CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Ceci
Chester, Cheshire, England)
They left after breakfast with Eleanor’s note folded into Duncan’s inner pocket and Margaret’s disapproval packed in with the sandwiches.
Margaret herself saw them to the motorcar with a basket on one arm and an expression that suggested no amount of warning had ever improved the judgment of the people she fed.
“You will eat,” she said. Archie took the basket from her with solemn obedience. “We always mean to.”
“That is not the same thing.” Her eyes shifted to Ceci. “And you will not go running into any more ruined gateways today.”
“I’ll try to restrain myself.”
“Do.”
Duncan, already at the motor, said, “We shall be back before dark.”
Margaret looked at him as if time itself had failed to earn her trust. “You will be back when you are back. Keep her warm.”
Archie smiled at that. “Which one of us?”
Margaret did not so much as glance at him. “The one with sense enough to hear me.”
Then she went back inside, leaving the front door to close behind her with all the weight of old houses and domestic verdicts. Ceci stood for a second in the clear, cold morning, gloves buttoned, coat pulled close and looked at the two men beside the car.
Duncan had chosen one of his darker coats for the drive, long and severe and cut so well it made her resent tailoring as a concept.
Archie looked less exact and more dangerous for it, his hat pushed back farther than fashion required, curls refusing every effort at discipline, mouth already carrying the hint of amusement he seemed to wake with.
It occurred to her, not for the first time, that stepping out in public with both of them might be the sort of thing county women noticed from behind gloved hands and discussed over lunch for a week. That thought should have embarrassed her more than it did. Duncan opened the rear door.
“Ceci.”
There was nothing intimate in the gesture. Nothing except the fact that he had done it himself rather than leaving it to habit or to Archie or to any lesser form of care.
She got in.
Archie settled in the front beside Duncan with Margaret’s basket at his feet, and a moment later, they were moving out through the drive, Hawarden falling away behind them in wet stone and winter light. For the first mile, no one said much.
The country rolled out in soft, damp color.
Hedges blackened by the season. Fields gone pale beneath a low sky.
Cottages appeared now and again as if the land had allowed them to remain by special indulgence.
The roads were not crowded, though every cart and motorcar that passed seemed to linger in her mind longer than it should have, proof that the world was proceeding toward its familiar catastrophe one ordinary mile at a time.
Archie turned half in his seat.
“Have you been to Chester before?”
“In my own time, yes.”
“That remains such a useful phrase.”
“It’s also deeply inconvenient.”
He smiled. “I like it anyway.”
Duncan’s hand tightened once on the wheel at the sound.
Not enough for anyone else to mark. Enough for her.
That was another difficulty she had not meant to acquire.
The growing ability to read them both in small physical truths.
Archie in brightness, in movement, in the easy warmth of his face.
Duncan withheld things, in stillness, in the one extra degree of care that gave him away more surely than any speech.
She leaned her head back against the seat.
“You know what’s offensive?”
“Almost certainly,” Archie said. “Still, tell me.”
“I’m starting to get used to this.”
Neither man answered at once. The motorcar hummed steadily on. Then Duncan said, “That seems sensible.”
“Sensible,” she repeated. “That is such an insulting answer to a woman adapting to time travel.”
“It is a useful answer.”
Archie looked over his shoulder again. “Do you want him less useful?”
“No,” Ceci said. “That would be terrifying.”
Archie grinned. “There. Everyone is agreed.”
They reached Chester a little before eleven. The city arrived first in smell, then in sound, then in stone. Wet air off the Dee. Bell metal from somewhere farther in. The close, layered geometry of old streets that had learned to carry centuries without looking burdened by them.
Ceci had known Chester before, though not like this.
In her own life, it had been a place of visits, of historic surfaces and careful tourism, of signage and interpretation, and the safe, sanitizing distance of the past already explained.
Now it stood around her uncaptioned. More alive.
Less tidy. Shops with real goods in the windows.
Women moving quickly against the cold. Men with newspapers tucked under their arms. Delivery carts.
Schoolboys. A city doing the ordinary work of being itself while Europe edged toward ruin.
Duncan brought the car to a stop near the Rows, and for a moment the three of them sat there, watching Lower Bridge Street move.
