CHAPTER SIX
Duncan
Duncan waited until Margaret led Miss Bishop from the room before he allowed himself to sit down again.
The door closed behind them with a soft, decisive sound.
After that, the room was suddenly larger, emptier, and more difficult to manage than it had been while she was in it.
He reached for his tea and discovered it had gone cold.
“That,” Sabrina said, without looking at him, “was fascinating.”
He said nothing. There was no benefit in encouraging her when she was in this mood.
Sabrina took Ceci’s abandoned chair as if it were the obvious place for her to be and curled one leg beneath her, unconcerned with propriety when no one remained to be impressed by it.
She was still smiling, though the expression had changed. Less bright now. More thoughtful.
“You’ve brought something strange into the house,” she said.
“She was already here.”
“You know very well that is not what I mean.”
Duncan set the cup down untouched. The tea was useless now, and he resented it for reasons that had nothing to do with the tea itself. What, exactly, had he brought into the house?
The house was always fuller on paper than in truth.
A great many rooms. A small number of lives.
His mother was gone. His brother gone too, taken by the influenza after the Armistice, when everyone had been foolish enough to believe death might finally have exhausted itself.
His father still occupied space in him long after death in all the least useful ways.
Margaret loved him, yes, but love from a housekeeper and love from the world were not the same comfort.
Since the war, Hawarden had often felt like a body that continued breathing after the soul had taken a step back.
He knew how to run it. He did not always know how to live inside it.
And now he had brought in a woman with an American accent and a plausible headache.
She looked to be about thirty-five, old enough to have settled into herself and young enough for men to keep making the mistake of underestimating what that meant.
A woman who was found alone on the old grounds in weather that ought to have sent her back down the hill long before she reached the ruins.
A woman who answered carefully when pressed and did not retreat when challenged.
One who looked at him as though she was trying to understand the world by first deciding where he fit inside it.
It was the last part that troubled him. She had the look of someone used to carrying her own disasters quietly. Duncan knew the type. The world called such people capable and never once asked what it had cost them to become so.
“She is tired,” he said at length. “Likely concussed. We know very little beyond that.”
Sabrina gave him a look of enormous patience.
“Oh, Dax. You only sound like that when you know more than you wish to admit.”
“That is a tiresome theory.”
“It is a correct one.”
She rose and crossed to the window, drawing one finger through the condensation at the edge of the glass. The motion was absent-minded. Her mind, he knew, was nowhere near absent.
“She is not lying altogether,” Sabrina said. “That much is obvious.”
“No.”
“And she is certainly withholding something.”
“Yes.”
Sabrina glanced back over her shoulder. “But you do not think it is anything common. What do you think she meant that she was supposed to be at the manse’s library? I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
He did not answer immediately. The common explanations were still available to him, at least in theory. Confusion. Accident. Fear. The disorientation of a woman far from home who had struck her head and woken in strange surroundings.
He had seen confusion. He had seen fear.
He had seen people construct lies in real time and hope no one would notice the unevenness of the seams. Miss Bishop did not feel like any of those things.
She held herself together by force, neither at ease nor in command, unwilling to collapse in front of strangers.
And then there was the matter of the gatekeeper. No one should have been there.
“She described details she should not have invented so quickly,” he said. “The coin window. The man. The receipt of money. A foolish lie would have been broader.”
Sabrina smiled faintly. “There you are.”
“I am aware of where I am.”
“Are you? Because from where I am standing, you look rather like a man who has encountered a problem he would prefer to solve with reason and has just discovered reason may not be sufficient.”
He looked at her then, and she laughed. That laugh, at least, was familiar.
He had known it in drawing rooms, on terraces, in schoolboy holidays gone on too long, through grief, scandal, boredom, marriages, funerals, and the slow dull accumulation of the years in between.
Sabrina was one of the very few people in the world before whom he had never had to pretend to be simpler than he was.
There were reasons for that. Some belonged to him. Some belonged to her.
“You are enjoying this too much,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t I? A mysterious American appears in our library after a storm, refuses to give a bad answer, and upsets your internal balance within the first quarter of an hour. Why should I not enjoy it?”
He did not dignify that with a response. Sabrina turned fully from the window and studied him. The playfulness remained, but she had grown more serious beneath it. She always did, eventually. That was one of the reasons he had loved her so well and so harmlessly for so long.
Others, he suspected, would not understand the word loved in that sentence. They would misunderstand the shape of it and shrink it to something smaller.
They would be wrong.
She knew it, too.
“I am not teasing when I say she interested me,” Sabrina said. “And I am not warning you when I say she interested you. I am merely observing.”
“You have made an art of observation.”
“I have made an art of survival.”
Her voice was light, but the truth in it was old and familiar. He let it remain where she placed it.
There were certain subjects they never had to speak of directly.
That, too, was part of the friendship. Years ago, when they were both young enough to believe one might confess a truth once and be done with it, Sabrina had offered him one of hers in a garden after midnight, with her shoes in her hand and a look on her face that dared the world to object.
He had not objected.
He understood at once, not because the particulars were his to know, but because the loneliness of it was.
She had no interest in the parade of men who hovered around her with their names and incomes and inherited certainties.
She had never been interested in men, however insistently the world arranged them around her.
He had been, since that night, a keeper of certain silences.
She had returned the favor more than once.
