CHAPTER FIFTY
Duncan
The Vale letters occupied the better part of Wednesday and all of Duncan’s patience. That was not because Vale was unclear. On the contrary. The man had been offensively lucid. It was because lucidity had yielded such terrible possibilities.
He worked alone until after midnight in the small study off the library, the one with the long table under the east window and the cabinet of older family correspondence arranged by sense rather than decade. The fire had sunk to a low red hush. The rest of the house slept or claimed to.
On the table before him lay three letters from Vale, one page of Leopold’s cramped notes, and a copy in Ceci’s hand of Eleanor’s line about the gate answering divided intention.
Duncan read again.
Repeated admissions may sensitize the traveler.Threshold return becomes easier where chronology has already been breached.One subject reported a growing capacity to anticipate disturbance before conditions were fully met.
He sat back.
Sensitize.
A monstrous little word.
Not enough to prove Voss had mastered the gate.
More than enough to make the theory plausible.
Repeated use did not merely endanger a traveler.
It might change him. Accustom him. Bring him into a kind of correspondence with the aperture itself, until the gate no longer appeared as catastrophe but as instrument.
Duncan looked toward the window, though there was nothing there but black glass and his own reflection.
If that was true, Voss had not spent decades in the wrong century. He had spent them learning where history could be nudged, laundered, frightened, softened for more brutal hands. Respectable men. That remained the true obscenity of it.
Every country had loud fools and open bullies.
They were seldom sufficient on their own.
The real danger lay in respectable exhaustion, in men with property and standing who would sooner sacrifice liberty than endure disorder, and in a bad economy that made hardness sound like responsibility.
Give such men enough unemployment, enough national embarrassment, enough talk of drift and family decline, and they would begin to call executive appetite maturity.
He was still staring at the page when the study door opened quietly.
Archie came in without knocking. He wore shirtsleeves, braces hanging loose at his hips, hair undone from whatever struggle with order he had lost on the way to bed.
The sight of him at this hour, inside the private dimness of Hawarden, struck Duncan with the old and exhausting combination of comfort and want.
“You’re brooding,” Archie said.
“I’m reading.”
“You do brood while doing it.”
Duncan put down Vale’s letter. “Why are you awake?”
Archie crossed to the sideboard and helped himself to the whisky as if he owned the house.
“I had a similar question.”
He poured a second measure and brought it over, setting one glass by Duncan’s hand before taking the settee opposite the table. For a moment, neither spoke.
The study held them easily. It always had. There were rooms in Hawarden that belonged to the family. This one, Duncan suspected, had belonged to Archie and himself since adolescence. At last, Duncan said, “Vale believed repeated crossings altered the traveler.”
Archie’s gaze sharpened. “Altered?”
“His word is sensitize.”
Archie made a face. “Hideous.”
“Yes.”
“And by altered, he means?”
Duncan slid the letter across. Archie read it once, then again more slowly. His expression changed by degrees.
“He thinks a traveler could begin to feel the gate before it opened?”
“Yes.”
“And perhaps learn how to move with it more reliably?”
“Yes.”
Archie looked up.
“Well,” he said. “That is the worst thing I’ve read since Tuesday.”
Duncan took the whisky at last.
“The consequence is obvious.”
“Yes.” Archie leaned back against the settee. “Voss may not simply be old-fashioned evil. He may be technically proficient.”
The line would have been funny in any other context.
Duncan almost smiled. Almost.
Archie’s eyes moved to the copied page in Ceci’s hand. He reached out as though to touch it from a distance. “She copied this?”
“Yes.”
The room shifted around the pronoun. Archie left his hand where it was a moment longer than necessary. Duncan watched that and, against all good judgment, found himself more moved than threatened.
“Are you jealous?” Archie asked. The honesty of it would have offended him from anyone else. Duncan considered lying. Discarded the effort.
“Yes.”
Archie nodded as if taking note of the weather. “Good.”
“Good?”
“It would be insulting if you weren’t.”
That drew a low breath from Duncan that might have become laughter. Archie watched him over the rim of his glass.
“I am too,” he said. There was no safety in that room. Only the old familiar peril of two people who had known each other too long to make pretense of much use. Duncan looked down at his hands.
