CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Archie
Hawarden Castle (New), (Castell Penarlag, Newydd)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
The house changed once the women left.
Archie felt it the moment the motorcar turned back into the dark and the front door shut behind them.
Hawarden had never lacked for silence, but there were different kinds of it.
The silence after supper could be companionable.
The silence after the argument could be hard and metallic.
This one was strange. Charged. Expectant.
Like the house itself had taken note of who was absent and what had gone with them.
Duncan stood for a moment in the hall, gloves in one hand, eyes still on the closed door. Archie leaned against the paneling and watched him.
“Well,” he said.
Duncan did not look around. “If that is all you have to offer, I’ll get the whisky without you.”
“That was merely the opening note.”
“I dreaded that.”
“You should. I’m in excellent form tonight.”
That brought Duncan back to himself enough to glance over, which was something. Archie had known that look for half his life. It meant the man in question was thinking too much and resented being observed while doing so.
He smiled.
Duncan sighed. “You are intolerable.”
“Only to men who lie to themselves.”
“Then you must find me exhausting.”
“I do,” Archie said. “Still, here we are.”
Duncan made the small sound that passed, in him, for laughter and led the way into the study.
The room suited the hour. Fire lay low but steady.
Lamps turned down. Dark wood that seemed to absorb anxiety rather than reflect it.
Duncan poured whisky with his usual exactness, as though even that had rules worth respecting, and handed Archie a glass.
Archie took it and settled into the chair by the fire.
Duncan remained standing.
That, more than anything, told him how the evening was going.
“You know,” Archie said, “most people would sit.”
“Most people don’t have your appetite for commentary.”
“That isn’t a denial.”
Duncan finally lowered himself into the chair opposite him, one ankle resting over the opposite knee, glass balanced loosely in one hand. In any other man, the pose might have read as ease. In Duncan, it looked like a temporary concession to furniture. Archie took his time with the first sip.
Whisky and Duncan had always gone together in his mind.
Duncan at eighteen, taller than everyone else at school and still all contained edges, stealing his uncle’s better bottle on a freezing holiday night because Archie had refused to go home for Christmas.
Duncan at twenty-one, already too handsome when he forgot himself, leaning against the library shelves at Hawarden in shirtsleeves and offering whisky as if comfort were an arrangement he could engineer for other people but never quite allow himself.
That memory had no business being as vivid as it still was.
What Hawarden had given him was not merely hospitality.
It had given him relief from being an afterthought in his own life.
At Hawarden, he had been wanted before he was useful.
Duncan, even then, had never treated him like overflow from someone else’s damaged household.
Archie had loved the house for that before he loved Duncan for anything more dangerous.
“Say it,” Duncan said.
Archie smiled over the rim of the glass. “You know me too well.”
“Yes.”
There was history in that one word. Enough to warm the whole room if a man let it. Archie stretched his legs out toward the fire and studied him openly.
“You’re worried about her.”
Duncan’s mouth tightened. “That is a practical response to the evening.”
“Mm.”
“You disagree.”
“I think practical is doing a great deal of work for you.”
Duncan tipped a little more whisky into his mouth before answering.
“She walked into a room full of polished vultures.”
Archie’s brows lifted. “How vivid.”
“And she knew someone in it was planning evil.”
That made him still.
“So, there is more?”
“There is enough.”
Duncan did not elaborate. Archie let the silence breathe for a second. Duncan tended to say the most when he was allowed to arrive at the edge of it himself. The fire shifted. Somewhere in the house, a board answered a servant’s step and settled again. Archie said, “You trust her judgment?”
Duncan looked into his glass. “Yes.”
A cleaner admission than Archie had expected. He tipped his head.
“That was quick.”
“No.”
“Quick for you, then.”
That won him the flicker of a look.
Archie smiled. “I knew that would get you.”
“Stop saying that.”
“I would, if you weren’t so determined to disappear into yourself whenever anything interesting happens.”
Duncan gave him a look meant to end the subject.
Archie ignored it. Archie had known him far too long for that.
They met at fourteen, two boys already shaped by grief and pretending otherwise with uneven success.
Duncan’s mother had been dead only months.
Archie’s had been gone longer. Grief recognized grief on sight. It made introductions unnecessary.
