Page 83 of The Oxford Guide to Scandal and Lies

Leland hung his head with a soft groan.

“Yes.” Watkins’s voice was thick with bitterness. “I nearly ignored him, he was pestering me so much. Only when I realized he had been in Vosburg too, that he knew Robert … that he’d overheard the truth and yet was too stupid to piece it together. It was not so very hard to figure out what Leland had pulled off then, and I was gobsmacked.” Her jaw tightened. “He had already shown off Trixie at a few parties and bragged about her father’s work with the Foreign Office. When they started throwing parties at his London house, it didn’t take long to discover he doesn’t always follow protocol with classified information. At that point, the idea formed itself.”

“This is outrageous!” Leland huffed. “To abuse our friendship—”

Watkins whirled upon him. “You’ve used that woman and her father to burnish your own reputation for years. You’re a hypocrite and a monster.”

“But I’m not the traitor now!” Leland wrestled against his bonds. “You all can see she’s mad, yes? She’s orchestrated this whole thing to ruin me—”

Watkins slipped Ginevra’s gun from her coat pocket and trained it on Leland. “I’m simply righting the balance,” she said. “You owe us all more than your miserable life can repay. But it will be a start.”

“I don’t think Uncle Robert would see it like that,” Marion said. “He was always saying he preferred driving the ambulance to fighting because saving lives was better than cutting them down. He said everyone deserved another chance.”

Watkins’s hand wavered, her eyes darting at Marion before returning to Leland. “I should have realized sooner you were related to Robert. You have the same look when you’re angry.” She adjusted her grip on the gun. “But I don’t really care what Rob would have wanted, Marion. He put his faith in faithless friends, and it ruined his life. I refuse to let Leland have the upper hand on him again.”

“You can’t just shoot the professor!” Ginevra cried. “Shouldn’t you let the police handle it now? We have the proof!”

Watkins avoided her gaze. “Unfortunately, Miss Bishop, this evening has spun out of my hands. I assume if I wait much longer, whoever has kept you so well informed of the treason I pinned on Leland will descend upon us.” Her mouth pinched. “I am sorry. This should all have been much simpler.”

Only Gin could tell from the way the don held the gun that she was not comfortable with the firearm and had likely never shot one. She also didn’t know to whom the gun belonged—that Ginevra was prepared to disarm her, just as her mother had taught her.

Gin spun around and shoved backward into Watkins. One swift elbow jab into the don’s stomach, one hard wrench to break her left hand’s hold on the gun. But Watkins held fast, fighting back harder than Ginevra had anticipated. The don threaded her right leg between Ginevra’s, catching her off-balance, and Gin tripped over Leland. She fell against the chair propping up Sidney’s feet, and he stared at her wild-eyed but didn’t move to catch her, which for a moment felt outrageously unhelpful. But it was then Gin noticed her minuscule torch tucked under his folded arms. Pressed to the window. Flashing, ever so quickly.

The earlier moment she’d interpreted as a swift embrace had in truth been surreptitious thievery of the torch from her coat pocket. Sidney had seated himself in a posture of dogged annoyance, propped against the window, sending an SOS into the night under his crossed arms, over and over the entire time. If Hughes was in the garden, he knew someone desperately needed help inside the house.

“You’re bloody brilliant,” Gin whispered. Sidney rolled his eyes.

She turned for another go at Watkins—now tangled up with a surprisingly agile Dr. Neville—when the back door flew open with a bang. Gin was thrown to the floor, and Sidney did leap from his seat then, flailing after her. Watkins, trying to wrench free of Neville, fired the gun toward the ceiling, but enough constables to capture an elephant swarmed into the room and encircled the pair of dons.

Gin collapsed against the cold, dirty linoleum in relief.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Sidney’s heart would not stop racing as he hovered over Ginevra, waiting till he was certain the police had the situation in hand. He squeezed his eyes shut and focused on the faint whiff of jasmine he could just detect among the sensations clamoring for his attention. The assignment was over—and they were alive.

“Sidney,” Gin murmured. “You’re on my leg.”

Hastily, he shifted onto the linoleum, but Ginevra grabbed his shoulders before he could move too far. She peered into his eyes.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Gin raised an eyebrow as though she’d rather inspect him to her satisfaction but nodded. “I’m so glad you thought of the torch. Only you might have warned me.”

“I’m glad you worked out the handwriting was wrong.”

“I’m glad you did.” She scrubbed a hand down her face and sighed. “I almost botched that, didn’t I?”

Across the kitchen, the police now had Watkins in handcuffs between two men in plain clothes who looked dragged from bed to assist with the caper. The room felt secure enough that Sidney drew them both to stand, though he kept his body slightly angled in front of Ginevra’s.

“No,” he said quietly, “you were far cleverer than me. My money was on Neville.”

Dr. Neville stood alone in the corner, shriveled and aghast, and sympathy stirred within Sidney. Sifting through the threads of deception that had wound through his relationships with the two dons now in custody would take time, and Sidney did not envy him the Herculean task of unraveling those years of memories.

Hughes left the circle of police and sank against the wall beside Sidney. “You’re lucky I remember Morse code. I was having a hell of a time with a constable who caught me slinking back from the carriage house. The whole lot was trying to haul me off when I pointed out your signal.”

“Better late than never,” Sidney said, though he did not like considering where Watkins’s next bullet might have landed if the police had further delayed. His hand drifted closer to Ginevra; close enough to know she was there without looking.

Though Watkins seemed to be cooperating with the police, staring into space as though wrung of all emotions, Leland varied between sobbing and raging.