CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Duncan
For the rest of the afternoon, Duncan moved by habit. That was the only reason he remained useful.
If he allowed himself to think too closely about the sound the ladder had made when it slipped, or the look on Ceci’s face in the instant before balance went, or the sight of Archie’s hand closing around her waist while Duncan caught her wrist hard enough to bruise, then whatever passed for composure in him would have gone at once.
So, he chose habit.
He checked the brake again. Then the track. Then the shelf above it. He examined the disturbed dust, the books, the angle of the wheels, the photograph in his hand, and finally the lock on the library door, as if one ordinary mechanism after another might restore ordinary proportions to the thing.
None of it did.
Archie stood close enough to interfere and did not. That alone told Duncan how serious he took it. The easy humor had gone out of him almost entirely, leaving only attention and a temper he did not bother to disguise.
Ceci had recovered before either of them, which did not reassure Duncan half as much as it should have. She was too pale, too still, too intent on usefulness. He recognized the instinct because it was one of his own. A person did not think about fear while they were naming details.
“It was released by hand,” she said. Duncan looked up from the ladder rail.
“Yes.”
Archie turned the photograph over once more and said, “Then either someone wanted the books, or someone wanted her off the ladder.”
The room went quiet.
Ceci crossed her arms, then immediately unfolded them again, as though the gesture had made her feel too closed in.
“That seems melodramatic.”
“It seems possible,” Archie said. Duncan set the brake back into place with a small, precise click.
“No one enters this house without my knowing it,” he said. “No one has, at least not recently and certainly not in this room.”
Ceci looked at him. “Then someone knew where to interfere.”
“Yes.”
The word came out harsher than he intended.
Duncan knew the difference between warning and violation.
A letter could be answered. A threat in a drawing room could be managed.
But someone had touched Hawarden. Someone had entered the library, studied the ladder, and arranged harm inside a room that should have been under his protection.
Archie handed him the photograph.
Matthias Voss stood at the edge of the group, placed with careful modesty.
Close to Mosley’s circle, close to Hart and Rowe, close enough to belong without inviting the first glance.
Two others Duncan recognized from neighboring counties stood nearby, all of them arranged on a terrace he thought might be Rowe’s, though the angle gave little away.
The back was blank, but the front had done enough: Voss, Hart, Rowe, and the others on the same terrace, arranged inside the same dangerous orbit.
“He has been in these rooms,” Ceci said.
Duncan nodded.
“Or close enough to them.”
Archie’s gaze moved to the upper shelf again.
“Which means he may already know more of Hawarden than we like.”
Duncan looked at Ceci then. She was standing a little apart now, hands at her sides. He wanted, absurdly, to ask whether he had hurt her. He wanted several things he had no business wanting. He settled, instead, for the practical.
“You’re done for the day.”
That drew her eyes to his at once.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not a spaniel you can order out of a room.”
“Then stop looking as if you might faint from anger.”
That took her up short enough that Archie turned away for half a second, either to hide amusement or sympathy. Duncan could not have said which irritated him more. Ceci exhaled sharply through her nose.
“I’m not going upstairs because someone tampered with a ladder.”
“You are going upstairs,” Duncan said, “because we now have reason to believe the house is part of the problem.”
That quieted all three of them. He reached for the bell pull. When Margaret arrived, she took one look at the ladder, the photograph, and their faces and dispensed with unnecessary questions.
“What’s happened?”
Duncan held out the photograph. She did not take it. She only looked at the man at the edge of the group and then at the released brake.
“Ah,” she said.
That was all.
Archie lifted his brows. “That seems an extraordinarily compact response.”
Margaret turned her eyes to him. “I have no use for theatricality when practical measures are wanted.”
Duncan almost smiled.
“Lock the side entrances,” he said. “And no one in the library unless sent for. I want a full account of who has been in this room over the last month.”
Margaret nodded once. “You’ll have it.”
Her gaze shifted to Ceci.
“And you,” she said, “will sit down before you fall down, which would be humiliating after surviving the exciting part.”
To Duncan’s astonishment, Ceci laughed. It came out a little ragged, but it was laughter all the same, and it brightened the room enough for him to breathe.
“Everyone keeps threatening me with rest,” she said. Margaret’s mouth moved very slightly. “Yes. We are all trying to preserve your inconvenience.”
Archie laughed properly then, one hand over his eyes.
Duncan did not.
The image of Ceci slipping backward off the ladder was still too near.
Margaret had her seated by the fire within two minutes with tea she did not want and biscuits she said she would not eat and then did.
Archie drew up a chair beside her. Duncan remained standing because if he sat, he suspected he might not get up again before midnight. They went over the sequence twice.
Who had last used the ladder?When the photograph must have been tucked into the book.Which servants had dusted the upper shelves?Whether anyone outside the immediate household had entered the library. The answers were not enough.
That was the worst of it. There was no smoking gun, only the steady accumulation of wrongness. A disturbed shelf. A loosened brake. A man who did not belong in the record suddenly appeared in a photograph from this house’s orbit.
By the time Margaret withdrew and the lamps had been lit properly, no one was calling the ladder an accident anymore.
Archie stood first.
“This is no longer academic,” he said.
Duncan looked at him.
“No.”
Ceci, seated by the fire with her untouched tea cooling beside her, gave a brief, humorless smile. “I’m relieved the two of you have finally reached that conclusion.”
Archie glanced down at her. “Mockery suits you.”
“I’m trying to stay charming under pressure.”
“You’re succeeding beautifully.”
The line irritated Duncan immediately.
Worse, the irritation came tangled with the clear memory of Archie’s hand at her waist, and Ceci’s mouth still softened from kissing when Duncan found them in the gallery. That image had been running under every practical thought of the afternoon like a current beneath ice.
