The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(24)
After a delicate pause, Burghley said, “Your Majesty, he holds no title, and his unfortunate relationship to the late Duke of Norfolk—”
“Norfolk was his stepfather in name only. Brandon was raised by his uncle, the Earl of Warwick, and all his allegiance by birth and blood is to the Protestants. As for titles, I intend to invest him before we leave for Portsmouth, and so you may let leak to the Spanish ambassador.”
“What title will you give him?”
“The Earl of Leicester.” Elizabeth stared down her chief advisor, daring him to say what he thought, that this was nothing more than a sentimental gesture on the queen’s part to a young man who reminded her of the only man she’d ever loved. Robert Dudley had been dead for twenty-two years, executed for nothing more than serving Elizabeth.
She would not be scolded for making his nephew an earl. Small enough repayment for the loss of Robert.
—
They were three days on the road to Blanclair. The second night was spent at an inn in Pithiviers, the LeClerc men once again sharing a chamber. Julien stumbled up late, but Nicolas wagered he’d been doing nothing more than drink to try and take his mind off Lucette Courtenay. Nevertheless, they were all up just after dawn, eager to finish their journey.
The Englishwoman traveled well, Nicolas admitted. He’d been prepared for a pampered girl, as she should be in her position, but she seemed unspoiled and refreshingly direct compared to the French. And she had wide-ranging interests. As he’d listened to her talk with knowledgeable enthusiasm on such disparate topics as the plague treatments of Nostradamus and the heliocentric model of the universe, Nicolas recalled a report from a recent German visitor to England: after praising their beauty, he had noted that “the womenfolk in England wish to be in at everything.”
Julien had been in something of a daze since the night he’d laid eyes on her at the Pearces’ reception. Nicolas found it amusing how hard his brother worked to turn his usual charm on Lucette, hampered as he clearly was by actual feelings. Amusing…and something else. Something darker.
Why should Julien have everything his own way?
Nicolas might have wanted Lucette in France for a very specific purpose, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate her virtues. Clever but innocent, highborn but generous, wary but willing to be won…he should have guessed that the honourable, romantic Julien would be smitten. Well, he didn’t mind opposing his brother for principle’s sake. Charlotte thought she had lured her friend here to capture a LeClerc son; for all anyone knew, it could just as easily be Nicolas.
So Nicolas didn’t mind when Julien maneuvered his horse to ride next to Lucette shortly after leaving Pithiviers. Letting him have his pleasure while he could would make it all the more sweet when it ended.
Renaud took the opportunity to ride by Nicolas. Through the turmoil of the last years—especially Nicole’s death—Renaud and Nicolas had maintained the relationship they had settled into early in Nicolas’s adolescence: his father rarely correcting him, Nicolas keeping up appearances as a respectful eldest son. Julien and Renaud had often argued long and loudly, but Nicolas knew what was expected of him, and was careful to keep up the image of those expectations. He knew people said he and Renaud were alike, but that only proved how good he was at manipulating responses.
The one thing he had never been able to completely hide from his father was his bitterness.
“She is a very lovely girl,” Renaud said in an offhand manner that didn’t deceive Nicolas. “Of course she would be, being who she is. But I confess I did not expect both my sons to be intrigued by her. You and Julien are usually so different.”
“Meaning I married dutifully at twenty-two and produced a son? Or that only Julien could be expected to still find a lovely girl…desirable?”
Renaud was not a man to be ruffled. “Meaning that I wonder at my wisdom in allowing her to visit. It is one thing to welcome a girl born in our house—it is another to set my sons at odds.”
“How can we be at odds? I will never marry again, and Julien knows it.”
He let the bitterness leak into his words, for it would help blind his father to his true interest in Lucette. That she was lovely was a pleasant surprise—but what he wanted from her, he would take if she were covered in pockmarks or had lost all her teeth.
And if his interest tormented Julien, so much the better.
—
It was just as well, Julien decided, that he had Lucette Courtenay’s presence to distract him on the road to Blanclair, or he might have been driven mad by memories and bolted back to Paris. He had not been south since his mother’s death, keeping his clandestine activities confined to areas well away from Orléans and St. Benoit sur Loire. During the last hour of their ride, it was as though every tree, every bend of the road, every vista called to him body and soul. Welcome home, they said—and, beneath that, the accusatory hint of: You should not have stayed away so long.
But Julien was adept at suppressing accusatory voices, so he shoved these reactions below the more immediate tension of keeping an eye on Lucette and wondering how the hell he was supposed to pull information from her. In just the relatively short time of travel, it was abundantly clear that she was no simpering girl to prattle away English royal secrets to the first man who paid her any attention. Julien knew how to work with those girls. He also knew how to work with women as suspicious as he was, who would trade information for information and whose morals stretched only as far as their self-interest. But Lucette was not that sort of creature, either.