The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(4)
“Rise,” Elizabeth said, “and join me.”
Lucette perched on the edge of a seat and waited warily. The queen rested her expressive hands on the gilded chair arms, and pondered Lucette with a remote expression that might have concealed anything from curiosity to disdain.
Tall and slender, the pale-skinned, red-haired queen never seemed to age. Save for the fine lines around her eyes and mouth, Elizabeth looked much younger than her forty-six years. Even if the paleness of her skin owed something to art, and even though her glorious hair was more often a wig these days than not, the Queen of England seemed almost a mythical figure: a fairy queen of boundless youth and wisdom.
Elizabeth’s tone was all exaggerated patience. “Walsingham tells me you are disinclined to aid the crown. Might your monarch know why?”
“I am disinclined to repay friendship with betrayal, Your Majesty. To pretend that I am angling for a husband while following the path of mere rumours—”
“It is not rumour,” Elizabeth said flatly. “Not this time. Three men were arrested last week in Calais, attempting to cross to England. They carried coded letters that my government deciphered. A most definite plot is under way, aimed not merely at my throne but at my life.”
Lucette hesitated. “Might I ask why the government suspects the LeClerc household? I can think of no more honourable man than Renaud LeClerc, or one less likely to be embroiled in secret plots.”
“Except perhaps the Duke of Exeter?” Elizabeth asked with a touch of humour. “I agree. It is not Renaud himself we suspect.”
“Surely if one of his boys were involved in anything so dangerous, their father would know it.”
“His sons are not boys, Lucette, as you are no longer a child yourself. They are men, full-grown and tested in the service of a Catholic government. Give over any childish romantic fantasies you have and consider the matter logically!”
“Is that why you want me, for my logic? Or is it not simply because I am a woman who will not be suspected and can…what? Seduce the brothers into spilling their secrets?” She asked it plainly enough, but wondered briefly how exactly one went about seducing secrets.
Elizabeth stood up and, from a coffer on a side table, took a sheet of parchment that she handed over. “Look at this list, Lucette. Take your time. Study each word and phrase, and when you are ready, tell me what you see.”
Reluctantly, Lucette accepted the parchment, densely scrawled with distinctive handwriting that she recognized as Walsingham’s, and did as she’d been bidden. It was not an especially coherent document, nothing so useful as a complete sentence, just names and phrases and dates compiled without apparent rhyme or reason.
Despite her reluctance, Lucette’s mind began to work. She was incapable of refusing a puzzle, and John Dee had used just such apparently chaotic collections in order to teach her how to order information. How to separate the important from the useless and the critical from the merely important. Patterns were instinctive to her way of viewing the world, as natural to her as breathing, and so her eyes skimmed lightly over the sheet, hardly knowing that her breathing slowed and her attention became so inward that she appeared almost to be in a trance. In that manner, the words and phrases rearranged themselves.
“Oh, yes,” she murmured, hardly aware of speaking aloud. “There it is.”
The queen’s voice pulled her forcefully back into the physical world. “There what is?”
“The pattern that has Your Majesty and Walsingham so worried. The flashpoint of trouble that you set me looking for although you have already discerned it.”
The queen did not dispute that this had been a test of some sort, but merely raised a cool eyebrow in that smooth, white face. “And?”
“Mary Stuart and Princess Anne. France and Spain. Two foreign interests dangerous enough in themselves, but exponentially more devastating if combined in one threat. It looks very much as though a narrow web is being woven between those two interests.”
Lucette laid aside the sheet and proceeded to speak honestly; there were some privileges of the queen’s insistence on their blood relationship. “And you did not need me to tell you that. So why am I here, Your Majesty?”
She did not miss the small smile, though the queen spoke matter-of-factly. “You are here because it took Walsingham a solid week to see the pattern that you just uncovered in three minutes. A pattern that has disclosed something called the Nightingale Plot.”
“I knew that I was looking for a pattern, and all the information was gathered in one place. Much simpler than sifting through scores of seemingly unrelated letters and documents.”
“That list includes unrelated documentary material. I am quite sure you could sift out crucial information…in the field, as it were.”
“Your Majesty, with all respect, I am not suited for such an endeavour. I will be happy to consider any information you care to pass along, but I wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to go about sifting intelligence as I go. People are beyond my skills.”
“Not these particular people.”
Lucette wasn’t sure if the pounding in her head was from apprehension or excitement. It was one thing to hear such a proposal from Francis Walsingham, quite another to hear the Queen of England seriously suggest that she turn intelligencer. Spying was a job for men like Walsingham and those he employed. Men of doubtful loyalty, men of easy conscience, men who could move unnoticed…