He hated the image.
He hated that some part of him still admired it too.
“Enough,” he said.
Archie turned.
The room narrowed.
Archie had not taken offense. He knew better than that.
The word carried too much weight to be only about the last sentence.
Ceci looked from one to the other, aware of something old moving between them without yet knowing what shape it took.
Archie answered lightly, though not carelessly. “Of what?”
Duncan set the photograph down on the table.
“Of treating this as though it were entertainment.”
Archie held his gaze, receiving the point, then nodded once. “Fair.”
The temperature in the room changed by a degree. Ceci rose then, slowly enough that Duncan almost told her to stay seated again and stopped himself only because the impulse was becoming intolerable.
“What now?” she asked.
Duncan forced himself back onto useful ground.
“Now we stop thinking like librarians alone.”
Archie’s mouth shifted. “How offensive.”
Duncan ignored him.
“We map the house,” he said. “Entrances, corridors, servants’ access, who could have been where, and when.
We check every photograph box and every book near that shelf.
We go through the guest records again, not just for Voss, but for any German visitor, any man introduced without family or title, any vague note that might have hidden him. ”
“And Rowe,” Ceci said.
“Yes.”
“And Hart.”
“Yes.”
Archie moved to the table and took up a pencil. “Liverpool as well. If he is a political adviser, someone will have heard the name, or at least one of the names he’s gone by before.”
“Good,” Duncan said.
Ceci came around to the table too, still pale but steadier now.
She stood opposite Archie, one hand resting near the photograph, and for a second Duncan had the absurd urge to move her bodily out of range of every dangerous thing in England, including the man smiling across at her with too much warmth.
He did not move.
That, more than anything, was the cost of adulthood.
By the time the hall clock struck eight, they had reached the limit of what the evening would give them. Archie returned to the study for his notes. Ceci gathered the guest book and the photograph. Duncan remained by the table, aligning the stacks until every edge sat clean beneath his hand.
He heard Ceci before she spoke.
“You were frightened.”
Her voice was quiet.
He turned.
She was standing only a few feet away now, the others gone from the room, the photograph in one hand.
The lamps were low enough that the library had softened at the edges.
Her face looked different in this light.
More tired. More open. Her sleeves were pushed back.
The black feather on the underside of her right wrist showed plainly against her skin.
He looked at it before he meant to.
Then at her.
“Yes,” he said.
Ceci blinked, as if perhaps she had expected him to deny it.
“That was quick.”
“Would you prefer a lie?”
“No.” Her mouth curved faintly. “I’m getting spoiled by honesty.”
He did not answer that. She came a little closer.
“I wasn’t going to faint,” she said.
“That was not the part I found alarming.”
The line sat between them. He saw the exact moment she heard more in it than either of them should safely allow. Her fingers moved against the photograph. For one dangerous second, he thought she might reach for him. Instead, she said, “Archie caught me.”
The jealousy that passed through him was so immediate, so unadorned, that he had no chance to disguise it from himself, and perhaps not from her either.
“Yes,” he said.
Ceci looked at him carefully now, with no innocence at all.
“He was closer.”
It was an observation. Nothing more. Duncan could have answered half a dozen ways. He chose the one least likely to ruin the room.
“I noticed.”
That, apparently, was not as safe as he had intended. A flicker of heat moved through her expression. Something alive and aware and far too interested in what she was hearing. The library seemed to grow smaller around them.
Ceci rested the photograph on the table and then, perhaps without quite realizing what she was doing, laid her bare right hand beside it.
The feather showed.
Duncan’s gaze dropped once, helplessly. When it lifted again, she had seen that too. He crossed the distance then. It was not wise. The space had become impossible.
He stopped close enough to take her wrist if he chose. Close enough to see the pulse there, quick and treacherous under the feather.
“Duncan,” her voice came to him just above a whisper.
His name in her mouth always sounded more dangerous than it ought to.
He touched her wrist very lightly, one finger at first, then the whole curve of his hand around it, not hard and not enough to frighten, only enough to feel her pulse jump under his thumb.
“This,” he said, “is why you are not going near another ladder.”
Ceci laughed, breathless and disbelieving at once.
“That is a terrible attempt at seduction.”
“It was not an attempt at seduction.”
“No,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
He almost smiled.
Almost.
Then the weight of the day returned all at once, Matthias Voss, the brake, the photograph, the clear fact that someone had reached into his house very nearly hurt her in it. The hand at her wrist tightened before he let her go.
“We are past pretending this is safe,” he said. The humor went out of her face.
“I know.”
“No more wandering the house alone.”
That won him a look.
“You cannot possibly think I’m going to obey that indefinitely.”
“Indefinitely would be ambitious.”
Despite herself, she laughed again, softer now. It lit her face in a way he did not trust himself to study closely. He stepped back before stepping back became impossible.
“Go upstairs,” he said. “Get some sleep.”
“That is becoming your favorite line.”
“It is a good one.”
“It’s infuriating.”
“Yes.”
She picked up the photograph, then paused on her way to the door.
“Duncan.”
He looked up.
“Thank you,” she said.
There was too much in that sentence to answer cleanly, gratitude and trust and whatever else had passed in the gallery and just now between his hand and her wrist. So, he did what he always did with too much feeling. He reduced it to truth.
“You nearly fell.”
Ceci’s mouth softened.
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
Then she left.
The door closed.
Duncan stood alone in the library with the ghost of Ceci’s pulse still alive in his hand.
At last, he exhaled.
This was no longer a matter of archives, or politics, or even history. Someone had reached toward her in his house.
That simplified things.
He turned down the lamps one by one and understood, with a clarity that left no room for argument, that whatever came next, he was done allowing the danger to remain abstract.