CHAPTER SIXTY
Duncan
Duncan read the words once.
Then again.
The second reading was worse. Behind him, Ceci had gone very quiet.
He could feel her silence as a pressure against his back.
Archie stood near her, too pale, one hand braced against the table in a way he clearly hoped no one would notice.
Sabrina had one arm around Grace, although Grace looked less in need of comfort than of a weapon. Margaret broke the spell first.
“I am bringing the dog inside.”
Duncan turned. “No.”
Margaret gave him a look that would have withered men with less training. “That dog is on the west lawn, making enough noise to wake the dead and half the village. I am bringing her inside.”
“Sabrina,” Duncan said.
She understood at once. “I’ll go with her.”
“No,” Grace said, already moving. “I know where Ginger runs when frightened.”
Duncan looked from one to the other and felt the old, familiar frustration of command dissolving under the actual conditions of a household. No one in this house obeyed cleanly when frightened. They all became more themselves, which was inconvenient, admirable, and deeply exhausting.
“You go as far as the terrace,” he said. “No farther. If she will not come, leave her.”
Margaret looked offended. “I have never left a frightened creature in the rain.”
“Tonight you may.”
“I may also lie to you and do as I please.”
Archie made a faint sound. Duncan did not look at him. If he did, he might smile, and if he smiled, something in him might crack straight through the middle.
“Take the lamp,” he said. Sabrina gathered it from the side table.
Grace had already snatched a coat from the back of a chair and thrown it over her nightdress.
Margaret moved ahead of them as if the situation had been invented solely to test her patience.
When the three women reached the library door, Duncan added, “If you see anyone, you come back immediately.”
Sabrina paused. “Dax, if I see Voss, I shall scream first and behave second.”
“That is not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Then they were gone.
The library door remained open behind them.
Cold air moved faintly from the hall. Rain tapped at the glass.
The knife held the note outside with obscene calm.
Archie lowered himself into the chair nearest the table and closed his eyes for half a second.
Ceci turned toward him at once. “Sit properly.”
“I am sitting beautifully.”
“You are gray.”
“I prefer golden.”
“Archie.”
His eyes opened. The joke faded. “I’m all right.”
Duncan crossed to him before he could help himself. “You are not.”
Archie glanced up. “Must everyone develop an alarming devotion to precision tonight?”
Duncan did not answer. He put one hand under Archie’s jaw and turned his face toward the lamplight.
Archie allowed it, which said more about the pain than any admission would have done.
His pupils were even. His color poor. His mouth cut.
His breathing shallow. The bruise at his ribs would be worse by morning.
If they lived to morning. The thought came with such clean brutality that Duncan released him and stepped back.
Ceci saw the movement.
She saw too much.
She moved to Archie’s side and knelt, careless of her dress, her hands going first to his wrist, then his cheek. Archie’s face softened, and Duncan looked away. He looked instead at the window.
The words stared back.
The anchor is the attachment.
A better man might have taken comfort in being loved enough to disturb time.
Duncan found only terror.
Love had already cost enough. His mother.
His brother. The men who had followed him because he wore rank well and spoke calmly under fire.
The men he had failed to save. The boy Archie had been, bright and half-abandoned, arriving at Hawarden during school holidays with too much pride to look grateful and too much hunger to hide it well.
Now Ceci stood in his library with her hair falling loose from his hands, the back of her dress fastened badly because Voss had rung the bell too soon.
She had crossed a century and become central to the house before anyone had understood the danger.
Archie had let himself want too openly for the first time in years, and Duncan had kissed him.
Kissed him with love, after half a lifetime of restraint made to look like friendship.
The world had answered by opening a door beneath them.
“Duncan.”
Ceci’s voice brought him back.
He turned.
She was standing now, still close to Archie. Archie had one hand at her waist, as if contact alone steadied him. It might have done. It steadied Duncan, too, which was the problem.
“We have to talk about it,” she said.
“No.”
Archie gave a small, strained laugh. “That went well.”
Ceci did not look away from Duncan. “You cannot say no to the entire conversation.”
“I can postpone it until the house is secured and we understand whether Voss is still on the grounds.”
“You can try.”
“Ceci.”
