CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Duncan
Hawarden Castle (New), (Castell Penarlag, Newydd)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
Hawarden stood where he had left it. That was impossible, absurd, and cruel.
The house should have changed beyond recognition.
It should have become a shell, a museum, a ruin with polite signs and rooms emptied of all troublesome memory.
It should have had the decency to be lost, because loss was at least a language Duncan understood.
Instead, Hawarden rose through rain and morning with its old bones intact.
There were changes. He saw them the moment the car turned along the drive.
The gravel had been edged differently. A new path curved toward a side entrance.
Electric lamps stood where none had stood before.
A discreet sign near the gate read Hawarden Preservation Trust in clean black letters.
The west lawn had been altered by careful planting and low modern rails.
Yet the house remained.
Stone knew how to survive an accusation.
Duncan did not.
The car stopped before the entrance. For several seconds, he could not open the door. Ceci sat beside him, still holding his hand. Archie watched the house through the glass; his face stripped of its usual bright defense.
Mr. Griffith turned from the front. “Take your time.”
Duncan almost laughed.
Eighty-five years had passed, and a solicitor had given him permission to take his time.
Archie reached across Ceci and touched Duncan’s wrist.
“Dax.”
The old name in his voice broke something open.
Duncan looked at him.
Archie’s face had gone pale with pain, but his eyes were steady.
“If we stay in this thing much longer, I may be defeated by the seats.”
Ceci made a sound that was half laugh, half sob.
Duncan opened the door.
Cold air entered, wet and clean. The step onto the drive felt stranger than the crossing.
He had left this house in darkness, Sabrina in the doorway, Grace holding herself straight, Margaret with a parcel in her hands, Ginger whining against her skirts.
He had crossed the lawn, believing he might return before dawn or vanish forever.
Now dawn had come eighty-five years later.
The front door opened before they reached it.
For one shattering second, Duncan expected Margaret. Instead, a woman in her late fifties stood there, wearing dark trousers, a wool jumper, and a scarf looped at her throat. She had gray-brown hair cropped to her chin and a face that undid every defense he had brought with him.
Her eyes filled the moment she saw him. She did not come forward.
Smart woman.
“Captain Carlton,” she said.
Duncan stopped.
The title should have sounded theatrical in the present. It did not. It sounded like a key turning in an old lock.
Ceci moved closer. “Who are you?”
The woman looked at her. “Mair Ellis. Director of the Hawarden collections.”
Her gaze shifted to Archie. “And you must be Mr. Booker.”
Archie pressed a hand to his ribs. “I am increasingly known, which is a worrying development.”
Her mouth trembled. “I have read your notebooks.”
Archie’s face altered. The old defense rose, faltered, and failed him. He looked away first. “Then I apologize for the more dramatic passages.”
Mair laughed softly, and the sound saved them all from the edge of tears.
“Please come in,” she said. “The doctor is in the morning room.”
The morning room.
Duncan’s breath caught.
Ceci saw.
Mair saw too.
“We use the old names,” she said. “Miss Carlton insisted. In the trust documents, at least.”
Grace.
Duncan stepped over the threshold. The hall greeted him with warmth.
Modern heat, invisible and even, moved through the air.
Electric lights glowed from fixtures shaped to look older than they were.
A fire burned in the main hearth, a real flame, a real coal scent mingling with something cleaner.
The portraits remained. Some he knew. Some had been moved.
A new security panel blinked discreetly near the door.
The old table stood where it always had.
Duncan put one hand on it. The polished wood held under his palm.
He closed his eyes.
Memory struck without mercy.
His mother crossing the hall in a blue dress. His uncle laughing too loudly at Christmas. Sabrina throwing her gloves onto that table as if the house were hers by conquest. Archie at seventeen, sitting on the bottom stair because his father had written a letter too cruel for breakfast.
Ceci descending in Grace’s dress, the wrong century in her pocket and the whole house beginning to wake around her.
“Duncan,” Ceci whispered.
He opened his eyes.
The hall remained.
Mair stood quietly near the door. Mr. Griffith had come in behind them, carrying Ceci’s suitcase with the solemnity of a man aware that luggage had become historical evidence.
A doctor emerged from the doorway at the end of the hall.
She was in her forties, with dark hair pulled back and a practical expression. “Which one is injured?”
Archie lifted a hand. “I have attracted attention.”
The doctor’s eyes moved over him. “You look like you’ve been in a fight.”
“I have won some aspects of it.”
“Morning room,” she said.
Archie looked at Ceci. “She has Margaret’s tone.”
“That means obey.”
“Yes, I gathered.”
Duncan helped him across the hall. Every step through Hawarden made the present and past collide.
The runner had changed. The wall color had shifted.
Modern lighting had been hidden with care.
A small plaque beside one doorway mentioned accessibility renovations.
The word accessibility meant nothing until Ceci murmured, “Good,” under her breath, and he understood enough to value it.
The morning room was both itself and a stranger.
