The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(77)
So Lucette equivocated.
“You were right—someone at Blanclair is running the Nightingale Plot. And so I have brought you both brothers, that one wiser than I might turn his mind to the conundrum of guilt or innocence.”
“What evidence do you have pointing at Nicolas LeClerc?”
“Nothing significantly more nor less than that pointing at Julien. It’s simply…” She trailed off.
Elizabeth, silent through their exchange, leaned forward in her seat. “Simply what?”
“I have no firm evidence, but I am certain that it is one of the brothers. It is the elegant answer. It is the piece that makes the pattern whole.”
Walsingham studied her for a long minute, expression inscrutable. At last he nodded once. “I have a plan to flush out the mastermind. We shall welcome your guests with courtesy tonight, and set things in motion tomorrow. I expect we will not need to keep you at court longer than a week at most.”
Lucette curtsied, and wondered bleakly what her life would be like a week from now. If it were Nicolas, as she believed, Julien would, first, refuse to believe it, and second, never forgive her for setting his brother up. And if it were Julien…
Either way, she’d lost Julien. Elizabeth’s life and England’s security would have to compensate for that loss.
—
Nicolas positively relished every moment of the journey to England and the heretic’s court. Though Lucette was not as easily pinned down as he’d expected, she accepted his affection with good grace, considering how her heart must be breaking for Julien. In fact, Nicolas took far more satisfaction from Julien’s grief and fury than he did in Lucette’s company. His brother had had things his own way for so long, why should not Nicolas enjoy discomfiting him?
You want her, Julien? Welcome to my circumscribed world, in which wanting must remain forever unfulfilled.
Once they reached court, there was business to attend to. Nicolas’s English contacts were waiting for him, eager to be of use to bring down the Protestant queen. It was simply a matter of manipulating their expectations. A matter at which he was highly skilled. What had his life ever been but a manipulation of expectations? He’d spent his youth running rings around women and their expectation of love, while simultaneously presenting his family with the face they’d expected to see—that of a dutiful eldest son. Intelligence work was no different. These days people saw in him what he’d conditioned them to see: a studious, introverted widower who preferred to keep his distance from politics and violence.
Only with Julien did his well of anger and ambition and envy occasionally spill out—but Julien was too damaged by his own guilt to read rightly his brother’s emotions.
On the very first night at Richmond, Nicolas made contact with a French official of the ambassador’s party who knew of the Nightingale Plot. Only a piece of it, which was all most people knew. Nicolas alone held the whole in his hands. The man received his brief orders and slipped away, unaware that his part in the whole was about to come to an end. Across the crowded hall—to which the English queen had not appeared, though both Lord Burghley and her Lord Secretary, Walsingham, were in attendance—Nicolas watched Julien watching Lucette.
For all the times Nicolas had burned with envy of Julien’s whole and perfect body, the life open to his brother that had been so violently shut to him, he was repaid a thousandfold now. Perhaps a casual observer would mark nothing in Julien’s controlled expression. But Nicolas could read every shade of his brother’s torment and reveled in it. His eyes tracked Lucette almost against his will, as she moved through the crowd with ease in a yellow dress that set off her dark hair to perfection. Around her neck she wore a circlet of Tudor roses. She avoided both brothers in equal measure and Nicolas didn’t mind giving her space tonight. Let her maintain the illusion of control while she could.
Shortly afterward the leading men withdrew, and not ten minutes later so did Julien. Sloppy, brother, Nicolas criticized silently. Anyone might guess you’re up to something secret.
Julien always played his part to perfection, even when he had no idea he was but a player in Nicolas’s drama. Let him talk things over with Walsingham—soon, Julien would be in a trouble he could not talk his way out of.
Leaving Nicolas free to act.
—
Julien had once learned to cope with misery by throwing himself into a chaotic mix of intelligence work, drinking, womanizing, and avoiding his family. Now he’d had to adapt his methods for a misery he’d never anticipated. He had never thought to fall in love—not like this, a love that made him want to shout to the heavens and dance through the fields, a love that had humbled him to the dust and shaken everything he thought he’d known about himself and his ambitions. But in the end, Lucette had been no different from any of a dozen women he’d known. She did not love him. Desired him, yes. But desire was easy. Desire had been all he’d wanted for eight years. Now he wanted more. And the woman he wanted it from could not give it to him. All he had left was to cope with bitter disappointment and do what he could to ensure Nicolas wasn’t destroyed when Dominic Courtenay forbade their marriage.
Even now, with no hope for himself, Julien could not bear the thought that the marriage might be blessed. He was mean enough to hope that if he could not have her, neither could Nicolas.
So all-encompassing was this misery and its effects that Julien had barely spared a thought for the fact that he would be facing Walsingham for the first time in eight years. Only when he reached Windsor did the reality of his professional situation sink in. He’d been an enemy spy in his own country so long that he hardly knew how to act in the company of his spymaster.