The Virgin's Daughter (7 page)

Anne, however, was Elizabeth’s heir and, in due course of time—a very long course of time, Elizabeth trusted—would herself rule England. The weight of Burghley’s arguments rested on the fact that
Anne should be as prepared as possible and not always kept at one remove from the center of government and power.

So why have I resisted so long?
Elizabeth asked herself.

She was honest enough to recognize that jealousy played a role—no woman wished to be upstaged by a younger woman—but not so honest as to dwell on that unpleasant fact. So she fixed Burghley with a gimlet eye and said, “The Princess of Wales will serve as she is required. Which for now is to correspond with James of Scotland in order to make her father nervous. It is also for her to be kept safe, for England’s security rests wholly on my own life and that of my heir. As you and Walsingham are so quick to remind me.”

One reason Burghley had endured so long in royal service was his inability to be offended by his monarch. But almost as important was his ability to remain unruffled in the face of said monarch’s displeasure. “The surest way to increase England’s security is for your daughter to provide another heir to the Tudor line. And that she cannot do while she remains isolated from your own court. Correspondence alone will not achieve a marriage.”

“But it is a necessary first step,” Elizabeth countered. “Leave off fretting, Burghley. Anne is quite able to plead her own case, and yes, I do acknowledge the need for her to be more visible. When Philip arrives, Anne will be very visible and very necessary, if only to keep her father and me from each other’s throats. I know how to position my daughter for maximum effect.”

“So you do have a specific agenda for the Princess of Wales?”

Elizabeth smiled, part amusement and part resignation. “It is not my agenda for Anne you need worry about. My daughter is quite capable of setting her own agenda and doing whatever she thinks necessary to achieve it.”

And that
, Elizabeth told herself,
is the true reason I keep my daughter on such a tight leash. In order to reduce any damage she might wreak
.

FOUR

J
ulien cursed himself soundly every day of the spring weeks that led to going home. He also cursed others: Nicolas for preying on his guilt, Charlotte for her irrepressible desire to make him better than he was, and even Lucette Courtenay (who, despite the undeniable passage of years, he still imagined as a bothersome child with sharp eyes and a suspicious nature). He coped by throwing himself into work, which outwardly involved lots of drinking and lots of women.

When he wasn’t drinking and womanizing, his work mostly involved hours spent alone ciphering letters and deciphering orders. Intelligence work sounded glamorous, Julien often thought, but was really just a long series of days spent sifting through gossip for fact and passing those facts along without anyone being the wiser. At least the drinking and women killed time.

Nicolas, who so rarely left their chateau near St. Benoir sur Loire, returned to Paris the last week of May in the company of their father. From the family’s town home in Paris—rarely used since Nicole LeClerc’s death—Renaud sent a brief note to his second
son upon their arrival, reminding him that he was expected at a welcome reception being given for Dr. Dee by an English scholar, after which Lucette Courtenay would be formally handed into the LeClercs’ hands for the duration of her time in France. Julien swore vividly when he realized he’d be traveling to Blanclair in the company of both his father and brother, though he should have guessed as much. Renaud LeClerc would never leave the girl’s safety in any but his own capable hands.

So it was, on this dazzling spring evening, Julien found himself being escorted across a checkerboard marble floor as though he were a guest in his father’s home. Fortunately for all the LeClerc men, who might have found this meeting awkward, Charlotte was there before Julien.

Engulfed in a wealth of scarlet satin, Charlotte was the image of their mother: a little short, a trifle plump, with a smile that could summon the birds from the trees. She turned all the power of that smile on Julien, and he felt a moment’s pure satisfaction in having pleased his sister.

“Julien!” She flung her arms around him, heedless of her finery, and he wondered with a jolt how long it had been since anyone had touched him in simple affection without wanting anything from him. Long enough that he couldn’t remember, at any rate.

Charlotte’s overflow of good spirits made it easier for Julien to turn from her welcome to his father. “Sir,” he said, and forced himself to stand straight and unflinching while Renaud sized him up. That was something else he could hardly remember—feeling at ease in his father’s presence. It hadn’t always been that way. The last eight years had left Julien isolated behind his walls, unwilling to let anyone see to the heart of him.

It had been more than a year since he’d seen his father, and he was relieved to note that Renaud looked better now than he had then. The death of his wife two years ago had hit Renaud hard, and Julien had wondered if he might never recover. But his father looked much
surer of himself than the last time they’d been together, as though he’d found his feet again and if still mourning was no longer unbalanced by it.

And he had certainly not lost his ability to read his younger son. “You look like a man in need of a drink,” Renaud observed, “but who knows better than to dull his wits tonight.”

“Parisian society is best enjoyed with dulled wits.”

It nearly broke his heart when his father smiled at him. “Then I must conclude that your purpose tonight is not enjoyment.”

“Of course Julien will enjoy himself,” Charlotte interposed sharply. “We will all enjoy ourselves. Nicolas is determined to, aren’t you?”

Nicolas kissed his little sister on the cheek. “For you,
ma chère
, anything. Speaking of enjoyment, why is your husband not with you?”

“Andry will meet us at the reception. He did not want to spoil our family reunion.”

“He did not want to risk being forced to express an emotion, you mean.” Julien said it out of habit, for he quite liked Charlotte’s mild-mannered husband. Andry was ten years older than his second wife, but he adored everything about her and his stability was a good counterpoint to Charlotte’s more intense temperament.

Charlotte pulled a face as though she was still ten years old rather than the twenty-five-year-old mother of two young girls. “Just you wait, Julien. I will shake that smug superiority of yours before this summer is out, see if I don’t.”

