The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(36)

In a code that Julien could decipher almost by instinct, Cardinal Ribault had written: There will be a man at the tavern of the Nightingale Inn tonight to receive your report. Be there by midnight.

“Damn it,” he said under his breath, and crumpled the message in one hand.

He had no idea what he would report. The truth? My conversations with Lucette Courtenay have been challenging and engaging and about every subject under the sun except her connection to the English royal family. Hardly. He would have to lie, which was no great issue. He had done little but lie to the cardinal for seven years now.

He might have encountered difficulty in getting out of the chateau unseen, but Lucette’s retreat to her chambers made things easy. Without a guest to entertain, the men of the LeClerc family reverted to type: the meal was mostly silent and they all scattered as soon as they decently could. Julien waited until well after dark and set off on foot to the village tavern. No need to alert anyone to his absence by rousing a groom or taking a horse. Dressed in subdued fashion, a cloak despite the June weather, in order to offer some concealment to his sword, he trudged to the village and thought about Lucette.

All he’d done for days now was think about Lucette—no, Lucie. Lucette was suspicious and restrained and did not like him at all. Lucie, on the other hand…Lucie laughed. Lucie teased. Lucie was no less intelligent than Lucette, but she wasn’t defined solely by her mind, and inhabited her body in an entirely different way.

Not that he should be paying attention to her body.

When Julien reached the Nightingale Inn, he still didn’t have the slightest idea what he intended to tell the cardinal’s emissary. Good thing he was used to thinking on his feet.

He couldn’t be anonymous here the way he could in Paris, but the people of the village knew enough about him to read his moods—either entertain me or, as today, leave me be. Aside from a nod from the tavern keeper, Julien made his way to a corner table and waited for the emissary to come to him. It was easy enough to pick him out—he might have been in exile in France but Englishmen moved differently than Frenchmen. The man was bearded and fiercely mustached, with a scar running across the back of his right hand.

The emissary turned a chair around and straddled it, arms resting on the chair back. “Monsieur,” he said in a hoarse voice that made Julien wonder in which gutter the cardinal had picked him up.

“Orders?” Julien asked softly.

“To tell me what you’ve learned of the girl.”

Julien leaned back and stretched, hands clasped behind his head, his pose of ease covering a mind working furiously.

“She’s unlikely to be of any real use,” he said negligently. “Queen’s niece or not, the girl is not a royal intimate. I’d say it’s by her own choice,” and as he spoke, Julien felt it to be true. As though putting Lucette into words helped him understand her. “She” (for he could not bring himself to use her name to such a slimy man) “is unwilling to be used by anyone, friend or family, and surely the English queen is too intelligent to think otherwise.”

“That is not what you were asked to discover,” the man said. “Surely she communicates with her sister, who is such an intimate of the young princess.”

“I have no news on that score,” Julien said bluntly. “Whatever the princess’s plans this summer, they have not, to my knowledge, been communicated to my guest.”

“How hard have you tried to learn?” The man’s very tone was a leer, and Julien wanted to smash his face.

Instead, he leaned across the table and said, “I don’t know how it’s done in your world, but gentlemen do not take advantage of young women of good family.”

“But by all accounts, monsieur, you are by no means a gentleman.”

Julien swung his gaze away, furious, and made himself survey the tavern simply to give his mind something to do. No, he wasn’t a gentleman and hadn’t been for years. A gentleman would not be having this conversation. A gentleman would not have quite so thorough knowledge of the intimate habits of every maid in this tavern. There was Madeleine with her tumble of red hair, and Sophie who giggled when kissed, and Blanche with her exceptionally skilled hands.

There had been a time when Nicolas would have been the one to know (in every sense) these women, but Julien had picked up his brother’s habits in an effort at staving off guilt. As though by following in Nicolas’s footsteps he could undo what had been done to his brother.

And then his uncomfortable thoughts stuttered and stopped as his eyes skimmed over something that caught his attention. He slowly moved his gaze back, tracking, and stopped dumbfounded at a table in the corner farthest from him. It was occupied by two men and a woman. A woman in plain skirts and low-cut linen, dark hair braided tightly to her head beneath a cap, eyes modestly lowered while no doubt her brain ran along five times faster than the idiots she was listening to.

Lucette.

—

Pride might be a sin, but Lucette was undoubtedly proud of how she’d managed tonight. Anise had been heaven-sent as her maid, for the girl was all too easy to persuade to lend her clothing, and vowed to maintain the fiction that the Englishwoman was confined to her chambers with illness. Lucette also knew (thanks to Felix) the less traveled corridors of the chateau and the side gate through which she could pass at a distance from Renaud’s men at arms and not be spotted.