A table had been moved. The chairs were wrong.
A framed photograph hung where a watercolor had once been.
Yet the windows looked out on the same slope of lawn, and the light entered from the same angle, and grief used both facts as weapons.
Archie was settled on the sofa. The doctor began examining him with brisk efficiency.
When she lifted the T-shirt and saw the bruise, her mouth tightened.
“Rib injury. Possibly cracked. Laceration reopened, but shallow. You should have imaging.”
Archie blinked. “That sounds ominous.”
“X-ray,” Ceci said.
“Does that involve knives?”
“No.”
“Electricity?”
“Yes, sort of.”
“No.”
The doctor looked at Ceci. “He needs it.”
Ceci nodded. “I know.”
Mair said from the doorway, “The trust has a private clinic arrangement. We can manage it discreetly.”
Duncan looked at her sharply. She held his gaze. “Miss Carlton anticipated medical issues.”
Ceci sat down abruptly.
Archie closed his eyes. “Grace, again.”
The doctor cleaned the wound, checked his breathing, checked his ribs, his pupils, and his pulse. Archie bore it with comments until the doctor said, “If you keep joking, I will assume the pain is manageable and press harder.”
He went silent.
Duncan found her excellent.
When the examination finished, she gave instructions. Pain medication. Rest. No lifting. No sudden twisting. Watch for breathing difficulty, confusion, fever, and worsening pain. Archie accepted the medication with theatrical suspicion. Ceci hovered near him until the doctor finally looked at her.
“You should sit before you fall.”
“I’m fine.”
Everyone in the room looked at her.
She sat.
The doctor checked her too, then Duncan, despite his protest. No major injuries.
Shock, exhaustion, exposure, mud, and minor cuts.
Duncan learned the future had many words for the body’s protest and used them all with unsettling calm.
After the doctor left to make arrangements with the clinic, Mair approached Duncan.
“The packet is in the library.”
The room changed.
Archie pushed himself upright. “Then I am miraculously recovered.”
“You are not,” the doctor called from the hall.
Archie looked offended. “She hears like Margaret, too.”
Mair smiled faintly. “The packet can be brought here.”
Duncan surprised himself by answering. “No. The library.”
Ceci looked at him.
He could not explain it well. The packet had waited there, or near enough.
Grace had written it from a table. Sabrina had placed herself inside the record because she had refused to be left out of any room worth entering.
If Duncan was going to receive what remained of them, he would do it in the place where they had left their hands on paper.
Archie held out an arm. “Then let me be dramatically escorted.”
The doctor reappeared. “You may walk if you go slowly.”
“Ah,” Archie said. “My preferred speed of tragedy.”
Ceci took his left side. Duncan his right. They crossed the hall toward the library.
The door stood open.
Duncan stopped just outside it.
The library had survived.
The breath left him.
The long table remained. So did the shelves, though now fitted with careful lighting and preservation glass in some sections.
Climate monitors rested in corners like small scientific shrines.
A computer sat on one side table, absurd and black among the old wood.
Labels marked boxes. The great ladder had been polished.
The fireplace had been restored. And on the far wall, where an indifferent hunting scene had once hung, was Sabrina.
A portrait.
Not the young woman who had stood in his hall before dawn. Older. Perhaps forty. Perhaps older than that. Painted in dark green, one hand resting on the back of a chair, chin lifted, mouth curved with the faintest suggestion of mischief. The artist had caught the eyes best. Bright. Ruthless. Alive.
Beside her hung Grace.
Grace’s portrait was smaller, plainer, and for that reason harder to bear. She sat at a writing desk, pen in hand, with Hawarden’s east windows behind her. Her face was calm, direct, and unwilling to flatter the viewer.
Archie whispered, “Oh.”
Ceci’s hand found Duncan’s.
Duncan did not remember reaching for it. Mair stood near the table, eyes wet.
“They commissioned each other,” she said. “Lady Sabrina first. Miss Carlton later. They left instructions that both portraits were to remain in the library unless the room itself was lost.”
Archie laughed once under his breath.
“Sabrina would insist on supervision.”
Mair nodded toward the table. At its center sat a long archival box. Gray. Acid-free. Modern. Tied with white cotton tape. On top of it lay an older packet, wrapped in oilcloth and sealed with cracked red wax. Grace’s handwriting remained visible across the outside.
For Cecily Anne Bishop, upon return or inquiry. Ceci made a small sound.
Duncan could not move.
Archie did.
Slowly, painfully, he stepped forward with Ceci’s help and placed one hand on the table.
“Hello, girls,” he said, voice breaking around the words. “You have been busy.”
No one answered.
Mair drew out a chair. “You may open it when ready.”
Duncan stared at the seal. The past had waited in a box. The future had brought them to it. Ceci reached toward the packet, then stopped.
She looked at Duncan.
Then Archie.
“It belongs to all of us.”
Duncan placed his hand over hers.
Archie did the same.
Together, they broke the seal.