The Virgin's Daughter (Tudor Legacy #1)(92)
“Nor yours.”
“Good!” Nicolas jerked his hand away and circled restlessly, hand tightening on the dagger hilt at his belt. “I never meant him to take it lightly. I meant it to dig his heart out, squeeze the guilt he deserves into every part of his soul and then squeeze harder.”
Anabel swallowed, and though he gave no sign of noticing her, it seemed to break Nicolas’s dangerous train of thought. He squatted easily before Lucette and studied her with a light smile before cupping one hand against the back of her neck. “So lovely and so wicked, like every woman ever.”
When he kissed Lucette, Anabel shut her eyes. But then she opened them, refusing to retreat when Lucette could not.
It had not gone further than kisses, and Lucette did not seem concerned that it would. But Anabel did not like the alarming light in Nicolas’s eyes, and she prayed for all she was worth. Lord, let them ride fast. Get us both out of here before something is done that cannot be undone.
—
Elizabeth reached the environs of King’s Lynn a day and a half before the Tutbury party. She had never been very good at waiting, and never more so than when waiting for something distasteful. But as they did not want word slipping out of their careful net of secrecy until Anabel had been safely retrieved, she kept her demeanor as steady as possible and used fatigue and a sick headache as an excuse to take refuge in the somewhat derelict Castle Rising five miles outside the town. Bequeathed to the Howard family by her father, she had repossessed the castle shortly after her brother’s death, and though much of the medieval castle had been overrun by rabbit warrens, the guest lodgings built in the 1540s were acceptable. Burghley’s report from London arrived the morning after Elizabeth’s arrival and confirmed that Dominic and Julien were setting off immediately for Wynfield Mote.
An outrider appeared at Castle Rising an hour before noon to announce the imminent arrival of Mary’s party. Elizabeth sent him back with orders for Walsingham to conduct her cousin anonymously around the outlying areas of the town and meet her at the French ship that had waited prudently offshore for the last week.
Elizabeth dressed with care. Though not as glamorous as she would have been in her own court, her brocaded crimson damask and high ruff were impeccably royal. She wore a wig closely curled and set with pearls. Though she had been dressing the monarch’s part for almost half her life, she admitted one moment’s weakness to have Minuette tell her how well she looked, or Kat Ashley to sniff and pronounce her appearance “adequate.”
When reunited with Anabel, she would take care to be freer with her compliments.
She took only two guards to escort her and rode in a carriage, not wishing to be on display. The ship stood a polite distance off, with a skiff waiting to board its royal passenger. Elizabeth ignored them.
She could hardly admit, even to herself, that mixed with fury was a hint of—nerves? anticipation?—at finally coming face-to-face once more with the woman who had been her greatest rival. They had met once, many years ago in France. Elizabeth had been attending the French court as her brother’s representative to his betrothed French bride, and Mary had been still a girl. Thirteen at the time, but Elizabeth remembered her as tall and breathtakingly beautiful. They had similar colouring, from their shared Tudor blood, but Elizabeth knew herself to be the better ruler. Mary might style herself Queen of France and Scotland, but her French reign had been astonishingly brief and the dislike of Catherine de Medici—Mary’s French mother-in-law—had driven her back to her rightful island crown. But she had barely managed six years in Scotland, running through two husbands and multiple scandals, and alienating her firmly Protestant people so thoroughly that they had not wanted her returned these dozen years.
All the while, Elizabeth had held England together, sometimes by the mere force of her will. And if it galled her to let Mary slip through her fingers today, there was consolation that at last the hated queen would be off English soil. For good.
Mary still managed an upright figure on horseback, though even from that vantage one could see the extra weight she’d put on in captivity. Elizabeth took petty pleasure in noting that—she herself was nearly as slender as she’d been as a girl. Of her famous beauty, Mary had retained the outlines, but eroded by time. She might be years younger than me, Elizabeth thought, but not so very much more desirable.
And that was only counting the physical. What price would Mary command on the open market, a woman so smeared by sexual and violent scandal? It almost cheered Elizabeth, so that she was able to greet her cousin with a modicum of politeness.
“So eager to leave our hospitality?” she asked as the Scots queen faced her down. It was slightly disconcerting not to be curtsied or bowed to, but it wasn’t worth fighting over at the moment.
Not that she wouldn’t mark every charge against Mary, that she might pay her back in kind one day.
“I would have thought you eager to rid yourself of me all these years, and yet you delayed. Perhaps you merely found my presence convenient.” Mary had been helped down from her mount by Stephen Courtenay, with a particular blankness of expression with which Elizabeth was long familiar on his father’s face. Mary ignored the men standing behind Elizabeth—Stephen, Kit, and Walsingham—as well as those who would be allowed to sail away with her. There might have been no one on earth at the moment save these two queens.
“You have never in your life been convenient,” Elizabeth said. “Only necessary.”