That had been the root of their loyalty from the beginning.
Not similarity, exactly, but recognition.
Two people living at a slant to the world, both practiced in concealment, both clever enough to make themselves charming where they could not safely make themselves plain.
He had never pitied Sabrina. She would have hated that.
He had only understood, from the first, how lonely it was to be surrounded by expectation and still remain fundamentally unaccompanied inside it.
Now she tilted her head and said, “If it reassures you, she presents no danger to me in the way she does to you.”
A reluctant smile threatened but failed to fully arrive.
“She presents no danger to me.”
“My dear Dax, that is exactly the sort of thing a man says when he has already begun to lose ground.”
He looked away from her, toward the chair where Ceci had sat. It was a foolish thing to notice, the slight impression left in the cushion, the cup no longer warm, the folded napkin she had not touched. Yet he noticed all of it anyway. What precisely had unsettled him?
Beauty alone was not what troubled him. Beauty was common enough, and he had long practiced ignoring what was merely pleasing.
She had a quickness to her that made the room alter around her.
Even exhausted, even damp and plainly miserable, she did not disappear into weakness the way many people do.
She remained sharply herself. He had the sense that even her confusion had edges.
And yes, if he was being honest, there was the matter of her body.
He had registered it before he meant to.
The wet cling of her clothes when she first stood on the grounds.
Displaying wide hips, a full bust, and just the right amount of softness to comfort a lover.
The way her mouth tightened when she was frustrated with him and loosened unexpectedly when amused.
Yes, he was not a boy. He did not mistake physical awareness for destiny. Still, the awareness was there.
It irritated him.
“You are frowning,” Sabrina said. “That means one of two things. Either you are already revising the terms on which she remains in this house, or you are thinking about the shape of her mouth.”
He gave her a level look.
“That is an extraordinary reach.”
“Is it?”
“It is.”
“Then you may relax,” Sabrina said. “Because I was not serious about the second.”
“You should make more effort to sound sincere when you are lying.”
Her smile deepened. “You know me too well.”
“Yes.”
That, if anything, sobered them both. The years in that word settled between them.
Their friendship had outlasted several romantic arrangements, countless idiocies, and the sort of confidences that bind people more securely than affection alone ever could.
He trusted Sabrina because she had never once asked him to be less observant than he was, and because the truths she kept in his presence are truths he knew how to honor.
“Do you trust her?” she asked. It was not an idle question.
“No,” he said.
Sabrina lifted both brows.
“I believe,” he added, “that she believes what she is telling us. That is not the same thing.”
“No,” Sabrina said, and now her voice was gentler. “It is not.”
He stood and walked to the hearth, though there was no real need. The fire was already laid properly. Margaret would have seen to that. He rested one hand against the mantel and looked down into the coals.
“Either it’s something commonplace she has magnified in her own mind,” he said, “or something she knows would sound absurd if spoken aloud.”
Sabrina considered that.
“You are hoping for the first.”“No.”
The answer slipped away from him before he could improve it. When he looked back at her, she was watching him with that infuriatingly perceptive stillness that meant she had noticed everything.
Sabrina’s expression softened with victory. “So that is the truth of it.”
He did not ask what she meant. He knew. He was not hoping for the first. He was hoping, against reason and good sense and every sensible instinct he possessed, for the version of events that would make her worth all this disturbance.
Sabrina moved toward him then and stood at his shoulder, close enough that he could smell the faint citrus oil she used on her wrists. She looked into the fire as if they were discussing weather and not the possibility that reality had become unreliable.
“You do not have to decide what she is today,” she said. “Only whether she is safer here than elsewhere.”
That, at least, he could answer.
“Yes,” he said.
“And is she?”
“Yes.”
Sabrina nodded. “Then she stays.”
He turned his head. “You say that as if it were your decision.”
She smiled at the flames. “Oh, it is not my decision. It is simply the one you have already made.”
He exhaled, a quiet admission of defeat.
The truth was, he had made it before Margaret ever came to the room.
Before Sabrina began prodding at the edges of his thoughts.
The moment he had looked at Ceci Bishop and understood that she was in no condition to defend herself against this world, he had known she would remain here until he understood more.
Perhaps until she did.
“See that Grace’s old room is made ready properly,” he said after a moment. Sabrina turned to look at him, her expression unreadable for a second, then unexpectedly tender.
“That,” she said, “is very nearly kind.”
“It is practical.”
“That’s one excuse.”
He almost laughed.
Almost.
Instead, he pushed away from the mantel and reached for the cold tea he had no intention of drinking.
When he lifted the cup, the faintest trace of another scent rose from it, not hers exactly, but rain maybe, or the damp wool she had worn into the room.
Something clean underneath that he could not yet name. He sat it down again.
Dangerous, Sabrina had implied.
No, not yet.
It’s intriguing, certainly. Disruptive, without question. Alive in a way that had made the whole house seem more awake than it did this morning. That was enough to contend with for one day.
Still, as he left the room at last, his mind would not stay on the practical questions.
The gatekeeper. The hill. The inconsistencies in her account.
They all mattered. Even so, what lingered was the steadiness with which she had met him.
Frightened, yes. Confused, certainly. But never cringing.
Never yielding. He wanted answers from her.
He wanted proof. He also wanted her close enough to watch, which was a complication in its own right.