CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Ceci
Ceci stood at the washstand in her slip, one stocking still unfastened and the strap of her brassiere biting lightly into her shoulder, staring at herself in the cloudy mirror as if the woman in it might explain something.
She looked flushed. Hair half-fallen from its pins. Mouth softer than usual, as though it had forgotten to arrange itself into endurance.
Still herself, then.
The problem was how neatly the future had filed it away.
Somewhere ahead of her, her marriage had been reduced to signatures, dates, and a paragraph about irreconcilable differences.
It had sounded so orderly. So civilized.
As if the truth had not been that she had entered a life that did not know what to do with the shape of her.
And now, impossibly, she had crossed a century only to acquire admirers.
It seemed excessive.
Ceci pressed her fingertips to her hot cheeks.
“I could not make one man happy,” she muttered to her own reflection, “and now apparently two of them are having a lovely time with me. That cannot be right.”
A laugh sounded from the doorway. Ceci jumped and turned.
Sabrina leaned against the frame with the easy insolence of a woman who had long since decided doors were decorative rather than meaningful barriers.
She held a ribbon in one hand and an expression of such naked amusement that Ceci considered, briefly, throwing a hairbrush at her.
“That,” Sabrina said, “is the most interesting thing you have said all week.”
Ceci dragged her shift back up her shoulder. “When did you arrive?”
“I came by to drop off an invitation to Dax. I wanted to check in on you after he told me about the incident.”
Ceci rolled her eyes. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough to know you are either composing tragic verse or inventorying your suitors.”
“I have no suitors.”
Sabrina’s brows lifted. “No?”
Sabrina’s smile widened. “My dear, you walked into that room looking terrified, clever, and entirely unaware of your own effect. I had very little work to do.”
Ceci made a face at her and turned back to the mirror, reaching for her brush. “I was trying to survive dinner.”
“And yet several people appeared ready to perish.”
Sabrina crossed the room without invitation, apparently her preferred method of movement through life, and took the brush from Ceci’s hand.
“Sit,” she said.
“I can manage my own hair.”
“I know. Sit anyway.”
Ceci sat, because for all Sabrina’s teasing, there was something soothing in being handled by someone brisk and competent.
Sabrina set to work with efficient fingers, drawing the brush through Ceci’s hair until the tension in her shoulders eased in spite of herself.
For a moment, neither spoke. Then Sabrina caught Ceci’s gaze in the mirror and smiled, small and fox bright.
“So,” she said. “Which one had you talking to yourself?”
Heat climbed Ceci’s throat. “No one had me talking to myself.”
“Mm.”
“I mean it.”
“Then perhaps you always stand before the glass, blushing and whispering about men. I should hate to think I have mistaken your ordinary habits for scandal.”
Ceci bit back a smile. “You are intolerable.”
“And yet you like me.”
Ceci looked at her reflection, at Sabrina’s clever hands separating and smoothing, at the intimacy of another woman standing this near with no apology for it.
“I do,” she admitted.
Sabrina’s mouth curved. “There now. Honesty becomes you.”
“It seems to get me into trouble.”
“Only the interesting kind.”
Ceci let out a dry breath. “You assume a great deal.”
“I observe a great deal,” Sabrina said.
She began to gather Ceci’s hair at the nape of her neck.
Her knuckles brushed the side of Ceci’s throat, light and cool.
The touch was incidental, perhaps, but it sent a tiny shiver down her spine anyway.
Sabrina’s eyes moved once, very quickly, and Ceci knew the moment had been filed away for later use.
“Goodness,” she murmured. “You are in a state.”
“I am not.”
“You are. I cannot yet tell whether it is because you are frightened, tempted, or vainly hoping to be pursued into a garden.”
Ceci laughed then, helplessly. “What a list.”
“It is not mutually exclusive.”
“That is a hideous thing to say to a person.”
“It is a true thing.”
Ceci looked down at her hands in her lap. “I was married.”
Sabrina’s hands stilled for only an instant before continuing. “Yes?”
The word was gentle enough that Ceci kept going.
“It ended badly. Or perhaps not badly, exactly. Dully. Which may be worse.” She swallowed.
“No broken plates. No shouting. Only the long, humiliating discovery that whatever was wanted from me, I was not providing it. Or not in the right proportion. Or not in the right tone. By the end, I felt as if I had failed some examination whose questions had been changed without my seeing.”
Sabrina said nothing.
