CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Duncan
Duncan woke before dawn, as he usually did, and lay for a few moments in the dark, listening to the house gathering around him.
Hawarden had a different sound before breakfast. The place breathed more softly then.
Pipes clicked somewhere in the walls. A door closed below stairs, soft enough to suggest someone had meant not to wake the house.
Far off, from the servants’ wing, came the first muffled stir of the kitchens beginning their work.
No voices yet. No movement in the main rooms. Only the old, half-waking life of the house was carrying on exactly as it had the day before, and the day before that, as though nothing had altered.
Except that it had.
He had allowed a woman into Grace’s room. An American into the library. A stranger to a problem, he had no sensible framework for naming. He ought to have been thinking about his uncle.
There was enough to occupy any practical man.
The hospital. The estate. The correspondence that was waiting on his desk.
The increasingly ugly texture of politics in London and farther afield.
The simple fact that a house this large required a dozen ordinary decisions before noon if it was to go on functioning at all.
Instead, he found himself wondering whether Ceci Bishop had slept.
That irritated him immediately.
He got up before the thought could root itself any deeper, shaved, dressed, and went downstairs while the light outside was still thin and undecided.
Margaret had already seen to coffee in the morning room.
as if the house itself reported to her first. She came in just after he did, carrying the pot with the self-possession of a woman who had run this household for so long that other people’s authority had become a decorative inconvenience.
“She slept,” Margaret said, before he had asked anything. Duncan looked up from the cup she had just set before him.
“You checked?”
“There’s a floorboard outside Grace’s room that complains whenever anyone crosses it.” Margaret poured with steady hands. “It said nothing until well after dawn.”
He nodded once and reached for the coffee.
“And Miss Gladstone sent word from the Manor,” she added. “She intends to come over again for supper.”
That, at least, restored the proper geography of the thing.
Sabrina belonged at Gladstone. She always had, in ways, nothing to do with title or furniture and everything to do with instinct.
Hawarden was his. Gladstone was hers. She crossed between the two often enough to make the boundary feel social rather than territorial, but it remained a boundary all the same.
Margaret set the pot down. “She’ll need clothes. ”
“I’m aware.”
“She cannot spend the week in Grace’s wardrobe.”
“No.”
“Nor in those dreadful American things of hers, whatever else they may be.”
That almost won a smile from him.
“I’ll leave the matter in Sabrina’s hands,” he said. Margaret gave him the kind of look that suggested he had finally, for once, chosen the obvious answer before being forced to it.
“She bathed,” she said then, as if delivering another domestic report of equal importance.
He should not have felt relief at that. Yet the image that had stayed with him from the previous afternoon, the wet hair, the mud, the smell of cold rain in her clothes, had been harder to forget than it had any right to be.
The thought of her warm and properly clean in Grace’s room settled something in him he would have preferred remained unsettled.
“No one could remain comfortable after sleeping outdoors,” he said. Margaret said nothing, but the glance she gave him made it clear she was not fooled by the practical tone. He drank the coffee before she could say anything else.
By the time Ceci came downstairs, the light had lifted into pale gold.
Duncan had already retreated to the library because the library allowed a man to pretend his motives were orderly.
He had laid out a first selection of family papers on the long central table, enough to begin with, not enough to overwhelm.
His uncle’s illness had dragged the whole question of the collection into the realm of necessity.
What had once been merely tolerated as household chaos had become a problem waiting for an intelligence he had not expected to acquire by accident.
He heard her before he saw her. A soft pause at the doorway. The slight change in the room when another person entered it became impossible to ignore.
He looked up.
Sleep had improved her. There was no use pretending otherwise.
The strain had not left her face altogether, but it no longer sat there like a visible bruise.
Her hair had been washed and pinned back more loosely than Grace would ever have worn it, and the dress she had borrowed, one of Grace’s blue day dresses, sat imperfectly enough across the shoulders to remind him it was not hers.
She had the look of someone half restored and half misplaced, which, he suspected, was the truth of her.
The faint scent of lavender reached him before she did, followed by that greener note beneath it, something kitchen-grown and unexpectedly calming.
“Miss Bishop,” he said.
She stepped inside. “Captain Duncan.”
There was less uncertainty in her this morning. Less effort, too. The wariness remained, but she was no longer spending all of it on the simple act of standing upright in a strange century.
“You’re up,” he said, and disliked the banality of it as soon as the words left his mouth. She glanced toward the windows. “I was hoping to sleep until next Thursday. Margaret appears to have different values.”
A smile threatened and, to his annoyance, nearly succeeded.
“She generally does.”
Ceci came farther into the room, her eyes moving over the table and the papers there.
He watched the change happen. He had seen it yesterday as well, though he had not yet trusted the evidence.
Put her in the presence of a collection, and some central part of her came into focus.
Her posture eased. Her attention gathered.
Fatigue remained, but it no longer had sole possession of her.
“It looked less haunted this morning,” she said.
“The library?”
“The entire house, actually. Though I’m willing to let the grounds keep some of their mystery.”
“You’re very generous.”
He gestured to the coffee service on the side table. “There’s still coffee.”
“Now you’re speaking my language.”
She crossed to pour herself a cup. When she lifted the pot, the sleeve of the borrowed dress slipped back along her wrist. Duncan took notice of a small design on the creamy skin of the underside of her wrist. Delicate.
Black and feathery. He wondered what other art might be hiding beneath her dress.
He looked away and arranged the nearest stack of papers into a straighter line than it had previously required.
When she returned to the table, cup in hand, she looked from the folders to him.
“So,” she said, “this is real.”
“I generally avoid theatrical hiring practices.”
“You say that as though the last twenty-four hours have not been theatrical at all.”
