men. Seduction would not be such a trial.”

“Your Majesty—”

“Do not take the high moral ground on the basis of your sex, Lucette.”
The queen was not angry—yet—but the warning of it was in her voice. “I am a woman and I do not scorn to make use of it against those weak enough to be so used. For all that, do you find anything lacking in the strength of my mind or the force of my will?”

Lucette pressed her lips tight so as not to lose her temper with royalty.

And then the queen, as she always did, chose precisely the right tone; one of wistful remembrance, tugging on loyalties formed before Lucette was even born. “I need you. England needs you. Body, mind, spirit—you can go where none other I trust half so well can go. You can enter the very heart of a home and family that evidence suggests may be a threat to us. I do not order you to a certain conclusion—I ask you only to bring me the truth, wherever it may lie. Chateau Blanclair and the LeClerc family may be innocently on the fringes of involvement, but a fringe can lead one deeper. If France and Spain combine against me, how long before an assassin gets lucky and my half-Spanish daughter is handed into Philip’s control? How long before England is left to be squabbled over by Catholics and Protestants once more? What are the niceties of your conscience against such a threat?”

Even as Lucette recognized the manipulation of Elizabeth’s passionate appeal, she was also moved by it.

She offered one last—expected—resistance. “If my father knew what you were asking…”

Clearly she was more rattled than she’d thought, or that would not have been her wording. The queen pounced on that slip. “Don’t let’s be coy, Lucette. If your ‘father’ were alive to know it, then I would not be queen and my life would not be in danger.”

And just when Lucette was prepared to almost hate the queen for her manipulation and self-righteous power, the facade opened a crack and there was Elizabeth—her mother’s friend, herself once a clever girl who no doubt could easily have seduced half the secrets of Europe out of any man she liked—and that warm, playful girl smiled out of the wary woman’s eyes.

“Ah, Lucie,” she said, “you were going to say yes before ever you came in here, whether you admit it or not, because there is no dare you will not take. You want people to think you restrained and modest and demure, but you are aching to live in this world and use the gifts God has granted you. And I like to think that you have a little affection for me, niece, and would rather not see me dead if you can help it.”

Fighting against the smile wringing its way out of her, Lucette said, “You truly believe I can help it?”

“Walsingham believes so, as does Dr. Dee. And yes, Lucie, I believe you can do it. Not because you are my niece, but because you are Minuette’s daughter. I never knew a woman more able to accomplish her own ends than your mother, and I believe she has passed that to you.”

Lucette rose from her seat and made her submission, feeling the wings of panic and pleasure combine in an exhilarating mixture. “I will serve you in this, Your Majesty.”

TWO

I
f Lucette had worried about the reception her impending visit to France would have at home, she needn’t have bothered. For her brother Stephen had news of his own to impart upon the Courtenay family’s return to Tiverton: namely, that he had been tasked with joining the English royal guard attendant upon Mary Stuart of Scotland. He delivered the news with his customary calmness at dinner, always using as few words as possible to explain himself, and waited for his father’s reaction.

One usually had to wait some time for a reaction from Dominic Courtenay. The Duke of Exeter was a man of even fewer words than his eldest son, and only long study and familiarity allowed Lucette and her siblings to read any sign in his countenance. She caught the twitch along his jaw, and then her mother intervened.

“Not quite the posting you had hoped for, Stephen, but at least it is not a dangerous one.”

Kit, at eighteen two years younger than Stephen, joined in. “Not dangerous? Tell that to the Duke of Norfolk!”

“Dangerous, then, only to men of little conscience and less intelligence,” Minuette Courtenay answered tartly.

Finally, Dominic spoke. “Neither of which applies to you, Stephen. Not that I like the thought of you caught in the tangled web that is Mary Stuart’s life. But,” he added wryly, “I don’t suppose the queen asked so much as commanded.”

“I am glad to go, Father,” Stephen replied. “And I am not afraid of political tangles.”

“You should be,” Dominic warned flatly. “You are yourself an earl, which makes you equal rank with Shrewsbury. Do you know how far into debt the Talbots have been driven in their guardianship of Mary Stuart? You’d best hope the queen does not intend to replace Shrewsbury with you as her chief jailer.”

“I’m hardly Shrewsbury’s equal, Father. My title derives as secondary to yours, not of my own account, and George Talbot is more than twice my age. My purpose at Tutbury has nothing to do with changing Mary’s prison or keeper.”

That almost sounded as though there
were
a distinct purpose for Stephen’s presence at Tutbury, Lucette thought. But before anyone could continue, her sister, Pippa, sent the conversation in an entirely new direction. “Lucette, is it true you have been invited to go to Paris with Dr. Dee?”

Coming from anyone else, this knowledge would have shocked Lucette and sent her wondering furiously how it had been obtained. But Pippa always knew far more than she should. Far more than was good for her. And not always from old-fashioned gossip or eavesdropping. There was a hint of the mystic to Pippa, times when her green eyes seemed to see far more than the world around her. Some of the village folk were superstitious about the single streak of black in her dark blonde hair.
Touched by the faeries
, some whispered.