The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(7)
Your rather disgruntled sister,
Pippa
Kit couldn’t decide whether to grin or grimace while reading Pippa’s latest letter. He had never spent such a long time away from England and the many women who had formed the backbone of his home life. Although he missed much of it, he could not deny that life here at Chateau Blanclair was a particular kind of restful.
It was a household of men—Renaud, nearly sixty, had been widowed for some years and showed no interest in remarrying. His only daughter was married well, with three daughters of her own, but spent most of her time in Paris or on her husband’s estates. And since the death of Renaud’s eldest son and the departure of his second son to marriage in England, the only other resident family member was twelve-year-old Felix. Felix was his grandfather’s heir and, between intensive tutoring, spent time learning the fine art of war. All in all, Blanclair was run rather like a soldiers’ camp. In that atmosphere, Pippa’s letters occasionally jarred on Kit.
But only for a moment. Then he was swept by a rush of bitter longing so strong his eyes stung and he had to breathe against it. What he wouldn’t give to be with Pippa at this moment—because if he was with his twin, he would also be with Anabel.
Longing was abruptly cut off by a slap on the arm. “What are you moping about?” Stephen asked.
Irritation made him sharp. “Why is it that everywhere I go I’m followed by questions about your love life?”
Since Ireland, Stephen wasn’t as easy to rile as he had once been. “I have no love life, brother, so the answers cannot possibly take long to compose.”
“For a man with no love life, you have a multiplicity of women following your every move. Anabel went all the way to York to meet that Scots girl who has been writing to you since Ireland. And Pippa found her curiously unwilling to speak about you.”
“If Anabel wanted to meet Maisie, it was for her business acumen,” Stephen said evenly, the only sign of tension the slight twitch of his left eye. “And I highly doubt that anything in the letters we’ve exchanged is a tenth as inflammatory as what you’ve been writing to the Princess of Wales.”
Kit grinned despite himself. “If I could cipher as well as you or Lucie, I could make them even more inflammatory.”
Stephen rolled his eyes, but there was an affection behind the familiar gesture that Kit had never been aware of when he was young. Despite all he missed about England, he was glad to have spent this time in France with his brother.
“Come on,” Stephen said. “Renaud has orders for us. A small sortie in the direction of Turin. Shouldn’t take more than a month. We’ll be back here by Christmas. And when spring comes, you should go home.”
“We’ve talked about that.”
“You can’t wait for me forever, Kit.”
“The queen will forgive you.”
“I don’t know that I care.”
Kit narrowed his eyes. “You don’t care if you’re never allowed to go home again? Never to set foot on English soil? Of course you care. And of course Elizabeth will forgive you. It’s not as though you killed anyone valuable.”
“It’s not who I killed,” Stephen replied. “It’s where and how. The queen can forgive much, but not insults to her authority. Even if I am allowed back to England, for what purpose? I have no interest in being decorative and useless.”
“Like a younger son?” Kit shot back. “It’s not all bad.”
Kit forced his older brother to look at him, to acknowledge the hit, and finally Stephen let a smile ghost across his sharp-boned face. “We have the winter before us. Perhaps when spring comes I’ll know what it is I want to do with my life.”
—
In mid-November the entirety of Anabel’s household at Middleham were uneasily wondering if the Princess of Wales intended to spend a second winter in the frozen North or might finally venture to the milder South. They had been out of Yorkshire twice in the last two years, but only to go to the princess’s chief holdings in Wales. In all that time, they had come no nearer the queen’s court than a hundred miles.
Anabel hadn’t meant to avoid her mother’s company this long. When she had taken Pippa’s advice to go north and establish a strong royal presence nearer the Scots border, she hadn’t considered all it might mean. Nor had she imagined how much she would enjoy the hard work of slowly weaving a disparate populace into closer ties to her own interests. With some of the strongest enclaves of Catholic recusant families settled in the North, the region had always been somewhat tenuous in its ties to the throne. And the North had long memories—a hundred years ago the people of Yorkshire had mourned the death of the royal usurper Richard III, and they still looked askance at the Tudors who had left his body on a battlefield.
But Anabel was not only a Tudor—she was also a Hapsburg, daughter of His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II of Spain. That impeccable bloodline went far with the recusants. Combined with her mother’s gift for charming those she cared to charm, the Princess of Wales now found herself a little bemusedly with her own center of power. Not in open opposition to the queen’s—but not precisely in concert with it, either.
All of that came into play over this one, outwardly simple decision: remain at Middleham for Christmas and the deep winter months or go to Greenwich for the traditional royal festivities. The gravity of the decision was underlaid by the fact that the royal invitation was not sent directly from mother to daughter, but through the official auspices of England’s Lord High Treasurer, Lord Burghley.