CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Archie
Archie had always considered himself a generous man.
This was proving an irritating morning in which to test the theory.
He stood at the library window with Leopold’s journal still open on the table behind him and looked out over the lawn as if the grounds might offer some guidance on how best to behave when the two people one most wanted in the world had plainly spent the night becoming more complicated.
The glass held a pale reflection of the room. Shelves. Firelight. Duncan bent over the journal with that grave, exact attention of his. Ceci, on the other side of the table, one hand at her throat, her face altered by what they had just read and by other things. Archie knew altered when he saw it.
There was a softness in her this morning that had not been there yesterday. A kind of inward brightness. Duncan had it too, though his version was better hidden, drawn tighter under the skin. Archie had known him too long for concealment to work. He could have named the signs with humiliating ease.
The way Duncan did not waste glances because he no longer needed to.
The way Ceci, usually so quick with deflection, had gone quieter around him in certain moments, not from discomfort but from new knowledge.
The thread between them had changed its tension.
It hummed now where yesterday it had only strained.
Archie was not a fool. More inconveniently, he was not innocent.
He knew what it looked like when a night had passed in precisely the way one feared and hoped it might. He also knew that jealousy, when indulged too freely, made a man ugly in the eyes of everyone, himself included. Archie inhaled deeply and closed his eyes for one brief moment.
Archie went still when he opened his eyes. Outside, near the yew walk, a man stood where no man had stood a moment before.
The figure was gone almost as soon as his eyes found it. A servant, perhaps. A trick of glass and pale morning. Then the reflection shifted, and Archie saw Duncan behind him, already watching the same patch of lawn.
So.
Not imagined, then.
Archie smiled before turning back, because a man could be jealous, frightened, and useful all at once if he had sufficient discipline.
“The woman in 1907,” he said. “I dislike her already.”
Ceci looked up.
“Because?”
“Because she arrived here before you and left us no useful instructions whatsoever.”
That got a tired laugh out of her, which was worth something. Duncan, who had been scanning the next page, said, “There may be more.”
Archie reached for the stack of loose papers beside the journal.
“Let me see those.”
Duncan slid them toward him without looking up.
Archie began sorting. Receipts. Estate inventories.
A list of repairs to the west wall. Two pages in Leopold’s hand describing weather patterns with an intensity that suggested he had not often been invited to more diverting company.
Then, tucked between a tenant dispute and a frankly tedious letter about roofing slate, Archie found a folded sheet smaller than the rest, the paper thinner and finer.
This one was not family business.
He opened it carefully.
The letterhead had faded, though not beyond reading.
Society for Psychical Research.
Archie sat up straighter.
Duncan looked over at once. “What?”
Archie handed it across. “You tell me.”
Ceci made a small sound. Duncan unfolded the paper and read silently, his face settling more deeply into concentration with each line. Then he said, “It is from a Dr. Edmund Vale. London. April 1895.”
“Psychical research,” Ceci said. “You told me before Duncan was a member.”
Duncan did not answer immediately. Archie, who knew that particular stillness, realized Duncan had forgotten that he had once admitted the fact. At last, he said, “Read.”
Archie took the letter back and read aloud.
My dear Carlton,
Your account of the Hawarden aperture is the most persuasive private record of threshold disturbance I have yet seen, though I remain dissatisfied with your refusal to let me examine the site personally.
Cases of temporal dislocation are rare enough to demand rigor; however distasteful you may find the Society’s appetite for spectacle.
The 1891 woman remains, in my view, less interesting than your 1894 man, whose speech patterns, dress, and odd metal objects suggest not merely foreignness but chronology. I must again press upon you that a keeper untrained in discernment is no keeper at all.
Seal the aperture if you must, but do not destroy the journals.
Yours in some frustration,
Edmund Vale
Nobody spoke for several seconds after Archie finished. Then Ceci said, very softly, “The 1894 man.”
Duncan’s gaze lifted to hers. Archie felt the shift before either of them said it aloud.
“The man,” Ceci said. “That could have been Voss?”
