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Peggy didn't know why she persisted in ordering tea when in New York. Even in a relatively international bastion such as this cafeteria, as often as not she'd be served something dispiriting, with leaves that been steeped too long in water that had never been boiled. Still, Peggy had had to make do with far worse during the war. She sipped absently from the cup while she worked her way through a stack of newspapers from home that one of the chaps from the British mission had been good enough to pass onto her after their meeting. They were several days, if not weeks, old, but they often contained the kind of information that Peggy could never quite convince Howard and the others was necessary rather than simply Old World gossip.
Peggy hadn't intended to stay for longer than it took her to finish her tea and winnow the most interesting articles out of the collection for closer reading back at her flat. The idea of taking the full bundle of newspapers out into the autumn damp and home on the subway didn't appeal. But her plans—not to mention her quiet skimming of the central pages of last Tuesday's Manchester Guardian—were derailed when a woman sat down heavily opposite her.
The woman was perhaps a few years younger than Peggy, very beautiful and dressed as if she cared for that fact not one jot. Her expression was stormy, and her fingertips bore evidence of a recent battle with a recalcitrant fountain pen.
"You're not another one of Warburton-Smythe's odious lackeys, are you?" she declared without preamble, in accents that sounded quite as English as Peggy's own. "Because I was quite clear to them last time, I don't care what he declares to—"
Peggy arched an eyebrow at her. "I am no one's lackey," she said with a firmness honed over several years of working with Howard Stark.
Whoever she was, the woman at least had the good sense not to try to refute that.
"Nor do I believe I have had the pleasure of an introduction," Peggy continued, injecting just enough Home Counties ice into her tones to make glad the heart of any WI matriarch. "I'm Margaret Carter. I work for the SSR." Which was not entirely the truth, but the SSR was a known entity whereas SHIELD prided itself on being the opposite.
The woman didn't have quite enough good sense to at least try to look awkward when faced with a forthright response, through truth be told Peggy found herself rather admiring that.
"Veronica FitzOsborne. I've been seconded here to help with some of the set-up, which wouldn't be so bad even without Daniel, but all of these odious public-school snobs they've sent along as well, it's as if they're trying to doom us to a repeat of the League of Nations before we've truly begun!"
Peggy felt both eyebrows rise this time, because she recognised that name. She'd had several friends in school who had treated Burke's Peerage and the Almanach de Gotha as something to be cribbed just as much as their Latin grammar. "Ought a Montmaravian princess to be disdaining Old Harrovians as snobs?"
A flush appeared high on Veronica's cheekbones. "Just because I happen to be of royal blood doesn't mean I can't be a committed communist!"
"I see," Peggy said, and wished that she had the paper in her hands so that she could hide the smile that threatened to break through behind it.
"And it wasn't such an illogical mistake to make. I saw you talking to Warburton-Smythe upstairs, and he is an odious little reactionary twerp who thinks that the 1867 Reform Act was a misstep and women's suffrage an act of wildest lunacy. And now here you are, chuckling over the same letter that he was so hateful to me about." Veronica tapped her finger against one part of the page.
Peggy blinked down at the newsprint. She'd been idly amused by something printed in the left-hand column of the Letters to the Editor page—a turn of phrase in a letter from a scientist she'd known a little back in her earliest days at the SSR, about the recent changes to the school certificate exams. Veronica, however, appeared convinced that Peggy had been more exercised by one in the centre column, in which a pseudonymous writer had gone on at some length about his or her disdain for some obscure aspects of British foreign policy in the Near East. It was the kind of thing Peggy was certain had only been printed because it was a slow news day. The letter was signed "Disgusted, of Milford Park." Peggy was sure that if she did a little digging, she'd find that Milford Park was home to some branch or other of the FitzOsbornes.
"Alastair Warburton-Smythe," Peggy said, with a disarming mildness that Steve would have recognised, once upon a time, as a danger sign, "is a godson of my Great-Aunt Wheelock." He had been rather a little toad once upon a time, but that was when he was still in long socks and in possession of one perpetually stuffed-up nostril. Now Al was just a very tall young man, frightfully earnest and a tad conservative. He may have laboured under the dire misapprehension that he had the chin needed to carry off a moustache, but Peggy didn't think there was any real harm in him. "There, and with the fact that he passes on the embassy's newspapers to me every so often, is where our acquaintance ends."
"Oh." Veronica blinked, and then seemed to collect herself. "Did you say you worked for the SSR? I didn't think they'd kept many women on there after most of the men were demobbed. How ever did you manage it?" She peered closely at the cut of Peggy's suit, one of the three she'd treated herself to from a really good tailor when Howard had played Lady Bountiful. It wouldn't do for the head of SHIELD to be shabbily dressed, even for a series of covert meetings such as these. "And you're not a typist."
"No, I'm not." Peggy leaned back a little in her seat and assessed Veronica. Stubbornness, yes, and little inclination towards sentimentality or tact—she could read all that in the set of the woman's jaw. But there was intelligence, too. If Peggy had to bet her last sixpence on it, she'd say that tactics might be out of Veronica's wheelhouse, but strategy, that was another thing entirely. As it expanded, SHIELD was going to need more people who were good at seeing the big picture, and had experience working in exactly the kind of milieu that Howard derided as old hat.
"Tell me, Your Highness," Peggy said, fighting back a grin at how the mention of her title made her bristle. Veronica would have to work to suppress that reaction, or Howard and the others would have a field day with her. "How would you feel about a brand new assignment?"