CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Ceci
By Saturday afternoon, Hawarden had settled into the sort of calm that usually meant trouble was close.
Margaret had ordered flowers to be sent to Gladstone.
Sabrina had dispatched three notes before luncheon and one after it.
Archie had gone into the village and returned with newspapers, gossip, and an orange wrapped in paper that he presented to Ceci with the air of a man bringing tribute to a queen in exile.
Duncan had spent the better part of the morning with ledgers, letters, and the locked impatience of someone trying to reduce danger to procedure.
Under it all, everyone was restless. Archie was the first to break.
At half past three, he dropped his pencil on the library table, declared he could no longer distinguish between Hart’s vanity and Hart’s handwriting, and went upstairs to wash before tea.
Exiting the room with more dramatic flair than was necessary.
Sabrina was still at Gladstone, preparing the manor and, almost certainly, wreaking emotional havoc across the county.
That left Ceci alone with Duncan and the papers.
The house quieted around them. Outside, the light had gone soft and cold, that flat Welsh silver that made the gardens look elegant and faintly haunted at once.
In the library, the fire had been built up against the damp.
The air smelled of dust, paper, beeswax, and the faint citrus polish Margaret preferred for the table.
Ceci looked up from a guest ledger and found Duncan watching her. His attention had a way of becoming a physical fact in the room. One could work beneath it for quite a while before suddenly feeling the whole weight of it at once.
“What?” she said.
He glanced down at the open photograph album in front of him. “There are more family books upstairs.”
Ceci sat back. “Upstairs where?”
“My mother’s sitting room.”
Something in his voice changed on the word mother, only slightly, but enough. Ceci set down the ledger.
“If you want the names before Sunday, we should probably go and get them.”
“Yes,” he said.
Neither moved at once.
Then Duncan closed the album, rose, and held out one hand toward the door with a formality that should have felt teasing and somehow did not.
“Come along.”
The room was on the second floor at the end of a quieter corridor; one Ceci had not yet had cause to use. Duncan unlocked it himself. That, more than anything, told her it mattered.
When he opened the door, a faint chill moved out into the passage, carrying with it the smell of old fabric and dried lavender. The room beyond had not been abandoned, not exactly. It had been preserved.
The furniture sat under its own memory. A sofa in pale green silk, faded now at the arms. A writing desk near the window.
Books in a glass-fronted case. Embroidery folded into a basket as if someone had meant to return to it after tea and simply had not.
The late light reached the room in a long, slanting wash.
Ceci stepped inside more quietly than she meant to. Duncan followed and shut the door.
“She died when I was fourteen,” he said.
Ceci turned.
The fact sat between them.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He inclined his head, accepting the sentence without pretending it repaired anything.
“So was I.”
The dry feeling in the line made Ceci smile before she could stop herself.
Duncan noticed.
“My mother would have approved of that.”
“Of my smiling while you discuss grief?”
“Of your refusal to sentimentalize it.”
Ceci looked around the room again.
“Did he keep it like this?”
“No,” he said. “Margaret did.”
That made sense.
“Your father couldn’t bear it?”
Duncan went to the desk and opened the shallow drawer at the top. Inside were albums, neatly stacked, their leather worn smooth from use.
“My father could bear almost anything, provided it was arranged attractively enough.”
Ceci glanced at him.
“That sounds like an affectionate accusation.”
“It is fair.”
He took out two albums and put them on the desk.
Ceci came closer.
The first held family photographs, mostly stiff and formal.
The second was looser: holiday groups, terraces, gardens, visitors half-turned from the camera, women in hats, men with drinks, children caught between supervision and escape.
The sort of private social record she knew how to read best. Duncan stood beside her, one hand resting against the edge of the desk.
“My mother disliked half the people my father invited,” he said. “He believed poor company could be managed by good manners. She believed bad men remained bad men at any table.”
Ceci looked down at a photograph of a beautiful dark-haired woman in a broad hat, seated in a garden chair with one hand shading her eyes from the sun.
“Your mother?”
“Yes.”
“She was lovely.”
The answer took a second.
“Yes,” Duncan said. “She was.”