“No.” She stepped around Archie’s chair. “He brought that page because he knew it would work. He knew I would look at those dates and believe enough of them to be afraid. He was right.”
Duncan’s jaw tightened.
“He was manipulating you.”
“Yes. He used the truth to do it.”
Archie said, “We don’t know that it was the truth.”
Ceci looked at him. “Tell me the possibility of it was wrong.”
Archie’s face changed.
This was the cruelest part of Voss’s gift.
None of them could confirm the details. None of them could dismiss the pattern.
War had been coming long before Ceci fell through the gate.
Men like Duncan were trained to be spent.
Men like Archie were clever enough to be recruited by dangerous rooms, especially if danger came with secrecy and purpose.
Duncan said, “I have no intention of dying for the convenience of a document.”
Ceci turned back to him. “Intentions are not armor.”
“No. They are choices.”
“And what choice are you going to make when Britain enters the war?”
The question hit so hard the room seemed to fall away from it.
Archie looked down.
Duncan held himself still.
Ceci’s eyes filled, but she did not soften the question.
“What are you going to do?” she asked again.
Duncan heard the answer before he spoke it.
He had known it for years in the marrow of himself, though no formal war had yet demanded the admission.
He had served once. He would serve again if called.
His name, his training, his rank, and every man he had failed to bring home had made the path long before he set foot on it.
“I will do what was required.” Ceci closed her eyes. Archie’s breath caught. Duncan looked at him. Archie’s smile had gone crooked with pain. “God help us. You mean it.” “Do not make a performance of this.” “I am making grief of it, actually. The performance is incidental.”
Ceci covered her mouth with one hand. Duncan felt the wound in them both.
He felt, too, the shameful shape of his old pride, still standing in him like a wall.
Duty had always been easier than desire.
Death asked less of him than love did. Death required no imagination, no future stripped of every familiar thing, where the people he loved were the only home he had left.
The terrace door opened somewhere beyond the hall.
Ginger’s barking grew louder.
Duncan reached for the pistol on the table and moved to the library doorway.
Archie started to stand.
“Stay there.”
“I dislike that word.”
“Then obey it out of spite.”
That won a faint, breathless laugh from Ceci. It was a small victory.
Duncan took it.
Footsteps crossed the hall. Wet paws skidded on the floorboards, then Ginger burst into the library, soaked, shaking, and indignant. She went straight to Ceci, pressing her wet body against the front of Ceci’s dress.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Ceci knelt and put both arms around her. “You scared us.”
Ginger shivered and buried her head against Ceci’s shoulder. Grace came in next, rain in her hair and a large branch in one hand. Duncan stared at it. “What are you carrying?”
“A branch.”
“I see that.”
“I thought it might be useful.”
Archie, from the chair, said, “I support Grace’s promotion to tactical command.”
Sabrina entered after her, face flushed from the cold, eyes fierce. Margaret came last and shut the door with satisfaction.
“No one in the garden,” Sabrina said. “Or no one foolish enough to remain in it after Ginger objected.”
Margaret looked toward the window. “The note?”
“Still there,” Duncan said.
Grace’s expression shifted. “We need to bring it inside.”
“It may be bait.”
Sabrina’s mouth tightened. “Everything is bait tonight.”
Duncan knew that tone. It meant she was afraid and had become angry out of habit. He went to the window, opened the latch, and let in a rush of cold rain. Ginger growled from Ceci’s arms.
The knife had been driven deep. He wrapped a handkerchief around the handle and worked it free, careful not to cut the paper. The blade came loose with a soft crack of wood. He brought the note to the table. No one touched it at first.
Then Grace took it.
Duncan let her. He was beginning to understand that Grace needed something to do with her hands or worry would occupy them.
She laid the damp paper flat beside Voss’s false death record.
Together, the two documents looked obscene among the estate correspondence and guest lists, as if the future and the impossible had entered the archive without permission.
Grace read aloud.
“The anchor is not the traveler. The anchor is the attachment.”
Her voice remained steady through the end, then failed just after it. Sabrina placed a hand on her shoulder. Margaret stood behind them all, arms folded. “Explain it plainly.”
No one answered at first. Ceci stroked Ginger’s wet ears, her face pale. Duncan said, “Voss believes the gate responds to emotional bonds.”
Margaret stared at him. “That was not plain.”