The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(17)
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.