The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(29)
On the fifth day—Sunday—Lucette claimed a headache when it came time for church, and the LeClercs accepted the polite fiction that would keep a Protestant away from a Roman mass. Lucette had little moral issue in attending a Catholic service, in truth she was rather curious, but it was her first time in the house without family and the bulk of the staff. Only a skeleton few were left in the chateau and Lucette drew a deep breath to suppress her ethics and set about searching her hosts’ bedchambers.
She began with Renaud, because she might as well do the most uncomfortable first. Logically, she supposed there was no reason her host could not be the Catholic mastermind: he was intelligent, he was dedicated to his kingdom, as a soldier he was accustomed to following orders, and no doubt he could be ruthless. Against the logic was only this: that she could not bear that it be Renaud. He was as honourable a man as Dominic, and she did not want to believe that, having met Elizabeth in person, as Renaud had when visiting England, he would countenance a plan to kill her.
She was not here for emotional reasons, however, but logical ones, so she shoved aside her distaste and searched Renaud’s bedchamber and adjoining small study. His were the surroundings of a soldier, such as she was accustomed to from Dominic. Spare without quite being impersonal, nothing cluttered, paperwork neatly ordered and put away. Although Lucette made a quick search of his clothing and bed itself, it was the paperwork she concentrated on. It was mostly personal—no doubt the account books and ledgers would be kept by the steward—but she plowed on through the neat journal that mostly recorded the weather and harvests and cloaked emotional subjects in the sparest prose. There was a gap of six months that she calculated was at the time of Nicole LeClerc’s death.
The only thing she would not search was the collection of letters from Nicole to her husband, kept in their own coffer and tied with a length of black silk ribbon. Lucette returned everything to its proper place—that useful visual memory of hers—and tackled Nicolas’s chambers next.
For all that he looked like Renaud, Nicolas’s surroundings were much different. Both more luxurious and more careless, as probably befit one who had not followed his father into the military but spent his days as a gentleman widower, looking after his son and running the estate under his father’s eye. Anise had elaborated on the image of Nicolas as entirely broken by the death of his wife and his withdrawal from Parisian society. He must have loved his young bride very much to mourn in such determined fashion for such a length of time. Lucette could not fathom why he had not remarried. But that thought took her to her unstated reason for being at Blanclair and she shied away. She did not want to think of Nicolas as a potential husband. For one thing, she was not Catholic. For another, she would never settle out of England.
From the carpets on the floors to the tapestries on the walls, from the brocaded silk of the bed hangings to the whisper soft linen in the chests, everything about Nicolas proclaimed quality. But his clothes were folded a degree less precise than Renaud’s, the down pillows were askew on the bed, and the inlaid desk in his personal alcove was awash in letters and books.
He apparently had a fondness for Italian poetry, judging by the number of volumes she counted. Catholic writers like Thomas More jostled for space with Machiavelli’s The Prince and Dante’s Divine Comedy. He, too, had a journal, but it was written in even sparer form than his father’s—often no more than a series of initials and dates and cryptic notes that Lucette stared at, imprinting in her ledger, before finally laying the journal aside.
His books were stamped with his personal badge, a silver cinquefoil that Lucette remembered from childhood. Nicole had decreed that each of her sons bear a cinquefoil for a badge—Nicolas in silver for peace and sincerity. He certainly appeared to live a peaceful life.
Unlike Renaud, Nicolas had kept nothing from his wife, unless the St. Catharine’s medal she found mixed in with several heavy rings had belonged to her.
She had left Julien for last and wondered if that was because she hoped to be interrupted by the family’s return from church. Not the mark of a very good intelligencer, she supposed, and with compressed lips and thudding heart hurried about her task.
Of course Julien had spent very little time at Blanclair for years—and not at all since Nicole’s death. Anise had overflowed with stories of that scandal: that Julien was summoned from Paris when his mother’s condition worsened, but delayed his coming until it was too late. He had arrived in time for the funeral mass, where he sat apart from his family and left abruptedly after an hour closeted alone with his father. This was his first visit home since then.
He was messy, no surprise. A jerkin and shirt tossed across the top of a chest, the bedclothes rumpled and untouched by maids. Interesting. She would have to ask Anise if Julien forbid servants in his chamber, which might argue a desire to avoid prying eyes. Or maybe he just couldn’t be bothered. There were books—more liberal and humanist than those of Nicolas—that she guessed had been there since he was young. Aside from clothing, the personal effects he’d brought with him from Paris consisted of a string of silverwork beads, a carved wooden soldier that matched the set Lucette had seen in Felix’s care, and two exquisite miniatures: his mother and his sister.
No journal. No letters. Not even a sign of his own cinquefoil badge except on the frontspiece of dusty books: his badge blue, for truth and loyalty. There was nothing in the chamber except cryptic clues as to his character and no evidence of deeper conspiracy. If Julien were the Nightingale mastermind, he’d either left any evidence in Paris or else he carried it all in his head.