CHAPTER NINE
Archie
Sabrina did not telephone unless she was bored, scandalized, or in possession of something she intended to enjoy in company.
Archie had been hoping for a quiet end to the day, which was how he knew, the moment the porter appeared in the doorway of his office and said, with too much neutrality to be innocent, “Telephone for you, sir. Miss Gladstone,” that his hopes were over.
He finished the sentence he was writing, though he could not say afterwards what it had been, sat down his pen, and went.
The corridor outside the lecture rooms smelled faintly of chalk, wet wool, and old paper.
The whole university had taken on that tired late-afternoon air it always wore by Michaelmas, one part seriousness, one part draft, and a larger part vanity than anyone in authority ever cared to admit.
Archie crossed it at a pace that would have been more convincing if he had not quickened it halfway to the telephone.
Sabrina came down the line in a rush of brightness.
“Archie, darling. Tell me you are free for supper.”
“That depends how one defines free.”
“You are at the university. I promise you no definition of freedom there will stand up under examination.”
He leaned one shoulder against the wall and smiled despite himself. “You’ve telephoned me to insult my profession.”
“I’ve telephoned because Duncan has acquired a fascinating American, and if you fail to appear before seven, I shall think you have gone dull.”
Archie straightened.
“An American?”
“Yes.”
“At Hawarden?”
“Yes.”
“And Duncan has acquired him…or her.”
“Her. Do keep up.”
He laughed softly. “That sounds more like a theft than an introduction.”
“Oh, I haven’t the patience to explain it properly over the telephone. Come to supper. She’s lovely. He’s impossible. I am being forced to carry the entire evening myself.”
“When have you ever objected to that?”
“Rarely. Seven o’clock. If you are late, I shall make you pay for it.”
She rang off before he could ask the useful question: why.
Archie stood for a second with the receiver still in his hand, then set it down and looked back toward the office he had left.
There were essays on the desk waiting to be marked and a set of notes he had intended to revise before the morning lecture.
They could all wait. He had spent enough years under the broad, respectable shelter of philosophy, smuggling his interest in motives, impulses, and the less orderly chambers of the mind into rooms that preferred abstractions, to know when curiosity was worth obeying.
Besides, Sabrina’s vagueness was never accidental. If she was withholding details, it meant the details were the point.
Back in his rooms, he gathered his things more quickly than he meant to.
He caught sight of himself in the glass above the mantel and paused long enough to flatten the front of his hair, which had already escaped any arrangement he had attempted after luncheon.
It refused correction, as it always had.
His father had left him that much at least, the fair, unruly curls and blue eyes that led strangers into assumptions he was content to let them make.
His mother had given him the rest, the warmer cast of skin, the features that left some people studying him as if he were a sentence they had expected to read more easily.
He had become very good at giving the impression of abundance.
Friends, students, invitations, noise, easy laughter, the whole bright machinery of a man no one need worry over.
It was a pleasant trick and had served him well.
The trouble with such tricks was that people believed them.
They liked Archie Booker immensely. They did not often ask whether he was lonely, and he had become skilled enough at charm that they no longer had reason to.
Only the well-worn path to Hawarden ever truly felt like going somewhere he might be missed.
Liverpool had taught him long ago that most rooms liked a man better when he could be placed. He had never been inclined to assist.
By the time he arrived at Hawarden, the light had thinned into the sort of gray that made the castle look older than it already was.
The house rose out of the evening like something that had been standing there before humans conquered fire, all stone, windows, and inherited certainty.
He knew the place well enough to walk into it without hesitation, but tonight, the moment the door opened, he felt that something in it had altered.
Nothing visible had changed, not the carpets, the portraits, or the old smell of beeswax and fire.
Still, the house felt newly alert, as if everyone inside it had spent the last several hours thinking around the same subject without yet agreeing to say what it was.
Margaret relieved him of his coat with her usual complete indifference to his charm.
“You’re late,” she said.
“Fashionably.”
“You’re damp.”
“That feels unkindly phrased.”
“It was meant kindly. Had I intended cruelty, you’d have known.”
