CHAPTER FIVE
Margaret arrived as if teleported. Normally, that thought would be fanciful, but now Ceci wasn’t sure of any reality.
There was no knock this time. The door opened, and Margaret stepped in with the quiet certainty of someone who had been moving through this house longer than anyone else.
Her gaze went first to the crumbs on Ceci’s plate, then to the cup in her hand, then finally to Ceci herself.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve got some color back.”
“That’s encouraging.”
“It is if you’d like to avoid falling over.”
Ceci let out a tired breath that almost became a laugh. Sabrina rose at once, clearly delighted to hand the practical part of the situation to someone else.
“Margaret has a room ready for you,” she said. “You look like you’re arguing with sleep and losing.”
“I wasn’t aware I was putting up that much of a fight.”
“You were not,” Duncan said.
Ceci turned her head and gave him a narrow look. “Thank you for that.”
“You’re welcome.”
The answer was so untroubled that it made her smile.
Margaret folded her hands in front of her apron and waited with that formidable patience only certain women seem to possess, the kind that suggests they have no intention of repeating themselves and no doubt at all that they will be obeyed the first time.
“If you please, miss,” she said.
She became aware, all at once, of the drag in her limbs, the way the day had settled into her muscles like damp.
There was still dirt under her nails. Her scalp felt tight with dried rain.
She had, she realized with some horror, spent the better part of the day looking and smelling like something the weather rejected.
“Right,” she murmured, pushing herself to her feet. “Yes. A nap. That sounds… embarrassingly necessary.”
“Necessary is not embarrassing,” Margaret said. Sabrina, who had retaken her seat and appeared perfectly content to observe, smiled into her tea. “You see why we all obey her?”
“No,” Duncan said dryly, “we obey her because the alternative is intolerable.”
Margaret did not so much as glance at him. Ceci, suddenly and dangerously close to genuine amusement, grasped at the edge of the chair to steady herself and immediately regretted the movement.
Duncan noticed.
He was already on his feet by the time she let go again, not making a performance of it, just moving close enough that, if she needed him, he would be there before she had to ask. She hated that she noticed. She hated a little more that some part of her found it comforting.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I’m sure you intend to be,” he replied.
That was very much not the same thing.
Margaret turned toward the door. “Come along.”
Ceci obeyed without argument.
The corridor beyond the room felt cooler, the air touched with old stone and distant fire.
The house was quieter here, though never fully still.
From below came the muted percussion of kitchen work: crockery, coal, a voice lowered before it traveled too far.
Nothing in Hawarden Castle was silent. It simply knew how to keep its own counsel.
Margaret led her up the staircase and into a long passage softened by rugs and age.
The windows along one side threw bars of warm afternoon light across the floor.
Family portraits lined the opposite wall, every one of them solemn in that particular way old money seemed to favor, as if cheerfulness were an indignity the well-bred learned early to avoid. Ceci glanced at them as she passed.
“Do they all look that disappointed,” she asked, “or am I having a very specific reaction to oil paintings?”
Margaret’s mouth moved. “They look worse in winter.”
That startled a real laugh out of her, brief but genuine. It also cost her what little energy she had left. By the time Margaret opened the bedroom door, Ceci felt as if she had been walking for hours.
“This will do,” Margaret said.
By the house’s standards, the room was modest, but it was beautiful in the way old things are when they have been kept with care.
The bed was narrow and high, covered in a quilt faded to the soft colors of pressed flowers.
A small fire had already been laid and lit, enough to keep the room warm without making a spectacle of comfort.
A washstand stood in one corner with a porcelain basin and a pitcher already filled.
On the chair by the window lay a folded blanket, a towel, and what appeared to be a clean chemise.
Ceci stopped in the doorway. The sight of it, something prepared for her, however provisionally, however out of necessity, caught at her more than she expected.
“Margaret,” she said, “thank you.”
Margaret turned back the bedspread with practiced hands. “It’s a room, miss. Not a coronation.”
“Still.”
“Still,” Margaret agreed, and left the word where it was.
Ceci stepped inside.
The rug muffled her tread. The room smelled faintly of linen, beeswax, and the low mineral warmth of the fire.
It was a room meant for sleeping, recovering, disappearing from the rest of the house for an hour or two without anyone naming it a retreat.
Margaret lifted the folded chemise from the chair and put it on the bed.
“You’ll want to get out of those clothes if you mean to rest properly.”
Ceci looked down at herself. The borrowed jumper. The corduroys. Her own boots still carried the memory of wet earth.
“Yes, ma’am.”
That earned the smallest hint of approval. Margaret, who seemed to regard mortification as an indulgence best kept brief, smoothed the turned-back coverlet and glanced at her again.
“You needn’t make sense of everything this afternoon,” she said, while adjusting the curtain so the light fell more softly across the bed. “Sleep will serve you better than thought just now.”
“That feels deeply unfair.”
“It remains true.”
Ceci moved toward the bed and sank down onto the edge of it. The mattress gave only slightly, more firm than soft, but the sheer fact of sitting somewhere meant for rest was enough to make her eyes burn. Margaret took two steps toward the door, then paused.
“You’ll be left alone,” she said. “No one will disturb you unless you ask for something.”
Ceci looked up.
There was no fuss in the offer, no pity, nothing she would have to politely refuse. Just a boundary. A kindness shaped like privacy.
“Thank you,” she said again.
Margaret nodded once.
Then, after the smallest hesitation, she added, “Captain Duncan asked that you be made comfortable.”
Ceci stilled.
The kindness caught her unprepared, and Margaret saw the damage before Ceci could hide it.
“He strikes me,” Ceci said carefully, “as a man who asks very little.”
“He asks exactly what he means to.”
It was impossible to tell whether that was meant as an explanation, a warning, or both. Before Ceci could decide, Margaret left and closed the door behind her. The quiet that followed was immediate.
Ceci sat there for a moment, hands loose in her lap, listening to the muffled life of the house beyond the walls. She should take off her boots. She should unpin her hair. She should make some effort to behave like a rational woman confronted with impossible circumstances.
Instead, she bent forward, untied one boot, then the other, and let them fall where they landed.
She pulled the borrowed jumper over her head and laid it carefully across the chair, too tired to care that the care itself felt ridiculous.
The chemise was cool in her hands when she changed into it, the fabric soft from many washings, and by the time she had climbed beneath the covers, the room was already blurring at the edges.
She told herself she would only close her eyes for a minute. Just long enough to stop the spinning. Just long enough to think in a straight line again.
The blanket was heavier than she expected. The pillow smelled faintly of starch and lavender, some clean trace of an order she had not yet earned but had been allowed into anyway.
What undid her was not the strangeness of the house, but the tenderness of being expected. Someone had looked at her and thought ahead to comfort. Someone had warmed the room, laid out the chemise, turned back the coverlet, all without asking her to deserve it first.
In her own life, comfort had become something she arranged for herself in advance or went without.
Fresh sheets because she washed them. Dinner because she bought it.
Heat because she paid the bill. No one had been cruel about it.
The cleanliness of it made the loneliness harder to accuse.
The loneliness had been clean, functional, and therefore difficult to accuse.
She had not realized how long she had been living without that sort of ordinary care.
Divorce had not made her tragic. It had only made her solitary in a hundred small domestic ways no one else ever saw.
This house should have frightened her more than it comforted her.
Instead, under the weight of the blankets, with the fire kept low and steady beside her, she felt safer than she had any right to feel.
And then she was gone.