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from hand to hand because it was hot. He sat on his heels and held it out, balanced on his fingertips.
    “If you think she has sense enough to eat slow,” LeBreton was genial as carded wool, “give it to her. You can clean up when she empties her belly out.”
    Nothing changed in the boy’s dark face. “You feed her, then. She’s your pet.” He tossed the bread in LeBreton’s general direction and walked off.
    They should not show her the bread and take it away. She would have clawed the world apart to get to that bread.
    “I keep him around because he’s so fond of the donkeys.” LeBreton picked the bread up and brushed it off. Tore it into parts and laid them along his thigh. He blew on a piece before he handed it over. “Then there’s his honesty. You’d look long and hard to find a lad with his kind of honesty. And that amiability of his.”
    She did not stuff bread into her mouth, snatching like an animal. She ate neatly. With restraint. She had been taught so well to be a lady.
    When she was done, he took up another piece, ate half, and gave her the rest. “He didn’t think about you needing to eat slow. Now he’s annoyed at himself.”
    “One is sincere at that age, and easily offended.” Maybe she burned her mouth. She didn’t feel it.
    Another morsel broken between them. Bread for her. Bread for him. They might have been friends sitting at the hearth, toasting bread and tearing off hunks to share back and forth. LeBreton kept talking, but she paid him no attention. “. . . with your mind running round and round like a squirrel in a cage. If I was going to do terrible things to you—which, I point out, I ain’t got around to yet despite these numerous opportunities—there’s not much you could do about it, me being twice as big as you are and strong as an ox. And that’s enough for right now.” He got up and set the rest of the bread on the upturned planter they were using as a table.
    He was right. She was still hungry, but she should not eat more.
    “You concentrate on keeping that down, just as a favor to Adrian.”
    He fed her and pretended to be harmless. He was subtly intelligent. He was a pillar of deception from the long, untidy hair he shook down to hide his face to the worn soles of his boots. Such a man did not wander to her chateau by accident.
    Are you one of us? Are you La Flèche?
    She offered the most common of all the passwords of La Flèche. “If the wind is right, you can smell roses in the garden.”
    “Roses? I saw some as we passed by. Pretty.”
    It was not the right answer. She had not expected to feel so disappointed.
    “When you finish that, I’ll lay a blanket by the fire and leave you to sleep,” he said.
    He was right in this much. If she was to escape, she must sleep first. There would be some chance in the night, when he was less attentive.
    He took the cup away from her, because it was empty. “Or you can just lie awake, thinking up all the things I might come do to you that I’m not doing now.”
     
     
    THE long dim twilight of July was winding to a close when Doyle finished going over the grounds and got back to the orangerie. A drizzle had been coming down, off and on, for a while. Mostly on. He was damp clean through.
    From every side of the garden, he’d been looking back toward the light in the orangerie. He couldn’t see the woman sleeping on her pile of straw, but Hawker was there, with his back to the wall, a candle lit beside him, a book in his lap. Alert. Keeping watch. Glancing up at the end of every couple lines, walking a round of the orangerie every ten or fifteen minutes. There was something to be said for recruiting cutthroats from the London rookeries. The King of Thieves, Lazarus, trained his crew well.
    When Doyle showed himself outside the windows, Hawker set the book down and came to him. They found an oak tree far enough away that their Frenchwoman wouldn’t hear them talking, close enough they had a clear view of her. And