CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ceci
Old Hawarden Castle (Castell Penarlag)
Hawarden, Flintshire, Wales
Sabrina caught them before they reached the stairs. She came out of the drawing room with her smile gone and the door eased shut behind her, one gloved hand still on the brass latch. For the first time since Ceci had met her, there was nothing playful on her face.
“What did he say?”
Duncan looked at Ceci.
She repeated it exactly.
“Leopold’s Gate was never meant to admit you.”
Sabrina did not gasp, or pale, or ask the sort of useless question people ask when they want the comfort of hearing the impossible twice. She only stood very still for a moment, her eyes sharpening as she turned the sentence over. Then she said, “That is much too specific to be a bluff.”
“No,” Duncan said. “It isn’t a bluff.”
Archie glanced back toward the drawing room door. “If Hart notices we’ve all vanished, he’ll assume someone’s died.”
“Then I’ll go back in and save him from his own curiosity,” Sabrina said. “You three go to the ruins.”
“You’re not coming?” Archie asked.
“Oh, I’m furious about it,” she said. “But if all of us disappear at once, Matthias will know he has struck something useful.”
The use of his given name sounded deliberate, almost contemptuous. Ceci looked at her. “You believe me.”
Sabrina’s expression softened.
“My dear, belief ceased to be the interesting question about ten minutes ago.”
She took one step closer and lowered her voice.
“If the gate matters, find out why. If you discover something dreadful, come straight back. If you discover something marvelous, come straight back and tell me first.”
Archie smiled despite himself.
Duncan did not. “Keep Hart occupied.”
Sabrina’s mouth curved. “Dax, please. Hart could be occupied by an especially decorative lampshade.”
Then she looked at Ceci, and what came into her face then was something steadier than wit.
“Be careful.”
It reached deeper than Ceci expected.
She nodded.
Sabrina squeezed her arm once, turned, and went back into the drawing room already rearranging herself into grace and ease and perfect hostess poise. The door closed behind her.
For a second, the corridor held only the three of them, the fading light, and the pulse still beating too fast in Ceci’s throat.
“Come,” Duncan said.
He did not take her hand this time. He only started down the corridor with that contained, purposeful stride of his, and she found herself moving after him at once. Archie fell in on her other side.
“Well,” he said under his breath, “this has become an appallingly good day.”
She gave him a look. “Your threshold for good is concerning.”
“It is one of my more charming flaws.”
“We will discuss your charms later,” Duncan said without turning.
Archie’s grin flashed.
Ceci almost laughed, which felt grotesque and necessary all at once. They moved through the house, down the front steps, and into the sharp blue cold of early evening. Duncan’s motorcar waited on the gravel, dark and gleaming, its engine already alive with a low, mechanical tremor.
The drive to the ruins felt shorter than it should have. That first morning, walking back with Duncan through the damp October air, the distance had been distorted by shock, each turn of the path drawn out by the simple fact that nothing in her world made sense.
Duncan drove. Archie sat beside him in the passenger seat after insisting, with complete cheerfulness, that Ceci should have the back where she would be “less likely to be flung to her death by Edwardian engineering.”
“It’s not Edwardian,” Duncan said.
“Then the point stands even more strongly.”
So, Ceci sat behind them with her gloved hands clasped too tightly in her lap, watching the road unspool through the windscreen and the darkening trees press closer on either side. No one spoke for the first several minutes.
The motorcar rattled and growled its way along the lane.
Headlamps caught stone walls, bare branches, the occasional startled gleam of an animal’s eyes before it vanished into the hedge.
The sky above the fields had gone from pewter to deepening indigo, with one long pale streak of afterlight still hanging over the horizon.
Ceci leaned her head against the leather seat and closed her eyes.
Leopold’s Gate was never meant to admit you.
The sentence had opened something in her. Not understanding, exactly. More like recognition. The sharp, sick click of one piece of the day sliding against another.
The old man at the gate. The three pounds. The receipt. The little barred window. The sense, even then, that the transaction had felt oddly complete, as though it had purchased more than entry.
“You’re doing it again,” Archie said.
She opened her eyes.
“Doing what?”
“Thinking hard enough to make the air around you look inconvenienced.”
Duncan’s hands stayed steady on the wheel. “If you have something useful to say, say it.”
