The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(15)
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.