CHAPTER SIXTY #2
Archie said, “He means the gate may open because we are all being tremendously inconvenient about loving one another.”
No one moved.
Said at last, lightly and devastatingly, in Archie’s voice. Grace’s eyes moved from Archie to Duncan, then to Ceci. Sabrina looked down at the table. Margaret muttered, “Well. About time someone said something.”
Archie blinked. “I beg your pardon.”
“I am old enough to recognize when people are suffering over the obvious.”
Ceci laughed once, then pressed her fingers to her lips. The laugh had nearly become a sob. Duncan found he could not look directly at any of them. Archie, however, looked only at him.
There was a challenge in it and something gentler underneath. No retreat now, his eyes seemed to say. No hiding in the old words. Duncan set the knife down.
“Yes,” he said.
The room went still again.
“Yes, what?” Grace asked.
Duncan looked at Ceci. Then at Archie.
“Yes. I love them.”
Ceci made a small, broken sound.
Archie closed his eyes.
Sabrina’s hand tightened on Grace’s shoulder. Margaret, mercifully, said nothing. Duncan felt as though he had stepped out onto a frozen lake and heard it crack beneath him. The fear came clean and bright. Then another feeling followed it, just as sharp.
Relief.
He had carried so many truths by omission that he had mistaken silence for structure. Now the structure had fallen, and he was still standing.
Ceci moved first.
She crossed to him and took his face between both hands. Ginger, abandoned at her feet, gave an offended sigh and shook rainwater across the rug.
Ceci kissed him.
It was not the kiss from the bedroom. It had no privacy; there was no heat allowed to unfold into touch and sheets and breathless laughter.
This kiss was small, fierce, and public enough to ruin every polite arrangement in the house.
Her mouth trembled against his. He put one hand at her waist and held her there because, for once, the holding felt less dangerous than letting go. When she drew back, her eyes were wet.
“You don’t get to say that and then die in 1941.”
Archie laughed.
It broke on the way out.
Duncan looked at him.
Archie rose slowly from the chair, ignoring Ceci’s immediate protest and Duncan’s sharper one. He crossed the few steps between them with one hand pressed to his ribs, then put his forehead against Duncan’s shoulder.
“I am deeply offended,” Archie said, voice rough, “that you finally became emotionally fluent during an emergency.”
Duncan’s hand found the back of his neck.
“So am I.”
Archie huffed a laugh against him. For three seconds, Duncan allowed himself the impossible: Ceci against one side, Archie against the other, the house witnessing the truth without collapsing from it.
Then the gate pulled.
Ceci’s body jerked.
Duncan caught her.
Archie caught her, too, which nearly dropped him.
The lamps flickered.
Grace gasped and gripped the table. Sabrina turned toward the windows.
The room did not change, and yet every object in it seemed to strain against its place.
The fire bent low. The papers lifted at their corners.
Ginger whined, backed under the table, and went silent. Ceci’s eyes had gone unfocused.
“Ceci,” Duncan said.
She stared past him.
“What do you see?”
Her lips parted. No sound came at first. Then, “The gate. It’s open.”
Margaret crossed herself. “Lord preserve us.”
Ceci blinked, and the room returned to her. She gripped Duncan’s sleeve with one hand and Archie’s with the other.
“It’s stronger.”
Grace looked toward the clock. “How long until dawn?”
“Three hours, perhaps less,” Sabrina said. Duncan released Ceci once he was sure she could stand.
“We cannot wait here.”
“No,” Ceci said. “We need a plan.”
“We need several,” Sabrina replied. She drew a chair out and sat with sudden purpose. “We need one if Voss succeeds in opening the gate. One if he fails. One if Ceci is pulled there against her will. One if he comes back here first.”
Margaret nodded. “Now we are speaking sense.”
Archie eased back into his chair. “I adore that your version of sense begins with four disasters.”
Sabrina looked at him. “My version of sense has kept you alive so far.”
“That is more Duncan’s department.”
“Mine is keeping him from dying of nobility,” she said, nodding toward Duncan. “A much heavier burden.”
Duncan did not respond.
He was still looking at the two pages on the table.
Missing, presumed dead.
Killed during enemy action.
The anchor is the attachment.
Ceci followed his gaze. “Duncan.”
He looked up.
She knew what he was thinking. She had no right to know him so well after so little time, yet she knew. She had learned the quiet signs of his restraint, and now she could see the longing he had tried so hard to hide.
