The Virgin's Daughter (41 page)

Was he really talking about his son at such a time? As though Nicolas expected, as Julien had sarcastically pointed out, everything to go back to normal once he left Wynfield? It was that blitheness that terrified Lucette more than anything else about the last days. Nicolas might be focused and clearheaded on his own concerns, but he seemed to have no realistic grasp of what others might be feeling or planning. Lucette liked logic and mathematics because they made sense. One could not reason with a man who lacked the most basic awareness.

No time for regrets. Lucette stepped forward into the hall, stopping Nicolas’s speech for a moment before he turned his words on her.

“How pretty you look! Very charming in your summer dress. I approve.”

“That was the point,” she said drily. She could not bring herself to flirt with him, but nor did she want to upset him. Nicolas had not let go of his dagger—Julien’s dagger—and Laurent leaned against the front door with dagger in one hand and pistol in the other. The tutor’s eyes never left Julien’s back, and they were filled with an icy rage that scared her. Laurent hated Julien, and there were not even any ties of sibling memory to soften it.

“And now we can talk,” Nicolas said cheerfully. “Anyone care to sit?”

“Talk about what?” Julien demanded. He had looked her over once, swiftly, when he’d come in and again when she’d returned to the hall. Otherwise he seemed to hardly know she was there, so tensely was he fixed on his brother.

“About the future. About how the three of us—sorry, Laurent,
four
of us—get out of England. About what happens when we reach France.”

“You’re not taking Lucette out of here, Nic. She’s got a father and
brothers and a band of very angry Englishmen just waiting for you to stick your head out the door before they take it off.”

“Not if Lucie comes willingly.”

She was getting tired of being talked about and around. “But I won’t, so there’s no need to imagine it.”

“Of course you’ll come willingly,
ma petite
. Otherwise, I kill Julien. You’ll leave Wynfield to save him. You’ll return to France to save him. And when we reach France, you will marry me…to save him.”

“Not going to happen.” Julien said it firmly, but Lucette noted the edge to his expression, coming in and out of focus through the flickering candlelight. Someone had lit the candles on the sideboard during her brief absence. It would soon be full night outside, and with all the shutters firmly closed the hall was already dark.

“Lucette is not that stupid or desperate,” Julien went on. “She knows I am not worth her life.”

“Such a martyr! Always ready to die for a cause, Julien. Or no, more like always ready to let someone
else
die for your cause.”

“And that’s the crux of all this, isn’t it? What happened to you because of me. Because you went after Léonore for my sake, and in trying to help me got yourself nearly killed. That’s on me, Nicolas. I know it. Don’t punish this girl because once you tried to help another girl I cared for.”

“You are such an idiot! How in Heaven’s name have you managed all these years not to get yourself killed with your stupidity? I wasn’t trying to help you. I wasn’t trying to save Léonore. She was a Huguenot bitch. Good for a little fun in bed, but that little fun cost me a lot more than my life. I wasn’t trying to help her, you stupid bastard—I was screwing her and got caught in the cross fire.”

Julien had gone so white and so still that Lucette was afraid he would stumble or fall. “Say that again.” His voice was like lead shot, dropped into her heart.

“I was caught in her damn bed when her brothers returned to the house. I imagine the mutilation they inflicted on me was just the
beginning, but before they could kill me the Catholics stormed the house and tore them both to pieces.”

When Nicolas smiled, it was the most terrible thing Lucette had ever seen. She wanted him to stop talking because he was going to break Julien, and she didn’t know if anyone would ever be able to put the pieces back together again.

“As for the girl,” Nicolas continued with remorseless pride, “I stayed conscious long enough to cut her throat myself.”

—

For the third time in his life, Julien stood still and recognized in a single moment that his life would never again be the same. They were rare, those moments, when one could see with perfect clarity that at this point everything changed. There would be
before
, and there would be
after
.

The second time had been just over a week ago, when Dominic Courtenay told him what Nicolas had done.

The first time was the moment he’d found Léonore dead and Nicolas castrated and bleeding out.

