The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(29)
And to navigate the space between camps? Lucette Courtenay LeClerc. Rumoured niece of the English queen, married to a Frenchman and former Catholic, known for her interest in scholarly pursuits and dislike of courtly games. Lucette had a correspondence nearly as wide as the queen; she could write to everyone and filter the necessary information between camps with greater ease than anyone else just now. That was the assignment on which Pippa had come.
The difficulty was in persuading her sister to care.
Lucette would not even agree to hear the proposition in its fullness that first day, insisting that Felix’s comfort and welfare must necessarily come first. However, it was obvious to all within twenty-four hours that, whatever enthusiasm the boy had once had for Lucette, it was now tainted by abandonment and violent death. With Kit anxious to leave and return to Anabel, Pippa more or less commandeered her older sister after dinner the second night and dragged her outdoors to talk.
“You cannot stay shut up here with nothing to do all day, Lucie. Julien is worried about you.”
“There is Felix. If I cannot manage to produce a child of my own, why not help care for the son of the man I helped murder?”
The bitterness broke Pippa’s heart, but she knew better than to let it divert her. Lucie didn’t need sympathy—she needed a purpose. “Felix does not seem to want your care. Not at the moment.”
“Tell me something less obvious, Pippa. Isn’t that your specialty? Tell me, dear sister, when you saw my French husband, did you see any half-French children in our future?” Abruptly, Lucette stopped walking and gripped Pippa above the elbow. Her voice was suddenly frantic. “Tell me, please. Tell me my future is not to remain barren.”
“Lucie—”
Lucette dropped her hand and swung away. “Never mind. I know what you’re going to say—it doesn’t work like that.”
If Pippa knew anything about her sister, it was Lucette’s fierce ability to set aside pain and do what she thought she must. For years, that fierceness had kept her apart from their parents—particularly Dominic. It was her gift and her curse: whatever emotional maelstrom she might be drowning in, Lucette’s mind would always demand that she think.
So it was no great surprise when she added, “Of course I will do what I can to keep both sides informed. Letters find me very easily here. But I won’t leave Compton Wynyates. Not now.”
Pippa watched Lucie walk away, her heart aching for her sister. Why could not the happy remain happy? Lucette had passed through much to make her beloved marriage, but that was not proof against further heartache. At the moment, it seemed the daughters of the family were destined for hurt, while the sons were better at living in whatever moment they found themselves in. Kit could not see far past his joy at being with Anabel again, and Stephen…Pippa knew enough to have a good idea of what would happen for Stephen in Scotland. It made her smile now despite all the reasons for sorrow.
—
Lucette had never been one for much weeping, but when she left Pippa it was to retreat to one of the lesser-used wings of her too large house and cry alone. She had discovered many such spots over the last two years, for she did not want Julien to catch her in tears. His concern for her was heavy enough to bear as it was.
And that was a constant annoyance in the back of her mind—since when had avoiding Julien become something to be considered?
Perhaps Pippa had alerted Julien to their conversation, for she had not yet pulled herself together when her husband found her.
She only knew it when his hands settled on her shoulders from behind—gently, as though fearing she would pull away. He treated her with such delicate politeness these days. As though passion of any sort would break her.
Perhaps it would. And perhaps she didn’t care.
She turned quickly in his grasp and pulled his head down to kiss her. For a few blessed moments he responded, but then he remembered and pulled away.
“Kissing will not hurt me,” she told him.
“But what follows will. We must be wise, Lucie mine.”
“If we must be wise, then you should not call me that.”
They separated, several steps between them now. It was a matter weighing heavily on them these last four months, ever since the physician had advised that, for her health, Lucette should take measures to ensure she not become pregnant for at least a year.
It was a matter Julien avoided discussing. As he did now. “I think you should go north with Pippa and Kit.”
“So eager to rid yourself of me?”
He was impossible to fight with these days—and perhaps that was what Lucette missed most of all. They had always sparred, from the very beginning, with a teasing tension that brought colour to her life. Now he was so damnably courteous it was like being married to a stranger.
“Felix is miserable and difficult,” Julien answered reasonably. “And not simply because of my father’s death. He is…troubled. Angry. About Nicolas, about all of it.”
“I know.” The boy she’d known in France, who had treated her as though she were the coming of an angel to brighten his life, had become an undeniably hostile stranger since his arrival the day before.
Going to Anabel’s court would allow Julien time and space to help Felix come to terms with the traumas of the last five years. And it would certainly make her husband’s insistence on celibacy easier to maintain. How could she be expected to live chastely when everything about Julien seemed designed to draw her in? From the first moment she’d met him again as an adult—tall and messily elegant, wheat-coloured hair falling across his eyes, the cynical smile that hid his gentleness—Lucette had wanted to touch him. In the five years since, that had not changed.