CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Ceci
Ewloe, Flintshire, Wales
Tuesday came gray and elegant and too quickly.
By half past seven, Rowe’s drawing room had filled with polished wood, low lamps, decanters glinting amber beneath the light, and the particular concentration of men who wanted to pretend they were attending a civilized supper while very much hoping to influence the fate of the state before pudding.
Sabrina, who had insisted on receiving Ceci at Gladstone’s rather than allowing her to arrive “looking like a librarian ambushed by destiny,” had put her in black silk with a burgundy sash and a set of earrings that made her feel more dangerous than she had any right to feel.
“You are not dressing for the men,” Sabrina had said while fastening the clasp. “You are dressing for the occasion.”
“And what occasion is that?”
“Mutual ruin.”
Ceci had laughed, though the sound had come out thin.
Now, standing in Rowe’s drawing room with a glass in her hand and Matthias Voss across the room in excellent tailoring, she thought perhaps Sabrina had been unduly optimistic.
Mutual ruin implied fairness. Voss never seemed interested in anything fair.
Duncan stood near Hart, already engaged in some dry exchange with Sir Neville Hargreaves.
Archie had found the editor within eight minutes and had turned the man visibly more agreeable simply by existing near him.
Sabrina, radiant and lethal, occupied the space between the women and the men without belonging to either camp, which was exactly where she preferred to stand when something ugly might need naming later.
Ceci moved slowly through the room and listened. Hart, expansive and flushed with importance, was saying to Peter Maddox, “One must admit Parliament has looked rather feeble over all this continental business.”
“Feeble is expensive,” Maddox replied. “Industry cannot survive perpetual hesitation.”
The tune came before the lyrics: cost, hesitation, efficiency. Men preparing themselves to admire force so long as it came with ledgers balanced. Voss entered that conversation with the ease of someone stepping into a carriage already in motion.
“The public,” he said, “will forgive many things. Weakness is not one of them.”
Maddox turned toward him at once. Hart smiled, pleased with himself.
Ceci felt the room adjust around the sentence.
No one challenged the premise. That was what frightened her.
The language had been chosen too well. He had not said violence.
He had not said suppression. He had said weakness, letting the rest of them supply the meaning most convenient to their own vanity.
She crossed toward the sideboard, took nothing from it, and used the position to listen better. Sir Neville said, “Surely what the country wants is steadiness.”
“Steadiness,” Voss replied, “and the confidence that steadiness can still act.”
The men murmured.
Hart laughed lightly. “We must not become theatrically continental, Voss.”
Voss smiled. “Certainly not. England’s genius lies in making discipline look like common sense.”
The line sent a visible flicker through Archie, who had just come within earshot carrying a fresh drink he did not intend to finish.
He caught Ceci’s eye across the room. She saw at once that he had heard the same thing she had.
Voss was not pitching the BUF as street theater.
He was pitching authoritarianism as proper government in a national emergency.
Duncan arrived at her side almost without seeming to move.
“Have you eaten anything?” he asked. The question was absurdly domestic under the circumstances.
“Some sort of fish arranged to flatter the plate.”
“Good.”
She looked at him. “He’s doing it.”
“Yes.”
The words barely moved his mouth.
“Who is already with him?”
“Ives is tempted. Maddox is worse. Hart is still trying to believe he hosts only reasonable men.”
Ceci kept her eyes on the room.
“And Hargreaves?”
“Frightened,” Duncan said. “Which may prove just as dangerous.”
They stood together for only a second longer before Hart turned and called Duncan back into the circle, delighted to have a sensible man present to legitimize the rest.
Ceci moved away before anyone could call attention to the fact that she had been standing rather too easily at Duncan’s shoulder. She found Archie by the piano.
“Well,” he murmured. “I’ve had pleasanter evenings, though fewer more educational.”
“You got something?”
“The editor is already half persuaded that Mosley has been misunderstood by people who object to uniforms on aesthetic grounds.”
She grimaced.
Archie’s mouth twisted. “Worse, Voss has convinced him that if war comes, party politics will look childish, and Britain will need a coalition of serious men prepared to act. He did not say BUF. He did not need to.”
Ceci looked back toward the group at the fire.
“Serious men,” she said.
“Yes.”
“God, I hate that phrase.”
Archie smiled faintly. “Quite.”
A servant passed with another tray. Hart called for more brandy.
Maddox began explaining shipping tonnage as if it were a moral category.
Voss turned his head and met Ceci’s eyes across the room.
Even at a distance, the recognition in him felt intimate.
He excused himself from the group two minutes later and made his way toward the bookshelves.
Ceci did not move.
Archie did.
He shifted beside her, closer by one deliberate inch.
Voss noticed.
He stopped at the shelves with one hand resting lightly on a leather spine.
“Miss Bishop,” he said. “Mr. Booker.”
“Herr Voss,” Archie replied with effortless politeness. Voss’s attention remained on Ceci.
“I hope Hawarden’s papers continue to reward your attention.”
The first time he had said something like that, it had gone through her like ice. Tonight, it only made her angrier.
“They have become rather more interesting of late,” she said.
“I am glad.”
Archie glanced between them, smiling faintly enough that only someone who knew him would recognize the tension underneath it.
“Have you an interest in archives, Voss?”
“I have an interest in what families think worth hiding.”
Ceci said, “That sounds almost romantic.”
“It is rarely romantic,” he replied. “Usually, it is money, sex, or power. Occasionally all three.”
His gaze dipped to where Archie’s hand rested near the back of her chair. Then back to her face. Heat rose in Ceci’s skin, half fury, half the dangerous awareness that he had noticed exactly what he was meant to notice.
Voss lowered his voice.
“The last American was less curious than you.”
