CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX
Ceci
“A sealed packet,” Ceci repeated. The woman on the other side of the door looked apologetic. “That is what he said.”
Ceci gripped the doorframe.
Behind her, Archie had gone still on the bed. Duncan stood near the desk, one hand resting on the back of the chair as if he had learned within the last hour that modern furniture might move without warning.
“He said a car is being sent.”
“A car?”
“He asked that you wait here and avoid unnecessary questions.”
Archie, from behind her, said faintly, “I like him already.”
The woman’s eyes tried to move past Ceci into the room. Ceci shifted enough to block the view. “Thank you. Really. I know this is strange.”
“That word is doing a lot of work this morning.”
“Yes,” Ceci said. “It is.”
“If he needs medical care, he needs medical care.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
The question was gentler than suspicion and harder to answer because of it. Ceci looked back at Archie. He had pulled the blanket up to his waist, bare chest bandaged, bruising spreading dark over his side. He looked like a scandal, and a hospital intake form had been forced into the same body.
Then she looked at Duncan, who was watching every movement at the door with a soldier’s focus and a displaced man’s terror.
“I know,” Ceci said. “I’m trying to get him help without making everything worse.”
The woman studied her.
Then her face softened.
“All right. I’ll give you ten minutes. After that, I’m checking again.”
“Thank you.”
Ceci closed the door and reset the chain. For a moment, she only stood there, palm flat against the wood, breathing as if breath had become a task with instructions she had misplaced.
“A car is being sent,” Archie said.
“Yes.”
“How does a car know where to come?”
“It has a driver.”
“A modern driver?”
Ceci turned. “Yes, Archie. A modern driver.”
He considered that. “I reserve judgment.”
Duncan had moved to the window and stood back from the glass, looking down at the drive below. “Who would know to send one?”
“Grace,” Ceci said.
The name altered the room.
Archie looked down.
Duncan closed his eyes.
Ceci crossed to the desk and grabbed her suitcase. “I need to pack. I need to get my wallet, laptop, charger, and passport. God. My passport.”
Archie looked at Duncan. “I understood perhaps four of those words.”
Duncan said, “So did I.”
Ceci pulled clothes from drawers with no grace at all. Sweater. Jeans. Toiletry bag. Laptop case. Phone charger. Wallet. Passport. She opened the little safe in the wardrobe and nearly cried with relief when her passport and spare card sat exactly where she had left them.
Her identity existed.
Two men she loved had none. The thought hit so hard she had to sit on the edge of the chair. Duncan turned at once. “Ceci.”
“I’m okay.”
Archie gave her a tired look. “We agreed on functional.”
She laughed once, then pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Functional,” she corrected. “Very functional. Absolutely thriving.”
Duncan did not smile, but his eyes warmed. Then the phone began to charge enough to wake fully. It lit. Messages flooded the screen. Missed call from Gladstone’s Library front desk.
Email reminder about checkout.
A calendar alert.
Two texts from a colleague back home, sent before her trip had gone wrong.
Hope Wales is gorgeous!
Ceci stared at the words. They felt as if they belonged to another woman. Wales had been gorgeous. Wales had also swallowed her and returned her with two men from 1938, one injured, one grieving, both staring at her phone as though the tiny vibration might be fatal.
Archie watched her face. “Bad news?”
“No. Normal news.”
“Worse, then.”
She looked at him.
His smile was faint.
She crossed to the bed and sat beside him. “How bad is the pain?”
“Manageable.”
“That is a lie.”
“Yes. But a gallant one.”
Duncan came closer. “You need a doctor.”
“I need a century’s worth of paperwork first.”
“You need both,” Duncan said.
Ceci put her hand over Archie’s. “The packet may tell us how to get you help privately.”
Archie’s face changed. “Privately.”
“Yes.”
“A doctor who does not immediately ask why I appear to have escaped a costume drama?”
“That’s the hope.”
He leaned back against the pillows. “Then we pursue the packet.”
Duncan looked toward the door. “We cannot leave him like this.”
“I can walk,” Archie said.
“You nearly collapsed ten minutes ago.”
“I am improving through irritation.”
Ceci went to the suitcase and pulled out a soft oversized cardigan, then stopped. Both men were still in wet 1938 clothing. Archie’s shirt was torn and blood-stained. Duncan’s coat had mud at the hem, and his collar had been ruined by rain, violence, and time. Ceci looked at her suitcase.
