CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ceci
Hawarden Castle (New), (Castell Penarlag, Newydd)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
By the time they reached Hawarden, the house had gone quiet in that layered way old houses do, as if every sound had first to pass through wood, stone, and memory before it could be heard at all. Duncan brought the motorcar around the drive and cut the engine. For a moment, none of them moved.
The ruins still clung to Ceci. The sealed window. The faded letters beneath the paint. The sense of the air tightening under the arch. Voss’s sentence had gone from threat to clue so quickly that it left her feeling behind in her own life. Archie was the first to stir.
“Well,” he said, opening his door, “I think we may safely say the evening improved.”
“That is a very strange conclusion to draw,” Ceci said.
“It is the only one available to me. We have a gate with history, a dead relative with papers, and a villain who talks too much. I prefer all of that to confusion.”
Duncan came around the motorcar and offered her a hand. She took it without thinking. His fingers closed around hers only long enough to steady her on the gravel.
Archie noticed.
The three of them went in through the front door, and once they were inside the entrance hall, the familiar warmth of the house closed around them. Lamp light glowed warm against the wood. The whole place seemed protective of the three, as though nothing on the hill had any right to follow them in.
Then Ginger growled.
The sound came low from the corridor behind them, so unlike her usual bright foolishness that all three of them turned. Nothing stood in the hall. Only rainwater, tracked in from someone’s boots, darkening the stone near the threshold.
Ceci looked down.
The wet mark had the shape of a shoe. Too narrow. Too neat. Facing inward. Duncan crossed the hall and opened the front door. The drive beyond was empty. Archie’s voice lost its amusement. “Did either of us step there?”
“No,” Duncan said.
He shut the door carefully, as if carefulness could make the house less breached. Ceci’s hand went to her wrist before she could stop it. For one moment, Hawarden had felt like shelter that morning. Now she could feel the breach in it. Archie stripped off his gloves and looked from Duncan to Ceci.
“I’ll come back in the morning.”
“You make that sound like a heroic vow,” Ceci said.
“It is one. You should appreciate the effort.”
Duncan set his gloves on the hall table. “You were coming back whether anyone asked you to or not.”
Archie smiled. “You know me too well.”
There was something old in the glance they exchanged. Affection, irritation, habit. The kind of understanding that had been built long before she arrived and had only grown more charged since.
Ceci felt it and felt too the now-familiar tug of wanting to step nearer to it and into it at once. Archie turned to her then, and some of the lightness in him eased.
“Try to sleep,” he said. “You look as though your mind has been chewing on barbed wire.”
She smiled despite herself. “I’ll do my best.”
His expression softened. For one brief second, with the hall lamplight on his face and his hair falling out of place from the excursion, he looked younger than he usually did.
Then he looked at Duncan. Again, the look that passed between them carried old knowledge, old feelings, and far too much ease. Duncan gave the smallest nod.
Archie took that for the answer it was, pulled on his gloves again, and moved toward the front door.
“Morning, then.”
“Morning,” Ceci said.
Duncan said, “You’ve plenty of time to catch the Merseyside train. Maybe walk with care.”
Archie glanced back over his shoulder. “I always do.”
Ceci snorted softly.
Archie laughed, let himself out, and the door closed behind him with heavy, muffled finality.
The house settled.
This time, there were only two of them. Ceci stood very still in the hall, aware of the front door Archie had just gone through, aware of Duncan a few feet away, aware of the hour and the quiet and the fact that six days ago she had not known either man existed.
Duncan picked up his gloves again, then seemed to think better of it and set them back down.
“Well,” she said, because silence with him could be bearable and dangerous in equal measure, “that has been an extremely normal Sunday.”
“Yes,” he said. “Entirely unremarkable.”
That tiny concession warmed her more than it should have. He glanced toward the library. “Come inside. We should talk while the details are still clear.”
She followed him there at once. The library received them in lamplight and low fire, the room dim beyond the nearest shelves, the air touched with coal warmth and old paper.
Duncan crossed into the hearth and stood for a moment with one hand on the mantel, his face turned partly toward the flames and partly toward thoughts she could not yet see.
Ceci stopped at the long table and set her gloves down beside a stack of unopened correspondence. For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.
