CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE #2
Archie’s voice came softly from the bed. “So far, I object to several features, but yes.”
Ceci laughed, and this time it became tears before she could stop it. Duncan pulled her into him.
She went.
For a few seconds, she let herself press her face into his coat, still damp from 1938 rain and 2023 rain and whatever weather lived between them. His arms closed around her. Solid. Real. Living. Then Archie said, with aching gentleness, “Come here too, or I shall become theatrical.”
Ceci lifted her face.
Duncan’s eyes had gone wet, though he gave the tears no permission to fall.
They helped Archie out of his coat first. It took time.
Every movement hurt him, and every flinch struck both Ceci and Duncan like an accusation.
Beneath the coat, his shirt had stuck to the bandage in one place.
The fresh linen Duncan had wrapped in the library was stained but not soaked.
“Good,” Ceci said. “That’s good.”
Archie looked down. “It does not feel good.”
“I mean, you’re not bleeding badly.”
“Then your phrasing needs work.”
Duncan unfastened the shirt with controlled hands. Archie watched him do it, eyes dark despite the pain. Ceci saw the look pass between them and felt the heat of it low in her own body, tangled painfully with fear.
Still alive.
Still wanting.
Still theirs.
The shirt came open. The bruise had spread, ugly and deep across Archie’s side. Ceci’s breath caught despite herself.
Archie saw. “I am beginning to think this will affect my dancing.”
Duncan’s mouth tightened. “You hate dancing.”
“With men, yes. With women, strategically. With either of you, I was prepared to evolve.”
Ceci pressed the towel gently to the edge of the wound and hated the way her hand trembled.
Archie caught her wrist.
“Look at me.”
She did.
“It is only flesh,” he said.
“No.”
His expression softened.
She leaned over him and kissed the uninjured corner of his mouth.
Carefully.
He made a small sound, less from pain than from surprise.
Then his hand slid to the back of her neck, holding her there for a second more.
The kiss stayed gentle, almost chaste, and still every part of her remembered the room at Hawarden, the bed, Duncan’s hand spreading across her stomach while Archie’s mouth found her wrist. When she drew back, Archie’s eyes were bright.
“That was better than salve.”
Duncan’s voice came rough. “Let her clean the wound.”
Archie looked at him. “Jealous?”
“Yes.”
The plainness of the answer stopped Archie’s breath for half a second.
Ceci looked up.
Duncan did not retreat from it. He stood beside the bed in his ruined clothes, damp hair, face pale with grief and shock and desire, and let the word remain. Archie reached for his hand. Duncan gave it to him.
Ceci cleaned the scrape while Duncan held Archie steady.
The intimacy of it nearly overwhelmed her.
Their hands joined beside Archie’s thigh.
Her fingers at his ribs. Duncan’s thumb moving once across Archie’s knuckles.
The future outside the locked door, waiting with forms and cameras and laws and terrible questions.
Inside the room, the three of them made a small circle around one injured body and called it survival.
When the bandage was replaced, Archie sagged back against the pillows.
“Now,” Ceci said, opening her suitcase, “painkillers.”
She found the paracetamol and held up the packet. Archie narrowed his eyes. “Those look suspiciously cheerful.”
“They’re medicine.”
Duncan straightened. “What kind?”
“Paracetamol. For pain. Safe if he takes the right dose.”
“Is it morphine?”
“No.”
“Will it cloud his mind?”
“Less than whisky.”
Archie reached. “Sold.”
Ceci gave him two tablets and the half-empty water bottle. He stared at the plastic bottle for a moment.
“It bends,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How dreadful.”
“Drink.”
He drank, made a face, then looked betrayed. “Water from a bottle. The future has made strange spiritual choices.”
“You have no idea.”
Duncan picked up the bottle when Archie handed it back, studying the plastic with quiet horror. Ceci let him. She crossed to the desk and opened the laptop. The startup sound made both men flinch.
“Sorry,” she said.
Archie lifted his head. “That book just chimed.”
“It’s a computer.”
“I thought the small black rectangle was the computer.”
“That’s a phone.”
“Your century lacks restraint.”
Duncan came to stand behind her as the screen lit. “This is the machine from your office photograph.”
“Similar.”
“And it contains records?”
“Access to records.”
“Through electricity.”
“And the internet.”
He stared at her.
She nodded. “I know.”
The laptop connected to the Wi-Fi automatically. Ceci watched the little symbol appear and felt a rush of relief so intense it made her dizzy.
Connection.
