The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(50)

For several breaths she thought he was going to kiss her. She did not pull away, but nor did she move closer. She left it to him, and in the end he dropped her hands with a wry smile. Lucette could not ignore her relief; Nicolas was handsome enough, but he wasn’t Julien. His hands were softer, his body thicker, and though she knew it for shallowness, Lucette felt not the slightest physical attraction.

“We shall see,” he said cryptically. “But I hope that coming here will end in bringing you joy as well.”

As she worked out what best to answer, the sound of booted feet on gravel came from behind. They both turned, and there was the groom that ran so many private errands for Nicolas, looking straight at his master.

“What is it?” Nicolas said with a touch of impatience at being interrupted.

“Apologies, sir,” the groom said in a manner not at all apologetic. “I was down the river’s edge just now and found something.”

“Found what?”

With a glance at Lucette and then away, as though dismissing her presence, the groom said bluntly. “I found a body. A man. Stabbed through the heart, looks like.”

Nicolas attempted to send Lucette back to the chateau, but not very hard. So she was on his heels, as he was on the groom’s, as they approached the river’s edge. The corpse lay tipped on its back, looking like nothing so much as a loosely jointed doll cast to the ground by a careless child. But it had been no child who had thrust a blade into his chest, leaving a mass of bloodstains hardening around the edges of the torn cloth of his doublet.

But it was his face that struck Lucette, and she inhaled a little sharper than intended. Nicolas said, “You should not be seeing this. My father would be furious. Come away now.”

As he took her by the arm, issuing low orders to the groom to have the body removed to the stable block and to alert Renaud and Julien, it was not horror or disgust that occupied Lucette’s mind. It was confusion.

She knew the man. Bearded and mustached, looking subtly out of place in the countryside, with a scar down the back of his right hand.

The man Julien had been meeting at the Nightingale Inn the night she fell ill.

—

Julien had spent the morning in a state of uncertainty. When Lucette did not appear, he quizzed a maid who told him she was studying in her chamber. He could hardly knock on her door and ask if she was avoiding him, so instead he wrote several letters to Paris and then took Felix for a ride after the noon meal.

They were just returning up the lane—Felix’s horse only a little smaller than Julien’s, for he was a fierce rider for his age—and bickering about the relative merits of swords on horseback when Julien caught sight of Lucette’s unmistakable dark hair and figure in a dress that looked as though she had plucked flowers from the garden with which to adorn herself. She strolled next to Nicolas, and the two of them looked deep in conversation as they passed beyond sight into the terraced gardens.

For a seven-year-old, Felix was unusually observant. Or perhaps it was that he was nearly as besotted with Lucette as his uncle was. “I don’t suppose my father would like it if we joined them,” Felix said half hopefully, as though wanting Julien to disagree.

“No, I don’t suppose he would.”

Still, Julien helped brush down the horses, lingering in the stables as long as he could without arousing too much speculation, hoping to encounter them returning. When they did, it was with a haste he had not anticipated.

Julien stepped out of the stables into their path, bringing Nicolas to a sudden halt. Lucette’s eyes looked as though she were contemplating something far away.

“Julien!” Nicolas grasped his shoulder. “I’m glad to find you. I’ve sent the groom for Father. We need to make arrangements to bring the body up here.”

“Body? What do you mean?”

Nicolas drew a ragged breath and shook his head once, as though to clear it. “Sorry, I’m still a bit shocked. There’s a man on the riverbank, with a dagger wound in his chest. Dead as can be, and most violently. I do not like the thought of it on Blanclair’s grounds.”

“Surely not one of ours?”

Nicolas shook his head, but it was Lucette who spoke up. “He looked like a city man. Down from Paris to meet someone, perhaps. He had the look of a man who frequents taverns.”

Her blue eyes locked on his, Julien felt the tingle in his spine. She was telling him who it was—though even she didn’t know his full identity. The emissary from Cardinal Ribault. A man who’d assumed Julien served the same master. And now he was dead, just when Lucette was trying to decide if Julien was a French traitor or an English one.

He wished Nicolas wasn’t here, but there was no help for that now. “Take her to the house,” he told his brother. “I’ll take some men and bring the body in.”

Several grooms followed him down to the river, bringing a wide plank on which to lay the body. What a disaster! Charlotte had the entire neighborhood and half of Paris coming to the chateau in less than two weeks; she was going to be very cross at this dead man disturbing her party atmosphere.

She might be less cross if Lucette agreed to marry one of her brothers. Marry me, Julien thought, even as half his mind scolded him for not focusing on the chaos of the moment. If it’s anyone here, it will be me. Nicolas might enjoy her company, but he could not marry her.