The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(28)
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.”
He captured and held those blue eyes with his long enough that he was dimly grateful both their horses knew their way along the road. A spark had kindled in Lucette’s that he wanted to believe meant she took his words as a challenge rather than an apology.
A swift smile, like spring sun, crossed her face and she turned her attention back to the road. “Where are you taking me today?” she asked.
He easily tipped into one of his more seductive smiles. “I want to show you off around the village. Most of them have never seen an Englishwoman, so don’t be surprised if there’s staring. They’ll be wondering where you hide your Protestant horns.”
Her eyebrows shot up, but she smiled in response. “I suppose the same place all of you hide your Catholic cloven hooves.”
Julien laughed in true delight. “I begin to believe I was a fool not to appreciate you properly when you were young, Lucie. Your tongue and your wits have not faltered.”
But beneath his genuine appreciation, Julien could only hope those wits of hers would not delve too deeply into his own secrets.
—
In just a few days at Blanclair, Lucette had already begun to amass a tidy collection of intelligence. She stored it all carefully away, bit by bit, in her Memory Chamber ledger and didn’t try yet to force a pattern. She knew from experience that the pattern would come when it was ready. One trifle, one fact, one overheard remark, would be the tipping point when the chaos became a design centered on a true north point and there could only be one answer to the variable she sought.
The household of Chateau Blanclair was serene on the surface but swirling with unnamed tensions just below. It was as though there were strings run between people, and some of them were pulled so taut as to practically vibrate. Lucette categorized them by colours, the deeper the colour, the more tense the connection: every string running to and from Julien was red, but even Nicolas had a good many blue threads between him and his family members. Renaud watched both his sons with a concealed caution that spoke of concern. The only truly open person in the household was Felix (his threads were all a sunny yellow).
As for the household and outdoor servants, Anise was Lucette’s entry point. She could hardly pop into the kitchens or the stables for a friendly conversation (though her Englishness was a convenient mask behind which to hide impertinent questions), but Anise liked to talk and soon Lucette had odd and intriguing bits to store in her ledgers: there was a groom who rode out a great deal more than the others and often spent days away from Blanclair; half the staff had Huguenot relatives who’d fled to England; the steward knew to the penny the state of the Blanclair accounts at any given hour; in the last five years, four maids had quit the household with no notice.
Felix’s tutor was someone Lucette could speak to without comment, and she did. With difficulty. Richard Laurent did not like her; whether because he disliked females on principle or just Protestant Englishwomen, she wasn’t clear. Laurent was obviously a committed Catholic and had even studied in a Jesuit seminary. He spent most of his hours with Felix, and though Lucette believed in keeping an open mind, she refused to believe that a seven-year-old was the Nightingale connection Walsingham was searching for. But Laurent himself might be a possibility.