CHAPTER TWELVE
Ceci
By the time the cards were abandoned, the candles had burned low enough to leave wax pooling in their brass holders, and the fire had collapsed into a bed of red that glowed without much flame.
Sabrina, triumphant and unashamed, declared the evening a success because she had won more often than any of them and because Duncan had finally been forced to accuse her of stacking the deck.
“I did nothing of the kind,” she said, rising from the table with the air of a queen falsely slandered by lesser minds. “I simply possess cleaner instincts.”
“You looked at the cards in the reflection of the decanter,” Archie said.
“That,” Sabrina replied, “is resourcefulness.”
Duncan gave her a long look and stood. “Go to bed, Sabrina.”
She smiled at that, bright and immediate. “You first.”
Then, before he could answer, she turned to Ceci and leaned down just enough to kiss the air near her cheek, the gesture fragrant with perfume and mischief.
“Sleep well, darling. I’m heading to the manse. We shall all be much duller in the morning.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“It should be.”
With that, she swept out of the room, carrying the last of the evening’s energy with her. Archie followed more slowly, setting his empty glass aside before turning back toward Ceci.
He stood close enough that she could see how tiredness had softened him, how the gold of his hair had gone darker in the low light, how his eyes, for all their brightness, had lost none of their attention.
“Perhaps I can persuade Sabrina to give me a lift. If we hurry, I can just make the last train back to Liverpool. Try not to dream of black sows and headless women,” he said.
“I make no promises.”
“Fair.”
His gaze flicked to the shawl still draped over her shoulders. She was suddenly aware of it again, of the place where Duncan’s hand had rested when he settled it there, of the faint warmth it had held for a minute afterward.
Archie’s mouth shifted, just enough to suggest he had noticed the same thing and was too well-mannered to name it.
“Good night, Ceci.”
“Good night, Archie.”
He inclined his head and left. When the door closed behind him, the room lost its shield of laughter.
The room did not change dramatically. Nothing in Hawarden ever did anything so vulgar as dramatic.
Still, the absence of Sabrina’s laughter and Archie’s easy warmth left only the fire, the dim lamps, and Duncan standing on the far side of the card table with one hand resting against the back of a chair.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Then Duncan said, “You look exhausted.”
It came out more gently than she expected from him.
“I am.”
“You should have gone up an hour ago.”
“That feels smugly accurate.”
“It was meant practically.”
Her answer found the place in him where concern preferred to call itself practicality. She could not have said what, only that his expression changed in some small, private way that she had already begun to recognize as dangerous.
He crossed toward her then and took hold of the empty coffee cup she had forgotten was still in her hand. Their fingers brushed around the handle.
Nothing more than that.
Still, the contact ran through her with embarrassing clarity. She let go a fraction too late, and because she did, she saw the corresponding pause in him before he set the cup down.
“Margaret said Grace’s room was prepared for you,” he said.
“It was.”
“Grace’s room has its own bath,” he said. “You won’t have to wait on the household for it.”
Ceci looked up. “You may have just become my favorite person in Wales.”
“That seems premature.”
“You’re offering hot water. I’m willing to be reckless.”
“I doubt that.”
There was no sensible way to answer that. Perhaps because she could find none, she said, “I still smell like the hillside.”
His eyes moved to her face, then, briefly and unmistakably, to her hair.
“No,” he said. “You don’t.”
The room seemed to draw in around the sentence.
She could not have said whether he meant the fire, the wool of the borrowed clothing, or something else.
The uncertainty made the line far worse than it would have been with certainty.
Ceci felt heat rise into her face and was grateful for the dimness.
“Then let’s say I feel like the hillside,” she said. That, mercifully, made him smile.
“You may remedy that.”
“Yes, Captain Duncan.”
The title did something to him again. Just a spark low in his expression, there and gone before she could properly claim it.
He picked up the shawl from the back of her chair and held it out.
She stepped forward to take it, and because the room had become too quiet to move carelessly in, her hand settled over his.
It would have been easy to take the shawl and let the moment pass.
Instead, she found herself looking at him.
He was closer than he had been earlier, close enough now that she could see the dark depth of his eyes in the firelight, the exact shade of brown that looked almost black until warmth caught in it.
Up close, they were softer than the rest of him, and that softness felt far more intimate than beauty would have.
“You should sleep,” he said.
“I know.”
Neither of them moved.
Then he released the shawl and stepped back. Ceci gathered it around herself and told her pulse to behave.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night, Ceci.”
It was the first time he had said her name when it was not wrapped around a dangerous conversation.
Her heart danced.
She climbed the stairs in a state so alert it felt like its own kind of exhaustion.
By the time she reached Grace’s room, the house had gone almost still.
Her hand shook as she closed the door behind her, though whether from tiredness or the accumulated strain of the evening, she could not have said.
The room greeted her with the steady warmth of the banked fire and the faint scent of clean linen.
Grace’s belongings had been put carefully aside, but traces of another woman still remained in the room in ways that felt impossible to erase.
A silver-backed brush on the dressing table.
A volume of poetry left face down on the window seat.
A ribbon tucked into the corner of the mirror frame.
