It’s been a long time since I was on her shit list—my attempt, at fifteen, to run away and marry an eighteenth-century pirate springs to mind—but the throbbing behind my eyes and across the front of my head reminds me it’s an unpleasant place to be.
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t break eye contact. Her gaze is hard and cold, and a quiver shoots down my spine that chills me as thoroughly as if I had just broken into a fevered sweat. I blink and look away. “I understand the danger we’re in.”
“I remain unconvinced until you show me otherwise.” She still doesn’t break eye contact.
“We’re going about this all wrong,” I say. Rather than trying to recount the finger points of Fagin’s lecture—and, let’s face it, I don’t remember a thing she said—I change tactics. I nod at the life-sized holographic image of an auburn-haired beauty with a long nose and pouting lips. “Eleanor of Austria, King Francois’ second wife, won’t get us into the retinue accompanying him to Calais. The Boleyn girls attended his first wife, Queen Claude, and adored Lady Anne. While this fact isn’t lost on Eleanor, the queen is also a staunch Catholic and history says she’ll never legitimize Anne by meeting with her.”
“Eleanor can get us access to her husband,” Fagin says in a tone that expects full agreement. “It would make sense to get close to the King by getting close to her.”
“There’s another way.”
“Enlighten me.” Fagin settles into a high-backed wood chair and spreads her arms open in a gesture of invitation. “If the queen isn’t the entry point to the French court, who is?”
I smile. “Computer, display Anne de Pisseleu d’Heilly as she was in 1532.” Eleanor disappears, replaced by a golden-haired woman with a pointed chin and dark eyes. “This is Frankie’s maîtresse-en-titre.”
“Frankie?” Fagin snorts out a laugh. It’s the first laugh I’ve heard from her in weeks. “And how does his attachment to his official mistress benefit us?”
“The French have a saying: A court without women is like a garden without flowers. Francois will be eager to display the most beautiful women in France in front of Henry, including his mistress. There will be more courtiers attending him at Calais than we can count. Make friends with his favorite mistress, and we’ll be in the King’s line of sight. A little flirtation here, a little flattery there, et voilà, we’ll get an invitation to Calais.”
“That’s clever,” Fagin says, grudgingly. “But we have to play this carefully. Making friends with the king’s mistress could be disastrous.”
“Not true. Francois rarely speaks to his wife. Anne wields more power in the French court than just about anyone. Trust me. This will work.”
“Trust you? You’ve been more of a pain in the ass since we got this assignment than when I first found you, and that’s saying something.”
“Are you seriously throwing that in my face?” I groan and slip into my rendition of Fagin’s throaty voice and, for added emphasis, throw up my hands in a frenzied motion to mirror her usual exasperation with the memory of those early days. “I was a little monster for the first six months. Mouthy. Disrespectful. Constantly trying to run away even though there was nowhere for me to go.”
“You were a beast,” she interrupts, slamming a book into the middle of the table, causing a slight flicker in the hologram image as the book lands with a thud. “The only reason I didn’t take you straight back to picking pockets on the wharves of New Orleans was your pure, raw talent. You were the most gifted thief I’d ever met before you’d had a single day of training.”
Fagin had considered throwing me back into that cesspool.
This confession strikes a surreal dissonant chord, tinny and out of tune with the rhythm of our relationship since she saved me. She taught me how to get what I want from people and make it think it was their idea to give it to me. She has been my protector, and the only family I have left.
The more her words sink in, the more they feel like a knife being drawn torturously down my chest until my nerves and muscles, my very heart, lay exposed and raw.
How could she have thought of abandoning me?
“I think I’m handling this entire shit show extremely well.” I swallow the lie along with the lump of emotion stuck in my craw; it leaves a trail of bile that burns down my throat, all the way to my belly. “What you’re asking me to do is—”
“Save our lives. That’s what I’m asking you to do, Dodger.” Fagin says.
“You know the Benefactors sent goons to threaten me into submission, right?”
“I know.” She looks like she hasn’t slept in years. Her face is drawn and dark circles mottle the skin below her eyes. “If we play our parts, we’ll come out of this in one piece.”
“Reporting my every move to the Benefactors is playing your part?”
“Yes.” She looks me square in the eyes. Her tone is matter-of-fact, like her choice to be an informant is what any sane person would do in her position instead of what it is: a solid blow to the foundation of our relationship. She doesn’t explain her answer further; instead, she pivots back to the argument at hand. “Convince me why King Francois’s mistress is the better in-road to Calais than his wife.”
Prying a rationale out of Fagin for her choices when she gives definitive one-word answers is akin to prying a coin from a miser’s grip. She knows better than to think I’ll let this go forever. For now, this battle will have to wait. “Neither of these men will risk being seen as having less fortune, fewer servants and courtiers, than the other,” I say. “Henry, alone, brings a contingent of two thousand people to Calais. We can expect Francois to do no less.”
The skin between her eyes crinkles.