“I was merely attempting to rescue her from the sort of silence that turns people religious.”
Ceci looked between the backs of their heads.
“Leopold,” she said. “Does that name mean anything to either of you?”
Archie shifted in his seat. “As a general category? Several dead Europeans and a regrettable number of men with portraits.”
Duncan answered after a moment.
“There was a Leopold in the family. My great-grandfather’s younger brother. He died long before I was born.”
Ceci sat up a little straighter. “And the gate?”
“That part I don’t know.”
The answer was worse than theory. Archie turned slightly. “Families name things after the dead for all sorts of reasons. Sentiment, usually. Guilt, occasionally.”
“Thank you, Archie,” Duncan said.
“My pleasure.”
Ceci looked out the window again. Sentiment.
Guilt. Family habit. All of that might explain Leopold.
None of it explained Voss speaking of the gate as if it had intention.
Unless he knew what had happened there. Unless he had used it himself.
The thought came with such force that she felt her breath catch.
Archie heard it. He always seemed to catch the room’s smallest shifts, including the ones she had not meant to make.
“What?”
She leaned forward; one hand braced on the back of Duncan’s seat.
“What if he didn’t only know about it. What if he came through there, too?”
Neither man answered immediately.
The motorcar swung through the last bend in the road. Then Duncan said, very evenly, “That is one of several possibilities.”
Archie turned half in his seat to look at her. “You might have led with that cheerful idea before we set out in the dark.”
“I only just had it.”
“Yes, well, I preferred the earlier version of the journey when the danger was unnamed.”
The ruins rose ahead of them, black against the last of the evening light. Duncan pulled the car to a stop. The engine died, and the quiet that followed felt immediate and ancient.
The ruins were dark by then, the only movement was the wind as it crossed the open ground and threaded through the broken stone. Ceci was out of the car before either man could stop her.
The cold struck hard and clean at her cheeks. She crossed the grass toward the archway with the certainty of someone walking back into a dream she no longer trusted to stay still.
The gate stood where it had stood before. Red painted wood set into old stone. Iron latch. Crumbling wall running out on either side into suggestion rather than structure. In the fading light, it looked innocent enough to be insulting. Archie came up beside her. Duncan, a pace behind.
“This is it,” she said. Duncan’s voice came low and close over her shoulder. “Show me.”
Ceci moved beneath the archway and turned, orienting herself with memory.
“I came in from there,” she said, pointing toward the village path. “There was a little barred window set into the stone here.” She touched the wall to her right. “The old man sat behind it. I paid him. He gave me a brochure and a receipt.”
Archie ran his hand over the stone where she indicated.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“I know there’s nothing there now. That’s the point.”
Duncan stepped closer and crouched, examining the mortar lines. For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then he looked up.
“There.”
He pointed to a narrow vertical seam almost invisible in the dimness, hidden beneath a drift of old ivy and a skin of weather-darkened grime. Archie dropped to his haunches beside him at once. “That is not natural.”
“No,” Duncan said. “It isn’t.”
Ceci knelt too, heedless of her skirt, and pushed the ivy aside with shaking fingers.
A rectangular shape emerged from the wall.
Stone had been fitted over an opening at some point, more neatly than the surrounding work, but not original to it.
Old infill. Old enough to escape notice unless one was looking for it.
The window.
Or what had once been the window. Archie let out a low breath.
“Well.”
Ceci sat back on her heels, staring.
“I’m not insane.”
The words came out smaller than she intended. Duncan rose and offered her his hand without ceremony. She took it. He pulled her to her feet but did not let go immediately. No,” he said. “You are not.”
The certainty in his voice nearly undid her. Archie stood as well, brushing dirt from his hands. “That still leaves us with several highly inconvenient questions.”
“Yes,” Duncan said. “Including how Voss knew.”
Ceci looked up at the crosspiece of the gate.
In her time, the words had been stenciled there in white.
Leopold’s Gate. Now the paint was dark with age and weather, but as she stepped closer and lifted her hand, she could just make out the faintest ridge in the wood, old lettering beneath later coats. She traced it with one fingertip.
“Here.”
Archie came to stand beside her. “Can you read it?”
“Not fully.” She squinted. “There are letters under the paint. Someone covered them.”
Duncan moved to the other side of the gate and looked back through it toward her.
“L,” he said. “Then E, I think.”