Page 16 of The Oxford Guide to Scandal and Lies

“Do you ever miss home?” she asked in lilting French.

No, he wanted to say. This life was so much more interesting than the Cumberland pit village he’d enlisted into the army to escape from. But what sort of person preferred the war-ravaged French countryside to their home? “Sometimes.”

Amélie laughed. “Liar. I enjoy the work too.” She tapped his shoulder and then hers. “You and I are the same, my friend. We need the danger to keep life sharp.”

Day bled into night as he stared into her eyes, and for the first time he could remember, Sidney was content to stand still. When her hand slipped down, angling toward his against the hedge’s sharp leaves, the rest of his life vanished beyond the point where their skin touched—

He hardly heard the footsteps pounding the earth before the soldiers rounded the corner with their guns drawn.

Sidney jerked awake and rolled onto his back. It took a few minutes of slow breathing to calm his pulse, to remind himself that stupid hedge maze was far away, across the Channel. He was in Oxford, in Swithun, and groggy from pondering Tolliver’s barmy sentences far too late into the night. Sidney turned onto his side, head cradled on his thin pillow, and blinked in the morning light.

There were two envelopes on his floor.

One of the scouts shuffling in the corridor must have delivered them, but he wasn’t expecting messages—was he? Sidney slid off the bed and threw a thin housecoat over his undershirt and flannels. The cold floorboards nipped at his bare feet, and he wriggled his toes to ward off the chill. Stiffly, he picked up the letters. The handwriting of the first he recognized right away. It was a hasty message from his brother about attending an Oxford Dramatic Society production later that month, asking if Sidney wanted to grab a pint after, and yet another reminder for Sidney to call their parents, underlined with the earnestness that characterized all of Felix’s life.

Sidney tossed it onto his desk. If something was amiss, his parents would have called him; this was Felix playing nursemaid. Sidney had cut short his stay during the Christmas and Easter vacations under the pretense of custodial jobs to be completed while school was out, reasons his parents had accepted graciously enough. But Felix had been dogged to cheer him up since that god-awful outing to the pub the day before Tolliver died, and this interference reeked of the same misplaced charity. Sidney didn’t like feeling like a special project.

The second letter he scrutinized with more care. He had half expected another message from the Rook, but this scrawling hand was different from the last. The notepaper was finer than Felix’s with a delicate floral aroma, and its message far more succinct:

Botanic Gardens, today, noon sharp.

A tiny symbol was drawn beneath as though in signature: a small circle balanced upon an elongated, slim oval with a flattened base. It reminded Sidney of a chess piece. A pawn, maybe?

No—a bishop.

At eleven fifty, Sidney Braithwaite strode across High Street. He had donned his nicest suit, shined his shoes, and wavered over the tie for an embarrassing length of time. If he had chosen the tie his mother insisted made his eyes striking, it was only to appear professional and authoritative, like someone Ginevra Bishop would recognize as an equal.

Sidney had only ever visited the Botanic Gardens once, but judging by the lack of foot traffic, Bishop had chosen their meeting time with care. He entered through the stone archway, serenaded by songbirds, and strolled toward a fountain down the lane. The deep quiet made his shoulders soften as he progressed deeper into the garden. At the fountain, he trailed his fingers through the rippling water, and the nip of cold steadied him. Bishop was likely only impatient for a progress report. There was no need to fight today.

“You got my note then.”

Sidney dried his hand on his jacket sleeve and turned. She sat cross-legged on a bench, regarding him with sphinxlike amusement and wariness. Her dark trousers and cream blouse looked like lecture attire, but the wall of ivy behind her made her green eyes shimmer like the northern lights. She rose and slid a silver cigarette case from her handbag. “Care for a smoke?”

“I don’t smoke anymore. Lost the taste for it during the war.” At her confusion he added, “I brought a pack to fake it if needed while scoping out Olenev’s. It’s good cover.”

Bishop nodded as though cataloging the information, a tiny movement that created a nervous flutter in Sidney’s stomach, and returned the case to her handbag. “Have you made progress decoding?”

Bishop seemed surprisingly calm—dangerously so. Sidney had expected excitement or demands or more of that irresistible energy that frothed about her. A calm Bishop foreboded a greater storm just out of sight, and Sidney pulled the slip of paper from his pocket to delay its arrival.

“I told you it wouldn’t be quick. I think it’s a Caesar shift of some sort, where you adjust the letters according to a set number.”

“But wouldn’t that create a string of gibberish?” Bishop’s brow wrinkled. “Tolliver’s sentences were lucid, if not slightly ludicrous.”

“They are,” Sidney conceded. “But something about the phrasing isn’t right. Take Bartleby saw Zelda Zimmermann Saturday, for example. Most people would say on Saturday, and I’d wager a man like Tolliver would too. So why drop the preposition?”

“Because only certain letters matter,” Bishop murmured. “And it must be the first, else why use Zelda Zimmermann when there’re innumerable words that end with a or n, but zed is more limited.”

“Precisely.” Bishop was better at this than he expected, and her sparkle of pleasure at the faint praise made Sidney return quickly to the paper. “So, if we only use the first letter of each word, there’s your gibberish. Without knowing the amount shifted, it’s lots of tedious counting to see if anything clicks. That’s where I’m currently at.”

Bishop grabbed his sleeve. “Let’s look at it now—together.”

Sidney hadn’t much experience with debutantes, and her interest surprised him. He allowed her to drag him into a glass house full of fronded plants, and they sat on a bench by a lily pond. He fished a pencil out of his inner jacket pocket and spread the paper on his knee beside hers. “I started with Violet and Cathy since it’s shortest.”

“So using only the first letter,” Bishop said, peering at the phrases, “that leaves us with VTCV. Which means the first and last letter of the real word will be the same too?”

“Right. I tried a couple of shifts with letters I thought most likely to double like that and turned methodical after that went nowhere. I got as far as an eight-letter shift before I dozed off.”

Bishop’s eyes widened. “Goodness, that does sound tedious.”