CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ceci
Hawarden Castle (New), (Castell Penarlag, Newydd)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
The return to Hawarden felt quieter than the drive out.
Perhaps because the evening had given them something real at last, and reality, she was beginning to learn, had a way of draining a room of all the easier kinds of speech.
Sabrina talked first. Sabrina always talked first. She did it briskly, as if naming things might keep fear from settling too heavily around them.
“He was not on any list I know,” she said as the motorcar turned through the gates. “That does not mean he is important. It does mean he is placed.”
Ceci, wrapped in Grace’s evening shawl with both gloves still on, stared into the dark beyond the window. “He felt important.”
“That,” Sabrina said, “I believe.”
The door opened before they properly reached the steps.
Duncan had heard the motor, or else Margaret had become clairvoyant out of boredom.
The hall behind him was warm and low-lit, and for a second the sight of him there, coat off, hair less exact than usual, face turned toward the night as if he had been listening for them, did something to her that was wildly disproportionate to the moment.
Archie stood just behind him, Ginger at his heels.
That did not help.
He had removed his jacket and loosened his tie sometime in the past hours, which he wore far too well to be forgiven for it.
The sight of him like that, easy and handsome in the amber light, made her think unhelpful things about bedrooms and badly made decisions.
She was tired enough to be honest with herself about that.
Sabrina swept inside first.
Ginger came at a trot, ears flying, then stopped short at the smell of strange houses, strange hands, and too much perfume. Her nose worked over the hem of Ceci’s dress with solemn concentration.
“Well?” Ceci asked softly. “Do I pass?”
Ginger sneezed.
Sabrina pulled off one glove. “An honest critic. How refreshing.”
Duncan, who had gone still the moment they entered, looked down at the dog first. Only then did his eyes rise to Ceci’s face.
“You’re back,” he said.
It sounded practical. It was not. Sabrina continued shedding her gloves and her conclusions.
“We were right,” she said to Duncan. “Or rather, Ceci was right, which is more irritating.”
Duncan’s attention went straight to Ceci. “Are you all right?”
The question was too direct to be casual.
“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”
He held her gaze just long enough to say he heard the uncertainty and was choosing, for now, not to expose it. Archie, beside him, smiled faintly. “That sounds like a successful evening, by your standards.”
“I’m not sure I have standards anymore.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Sabrina replied. “You still looked offended by half the room, which shows admirable consistency.”
That won a laugh out of Ceci, tired and real. For a second, all four of them were simply there together in the hall, the whole dangerous mess of the thing suspended in firelight and fatigue.
Then she felt it.
Something had shifted between Duncan and Archie.
The shift was small, almost deniable. A quicker glance. A pause Duncan let Archie keep. The faintest change in Archie’s mouth when Duncan spoke. Nothing anyone else would have named, perhaps, but Ceci saw it because she had spent too long wanting that kind of history with someone.
Whatever lived between them had years behind it. Private jokes. Old injuries. Rooms she had never entered.
She could not have said what had changed. Only that something had, and now she kept seeing it at the edges of them.
Sabrina seemed not to notice. Or perhaps noticed and filed it away for later, which with Sabrina amounted to much the same thing.
What struck her was recognition of a lack.
Jealousy might come later. For now, the feeling was older and emptier than that.
Whatever lived between Duncan and Archie had years behind it, private language, old injuries, old repairs.
They knew how to read one another at a glance.
She had almost never had that with anyone.
Marriage had given her paperwork, habit, and eventual disappointment.
Friendship had given her affection. This was something else.
Something built over time until it became a shelter.
She wanted it on sight with the greed of a woman who had gone too long making herself enough.
Margaret appeared from the back of the hall, took one look at Ceci’s face, and said, “You’ll sleep before you make sense of any of this.”
“That’s becoming a theme,” Ceci said.
“It’s becoming advice.”
Sabrina laughed and kissed the air near her cheek again. “Go upstairs, darling. I’m going back to Gladstone before Duncan begins trying to command us all into silence.”
“I would never attempt the impossible,” Duncan said. Sabrina looked at him with great tenderness and no mercy at all. “Liar.”
There was a brief fuss about coats and car arrangements after that.
Sabrina left in a fresh burst of perfume and opinion.
