The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(21)
Stephen froze where he was, half standing. Then, cursing himself for awkwardness, he straightened and turned.
His first impression was that Maisie had changed hardly at all from the last time he’d seen her, when she visited him in the Tower of London. She was still little, barely reaching his shoulder, and had the same pleasant expression that one had to decipher carefully to understand.
Her voice was also unchanged. “The brothers Courtenay. What a surprise to find you commandeering my ship. I little expected you to land on my doorstep the very moment I returned home.”
Stephen flushed and could not immediately think of what to say. Kit, at his most engaging, rescued him. “Mistress Sinclair, how could we not be drawn to you as butterflies are drawn to the fairest blossoms?”
“You must be desperate if you’re wasting your charm on me. And who is the third and handsomest member of your party?” She smiled at Felix.
Finally Stephen got a grip on himself. Noting the many eyes on them, curious and storing up gossip to spread around the port, he spoke softly. “Perhaps we might withdraw for a full accounting of our presence?”
The look she shot him was sharp with understanding and intelligence. But she might have been any mere Edinburgh hostess when she proclaimed, “You’re coming with me. The Sinclair Company keeps a town house for visitors. I’ll show you.”
They walked the two miles from Leith to the Sinclair town house in Edinburgh. Maisie—who, one remembered, had been brilliant with a child in Ireland—took Felix as her companion and chattered to him all the way until even he was smiling.
Stephen and Kit walked behind, and Stephen was glad for his brother’s unusual discretion in not prodding him with dozens of questions or comments. Other than shooting him a few curious glances, Kit left him alone.
They entered Edinburgh from the north, the castle rising on its stark crag to their right and the road continuing down to the Palace of Holyrood on their left. Following Maisie, they turned in that direction down the densely built road until abruptly she turned again, into a narrow close on their left.
The town house had a medieval feel, and Maisie informed Felix that parts of it were a century old. From outside, the ever-present dark grey stone gave it a forbidding aspect, but the interior was pleasantly updated. Maisie had clearly given orders before coming to the port, for the house was opened and aired and food and drink had been provided. After showing them to welcoming bedchambers, she neatly set Kit and Felix to entertaining themselves, then turned to Stephen.
“Let us withdraw, as you suggested, and you can give me a full accounting.”
He had forgotten how intense her presence could be. It was an effect she had kept mostly muffled in Ireland, but now, secure in her home city, she practically radiated competence. No, something much more than mere competence—genius, perhaps.
Sitting across a table from her in an impersonal reception chamber, Stephen flashed back to his many meetings with Ailis in just such a manner. He’d had to guard himself carefully during those interviews. It was a hard habit to break.
“Tell me,” Maisie said.
It was a long story, for Stephen began not in France, but with the details of his assignment to spy on Mary Stuart in the last months of her English imprisonment. He told Maisie about the Nightingale plot, about the Frenchmen who had embroiled Stephen’s sister in the affair, and of the violence at Wynfield Mote that had not been sufficient to prevent the Scots queen from sailing away to become, in turn, the Spanish queen.
And how, last year, he had begun to receive anonymous missives containing no words—simply a drawing of a nightingale.
Maisie broke in then, with a question. “And you told no one?”
“No.”
She did not ask him why. Perhaps she knew how much he had flayed himself for that error, wondering if Duncan Murray and Renaud LeClerc would still be alive if he had spoken earlier. Stephen finished the story with those deaths. Of their flight across France, he said little.
When he finished, he waited for her judgment. To his surprise, she asked another question. “Why me?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why put yourselves in the care of my factor? There are Englishmen aplenty in France. Surely the English ambassador in Paris would have conducted you to safety in far greater comfort.”
“To England,” Stephen pointed out. “Which I am forbidden.”
“Please,” she said derisively. “Queen Elizabeth would hardly have tossed you back to the wolves once you’d fled to her for help.”
“I didn’t want the queen’s help.”
“You mean you didn’t—and don’t—want anyone’s help. So why mine?”
“Because you I trust.”
At that she stilled, and Stephen had a chance to study her more closely than he yet had. He realized that despite his earlier impression, she had indeed changed in the interval since their last meeting more than two years ago. The bones of her face and brow had grown more defined, so that despite her youth, there was no longer anything of the child about her. One tended to think of her still as sixteen, though he supposed she must be nearly nineteen by now. Her mind had always been far ahead of her body, but it seemed the gap was narrowing. In Ireland, Stephen had grown used to seeing Maisie in well-cut but plain wool or linen. Today she was dressed in impeccable—if restrained—fashion: her skirts a subtle blue silk that shaded to mauve when she moved, an organza partlet rising from the bodice to encircle her throat, her hair contained in a velvet caul.