The Virgin's Daughter (37 page)

In his right hand, he held a dagger, long and wicked-looking, stamped on the hilt with a blue cinquefoil. By the time she’d taken it in, the dagger point was at her breast. Julien’s dagger.

Sickeningly, she thought she read lust in his eyes. Without moving the dagger, Nicolas stroked her cheek with his free hand. “So certain that you had me at your mercy,” he purred. “But you have been playing my game for me. And quite appealingly, I might add.”

She would not let the fear rule her. “What do you want?”

“The one thing you could not figure, the motive that has eluded you from the first. All this time spent protecting your queen…and in the end, you have delivered my quarry straight into my hands.”

It took only two heartbeats for comprehension—and horror—to dawn. “Anabel,” she breathed out. “You are here to kill Anabel.”

He smiled broadly and shook his head. “Not at all. Princess Anne
is my greatest asset. With her daughter in my hands, your heretic queen will fall over herself to give me what I want.”

“And what is that?”

“Mary Stuart’s freedom.”

—

Lucette refused to cooperate. In the end, Nicolas had Laurent tie her hands behind her back and gag her, then the two men, armed with both daggers and swords, marched her across the hall to the family wing. Even subdued, Lucette was troublesome. He could have knocked her out, but absolute silence wasn’t necessary. Laurent carried her, though she managed to kick at the walls a few times.

But the family wing remained dark and still when they arrived outside the chamber where Pippa Courtenay and Anne Tudor slept. Nicolas tried the door and found it barred.

He would have preferred to have the princess in his hands before everyone knew, but as long as he had Lucette, he was confident of success. So he pounded on the door with the dagger’s hilt and waited for an audience.

The royal girl and her friend were no fools—the door remained barred. He heard Pippa’s suspicious voice ask, “Who is it?”

“I have your sister,” he announced. “With a dagger at her throat. Untie the gag, Laurent, and let them hear her.”

Laurent complied, though Lucette was pulling furiously away. Nicolas rolled his eyes and slapped her twice, hard. “Do that again,” he warned, “and it will be the butt of my sword next time.”

That was the moment Dominic Courtenay flung open his door, sword in hand and his wife just behind him with a dagger. Kit Courtenay was just a moment later.

Nicolas smiled coldly. “There will be no blood shed tonight,” he promised. “As long as Her Royal Highness opens this door and surrenders herself to me.”

“Don’t do it, Anabel!” Lucette shouted.

Everyone else stayed still, though Dominic Courtenay’s eyes glittered dangerously in the hints of moonlight that played through the corridor window. “You’ll never get out of this alive, Nicolas. Give me my daughter, and perhaps I’ll see to it that your father deals with you instead of my queen.”

“You can’t threaten a man who’s willing to lose everything,” Nicolas said. “I have uses for Lucette that require her to be alive, but I will kill her if I must. And you will have no one to blame but yourself and your stubborn princess.”

He pounded on the door once more. “What do you say, Your Highness? What price your life and honour? Willing to get your friends killed for you? I hear that’s a particularly Tudor trait.”

There were harsh whispers behind the door, and what sounded like a scuffle. Then the door was flung wide. Anne Tudor faced him, clad in a lavish taffeta nightrobe trimmed with silver lace. Her hair lay across her shoulders in two long plaits but she stared him down with a blazing scorn that didn’t entirely hide her fear. “Here I am,” she announced with that arrogance that was purely royal. “Do what you will.”

“Good girl,” he said, and in two steps had the dagger at her throat, matching Laurent’s pose with Lucette. “What I will is for everyone to leave this house now. No getting dressed, no snatching valuables. I have no interest in the contents of your home and promise to leave them unharmed. But within five minutes I need this house cleared. I believe you will find armed men just outside the grounds waiting for my signal. When you have gone, my men will take position to ensure no one comes back in. Again, I have no interest in bloodshed. Laurent and I will remain here with the two women.”

“Until when?” Surprisingly, it was Minuette who asked, looking nearly as fierce as her husband, but practical with it.

