CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Ceci
Sabrina arrived just after three with cold air in her wake, dark gloves in one hand, and the look of a woman who had spent the better part of the day being patient with lesser minds and had about reached the end of her enthusiasm for it.
She stopped in the library doorway and took in the room at once.
Duncan at the table with Vale’s letter open before him. Archie, half-seated on the edge of the desk with a cup of coffee gone neglected at his elbow. Ceci with Leopold’s journal spread wide under her hands, and far too much awareness in her body of both men’s proximity.
Sabrina’s gaze sharpened.
“Oh,” she said. “Something happened.”
Archie smiled. “Astonishing powers of deduction.”
“No,” Sabrina replied, stepping inside. “You three look as though the house has developed a pulse.” She set her gloves on the side table and added, with bright malice, “Also, Dax appears tired in a highly specific way.”
Ceci nearly dropped the journal. Duncan, who had the grace to look only faintly murderous, said, “We found more.”
“That,” Sabrina said, coming closer, “I had gathered from the note. I was referring to the rest of it.”
Archie covered a laugh with his hand. Ceci kept her eyes very firmly on the page in front of her and wished, not for the first time, that time travel had granted her invisibility in addition to historical inconvenience.
Sabrina took the chair Duncan pulled out for her and accepted the packet of papers without further tormenting any of them, which was almost more alarming than if she had gone on.
She read quickly.
Archie watched her over the rim of his cup.
Ceci watched too, because Sabrina was one of the few people in the world who could make thought look glamorous.
Her face altered by degrees. Interest first. Then attention.
Then something colder. When she reached the newspaper clipping about the missing American woman, her mouth tightened.
“Well,” she said. “That is abhorrent.”
“It improves from there,” Archie said.
“It had better not.”
Duncan passed her Vale’s letter. She read it in silence, then read it again.
“The man in 1894,” she said at last. “Yes. That could well have been Voss.”
Ceci sat back in her chair. Hearing someone else say it made the thing more real. More solid. Less like a fever dream produced by exhaustion, ghosts, and Welsh weather. Sabrina laid the papers down with great care.
“And,” Sabrina said, “before anyone congratulates himself on being usefully horrified, there is more.”
Archie looked at her. “There always is with you.”
“A man came to Gladstone this morning asking after Miss Bishop.”
Duncan’s face altered.
Ceci’s hand tightened on the edge of the journal. Sabrina removed a folded calling card from her glove and laid it on the table.
“No name. He gave it to Ellen at the side door and asked whether the American lady had recovered from her walk.”
The room went still.
Ceci stared at the blank card.
“The side door?” she said.
“Yes,” Sabrina replied. “Which means he did not want to be received. He wanted the servants to carry the question inward.”
Duncan reached for the card, then stopped short of touching it.
Sabrina’s mouth hardened.
“I sent Ellen home for the afternoon with pay and told the footman to forget he had ever seen the man. Then I came here.”
Archie’s voice was quiet. “That is why you were late.”
“That is why I am angry.”
“Yes,” Archie said. “Margaret’s sponge cake was disappointing at luncheon.”
Sabrina gave him a flat look. He smiled. “I thought it important that we preserve proportion.”
Duncan ignored them both.
“Hart sent anything?”
Sabrina’s eyes shifted to him. “Yes.”
At once, the air in the room changed. Hart had sent something. Hart, who had been so pleased to discover a handsome extremist with tailored opinions and the manners to make them sound like difficult truths rather than sewage dressed for dinner. Sabrina opened her bag and withdrew a folded note.
“Delivered to Gladstone’s half an hour ago,” she said. “Hart wishes to gather a few of us at Rowe’s on Tuesday evening. Informal. Merely supper and conversation. Matthias will be there.”
Archie let out a quiet breath. “How charming.”
Ceci held out her hand. Sabrina passed her the note. Hart’s handwriting sprawled confidently across the page. There was the usual nonsense about friendship, ideas, and the necessity of private discussion in serious times. Beneath it all, she could feel Voss in the invitation like a second ink.
“He knows we’re looking,” she said. Duncan’s gaze lifted to hers. “Yes.”
“He wants to see how much.”