“It could have been,” Duncan replied. Archie leaned back in his chair.
“Well,” he said, “that is thoroughly unwelcome.”
Ceci was already reaching for the letter. Duncan let her take it. She read the lines again more quickly this time, her mouth tightening as she did.
“Speech patterns. Dress. Odd metal objects,” she said. “That sounds exactly like someone who didn’t belong.”
“Yes,” Duncan said.
“Yes,” Archie echoed. “And if it was Voss, then he has known about the gate, or his family has, or he found out by means I already dislike.”
Ceci looked from one man to the other.
“He may not have come through by accident.”
The sentence sat in the middle of the table like another discovered thing, cold and heavy. Duncan rubbed once at the bridge of his nose. Archie would have laughed, under other circumstances, at the sight of him looking scholarly and irritated in equal measure.
“He may have come through by design,” Duncan said. “Or by chance and then made design of it afterward.”
“That feels more his style,” Archie said. “I don’t imagine Matthias Voss believes in wasting a good catastrophe.”
Ceci folded the letter back with careful fingers.
“If he came through in 1894,” she said, “then he’s been here for decades.”
“Or he moved back and forth,” Archie said.
Duncan’s expression sharpened. “Yes.”
Archie spread his hands. “Well. If we are already entertaining time travel before breakfast, we may as well do it thoroughly.”
Ceci did not smile.
“He would know how the world bends from here to there,” she said. “He’d know where to place himself, what to influence, which people to cultivate. Hart. Mosley. Any of them.”
Duncan reached for the journal again and turned to the back pages.
“This is no longer only about the gate,” he said.
“No,” Archie replied. “It’s about a man who may have had forty years to practice being monstrous in the correct century.”
That one made Ceci shut her eyes. Archie regretted it at once.
“Sorry,” he said.
She looked at him again. “Don’t be. It’s true.”
He wanted, irrationally, to touch her then. Only her hand. Her wrist. Something. Instead, he gripped the arm of his chair and let the feeling pass through him unindulged.
Duncan found another slip tucked into the journal’s back cover. This one was not a letter, but a page torn from some smaller notebook, the hand hurried and darker.
If the aperture cannot be governed by blood, then it must be governed by witness. Admission without witness appears unstable. Closure requires one who sees and one who remains.
Ceci frowned. “What does that mean?”
Archie answered before Duncan could.
“It means your old ticket man was not ornamental.”
Duncan nodded. “A keeper. Or a witness.”
“One who remains,” Ceci repeated. “Meaning someone has to stay on this side.”
Archie looked at her.
The shadow that moved across her face then was quick, but he saw it. He had learned the shape of pain in her too well to miss it now.
Stay. Go. Return. Remain.
The gate had turned those into more than abstract questions now.
He had the sudden, vivid urge to snatch the papers off the table, throw them all into the fire, and demand a simpler problem from the universe.
He did not, mostly because Duncan would have killed him and partly because Ceci was watching the page as though it had already begun to alter her understanding of herself.
Duncan rose.
“We need everything relating to Vale.”
Archie did the same. “And the 1907 woman.”
“And any mention of the keeper,” Ceci added.
For the next hour, they worked. It should have been easier then.
Work always steadied him. He liked finding.
Sorting. Reconstructing what other people had scattered.
It was a trade anyone sensible could learn from a good archive or a bad attic.
Yet today, the work was threaded through with too much awareness.
Duncan and Ceci moved around one another with greater care now, which only made their altered intimacy more apparent.
He would hand her a volume without touching her if he could help it.
She would take it with her mouth set in concentration that fooled nobody who had seen the way her face changed when Duncan’s name came out differently in private.
When they brushed their fingers, the pause was tiny. Archie still noticed every one.
It hurt.
He had always feared being the bright one left outside the deeper weather of other people’s lives. That was the old wound. Not abandonment exactly. Nearness without arrival. Warmth visible through glass. There was no point lying to himself about that.
It hurt, and the hurt lived side by side with want and affection and a kind of admiration he had never managed to extinguish even when life would have been easier had he done so.