CHAPTER NINE #2
Archie did not look at him, but he knew that stillness well.
He had known it years ago when they were both younger and more foolish, when a pause in Duncan could mean irritation, restraint, jealousy, or, on rare and dangerous occasions, feeling.
The distinctions had always required care.
Sabrina, who missed nothing worth enjoying, looked from one to the other with unconcealed pleasure.
“You may continue this at the table,” she said. “Come along,” she said. “If this gets any more interesting before supper, I’ll resent it.” Supper was announced almost on cue.
The dining room had been laid with enough polish to flatter the house without making a ceremony of itself. Candles caught along the silver and glass. Outside, the windows had gone dark enough to reflect the room back upon itself. Hawarden always knew how to gather people inward after dusk.
Archie found himself seated to Ceci’s left, Duncan opposite, Sabrina at the far end with the contentment of a woman who had set a stage and had every intention of enjoying what followed.
Whether Margaret had made the arrangement on purpose or Sabrina had interfered, he could not tell. Either way, it was very good work.
Conversation began where polite supper conversation always did, in a place so harmless it was effectively a lie.
The weather. The train. The latest university absurdity.
Sabrina’s account of a woman in Mold who had taken up spiritualism for the express purpose of tormenting her husband.
Ceci listened more than she spoke at first, but she listened well, which was rarer and more attractive than most people understood. The details came by degrees.
She had been meant to stay at Gladstone’s Library, she told him, and he watched the line strike two different notes at once, one practical and one hidden.
Practical because it explained her presence in Hawarden at all.
Hidden because Duncan’s expression changed when she said it, and Archie knew enough to recognize the sign of prior knowledge.
So. There was already a conversation from which he had been excluded.
Interesting.
“And instead,” he said, because the opening presented itself too neatly to ignore, “you found us.”
A breath left her, not quite a laugh. “I think I found the earlier edition.”
He laughed then, genuinely, and saw at once that she had meant him too. Duncan heard it too. That much was obvious from the way his gaze lifted to Ceci over the rim of his glass, as if measuring what the line had cost her and what it had not. Archie stored that away for later.
He asked after her work and was rewarded. Archive research, correspondence, Gladstone holdings. Then the name that made Sabrina put down her fork with the attention of a woman scenting scandal.
“Diana Mitford,” Ceci said, and the room improved at once.
“Oh, now we’re alive,” Sabrina said. Archie smiled. “You are holding out on me, Miss Bishop.”
“He asked a better question.”
“Cruel.”
“Accurate.”
That, he thought, had more edge than the smile. Better still.
Ceci went on, more fully now that the line had been opened.
Diana Mitford. Gladstone family correspondence.
Influence moving through intimate channels before it ever declared itself in public.
People using friendship, charm, and invitation as conduits for uglier loyalties.
It was the sort of topic that would have won his attention anywhere, but at Hawarden, with Duncan listening in complete stillness and Sabrina leaning forward with bright concentration, it acquired a second life.
Duncan spoke only occasionally, but every time he did, Ceci answered him more carefully than she answered anyone else.
That, too, Archie noticed.
It wasn’t deference. It was attention sharpened by consequence.
And Duncan, for all his economy, was listening to her with the particular alertness he usually reserved for difficult arguments and immediate danger.
Archie had not seen that look turned on a woman before.
Well, not one available to discuss over supper.
That thought arrived with less humor than he might have preferred.
Sabrina, meanwhile, seemed almost radiant with satisfaction. Whatever had happened before he arrived, she had decided already that Ceci must remain in the house a while, if only because all the existing lines of attachment had begun to vibrate under her presence.
Archie had known Sabrina and Duncan separately almost as long as he had known them together, which was another way of saying he knew perfectly well there was no romance to uncover between them.
That possibility had interested outsiders for years, largely because outsiders were stupid about friendship.
Duncan loved Sabrina with the steadiness of a man who had made certain promises and intended to keep them until death relieved him.
Sabrina returned his loyalty with the same fervor and none of the sentimentality.
Desire had never belonged between them. Sabrina’s appetites had always moved along a different current, one she entrusted to very few people and named even less often.
Duncan, to his credit and his quality, had long ago understood the shape of that confidence and never once used it against her.
Which left the field, tonight, rather clearer than Archie suspected any of them were prepared to admit.
By the time dessert appeared, he had learned several useful things.
Ceci Bishop was exhausted but game. She possessed excellent instincts about what to conceal and a still better one about when concealment itself could become conspicuous.
Duncan had become invested before Archie arrived, though in what precisely he had become invested remained to be determined.
And Archie himself, against all sober judgment, had developed an immediate wish to see what Ceci would say if pressed one degree further than politeness allowed.
That could wait.
Perhaps.
When supper ended and they rose for the drawing room, he fell half a step behind Duncan out of old habit.
“Well,” he said, once the women had gone ahead of them, “you do seem to have acquired a lovely new friend.”
Duncan kept his eyes on the doorway before them. “Sabrina’s phrase, not mine.”
“Still. She has excellent taste in disruptions.”
At that, Duncan glanced at him. Archie smiled. He knew exactly how that would land.