CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Voss
He had her attention the moment he mentioned the library. He had chosen the line with care. Mild enough to pass as social concern. Specific enough to draw blood. Now, across the room, he watched the knowledge settle into her.
She concealed it well. Better than most women would have. Better than many men. Her cup remained steady. Her mouth did not betray her. Only the eyes gave anything away, and even there the change was slight, a tightening of focus, a pause too small for anyone else to mark.
Anyone else.
Hart noticed nothing. Hart rarely noticed anything that did not arrive wrapped in flattery.
Hart had already resumed his cheerful drift from politics to architecture to the fate of county roads, all of it delivered with the complacent confidence of a man who had never once doubted that the world would continue arranging itself to suit him.
Sabrina Gladstone sat half turned toward them, smiling at the proper moments, her mind elsewhere.
Duncan Carlton was the only one who mattered. Voss let his gaze move there and found the man watching him over the rim of his cup.
Good.
Carlton had understood the first line. That had been the point.
There was an old pleasure in this kind of exchange, in placing one sentence into a room and watching it do its work.
Most people required spectacle. Most men mistook noise for power.
Voss had always preferred elegance. It lasted longer.
Miss Bishop, though. She was proving more interesting than he had hoped.
At Rowe’s, he had mistaken her for an anomaly.
By luncheon, he understood she was a threat.
The matter with the ladder had failed to remove her, and he had been forced to revise his opinion.
At luncheon, she had answered too carefully, watched too intelligently, and carried herself with a strain he recognized at once.
The strain of someone holding two worlds in her mind and trusting neither.
She was one of his own kind, then.
Or near enough.
That changed the arithmetic and worsened every sum
Hart had drawn her into the room almost too easily.
Sabrina had helped without realizing who she served.
Carlton had done the rest by bringing her into Hawarden and teaching her where the valuable papers lived.
None of them understood the shape of the contest yet.
That, Voss thought, was the only reason any of them were still breathing so peacefully.
He set down his cup and crossed toward the sideboard for more coffee. He did not need more coffee.
He needed proximity.
Miss Bishop stood a little apart from the others now, near the narrow table set beneath the blue Chinese vase.
Hart had left her there to reclaim some anecdote from Sabrina.
Archie Booker remained near the fire, laughing with a guest, broad-shouldered and easy, though the ease in him was never quite as careless as people liked to believe.
Voss had known that sort of man before. Bright.
athletic. adored in every room. Useful until sentiment complicated them.
Carlton, on the other hand, had the look of a man who had spent years teaching himself to live inside a smaller shape than nature intended.
That, too, was useful.
Voss came to stand beside Miss Bishop with perfect courtesy.
“The coffee is stronger than I expected,” he said. She turned her head and gave him the kind of smile women gave men they would rather push down a staircase.
“Then perhaps Hawarden has exceeded expectations all around.”
American. Clever. A little breathless under the wit.
“Yes,” he said. “There have been several surprises.”
She did not answer at once. Good sense, perhaps. Or instinct. He let the silence rest between them for a second. Then he looked down at her hands. No wedding ring. No glove. A pulse visible at the wrist.
In another age, he might have admired her without inconvenience.
In this one, she was a complication, and complications required discipline.
The room had begun to drift into separate conversations again.
Hart had reclaimed the colonel. Sabrina had a guest laughing.
Booker had moved closer to the mantel, though his attention had already come free of the woman beside him. Carlton had set down his cup.
Voss lowered his voice.
“Leopold’s Gate was never meant to admit you.”
She understood.
He saw it at once. No flinch. She was too good for that. No visible blanching. She held herself together admirably. The change came in the eyes, which widened only a fraction before the mind behind them locked down.
He had chosen well.
She knew the name.
She knew it. The gate had been her point of entry. The error had occurred there if error was the correct word. He was no longer certain it was.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand you,” she said. It was a graceful lie. He almost respected it.
“You understand me very well.”
He let that rest a moment longer, then gave her the mercy of another sentence, quieter still.
“You should be more careful where you wander. Ancient places have long memories.”