Archie smiled. “Have I time to improve myself before supper?”
“No.”
“Then you are sending me in at a disadvantage.”
Margaret gave him a look that took in his cuffs, his hair, his shoes, and whatever remained of his good intentions. “It has never slowed you before.”
That, he thought, was unfairly accurate.
He followed the sound of voices toward the drawing room.
Sabrina’s came first, unmistakable even through a closed door.
Duncan’s followed, quieter and less frequent, which only made Archie more certain that Sabrina had not exaggerated.
Duncan was never more sparing with speech than when his attention had narrowed to a single point.
Archie slowed just outside the doorway and saw them all at once.
Sabrina had arranged herself on the sofa with one ankle tucked neatly beneath her, all ease and command, as if rooms were only ever waiting for her to occupy them properly.
Duncan stood near the mantel, one hand resting against it, the posture he adopted when he wished to look at ease and had not quite succeeded.
And by the window, half-turned toward Sabrina, stood the American. So, this was the acquisition.
She was not what he had expected, though he could not have said what he had expected from so vague a summons.
Something louder, perhaps. Someone more determined to be impressive, or more consciously out of place.
Instead, she looked like a woman who had spent the day being astonished and had finally become too tired to continue performing it.
Her dress suited the house well enough, though there was still a trace of foreignness in the way she carried it, not inaccuracy exactly, more a reluctance to let the fabric decide the shape of her.
Her hair was pinned up, but not so carefully that a few strands had not escaped.
Her face was open in that dangerous way intelligent faces are when they have not yet learned which company deserves concealment.
And then she turned fully toward him, and he saw at once what Sabrina had meant.
Beauty alone was not what struck him, though she had that.
She was vividly in motion, in the quick expressiveness of her mouth and the alertness of her eyes.
What caught him was the sense of a mind still moving at speed beneath visible restraint.
She seemed both very present and slightly elsewhere, like someone who had not yet made peace with the day’s terms.
Interesting, then, in the old and honorable sense of the word. Sabrina saw him first and smiled as if something had gone precisely to plan.
“Archie,” she said. “At last.”
“I came as quickly as your intrigue permitted.”
“You’re here now. That’s all I require.”
Duncan turned then. Duncan’s face altered by a fraction at the sight of Archie: relief first, then recognition, both gone almost as soon as they appeared.
Relief, perhaps. Or simple recognition, the sort reserved for old loyalties one had stopped expecting to explain.
It was gone almost at once, but Archie saw it.
“You made it,” Duncan said.
“I was promised supper and a lovely new friend. It would have been vulgar to disappoint both.”
That, finally, won him a brief change in Duncan’s face. Close enough to a smile to count. Sabrina rose and made the introductions with all the ceremony of a woman arranging a meeting she had already enjoyed imagining too much.
“Archie Booker, who teaches young men to misunderstand themselves with greater sophistication every year. Miss Cecily Bishop.”
“Ceci,” the woman corrected at once.
Archie liked that immediately.
“Archie,” he said, taking the hand she offered.
Her grip was warm and steady. She did not lower her eyes or soften her voice or attempt the sort of charming uncertainty some women used to make men feel larger than they were.
She looked at him, directly and with interest, as if introductions were most useful when they gave both people an honest place to begin.
He released her hand more reluctantly than he should have.
“Miss Gladstone had made you sound irresistible,” he said.
“That seems deeply irresponsible of her.”
“It was generous,” Sabrina said.
“It was manipulative,” Duncan corrected. She waved a hand. “Only slightly.”
Archie let his gaze move back to Ceci. “And have you, in fact, proven worthy of the telephoned summons?”
“That depends,” she said. “Is the standard very high?”
“For most people. I’m willing to be flexible.”
The faintest curve touched her mouth. There and gone again. He felt it like a small private success. Duncan had gone still beside the mantel.
The old private wound moved beneath the wit again. Archie could charm a room, improve a supper, and be invited back anywhere worth going. None of that guaranteed he would be the one someone reached for when the fire burned low.