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ultimately successful—attempt to rescue Mary Stuart from her English prison. It had been known as the Nightingale Plot. It was that plot that had drawn his sister Lucette into the heart of the LeClerc family, entangling her with both of Renaud’s sons. The affair ended with violence and death in England. No matter how much had been kept quiet in the aftermath, there were those in Europe who knew enough to direct their Catholic vengeance at both the LeClercs and Stephen himself.
    And one Catholic above all.
    You have made an enemy today,
Mary Stuart had said to Stephen as she left England’s shores.
    As though mentioning his sons had sent his mind in a specific direction, Renaud said abruptly, “It will be hard for Felix when you leave.”
    “I know. I’m sorry.”
    “The loss and sorrow is not of your making. And I understand why Julien cannot come to France. But, perhaps, when you leave in the spring, your brother might be willing to escort him to England for a time? I think Felix needs his uncle.”
    “I am sure Kit would gladly do so.” And it would serve to ensure that Kit did not follow him into a war.
    Renaud sighed, and Stephen could see the weight of the last years in his face. “We shall have you both for the winter, at least. I am glad. Charlotte is all that I could wish for in a daughter—but I confess that I miss both my sons.”
    After all the emotionally laden undertones, Stephen could finally be alone. He knew he needed a bath and a meal, but he was so tired and relieved to be without immediate responsibilities that he shut his door, pulled off his boots, and threw himself into a thickly padded chair in front of the fire. The small table at hand held the letters that had arrived in his absence.
    Six from his parents—they wrote once a week without fail, though sometimes they arrived together in batches—and three from Pippa. There was only one from Lucie, and it hurt Stephen just to look at her handwriting. Her string of miscarriages had wounded her in a place he didn’t know how to reach, and her letters to him had become almost painfully dutiful.
    He laid aside his family’s letters in favour of the last, addressed to him in the distinctive mix of merchants’ scrawl and convent copperplate that announced Maisie Sinclair as thoroughly as her tiny frame or enormous mind.
    He couldn’t say when her letters had become so important to him. They started a few weeks after he’d left the Tower. Maisie wrote as she spoke—as though constantly engaged in a free-flowing conversation that made leaps from the philosophy of Erasmus to the science of Galileo to the wars of the Italian city-states to the price of alum on the open market. In the last year and a half she had written to him from Bruges and from Amsterdam, from Cologne and Rheims and Bohemia. She had ventured as far east as Krakow and as far south as Florence.
    And though she was in motion and Stephen hardly stirred from Blanclair save for campaigns, he had come to understand that they were both learning to cope with the traumas they’d passed through in Ireland. Communicating with the only other outsider who had been part of the deaths and hollow victories of the Kavanaugh clan was a method of healing. Not as quick at inducing painlessness as the bottle, but less messy in the long run.
    He had not heard from her since Kit’s report of her visit to York. Stephen broke Maisie’s seal—a fox, symbol of ingenuity and wit. Shortly after leaving England, she had sent him its match: a ruby-set pin in the shape of a fox.
This will ensure you aid any time you may need it from any of my men in Europe.
    He opened the letter and read with interest.
3 December 1584
    Newcastle-upon-Tyne
    Stephen,
    Why did you never tell me how terrifying your youngest sister is? One would think that in private audience with the Princess of Wales—daughter of the most fearsome monarchs of our age—that Princess Anne would dominate. But it is the quiet ones one has to