“You think leaving would be desertion,” she said.
“Yes.”
Archie closed his eyes.
Grace’s face tightened.
Sabrina went very still.
Ceci said, “Even if staying kills you?”
“Every man who goes to war risks death.”
“You are not every man.”
Duncan’s mouth tightened. “I am not exempt from history because I am loved.”
“No,” Ceci said. “But you might be allowed to survive because you are loved.”
The line rippled through the room and settled into every person there.
Margaret looked away first.
Grace pressed a hand to her stomach. Archie’s face twisted for one second before he brought it back under control. Duncan held Ceci’s gaze and found no answer equal to it.
Sabrina broke the silence.
“If they go,” she said, “the house must explain their absence.”
Duncan turned. “Sabrina.”
She lifted one hand. “We are planning, not deciding. Spare me the masculine horror of considering options.”
Grace sat beside her. “If they vanish tonight, the official account cannot be that they vanished. That invites searching. Questions. Police. Papers.”
Archie leaned back, watching her now. “You are disturbingly calm.”
“I am furious,” Grace said. “There is overlap.”
Ceci sat across from her, Ginger pressing under her knees. “What would work?”
Duncan stared at her. “You are participating in this?”
“I said I would not force you. I did not say I would pretend I don’t want you alive.”
His face changed.
That sentence hurt him.
Good, she seemed to think. He could see it in her. Let it hurt. Grace reached for a blank sheet from the stationery box and dipped a pen. “The war will create confusion soon enough, but not tonight. Tonight is the problem.”
Sabrina nodded. “They cannot both disappear from this house on the same night as Voss unless we want every fool in three counties sniffing around.”
Archie lifted a hand. “As one of the potential disappear-ers, I object to being discussed like luggage.”
Grace looked at him. “Then be useful luggage.”
He smiled despite himself. “God, you are frightening.”
“She gets it from Margaret,” Sabrina said.
Margaret snorted. “That she does.”
Grace began writing. “We give the world a story it can understand. Voss tried to blackmail us. He was discovered. He ran.” Duncan folded his arms. “No.” Everyone ignored him.
Sabrina leaned forward. “His legal identity is already thin. His presence here tonight is known to us, and perhaps to no one else. If he disappears, let him take the scandal with him.” “Good,” Grace said.
“He fled, and Duncan and Archie went after him.” Archie looked at Duncan.
“I vote we say he fled in an undignified manner.”
Ceci laughed, startled and shaky. Duncan did not, though he wanted to.
Sabrina’s eyes had sharpened in the way they did when she scented social destruction.
“Voss has been seen in connection with Mosley’s circles.
Lady Judith’s room will supply whispers if pressed in the right places.
We can make him appear cowardly, unstable, compromised. ”
Grace wrote. “If he is later missing, no one mourns too loudly.”
“Especially if enough people fear being named beside him,” Sabrina said.
Ceci looked at them both with something like awe. “You two are terrifying.”
Sabrina’s smile was thin. “Darling, women who cannot inherit cleanly learn to move through side doors.”
Grace did not look up from the page. “And women asked to wait quietly learn the true function of estates.”
Duncan felt a strange, terrible pride in them.
He also felt ill.
They were already building a world in which he and Archie were absent. Sabrina saw it. Her face softened, which was worse than being mocked.
“Dax,” she said.
“No.”
“You do not yet know what I mean.”
“I know enough.”
Her voice became gentler. “You think I am arranging to lose you.”
The quiet after that was unbearable.
Duncan looked away.
Sabrina rose and crossed to him. She did not touch him. She had known him too long for careless comfort.
“I am arranging to have the choice,” she said. “That is all.”
Grace looked at him from the table. “If you stay, we burn the page and carry on. If you go, someone has to keep the world from swallowing the evidence that you lived.”
Archie’s wit vanished.
Ceci’s hand went still against Ginger’s head.
Duncan looked at Grace then. His cousin, who had been a girl in this house, then an absence, then a woman returned at the worst and most important possible hour.
Grace, whose room Ceci had taken. Grace, who should have hated the disruption and had instead begun making room for the impossible with ink and fury.
“You would do that?” he asked.
Her voice was steady. “For you? Yes.”
“And for Archie?”
She looked at Archie, who had gone unusually quiet.
“For him too.”
Archie lowered his eyes.
Grace looked at Ceci last.
“And for her, if she can carry you where I cannot.”
Ceci pressed her lips together hard.