By the end of that first term, they had become fixed points in one another’s lives. Duncan had Hawarden, and from the first time his invitation was extended, Archie had taken it with both hands. He had never really gone home again.
“You’re miles away,” Duncan said. Archie came back to the room with a small laugh. “Only to the usual places.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It was preparatory school,” Archie said.
That brought the ghost of a smile to Duncan’s face.
“You were impossible at school.”
“That is deeply flattering. I worked very hard to be a nuisance.”
“You succeeded.”
“And you liked me for it.”
Duncan’s gaze held his for a second longer than the line required.
“Yes,” he said.
The room shifted, softly, almost imperceptibly.
Archie felt the old current in it then, not a new attraction, because nothing about Duncan had ever felt entirely new to him, but something older, better worn, and more dangerous for having survived so long without losing heat.
He leaned back further into the chair and let himself enjoy that for a moment.
Then he ruined it.
“You want her.”
Duncan’s jaw moved once.
Archie waited.
He knew better than to fill the silence. Duncan had always hated being cornered into speech. He preferred to arrive there by his own route and pretend no one had watched him choose it.
At last, Duncan said, “Yes.”
The answer sank low in Archie’s stomach. Surprise was not the problem. The absence of hesitation was. Duncan rarely said yes so cleanly to anything involving desire. He liked desire best when it could be arranged into principle and fed a schedule.
Archie took another sip of whisky and said, because humor was still the most dignified form of damage available to him, “Well. That’s appalling.”
Duncan looked up.
“For me,” Archie added.
That won him a laugh, brief and real.
“Your suffering appears theatrical.”
“It’s one of my better features.”
“You have too many of those.”
Archie smiled. “Careful.”
Duncan seemed to hear the second meaning in it and ignore it with visible effort.
Archie watched him for another moment, watched the firelight catch the strong line of his face, the dark brown of his eyes going softer at the edges when he forgot to guard them.
He had spent years pretending Duncan’s beauty was incidental.
It had never been incidental. It had been inconvenient to name.
Ceci, he thought, had walked into that inconvenience without the slightest idea of its history. And what a delightful history it was.
“So,” he said lightly, “does she know?”
“That I want her?”
Archie lifted one shoulder. “She’s intelligent,” Archie said. “I assume she has noticed.”
Duncan’s expression altered, somewhere between annoyance and acknowledgment. “I haven’t touched her.”
Archie laughed outright. “My dear Duncan, that is rarely where these things begin.”
That earned him a sharper look. Archie softened his tone just enough.
“She knows,” he said. “Perhaps not the full shape of it. But she knows she has your attention, which is arguably worse.”
Duncan glanced toward the fire.
“Yes.”
It came out quieter than the first yes. Archie leaned forward, forearms resting on his knees, glass dangling from one hand.
“And what do you intend to do about that?”
“Nothing.”
Archie was laughing before Duncan had finished the word.
Duncan looked offended.
“That,” Archie said, still grinning, “is the least convincing answer I’ve heard from you in years.”
“It happens to be the truth.”
“It happens to be a strategy,” Archie corrected. “And a poor one.”
Duncan’s mouth shifted. “You would know.”
“I would. I’ve used it myself.”
That altered the room again. Duncan looked at him fully now. Their history had always lived in glances first.
There had been an evening at nineteen in a room much like this one, a fire too low, too much whisky, Duncan wet from the rain and unwise enough to look at Archie for too long while toweling his hair dry.
Archie had almost kissed him then. Duncan had almost allowed it.
Instead, they had laughed at nothing and gone to bed furious for reasons neither of them had named.
Years later, Archie could still remember the shape of Duncan’s mouth in that firelight. Some indignities never improved with age. Duncan said, very carefully, “And did the strategy work?”
Archie smiled into his whisky.
“No.”
That earned him another of those low, unwilling laughs. God, he loved that sound. He hated that he loved that sound. He loved, too, the way Duncan always softened after laughing, as if some stricter version of him stepped aside for a second and allowed the looser one through.
“You know,” Archie said, “this would all be much easier if you were less attractive when conflicted.”
Duncan shook his head once, then looked down at the amber in his glass.