CHAPTER SEVEN
Ceci
Ceci woke to the peculiar silence of a house that had already gone on without her.
For a few seconds, she did not know where she was.
The bed beneath her was too narrow, the blankets too heavy, the air touched with coal warmth instead of the dry, forgettable heat of a modern building.
Then the room came back in pieces. The quilt faded to the colors of old roses.
The washstand. The chair with her folded clothes.
The low fire burned down to a red hush in the grate.
The day returned all at once and left her lying still, staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling with one hand over her stomach, as if she might keep the knowledge from sinking too far into her. Hawarden Castle.
Her voice sounded rough with sleep and disbelief.
She pushed herself upright and discovered, with mild astonishment, that she had slept harder than she could remember sleeping in months.
There was no dream she could hold on to, no memory of turning beneath the blankets, no sense of time passing at all.
One moment, she had been closing her eyes in a borrowed chemise in a stranger’s bed, and the next, the light had changed, and the house had moved on to another part of the day without consulting her.
Late afternoon lay gold and thin across the floorboards, pressing itself through the curtains in softened bars. Below, the last trace of household motion seemed to withdraw behind the walls. Then nothing. No voices. No clatter. No Sabrina.
She dressed. The borrowed clothes waited where she had left them, the green jumper, the corduroy trousers, her practical boots.
Her own things sat on the chair in a silent heap of modern inconvenience.
She looked at them and felt a brief, absurd stab of homesickness for nothing more meaningful than familiar stitching and a decent elastic waistband.
Then she laughed at herself, because this was not the moment to mourn underwear.
By the time she had pinned her hair back as neatly as she could manage, thirst and curiosity had overcome whatever good sense might have advised her to remain in the room until called.
Margaret had said supper, not prison, and Ceci had never been particularly good at waiting in one place because someone expected it of her.
The corridor outside lay quiet and long in the late light.
The house felt altered now, not emptier exactly, but less observed.
The day's performances had shifted. She had the sense of moving through some in-between hour when the household had drawn breath before beginning again.
She made her way down the stairs with more confidence than she felt, one hand skimming the banister, her body remembering the route before her mind fully trusted it.
At the foot of the stairs she hesitated, listening.
Nothing from the morning room. Nothing from the front hall.
Then, from farther down, the particular stillness of a library.
It drew her before she had consciously decided to go there.
The door stood open.
She stopped in the threshold.
Duncan was alone.
He stood at one of the long tables with his jacket off, and his shirtsleeves rolled back once, not enough to look careless, just enough to make him seem more human than he had when she first saw him out on the grounds.
The light from the windows caught along the length of his forearms as he sorted through a stack of papers.
He looked up at the sound of her step, and the room seemed, absurdly, to settle around the fact of her.
“Miss Bishop,” he said.
She leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Captain Duncan.”
His gaze moved over her once, taking in the evidence of sleep, the steadier posture.
“You’ve recovered.”
“Dangerous word,” she said. “It implies completion.”
A faint change touched his mouth, almost a smile. Enough to suggest he understood the distinction.
“Then you appear improved.”
“That,” Ceci said, stepping fully into the room, “I can allow.”
He set the papers down.
“Sabrina has gone into the village,” he said. “She’ll be back for supper.”
There was something almost formal in the way he offered the information, as though accounting for the absence of a third presence made the house easier to navigate. Ceci nodded. “I had noticed the quiet.”
“You minded it.”
“I noticed it,” she corrected. He accepted that without comment.
The library looked different in this light.
Softer at the edges, less imposing than it had been earlier.
The shelves rose in orderly confidence all around them, ladder tucked neatly against its rail, dust made golden where the sun found it.
A room built for knowledge, for ownership, for long habits of reading that had never once had to justify themselves.
It was, annoyingly, a very fine library. Ceci took a few steps closer to the table. “I seem to have wandered exactly where you expected I would.”
His eyes rested on her for a moment. “You were always going to come here.”
“Was I?”
“Yes.”
“That sounds terribly smug.”
“It’s observational.”
“Still smug.”
This time he did smile, though briefly, and the effect was disarming enough that she had to look away and pretend sudden interest in the nearest pile of correspondence.
The silence that followed surprised her.
He did not strike her as a man around whom ease came naturally.
That, perversely, made the house more dangerous.
Places run by lonely people always felt safer than they should, as if solitude had taught them the exact cost of neglect.
But there was room in it. She could stand in it without feeling examined every second.
That lasted until he asked, “How long have you worked as a librarian?”
She looked back at him. “You’re beginning an interview now.”
“I’m asking a question.”
“Those are not always different things.”
“No,” he said, “they are not.”
Ceci moved to the table and rested her fingertips lightly on the edge of it. “Most of my professional life,” she said. “Public libraries first, then academic. Special collections, when I could get near them. Rare books if someone very generous was making the decision.”
His attention sharpened in the quiet way, as though the line of the conversation had narrowed and become more useful.
“And now?”
“I work at a university.”
“In America.”
“Yes.”
“What does that involve, in practice?”
Ceci gave a small laugh. “You say that as if it might vary wildly.”
“I assume it does.”
“It does,” she admitted. “Research support. Teaching people how to find what they actually need instead of what they think they need. Collections management. Acquisitions. The occasional crisis brought on by faculty who have just discovered a missing footnote at midnight and believe it constitutes an emergency.”
His expression stayed level, but she could see he was listening closely.
“You teach?”
“Sometimes.”
“You catalog?”
“Yes.”
“You organize collections?”
“Yes.”
He glanced down at the papers on the table, then back at her.
“And you enjoy it?”
That one made her pause.
“Yes,” she said, “I do.”
“Why?”
She had not expected that question to feel personal.