I hope not, Julien thought. Because the smug superiority, as she called it, was the defensive wall between his family and the dangers of his professional life. He would not expose them to that for anything in the world.

But he only grinned and said, “Lead on, sister. I promise to flirt with so many women tonight that even you will be pleased.”

“I don’t believe flirting has ever been your problem, Julien. It’s what comes after.”

“Dearest sister, whatever do you mean?”

But she was too French to be flustered. “You know exactly what I mean. It’s time to grow up, Julien. Find a wife and settle down.”

Nicolas, perhaps uncomfortable with the topic of wives, intervened. “If we don’t make it to the party, Julien won’t even have the opportunity to flirt, let alone marry. Leave him be, Charlotte. I’ll see to it that he is the perfectly available gentleman tonight.”

The party was being hosted by Edmund Pearce, an expatriate Protestant Englishman with a French Catholic wife. Pearce was a well-known logician and collector of scientific texts who had managed to straddle the uneasy religious divide in both his marriage and his professional life, and Julien knew there would be any number of guests tonight who could harbor secrets he wanted. But he wasn’t here to work, he reminded himself. He was here to make his sister happy.

That didn’t stop some members of the party from being particularly glad to see him. But those members were mostly in attendance with their husbands, so some measure of discretion prevailed. Julien exchanged several significant bows and followed in Charlotte’s wake. He expected they were heading for Andry, wherever he might be, but he should have guessed Charlotte’s priorities. They were headed directly for the English guests.

He recognized John Dee from descriptions and from having met him once years ago in England. The doctor was in black robes, a pointed beard lending his face a particular air of scholarship and mysticism. Julien braced himself, knowing his sister well enough to guess that Dee was not her primary aim. He tried to pick out, from the crowd around Dee, Lucette Courtenay. There were half a dozen women of the right age that Julien could see, but none were familiar to him. Her hair had been dark, he remembered—much darker than her mother’s honey gold—but beyond that his memories were hazy.

And then one of the women near Dee turned in his direction. She wore a gown of rosy plum, an unusual shade for springtime, and the starched lace ruff at her neck highlighted her elegant pose. He
could see even from here that her eyes were blue. She was not French, for he would have remembered seeing her before. But surely life was not so capricious as to turn his heart with the English girl he’d been scoffing at in his head?

Apparently it was exactly that capricious. “Lucie!” Charlotte’s voice pealed above the babble and several heads turned their way as the blue-eyed woman returned Charlotte’s smile and Julien felt, with a shock of dismay, his own heart turn over in reply.

He did not have the right to fall in love.

—

From the moment the French coastline came into sight, Lucette had been in a state of acute aliveness. They landed at Calais, once again precariously held by the English after its brief loss in the 1550s to the French. (King Philip had sent Spanish soldiers to retrieve Calais from the French in 1559 and offered the return of the city to Elizabeth as a wedding gift.) They spent one night at the governor’s home, then set out on horseback for Paris.

The French countryside was a revelation of colour and scent, though Lucette could imagine her practical brothers asking her what was so different about French grass and flowers. She argued against that practicality in her head, silently assuring them that the green of the Picardy hills was an entirely different shade from that of Warwickshire, and the poppies that edged the roads and fields were a much deeper red than anything seen in England.

The language that surrounded her was a hundred different tones of melody, and the French cheeses were sharp on her tongue. And the wine? Well, everyone knew French wine was superior and Lucette enjoyed tasting the different varieties at each meal.

Logically, she knew it for what it was—the rush of excitement at being more or less on her own, at going somewhere wholly for herself, at having a task before her that would call on all her skills of mind and wit. But she reveled in the rush nonetheless.

They stopped in Amiens to view the cathedral, Dr. Dee pointing
out the 126 pillars that made the nave the largest interior space in Europe. Although they mostly spoke in French, their group was unmistakably English and there were many curious glances cast at her—and perhaps a few hostile ones as well. The closer they got to Paris, the more she began to grasp the reality of European opposition to her queen and country.

She was not officially presented at the French court, for that would entail a different sort of visit entirely, but when they reached Paris she and Dr. Dee were invited to a feast at the Louvre. Though Henri III was not present, nor his formidable mother, Catherine de Medici, even the edges of Henri’s court were brilliant. She thought herself immune to the trappings of earthly power, made cynical by her long exposure to Elizabeth’s court. But the elegant details of the dresses, the bold behavior of the women, not to mention the noticeable presence of many red-cassocked prelates of the Catholic church, combined to leave Lucette with a hint of unease beneath her pleasure.

In Paris, they were quartered in the luxurious home of Edmund and Marguerite Pearce, a couple who managed to combine their disparate religions and cultures into a pleasing combination of art and scholarship. Edmund Pearce and Dr. Dee were longstanding friends and correspondents and spent many happy hours the first two days wrangling over books in Pearce’s library. Marguerite took Lucette to Notre Dame (to visit, not worship—it was not nearly as impressive as Amiens Cathedral) and shopping, which she did not mind as much as she expected to. And the third night—Lucette’s final night in Paris—the Pearces threw open their doors for a grand reception in honour of Dr. Dee and Lady Lucette Courtenay.

As one of Marguerite’s maids fussed over Lucette’s hair, curling and pinning it into an elaborate piece of art, Lucette braced herself for the LeClercs. Not Charlotte, whom she loved dearly even if they had not seen each other for years, nor even Renaud, who troubled her only because he was Dominic’s friend and thus might not think too highly of her just now. Rumours were not bound by the seas.
Surely they’d heard something in France of Elizabeth’s meddling in Courtenay family affairs and the ensuing strained relationships.