CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Ceci
Grace arrived in the middle of supper with rain on her hat and opinions already formed.
Margaret had just set down the dish of roast chicken.
Archie was reaching, in defiance of every civilizing principle, for the crispiest potatoes.
Duncan had that look he got at the table when half his mind remained on the day’s papers and the other half was trying not to notice how frequently Ceci’s knee brushed Archie’s beneath the linen.
Then the front door opened in the hall.
Voices.
Margaret’s, disapproving but pleased.
A woman’s lower and brisker, carrying a sort of amused fatigue that struck Ceci at once as family. The dining room door opened without ceremony.
Grace came in wearing a dark traveling coat over a skirt cut more for ease than prettiness, gloves half removed, hat tilted by the rain, and the kind of expression that said she had already assessed the house and found several things wanting.
She was lovely in a severe, intelligent way, black hair tucked with more impatience than care beneath the hat brim, mouth made for irony, eyes too sharp to flatter anyone by accident. Her gaze went first to Duncan.
“Still alive, I see.”
“Only just.”
Then to Archie.
“You look insufferably well.”
“I’ve worked at it.”
Only then to Ceci.
The pause there was brief and devastating. Grace took her in with one sweep. Face, dress, posture, and the exact distance between her and the two men at the table. Something faint and dangerous entered her expression.
“And this,” she said, taking off one glove finger by finger, “must be the American.”
Ceci rose.
“Yes.”
Grace moved farther into the room and held out her hand.
“Grace Carlton.”
Her grip was dry, firm, and not in the least decorative.
“Ceci Bishop.”
“Mrs. Bishop?”
“Ms. Bishop, formerly Mrs. Wright.”
“Good.” One corner of Grace’s mouth moved. “I dislike men lingering where their absence would be more useful.”
Archie made a delighted choking noise. Duncan did not quite smile. Margaret, behind Grace in the doorway, looked as though she had heard the line before and approved of it no more now than she had the first time.
Grace handed off her gloves and hat without looking and took the empty seat Margaret was already preparing as if she had never been anywhere else.
“Have I missed anything?”
Archie leaned back in his chair. “Europe, possibly.”
“Ah,” Grace said. “Then I’m just in time.”
Supper resumed.
If resumed was the proper term for any meal once Grace Carlton had joined it.
She brought weather from London, a scandal involving an editor’s second wife, a dismissive account of a parliamentary speech that had bored three-quarters of the press gallery into moral collapse, and one perfect line about civility that made Archie laugh into his wine.
She brought, too, the city’s exhausted mood.
Men talking of recovery who had not lately looked a jobless clerk in the face.
Editors calling public fear realism. Younger women wondering whether any future worth wanting had survived the decade intact.
Grace did not narrate these things sentimentally.
She laid them out like evidence. All the while she watched.
Not openly. Skillfully. Duncan and Archie. Archie and Ceci. The household rhythm. Margaret’s expressions. Which pieces of conversation caused the room to draw tighter, and which made it breathe again. Ceci felt herself being read and, to her own irritation, did not wholly dislike it.
After the pudding was taken away and Duncan had gone to retrieve coffee, Grace turned to her as if they had been alone all evening.
“How long have you been here?”
“Nearly two weeks.”
“And in that time, you’ve acquired the library, Margaret’s provisional tolerance, Archie’s complete attention, and my cousin’s face when he is pretending to be calm.” Grace accepted the coffee Duncan set before her. “You are either unusually gifted, or the house was very nearly waiting for you.”
Ceci nearly choked.
Archie looked delighted.
Duncan took his own seat with the expression of a man who has seen the cliff edge and would still, if necessary, proceed at a walk.
Grace sipped the coffee.
“Relax,” she said. “I am family. Pretending not to notice obvious things is for guests.”
After supper, they moved, by long habit, into the library. The room took Grace easily. That was perhaps the most disconcerting thing about her. She did not enter places as if asking permission. She entered as if rooms ought to be grateful to receive the correct intelligence at last.