Her fingers tightened around the cup. Across the room, Carlton had gone very still. Booker, faster by temperament, had already begun to move before he could possibly know why.
Excellent.
Voss lifted his coffee, took a measured sip, and stepped away before anyone could force the scene into something cruder. Hart intercepted him at once, eager to drag him back into talk of party organization and public feeling in the counties. Voss gave Hart just enough attention to keep him pleased.
Over Hart’s shoulder, he saw Miss Bishop set down her cup. Booker reached her first. Carlton followed two seconds later. Sabrina did not turn. She had more skill than the others and knew the value of leaving an opening undisturbed.
Miss Bishop said something. Booker’s face changed. Carlton spoke one short sentence, then all three of them were gone from the room.
Hart continued speaking.
Voss listened with the expression he had trained into place years ago; the one people took for intelligence because they were too lazy to look harder. Inside, his thoughts had already gone elsewhere.
Leopold’s Gate.
He had not lied. It had never been intended for her.
The old paths had rules. Thresholds did.
Most people moved through the world without ever touching them, and for that, Voss had always found them dim, however competent they were in ordinary life.
Miss Bishop had stumbled through one blind.
That meant luck, intervention, or appetite from the other side.
He did not care for any of the possibilities.
Still, the result was before him now. A woman from the future, planted in Hawarden like a pin through a map.
Clever enough to be dangerous. Lonely enough to be moved by kindness.
Erotic in the way certain women were, almost against one’s better judgment, with their softness and temper and inconvenient capacity for looking directly at what they should have the good sense to avoid.
She had already affected Carlton. That was plain. Booker, too, if one had eyes.
Good.
Desire made excellent leverage. People liked to call it weakness, but that was too small a word for such a reliable instrument.
Men betrayed parties, countries, God, and themselves for less than the hope of being wanted by the right person.
Hart was saying something about London now.
Voss inclined his head at the proper intervals and let the man continue. The larger problem was timing.
He had meant to spend longer at the edges of the Hawarden circle.
Longer with Hart. Longer making himself desirable to the people who preferred their politics with wit and tailoring and no odor of the street attached.
He had not expected to find another traveler there.
He had certainly not expected her to have come through so near the papers.
That altered matters.
He would have to move more quickly. Booker could be distracted.
Sabrina might be managed with charm, at least for a while.
Hart was barely worthy of contempt. Carlton would be the difficulty.
Men like Carlton believed themselves moral even when they were frightened, which made them stubborn in tiresome ways.
No matter.
Every house had a weakness. Every man had a cost. And Miss Bishop, for all her intelligence, had one flaw he already understood. She had not yet decided whether she wished to go home. That hesitation would ruin her long before he did.
At last, Hart’s voice faltered under the weight of its own importance. Voss supplied a smile and an agreeable phrase, then excused himself with precisely the measure of regret required to make a man feel flattered rather than dismissed.
He crossed the room, pausing once to thank Sabrina for her hospitality. She looked up at him with those clear blue eyes and smiled as if they were engaged in an entirely different conversation.
“Leaving so soon?” she asked.
“For now.”
“How wise of you.”
He gave her back a smile of equal polish.
“Wisdom has its uses.”
She laughed softly, though nothing on her face suggested amusement.
By the time he stepped into the corridor, the house had settled again around its own old dignity.
Rugs, portraits, the faint smell of wax and coal, and flowers brought in from the cold.
It would have been beautiful, in another light. He put on his gloves.
Somewhere upstairs or down some private passage, Miss Bishop was telling them.
She would have to. The sentence had been too precise to keep to herself.
Carlton would take her to the gate soon.
Booker would insist on going. Sabrina would make certain she knew before they left, because Sabrina never tolerated being the last to a secret.
That was all for the good. Let them go to the ruins.
Let them stand before the red gate and make a mistake to gain an advantage. By then, he would know which of them needed to be removed first. And if Miss Bishop proved more difficult to kill than expected, there were other ways.
A woman who had fallen out of her own century and could no longer say with any conviction which world she belonged to, remained useful. He smiled to himself as he descended the front steps into the blue dark of early evening. The gate had made its mistake. He would not make his.