The quiet felt different with Archie gone.
Less buoyant. More intimate. It seemed to hold the whole shape of the evening inside it: the drive back from the ruins, the sealed window, the faded name on the gate, the knowledge that Matthias Voss had looked straight at her and chosen to let her know exactly how much he understood. At last, she said, “Six days.”
Duncan turned his head.
“That is all this has been,” she went on.
“Six days. Six days ago, I was annoyed about weak coffee, footnotes, and whether I had packed enough sweaters. Six days ago, I thought my life was difficult because I had a divorce, a mediocre future, and a tendency to panic in interesting settings.” Her mouth tightened.
“Now I am in another century, living in your house, trying to stop fascism, and following clues left to me by a man who may have stepped through the same gate I did. Less than a week. That’s all this has been, and it already feels like another life. ”
A faint, fleeting warmth touched his mouth.
“When you put it that way,” he said, “it does sound crowded.”
She laughed softly, then pressed the heel of one hand against her brow.
“I am very tired.”
“I know.”
The gentleness of it caught her off guard.
She lowered her hand and looked at him. His expression had softened in the firelight.
Not by much. Just enough to make him look less like the man who held himself together by discipline and more like the man beneath that discipline, the one she had only begun to glimpse in fragments. Ceci drew a slow breath.
“Voss terrifies me,” she said. “Not because he threatened me outright. That would almost be easier. It’s the polish of it. The civility. The way he says one sentence and leaves the rest for me to feel in my bones.”
Duncan’s gaze held hers.
“Yes,” he said. “That is how men like him prefer to work.”
She moved a little nearer to the fire.
“In my time, people like him never really go away. They change clothes. They change slogans. They learn how to use fear more elegantly. They make cruelty sound reasonable. They make democracy sound embarrassing. They flatter people into surrendering it one concession at a time.”
The library seemed to grow still around those words. Duncan looked down at the coals.
“And the people who help them,” he said. “Hart?”
“Yes.”
“And those who tell themselves they are only being social?”
“Yes.”
She watched him absorb that. The shape of his thought was visible in him when he let it be, in the stillness, in the way his hand flattened once against the mantel.
“He will not arrive shouting,” Duncan said.
“No,” Ceci replied. “He’ll arrive at luncheon. He’ll arrive in drawing rooms. He’ll arrive in polite company and speak of restoration, order, and English greatness, while everyone tells themselves he is simply frank. Tell each other they like the way he talks.”
Duncan lifted his eyes to hers again.
“And if enough people indulge that?”
“Then by the time they admit what he is, he’s already where he wanted to be, and enacting untold amounts of damage.”
The truth of it sat heavily between them.
For a moment, Ceci thought of Hart’s open face, of the retired colonel, of Lady Judith’s careful hospitality, of all the people who would never call themselves fascists but might still open the door for one if he came properly dressed.
Then the gate rose in her mind again. Leopold’s Gate was never meant to admit you.
She sat down abruptly in the nearest chair, the force of the evening catching up to her all at once. Duncan came away from the hearth then, slowly, as if not to startle her, and stopped at the edge of the table.
“I keep thinking about the old man,” she said. “About the money. The receipt. The brochure. About how ordinary it all felt while it was happening.” She looked up at him. “If that gate admitted me, someone let it happen. Or failed to stop it. Or knew it could happen and said nothing.”
“Yes.”
“And Voss knew enough to name the gate as if it had rules.”
“Yes.”
Ceci let out a breath. “I hate him.”
A shadow of feeling crossed Duncan’s face, sharper than amusement and warmer than approval.
“So do I.”
That should not have comforted her as much as it did. She studied him for a long second.
“You believe me now?”
“I have for some time.”
“Why?”
He did not answer immediately. He pulled out the chair opposite hers and sat, though he did not relax into it. Duncan never simply relaxed. He arranged himself even in weariness.
“Because lies have a shape,” he said. “Most of them flatten under scrutiny. Yours deepened.”
She held his gaze.
“That sounds almost romantic.”
“It is meant to sound accurate.”
She smiled in spite of herself. Then he said, “Because I have only once in my life looked at someone and known, against every sensible instinct I possessed, that they would matter to me.”
