CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Duncan
He lasted twelve minutes.
That was the measure of his reason. He knew because the clock on the mantel in his room had struck the quarter hour just as he came in, and when he looked at it again with his shirt half unbuttoned and his temper worn thin by his own thoughts, the hand had moved scarcely enough to accuse him properly.
Twelve minutes.
Long enough to remove his coat and lay it carefully over the chair. Long enough to pull off his tie and leave it folded across the washstand. Long enough to sit at the edge of the bed and inform himself, with all the authority of a man accustomed to being obeyed, that he was not going anywhere.
Ceci had gone upstairs.
He had told her to sleep.
He had meant it.
The house was quiet now, the sort of quiet that came late, after servants had withdrawn and fires had settled, and even the old pipes in the walls seemed to have stopped speaking to one another.
His room held the familiar things it always held.
The austere bed. The dark wardrobe. The chair by the cold hearth.
The row of books on the small shelf, all of them chosen for usefulness rather than comfort, though a few had managed to become both in the years since.
He ought to have been equal to such a room.
He had spent enough nights in it. Enough years in rooms like it.
Rooms intended for men with breeding and rank and obligations that were meant to matter more than whatever private disorder might be moving beneath the waistcoat. He stood and crossed to the window.
The grounds lay in darkness. At this hour, Hawarden offered back only fragments: trees, gravel, lawn, the blacker rise of older stone beyond what his eyes could comfortably make out.
Somewhere on that hill sat the gate, shut in the dark and keeping its own counsel.
Leopold’s Gate. A family name. A sealed window.
A lie someone had given a frame and hinges.
It should have occupied him completely. Instead, every thread of the evening led him back to her.
To the sound of her voice when she spoke of democracy as if it were a thing, flesh and blood people had to keep alive with their own hands.
To the fear, she had not hidden from him.
To the warmth of her mouth when she kissed him.
To the brief and devastating pressure of her hand against his chest, as if she had wanted proof that there was a living man inside all that caution.
He closed his eyes.
Reason said the same thing it had been saying for days.
She was frightened. Disoriented. Dependent, though she disliked the fact of it.
He was giving her shelter. Work. Protection, if he could manage it.
Any desire layered over that was suspect by nature, if only because power could so easily disguise itself as tenderness and leave a man calling himself decent while behaving like every other predator he despised.
He had seen enough of that among his own sort.
Men who imagined themselves kind because their appetites wore gloves.
Men who took what they wanted from governesses, maids, widows, girls too new to their first season to know when to say no in a tone anyone would respect.
Men who called it admiration, or comfort, or one of those ancient male privileges that became tradition by surviving long enough without challenge.
He hated them.
He had always hated them. Perhaps because he knew too well what desire could excuse, if one allowed it too much dignity. He opened his eyes again.
The window gave back a dark reflection. His own face, severe in outline.
His hair gone loose from the day. The scar at his temple dim in the glass.
The faint asymmetry of age and injury had pressed into him after the war, though others rarely saw it.
He saw it often enough. He thought of what he had told her in the library.
That he was drawn to people who seemed to contain more life than the world had properly made room for. It had sounded very nearly eloquent. That, in itself, ought to have embarrassed him. Yet it had been true. It had been true of Archie first.
Archie had altered the shape of Duncan’s wanting before Duncan knew what shape it had. The desire had changed over time, deepened, complicated, taken on tenderness and patience, but it had never vanished.
There had been others, too. The surgeon in France.
Women with courage, vanity, tenderness, hunger.
Moments that had mattered without asking to become permanent.
Yet what Duncan rarely found was that deeper and more troublesome thing: the sense that someone had laid a hand on the central thread of him and tugged once, lightly, and the whole pattern of his life had answered.
Archie had done that.
And now Ceci had done it too. He turned away from the window.
The room looked the same as before. The same orderly shape.
The same bed turned down by hands that trusted routine more than feeling.
He could lie down. He could put out the lamp.
He could wake in the morning and be the man he had always been, controlled and thoughtful and determined to keep appetite from trespassing where care had already made things vulnerable. He sat on the bed again.
Then stood at once.
No.
He had never mistaken stillness in his life for virtue.
It was a different kind of fear. What did he actually mean to do?
Go to her room. See whether she was awake.
See whether this strangeness between them had changed under the pressure of solitude or sharpened in it.
That was what he told himself. The lie did not improve with repetition.
He wanted her.
There was no use dressing it in gentler language when the body had already decided the matter.
He wanted the sound she made when she lost patience with him.
The look in her eyes when she was startled into honesty.
The soft red weight of her hair spread against his pillow or across his arm or over the back of his hand if she turned in the dark and trusted him enough to remain there.
He wanted to touch her with more than caution. He wanted far more than was reasonable for a man in his position, and the knowledge of that did nothing to diminish it. He pulled on his coat and left it unbuttoned.
The corridor outside his room lay in shadow, lit only by two lamps spaced too far apart and the last amber spilled from the hall below.
Hawarden at night knew how to become intimate.
Rugs swallowed his tread. Doors waited shut and watchful.
The portraits along the wall seemed less disapproving than tired.
He knew the way to her room without thinking.
That knowledge gave him pause halfway down the passage.
This was foolish.
This was rash.
This was a man walking willingly toward temptation and congratulating himself on the elegance of his shoes while he did it.
He almost laughed.
Then he thought of her at the ruins, standing in the dark with the gate behind her and the wind moving through the broken stone, refusing to yield to terror.
He thought of her in the library, the astonished courage of her kiss.
He thought of the way her face had changed when she understood Archie was not outside this.
His hand tightened once against a table.
He went on.
At the top of the stairs, he stopped. The corridor had gone cold, the mineral cold of cellars and sealed rooms. A thread of water moved along the floorboards near Grace’s door.
Duncan stared at it.
There had been no leak there that morning. The water slid another inch, thin as a drawn line, then stopped. From inside the room came one soft tap against wood.
Then another.
Duncan had not touched the door. He crossed the remaining distance without deciding to move. For one second, he listened, every part of him sharpened around the quiet on the other side.
Then he knocked.
“Ceci?”
Her answer came too quickly.
“I’m here.”
That did not reassure him.