CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Duncan
Duncan noticed the ribbon before he noticed anything else. It was a foolish detail to be undone by.
He had spent the better part of two days trying to force Matthias Voss into a shape that could be acted upon.
Names, houses, invitations, guest lists, whatever traces a man left when he moved too quickly through rooms that preferred to pretend they had no politics at all.
He had every reason to think of nothing but that.
Instead, the first thing he saw when Ceci came into the library the next morning was the dark ribbon at the back of her neck.
Sabrina had given it to her. He knew that at once.
In Ceci’s hair, it looked like proof of another woman’s attention.
He looked up from the papers and found the rest of her half a second later.
She was brighter. Something in her had eased.
Her mouth seemed closer to laughter. It was obvious why Sabrina liked her.
It was less useful to consider why that should bother him.
Ceci crossed the room with a stack of letters in one hand and stopped at the far end of the table.
“You’re staring,” she said.
Duncan lowered his eyes to the open ledger before him. “I’m working.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly. He heard it. So did she. When he looked back up, her mouth had moved at one corner.
“That sounded dangerously honest,” she said.
He disliked how much the line affected him.
It was bad enough when Archie said such things.
Archie had spent half his life dragging the submerged parts of him to the surface by sheer repetition.
From Ceci, the phrase felt less like teasing and more like recognition. He set the ledger aside.
“You look different.”
Ceci lifted one brow. “That sounds ominous.”
“It isn’t.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m not in the mood to be told I look altered in some tragic and significant way.”
Duncan’s gaze moved, against his better judgment, back to the ribbon. She followed it at once.
“Oh,” she said. “That.”
He could have left it there. He should have. Instead, he said, “Sabrina has been at you.”
Ceci laughed, quick and helpless enough to make the room warmer for a second.
“She has,” she admitted. “In fairness, I may have invited it.”
That did not help.
“What did she do?”
“Brushed out my hair, insulted my marriage, and announced she was a little in love with me but had no intention of making it a problem.”
Duncan stared at her.
Ceci, seeing his face, laughed harder.
“That was approximately my reaction.”
He should not have found the whole thing so easy to picture.
Sabrina in Grace’s room. Sabrina’s hands in Ceci’s hair.
Sabrina discovering exactly how to make Ceci blush.
Sabrina, who liked women in precisely the way the world required her never to say plainly, found one more woman worth admiring and decided admiration ought to be applied at once.
It was all perfectly in character. He still resented hearing it.
Ceci saw enough of that to smile with unmistakable satisfaction.
“You are making a face.”
“I am not.”
“You are,” she said. “You looked exactly like that when Archie described the sort of men who call cowardice moderation.”
“That was a different expression.”
“Was it?”
“Yes.”
Ceci laid the letters down and leaned one hip against the table, looking brighter and more open by the second.
“I begin to suspect,” she said, “that you dislike being surprised.”
That, at least, was simple.
“I dislike surprises that arrange themselves in my house.”
She heard his intent.
He knew she did because something in her expression softened before it sharpened again into play.
“Your house,” she repeated. “That sounds possessive.”
“It is possessive.”
“Of Hawarden?”
“Yes.”
“Only Hawarden?”
The question slid quietly into the room and stayed there.
Duncan looked at her.
There was no good answer to that. He chose the one least likely to damage them both.
“For the moment.”
Ceci let out a thin laugh, though he could see she felt the weight of it too. Then, because luck had apparently abandoned him, Archie walked in.
He came through the library door with cold air still clinging to his coat and a packet of papers tucked under one arm, his hair wind-ruffled and his expression alive in a way Duncan had learned to distrust on sight. Archie only looked that pleased when he had found something inconvenient.
His eyes moved first to Ceci, then to Duncan, then to the space between them, and his mouth curved with immediate understanding.
“Well,” he said. “This feels promising.”
“It isn’t,” Duncan replied.
Archie set the packet down on the table and looked at Ceci more closely.
“God,” he said. “Sabrina’s improved you.”
Ceci laughed.
Duncan looked at him.
