CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Duncan
Duncan knew what he had interrupted before either of them spoke.
He had seen too much of desire in the world to mistake the signs when they stood arranged before him in winter light, however carefully both parties tried to recover themselves.
Archie’s mouth had the softened look of a man who had just used it to his own satisfaction.
The air in the gallery had gone bright and close, carrying the last heat of what had happened between them.
Duncan stopped for only a moment. Long enough to understand it.
Long enough, God help him, to feel it. What bit deepest was not simple jealousy.
It was the older fear beneath it, the one that had survived war and grief and all his years of restraint, that warmth might gather somewhere nearby and leave him, yet again, the last man standing in the doorway.
Then he said the first useful thing that came to hand.
“Margaret is looking for you.”
Ceci turned toward him, as if her body had not yet caught up with the effort of becoming composed again.
A flush rose at her throat and into her face.
If he had not already known, that would have told him enough.
She looked younger in embarrassment. Softer too.
He found himself resenting the fact that Archie had seen that before he had.
“I’m sure she is,” she said. Her voice was almost steady. Archie, who had recovered far faster, leaned one shoulder against the window frame and asked, “Have we sinned, Duncan, or merely disrupted the household timetable?”
Duncan looked at him.
There was too much in that glance to sort cleanly. Irritation. Want. Memory. The old, stale ache of being outmaneuvered by a man he knew too well and still did not know how to stop wanting at inconvenient intervals.
“Margaret,” he said, keeping his tone level, “rarely distinguishes.”
Ceci made a sound that might have been a laugh if she had trusted herself to let it become one.
She slipped past him then, close enough that the edge of her sleeve brushed his hand.
He made room for her automatically, and in doing so caught again the scent that had become, in far too few days, inseparable from her in his mind.
Lavender. Soap, warmth, and a body recently held by another man.
He remained still until he heard her steps fade down the passage. Only then did he turn back to Archie.
The ease had gone out of him. He still looked handsome.
Archie always looked handsome. That had been one of the world’s less charitable jokes from the beginning, that a scholarship boy with secondhand shirts and too much intelligence should also grow into a face people trusted on sight.
But the carelessness he usually wore had slipped.
Under it, Duncan could see the force of whatever had passed between them, the fact that Archie felt it too and was not, perhaps, as amused by that as he pretended.
“That,” Duncan said, “was fast.”
Archie let his head fall back against the window casing and laughed once, low in his throat.
“Yes.”
Duncan had not expected so unguarded an answer. He should have. Archie had always told the truth most nakedly when it would do him the least amount of good.
“You don’t regret it.”
“No.” Archie’s mouth altered. “I regret the timing, possibly. I regret your face. I regret very little else.”
A sharper man would have walked away. Duncan had never been as sharp around Archie as he liked to imagine.
“So that is the strategy?”
Archie looked at him properly now. “There was no strategy.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
They held one another’s gaze in a silence rich with too much history to survive simple naming.
Duncan remembered other afternoons, other rooms. Archie wet from rain at seventeen, laughing in the Hawarden stables with a bruise over one cheekbone.
Archie at nineteen, stretched loose and languorous by Duncan’s fire at Cambridge, speaking too quietly for safety.
Archie, at twenty-two, leaving for Liverpool and turned back at the station with a look on his face Duncan had not been brave enough to answer.
And now this.
Now, Ceci was in the middle of them like a lit fuse.
He had lived so long assuming warmth belonged, in the end, to other people.
To easier men. To lawful arrangements. To rooms where his own appetites need not enter and spoil the setting.
Seeing Archie and Ceci in that winter light struck not only at desire, but at that older wound, the one that had spent years teaching him to expect exclusion before invitation.
He did not want to stand outside this. The admission was so raw he could scarcely bear it.
Duncan said, more quietly, “How far?”
Archie’s brows rose.
“You heard me.”
“Yes.” Archie straightened from the window. “I heard you. I’m deciding whether you deserve the answer.”
Duncan nearly laughed at that, but the laughter would have carried too much surrender. At length Archie said, “A kiss.”