“And to place us together in a room of his choosing,” Sabrina added. Ceci folded the note shut. The thought of another evening with Voss should have made her refuse on principle. Instead, she felt the sharper thing beneath fear. The excitement of a competition becoming more defined.
“Then we go,” she said. All three of them looked at her.
Archie’s mouth curved. “I did wonder how long patience would hold.”
Ceci threw him a look. “I refuse to be sent upstairs while men with fascist sympathies discuss the fate of the world over mutton.”
“That,” Sabrina said, “is an excellent instinct and a terrible plan unless managed carefully.”
Duncan leaned back in his chair, one hand resting over Vale’s letter.
“You are not going alone.”
“I had not suggested it.”
“You implied it.”
“I implied competence.”
Archie made a thoughtful sound. “This is very good. I find myself equally fond of you when you are right and insufferable.”
Ceci ignored him. Mostly.
Sabrina regarded the three of them with a speculative stillness that made Ceci uneasy for reasons having nothing to do with politics.
“You will all go,” she said finally. “That is obvious. Hart likes Duncan. Voss is intrigued by Ceci. Archie can charm information out of a stone wall if given half a glass of decent whisky and an appreciative audience.”
Archie bowed his head. “At last, someone sees me clearly.”
“Do stop speaking,” Sabrina said. Then her eyes moved from one to the other again. “What matters is that none of you behaves as though the emotional situation in this room is more pressing than the political one outside it.”
Nobody answered.
That silence told its own story.
Sabrina smiled without kindness.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
Ceci looked down at the note in her hand.
The emotional situation in the room. A neat phrase for a profoundly indecent reality.
She had spent the night with Duncan. She still wanted Archie.
Archie knew. Duncan knew. Sabrina knew all of it within thirty seconds of stepping into the library because Sabrina missed very little and forgave even less where foolishness was concerned.
There was, apparently, no civilized way through the day.
Sabrina folded her hands.
“Let me save us time,” she said. “If any one of you becomes territorial, I shall have you removed bodily from the evening by whichever servants are nearest.”
Archie laughed first.
Duncan did not, though something moved at the corner of his mouth. Ceci stared at Sabrina. “That is an extraordinary thing to say.”
“It is an extraordinary room.”
Then Sabrina’s expression softened.
“Must every arrangement be reduced to a contest?” she asked. “Especially by people old enough to know better.”
No one spoke.
Ceci sensed the words continue to resonate. A hidden possibility lay within the reprimand. She had been thinking in terms of choices because stories taught women to see only that. This man or that one. One path, one bed, one future, one person cast aside in the cold. Clear lines. Neat losses.
But Sabrina’s question exposed the poorer truth: Ceci had been thinking in the shape of loss. One man chosen, another left out. One loyalty elevated, the rest made embarrassing. Perhaps that was only the vocabulary loneliness taught people.
Looking at Sabrina, at Archie, at Duncan, Ceci felt the frightening possibility of a room in which no one had to vanish to make the others fit. Archie broke the silence first, though without his usual ease.
“There are, in fairness, practical objections.”
“Yes, there are practical objections,” Sabrina said. “You are three intelligent people in 1938, not decorative geese in a pastoral painting.” She pushed back her chair and stood. “My point is simpler. Voss would be delighted if jealousy made you stupid. Do try not to hand him that pleasure.”
She gathered her gloves.
“And,” she added, glancing at Ceci, “the twentieth century is already exhausting enough without all of you trying to think like Victorians.”
Then she left the library in a stir of wool, perfume, and devastating clarity. The door closed behind her.
The room went still.
Archie looked at Duncan.
Duncan looked at the papers. Ceci looked at neither of them because she had become suddenly, painfully aware of the sound of her own breathing. At last Archie said, with astonishing mildness, “Well.”
“Yes,” Ceci said. “Well.”
Duncan rose and crossed to the hearth, though the fire did not need him. He stood there a moment with one hand on the mantel, shoulders straight, face unreadable in profile.
It occurred to Ceci, not for the first time, that men who looked composed often did so because the alternative would burn through the walls. Archie slid off the desk and came to the table. He braced both hands on the wood and looked at her directly.
“I think,” he said, “we should perhaps stop pretending this is a question of simple arithmetic.”
Her heart kicked once, hard enough to hurt. Duncan turned from the hearth.
Ceci glanced between them.
