The Virgin's Daughter (12 page)

The first step was to conjure up the image of the library at Wynfield Mote. It was a small chamber—as everything at Wynfield was on a smaller scale than, say, Tiverton Castle—but beautiful with its coffered ceiling and ebony wood floor. The library was her Memory Chamber. The shelves in her imagination were not filled with her family’s books, but with tall quarto-size ledgers, spines neatly aligned along each shelf. Each ledger—or sometimes shelf of ledgers, if the subject matter was complex—represented a single subject.

Eyes closed, Lucette conjured up the image of herself walking to a previously unused shelf and taking down the first ledger. Then to the circular table in the center of the library, where quill and ink awaited her. She opened the cover and on the first page imagined herself writing
THE NIGHTINGALE PLOT
.

She did not have to imagine the actual writing—sometimes she did it merely for effect, occasionally to underscore the importance of how she felt about a piece of information. Now, eyes still closed, she poured out on the first pages of the ledger the information gleaned from Walsingham and Burghley and Queen Elizabeth back in February. The names of those she’d met in Paris; the impressions of the Catholic priests she’d seen along the way, friendly or not; and finally she headed a page simply
CHATEAU BLANCLAIR
.

Opening her eyes, Lucette stretched as though she had actually been sitting hunched over a table writing. Time to start snooping, so she might begin to fill in the next pages. Felix had given her a good foundation, with his thorough tour of Blanclair, but the kinds of information she needed would not come from a child. She would need to be visible, need to chatter to as many of the household staff as possible, and most of all be present with family members every hour she could manage.

She summoned the maid to help her dress for dinner and began with gentle questions about the family. But the girl—Anise—had only been here for a year, after Nicole LeClerc’s death, and had never even met Julien until now.

Not that it kept her from talking about him. “Felix is very taken with his uncle,” she confided as though it were a great secret, rather than something that radiated from the boy’s very being. “I hope for his sake Monsieur Julien behaves himself properly. Apparently he can be quite wicked in Paris.”

Lucette was torn between the impropriety of gossip and the necessity of investigation. “I imagine Julien can behave properly when he wishes. And there is much less scope for wickedness at Blanclair than in Paris.”

“Oh, yes,” Anise—who had surely never been farther than ten miles from Blanclair—agreed. “Though there is the Nightingale Inn in the village. Cook says it’s the first place Master Julien goes when he’s home. Hours he spends there, but he must hold his drink well
for she says like as not he comes back no more addled than when he went.”

“Indeed?” Lucette said no more while the girl finished attaching her starched ruff of finest lawn. She was thoughtful as she descended to dinner. On the surface, Julien passing time at a tavern seemed perfectly natural. But a tavern called Nightingale? That detail, combined with the cook’s commentary that Julien did not seem to be especially drunk, had Lucette tucking that piece into the landscape of the puzzle she was attempting to put together. Taverns, she imagined, were a good place for clandestine business.

That night she set about being, if not quite charming, then something more than just polite toward Julien. And, to her surprise, he seemed prepared to match her attempts. She was seated next to Nicolas, facing Julien across the table. He had Felix on his left, with Renaud at the end of the table. It was she and Julien who carried the bulk of the conversation.

He seemed especially interested in talking about Wynfield Mote and the LeClercs’ long ago visit to England. He didn’t quite have the nerve to frame it as “do you remember how nice I was to you when you were little,” but Lucette was forced to admit he was ruefully charming in talking about her younger siblings and the constant crowd he and Nicolas had drawn whenever they had sparred at Wynfield.

“What I recall,” Lucette said, “is your father chastising you for depending on luck when you fought.”

“True,” Julien laughed. “I did have a rather careless attitude when young, but time has taught me that fortune may not always be wholeheartedly on my side.”

“And did you learn that lesson before your carelessness caused much damage?”

It was astonishing the swiftness with which his features changed. All at once Julien was as forbidding as he had been open before. But only for a moment. Then his expression cleared, if not quite regaining
its former openness. “I am still here, at least,” he said. “And with a lifetime to atone for my former errors.”

No one else spoke or even, it seemed to Lucette, breathed. Through the thickening tension, she managed a noncommittal smile and then asked Felix about his Latin studies.

When they broke for the evening, Lucette was wondering how to ask what the men were doing the next day when Julien said abruptly, “Would you care for a tour of the valley, Lucette? I’d be happy to ride with you tomorrow around St. Benoit.”

“I should like that.”

Lucette glanced at Nicolas, wondering if she could invite him as well, but Julien said roughly, “If you’d rather go with my brother, of course…”

Nicolas rescued her. “I have estate business to do with Father tomorrow. Enjoy yourself, Lucette.”

She looked back to Julien, the same grey eyes as his brother, but inspiring quite different feelings. “I don’t know if I’m brave enough for all your attention.” She meant it to tease, but there was a catch in her voice that left her a little breathless.

Julien seemed to feel it as well, for his voice dropped to something confidential. “Then I shall have to be brave for the both of us.”

The tension was broken by Felix, who asked hopefully, “May I come, Uncle?”

“You, young sir, have lessons to do. If you work hard with your tutor tomorrow, I will spar with you in the afternoon. And perhaps Mademoiselle Lucette will favour us with her presence—she quite liked watching LeClerc boys spar when she was younger.”

Julien winked at her, and Lucette knew that the two of them were now engaged in sparring of quite another nature.

