The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(58)

Words trembled on her lips, pushing her to say things she’d never thought she’d be brave enough to say. “Julien,” she managed to begin…and was interrupted by Felix practically bouncing from excitement.

“May I escort you to the practice yard, mademoiselle?” he asked with endearing charm.

Instantly, Julien’s smile twisted into rueful mocking. “Enjoy yourselves,” he told them. “Felix, I expect you to help the lady understand the finer points of what she’s seeing.”

If only there were someone to help her understand the finer points of Julien’s behavior.

The practice yard at Blanclair was surrounded by trees, not dissimilar to the one at Wynfield Mote. Both those houses were manor houses, meant for family living and not defense. The practice yard at Tiverton Castle, by contrast, was far more serious in purpose, meant for exacting military training for the Duke of Exeter’s retainers and liege men. Renaud LeClerc had done most of that sort of training in Paris or at court, so Blanclair retained the homey sense of familiarity.

Lucette had spent many hours watching her brothers and other young men of their household train, and so she expected a certain degree of teasing. Stephen and Kit always threw taunts at one another—Kit more than Stephen—and did not give quarter in their fights. She was accustomed to Dominic’s eagle eye on his two sons, and could remember occasions when he took the yard himself against them. Having only one hand might change his balance and necessitate a lighter sword, but it had not materially affected Dominic’s skills, and her brothers had always paid the closest attention.

Renaud was present today, but he kept well back and did not shout either encouragement or directions, as she remembered him doing when his adolescent sons fought at Wynfield. Of course, they weren’t adolescents anymore. As Lucette watched Nicolas and Julien finish lacing their padded jerkins, thickly quilted for protection, she was struck anew by the fact that both were far removed from being boys. And how, she wondered, was the unacknowledged tension between these men going to manifest in physical form?

Charlotte seemed to wonder the same. She leaned against the fence, with Felix bouncing on the balls of his feet on Lucette’s other side, and said pensively, “It has been a long time since I have seen my brothers spar openly. I think perhaps they have much between them that will arise when fighting.”

“Did they disagree often when they were young?”

“No more than most brothers, I should think. But these last years…I wish I knew what was keeping Julien from home. And not just since Mother died. He has kept himself in Paris since…” She hesitated.

“Since when?” Lucette expected to hear about St. Bartholomew’s Day, wondering if Charlotte had guessed about Julien’s love for a Huguenot girl.

But though Charlotte’s timing was right, her conclusion was wildly different. “Since Nicolas was injured in Paris and then lost his wife. Julien seemed so stricken with guilt. I have never dared ask, and I can’t say that I saw any signs during her life, but I have since wondered if Julien was in love with Nicolas’s wife.”

Oh, dear. Another possible woman in the mix! Why did Julien attract troublesome women like flies? Although she supposed grudgingly that it wasn’t fair of her to assume they were troublesome simply because they were dead.

And yet, wasn’t guilt something she could well understand? Although how guilt over loving his brother’s wife might have prompted Julien to work for Walsingham…no, she couldn’t quite make that piece fit. She could, however, turn it around. If Julien had been in love with Célie—and Nicolas had known it—then the older brother might well be targeting Lucette simply to upset Julien. Though that did not answer why Nicolas had apparently been interested in her months before her arrival.

Did that make it more or less likely that Nicolas was involved in Nightingale? That was the piece she was still missing—his motivation. Whatever injury had been done to him in Paris had been committed by the Catholics. Wouldn’t that make Nicolas unlikely to aid their cause?

She shook her head, forcing the tumble of overlapping thoughts into the background. Puzzles were solved out of the corner of the eye, when the mind was focused elsewhere. So she focused on Nicolas and Julien and their fight.

Lucette supposed that training bouts had not changed substantively in several hundred years. Using either wooden replicas or rapiers with their deadly edges blunted, men had a way to practice the skills that might mean the difference between life and death. The LeClerc brothers used rebated steel today, and the flash of sunlight on swords looked deadly enough.

“I’m only allowed to use wood,” Felix informed her regretfully. “Uncle Julien says if I work very hard, I can try rebated steel when I’m ten. That’s how old he was.”

“And your father?”

“Father doesn’t often like to fight. Not with me. The master tells me he and Uncle Julien were well matched when younger, but they have not fought against each other since I was born.”

Another link to the year of 1572. The threads surrounding that date in Lucette’s ledgers were beginning to vibrate with suppressed meaning.

The match was little different from the ones Lucette had seen, not only between her brothers, but at court. She was accustomed to the dance of men and weapons, but she quickly realized that there was more behind this bout. Nicolas might be out of practice—she could see that his early movements were half a beat slower than Julien’s—but his instincts had been so well honed that it didn’t take long for his body to remember what it had once done without thought. As Lucette remembered from watching them when she was a child, Julien was the gambler and Nicolas the thinker. But they had both grown, and not just physically, since those days. She had no doubt that Julien had killed men with the moves he used now, and it sent shivers down her back.