Then at them.
“I have no clothes for you.”
Archie glanced down at himself. “Tragic. I was looking forward to your trousers.”
Duncan’s attention moved to the open suitcase, where jeans, bras, and soft cotton things sat in domestic betrayal of her privacy. His gaze returned to her face with strenuous discipline. Under different circumstances, Ceci might have enjoyed that more.
She crossed to the wardrobe and pulled out the long black coat she had worn on the trip over. “Duncan, this might cover some of the mud. Archie, you keep the blanket until we get to the car.”
Archie stared. “I am to travel in bedding?”
“You are going downstairs wrapped like a man who has had an accident and whose shirt is ruined.”
“Distinctly less romantic when you put it that way.”
She found a clean T-shirt and held it up. Archie looked at the soft knit fabric with suspicion.
“What is that?”
“A shirt.”
“It has no buttons.”
“It does stretch.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Duncan, despite everything, made a sound suspiciously close to laughter. Archie narrowed his eyes. “Do not enjoy this.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
Ceci brought the shirt to the bed. “We need to get you out of the bloody one.”
“I have not crossed time to be dressed like a child.”
“No, you crossed time to be alive. Lift your arm.”
That shut him up.
Only briefly.
With Duncan supporting him, Ceci eased the ruined shirt away, then guided the T-shirt over Archie’s head with as little movement as possible. He hissed once and swore twice, but when the shirt settled over his torso, covering the bandage and bruise, the transformation startled her.
He looked modern.
Wrongly modern. The cut of his hair, the angle of his face, the way he carried himself, even while half upright, all betrayed him. Still, the plain dark shirt made him seem closer to her world, almost possible within it. Archie looked down. “This is indecently soft.”
“It’s cotton jersey.”
“I shall remember the name of my seducer.”
Duncan turned away, but not before Ceci saw the smile. She handed Duncan her coat. “This may look strange, but less strange than that jacket.”
He accepted it with grave suspicion. It was too short in the sleeves and wrong across the shoulders. He put it on anyway. The sight of Captain Duncan Carlton in a modern women’s black coat nearly broke Ceci’s grip on reality.
Archie stared, then smiled.
Duncan pointed at him. “No.”
“I have said nothing.”
“Continue.”
Archie’s smile grew. “Magnificent restraint from both of us.”
Ceci pressed her hand over her mouth.
Duncan looked at her. “Do I look ridiculous?”
“Yes,” she said. “But in a way that might pass as eccentric.”
“Comforting.”
“Extremely British, I’m told.”
Archie laughed and immediately regretted it.
Duncan and Ceci moved toward him at once. He lifted a hand. “I’m fine.”
Ceci gave him the look.
“Functional,” he amended.
A knock came again.
“Cecily? The car is here.”
Ceci’s pulse jumped.
Duncan moved to the door first, then stopped because he did not know what to do with the lock. Ceci went around him, undid the chain, and opened the door.
The woman from the desk looked from Ceci to Duncan, in her coat, to Archie sitting on the bed in a T-shirt and blanket.
Her expression became heroic.
“A Mr. Griffith is downstairs,” she said. “He says he is expected.”
Ceci swallowed. “Thank you.”
“He also said to ask you a question.”
Ceci went still.
“What question?”
The woman looked uncomfortable now, as if she had begun to regret becoming involved in a family mystery before breakfast.
“He said, ‘What does the house do?’”
Duncan made a sound behind her. Ceci’s eyes filled at once.
Grace.
Or Sabrina.
Maybe both.
She answered before she could think.
“It waits.”
The woman nodded. “Right. I’ll tell him.”
When the door closed again, Archie was staring at Ceci. Duncan had one hand pressed to the back of the chair. No one needed to ask who had written that test. Ceci zipped the suitcase with trembling hands. “We go now.”
Archie held out an arm. “Then let us offend the lobby.”
They managed the stairs with more dignity than Ceci expected and less than Archie would have preferred.
Duncan took most of Archie’s weight. Ceci hauled her suitcase with one hand and supported Archie’s other side with the other.
The hallway camera watched them descend.
Ceci refused to look at it. At the bottom, a man in his early sixties stood near the desk.
He was neatly dressed in a gray coat, with silver hair, dark brows, and a leather folder tucked under one arm. His expression remained composed until he saw Duncan.