Before she slept that night, Lucette wrote to Dr. Dee. She could have encoded it to an algebraic equation, but chose the faster method of their key phrases. She told herself it was because she was tired, not because her mind kept stealing away to images of Julien—the grey eyes that seemed meant for seduction, the way his blond hair fell
about his face until her fingers itched to push it away. Whatever the reason, she had a hard time keeping to mathematics.

Dear Dr. Dee,

The journey was uneventful. I have found Blanclair to be more moving than I expected, and the family has been nothing but welcoming
.

You may report to my family that I am taking it all in to remember later. And yes, I am keeping up with my reading in German
.

Lucette Courtenay

SEVEN

J
ulien whistled his way down the stairs next morning, jubilant at the thought of several hours alone with Lucette. Not even his brother’s troubled expression as they passed on the steps bothered him.

“Don’t worry, Nic, it’s just an hour or two of riding. Even I can manage to be polite for that length of time.”

“Rather more than polite,” Nicolas said slowly. “Julien, this is not one of your Paris society ladies. Don’t insult her—and don’t get either of your hopes up.”

That sobered Julien, for he knew Nicolas was right. Whatever Charlotte’s plans (and his own rebellious emotions), there were no marital options for Lucette, he thought as he strode out to the courtyard. Not here. How disappointed Charlotte would be when Lucette returned to England without a husband, leaving him to his dissolution and Nicolas to his solitude.

Lucette was already mounted in the Blanclair courtyard, atop a fine-boned chestnut mare that might have been chosen to highlight her appearance. She could not have looked more lovely if she were
deliberately trying to snare him. Though they had shared the road for three days from Paris, today she wore a riding dress he hadn’t seen before. Rather than a ruff, an organza partlet rose from the square neckline to her throat in a maddening tease of sheerness; the dress itself was black embroidery on a white background. She might have been one of the ancient Greek deities condescending to visit mortals for her own pleasure: Aphrodite, perhaps, or the more elusive Athena.

Julien felt the hard truths of his life slip away and, with reckless abandon for either of their hearts, decided to revel in the pleasures of the moment.

As he took his reins from a groom and swung into his own saddle, he said lightly, “Good morning, Lucie. May I call you Lucie?”

At his request to address her so familiarly, she blushed but her voice was steady in reply. “I suppose since you’ve actually known me longer than my own siblings, you may as well.”

The two of them rode out of the courtyard unaccompanied. He carried two long daggers about him, and they would not go farther than the village. St. Benoit sur Loire was not Paris; there was little need to suspect violence at every moment. When they were well down the long, tree-lined road that led away from the chateau, Julien picked up the previous conversational thread. “What I recall of you as a baby is precious little, I’m afraid. I hardly paid any attention to my own little sister in those days.”

“And my mother? Did you pay her as much attention at Blanclair as you did when you came to Wynfield Mote?”

“Ah.” Julien fumbled for a moment, then remembered that honesty was his only hope. “Lady Exeter was an uncommonly kind woman to a small boy, though I do remember that she rarely smiled. Only at you, in point of fact.”

“You were…seven years old then?”

“Yes. I knew that your mother had lost her husband in England—at least, we all thought so at the time—and that the king was angry with her. Nicolas had a memory of Dominic visiting Blanclair years
before that. I was too young to remember him, but Nic told me he was that rarest of creatures—an honest Englishman.” Julien paused. “Do you know, the first time I ever saw my father cry was the day he got the news that Dominic Courtenay was still alive.”

Lucette drew a breath that might have had a slight hitch to it. He had not thought to wonder what reactions might be called forth by her return to the place of her birth. But she did not linger on that point. “Then you all came to Wynfield that long ago summer. Where you were old enough to realize how very beautiful my mother is.”

Julien spoke carefully, knowing he had to get past this particular issue, upon which she seemed so fixed. “I hope…I have always remembered what you overheard between Nic and me that day at Wynfield. I do hope you have never allowed it to trouble you. I thought myself very adult at sixteen, but of course I was barely more than a boy with a silly infatuation. I never meant disrespect to your mother.”

What he left unsaid was an apology for his first words to her the other night:
You’re not very like your mother, are you?
Why had he even said that? Shock, he supposed. For all that he proclaimed it now an infatuation, he had indeed been dreadfully in love with Minuette Courtenay. That summer at Wynfield had been passed in a state of heightened sensitivity, an alertness to her presence, the painful hope that she would speak to him, dreams of her looking at him warmly and letting him touch her…

What a fool he’d been—but no more a fool than most boys that age. If nothing else, that hopeless calf-love had kept him away from any enticements the local girls might have offered. Nicolas had not been so circumspect. Julien wondered what Lucette would say if he told her how his brother had graced the bed of more than one young woman in the Wynfield household and its surrounding neighbors. He had covered for his brother against Renaud’s suspicion, and he remembered how little Nicolas had cared for the feelings of the girls he so casually used. Julien may have been two years younger and desperately
in love with a married woman twice his age, but even he had noted his brother’s callousness.

Of course he said nothing about that now. Because for all Nicolas’s faults when young, the price his brother had since paid for Julien’s own faults had been grievously high. And if heaven had disapproved of Nicolas’s past lechery, then it had found the most cruelly ironic punishment possible.

“You’ve no need to apologize.” Lucette’s voice dragged him back to the present moment and the more than pretty woman riding beside him. “Any man who doesn’t appreciate my mother’s beauty does not have eyes. And of course I never suspected you of anything…base.”

The number of base things he’d done in the last eight years was too high to count. But he appreciated the effort and, with that reckless abandonment she called forth so easily, let himself flirt with danger. “I promise you one thing, Lucie—I have never in my life kissed a woman who has not asked it of me.”