The Virgin's Daughter (8 page)

It was the brothers who unsettled her: Nicolas and Julien. And not simply because Walsingham suspected that one or both of the young LeClercs might be working against England. That task was real enough, but so were the memories of herself as a tongue-tied, impressionable child who had followed Nicolas around like a puppy and had loathed Julien for pointing it out. She knew they must be very different after twelve years, but inside she half expected to see the two tall young men who had overawed her at Wynfield Mote.

By the time Lucette descended, there were already several dozen members of the Paris intelligentsia who were the natural crowd for John Dee. But there were nobles as well, the men sharp and watchful beneath their finery, and the women glittering with a sense of their own worth. That was not so different from England. Two or three churchmen moved through the chambers as well, one of them a cardinal in scarlet.

When she heard her name called, she knew Charlotte instantly, even without the pleasure writ large on her friend’s face. It was the same face of early adolescence, round-cheeked and wide-eyed, and she gave Lucette an embrace that crushed a great deal of expensive fabric between them.

But even as she hugged Charlotte, Lucette’s mind was turning, for she had taken in the three LeClerc men and found that she could name them just as easily as if she’d seen them last week. Renaud, of course, was silver-haired but otherwise unchanged. Tall, with broad shoulders and chest, and the bearing of a soldier. Nicolas was nearly as easy to identify, for he was undeniably his father’s son. Though not, Lucette decided, as imposing. There was something—kinder? softer?—about him, as though his edges were smoothed away. But he was still very handsome.

Julien was the shock. He had been taller than his brother even at sixteen, and now he topped both his father and brother by at least three inches. He might even be taller than Dominic, she thought
dizzily. His hair was still that wheat-coloured shade, though with streaks of both darker and lighter blond to it. He looked…messier than Nicolas, but also more elegant in the way that only Frenchmen can bring off.

His eyes, Lucette noted, when Charlotte stopped hugging her and turned to her brothers, were still unfriendly. And, worst of all, amused. As though he expected her to fawn and blush and fall over her words as she had when she was a child.

He’d be getting no blushes from her.

Renaud, however, was a pure pleasure to greet. His genuine affection nearly brought tears to her eyes. And Nicolas was as gracious as he’d ever been.

“My dear girl,” he said in English. “You are every bit as lovely a woman as your childhood promised.”

“Merci,”
she said, continuing in rapid French. “And you will do me a favor by letting me speak your language. I need the practice.”

“Not at all,” he replied, graciously switching. “You have a lovely accent. I do hope you’ll do me the honour of dancing with me later. It has been…many years since I have so indulged myself.”

With that, Lucette remembered his widowhood, how his young wife had died delivering their only son, Felix. How Nicolas had more or less shut himself up at Chateau Blanclair since then. Touched that he had come all the way to Paris to greet her when he could have waited for her to arrive at his home, Lucette smiled. “It has been the purpose of my voyage to dance with you, Nicolas.”

She tried to ignore Charlotte’s expression—like a cat in the cream—and wondered for the first time what would happen to her investigation if she made the mistake of allowing her childish emotions to get the better of her.

But this was France. Flirting was a game—no more, no less—and she would use it. If she happened to enjoy it, no one need know.

At last she could not avoid greeting Julien without open rudeness. But he had no such scruples. Before she could do more than
look his way, he said in rapidly clipped French, “You’re not very like your mother, are you?”

In a flood of childhood indignation, Lucette remembered the claim Nicolas had launched at his brother during their trip to Wynfield:
You’ve been panting after her all summer like a dog in heat
. He had meant Minuette. Whom clearly Julien had found beautiful. And whom he had just casually noted that Lucette was nothing like.

“Enough like her to recognize good manners or the lack thereof,” she retorted.

Could it be that she’d stung him? She thought she saw a twitch along his jaw before he said, “That came out rather differently than I intended. I meant only that you are very dark. Your hair, at least. And your eyes—”

“Are blue. I know,” she said shortly. Turning to Nicolas, she said, “May I introduce you to Dr. Dee? You’ll find him quite an entertaining storyteller while we wait for the dancing to begin.”

Charlotte came with them, but Renaud drifted away in conversation with old friends. Julien turned on his heel and melted into the crowd.

And Lucette told herself sternly to remember that liking or disliking had absolutely nothing to do with intelligence work. Just because Julien was as rude as he’d ever been didn’t make him an agent against England. It simply meant that her scruples in investigating him were lessened.

—

Julien walked way from Lucette with his head spinning so much he might as well have been drunk. He could hardly even remember opening his mouth, but somehow he’d managed to insult her very first thing. How had he let his thoughts tumble out of his mouth like that? He never spoke without thinking, for that was likely to get an intelligencer killed.

At least he’d managed not to babble that she was far more beautiful
than he remembered even her mother being, that he—who had a specific type of woman, always blonde to some degree and charming and skilled at seduction—had been completely knocked off balance by the contrast of her dark hair and pale skin and sea-blue eyes.
This is ridiculous
, he told himself firmly.
I do not believe in love at first sight
.

He wasn’t entirely sure that he believed in love at all. Not any longer.

Best way to get a woman out of one’s mind, he knew, was to find another woman. Julien began to scan the crowds to find the best choice for the evening, one whose studied play would demand no more of him than surface expertise. Being Paris, he almost instantly marked three women and decided on the blondest, giggliest, silliest of the lot. He set off toward her and made it five steps before someone laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.

“You’re heading for the wrong woman,” the familiar voice of Cardinal Ribault said softly. “I thought it was the Englishwoman your sister brought you here to charm.”

“Not now,” Julien said under his breath. He was in enough turmoil without adding in the quick wits demanded of his work. At least not without warning. What the hell was Cardinal Ribault doing here anyway, at a party designed to welcome an emissary from that most heretic Queen Elizabeth?