Ceci was grateful for it. She stared at the warped edge of the dressing table and heard herself speak in the quiet, because some humiliations became easier once they were ridiculous enough to say aloud.
“I suppose that is why this feels absurd.” She laughed once, softly. “I was unable to keep one husband satisfied in my own century, and now I appear to have stumbled into another one where two men look at me as if I am something they would very much like to do something about.”
Sabrina’s laugh came low and delighted. “Oh, that is excellent.”
“It is not meant to be excellent.”
“No, darling, that is why it is.”
Ceci covered her face with one hand. “You see what I mean.”
“I do.” Sabrina leaned closer, meeting her eyes in the mirror. “But I think you are framing the matter poorly.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. You speak as if affection were a prize given for correct performance. As if desire were wages for service rendered.” Sabrina began braiding her hair, neat and unhurried. “Men are not examinations. Marriage, least of all.”
Ceci let her hand fall. “You make it sound simple.”
“I assure you, I do no such thing. I merely object to the idea that one failed arrangement should be permitted to govern all future pleasure.”
The word pleasure hung between them with enough warmth to make Ceci glance up. Sabrina saw that too and smiled without mercy.
“There,” she said. “You do know what I mean.”
Ceci held her gaze. “You enjoy tormenting me.”
“I enjoy watching you wake up.”
That touched somewhere tender. Too tender, really.
Ceci looked away first. “It is all a bit much.”
“My dear,” Sabrina said, “you traveled through time. At this point, I think you are allowed a little romantic untidiness.”
Ceci laughed again, this time with something freer in it. “Romantic untidiness.”
“Yes. Very fashionable, I believe.”
“In what circles?”
“In mine.”
Sabrina’s fingers moved to the ribbon, tying it off with a competence that made Ceci absurdly aware of the line of her wrist, the closeness of her body, the faint scent of powder and starch and something floral she could not name.
When Sabrina was finished, she rested both hands lightly on Ceci’s shoulders and studied her work in the mirror.
“There,” she said. “Now you look like a woman with options.”
Ceci snorted. “That sounds adventurous.”
“It is.”
Sabrina bent, her mouth near Ceci’s ear, all mischief and silk.
“If it eases your conscience,” she said, “I am a little in love with you myself, and I have no intention of making it a problem.”
Ceci turned so quickly that their faces were suddenly close, closer than they had ever been.
Sabrina did not move back. Her expression remained playful, but only just. There was a bright curiosity in it now, and a kind of invitation with no demand attached.
Ceci felt, with terrible clarity, the wild unreliability of her own life.
A husband in the future who had let her go cold by inches. Two men here who made her feel watched in wholly different and equally dangerous ways. A sharp-eyed woman with clever hands and a wicked mouth stood close enough to kiss, though Ceci knew she would not do it here, not now, perhaps not ever.
Still, the possibility itself felt like laughter bubbling up beneath grief. Like a door opening in a house she had thought was empty.
“Well,” Ceci said, because it was either speak or combust, “that is an extremely irresponsible thing to say to a woman in my condition.”
Sabrina’s brows rose. “And what condition is that?”
Ceci looked at her steadily.
“Newly unreasonable.”
Sabrina laughed aloud, delighted, and stepped back at last.
“Oh, you are going to be fun,” she said. She swept from the room with the ribbon ends dancing at the back of Ceci’s neck, leaving Ceci alone again in the mirror. Ceci touched her hair, then her own mouth.
“One husband,” she murmured to the glass. “Two gentlemen. And one exquisitely dressed menace making a nonsense of my better instincts.”
Her reflection, for once, looked pleased.
The next morning, Margaret brought the account Duncan had asked for.
Margaret did not require paper for the movements of her own household.
She stood at the end of the library table with her hands folded at her waist and recited names with the grim precision of a woman who had been waiting for someone to ask the right question badly.
“Mrs. Vale dusted Monday. Thomas laid the fire Tuesday morning. I came in twice with post. Annie turned down the lamps Wednesday. Nell brought coal through the west corridor Thursday because Thomas had gone to the village and no one in this house can bear to be cold for twenty minutes.”
Duncan looked up.
Margaret stopped.
Ceci felt the change before she understood it.
“Nell,” Duncan said.
Margaret’s mouth tightened.
Archie, seated on the edge of the table despite Margaret’s visible disapproval, set down his pencil. “That sounded like a name arriving with luggage.”
Duncan did not look away from Margaret. “Where is she?”
“Gone.”