“That depends on one’s standards.”
Ceci let out a quiet laugh and set the cup down. Her fingers hovered over the nearest packet but did not touch it yet. He respected that more than he would have expected. Many people, confronted with a private collection, reached first and thought later.
“Your uncle really meant to hire someone,” she said.
“Yes. He had finally admitted the collection had outgrown domestic management.”
“That must have been painful.”
He looked at her. “For him, yes.”
She nodded, accepting the answer for what it was.
He rested one hand on the nearest box. “These are family papers. My father’s correspondence first, then my uncle’s.
Estate ledgers, guest lists, letters, invitations, account books, and memoranda he saved for reasons no one had yet successfully explained.
Some political material, though not organized in any useful way. ”
Ceci’s attention sharpened as he spoke, though not in the superficial way people often sharpened when they heard a list of categories. This was more immediate. Professional. He had the distinct impression she was already building order from the fragments.
“Guest lists,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Invitations.”
“Yes.”
“Private letters from people who thought they were only writing to friends.”
His gaze stayed on her face.
“Yes.”
She looked down at the box again, and he saw the exact moment she understood what might be inside it.
“This is how it travels,” she said. He did not pretend not to know what she meant.
“You’ve seen the pattern before.”
“In another form.” She touched the ribbon binding on one packet with great care.
“In my own time, I came here to study what survived, not these exact papers, but the same kind of evidence. Relationships. Influence. How dangerous ideas move through private circles before the general public has the chance to understand the trouble.”
That was better than the line of thought he had already arrived at in the night. Clearer. More exact. Less dramatic than the conclusion itself and therefore more convincing.
“And now,” he said, “you’re standing in the middle of it while it still believes itself respectable.”
Her eyes lifted to his.
“Yes.”
The word stayed with him. He pulled a chair away from the table for her. “Then begin there.”
Ceci looked at the chair, then at him. “You’re very sure I’m staying.”
“You told me there was nowhere else you needed to be.”
It came out more bluntly than he had intended. She did not seem offended, only a little startled by the accuracy of the wound.
“There isn’t,” she said after a moment. “Not really.”
The library fell quiet around that answer. Morning light moved a little farther across the table. Somewhere below stairs, a servant crossed the hall. The house went on with its ordinary business while he stood there, listening to the extraordinary plainness of her words.
Ginger appeared ten minutes later with the air of someone arriving late to an appointment she had arranged herself.
She nosed the library door open, crossed directly to Ceci, and placed her chin on the edge of the table.
Ceci looked down at her. “You are absolutely not supposed to be in here, are you?”
“She believes all rooms belong to her by right,” Duncan said, without looking up from the papers. Ginger’s tail struck the side of Ceci’s chair twice.
“I respect that,” Ceci said.
Duncan’s mouth moved. “I rather thought you might.”
“My life wasn’t tragic,” she said, looking back down at the papers rather than at him. “That’s what makes it difficult to explain. It just wasn’t… fixed in the way I thought it would be by now.”
He had no ready comfort for that and was grateful not to be expected to produce one. Instead, he said, “Then this gives you work.”
Her mouth shifted. “That is such a librarian seduction.”
He looked at her.
She looked back, and for one dangerous second, he forgot how to be careful.
“I beg your pardon.”
“You’re offering me a large uncatalogued archive, institutional cover, and a plausible reason to remain in a beautiful old house while the world rearranges itself.” She lifted one brow. “I don’t know what you think that is, Captain Duncan, but where I come from, it qualifies.”
To his own astonishment, he laughed. It was slight, but enough to alter the air between them. Ceci went still; eyes fixed on him now. The laugh had changed him, and he seemed to know it.
He straightened at once and reached for the nearest bundle, putting the distance of paper between them before either of them could say something irretrievable.
“These are from the early thirties,” he said. “My father was still doing most of the social work of the house then.”
“Social work?”
“The dinners. Weekends. Invitations. The endless traffic of people determined to seem inevitable.”
That won him a quick smile.
“Now that,” she said, “I understand.”
He put the packet on the table in front of her. She untied the ribbon and opened the first letter. He should have stepped back then. Given her room. Instead, he remained close enough to follow the line of her reading over her shoulder.
“You read very fast,” he said.
“I read for a living.”
“You catalog for a living.”
“I do several things for a living.”
“Such as?”
She glanced at him. “Teaching. Research support. Collection development. Preventing other people’s emergencies from becoming my emergencies.”
“That last sounds ambitious.”
“It’s mostly aspirational.”
The line pleased him more than it should have.
She turned another page.
He leaned closer to see the date. Her shoulder brushed the front of his coat.
The contact was light enough to deny, but neither of them denied it.
She stopped reading for half a second. So did he.
Then, very carefully, she said, “You’re standing quite close for a man who distrusts dramatic developments. ”
He looked down at her from the edge of the page.
“And you’re remarkably composed for a woman a century from home.”
“That’s because if I let myself think about it too hard, I’ll probably scream.”
That was honest enough, and quietly enough offered, that he stepped back at once.
“Then by all means,” he said, “let’s continue with the archive. It sounds safer.”
Ceci smiled without looking up. “Liar.”
He could not even object to that. He moved to the other side of the table and drew the next box toward him while she continued reading, already lost to the work in that deep, disciplined way he had begun to recognize.
She seemed calmer with a document in hand.
More herself. Less stranded. He found that he liked watching that happen.
Which was unfortunate.
Because the longer he stood there, in the clear, disciplined light of morning, listening to the turn of paper and the occasional low remark between them, the more he understood that offering her a place in the archive had solved very little.
It had only ensured she would remain near him while the problem deepened.