Archie held up one hand. “In mood, man, not morality. Though that too is always possible.”
“What have you found?” Duncan said, before the conversation deteriorated further. Archie gave him a look that said he knew perfectly well why he was being cut short and was choosing, for now, to be merciful.
“I called in a few university favors,” he said. “Then a few less respectable ones.”
Ceci straightened. “And?”
Archie untied the packet and spread three sheets across the table.
“Nothing,” he said.
That quieted both of them at once.
Duncan frowned. “Explain.”
“I tried the name three ways,” Archie said.
“Matthias Voss, M. Voss, and Voss without the given name. University circles, consular gossip, trade inquiries, lecture societies, two shipping clerks who owe me money, and a German émigré in Liverpool who dislikes almost everyone and therefore notices them closely.”
Ceci had gone very still. Duncan could feel it from across the table. Archie tapped the page with one finger.
“There is no one by that name moving where he ought to be moving if the story at Rowe’s is true. No serious academic contact. No diplomatic trace was worth the room he was given. No trade introduction that would explain his social entry. The gaps are too clean.”
Ceci said, “Meaning?”
“Meaning,” Archie replied, “that either Matthias Voss is not his name, or it is a name someone put on him very recently and with unusual care.”
Duncan looked down at the page. It was a list of inquiries, dates, responses, and absences. Archie’s handwriting down the margin, quick and firm.
Nothing.
Again, that was the worst kind of answer. Ceci stepped closer to the table.
“How recent?”
Archie glanced up at her.
“If I were guessing,” he said, “I’d say he was inserted with sponsorship strong enough to keep people from asking the ordinary first questions. Who is he, where is he from, which family, whose cousin, whose protégé, whose recommendation?”
Duncan felt the line of the thing sharpen at once.
“Not merely admitted,” he said.
“No,” Archie agreed. “Placed.”
Ceci put both hands flat on the table and looked down at the pages.
This was what he had wanted, he realized, not proof exactly, because proof in a matter like this would likely never arrive in one obliging piece, but resistance.
Something the world would not explain away.
Something to justify the unease that had been building since Lady Rowe’s.
Instead of satisfaction, he felt only the problem worsening.
Ceci said, almost to herself, “Then it’s deliberate.”
Archie’s attention stayed fixed on her face.
“Yes.”
She drew in a slow breath. Duncan knew that look now. She was thinking too quickly. Making connections. Following them farther than anyone else in the room could.
“What?” he said.
Ceci lifted her eyes.
“If he doesn’t belong anywhere obvious,” she said, “then his usefulness is the point. He isn’t there because of family, title, or ordinary access. He’s there because someone wants him there, and because whatever he’s offering is working.”
Archie nodded.
“That was my conclusion too.”
Duncan looked from one to the other, Archie with his impossible perceptiveness, Ceci with her dangerous archival instinct, and felt a quick flash of something mean and unworthy.
They understood each other too quickly. Then again, perhaps that was his own fault for appreciating the same thing in both.
Ceci reached for the top page in Archie’s stack.
Their fingers met.
Archie’s hand stayed under hers a fraction longer than the accident required. He looked at her, not apologizing.
Ceci looked back.
Duncan stood.
Both turned toward him.
Archie’s mouth shifted. “If you mean to object, words remain available.”
Ceci withdrew her hand first and picked up the page. The ribbon at the back of her neck moved with the turn of her head, one dark line against the nape that he had no business noticing a second time yet noticed anyway.
She scanned Archie’s notes.
“What did the émigré say?”
Archie came around to stand beside her, not touching now, though Duncan was still too aware of the fact that he had recently done so.
“He said men who enter rooms that quickly are usually one of two things,” Archie said. “Useful financiers or political couriers.”
“Which?”
“He leaned toward courier.”
Ceci looked up.
“Why?”
“Because no one resented Voss enough.” Archie smiled faintly. “Money makes enemies faster than ideas do.”
That, Duncan thought, was infuriatingly good. Ceci laughed once, brief and sharp with admiration. “I hate that that’s true.”