“I have a message for your queen. Tell her that her daughter will be freed when I have received assurances that Queen Mary has left England in safety. There is a ship prepared to reach her at King’s
Lynn. Perhaps your menfolk would care to take that message. The sooner it’s done, the sooner you may have your house—and women—back.”

Dominic Courtenay did not move and his face was unreadable. Kit, on the other hand, had the fine tremble beneath his skin of a thoroughbred aching to run. There was a boy who would gladly kill him without thought.

But Dominic controlled both his house and his family.

“Very well,” Dominic said, still holding his sword in the left hand and looking as though he would very much like to run it through Nicolas’s chest.

“Father, no—” Kit began.

“Take your mother and Pippa and go,” Dominic ordered.

Pippa looked as murderous as her father, but she only glanced once between her sister and her friend before stepping into the corridor and following her family.

Dominic left last. “Don’t do anything reckless,” he said to Lucette, “and trust me.” Then, to the princess, “That goes for you, too, Anabel.”

“Father,” Lucette said, “tell Walsingham to get Julien out of the Tower.”

Nicolas laughed. “Single-minded in your devotion, aren’t you? But why not? Julien has his part to play in this as well.”

And then it was just the four of them. Nicolas nodded to Laurent and they switched in one smooth movement, the tutor to drive Anne back into her chamber and Nicolas to confront Lucette.

“Don’t even think about it,” he told her softly.

“Think about what?” she shot back. “Killing you?”

“Among other things. Lucie mine, you are truly the best thing that’s happened to me in years. I never lied about that. I will not hurt your princess and I will not hurt you—as long as I am not given cause. I am doing this for Queen Mary, and then…then I will be free and maybe we can begin again.”

“You set up Julien, you bastard! You set the Catholics on his trail and delivered him into Walsingham’s hands. Now he’s in the Tower being tortured while you blithely go your own way.”

He slapped her once, more lightly than before. “Not everything in this world is about Julien,” he snapped. “For eight years he’s had it all his way. It won’t hurt him to learn a little humility. And don’t worry—I’m sure they’ll turn him loose when they hear what I’ve done. Walsingham will think my brother might get through to me. Or perhaps knows the best way to kill me. Either way, I’m confident that the three of us will soon enough be alone in a place where the truth can finally be told.”

For a moment, Nicolas thought he’d finally cowed her. He should have known better.

“That’s Julien’s dagger you have,” she pointed out, with a control that barely wavered. “If you were planning to use it as evidence against him, you should have taken care to act before he was locked in the Tower. Not to mention that you’ve showed your face to my family.”

Stroking her cheek with the flat of the stolen blade, Nicolas said, “Julien’s dagger, and Julien’s lover. It’s time I took back all that my brother stole from me.”

He seized her arm and wrenched her into the bedchamber with the princess.

Nicolas would not touch either of them, not seriously. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself. Being castrated had taught him to take his pleasures in many ways, and he planned to exercise them all in the immediate future.

—

Elizabeth had just reached Cambridge on the first leg of her summer progress when Dominic and Kit Courtenay pounded into the university town with demons at their heels and blew apart what she only recognized in the aftermath as her relatively ordered world.

Of course she and her council had imagined threats to Anne over the years. Why else keep her sequestered away from court? But the moment Dominic told her that her daughter was in an enemy’s hands, Elizabeth felt time suspend, and when the clock began to move again, fear had entered her heart in an icy wave she had never imagined.

There were only five of them in her privy chamber: Elizabeth, Dominic, Kit, Walsingham, and Burghley. Other than Kit—and that reservation solely because of his youth—there were no men Elizabeth trusted more in her kingdom.

“No one else must know,” she said first, and was pleased and a touch surprised at the firmness of her voice. But then, she had always coped well in extremis.

“Agreed,” Burghley said. “And we must move quickly.”

“Will you let her go?” It was Walsingham who asked, and in his roughness Elizabeth heard all the arguments he’d made over the years for the necessity of Mary’s death. God help him, if he so much as hinted that this was her fault…

He wouldn’t. He didn’t have to. Elizabeth knew it all too keenly herself.