“Because disorder hides things,” she said after a moment. “Sometimes by accident. Sometimes on purpose. I like putting things in a shape where they can be found.”
The answer settled between them. He did not rush to fill the space after it. At last, he said, “My uncle had meant to write to the university at Liverpool.”
Ceci blinked. “About what?”
“The library.” He laid one hand flat on the nearest stack, not possessively, but with the ease of long familiarity.
“His health had been poor for some time. Before he was taken into hospital, he had decided the collection required proper attention. A librarian. Someone trained. Someone who does not confuse ownership with order.”
That brought her eyes back to the papers, the shelves, the room itself, and suddenly she saw the truth of it. It wasn’t neglect, exactly. The library had been cared for. Loved, even. But care and usefulness were not always the same thing.
“Was he right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
He said it without defensiveness, which she respected more than she expected to.
“He had meant to send word properly,” Duncan continued. “Then he worsened before it was done.”
“And now?”
“And now,” he said, “a librarian has appeared on the grounds under circumstances I do not yet understand.”
The line should have been drier than it was. Instead, that faint trace of irony nearly undid her. She looked at him. “You think I should take the position.”
“I think,” he said, “that it would give you a practical reason to remain here. It would also give you work, structure, and a degree of independence, all of which I suspect you prefer to uncertainty.”
Ceci considered that, then smiled despite herself. “That does sound disturbingly like me.”
He did not look away.
“Do you need to be elsewhere?”
The question was simple on the surface and vast underneath. In another room, with another person, she might have laughed it off. Deflected. Lied. Here, with him looking at her as though a careless answer would be an offense to them both, she found she could not quite manage it.
No, she thought.
Certainly not in 1938.
And if she was honest, not really in 2023 either.
The answer startled her by how cleanly it arrived.
No husband waiting. No lover. No child. No life she had left in such exquisite shape that it would collapse without her by Tuesday.
There was work, yes. A career. Obligations.
Email, probably. A calendar she had once mistaken for purpose.
But nothing there reached across a century and demanded her immediate return.
It was an ugly realization. It was also, in some hidden part of her, a relief.
“No,” she said.
His expression changed with a deeper stillness, as if the room itself had taken note.
“No,” she repeated, quieter now. “I don’t.”
He absorbed that without comment. She was grateful for it. At length he said, “Then the arrangement may suit us both.”
“Us both,” she echoed.
“The house needs the work done,” he said. “You need a plausible place within it.”
That was fair. Entirely fair. She hated that the fairness of it made her chest tighten.
“And if I say yes,” she asked, “do I become your interloper with a filing system.”
His mouth curved. This time she was sure of it.
“You become the librarian my uncle was already expecting.”
“That sounds much more respectable.”
“I assumed you’d prefer it.”
“I do,” she said. “Though I’d like it noted that I am considerably more impressive on paper.”
“I have no difficulty believing that.”
It came out so smoothly she almost missed it.
She looked at him again, properly this time, and the awareness she had been trying not to cultivate all day stirred low and warm in her stomach.
He was very good at this, she thought. It wasn’t exactly flirtation, at least not openly, but he knew how to say a thing plainly and leave it carrying two meanings.
Dangerous man.
“What would I be cataloging first,” she asked, because if she did not turn the conversation, she was going to start thinking about his eyes again, which seemed an especially poor professional instinct for a woman newly employed by a man in 1938.
“The Gladstone correspondence,” he said. “Then my father’s papers. There are political collections, estate records, family letters, books that have not been properly entered anywhere, and at least three cabinets full of material everyone has ignored because no one wishes to make sense of them.”
She felt, to her own surprise, a quick, bright flare of interest.
“That sounds wonderful.”
He watched her, and for the first time all afternoon, his reserve seemed touched by something lighter.
“You do mean that.”
“Yes,” she said. “Which should probably concern me.”
“It reassures me.”
“That’s because you’re not the one who’s just agreed to work for a man she met twelve hours ago after accidentally time-traveling.”
The sentence left her mouth before she could stop it.
She froze.
He did too, but differently, less startled than intent. Ceci closed her eyes for half a second. “Well.”
When she opened them, he was still looking at her, his face unreadable.
“You did not say that as a joke,” he said. There was no point pretending after that, not when the truth had finally slipped free in the one room where it had probably always meant to.
“No,” she said.
The late sun had shifted lower, laying a long band of light across the table between them. Dust moved in it, quiet and slow. Duncan’s hand tightened once against the edge of the papers, then eased.
“Ceci,” he said, and it was the first time he had used her name. That was worse than everything else.
She swallowed.
“I know how it sounds.”
“I am less concerned with the sound of it than with whether you mean it.”
She gave a breathless, exhausted laugh. “Yes. I mean it.”
He said nothing for a long moment. Then, very carefully, “I had suspected that your explanation was larger than the one you gave.”
“That is one way to put it.”
He moved around the table with the calm certainty of a man approaching something he had already decided not to mishandle. He stopped close enough that she could see the change in his eyes, the thought moving behind them, the effort to keep his voice even.
“And now,” he said, “you will tell me everything.”
Ceci looked up at him. The room had gone so quiet she could hear the ticking of the clock on the mantel, the faint pop of settling coals in the grate, the sound of her own heartbeat doing absolutely nothing useful.
This, she thought, was not the moment she had planned.
But it might be the one she had been waiting for anyway.
“All right,” she said.
And then, because honesty had already ruined the shape of the afternoon, she added, “But if I tell you, you can’t stop giving me that library job.”
For one suspended second, he only stared at her.
Then he laughed. An uncontrolled sound of joy.
“Is that a condition?”
“It’s self-preservation.”
His gaze held hers, warmer now than before.
“Then yes,” he said. “You may keep the library.”