The room seemed to drop away. Ceci looked at him and knew, before he even smiled, that this was deliberate cruelty shaped into courtesy. Archie heard it too. She felt him still beside her.
“What last American?” he asked, very lightly. Voss turned to him as though mildly surprised by the question.
“The one in 1907,” he said. “Surely you have found her by now.”
Archie’s smile vanished.
Ceci said nothing because she no longer trusted her face. Voss looked back at her.
“She wanted badly to go home,” he said. “That was her mistake. The gate has very little patience with divided longing.”
Then he inclined his head, as if he had done nothing more outrageous than discuss the weather and returned to Hart’s circle. Ceci stood up and her chair scraped the floor.
A few heads turned.
Archie touched her wrist at once.
“Easy.”
She looked at him.
“He knew about the clipping,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He knew what she wanted.”
“Yes.”
“He knows something about how the gate works.”
Archie’s fingers tightened once around her wrist, then gentled.
“Yes.”
Across the room, Duncan had gone silent in the middle of Hart’s speech.
Hart, oblivious, was still talking. Duncan, who had read the scrape of her chair and the shape of Archie’s stillness correctly from half a room away, was already excusing himself.
By the time he reached them, Ceci had regained enough of her composure to want to throw something.
“What?”
Archie answered before she could.
“He knows about the 1907 woman.”
Duncan’s face hardened almost imperceptibly.
“And more,” Ceci said. “He said she wanted to go home. He said that was her mistake.”
Duncan looked once toward Voss, then back at her.
“Do you wish to leave?”
Its directness cut through the anger like a blade.
Ceci stared at him.
That was what Voss had been trying to do. To strike at the one fear beneath all the rest. To make her believe wanting two times, two lives, two men, was enough to tear her apart at the seam.
“No,” she said. “I wish to kill him, which is entirely different.”
That startled a breath of laughter out of Archie even now.
Duncan’s mouth almost moved.
“Good,” he said. “Hold to that.”
Hart called from the fire, “Carlton, you are missing the whole point.”
Duncan did not look away from her.
“I shall return presently,” he said. “Do not be alone with him.”
Archie answered, “You wound me.”
Duncan did go then, though with visible reluctance. Archie remained close enough that their sleeves brushed. After a moment, he said, “You do realize he was trying to frighten you into choosing some clean and singular loyalty.”
Ceci let out a sharp breath.
“Yes.”
“And how unfortunate for him that you are already so complicated.”
That made her look at him. He smiled then, small and private and full of dangerous warmth.
For one split second, with Voss across the room and Hart half seduced by power and Duncan returning to the fire with perfect English composure, Ceci wanted nothing more than to drag Archie into the library at Rowe’s and kiss him senseless.
The urge was so immediate it left her lightheaded.
Archie saw it in her face. His own expression changed.
“Later,” he murmured.
This time, the promise in it made heat flash through her instead of shame.
Later.
The word sat between them with a pulse of its own. A footman appeared at Ceci’s elbow.
“Miss Bishop. Lady Judith asked for you.”
Ceci looked toward the far side of the room, where Lady Judith had just vanished through the doorway near the bookshelves. The request was plausible enough to be dangerous. Archie’s hand shifted near hers.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No,” Ceci said quietly. “That would make it strange.”
“It is strange.”
“Stranger, then.”
She followed the footman out. At least, she thought she did.
He opened the door ahead of her, stepped aside, and Ceci passed through, expecting the short passage back toward the withdrawing room.
Instead, she found herself in a narrow corridor paneled in dark wood, the lamps turned low enough that the far end vanished into shadow. Behind her, the door clicked shut.
She turned at once.
The handle moved under her hand.
Locked.
For one cold second, she heard only her own breath and the muffled conversation beyond the wall.
Then the key turned.
The door opened from the other side, and Voss stood there with one hand on the knob.
“My apologies,” he said. “These old houses do enjoy confusing strangers.”
Ceci looked past him and saw Duncan at the end of the hall, already moving toward them. Voss stepped back before Duncan could reach her.
So careful.
So civilized.
So impossible to accuse.
“Miss Bishop,” Duncan said.
“I’m all right.”
Voss smiled faintly. “I am relieved to hear it.”
Duncan did not look at him. That, somehow, was worse than anger. He offered Ceci his arm.
She took it.
By the time they returned to the drawing room, Hart had raised his glass and called the room to attention.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “let us at least admit that if war comes, party rigidity may become a luxury Britain cannot afford.”
Silence followed.
Voss stood with one hand in his pocket and the faintest hint of a smile.
The argument had been laid bare. A national emergency.
A coalition of serious men. Party rigidity as childishness.
Democracy as something admirable in peacetime and disposable when frightened people could be persuaded to call fear realism.
Ceci felt every hair rise along her arms.
This was what they had been afraid of. This room. This language. This soft, polished push toward surrender dressed as pragmatism.
Duncan answered first.
“The country may be forced into many unpleasant choices,” he said. “Abandoning representative government to men who admire continental strongmen ought not be among them.”
The room shifted.
Hart laughed uneasily. Maddox frowned. Hargreaves looked down at his drink. Ives sharpened, sensing the first real line of conflict all evening. Voss said, “No one here has proposed abandoning anything.”
Duncan turned his head.
“No,” he replied. “You are only teaching men how to speak of it without naming it.”
That shook the room more than Hart’s speech had. Ceci watched the room divide, ragged and visible.
Who looked away. Who leaned in. Who enjoyed the argument because it spared them the trouble of deciding. Who feared where it led and still lacked the nerve to stand against it openly. Archie murmured, “Well done, love.”
It took Ceci a second to realize he had not meant Hart. Heat moved through her so quickly that she did not trust herself to look at him. Across the room, Voss’s gaze flicked once toward them.
Then he smiled.
And she understood with perfect clarity that he had seen enough to begin using it.