Margaret extracted Ceci from the hall with a competence too practiced to resist. Archie stayed.
She registered that halfway up the stairs, hand on the banister, and almost stopped.
It was late. The roads were cold. Hawarden had rooms enough to absorb half of Wales if required. Still, the knowledge gave the rest of the night a strange edge.
When she looked back once from the landing, Duncan and Archie were standing together below, speaking low near the study door.
Duncan’s face was turned enough that she could not read it properly.
Archie’s she could, and there was something there she did not understand at all.
Warmth. Amusement. Something older than either.
Then Margaret cleared her throat behind her and Ceci went upstairs before curiosity made a fool of her.
She woke to bells.
For a few disoriented seconds, she thought she was back in her own life, some Sunday morning in New Haven with church bells drifting from a neighboring steeple she had never entered.
Then the room arranged itself around her.
Grace’s room. The quilt. The softened gold of morning through the curtains.
The faint scent of lavender and herbs still lingered in her hair from the bath.
Wales. Hawarden. 1938.
“Right,” she murmured.
The bells went on.
By the time she came downstairs, properly dressed and still half thinking about the unknown man at Lady Rowe’s, breakfast was already set. Duncan was there with the newspaper. Archie was there with coffee, his tie crooked in a way that suggested he had tied it in a mirror he did not trust.
He looked up first.
“You’ve rejoined us.”
Ceci paused just inside the room. “Against impressive odds.”
“Sleep is rarely fatal.”
“You say that with too much confidence.”
“A healthy habit, sleep.”
She took her seat. Margaret set eggs in front of her before she could pretend she wasn’t hungry.
“What are the bells for?” she asked.
“St. Mildred’s Day,” Duncan said, not looking up from the paper. “A local feast day for the St. Mildred reliquary at the Abbey,” Archie added. “One of the nicer inventions. It lets the English feel devout about the dead in an orderly manner.”
Ceci looked at him. “You don’t sound especially committed.”
He smiled and wrapped both hands around his coffee cup. “What little faith I ever had came from my mother’s family. Lamps, stories, flowers, names spoken aloud. The church can keep its calendars. I only ever liked the parts that remembered the dead.”
Something in his voice altered the room.
Duncan’s eyes lifted from the paper, brief and unreadable.
Ceci found herself looking at Archie more carefully.
The line of his face in morning light. The unruly fairness of his hair.
The warmth in his skin, inherited from a mother she now realized he rarely spoke of and perhaps for that reason felt most strongly when he did.
“What did your mother do,” she asked, “for the dead?”
He looked at her over the rim of his cup.
“We lit lamps,” he said. “At home. Proper little flames, not church windows. My grandmother would say the names, and my mother would correct her pronunciation of the English ones just to annoy her. There were flowers. Rice. Sweet things if the dead had liked sweet things.” His smile changed, softened.
“It felt less like submission than memory.”
“That sounds better,” Ceci said.
“It was.”
For a second, no one spoke. Then Archie’s expression brightened again, deliberately lighter. “Also, it had the advantage of not requiring me to sit through cold hymns while wondering whether God liked boys less than priests claimed.”
Ceci choked on her coffee. Duncan closed his eyes very briefly.
“Archie.”
“What. It’s a church holiday.”
“That is not license.”
“It absolutely is.”
Ceci laughed helplessly, and to her surprise Duncan did too, once and low enough that she almost thought she had imagined it.
That altered current between them. She looked from one to the other and, before she could stop herself, said, “Did something happen after we got back.”
Both men went still in different ways.
Archie recovered first.
“Yes,” he said gravely. “We drank Duncan’s whisky and improved each other’s opinions.”
“That sounds false.”
“It is false,” Duncan said.
“Cruelly phrased,” Archie murmured.
Ceci narrowed her eyes at them, which only made Archie smile more.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “you’re being strange.”
Archie lifted one shoulder. “That suggests you know us.”
“Or that you’re being obvious.”
Duncan folded the newspaper once with unnecessary precision. “You imagined it.”
Archie looked delighted. “Now that is an outright lie.”
Ceci gave up and ate her breakfast, though she remained uncomfortably aware that something had, in fact, happened. She just didn't have the language for it