Chapter Seven #2
“Didn’t you nearly fail Smalls twice?” Kirk taunted. “I’d like to see you try.”
A muscle twitched in Oliver Whitby’s jaw, but it was then he noticed Ginevra. “What are you doing in here? This is a private—” he stopped, his mouth falling slightly open. “Are you Gin Bishop? The Honorable Ginevra Bishop, I mean,” he corrected with an obsequiousness that made Gin cringe.
The air around Marion Kirk thickened with surprise and distrust.
“I am,” Gin said. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
The man slicked a hand over his dark hair and grinned. “Oliver Whitby. Friend of Don Craddock. It’s a pleasure to finally meet, Don talks about you all the time.”
If Donald had been discussing their marriage prospects, Ginevra would throttle him at the first possible opportunity. “Only good things, I hope.”
“He says you’re brilliant.” Whitby’s smile lit up the dingy room. “We’re always recruiting notable voices to add to The Blue. If you ever want to write a piece, you’d go straight to the top of the submission pile.”
“You’re too kind, but I can’t imagine what I should even write about.” Gin forced a laugh. “Women’s woes finding nylon stockings?”
Kirk rolled her eyes and stabbed both arms into her jacket.
Whitby snapped his fingers. “A human-interest piece from a female perspective. I like it!”
“It was a joke,” Gin said, taken aback. “I have no desire to write about stockings. Women are already quite aware of the issue. It’s not particularly newsworthy.”
“It’s not only the information, it’s how you present it.” Whitby leaned on a desk, thumbs hooked through his suspender straps. “I’m sure most gents have never considered the issue—and it’s got sex appeal.”
“Drivel.” Kirk jammed a brown felt hat onto her head, the brim at a jaunty angle. “I’m not changing the piece about Bevan, Whitby; I don’t care how you feel about his politics. It’s relevant, it’s interesting, and you can take it or leave it. I have another meeting, so I’m done here.”
But Whitby was now fixated on Gin, and his eyes lit up further still when he noticed the paper in her hands. “Keep that and read it over. You can see the kind of stuff we do.”
Behind Whitby’s back, Kirk rolled her eyes. She stalked to a desk in the middle of the room and picked up her handbag but was accosted by Jenkins holding a fresh page. With a relish that boded ill for the man’s grammar, Kirk leaned against the desk and exchanged the handbag for her fountain pen.
It was at that moment, Gin found herself at a terrible crossroads. She absolutely did not want to turn the price of stockings into human interest with sex appeal, but this was an easy way to put herself in Marion Kirk’s crosshairs without finding new excuses to bother Tweety.
It might also put her on Kirk’s bad side.
Gin forced a smile. “I’ll think about it. Perhaps the muse shall strike when I least expect it.”
Whitby leaped off the chair and grabbed her hand, pumping it with enthusiasm. “Don said you were a brick, and he’s right. You won’t regret it, Bishop.”
Gin smoothed her mauled gloves and edged backward toward the exit. “Thank you, Mr. Whitby. I’m sure I won’t.”
Only as Ginevra hurried from the bowels of the smoky office, breathing deep the fresh air of freedom, she rather suspected the regrets would arrive soon enough.
There was still, however, an opportunity to turn this disastrous day around.
Marion Kirk ought to emerge and return to Lady Margaret Hall, and Gin could follow her.
If spotted, making her own way home was an easy excuse.
Gin strolled to the nearest bus stop, pretending to review the newspaper, and waited.
As expected, Kirk soon appeared and walked down the street—but in the opposite direction of LMH.
Gin cursed under her breath. She hadn’t considered that postgraduate students didn’t usually live in halls of residence. Following Kirk to a boardinghouse would prove more difficult if caught.
But at the corner, Kirk stopped. She turned toward a chemist’s, already closed for the evening, and appeared to address someone hidden under the shadow of its awning.
A meeting—that’s what she’d told Whitby.
But who scheduled meetings on street corners under cover of darkness?
Only a person with something to hide, Gin thought with grim delight.
She walked back down the road, threading through the people bustling home for supper, and sat on a bench across the street from the chemist. Gin leaned over to fiddle with her shoes, pretending to search for a pebble in the heel.
