The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(91)
She drew back, stung and furious. “You insinuated your way into my good graces to spy my secrets? How dare you!”
“I dared very easily, though not successfully enough, it seems.”
She slapped him. The younger brother took a step forward, but Walsingham restrained him. Stephen merely stared her down, every bit as cool as she was incensed.
“You have made an enemy today, Lord Somerset,” Mary told him.
“I was always your enemy, lady. You just didn’t have the wit to see it until today.”
—
Anabel had heard stories of her mother’s captivity at the hands of the Duke of Northumberland when Elizabeth had been Princess of Wales. She had thought it mostly a romantic tale, for it was long past and the outcome certain. Actually being held, she discovered, was an entirely different matter.
Also, the Duke of Northumberland had not been a fanatic or a madman, just an ambitious lord who overreached and was eager to save his family from falling. It was unlikely he would have actually harmed Elizabeth. But Nicolas LeClerc was a different matter entirely. Anabel didn’t trust him an inch, and she didn’t like the way he looked at Lucette.
The women were kept confined to Anabel’s bedchamber. They were allowed a screen in the corner behind which to change and use a chamber pot that Nicolas made his man empty. They were brought the simplest of foods twice a day: porridge, apples, cheese, and beer. Nicolas stayed with them eighteen hours a day, only locking them in at midnight while he slept on a pallet outside the locked door. They had briefly considered trying to escape through the window, but it was a forty-foot sheer drop, and Nicolas had a dozen armed men inside the moat, scruffy and ill-dressed but handling weapons knowledgeably enough.
“He won’t hurt you,” Lucette had told Anabel the first day, and continued to repeat as something of an incantation as the days wound endlessly on. They did the calculations on how long it would take riders to go their various directions and figured it would be at least ten days before they would know if Mary had been freed.
Of course Mary would be freed, Anabel thought firmly. Her mother might find Anabel troublesome at times, but Elizabeth would never risk her daughter’s life. If for no other reason than that England’s throne must have an heir.
But mostly, Anabel didn’t talk. Except for her title, Nicolas was uninterested in her. It was Lucette who consumed him.
Nicolas liked to talk, and Lucette had to spend hours each day parrying his conversation. It was exhausting merely to watch. But Anabel learned plenty through his endless discourses. Such as the fact that his younger brother, Julien, was head over heels in love with Lucie. That Nicolas might have set his sights on her merely to upset his brother, if he hadn’t had a use for her already. That he’d maneuvered his sister into asking Lucette to France precisely in order to gain a reciprocal invitation to England, thus giving him his chance to seize Anabel herself. “And how fortunate for me that you were beautiful and spirited,” Nicolas said, “for thus I gained pleasure along with necessity.”
But it was the fact that Lucette had apparently fallen in love with Julien that upset Nicolas beyond measure. It made him try all the harder to break her.
Eight days into their confinement, Anabel kept her usual silent perch on the deep windowsill, the diamond-paned glass offering an alluring view of hills and freedom beyond the immediate ring of armored men inside Wynfield’s perimeters. It was possible from here to see the camp put up by the Courtenays and faithfully attended by Minuette, in command while her husband was absent. It made Anabel feel better simply to have someone faithful in sight, no matter how far it might be from practical help.
Lucette sat in the chair Nicolas liked her in, hands folded in her lap and her face as inscrutably unreadable as her father’s at its most forbidding. Anabel knew the technique—refuse to give a bully the reaction he was hoping for and eventually he will tire of provocation.
Nicolas never tired of provocation.
“You should write to Felix,” he told Lucette today. “I know how much he is longing to welcome you officially as his mother.”
“I will be truly sorry to disappoint Felix.”
“But not to disappoint me? See, there’s your trouble in miniature—you worry about hurting a seven-year-old boy thousands of miles away, but not the grown man with a dagger in his hand and a dislike of your tongue.”
“If you dislike my tongue, why not cut it out?”
“I have no wish to damage you, Lucie mine. At least not permanently.”
“Don’t call me that,” she said softly, almost under her breath, and Anabel had the impression the protest was wrung from her against her better judgment.
“Because it’s what Julien calls you? Ah, but Julien is not here.” Nicolas walked around her and with one hand stroked her dark hair. Both girls were, by necessity, dressed simply and with their hair done in plaits. Nicolas lifted the end of one of Lucette’s braids and said in a tone clearly meant to be seductive, though it mostly made Anabel’s skin crawl, “You are mine for now. And if Julien should reappear? Then may the best man claim you.”
“I am no slave to be claimed,” she blazed. “And there is no question which of you is the better man.”
“If only he could hear your valiant defense of his character…but I rather think the only thing on Julien’s mind will be that you lied to him. You suspected I was the one behind Nightingale, and you didn’t tell him. For all his easy lies, my brother is quite stupidly devoted to honesty. He will not take your betrayal lightly.”