The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(25)

It would take far more than that to send Matthew Harrington fleeing, but he did flinch involuntarily, and Robert Cecil looked as though he longed to be anywhere else.

“I apologize,” Anabel said winningly—to Matthew, not Pippa. “This is a conversation I believe Lady Philippa and I should continue privately.”

She did not miss the long look Matthew directed at Pippa before he left. Pippa stared straight ahead, but Anabel could trace the slightest flush of her friend’s throat.

“This is absurd!” Anabel exclaimed when the room had emptied. “If the two of you cannot come to an accommodation, I shall have to let one of you go. I can hardly concentrate on my responsibilities with you and Matthew actively ignoring each other.”

“I thought we were discussing your emotional life, Your Highness.”

“With James of Scotland? Emotion does not enter into it, only policy. You need have no fear that I will forget my responsibilities. And I suspect you are only focusing on my personal matters in order to avoid your own.”

“If you wish me to leave, I shall of course oblige my princess.”

“Pippa, stop being an idiot!”

They glared at one another, and for a moment Anabel had great sympathy for her mother. How many times had the queen come to these sorts of impasses with Minuette Courtenay? And which of them bent in the end in order to continue their friendship? The two women had not seen each other since Stephen’s banishment more than two years ago. Was she really going to banish Pippa away in a similar fit of fury?

Finally, reluctantly, Anabel let her temper slip away. “I wish I knew what you were afraid of, Pippa. If you will not share, I cannot help you.”

“No one can help.”

Anabel never knew what might have followed this bleak statement, for at that moment there was an unusually aggressive knock at the door.

“Come!” she called irritably.

She had not expected to see Matthew again so quickly. His grim face was lighter than she’d seen in some time as he announced, “Visitors from the Sinclair Company, Your Highness.”

“Did we have a meeting I’m not aware of?” she asked acidly.

“Their purpose is to deliver guests directly to your court from Edinburgh.”

Despite herself, Anabel’s heartbeat spiked. There was no chance that James Stuart himself had impulsively crossed the border, was there? What a mess that would be…

Then Matthew stepped aside to allow the small party behind him to enter. An older man who must be from the Sinclair board; a boy just entering his youth, tall and awkward; and then a man with hazel eyes and hair like sun-warmed honey, a laugh to rouse the dead, and sweetness to charm the birds from the trees.

She should be restrained. She should be formal. She should be the princess she had been raised to be. But Anabel was already across the room and in Kit’s arms before any of that sensible advice penetrated.

“You’re home,” she said, happier than she had been in many long months.

“I’m home,” he agreed.





30 April 1585


York


Your Most Gracious Majesty,

I have been formally received at your royal daughter’s court in York. She is all that I would expect your child to be—intelligent, discreet, and farsighted. I am cautiously hopeful that she will indeed be amenable to our dearest hopes. A princess of such gifts and ambition will always look to wield her power.

Unexpectedly, one of our assets has presented himself at the perfect time. Lord Christopher Courtenay arrived unannounced in York the very day of my reception. The entire city is awash in rumours of their mutual attraction. Rumours Her Highness has done little to squash. Not, of course, that she behaves in other than the most proper of ways. But the young lord is without doubt one of the strongest wedges into her life.

I have heard only the barest details of how Courtenay came to be so suddenly returned to England, with the boy Felix LeClerc in his company. It appears the French general, Vicomte Renaud LeClerc, is dead, in a violent manner unspecified, and both Courtenay sons fled France under threat of their lives. The only other detail that I have heard whispered is that there was a symbol connected to these attacks—a nightingale.

I offer this to Your Majesty’s wisdom to decipher and follow as seems best. Faithfully your servant in God,

Tomás Navarro





Philip, by the grace of God King of Spain and the Netherlands, ruler of an empire on which the sun never set, finished Navarro’s letter and, in a rare display of temper, ripped it to pieces before throwing the remains into the fire. All of the good news passed on from his daughter’s court had been eclipsed by that single sentence about nightingales.

But because he was a man whose passions were always ruled by his will, he refrained from immediately confronting his wife. It was not difficult, for Philip by nature preferred to take his time. Here at El Escorial, his own purpose-built retreat, he had designed a private suite next to the monastery church. Small and plain and difficult for others to penetrate, the study and alcove bedchamber were Philip’s preferred environment. He would work for hours alone at his desk, listening to the chanting of the Hours from the monks.

Since his divorce from Elizabeth, that work had centered increasingly on the Enterprise of England. His advisors had been counseling a military solution to England’s heresy for twenty years—in the last four, Philip had begun to listen. It was hardly as simple as some wished to make it. When asked for a realistic estimate of what the Spanish fleet would require to defeat the English navy, Admiral de Bazan had provided a list that detailed five hundred ships and would cost nearly four million ducats.