Archie took the basket. Duncan got out and came around to open Ceci’s door.
Again, that same small courtesy. Again, the same effect.
She stepped down onto the pavement and turned her face up into the cold.
Chester.
In the distance, bells sounded noon’s approach.
The three of them stood together for a second, and she had the fleeting, disorienting impression of being seen from outside.
One woman, two men, a winter morning, a purpose no one passing them would have guessed at.
Archie must have felt some version of the same thing because he said lightly, “Well. We do look incriminating.”
“That is because you insist on sounding pleased,” Duncan replied.
“I am pleased. We are conducting a possibly supernatural inquiry in one of the better cities in England.”
Ceci looked from one to the other. “It’s honestly offensive how much you both suit the place.”
Archie laughed. Duncan only reached into his coat and took out Eleanor’s folded page.
“Lower Bridge Street,” he said. “Ashgrove House.”
The search itself took less time than she expected and longer than she wanted.
The first person they asked had never heard of Ashgrove House.
The second pointed them one street too far.
A bookseller with spectacles thick as bottle bottoms knew the name but insisted the numbering had changed before the war, then corrected himself and said before the last one.
At length, a woman in a hat shop, after looking them all over with open curiosity, pointed with her chin to a narrow frontage farther down.
“That was Fellows’s place,” she said. “Before her niece took it.”
“Niece?” Duncan asked.
The woman shrugged. “Or cousin. Some relation. Still there, I think, unless she’s at dinner early.”
It was just after eleven.
Archie murmured, “Encouraging.”
Ashgrove House turned out to be narrower than its name had implied.
A modest Georgian frontage with a faded painted sign over a ground-floor dressmaker’s premises and rooms above.
The sort of city house in which people lived and worked and kept the middling parts of their lives arranged behind ordinary doors.
Ceci stared at it for a moment longer than she meant to.
Eleanor had crossed this threshold after the gate, carrying whatever terror and unbelief came with being untethered from one’s own year, and had chosen to leave something behind in case the pattern repeated. That knowledge moved through her with an intimacy she was not prepared for.
Duncan knocked.
A minute later, the door opened on a woman in her late fifties wearing spectacles on a chain and a measuring tape draped around her neck. Her eyes moved over Duncan, then Archie, then Ceci with practiced efficiency.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Fellows?” Duncan asked.
“No.”
“Miss Fellows, then?”
“I am Miss Edna Fellows. What is this in regard to?”
Ceci felt both men shift, neither of them stepping in front of her exactly, only making themselves present on either side in a way that steadied and exposed her all at once. Duncan took Eleanor’s folded note from his pocket and offered it without surrendering it.
“We’re trying to locate a packet left here many years ago. By an American woman. Eleanor Price.”
Miss Fellows did not take the note. She looked at his face instead, then at Ceci’s.
Something changed in hers.
“Come inside,” she said.
The front room was half shop, half parlor, warm from a coal fire and crowded with dress forms, pinned fabrics, and the pleasant tyranny of useful objects. She closed the door carefully behind them and gestured for them to go farther in.
“My aunt kept the house before me,” she said. “Mrs. Eliza Fellows. She died ten years ago and left me a great many impractical instructions. Most of them concerned linens. One or two concerned Americans.”
Archie’s brows lifted. “One does so appreciate a family with priorities.”
Miss Fellows ignored him.
Her gaze remained on Ceci.
“What year do you believe yourself to be from?”
The room went very still.
Ceci looked at Duncan.
Duncan’s face gave away nothing. Miss Fellows said, “If you can answer that properly, then I know which packet she meant.”
Ceci took one step forward.
“Two thousand and twenty-three,” she said. Miss Fellows closed her eyes.
“God help us,” she murmured. Then she opened them again. “She was right.”
Archie let out a low breath. Miss Fellows turned without another word and crossed to the escritoire beneath the window.
From its lowest drawer, she drew a key, then moved to a narrow cupboard built into the wall beside the hearth.
The lock resisted once, then yielded. Inside sat a small tin dispatch box wrapped in old oilcloth.
Miss Fellows lifted it out with visible care and set it on the table.