Then his face changed.
Only for a second.
A man raised on a story seeing the impossible walk down the stairs. He recovered quickly, but not before Duncan saw.
“Miss Bishop,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Tomos Griffith. Griffith, Ellis, and Pritchard. My firm has represented the Hawarden Preservation Trust for four generations.”
His eyes moved to Archie, then Duncan.
“Gentlemen.”
Archie gave a strained nod. “Charmed, though currently undermedicated.”
Mr. Griffith’s mouth twitched once. To his credit, he did not ask the first twenty questions screaming in the room. He turned to the desk woman. “Thank you for your assistance. The trust will handle matters from here.”
The phrase had money in it.
Old money.
Useful money.
The woman’s shoulders eased by a fraction. “Should I still call for medical help?”
Mr. Griffith looked at Archie. “A physician is waiting at Hawarden.”
Ceci nearly sagged with relief. Archie murmured, “Grace, you genius.”
Duncan’s face tightened at the name. Mr. Griffith heard it. His eyes softened.
“Yes,” he said. “Quite.”
The car outside was black, sleek, and more expensive than anything Ceci had ridden in since an airport conference shuttle mishap involving a university dean and a driver named Marco.
Archie stopped dead on the steps. “No.”
Ceci tightened her grip. “Archie.”
“That is not a motorcar. That is a beetle with ambitions.”
Mr. Griffith glanced at the vehicle, then back at him. “It is a Mercedes.”
“I do not care for its confidence.”
Duncan stood beside him, equally wary though less verbal. Ceci leaned close to both men. “You got through time. You can get through a twenty-minute drive.”
Archie looked at her. “Time did not have leather seats.”
“No, but it threw you into mud, so let’s call this an upgrade.”
Mr. Griffith opened the rear door. Duncan stared into the car as if it were a trap. The interior lights glowed softly. Archie bent just enough to see inside and grimaced.
“It resembles a private railway carriage designed by a doctor.”
Ceci nudged him. “In.”
They got him inside with effort. Duncan followed, hands braced against the seat when the door closed.
Ceci slid in beside Archie, still clutching her phone, passport, and the estate key in her coat pocket.
Mr. Griffith sat in the front passenger seat.
The driver pulled away from Gladstone’s Library.
Archie swore under his breath as the car moved.
Duncan’s hand shot out and gripped Ceci’s. She held him back tightly.
The village moved past the windows in impossible fragments.
Cars. Signs. Wet pavement. People in bright coats.
A delivery van. A cyclist. A woman walking while looking down at a phone.
The world continued, careless and loud and alive.
Duncan stared out as though every detail struck.
Archie closed his eyes after the second turn.
“Are you sick?” Ceci asked.
“No. I am choosing spiritual distance from the vehicle.”
Mr. Griffith said from the front, “There are bags if needed.”
Archie opened one eye. “How thoughtful and horrifying.”
Ceci almost laughed again.
She had laughed more in the first hour of catastrophe than seemed proper. Perhaps laughter was the only way a body handled impossible joy and impossible grief without choosing between them.
Mr. Griffith turned. “I know very little compared with what you need. My instructions were precise on some matters and silent on others.”
Duncan’s voice came rough. “Whose instructions?”
Mr. Griffith looked at him.
“The original instrument was created by Miss Grace Eleanor Carlton in 1938 and revised over her lifetime. Lady Sabrina Gladstone added personal instructions through the trust. The sealed packet waiting now contains both.”
Duncan looked down.
Archie did too.
Ceci felt the ache pass through the car like weather.
Mr. Griffith continued. “My grandfather thought it eccentric family business. My father thought it romantic nonsense. I was told only that if a woman named Cecily Anne Bishop appeared at Gladstone’s Library and answered, ‘It waits,’ I was to bring her and any companions directly to Hawarden. ”
“Any companions,” Archie repeated.
“Yes.”
Duncan’s voice was barely audible. “They believed.”
Mr. Griffith looked out through the windshield. “Someone did.”
No one spoke for several minutes.
Then Hawarden appeared.
The house rose beyond the wet grounds, old stone in morning light, altered by time and preservation, yet still itself. Chimneys. Windows. The line of the roof. The weight of it against the sky. Duncan’s hand closed so tightly around Ceci’s that she almost gasped.
Archie opened his eyes.
For once, he had no joke.
The car turned onto the drive.
The house had waited.