For twelve years she had ignored Walsingham’s advice, and that of her council, to bring Mary up on charges that would end in her execution. How could she have done otherwise? Mary, for her faults and silliness, was her cousin. And a queen crowned and anointed. But once violate that holy gift, and how quickly the future blood of royals might be spent. Including Elizabeth’s own.

Mary had not been so circumspect, more than once lending her approval to plots to assassinate her cousin. Elizabeth had not minded those. But now Mary had brought Anabel into play…and at the moment Elizabeth would cheerfully have swung the sword of execution herself.

Now that it was too late. Because there could be no other answer. “Mary goes free,” Elizabeth announced grimly. “Walsingham, ride in
all haste to Tutbury. Take Christopher with you.” She nodded at Kit. “Stephen Courtenay might be harder to persuade of this step than even Shrewsbury, but he will take his brother’s word where he might not take my Lord Secretary’s. I will meet you all at King’s Lynn.”

Burghley intervened. “Do you think that wise?”

“From the first, Mary has pressed to meet me face-to-face. It would be rude of me to let her go without granting her that request. You ride to London, Burghley. Take Dominic with you.”

“I must return to Wynfield,” Dominic insisted flatly.

“And you will soon enough. With Julien LeClerc. If Lucette wants him there, that is good enough for me.”

They broke up with only a few more words. There was little to say and plenty to do. Elizabeth ached to be in motion like the men around her. Burghley would see to it that the government and London were held stable and in ignorance of what was happening. Time enough to announce the peril once it passed. When Anabel was safely in her power once more, and Mary set loose to wreak what havoc she could outside of England.

The men did not even wait until morning. Walsingham and Kit rode northwest for Tutbury, Burghley and Dominic south to London. Elizabeth spent a restless night in Cambridge, and when the sun had risen, rode for King’s Lynn on the Norfolk coast. Her brother had fought and won a notable battle there in his last years, sending the Duke of Norfolk fleeing across the waters as Mary now meant to flee. Elizabeth took grim satisfaction from the fact that Norfolk had eventually lost his head in another rebellion, attempting to bring her down and wed Mary Stuart himself. Justice might be delayed, but it always came in the end.

—

Julien waited every day in expectation of the rack, but it never came. The closest he got was being shown the device—along with the other instruments of torture, some of which he could guess at, others too horrifying to contemplate when one might be on the receiving
end—as a sort of prod to giving the answers they wanted. But he couldn’t, because what they wanted was not the truth.

He might be a liar, but he had a strange devotion to the truth. Also a perverse wish to do the opposite of what anyone wanted of him.

Walsingham did not return, which Julien found increasingly ominous. Mostly because no one else would even hint at what was going on outside the Tower walls. Where was everyone? What were they doing? Mostly, though,
everyone
simply meant Lucette.

After eight days (the stone of the walls was soft, and though he was no artist he could at least mark the passage of time), Julien lay on his hard bed, arms behind his head, wondering why he’d never had the nerve to tell Lucie how he loved her, when the cell door opened. He didn’t bother getting to his feet; it would simply be a guard checking on him or taunting him, or the lieutenant to ask him more meaningless questions.

Dominic Courtenay walked in.

Julien had never shot to his feet so fast in his life. For one thing, the Duke of Exeter was that sort of man—and would have been even without his exalted title. It had been twelve years since Julien had met him, but Lord Exeter looked less changed than Renaud. Of course, his wife still lived. The thought of Minuette made Julien flush with embarrassment at how he’d fawned over this man’s wife, then deepened to regret at how Lucette still held it against him. Heaven forbid Dominic Courtenay had any idea how he had tormented himself with boyish dreams all those years ago.

It was a remarkable amount of humiliation and hope to swing through in three seconds. Frankly, Julien was surprised he managed to make it to his feet and stay there steadily. Lord Exeter had the kind of black stare that made one certain the worst was about to happen to you and he was completely uninterested in your fate.

But fear for Lucette conquered even fear of her father. “Is your daughter well, my lord?” he asked.

That provoked a crack in the facade, a querying expression that
quickly resumed forbidding. “I suspect you and I are going to have a long talk about Lucette in the near future,” he said grimly. “But not today. I have horses below, and we must set out at once.”