“You choose extraordinary moments for honesty.”
Archie’s mouth curved, though there was strain under it now.
“I’m very nearly heroic under pressure.”
Duncan came back to the table and stood opposite them both.
The papers lay open between the three of them.
Leopold’s warnings. Vale’s irritation. A missing American woman in 1907.
Hart’s invitation for Tuesday. The gate on the hill waiting in memory like a second room inside the first. And inside all that, this impossible triangle.
Ceci looked at Duncan.
He met her eyes with that grave steadiness of his.
“I have no desire,” he said carefully, “to make claims upon you as though you were territory.”
The words went through her like heat. Archie let out a soft breath. “Thank Christ.”
Duncan’s gaze shifted to him then, and something older moved across his face. Weariness. Affection. A sharper thing beneath both.
“Nor,” Duncan said, “have I any wish to behave as though what exists between us, Archie, can be set aside because the situation has grown more complicated.”
Archie was unguarded now, no longer dismissed as history while she desired him in the moment. He became very still, a rare reaction Ceci had only seen a few times, when something struck him so profoundly that all his vibrant energy seemed to pause.
“Duncan,” he said.
“I am being plain.”
“You are being alarmingly plain.”
“It seems overdue.”
Ceci’s hand gripped the edge of the table, and for a moment, she struggled to breathe.
This was the reality she had scarcely dared to envision even as Sabrina’s words still echoed in the air.
It was a reality broader than merely choosing between them, broader than any limited expectation she had learned to accept.
It felt impossible, greedy, possibly foolish, and it was very much real. Archie then looked at her.
“I’ve no wish to surrender either of you,” he said. “That would be a ridiculous waste.”
That did it.
Ceci laughed, breathless and half shocked.
Archie would say the outrageous thing as though it was common sense and weather.
Duncan had gone silent just long enough to let the words stand and not deny them.
Worse, some part of her had wanted to hear exactly that and had been too frightened of her own appetite to ask whether it could exist in the world without destroying something beautiful. Duncan’s eyes never left her face.
“And you?” he said.
The question in it was unmistakable. Ceci looked from one man to the other.
Archie, bright and open and physically alive in every room he entered.
Duncan, all restraint and intensity and the exquisite danger of a man who loved with his whole soul, once he finally allowed himself to call it love.
Both of them dear already in entirely different ways.
Both of them tangled together long before she arrived.
Both of them were looking at her now as though she had some power to bless or ruin the moment.
Her pulse was wild.
“I don’t want to choose,” she said. The truth of it settled over the room with almost physical force.
Duncan shut his eyes.
Archie, astonishingly, smiled.
“Well,” he said, “that is convenient, because I do not particularly want you to.”
Ceci’s throat tightened.
Duncan opened his eyes again. There was heat in them now, and something like relief, though he wore it more carefully than Archie would have.
“We are not deciding the whole of our lives this afternoon,” he said. “Or even next Tuesday.”
“No,” Archie agreed. “God forbid we become efficient.”
“But we will not lie to one another,” Duncan finished. That, perhaps, was the real vow in the room.
No lies.
No forced simplicity.
No pretense that desire had drawn one line when it had, in truth, drawn three. Ceci looked down at the papers, then back up.
“Then what are we doing?”
Archie leaned one hip against the table and folded his arms.
“Stopping fascists, apparently.”
Duncan’s mouth almost moved.
“And after that?”
Archie’s gaze went to Duncan, then back to her.
“After that,” he said, gentler now, “we shall have to see whether we are all as brave in private as we have been pretending to be in public.”
Heat rose in her so quickly she had to look away.
The room had become almost unbearably charged, and for one dangerous second, she thought Archie might come around the table, or Duncan might reach for her, or both.
Instead, Duncan drew Hart’s invitation toward himself and flattened it neatly with one hand.
“Tuesday,” he said.
The word had changed its meaning. It was no longer only about Voss. Ceci let out a breath and gathered Leopold’s journal closer, because work was the only available form of composure left to her.
“Tuesday,” she repeated.
Archie looked at the two of them, smiled with unmistakable satisfaction, and picked up his coffee at last.
“Well,” he said, “that should make dinner conversation more interesting.”
No one answered him.
No one needed to.
Somewhere deep in the house, a clock began to strike the hour.