Ceci turned the page.
There was Duncan as a boy, all sharp bones and watchful eyes. Beside him, younger by a year or so and already grinning at the world as if the world had not earned it, Archie.
Ceci stopped.
“Oh.”
Duncan followed her gaze.
“That was his first summer here.”
“He looks impossible.”
“He was.”
“And you?”
Duncan looked at the photograph for a long moment.
“I was very tired.”
The simplicity of it caught her by the throat. She touched the edge of the page lightly, not the photograph itself.
“Did he help?”
“Yes.”
Again, too simple to do anything but tell the truth.
Ceci turned to look at him fully. The room had narrowed around them without either of them seeming to notice.
The slanting light, the scent of dried lavender, the opened albums, all of it had conspired into intimacy before either of them quite chose it.
“You let him,” she said.
Duncan’s mouth shifted once, humor moving briefly through restraint.
“I had fewer useful choices than I preferred.”
Ceci laughed softly.
“You do make surrender sound procedural.”
“It often is.”
“Only if you’re doing it wrong.”
That, at last, made him smile, though briefly.
She looked back down at the pages before she did something unwise with the expression.
There was Archie again at sixteen, stretched out on the grass with a book over his face.
Duncan at perhaps seventeen, taller already, coat off, sleeves rolled, one arm braced on the ground behind him as he looked up toward who had taken the photograph.
The kind of image no one means to become intimate until years later.
Ceci became abruptly aware that she was looking at Duncan’s history in a language she understood too well. Glances. Placements. Private loyalties caught by accident.
“And your father,” she said, because she needed the room to widen again. “He’s the one who kept the dangerous guest lists?”
“Yes.”
The smile was gone.
“He died five years ago. A riding accident, idiotic enough to suit him. By then, the politics had already become uglier. Less theoretical. My father never understood the difference in time.”
Ceci closed the album halfway.
“You mean he thought he could dine with fascists without becoming responsible for them.”
“Yes.”
“You’re angrier with him than with your uncle.”
Duncan looked at her then, properly.
“My uncle tolerated fools for longer than he should have. My father had charm and used it as an excuse.”
That was not about politics alone. Ceci could hear it.
She touched the ribbon at the back of her hair without meaning to, suddenly aware of herself in his mother’s room, wearing his cousin’s dress and Sabrina’s ribbon, standing close enough to him that if either of them moved carelessly, there would be no room left at all. Duncan’s eyes followed the motion.
“Sabrina likes you.”
“Yes,” Ceci said. “She said so with alarming freedom in this era.”
“That is how she said most things.”
“She also said I’m taking all this much too hard.”
“Are you?”
Ceci looked down at the album again.
“Maybe. Maybe not. It’s strange. I spent years in rooms full of people who talked about identity and structures and networks and institutional power as if all of it could be held at a safe academic distance.”
She let out a breath. “Then I cross a century and discover fascism is still built out of dinners and flirtation and men who think their own charm makes them harmless.”
Duncan said nothing.
She looked back at him.
“And women who make it fashionable,” she added.
“Yes.”
The word settled heavily.
Ceci should have stepped away then. Instead, she said, very quietly, “Did you ever love anyone?”
Duncan did not move.
There were a hundred ways he might have deflected that. She knew it as soon as the question left her mouth. Yet he stood there in the fading light with his hand still on the desk and gave her the truth.
“Yes.”
The answer was enough to tighten her whole chest.
“And?”
His gaze did not leave hers.
“And nothing.”
Ceci swallowed.
The room seemed to hold its own breath with her. She ought to have asked who. She did not want the answer and wanted it too much. Instead, she said, “That sounds lonely.”
Something in his face changed.
“Yes,” he said.
The word was softer than any of the others. Ceci did not know who moved first. Later, if she tried to be fair, she thought it was probably both. A fraction from her, the slightest shift from him, then all at once the remaining distance failed to hold.
His hand came to her face with a carefulness that nearly undid her before his mouth ever touched hers. For one suspended second, he only looked at her, dark eyes moving over her face as if giving her one final chance to stop this and remain respectable.
She did not.
Then he kissed her.