Julien had changed everything in his life—sacrificed his family, lied to his fellow countrymen, missed his mother’s deathbed—because of what he believed had happened that day. He knew that, should he get out of this house alive, he would have to deal with a crushing weight of guilt, much worse than the false guilt he’d been carrying for years.

But first he had to get out. Or, at the least, get Lucette out.

For she was the only fixed point in his world at this moment when all else hurtled into a chaos of lies and deception. She stood there staring at him, as if her gaze could keep him anchored to the world. And it did.

Julien asked simply, “How long?”

“Just the once,” Nicolas answered, correctly surmising his brother’s intent. “I thought for certain you’d already had her, but she was
a virgin, sure enough. Your loss. But then, you always have been the romantic one. The one for whom honour is more valuable than life.”

Julien blinked, and twitched his head as though shaking off a fly. He could not afford to get lost in memories just now. Focus, instead, on Laurent at his back and Nicolas facing him. Focus, also, on the quality of Lucette’s gaze, and the way she flicked her eyes downward to her hands, crossed demurely below her waist.

But not just crossed—her fingertips disappeared beneath the fabric of her split-front skirt. Back in France, outside the Nightingale Inn, Lucette had produced a dagger from somewhere about her women’s clothing. Could it be she had hiding places in this dress, as well?

As though she could read his mind Lucette said tentatively, “Nicolas, I’m feeling a little faint. Might I sit down?”

He cupped his hand on her cheek. “Of course. Laurent,” he called over his shoulder, “place a stool for Lucette next to you.”

Perfect. Laurent thudded a low-backed stool in front of the door, with just enough room for him to stand behind her. Leaving himself in easy reach of a woman he wasn’t much afraid of.

His mistake.

As long as Lord Exeter’s men were quick and quiet in their execution, then Nicolas would never know when his men outside were taken down and he and Laurent remained alone. Dominic had told Julien he preferred not to storm the house and risk injury to Lucette. If only they could take out Laurent and better the odds, then Julien would force her to run.

It was interesting how his mind could operate cold-bloodedly on such details while his gut roiled with bile and betrayal. But as much as he hated Nic at this moment, when he looked at his brother, he could not help seeing Felix as well. And Charlotte. And their father. And even Nicole, who might be watching her sons from Heaven.

Nicolas stopped the threat of drowning misery in its tracks. “So, brother, how would you like to share a woman in truth? Everyone
keeps making such a fuss about Lucette deserving to have children of her own. Why should she not have LeClerc children?”

“You must be mad,” Julien said flatly.

“To imagine she would welcome you into her bed? Not mad, brother—just perceptive. She’s fond enough of me, and I’m not too proud to trade on that fondness and even pity—but it is you she wants. From the moment she laid eyes on you in Paris, it is you she has wanted to claim her.”

Julien was glad that he could not clearly see Lucette.

“If you hate me so much, why offer what I want most in the world?”

“Because it is not what you want most! You want all of her. I know you, Julien. You want the priest and vows, the loyalty and the love, the days as well as the nights. You are too honourable for your own good, and that is why you lose. I am willing to throw you scraps of my wife, if only to keep you in perpetual torment.”

Julien had to close his eyes against his brother’s venom. When he opened them, he had himself under control. “You might read me well enough, Nic, but I’m afraid you’ve completely misread Lucette. She had quite other plans in coming to France, and marriage was not among them. Haven’t you worked it out yet? Didn’t she tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Walsingham sent her to spy out Nightingale. Before she left Blanclair, she knew it was one of us running it. She would have done whatever was necessary to get us both to England. She accepted your proposal because she knew I would come with you, putting whichever of us was guilty into Walsingham’s reach. She would have accepted me with the same calculation. Everything she’s done has been bent to her purpose.”

He had shaken Nicolas; there was a sheen to his brother’s face as though finally the heat of the closed-up hall was getting to him. “If you believe that, you know nothing about women. She was lost the moment she loved you. And you’re too much a fool to have seen it.

“Besides,” Nicolas gestured to her sitting before Laurent, “she has
failed spectacularly. She followed the false trail, thinking it was Elizabeth’s death we wanted. And in the end she brought me exactly where I needed to be—within reach of the heretic’s daughter. So calculating or not, I must thank her for her service.”