Ceci set the shawl over the chair and stood in the middle of the room, listening.
Nothing.
Only the small sounds of old wood cooling and the distant, muffled pulse of water moving somewhere in the walls. For a second, she didn’t understand what she was hearing. Then she turned toward the small adjoining door Margaret had indicated earlier, crossed the room, and pushed it open.
The bathroom beyond was dim, a claw-footed tub with warm water already drawn. A narrow shelf near the basin held a folded towel, a fresh cake of soap, and a squat bottle with a handwritten label she could not quite read from where she stood.
She stared.
Then laughed softly, helplessly.
“Grace,” she murmured, though she had never met the woman, “I owe you.”
The sheer relief of it nearly unstrung her. No more waiting. No servants carrying up steaming pails in a procession of martyrdom. No complicated humiliation. Just water, warm and ready, in a room with a door she could close behind her.
She did exactly that.
The first thing she did was unpin her hair.
It fell around her shoulders with a heaviness she hadn’t fully felt until that moment.
Then the borrowed clothes, the jumper, the corduroy pants felt adversarial in her hands.
The room was warm enough that the air against her skin didn’t shock her, and she stood for a second at the edge of the tub, aware in a distant way of dirt and fatigue and a whole day still clinging to her in layers.
“Right,” she said.
Then she stepped in.
The heat caught her all at once, deep enough to make her gasp. She sat slowly, then all at once, sinking until the water held her from waist to shoulder, and every muscle she had been commanding through the day gave up the effort.
“Oh,” she whispered.
Ceci closed her lids for the moment. If Grace had ever been reluctant to give up the room, Ceci understood her completely.
The water smelled faintly of the herbs, lavender first, then a greener note beneath it.
Basil, or something near enough to basil to make her smile again.
She had not expected that fragrance in this era.
Something in her had assumed the past would smell of coal, starch, and restraint.
Instead, she had found herbs, beeswax, rain, paper, and Duncan’s hands on a shawl. She opened her eyes immediately.
“No,” she told the ceiling. “We’re not doing that.”
The ceiling declined to help. She reached for the soap and worked it between her hands, building lather before dragging it along her arms, her neck, the back of her shoulders.
By the second pass, the water had already begun to cloud, carrying away whatever remained of the hillside, of old leaves and damp stone and the animal exhaustion of sleeping where she should not have slept.
At some point, she caught the scent of herself under all of it and made a face.
“Oh, that is vile.”
She could not believe she had spent the better part of a day in polite company smelling like wet wool, rain, and some unclassifiable edge of panic. Then again, she could. She had been busy.
“Excellent work, Cecily,” she muttered. “Really making the strongest possible impression.”
By the time she reached her hair, the worst of the day had begun to dissolve.
She pulled the chain to the drain, willing the day's anxiety to slip away with the dirty water.
Once she was satisfied the tub was empty enough of the old water, she began the task of refilling it with clean water to wash her hair.
The little bottle on the shelf proved to hold some kind of wash, thinner than modern shampoo, not meant for luxurious abundance so much as practical cleanliness.
Still, when she worked it through her hair, the scent rose warmer than she expected.
Lavender again, but greener now, less floral than crushed and living.
Kitchen herbs turned soothing by heat. She let herself enjoy it.
What made the bath dangerous was not the water, the solitude, or even the strange century pressing at the edges of the room. It was her enjoyment. Her body was relaxing before her mind had approved it.
Her thoughts drifted anyway.
To Archie, bright-eyed and quick, looking at her as if she were already a story worth following to the end. To Sabrina, who had taken one look and decided Ceci might be fun.
And, inexcusably, to Duncan.
To his stillness. To the brief warmth in his voice when he said her name. To the fact that he knew the whole truth and had chosen to carry it alone. To the quiet treachery of her own instinct, which had trusted him before she had any right to. That was the part she did not know what to do with.
When she finally rinsed her hair and stood, the room had grown hazier with steam, the mirror over the basin gone soft with it.
She wrapped herself in the towel and crossed to the glass, anyway, wiping a clear circle with one hand.
Her own face emerged from it in pieces. Tired, yes. But brighter. More alive.
“You cannot be getting prettier because you’re time traveling,” she told her reflection. “That would be offensive.”
The woman in the mirror, annoyingly, offered no argument.
By the time she had dried herself and pulled on the nightdress Margaret had left for her, the house had gone completely quiet.
The fabric felt cool and soft over her skin, and the scent of the soap still lingered at her throat and in her hair.
She padded barefoot back into the bedroom, crossed to the chair, and picked up the shawl Duncan had handed her.
It still held the shape of his hands in her imagination.
That was intolerable.
She draped it over the foot of the bed and climbed under the blankets before her mind could build anything worse from the memory. Outside, somewhere beyond the thick curtains and older walls, Wales had turned fully toward winter. Nos Galan Gaeaf, she thought.
A night for thresholds. For strange arrivals.
For the possibility that the world was thinner than anyone liked to pretend.
She lay in the dark with lavender and basil drying in her hair and tried, with very little success, not to think of the fact that the strangest thing she had crossed tonight was not the line between centuries.
It was the distance between herself and Duncan. And how small it had become.