Ribault did not leave him long in ignorance. The cleric—short and compact, with flyaway brown hair that curled at the edges of his tonsure—maneuvered Julien into a secluded corner of the chamber and said softly, “Have you really not worked it out? You’re slipping, LeClerc. You know about John Dee. He’s almost as canny a character as Walsingham, and his scholarly connections are but a thin veil for intelligence activities. He’s here to find out what he can about plots against his bastard queen.”

“So?” Julien challenged. “What’s that to do with me? Unless you want me to abandon my promise to spend the next six weeks at Blanclair and remain here in Paris instead?” He asked it almost with a lift of hope. It would surely infuriate Charlotte, and he could
hardly tell his sister the reason why, but then at least he wouldn’t have to deal with the profoundly unsettling Lucette.

But Ribault dashed that hope. “You are slipping. It is the girl herself who’s the real interest, LeClerc.”

He stared dumbly. “Whatever for?”

“Surely you know who she is—or who Elizabeth thinks she is. Those blue eyes?”

Of course there had been rumours, even here. That Lucette’s blue eyes were a legacy from her true father, the late king of England. That Elizabeth treated the girl as her niece, whatever the protests of her putative father, the Duke of Exeter. Julien had never thought much about the truth of such rumours, but suddenly he put together their significance. And why the Catholic network was so very interested in her.

“Do you honestly think Walsingham would employ a woman?” Julien asked in disbelief.

“Of course not,” came the withering reply. “But that doesn’t mean she would not make a very valuable source of information for our cause. Whatever her true relationship to Elizabeth, it is undeniable that the Princess of Wales is extremely close to the Courtenay family and continues to spend her summers at their country home. Whether she will continue that practice this summer is something of a question. A question to which I daresay Lucette Courtenay could provide an answer.”

Julien’s head spun even more. He was already juggling so many balls, how on earth was he supposed to add this one to the mix? “What do you want?” he asked bluntly.

“What do we ever want? Information.”

“And how do you propose I go about it?” He must be rattled, or he would not have posed such a stupid question.

The cardinal, with as much righteous delicacy as possible, said, “I am not aware that you have ever encountered difficulty in gathering information from comely women. Surely you do not need a man of the Church to tell you how.”

“Lucette Courtenay is a guest of my family, and I can hardly seduce such a guest in my father’s home.” Never mind that the thought instantly brought with it irresistible images of seduction, with Lucette in his arms, that dark hair tumbled round her bare shoulders…

Heaven above, but he was in trouble.

“I don’t care how you do it, LeClerc.” Ribault leaned closer, words barely above a whisper that made the threat all the more intense. “This girl is the best chance we have ever had of gaining inside information about the very heart of the heretic’s court. Get us what we need to bring us nearer to restoring God’s light to the benighted people of England.”

The cardinal stalked away in a swirl of crimson robes while Julien cursed inventively and soundlessly. He didn’t dare openly disobey. Which meant spending more time with Lucette than was wise for either of them.

If his heart leaped treacherously at the thought, he shoved it firmly away. Lucette was nothing more now than a job. And he was very good at his job.

FIVE

M
ary Stuart had not been in such a good humour in a very long time. Indeed, she had difficulty remembering when last she’d felt so hopeful. When she’d first married Darnley, she supposed. She had been carried away then both by her passion for the handsome young man and the satisfaction of exercising her royal will, for she had found great pleasure in marrying him despite the vocal protests of her recalcitrant council. Sometimes she wondered if her love had been more about Darnley himself or about getting her own way.

Well, she’d long since learned that lesson. Men were to be used, not trusted. And her satisfactions now depended solely on herself. Much more practical. Not that she minded having handsome men around her. There had been the Duke of Norfolk, of course, though that had ended badly for both of them. (Admittedly, rather the worse for him, since he’d lost his head on her behalf.) Her present guardian, the Earl of Shrewsbury, was attentive enough, certainly polite and careful of her status, and his wife had become a good friend.

Stephen Courtenay, however, the young Earl of Somerset, had made a very welcome addition to Mary’s household at Tutbury. Besides being decorative, he was intelligent and astute. A boy of few words, but those few always well-chosen and nicely balanced between loyalty to his own queen and kindness to the imprisoned queen he spent time with.

And such a convenient source of familial information.

“I hear from my friends in Paris that your sister made quite the impression with Dr. Dee,” Mary said conversationally one afternoon, as Stephen and she played cards. “It seems everyone in society is highly taken with her beauty and conduct.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Stephen said.

“And now she has gone on to…Chateau Blanclair, is it?” Mary probed. She knew perfectly well it was; her correspondents were well-informed.

“Yes.”

Mary sighed in exasperation. “Really, sir, you could converse with me in more than one syllable words.”

“So I could.” His quick grin saved the remark from impertinence and moved it into the category—just—of courtly flirting.

Mary laughed. “So what will your parents say if your sister decides to remain in France with a husband? Or more pertinent, perhaps, what would your queen make of the matter?”

Mary naturally knew the gossip, that Elizabeth believed Lucette Courtenay to be her niece. No one spoke of it openly, for the Duke of Exeter was held in high regard and was, besides, a most forbidding man. And the Duchess of Exeter? Well, Mary remembered Minuette Wyatt during her few weeks at the French court. Mary herself had not yet been wed to Francis and had felt a most unusual envy of the older, beautiful, and utterly charming Englishwoman. Had Minuette betrayed her husband with the late king of England? Mary supposed no one living knew that except the woman herself. And what, in the end, did it matter? Elizabeth believed it, and that made it a fact in the murky world of politics and royal intrigue.