CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ceci
By the following afternoon, they were all, at least in one sense, finally in the same century.
Sabrina recovered first.
That, Ceci thought, should not have surprised her. Sabrina had the sort of mind that could survive almost anything so long as it was interesting enough to deserve survival.
She set Ceci’s phone down with reverence absent from her expression and said, “Start at the beginning, and if you skip anything useful I’ll know.”
Archie laughed under his breath.
Duncan did not.
The library had changed shape around them again.
Tea sat untouched. Matthias Voss’s card lay on the table like a private insult.
The lamps had gone from evening to night, leaving the windows black and reflective.
All of them were caught there now, four people in a room that had become too small for anything except truth.
Ceci leaned back against the edge of the table.
“The beginning is boring,” she said. “I came to Wales to do research.”
“Yes,” Sabrina said. “We’ve had the polite version of that.”
Ceci looked at Archie, then at Sabrina, then finally at Duncan, because saying it again with all of them there still felt faintly impossible.
“In 2023, I’m an academic librarian in 2023,” she said.
“At a university in America. I came here on sabbatical to work in the Gladstone collections. I was looking at private correspondence, social networks, the sort of material that lets you trace how fascism moved through respectable people under the guise of politeness.”
Archie rested both hands on the back of the chair in front of him and listened with an intensity that made joking feel suddenly impossible.
“And then,” Sabrina said.
“And then I went up to the ruins in the rain,” Ceci replied. “I sat down for a minute, I think. I must have fallen asleep, or hit my head, or slipped sideways through time because apparently that was on the menu, and when I woke up I was here.”
Sabrina narrowed her eyes.
“That part remains offensive.”
“I know.”
Archie said, softly enough to sound like thought rather than interruption, “And you understood it quickly because you’ve spent your life reading strange things.”
Ceci looked at him.
“Yes.”
He smiled faintly, though there was no humor in it. “That is unfairly attractive.”
“Archie,” Duncan said.
“What? It is.”
Sabrina turned on him. “You kissed her in the gallery and you’re still only saying attractive.”
Archie looked delighted. “Would you like the longer version?”
“No,” Duncan said at once. Ceci covered her face for one second, laughing helplessly into her own hands before pulling herself back together.
“Please,” she said. “Can we do one catastrophe at a time?”
Sabrina sat down at last, all elegance and attention.
“Fine. One catastrophe. Explain Mosley.”
Ceci lowered her hands.
This, at least, she could do. Or she could do the useful part of it, which was not the same thing.
“Mosley matters,” Ceci said, “but not because he wins. In the history I know, he never becomes prime minister. The BUF never becomes the British government.”
Archie’s gaze sharpened. “That sounds like comfort and is somehow not.”
“It isn’t,” she said. “The movement still wounds people. It still normalizes ugliness. It still gives respectable rooms a language for things they should be ashamed to want.”
Sabrina looked down at Voss’s card. “And now?”
“Now there is a man close to Mosley who should not be there,” Ceci said. “A man who seems to understand exactly how to make the vulgar parts less visible.”
Duncan’s voice came low from the hearth. “Less marching. More drawing rooms.”
“Yes.”
That quieted them.
“And Mosley never actually takes power.”
It was not a question. It was a check.
“No,” Ceci said. “Not in the history I know. The BUF matters. It wounds people. It helps normalize hate and bigotry. But it doesn’t become the British government.”
Sabrina looked at the calling card again.
“And now you think Voss may be one reason that changes?”
Ceci hesitated.
“That,” Archie said, “is the question.”
She met his eyes.
“I think Voss is altering the texture of the movement. I don’t know yet whether he can alter the outcome.”
Duncan nodded once.
“That is a distinction worth keeping.”
Sabrina tilted her head. “And if he is what you are?”
The room quieted again.
Ceci answered carefully.
“Then I think he’s here for the opposite reason I am.”
Archie’s mouth curved, though not in amusement. “At last. Something simple.”
“That is not simple,” Duncan said.
“No,” Archie replied. “But at least it’s clear.”
Sabrina rose and crossed to the fire, glass in hand.
“We need to decide what the others in the room were doing,” she said. “Not philosophically. Practically. Lady Judith. Diana. Whoever else is hosting these people.”
Ceci felt steadier now that the whole shape of it was no longer trapped in her own head.
“Lady Judith matters because she offers social cover,” she said. “Diana matters because she’s glamour and access at once. The whole problem with fascism in rooms like that is that it doesn’t arrive as a jackboot first. It arrived as wit, confidence, style, grievance made seductive.”
Archie looked at her with something close to awe.
“You really did come here prepared to ruin your own peace.”
“That’s a very romantic way to describe research.”
“It’s a very romantic way to describe you.”
Duncan closed his eyes.
Sabrina laughed.
Ceci did too, because if she didn’t, the heat in the room might become impossible to manage. Duncan set his glass down with enough precision to quiet the room. Archie looked wholly unrepentant. “No.”
Duncan ignored him.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “Archie starts on Liverpool. Sabrina continues with Rowe. Ceci stays with the papers and builds us a map of these social links. I want names, houses, recurring combinations, dates.”
Ceci nodded. “I can do that.”
Sabrina turned from the fire. “And the royal thread?”
That gave all of them pause.
Ceci answered.
“We don’t need to drag the king into the drawing room tomorrow,” she said.
“But we do need the shadow of it. Edward has already abdicated. George VI is king now. Edward is Duke of Windsor. The fact that the Windsors visited Germany in 1937 means a politically alert person in 1938 could be thinking about that, gossiping about it, or pretending not to gossip about it. Some historians believe Edward’s abdication may have had more to do with is relationship with fascism than his relationship with Wallis Simpson. ”
Sabrina smiled, all intelligence again.
“Oh, that I can work with.”
Archie laughed. “God preserve the monarchy from your idea of subtlety.”
“No.”
The answer came from Duncan. All three of them looked at him. He took his hand from the mantel.
“Let’s begin by preserving the country.”
That silenced the room more completely than anything else had.
Ceci felt the scale of it then: the false future, the hidden man, the polite rooms making space for ruin. History was no longer safely behind glass. It was here, breathing with them.