The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(88)

He pounded on the door once more. “What do you say, Your Highness? What price your life and honour? Willing to get your friends killed for you? I hear that’s a particularly Tudor trait.”

There were harsh whispers behind the door, and what sounded like a scuffle. Then the door was flung wide. Anne Tudor faced him, clad in a lavish taffeta nightrobe trimmed with silver lace. Her hair lay across her shoulders in two long plaits but she stared him down with a blazing scorn that didn’t entirely hide her fear. “Here I am,” she announced with that arrogance that was purely royal. “Do what you will.”

“Good girl,” he said, and in two steps had the dagger at her throat, matching Laurent’s pose with Lucette. “What I will is for everyone to leave this house now. No getting dressed, no snatching valuables. I have no interest in the contents of your home and promise to leave them unharmed. But within five minutes I need this house cleared. I believe you will find armed men just outside the grounds waiting for my signal. When you have gone, my men will take position to ensure no one comes back in. Again, I have no interest in bloodshed. Laurent and I will remain here with the two women.”

“Until when?” Surprisingly, it was Minuette who asked, looking nearly as fierce as her husband, but practical with it.

“I have a message for your queen. Tell her that her daughter will be freed when I have received assurances that Queen Mary has left England in safety. There is a ship prepared to reach her at King’s Lynn. Perhaps your menfolk would care to take that message. The sooner it’s done, the sooner you may have your house—and women—back.”

Dominic Courtenay did not move and his face was unreadable. Kit, on the other hand, had the fine tremble beneath his skin of a thoroughbred aching to run. There was a boy who would gladly kill him without thought.

But Dominic controlled both his house and his family.

“Very well,” Dominic said, still holding his sword in the left hand and looking as though he would very much like to run it through Nicolas’s chest.

“Father, no—” Kit began.

“Take your mother and Pippa and go,” Dominic ordered.

Pippa looked as murderous as her father, but she only glanced once between her sister and her friend before stepping into the corridor and following her family.

Dominic left last. “Don’t do anything reckless,” he said to Lucette, “and trust me.” Then, to the princess, “That goes for you, too, Anabel.”

“Father,” Lucette said, “tell Walsingham to get Julien out of the Tower.”

Nicolas laughed. “Single-minded in your devotion, aren’t you? But why not? Julien has his part to play in this as well.”

And then it was just the four of them. Nicolas nodded to Laurent and they switched in one smooth movement, the tutor to drive Anne back into her chamber and Nicolas to confront Lucette.

“Don’t even think about it,” he told her softly.

“Think about what?” she shot back. “Killing you?”

“Among other things. Lucie mine, you are truly the best thing that’s happened to me in years. I never lied about that. I will not hurt your princess and I will not hurt you—as long as I am not given cause. I am doing this for Queen Mary, and then…then I will be free and maybe we can begin again.”

“You set up Julien, you bastard! You set the Catholics on his trail and delivered him into Walsingham’s hands. Now he’s in the Tower being tortured while you blithely go your own way.”

He slapped her once, more lightly than before. “Not everything in this world is about Julien,” he snapped. “For eight years he’s had it all his way. It won’t hurt him to learn a little humility. And don’t worry—I’m sure they’ll turn him loose when they hear what I’ve done. Walsingham will think my brother might get through to me. Or perhaps knows the best way to kill me. Either way, I’m confident that the three of us will soon enough be alone in a place where the truth can finally be told.”

For a moment, Nicolas thought he’d finally cowed her. He should have known better.

“That’s Julien’s dagger you have,” she pointed out, with a control that barely wavered. “If you were planning to use it as evidence against him, you should have taken care to act before he was locked in the Tower. Not to mention that you’ve showed your face to my family.”

Stroking her cheek with the flat of the stolen blade, Nicolas said, “Julien’s dagger, and Julien’s lover. It’s time I took back all that my brother stole from me.”

He seized her arm and wrenched her into the bedchamber with the princess.

Nicolas would not touch either of them, not seriously. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself. Being castrated had taught him to take his pleasures in many ways, and he planned to exercise them all in the immediate future.

—

Elizabeth had just reached Cambridge on the first leg of her summer progress when Dominic and Kit Courtenay pounded into the university town with demons at their heels and blew apart what she only recognized in the aftermath as her relatively ordered world.

Of course she and her council had imagined threats to Anne over the years. Why else keep her sequestered away from court? But the moment Dominic told her that her daughter was in an enemy’s hands, Elizabeth felt time suspend, and when the clock began to move again, fear had entered her heart in an icy wave she had never imagined.