CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE #3
“I would ask you to stop mistaking my love for a chain.”
Archie closed his eyes.
Ceci’s hand covered her mouth. Duncan’s voice had almost nothing in it. “You are my family.”
“Yes,” Sabrina said. “That is how I know family sometimes has to open the door and hate the emptiness after.”
Duncan could not answer.
Sabrina touched his cheek. Brief. Sisterly. Fierce.
“You have been braver than happy for too long,” she said. “Try the other thing.”
Duncan bent his head.
Grace stood from her paperwork and crossed to Archie before the silence could deepen.
He tried to rise.
She pressed her hand to his shoulder. “Stay down, idiot.”
Archie blinked up at her. “I had forgotten how naturally compassion comes to you.”
“It comes with limits,” Grace said. “Sit still.”
You will look after him,” she said.
Archie’s throat tightened. “I generally thought that was his job.”
“It is everyone’s job now.”
“That sounds communal. He will hate it.”
“He may grow.”
“Grace, please. We are already under strain.”
Her mouth trembled. Then she leaned down and kissed his forehead.
He went still.
“If you get another century,” she whispered, “do something indecently happy with it.”
Archie shut his eyes.
When he opened them, she had stepped back. Ceci went to Grace next. For one awkward heartbeat, neither woman moved. Then Grace pulled her into a hard embrace.
“I am so sorry,” Ceci whispered.
Grace held her tighter. “Don’t be sorry yet. You haven’t done it.”
Sabrina joined them, wrapping both arms around Ceci from behind with dramatic possessiveness and genuine grief.
“If you take my favorite men,” Sabrina said into Ceci’s hair, “I shall expect you to make them tolerable.”
Ceci gave a wet laugh. “That may be beyond my skill set.”
“Learn.”
Margaret had gone very still by the hearth. Archie noticed because Margaret never wasted stillness. Then she crossed to Duncan. He turned toward her at once. She looked up at him.
“You were a dreadful boy,” she said.
Duncan blinked.
“Too quiet. Too thin after your mother died. Always reading when you should have been eating. Always acting like grief was a task you could complete if you behaved well enough.”
Duncan’s face changed in increments. Margaret’s voice grew rougher. “I have fed you through more foolishness than any woman should bear. If you come back, I will feed you again. If you go forward, find someone there who understands you forget meals when unhappy.”
Duncan said, “Margaret.”
She took his face in both hands and kissed his cheek.
“Live if you can,” she said. Then she turned sharply away and began rearranging the tray with unnecessary violence. Archie decided he would say nothing because he wished to continue existing.
Duncan seemed equally wise.
Outside, the rain began to soften. The window had lightened at the edges. Not dawn yet. The first suggestion of it. A thin gray weakening of the dark.
Sabrina saw it. “Time.”
The word restored motion.
Duncan moved like a man grateful for orders. He gathered the pistol, checked it, then took another from the desk drawer and handed it to Archie. Archie lifted a brow. “Darling, I am flattered but also sitting.”
“You know how to use it.”
“Yes.”
“Then carry it.”
Ceci looked at the gun in Archie’s hand, then at Duncan’s.
Her face tightened. Archie understood. In her century, guns had become one of those horrors everyone named, and no one solved.
Or perhaps his own century had simply dressed the same horror in finer clothes.
Duncan saw her expression. “You do not have to carry one.”
“I don’t want one.”
Archie slipped the pistol into his coat pocket, careful of the weight. Grace folded the packet, tied it with a ribbon from the stationery drawer, and sealed it with wax because Grace, under world-ending pressure, still cared about method. Sabrina added her own smaller envelope and tucked it inside.
“What is that?” Ceci asked. “A letter,” Sabrina said.
“To whom?” Sabrina smiled. “To you, if time has the decency to deliver it.” Ceci’s eyes filled again.
Sabrina pointed at her. “No. Don’t you dare.
I am being very brave and very moving, and we haven’t time to make a ceremony of it.
” Grace wrote one final line across the outside of the packet.
For Cecily Anne Bishop, upon return or inquiry.
She handed it to Margaret. Margaret took it as if receiving a child.
“I will put it in the silver safe,” she said.
Grace shook her head. “No. Too obvious. The old linen press behind the cedar panel in the east corridor.”
Duncan stared at her. “There is a cedar panel behind the linen press?”
Grace looked at him. “This is exactly why women run houses.”
Margaret nodded once, deeply satisfied. “I’ll see it done.”
The house seemed to shift around that promise.
Archie stood slowly.
Ceci turned at once. Duncan did too. He held up a hand. “If either of you tells me to sit, I shall become unbearable.”
“You already are,” Duncan said.
