It takes two swipes to get to Henrik’s chat. No Kai lurking in the corner to add his two cents, and soon I’m typing out the message before I can stop myself. In a rare moment of luck, he’s already online.
Eric
Need a favour.
Is there a way you could pull Edmund Marathid’s full medical records?
Something isn’t adding up.
And don’t involve Kai.
Henrik
the fuck would i involve kai for?
he still thinks the WHO refers to ‘horton hears a who’
and i already sent you everything the palace had clearance for on the sheffolks.
if anything in those files seems as though it was redacted, it had to have happened before i even got my hands on it.
Fuck.
Eric
There’s a gap. His file reads too clean for what I’m witnessing over here.
Scan for anything strange when you have the time. I don’t care how minor, just send it my way.
People misfile things all the time, I tell myself. But I need to know, more than my next breath, whether somebody flagged Edmund as being a risk and yet somehow never disclosed it. Francesca deserves that certainty, and if Edmundisbeing protected, well, history certainly taught us that protected threats breed even bigger problems.A small, annoying part of me hopes that, just this once, my theory is proven false and that Pascoe’s nothing but a distrustful old man.
For the sake of the love IknowFrancesca harbours for her cousin, being wrong would be a relief, especially when the alternative is Edmund deciding she’s prettier pinned than left free.
23
LESSONS IN EROSION
FRANCESCA
My grandmother doesn’t come for me until two weeks later. I’m not sure whether it’s to ‘throw Eric off’, considering she still believes him to be some sort of spy sent to recuperate in the jaws of his family’s enemy. It sounds absurd; then again, everything about this family is absurd.
Unfortunately for her, Eric doesn’t seem to give a fuck about being ignored. I’ve never met a man so truly unaffected. But while Gran hasn’t exactly been interacting with him, she’sabsolutelybeen deploying him, and on his arm she’s placed his trusty sidekick: me, apparently.
Every other day it’s been a fundraiser or a luncheon and because I love my people, I can’t say no. Pair that with the prince who’s supposedly here to restore political relations, and you’ve got yourself a duo on tour. Susannah slapped a Sheffolk emblem onto his suit jacket, pinned a lily to my chest and then shoved us before the camera like two mall mannequins. And Eric continued to prove how atrocious he is at small talk, which means I’m not nearly as nervous as I usually am, considering I’m laughing at him. He catches me sometimes, snorting discreetly into my glove, and his expression softens.
A reporter shoved a microphone at him yesterday during the greenhouse expansion at Thistleburst Gardens and asked what he liked best about Sheffolk’s cuisine.
Then this man, this future king, without even a hint of hesitation, replied with, “I love theslap chips.”
In that polished accent of his, it came out as more of a ‘slaahp chuhps’. I almost bit through my lip. It was so painfully,stupidlyadorable because he’s been scarfing them down for days now, practically guilt-tripping Lydia into making new batches. But the press only stared at him like their brains ran out of storage space. Just stunned silence everywhere, from the horticulturists and the donors—even the bees went quiet, I swear.
I had to lean over and whisper, “That’s South African cuisine, honey. Not Sheffolk.”
And Eric—God bless him—lookedsomortified and turned back to the reporter in an attempt to explain. Which made it worse. “Yes, well… It’s a limp potato. A very limp potato, but cut into thick chips…”
A limp potato. I could almost picture how he abandons his knife and fork as soon as the bowl gets placed before him, burning his fingers on the first chip. And there he was, trying to put that enthusiasm into words. Wrong choice of words, though. A limp fucking potato.
I’ve been laughing about it ever since. Laughing about it now actually, as I finish my own bowl Arabella delivered from the kitchen. The smile, however, gets ripped right from my face when my grandmother’s grumbles grow louder.
