CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT #2
Duncan, for all his gravity, had always been very beautiful when he forgot to guard himself.
Ceci, for all her disarray and temper and modern bewilderment, had become beautiful to Archie in the particularly dangerous way women did when they seemed half inclined to laugh and half inclined to bite.
He was not angry with either of them. That would have almost simplified matters.
What he felt was older and far less flattering than anger.
It was the childhood fear, dressed better now, but still, he had spent years becoming the sort of man no one thought to abandon in plain sight.
That had been the function of all the brightness.
Yet brightness had never cured the deeper fear of being unnecessary once other people began belonging to one another in earnest.
He wanted what they had taken into themselves last night and could not yet quite pretend otherwise.
At noon, Margaret sent in a luncheon tray and a look pointed enough to suggest she had opinions about all three of them. None was likely charitable.
Archie took his plate to the window again while Ceci and Duncan argued, quietly and with rising animation, over whether “witness” in Leopold’s notes meant literal observation or some older ritual function. It should have amused him.
It almost did.
Ceci turned a page, frowned, then tugged a folded clipping loose from between the leaves of Vale’s letter book. It drifted to the floor. Archie bent first and picked it up. A newspaper cutting. Small. Welsh paper by the look of it.
The headline read:
American Visitor Missing Near Hawarden, Presumed Drowned
He stopped breathing for a second. Duncan took the clipping from him. Ceci came around the table. The article was short, dated November 1907.
A Miss Eleanor Price of Massachusetts, visiting relations in Chester, had been reported missing after walking out toward the old castle grounds and failing to return. A search of nearby water had yielded no result.
American.
A woman.
Missing after the ruins.
Ceci made a sound so faint Archie almost missed it.
“She didn’t drown,” she said.
“No,” Duncan said.
Archie looked at her.
She had gone very pale.
She looked up at him, and fear was only part of what moved through her face.
The rest was recognition.
Ceci understood the shape of it. A woman pulled out of one life and sealed into another. A disappearance that looked clean from the outside because no one knew where to search.
Duncan came around the table at once.
“Ceci.”
“I know,” she said, though her voice shook. “She isn’t me. She’s the version that didn’t get found.”
Silence settled.
Archie set down his untouched plate. Outside the window, the late morning had brightened fully.
Ordinary light on ordinary grounds. Somewhere down the lane, a motorcar passed and was gone.
The library, by contrast, had become something stranger by the hour.
Duncan folded the clipping once and laid it very carefully beside the journal.
“We stop for now,” he said.
“No,” Ceci replied immediately.
He looked at her.
She had color in her face again now, brought there by force.
“If I stop now,” she said, “I start imagining that article being about me.”
Archie understood that. More importantly, he understood the danger in trying to stop her once she had that tone in her voice. Duncan understood it too. He exhaled once through his nose.
“Very well.”
Archie pushed away from the window and came back to the table.
“Then let us continue before any of us becomes sensible.”
That won him a look from Ceci that held gratitude beneath the strain.
He took it and said nothing more. An hour later, when the first rush of discovery had settled into the slower work of copying names and dates, Duncan left the room to send a note to Gladstone’s for Sabrina.
Margaret, it seemed, had views on telephones and private correspondence that made written messages preferable unless death was actively progressing.
The library door shut behind him. For the first time all day, Archie and Ceci were alone.
The room altered immediately.
Ceci stood by the table, one hand on Leopold’s journal. Archie leaned back against the edge of the desk and looked at her. Neither of them pretended not to know what sat in the silence.
At last, she said, “Archie.”
He smiled faintly. “That rarely means anything simple.”
“No.”
“Go on.”
Her eyes met his then, direct, and uneasy and far too honest.
“I don’t know what to do with any of this.”
He let the words sit between them.
“The gate,” he said lightly.
She shook her head.
He looked at her for another second.
“Ah.”
That brought the smallest, pained laugh out of her.
“Yes. Ah.”
He crossed his arms, not to close himself off but to keep from doing something foolish with his hands.
“I know,” he said.
“I thought you would.”
“I’m bright in flashes.”
Ceci’s mouth trembled around what might have become a smile. Archie pushed away from the desk and came a little nearer.
“Do you want me angry?”
“No.”
“Good. Because it would be mostly theater.”
Her face softened then, and that was far more dangerous than if she had cried.
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Well,” he said, “that ship has likely put out to sea, but I appreciate the sentiment.”
She made a small, exasperated sound at him. It pleased him more than it should have.
Archie’s voice gentled.
“I’m not angry with you, Ceci.”
Her eyes searched his face for the lie. There wasn’t one, not in the way she meant.
He was hurt. He was envious. He was still deeply, inconveniently attracted to her.
He was perhaps a little furious with fate for arranging the matter so quickly and so well for Duncan when Archie himself had only just begun to admit the scale of his own wanting. Yet anger at her was not the thing.
“He loves carefully,” Archie said. “When Duncan chooses, he chooses in earnest. That was always going to be difficult for anyone standing nearby.”
Ceci looked down at the journal. “And you?”
Archie’s silence was its own answer.
The room felt warmer suddenly. She lifted her gaze again, and when she spoke, the words seemed to cost her something.
“I still want you too.”
Archie went very still.
For one reckless second, he could only stand there and let himself believe her. She had said it plainly. She had given him nowhere to hide his hope.
He stepped closer before caution could recover.
“You say the most dangerous things in a voice like that,” he murmured.
Ceci did not move away.
“Should I stop?”
“Absolutely not.”
That made her laugh, breathless this time. Archie reached out, slowly enough to give her every chance to refuse, and tucked one loose strand of her hair behind her ear. His fingers lingered just long enough to feel the heat in her skin.
“If I kiss you now,” he said, “I suspect the whole day becomes far less productive.”
“Probably.”
“And Duncan would be intolerably noble about it.”
That earned him another of those helpless little laughs.
He wanted her then with such immediate force it almost shocked him.
Wanted her mouth, yes. Wanted the quick warmth in her eyes.
Wanted the chaos of being wanted back when the whole house already smelled faintly of another man’s claim.
It would have been easy enough to kiss her.
Easy, and catastrophic in ways he was not yet certain they could afford.
So, Archie let his hand fall.
“Later,” he said.
Ceci stared at him.
“Later?”
“If the world remains deranged, and we remain ourselves, yes.”
Something in her face eased and tightened at once.
“You’re infuriating.”
“I’ve been told.”
The library door opened.
Duncan came back in with a note in one hand and took in the room in a single glance that saw far too much, as usual.
Archie met his eyes.
No apology. No challenge. Only truth, and perhaps a warning, if Duncan cared to read it.
Duncan read everything.
He set down the note.
“Sabrina will come after luncheon,” he said.
“Splendid,” Archie replied. “We’ve found enough to ruin her afternoon.”
Ceci turned back to the papers, though her pulse was still visible at her throat. Duncan resumed his place opposite them. And Archie, settling once more into work, thought with a kind of bitter delight that matters were now irretrievably worse.