Nicolas sketched a mocking bow in Lucette’s direction, breaking eye contact with his brother. Without turning his head, Julien could just see the moment when Lucie rose and turned in one smooth movement. The daggers she’d pulled from their hiding place had blades barely longer than her palms, but light gleamed sharp on their edges. In the same moment that Nicolas straightened, Julien tackled him and prayed that Lucie’s blades met their mark.

—

Lucette had never plunged a blade into living flesh, and so was surprised at how easily she did it. The dagger in her right hand went straight through the fabric of Laurent’s shirtsleeves and into his forearm, which made him reflexively drop the pistol he’d been holding in that hand. Her left-hand dagger did not quite so easily find a mark, skittering across the buttons of his jerkin. With a wrench, he pulled her blade out of his arm and backhanded her with the other hand.

“Bitch!”

Behind her there was the sound of scuffling, which faintly recalled the time she’d come across the brothers in Wynfield’s stables, but she knew this was far more deadly. Laurent struck her again, so that her vision blackened and she fell awkwardly backward, half sitting on the floor. With black spots still dancing in her eyes, she watched Laurent raise his pistol.

And then a sword, knocking the pistol aside, and before she could react the blade plunged into Laurent’s stomach. He fell with a terrible gurgling, and Lucette thought dimly that she had to get up, she couldn’t keep sitting on the floor with a man dying three feet away, she must…

It was Nicolas who pulled her up, who ran his hands along her body. “Did he hurt you?” he asked urgently.

She shook her head, which made it ache worse, and then Julien was in her vision as well and she could breathe deeper.

His lip was split and he had a welt along his cheek, but he appeared otherwise unhurt. Beneath the relief, confusion pounded through her: Why had Nicolas killed his ally?

For her sake, apparently. “Bastard was told not to touch you. Ever.” Nicolas bent to his son’s former tutor, who was still twitching a bit, and studied the wound Lucette had made in his forearm. “Although I must say your provocation was extreme.”

When Nicolas moved again, it was to make a clean sweep of the various weapons in the hall. Laurent’s pistol and sword, Lucette’s thin bodice daggers—they looked like toys in his grasp—everything except Nicolas’s own sword and dagger, he locked in the silver cupboard on the wall across from the fireplace.

At last Julien moved to stand between his brother and Lucette. “Nic, let’s go now. If you leave her alone, Lord Exeter will allow us through his line. We can be halfway to the coast by morning.”

Nicolas seemed not to have heard him. All his attention was bent to Lucette, who met his gaze fiercely. “Little spy,” he purred, and he was only partly amused. “Did I give you enough mysteries to puzzle out at Blanclair?”

“What did you do to the maids?” she threw back at him in challenge.

Julien looked bewildered, but Nicolas grasped it at once. “Was it Anise leaving that set you off? Or had you picked up on that before?”

“Before. There were four maids who left their employment at Blanclair with no more than a message left for the cook, all within the last five years. Five maids, once Anise left. Even after Anise left, you used her to send me a message naming Julien as working against me. Did you kill the others?”

“Of course not! What do you take me for? I paid the bitches well to leave without notice and with a promise not to return. With the
money I paid, they would have little need to look for work for some time to come.”

“Why pay them off? What did they learn about Nightingale?”

“So focused on politics—I thought women were supposed to be good at understanding the personal.”

But it was Julien who spoke up in quick understanding. “You seduced them,” he said flatly, “as well as you could. But when they came too near to discovering that the seduction could only go so far…well, you would do nearly anything to protect that secret.”

“As would any man. Don’t you sneer at me, Julien. What do you know of the hell those Huguenot bastards left me in? Better to die, I thought, for a long time. But then I realized that I wasn’t absolutely, entirely unmanned. Did you know that, in some few cases, it’s possible to feel arousal? Possible for desire to flood you body and soul until there’s only one release? And when that one release is impossible…what then? Don’t you dare mock at how I managed in the face of such provocation.”