Actual connection.
She opened the browser.
Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. For one second, she could not type. Because once she searched, the world would answer.
Or fail to.
Duncan’s hand came to her shoulder. “What are you looking for first?”
She knew what he wanted her to say.
Voss.
The gate.
Hawarden.
Instead, she typed:
Captain Duncan Alexander Clifton Carlton
The keys clicked loudly in the quiet room.
Archie, from the bed, whispered, “Oh.”
Search results filled the screen.
Ceci scanned.
Her pulse beat in her throat. An archival entry from a Welsh heritage site. A digitized finding aid. A mention in a local historical society PDF. Then an image result that made her go still.
Duncan leaned closer.
“What is it?”
She clicked.
A scanned newspaper clipping opened slowly.
The headline appeared first.
HAWARDEN ESTATE HEIR VANISHES AFTER NIGHT DISTURBANCE AT OLD CASTLE
Her hand flew to her mouth.
Duncan said nothing.
Archie, unable to bear waiting, pushed himself higher on the pillows. “Read it.”
Ceci swallowed and read.
“Captain Duncan Carlton of Hawarden Castle and Mr. Archibald Booker of Liverpool were reported missing in the early hours of November twelfth, 1938, after an alleged confrontation near the Old Hawarden Castle ruins. A third man, identified in some reports as Matthias Voss, remains sought in connection with forged papers, political blackmail, and trespass.”
Archie’s voice was faint. “Political blackmail. Sabrina.”
Ceci kept reading.
“Miss Grace Carlton, cousin of Captain Carlton, stated that the men had followed Voss after he threatened a visiting American researcher attached to the Hawarden papers.”
Duncan’s breath changed.
Grace had done it.
She had written the story, then lived long enough to say it aloud.
Ceci scrolled.
Another clipping.
This one from several days later. The name Matthias Voss appeared beside phrases like extremist associations, false identity, and suspected links to pro-fascist circles. Lady Judith Rowe’s name did not appear, but Ceci could feel Sabrina in every careful omission.
“They did it,” she whispered.
Archie closed his eyes. “Good girls.”
Duncan remained silent behind her. Ceci looked up at him. His face had emptied of everything but grief. She reached for his hand. He did not take it at first. Then he did, slowly, as if the motion crossed a greater distance than the room allowed.
“Keep going,” he said.
She typed Sabrina Gladstone Hawarden 1938.
The results shifted.
A biographical page. Local history. A photograph.
Ceci clicked before courage could fail. Sabrina appeared on the screen in black and white, older than when they had left her, perhaps in her fifties.
Still beautiful. Still sharp enough to make the photograph seem afraid of her.
She stood on the steps of Hawarden with Grace beside her.
Grace.
Older too. Hair swept back. Face steadier, stronger, marked by years and not diminished by them. Between them was Ginger, or another springer spaniel so like her that Ceci made a sound of pain. Archie had gone very still.
Duncan’s fingers crushed hers.
The caption loaded beneath the photograph. Lady Sabrina Gladstone and Grace Carlton, founding trustees of the Hawarden Preservation Trust, circa 1957.
Ceci’s vision blurred.
“They kept it,” she said.
Duncan’s voice barely carried. “The house?”
She scrolled.
The trust had protected the Hawarden estate library, family papers, and remaining architectural fabric after postwar financial pressure threatened sale and dispersal.
The archive was later transferred under restricted terms, with several sealed packets remaining under private instruction until the early twenty-first century.
Archie looked at Duncan.
Duncan stared at the screen.
Then he stepped away.
Ceci turned. “Duncan.”
He crossed to the window and braced one hand against the frame, looking out at the wet modern grounds without seeing them. No one moved for several seconds.
Archie looked at Ceci. His face said go.
She went.
Duncan stood so rigidly that she feared touch might break him. She touched him anyway, one hand at the center of his back.
“They lived,” she said.
He closed his eyes.
“They had to live without knowing,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I did that to them.”
“No.”
His laugh was terrible. “Do not comfort me with an untruth.”
Ceci moved in front of him. “Then I’ll comfort you with the rest of it. They chose too. Grace wrote the story. Sabrina made Voss poisonous. Margaret hid the packet. They knew what they were doing.”
His jaw tightened.
“You did not abandon them,” she said. “You trusted them with the house.”
That struck.
His eyes opened.
For one moment, Ceci saw all of him. The soldier, the heir, the boy who had lost his mother, the man who believed leaving was the same as failure, the lover who had crossed time because staying had become the greater cowardice.
