CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN #2
Duncan untied the first bundle and laid out the contents with the precise economy of a man who had been taught from childhood how to command chaos into neatness.
Letters. Estate memoranda. Two journals, one in a narrow decisive hand, a bulkier ledger with loose inserts pressed into its pages, and a packet of papers whose string had been tied so tightly it had cut a groove into the dust-softened edges.
Ceci moved closer at once, grateful for the anchor of paper. The anchor did not hold as cleanly as she wanted.
Leopold had not left them a manual. He had left fragments.
Weather-stained notes, household memoranda, half-legible field accounts, copied bits of local speech with no source named, and marginal comments that assumed the reader already understood the question being asked.
Some pages had foxed into brown constellations.
Others had been folded and unfolded until the creases had begun to break.
One notebook was written in a cramped, German-inflected hand that forced Duncan to read twice and Ceci to stop pretending that frustration was not part of scholarship.
“That,” Archie said after twenty minutes, “is either folklore or a shopping list written by a dying spider.”
“It’s an account from a woman in Broughton,” Ceci said, without looking up.
“About?”
“She saw lights near the old arch after her brother’s funeral. Or possibly sheep. I’m having a hard time with handwriting.”
Duncan reached for the page. “Let me.”
She gave it to him and hated the relief of doing so. For the next hour, the room held the sounds of turning pages, the occasional scrape of a chair, the soft exchange of necessary remarks, and the growing irritation of three people being offered knowledge in pieces too small to trust.
Most of it was family tedium. Repairs. Accounts.
Weather complaints. Advice about tenants.
Letters from London full of bad handwriting and worse judgment.
Archie found a note about hounds and tried to make it sound sinister.
Ceci threatened him with the paper knife.
Then Duncan opened the second journal. He had gone perhaps a dozen pages in when he stopped. The stillness in him changed.
“Here,” he said.
Archie came up on one side of him. Ceci on the other. The entry was dated October 1891. Leopold’s hand was elegant and maddeningly compressed, though not beyond reading. Duncan, who knew the shape of his family’s writing, read aloud.
The old arch again troublesome. W. insists the aperture should have been bricked entirely after the incident of misplacement, but I continue to think the threshold useful if properly observed.
Admission appears tied less to hour than to condition, particularly storm, darkness, and a witness at hand.
Under no circumstances should an unknown traveler be admitted without a keeper present to close the passage after.
Nobody spoke.
Ceci felt the fine hair along her arms rise. Ceci stared at the word misplacement. She had seen it before. A footnote in a local history article had mentioned misplacement at Hawarden, 1891, author unknown, private family papers.
At the time, she had thought it meant a missing object. A lost tenant record. Some estate embarrassment softened into euphemism. Now the word looked back at her with teeth.
“I read this wrong,” she said. Duncan looked up. “This entry?”
“No. The trace of it. In my time.” Her mouth had gone dry. “I saw a reference to this and didn’t understand what I was looking at.”
Archie’s expression sobered. “That is a uniquely horrible feeling.”
“It survived,” she said. “Not the truth. Just enough of a trace to be dangerous.”
Duncan’s gaze returned to the page. “Then we assume there are others.”
“Yes,” Ceci said. “And we assume Voss may have found them before I did.”
Ceci reached to turn the page. The paper split under her fingertip. A fine slice opened across the pad of her thumb, bright red against the old cream sheet.
“Damn.”
Duncan caught her wrist before the blood could fall.
The gesture was practical. It still silenced the room.
Archie handed over his handkerchief without a word.
For a second, Ceci could only stare at the red mark blooming through the linen.
An archive had always asked for patience. This one, apparently, wanted blood.
Duncan turned the page.
There was more.
Another note, written later and more hastily, squeezed into the margin.
L. says the local people once used the word appetite. I dislike it. Gates do not hunger. Men do.
The room seemed to contract around the line. Ceci stared at the page. The old man. The aperture. The passage. Her whole body remembered the barred window in the stone, the three pounds, the bored transaction, the receipt in her hand.
Someone had been there.
Something had admitted her.
And Voss understood enough to speak as if rules were in place.
Duncan turned another page.
The entries nearest 1891 were firm, amused in places, faintly vain. By 1894, the pen pressed harder, as if the business had ceased to entertain and begun instead to rankle.
A note had been pasted there, then partly torn free and folded back again. Some old paste had yellowed along the edge.
Duncan lifted it carefully.
The note underneath was short.
June 1894. The second admission in three years confirms the threshold remains active despite repairs. W. continues to insist the aperture should be sealed beyond recovery. I continue to insist that ignorance is a poor form of safety.
“Second admission in three years,” Ceci said.
“Yes,” Duncan said.
“So, whoever came in 1891 was not the first either.”
The room fell still again. Archie let out a low breath through his nose.
He would have preferred, he thought, a nice adulterous scandal.
A hidden inheritance. A corpse in the lake.
All the respectable varieties of family rot one could manage with common sense and poor lighting.
Instead, they had inherited time-slips, keepers, and a threshold that had been active longer than any of them wanted.
Archie was already leaning over the next page.
“There’s another note here. Later hand.”
Duncan shifted the journal so all three of them could see. This one was shorter. Different ink. A later addition in some family descendants’ irritated scrawl.
The gate remains shut. Grandfather’s stories were nonsense, though the woman in 1907 was never properly explained.
Ceci grabbed the edge of the table.
The woman in 1907.
The crossing had not begun with her.
It had happened before.
Duncan turned his head toward her, eyes intent.
Archie had gone very quiet. Outside the windows, morning carried on, birds in the shrubbery, servants moving distantly through the house, the whole ordinary world continuing as though Hawarden had not just offered up proof that its gate had once taken in the wrong century and given something back.
Ceci looked from one man to the other and felt the story lurch forward under her feet.
“Voss was right,” she said. “It wasn’t random.”
Duncan closed the journal.
“No,” he said. “It was never random.”
And Archie, still staring at the page about the woman in 1907, said in a voice stripped suddenly of all brightness,
“Then God help us, because you are not the first.”