“And yet loved. A triumph.”
Duncan’s eyes met his.
No evasion now.
“Yes,” he said.
Archie’s breath caught.
How absurd, to almost die from a single word after surviving the night so far.
Ceci stepped between them and buttoned Archie’s coat herself, slow around the bandage, her hands lingering a second at his chest. Then she turned and straightened Duncan’s collar, because even the apocalypse required symmetry.
Archie watched Duncan look down at her. It was all there.
Love, fear, refusal, surrender, the impossible hunger for more time.
Ceci looked up at him. “You have to choose for yourself.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Duncan’s mouth tightened. “I am trying.”
She nodded.
Then Archie said, “So am I.”
Both of them looked at him. He had not meant to say it like that. Bare. Without decoration. Yet the words had arrived, and there was no retrieving them.
“I want to live,” Archie said.
The room went still again.
He gave a faint, humorless laugh. “Awful, isn’t it? At my age, one hopes to have developed a more impressive moral crisis.”
Ceci’s face softened.
Duncan’s did something worse. It opened. Archie looked at him because if he did not now, he might never manage it.
“I want to see what she means by airplanes and 3-D pictures with sound and libraries full of invisible catalogs. I want to watch you attempt to understand a supermarket. I want to sleep beside both of you without listening for footsteps in the hall. I want to hold your hand in public and survive the scandal by being several decades too late for it.” His voice broke, and he smiled through it because he was still himself.
“I want central heating. I want mornings so safe they have the nerve to be boring. I want a century that has no idea what to do with me, and I want the arrogance to make it try.”
Ceci was crying now.
Duncan had not moved.
Archie looked at him. “And I hate wanting it, because wanting it means leaving them. Leaving Sabrina. Grace. Margaret. Hawarden. Every version of myself I constructed in order to endure this world. But I want it.”
Duncan crossed the distance between them.
He kissed Archie in front of everyone. No hesitation.
No hidden angle. A hand at the back of his neck, a carefulness for the bruise, a force that made Archie’s eyes close and the room disappear for the length of one heartbeat.
When Duncan drew back, his voice was rough.
“Then we get you there.”
Ceci made a sound that did finish him then, or nearly. She reached for both of them, and they folded around her as much as Archie’s ribs allowed. Her face pressed against his coat. Duncan’s arm came around them both.
No one spoke.
Even Sabrina let them have it.
Then Ginger barked once.
All three of them startled. Archie let out a laugh against Ceci’s hair. “She makes a compelling point.”
Duncan released them first, though his hand stayed at Archie’s shoulder a moment longer. Sabrina wiped beneath one eye with the heel of her hand and looked furious about it. “Go before I become ignoble and embarrass us all.”
Grace took Ceci’s phone from the table and handed it to her. “Take this.”
Ceci looked down at it. “The battery is nearly gone.”
“It brought the message. It may bring another.”
Ceci nodded and slipped it into her coat pocket. Duncan took two torches from the drawer, then paused with one in hand. Ceci stared. “You have flashlights?”
Archie looked between them. “I beg your pardon.”
“Electric torches,” Duncan said.
Ceci’s laugh came out wild. “Right. Sorry. Crisis vocabulary.”
Archie smiled. “No, no. ‘Flashlights’ is appalling. I shall enjoy being appalled later.”
“Promise?” she asked.
His smile softened. “Yes.”
Duncan handed him one of the torches.
“Stay between us when the ground turns rough,” Duncan said.
Archie opened his mouth.
Duncan looked at him.
Archie closed it. “How thrilling. Growth.”
Grace gathered coats from the hall. Margaret returned just as they reached the library door, face composed again, hands empty.
“The packet is hidden,” she said.
Sabrina nodded.
No one asked where.
That was the point.
Ginger had begun following Duncan from room to room.
She did it without fuss, which made it worse.
No barking. No bright demands for attention.
Only the steady click of claws behind him whenever he crossed the hall, as if she had appointed herself witness to whatever he refused to say.
At last, Duncan stopped outside the library and looked down at her.
“You cannot come everywhere.”
Ginger sat.
Archie, from the doorway, said, “She appears to disagree.”
Duncan did not answer. He only bent and touched two fingers to the white blaze between her eyes. Ginger leaned into the contact at once. His face changed for half a second. Then he stood.
“Inside,” he said.
This time, she obeyed.
At the front door, the whole house seemed to gather for them.
The lamps along the hall burned low. The portraits watched with their usual grave disapproval, although tonight Archie liked to imagine they were merely concerned.
The floorboards creaked beneath their feet.
Somewhere above, a window rattled in the wind.
Duncan opened the door.
The rain had thinned to mist.