He reached for her and pulled her against him. The embrace was hard enough to hurt.
She welcomed the hurt.
Archie’s voice came from the bed, softer than she had ever heard it. “Ceci.”
She turned in Duncan’s arms. Archie had the laptop balanced awkwardly on his thighs. His face had gone pale in a new way.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I typed my name.”
Her stomach dropped.
Duncan released her, and they crossed to the bed together.
On the screen was another page. A university archive entry.
Archibald Elias Booker. Lecturer in philosophy, University of Liverpool.
1 November 1938 Disappeared. Presumed dead.
Later papers preserved by the Hawarden Trust. Archie scrolled with one finger, clumsy on the trackpad and silently offended by it.
A short paragraph appeared.
Booker’s surviving notebooks, published posthumously in edited form by Lady Sabrina Gladstone in 1948, were later recognized for their early analysis of political charisma, mass grievance, and the emotional appeal of authoritarian movements.
Archie stared.
“I was published?”
Ceci covered her mouth.
Duncan said, very quietly, “Sabrina.”
Archie scrolled again.
The entry continued.
The 1948 edition included a preface by Gladstone, who described Booker as “the cleverest man I ever knew, and therefore frequently impossible.”
Archie laughed.
Once.
Then he began to cry. He turned his face away with instant fury, but the tears had already come. Ceci climbed onto the bed beside him without thinking. Duncan followed more carefully, sitting at Archie’s other side.
Archie shook his head. “Don’t.”
Ceci wrapped both arms around him. Duncan took the laptop and set it aside before it slid to the floor. Then he cupped the back of Archie’s neck and pressed his forehead to his temple.
Archie’s breath broke.
“She did it,” he said. “That witch. She made me respectable.”
Duncan’s laugh sounded nearly as broken. “Only in death.”
“Still appalling.”
Ceci kissed Archie’s cheek, then the corner of his mouth, tasting rain and blood and tears.
He turned into her.
The kiss deepened because they were alive, because grief had nowhere clean to go, because the bed beneath them belonged to a room in her century, and both men had crossed the impossible to reach it.
Archie’s hand found her waist, then Duncan’s sleeve.
He pulled them both closer with what strength he had left. Duncan kissed Archie’s hair first.
Then his mouth.
Slowly. Carefully. In the washed-out morning light of 2023, with the laptop glowing beside them and the whole future pressing against the locked door.
Ceci watched them for a heartbeat and felt desire rise again, warm through fear, through grief, through the ache of what had been left behind.
This was no longer the urgency of the room at Hawarden, no longer desire interrupted by bells and enemies.
This was different. A claim made after arrival.
A proof of bodies still here. Archie opened his eyes and looked at her.
“Come back,” he whispered.
She did.
The three of them folded together as much as his injuries allowed.
There was no room for anything grand. Only hands.
Breath. The careful press of lips. Duncan’s fingers in Ceci’s hair.
Archie’s palm flat against her back. Ceci’s mouth at the inside of Archie’s wrist, then Duncan’s throat.
The small, living circuit of touch that said they had crossed, they had survived, they had not been scattered after all.
A knock came at the door.
All three froze.
“Cecily?” the desk woman called. “I’m checking on you.”
Archie closed his eyes. “I have come to loathe doors.”
Ceci scrambled off the bed. Duncan rose too, but she held up a hand.
“Let me.”
She checked the mirror and almost laughed. There was no fixing this. Her hair was wild, her dress muddy, her face tear-streaked. Behind her, Archie was shirtless under a blanket, and Duncan looked like a haunted aristocrat in a room with Wi-Fi.
Fine.
Fine had become a daring concept. She opened the door on the chain. The woman glanced past her shoulder. “Is he any better?”
“Yes,” Ceci said. “A little. Thank you for checking.”
“I really think you should consider medical help.”
“We will.”
The woman hesitated. “Also, someone called asking for you.”
Ceci’s blood went cold.
“Who?”
“A solicitor, I think. Or someone from a heritage office. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch it properly. He asked if Cecily Anne Bishop was still staying here.”
Duncan had gone still behind her. Archie’s voice came from the bed, low and stripped of humor. “What name?”
The woman looked startled. “He didn’t give a name to me. He said there was a sealed packet waiting under instruction at Hawarden. He asked that you be told immediately.”
Ceci gripped the doorframe.
The packet.
Grace’s packet.
Sabrina’s letter.
The future had not only received them.
It had been waiting.