The smile left her face. He did not look away. There was no embarrassment in him now, only the grave steadiness she had come to recognize as the shape his honesty took.
“Once,” he said. “And only once.”
Ceci knew before he spoke the name. Some part of her had known for days now, in glances, in interruptions, in the ease and ache that lived between the two men.
“Archie?” she said.
“Yes.”
The word was simple. He offered it without apology, and perhaps that was what made it so moving. The honesty of that undid her a little. She looked down at her hands, at the fine grain of the wood beneath them.
“And I,” he went on, “am drawn to you for reasons that are not entirely separate from that.”
She lifted her eyes again. Firelight moved faintly across the planes of his face. There was weariness there now, and something more dangerous because it was so carefully held.
His gaze held hers. “I have spent most of my life trusting what can be proved,” he said. “Papers. Dates. Names. A thing in its proper place.”
His mouth shifted, almost a smile.
“Then you arrived with a story reason had no room for, and I believed you anyway.”
Ceci’s breath caught.
He came nearer, only a fraction.
“You are inconvenient,” he said softly. “Dangerous to my peace. Dangerous to every tidy answer I have tried to build since you arrived.”
A faint warmth touched his mouth, gone almost at once.
“And still, I find myself wanting the trouble of you.”
She could not seem to breathe properly.
“You are from a century I cannot imagine without wanting to understand it,” he said. “You move through the world with assumptions I have only argued toward in private. You speak as though women belong to themselves. As though the future can be fought for and shaped, even when it disappoints you.”
His gaze did not leave her face.
“You are clever. Difficult. Alive in a way I cannot stand at a distance from. Those things have never failed to affect me.”
Ceci felt warmth rise under her skin, low and startling and impossible to separate from tenderness.
“Difficult,” she repeated.
“I am trying to be honest.”
“That is an extremely unfair habit in a man who looks like you.”
For the first time that evening, a real smile touched him, brief and beautiful enough to make her breath catch. Then it was gone again, though the warmth remained in his eyes.
“I do not mean to make light of this,” he said. “Or of Archie. I care for him. I have cared for him for a long time. What exists between us is not a passing appetite.”
“I know,” she said.
“Good.”
Silence settled for a moment. It was gentler now, though no less charged.
Ceci looked at him across the table and felt the weight of the past six days all at once.
The hill. The gate. The rain. His voice in the morning cold.
The library. The kindness he wore as practicality because kindness was more dangerous to admit.
The certainty with which she had trusted him before she had no sane reason to do so.
Then, because she was too tired to pretend she did not want him and was too honest now to hide behind wit for another hour, she asked the question that had been sitting between them in various disguises all evening.
“What happens to us if I find a way home?”
The change in his face was very slight, but she saw it. A deepening stillness. A grief he had not meant to show. After a moment, he said, “I don’t know.”
It was the truest thing he could have given her, and she loved him a little for it before she had any business doing so. He rose then and came around the table.
Ceci did not stand. She only looked up at him as he stopped beside her chair, close enough now that she could feel the heat of him.
He lifted one hand and touched her hair, just once, the backs of his fingers moving lightly along the pinned wave above her temple. The tenderness of it nearly ruined her.
“Go to bed,” he said. “Sleep while the house is quiet, and Voss is elsewhere, and the gate is shut. Tomorrow we will face all of it in daylight.”
She looked up at him, at the impossible restraint of him, and let herself lean into his hand before he drew it away.
“That sounds like an order.”
“It is an appeal to reason.”
“Which I am famously insusceptible to.”
His mouth curved again.
“Yes,” he said. “I have noticed.”
She stood then, and because neither of them seemed willing to trust what might happen if she remained where she was, she picked up her gloves. At the door, she turned back.
He had not moved. One hand rested on the back of the chair she had just left, his face half in shadow, half in firelight.
“Good night, Duncan.”
His eyes lifted to hers.
“Good night, Ceci.”
She left the library with her pulse still unsteady and the whole dangerous shape of the future pressing just beyond the walls. The fear was still there. Voss was still there. The gate, the papers, Hart, the whole polished machinery of men making room for fascism, all of it remained.
And yet.