Ceci found herself beside the fire while Grace walked the shelves with a familiarity that made Hawarden feel at once larger and more intimate.
“She used to work in Fleet Street,” Archie said quietly at her shoulder. “Then in Cardiff. Now everywhere and nowhere at once.”
“Does she ever stop?”
“No one has yet proved it.”
Grace turned from the shelves with a slim volume in hand.
“Leopold,” she said.
The room sharpened.
Duncan set down his cup. “You remember him?”
“I remember stories.” Grace came nearer. “My grandmother said he was the only man in the family who took local folklore seriously without becoming religious about it, which meant the rest of them called him unwell.”
Ceci sat forward. “Did she say anything specific?”
Grace lowered herself into the chair nearest the fire and crossed one booted ankle over the other.
“That depends. Are we speaking as acquaintances, or as people who have decided nonsense may be useful?”
“The second,” Duncan said.
Grace looked at him. “At last.”
Then to Ceci again. “There was a story about a bridegroom once,” she said.
“Not from the main line. One of the Conwy cousins. He vanished on the morning of his wedding after going up to the old ruins with some challenge or dare in his head. He came back after dark, according to the story, but not properly. He was there. He spoke. He knew names. Yet something in him had slipped. My grandmother always said the family hushed it by calling it nerves and drink.”
Archie said, “Returned altered?”
“Yes.”
Ceci felt her skin rise at once.
Grace went on.
“There was another story, much older, about the gate taking the wrong man and returning one better suited to the house.” She shrugged. “That one sounds like family vanity embroidered onto fear, which is why I am inclined to distrust it.”
Duncan looked at the fire.
“The wrong bridegroom?”
Grace nodded.
“That is how he told it.”
“Did he say when?”
“No exact year.” Grace’s gaze moved between the three of them. “He also said there were certain kinds of loneliness the gate answered more readily than others, though I took that for poetry at the time.”
Ceci felt something strange in her chest at that.
Poetry.
Or not.
Grace looked at her then with a sudden, assessing gentleness sharper than scrutiny.
“You look tired.”
“I am.”
“Good. It means you’re real.”
Archie laughed softly. “That is very nearly kind.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
Later, when Duncan and Archie had gone to fetch the old county maps from the study, and Margaret was making some noise in the passage about bed warmers and common sense, Grace found Ceci at the cabinet where the glasses were kept.
She came to stand beside her, not so close as to crowd, but close enough that the shared quiet felt chosen.
“Do they know,” Grace asked lightly, “or are they still at the stage of trying not to name anything?”
Ceci looked down into the amber at the bottom of her glass.
“They know.”
“And you?”
“I know enough to be frightened.”
Grace smiled without amusement.
“That’s healthy.”
Ceci turned toward her. “You’re not shocked.”
“My dear, I’ve been in newspaper offices.”
That made Ceci laugh.
Grace’s face softened at the sound.
“I am not shocked,” she said. “I am interested.”
Then, after the smallest pause, “Sabrina isn’t either.”
Ceci lifted a brow.
Grace said Sabrina’s name with too much ease for indifference, and when Margaret later mentioned that Miss Gladstone would be over the next day, Grace’s face altered by only a degree.
That was all. Yet Ceci, newly alert to the smallest changes in rooms, saw it at once.
Grace looked toward the fire, where Sabrina’s absence had remained present all evening.
“She has the same look,” Grace said. “People who are clever at rooms and not always welcomed by the world tend to recognize one another.”
The sentence settled low in Ceci’s mind. Not always welcomed by the world. It fit Grace too easily to be accidental. She said nothing. Grace seemed to appreciate that.
From the doorway, Archie’s voice came warm and teasing. “If you two are already forming a private alliance, the rest of us deserve a warning.”
Grace turned her head. “You are the rest of us.”
Archie grinned.
Duncan, behind him with the map case in hand, met Ceci’s eyes. There was a house around them now. Not only walls. People. Threads. A growing web of witnesses.
And for the first time since she had come through the gate, Ceci felt Hawarden stretching wider to make room.