“You can’t hide forever—” Kirk’s angry voice wafted through a lull in the traffic.
She leaned against the storefront, her shoulders outlined in the streetlamp’s glow, and beyond her, a smudge of shadow shifted.
But it was impossible to identify anything useful about her companion, and the steady putter of cars absorbed their conversation.
Too late did Ginevra notice Braithwaite approaching her bench, his fedora tipped low on his brow.
He sank down beside her and leaned back, hands deep in his pockets. “Going into the lion’s den for your first outing wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,” he said without greeting.
“Not here. Marion Kirk is right over there.”
She nodded across the street, and Braithwaite tensed. Without preamble, he rose, tugging her up with him, and steered them behind a nearby telephone box. He peered through the walls of grimy glass. “What’s she doing?”
“Meeting with persons unknown. She left the Blue’s office right behind me and went straight there.”
He glanced down at her. “And how did you fare in the lion’s den?”
“A little curious sniffing, but no one ate me.” Ginevra hurried on, quite sure her partner would say bumbling into an opinion piece was hardly discreet. “But now I’m desperate to know who’s over there with Marion Kirk. Seems awfully cagey, the way they’re hanging in the shadows.”
Braithwaite looked back across the street and stiffened, swearing under his breath. “She’s gone.”
“What!” Gin whirled beyond the booth, hoping the clouded glass had merely obscured her, but neither Kirk nor the shadowy figure remained beneath the awning. “Where the devil did she go?”
The smart clip of heels on pavement was the only warning before Marion Kirk swooped upon her like a great bat of the night.
“Were you following me?” Kirk demanded. “Did Whitby send you to spy on me?”
Gin recoiled as the other girl advanced, looming nearly a head taller. “Heavens, no. Why on earth would he do that?”
Kirk’s angular face lengthened with a sneer.
“Journalism is a cutthroat business, Miss Bishop, and our esteemed editor will try to use you however he can. Insipid opinion pieces are the tip of the iceberg.” She needled a finger into Gin’s shoulder, prodding her back a step.
“Don’t try to steal others’ confidential sources, no matter what Whitby might ask.
I’ve spent years working on some of my stories, and it’s bad form. ”
“I wasn’t,” Gin gasped, retreating. “I promise—”
She backed into Braithwaite’s chest, and his hands slipped under her elbows, warm and firm and steadying.
“Ready for dinner?” he asked, his tone light and conversational. Ginevra was not aware he possessed such an easy manner, and the other woman’s fiery attack was only half responsible for Gin’s hasty nod of shock.
Kirk’s glittering eyes shifted to Braithwaite and narrowed with faint recognition. Her lips pursed in annoyance, and she withdrew. “My apologies,” she said stiffly. “Enjoy your evening.”
Braithwaite raised an eyebrow at her with cool nonchalance, and he steered Ginevra down the pavement with a firm hand between her shoulder blades.
“I knew you weren’t cut out for this,” he muttered. “No, don’t glare at me now. I’m sure she’s watching us.”
“I was doing just fine before you showed up.”
“You sat on a bench right across from your mark. How long did you think that would work?” He exhaled a low rumble of irritation. “You’re welcome for getting you out of that interrogation.”
“You didn’t give me a chance to try.”
Braithwaite scowled as though about to retort, and Gin walked a little faster to dodge it.
They turned right at the next street corner, and he dropped his hand from her back, shoving it straight into his pocket.
Gin was relieved Kirk’s gaze no longer burned on her neck, but the absence of that faint pressure against her spine made her feel like an untethered kite.
She was keenly aware of the imbalance in their experience on this assignment, and she didn’t want Braithwaite to nanny her.
But she would have liked a real partner, even one whose gray glower made her feel trapped in the undertow of a rushing stream’s current.
“This is my turn,” Braithwaite said, peeling away at the next street. “Let me know when you’ve made contact with Neville.”
“Of course.” Gin gave a clipped farewell and continued briskly down the lane, willing herself to feign professional nonchalance. Inside, however, her modest satisfaction with the day crumbled like a sandcastle, destroyed by the waves before anyone had a chance to admire it.
She would make him admit yet just how capable she was.