“You don’t,” Archie said.
“No,” she admitted. “I don’t.”
Duncan reached for the final sheet and saw, halfway down, one further note in Archie’s hand.
Hart in Liverpool two weeks before the Rowe dinner. Met privately with German visitor at Adelphi. No record of the visitor’s name.
He read it twice.
“Archie?”
Archie leaned over the page. Too close. Duncan ignored that.
“Yes.”
“This meeting.”
Archie followed his finger.
“Ah. That.”
“That,” Duncan repeated, “is not a phrase that inspires confidence.”
Archie smiled. “A porter at the Adelphi remembers Hart because Hart tipped badly and spoke as if everyone in the city had personally offended him. He also remembers Hart meeting a dark-haired German in a private room upstairs. No name. No introduction.”
Ceci had come around to Duncan’s side of the table now, close enough that he could smell the faint trace of Sabrina’s powder still tangled with the lavender in her hair.
“Two weeks before Rowe,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And Hart is already in the social chain?”
“Yes.”
Duncan looked at the map she had built the day before, the lines between Hart, Rowe, country weekends, smaller suppers, names repeating until the whole county seemed held together by gossip and good china. Then he looked back at Archie’s sheet.
“There’s our hinge.”
Ceci looked at him.
“Hart brough him in.”
“Or vouched for him,” Archie said.
“Either is enough.”
The room changed.
This, finally, felt like movement. Ceci leaned one hand on the table and laughed under her breath, startled by the thing becoming legible at last.
“What?”
She looked up at Duncan.
“I just crossed a century, nearly got myself killed by a library ladder, and now I’m excited because a bad tipper in Liverpool confirms a fascist social courier.”
Archie put one hand over his heart. “That is one of the reasons I like you.”
Ceci turned toward him. “One of them?”
“Yes.”
“That sounds greedy.”
“It is.”
Duncan had watched them look at one another long enough.
“Hart,” he said. “What do we know of his next movements?”
Archie, to his credit, answered at once.
“Nothing certain yet. But if Rowe’s dinner was part of a chain, there will be another room.”
Ceci looked down at the map again. “A weekend house party. A Sunday luncheon. Something smaller than a rally and richer than a meeting.”
“Yes,” Duncan said.
Archie lifted one of the guest lists. “And if we can find it before Voss knows we’re looking.”
That was the problem they all heard, but none of them named immediately.
Ceci did.
“He may already know.”
Duncan met her eyes.
“Yes.”
The library quieted around that. Then Archie said, lightly enough to let them breathe again, “Well. If we’re already compromised, I suggest we at least be elegant about it.”
Ceci laughed first.
Duncan almost did.
The sound eased the room just enough for him to decide the next thing.
“We stop reacting,” he said. “We use Hart.”
Archie’s brows rose. “That sounds ominous.”
“It sounds practical.”
Ceci looked at Duncan with quick attention. “How?”
Duncan pulled the map toward him and laid Archie’s Liverpool note beside it.
“We assume Hart believes his discretion is sufficient. Men like that grow sloppy when they think they are operating socially rather than politically. We give him room to reveal the next gathering.”
Archie smiled. “You want bait?”
“Yes.”
Ceci looked from the note to Duncan. “Who?”
He met her eyes and saw at once that she already knew the answer and disliked it.
“Me,” he said.
Archie let out a soft, appreciative sound that was far too close to delight.
Ceci folded her arms.
“No.”
The answer came too fast to be anything but instinct. Duncan should not have liked that. He did.
“Ceci.”
“No. You can’t possibly think you’re the only one who gets to walk into rooms.”
“On the contrary,” Archie said. “That appears to be precisely what he thinks.”
Duncan ignored him.
“It will be easier if the invitation comes from Hawarden.”
Ceci looked ready to argue again, properly this time, and Duncan knew with perfect clarity that the next phase of the plot had arrived.
Hart. Hawarden. Another room.
And between all of it, this intolerable chemistry, bright as an exposed wire.
Good, he thought.
At least now the danger had a direction.