The word tightened something low and instinctive in Duncan’s chest. He felt, absurdly vividly, the loss of something that had never been his to claim.
At the same time, threaded through it, came another sensation, older and uglier and no less alive for being old: the unwilling image of Archie kissing anyone with that kind of concentration.
Duncan looked away first.
“Was that wise?”
“Probably not.” Archie’s tone lost some of its play. “But I won’t apologize for it.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“No.” Archie moved toward the door. “You never do. That is one of your more exhausting qualities.”
He should have let the line stand. Instead, he said, “And yours.”
Archie stopped.
For a moment, the house seemed to gather itself around them again, old boards and old stone holding the heat of what neither of them had chosen to say.
Duncan could not have explained why he spoke next.
Perhaps because Ceci had already ruined all his better habits.
Perhaps because the sight of Archie still looking touched by her had done something reckless to him.
“You care for her?”
Archie did not answer at once. When he did, his voice had gone quieter. “Yes.”
The honesty of it shook him more than the kiss. Duncan folded his arms. “That too was fast.”
“Yes,” Archie said again. “And before you ask, no, I don’t know what to do about it either.”
A footstep sounded in the passage before Duncan could answer. Margaret appeared at the doorway with all the gravity of a woman carrying domestic news and political consequence in the same hand.
“Miss Gladstone is here,” she said.
Archie turned. “At this hour?”
“She came straight over from the Manor,” Margaret replied. “And she said, with language I won’t repeat in this corridor, that everyone is to come to the library immediately.”
Duncan and Archie looked at one another. There were times when Sabrina’s theatricality was merely Sabrina’s theatricality. This did not feel like one of them.
The library was brighter than the gallery had been, the afternoon now slipping toward evening, and the lamps already lit against the early dark.
Sabrina stood by the long table in her day coat, gloves still on, face alight with that dangerous animation she wore when the world had finally offered her a problem equal to her appetite for one.
Ceci was already there.
She had regained most of her composure, which told Duncan either that Margaret had intercepted her long enough to let her breathe or that she had simply fought her way back into herself by force.
Sabrina didn’t wait for the door to close.
“I have a name,” she said. That altered the room at once. Duncan crossed to the table. Archie came around on the other side. Ceci stayed where she was, one hand resting on the back of the chair she had probably been gripping before they entered.
“Well,” Duncan said. “That was quick.”
Sabrina smiled without humor. “You’re welcome. Lady Judith’s maid is the daughter of a woman who once worked for us at the Manor. There are advantages to living somewhere longer than a season.”
She took a folded calling card from her bag and laid it on the table. The engraving was neat and unremarkable.
Herr Matthias Voss
Nothing more.
No title.
No address.
No explanation.
Ceci looked at it as if she might force a second line into existence. Archie read it aloud and frowned. “That means nothing to me.”
“Precisely,” Sabrina said. “Which would be unremarkable if Lady Judith had introduced him as some minor attaché or cousin from nowhere. But she didn’t. She assumed everyone already understood why he was there.”
Duncan lifted the card. The paper was good. Expensive, discreet, continentally styled. A man who carried such a card intended to pass through rooms without ever needing to explain himself twice.
“And who is he supposed to be?” he asked.
Sabrina unbuttoned one glove finger by finger, each tug sharper than the last. “That depends who is asking. To Lady Judith, he is a German political adviser with excellent manners. To another guest, he was ‘one of the men helping the movement refine its message.’ To Diana, apparently, he was Matthias, which I find irritating.”
Ceci’s hand tightened on the chair.
Refine its message. The phrase struck the table like evidence. The room went quiet enough for Duncan to hear the minute change in her breathing. Archie heard it too. He turned toward her at once, his face losing all remnants of ease.
“Ceci.”
She did not seem to hear him. Her eyes remained fixed on the card. Duncan set it down again.
“You know that line means something?”
At last, she looked up.
“Yes.”
The answer came softly, but there was no hesitation in it. Archie took a step closer. “What?”