“The strange thing,” he said, “is that what I feel toward you has not lessened.”
Archie did not answer at once. When Duncan looked up, the brightness in him had gone very still.
“No,” Archie said. “It hasn’t.”
They let that remain between them. It had earned the space.
Archie spoke first again.
“And what you feel toward her?”
Duncan’s voice came rougher than he intended. “Has not lessened either.”
Archie smiled faintly, not because anything was easy, but because at least it was true.
“Well,” he said. “What a remarkably inconvenient blessing.”
Duncan shook his head once, though there was no real disagreement in it. The study had grown warm. Archie had loosened further in the seat, one ankle over the opposite knee, his shirt open at the throat. Duncan’s eyes went there without permission and were caught.
Archie saw that too.
“Tell me plainly,” Archie said.
“About which thing?”
“Whether you think this is madness, appetite, or courage.”
Duncan looked at him for a long moment.
“All three.”
Archie laughed softly.
“That is annoyingly well judged.”
Duncan set down his glass.
“And you?”
Archie’s expression gentled.
“I think,” he said, “that if loneliness teaches a person anything, it is to be suspicious of abundance. We spend years convincing ourselves that wanting too much is greed when often it is only hunger finally being answered.”
The line went through Duncan like heat. He stood before he had entirely meant to. Archie’s gaze followed him upward. The old current between them woke at once. Not because it had ever died. Because honesty had removed the obstructions from its path. Duncan came around the table.
Archie did not rise. He only tipped his face up slightly, watching him approach with that unbearable mixture of warmth and knowledge that had first undone Duncan at nineteen. Duncan put a hand on the back of Archie’s seat.
“Yes?”
“Good.”
Then Duncan bent and kissed him. The kiss carried years inside it.
Not youth, not the wild urgency of stables and boathouses and half-stolen rooms, though memory ran warm beneath it.
Something older. Slower. The exact intimacy of men who had known one another’s mouths in different versions of the world and still came back to the same point of tenderness.
Archie rose into it after a second, one hand catching at Duncan’s wrist, the other finding his waist. The heat of him, even now, even after all these years, had the power to take the whole room and tilt it.
When they drew apart, it was only by inches.
Archie touched his forehead lightly to Duncan’s cheek.
“You know,” he murmured, “if we continue speaking this honestly, I may be forced to become brave.”
“You already are.”
Archie smiled against his skin.
“No. I’m merely charming under pressure.”
Duncan laughed then, quietly, helplessly, and turned his head to kiss him once more before stepping back.
“Stay,” Archie said. There was no command in it. Only request. Barely a whisper against the fire.
Duncan closed his eyes.
The word settled in his chest, heavy and warm, and he knew he had already chosen before he opened his mouth to answer.
“All right.”
He did not step forward at once. He did not need to. The room had narrowed around them: firelight, whisky, the old crushed velvet settee, the desk with Vale’s papers waiting in their cold, patient disorder.
“You are very still,” Duncan murmured.
“So are you.” Archie reached for his hand, only to hold him there. “It seems to be one of our talents.”
That nearly undid him.
Duncan shifted closer, one knee braced beside Archie on the settee. Archie’s breath changed at the contact. His hand tightened around Duncan’s, and the old current between them moved through the room with frightening ease.
“Duncan.”
“Yes.”
Archie’s gaze dropped to his mouth. “If you keep looking at me like that, I will not be responsible for what I do.”
Duncan leaned in. “Good.”
The kiss that followed was slower than the first. Deeper.
It carried less surprise and more surrender.
Archie’s hand came to the back of his neck, fingers threading into his hair, and Duncan felt the familiar become dangerous again through the terrible mercy of being allowed.
For years, they had known how to want and survive it. Tonight, survival seemed less useful.
Duncan’s hand moved to Archie’s waist. Stopped there. Stayed there long enough for the question to become clear. Archie answered by covering Duncan’s hand with his own and holding it in place.
“Here,” Archie whispered. “We are still here.”
“Yes,” Duncan said. “We are.” Duncan raised his other knee to fully straddle Archie’s thighs. The heat radiating off Duncan nearly made Archie combust.