“Oh my,” said Iris, looking at her partner in admiration. “You want to steal them from the thief and the Queen’s woman. Now, that sounds like fun!”

“Do you agree?”

“I do. I am now Love’s Champion!”

“Good. Because we need to plan this now. And there is one more thing. Before Patience got here, we were talking about possible leaks.”

“Yes?”

“How much did you tell your old boss when you went to him for information?”

“A fair amount,” said Iris. “I had to convince him of the importance of the task before he would relent.”

“You didn’t consider him as a risk?”

“Of course I did.”

“You didn’t mention it during that portion of our discussion. Why not?”

Iris looked at her partner, who was staring at her with that unearthly focus that always seemed to penetrate Iris’s innermost thoughts.

“Because I didn’t want to think that of him,” she said. “Because I want to trust him.”

“When you made your list of those you trust the other night, there were only two people on it,” said Gwen. “He wasn’t one of them.”

“I want him to be,” said Iris. “I need to know that the things I did during the war at his behest were all for the good. Because some of them were quite terrible.”

“And now?” asked Gwen.

“What are you asking?”

“You told me that you didn’t want to work for him anymore. Yet I sense a yearning within you for that life, as duplicitous and dangerous as it was.”

“I thought Dr. Milford was in charge of winnowing out my dark secrets.”

“This isn’t therapy, Iris. This is you and me. I’m not asking you to spill every sordid detail of your past, but if we are working together on something this risky, then I need to know that you won’t have any blind spots about anyone involved.”

“All right,” said Iris.

“So, is it possible that your boss is the one who got to Madame Bousquet?”

“Yes. In fact, it would be exactly the sort of thing he would do.”

“Which means he knew about her beforehand but lied to you about it.”

“Also possible. And he might already have reached out to Vivienne Ducognon by now. He has more resources than we do.”

“And more time. Well, that can’t be helped. I’ll make some calls to see if I can find her, but our priority is getting hold of those letters.”

“And then keeping them, which might be the more difficult task,” said Iris.

“Iris, why don’t you trust Patience? I’m going on instinct, as I always do, but you usually have some concrete reason.”

“She didn’t have the letter fingerprinted,” said Iris. “If they have old letters from Alice, then they would have fingerprints for comparison. Lady Matheson doesn’t want the whole truth, just a truth that she can use, and that can’t be good.”

“How do we keep them away from her? She might have us followed.”

“I have an idea. Pass me the telephone, if you please.”