CHAPTER SEVENTY
Ceci
The room had changed and held. That was the first thing Ceci thought when Mair opened the door to Grace’s old room.
But the bones remained.
The window seat.
The line of the ceiling. The view toward the lawn. The dressing table, now restored, with Grace’s silver-backed brush under glass nearby and a label discreetly placed beside it.
Grace Eleanor Carlton’s room, preserved private family wing, restricted access.
Ceci read the label and nearly sat on the floor. Mair noticed and removed it without comment.
“Temporary,” she said. “For tours. This wing is closed today.”
Duncan looked at her. “Because of us?”
“Yes.”
“People come through these rooms?”
“Occasionally. Under supervision.”
Archie looked around. “I have become a heritage interpretation problem.”
“You have become several problems,” Mair said.
He smiled faintly. “I like you.”
The doctor returned with a compact bag and far too much determination. Archie was examined again, then escorted, with Duncan and Ceci, to a private clinic in a car he declared only slightly less judgmental than the first.
X-rays showed bruised ribs, perhaps a hairline fracture, nothing worse.
The doctor cleaned the wound properly, gave stronger pain relief, and warned him with devastating calm against heroics, strenuous activity, and “romantic overexertion,” which made Ceci turn crimson and Archie resurrect himself out of pure delight.
Duncan went silent enough to be dangerous. The doctor looked at all three of them over her glasses.
“I am very serious.”
Archie answered, “Madam, so are we.”
Ceci dragged him out before anyone could make eye contact with her again.
By the time they returned to Hawarden, the day had moved into late afternoon.
Mr. Griffith had arranged a private meeting for the next morning.
Mair had placed food in the sitting room beside Grace’s room.
Fresh clothes waited too, gathered from some emergency trust arrangement and a nearby shop.
Soft trousers. Plain shirts. Sweaters. Underwear still in packaging, which Duncan regarded with the same grim attention he had once given Voss’s forged papers.
Ceci left both men to bathe and change in shifts while she took the fastest shower of her life in the adjoining bathroom. Hot water struck her shoulders. Modern water. Modern pressure. Modern pipes. She braced both hands against the tile and cried so hard the sound vanished under the spray.
She cried for Sabrina and Grace. For Margaret, beneath the yew Ginger nearby.
For Duncan standing before Grace’s portrait.
For Archie reading his own afterlife on a laptop.
For the woman she had been before the gate, who had thought loneliness was manageable because she had mistaken survival for a full life.
Then she turned off the water, wrapped herself in a towel so thick it felt obscene, and looked in the mirror. Her face was the same.
It shouldn’t have been.
She dressed in her own clothes: black leggings, a long sweater, thick socks. She had never felt less glamorous or more real.
When she came out, Duncan stood near the window in modern clothes.
The sight stopped her.
Dark trousers. Charcoal sweater. Hair damp. Barefoot on the old rug.
He looked wrong.
He looked beautiful.
He looked alive.
Archie lay propped against the pillows in a soft navy shirt and loose trousers, face pale but eyes brighter after medication. The future had dressed him tenderly. That felt like justice. He saw her looking and smiled.
“Well?”
Ceci swallowed. “You look like you’re about to teach a very intense seminar.”
Archie glanced down at himself. “Do I?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. I shall demand a chalkboard.”
Duncan turned from the window. “I look absurd.”
Ceci crossed to him. “No.”
His eyes searched hers.
“You look here,” she said.
That undid him more than she expected. He reached for her and pulled her close.
For several moments, they stood with no agenda beyond contact.
His body was warm through the sweater. His breath moved against her hair.
She closed her eyes and let herself feel the impossible fact of him in her century, in this room, in clothes bought that morning by a trust built from grief and stubborn hope.
Archie’s voice came from the bed, softer now. “I would join you, but I have been medically forbidden from gestures.”
Ceci laughed against Duncan’s chest. Duncan extended one hand without letting her go.
Archie took it.
The shape of them was awkward. Duncan near the window, Ceci held against him, Archie half reclined, and reaching across space. It was also the truest thing in the room. The afternoon dimmed toward evening.
Mair brought them a tray herself. Soup. Bread.
Tea. Bottled water. Pain medication set apart with written instructions.
She asked no unnecessary questions and promised to return in the morning unless called.
Mr. Griffith had left a temporary phone, an envelope of emergency funds, and a note advising them to remain inside the private wing.
Archie read the note and sighed. “Even the future imprisons us with paperwork.”
Ceci took it from him. “The future is giving us a safe room and legal counsel.”
“Same sentence, duller hat.”
Duncan had spent several minutes studying the temporary phone. Ceci gently removed it from his hand before he found a way to make it a philosophical enemy.
They ate because Margaret’s ghost would have judged them into compliance. Archie took the pain medication because Duncan looked at him in a way that made refusal seem childish. Duncan drank tea and stared into the cup as if tea itself had betrayed historical continuity by tasting the same.
Eventually, the room quieted.
Outside, Hawarden’s grounds darkened. Electric lamps along the path glowed softly. The rain ended. The window reflected them back to themselves: three figures in a room built before all of them, altered by time, held open by women who had loved them enough to let them go.
Archie broke the silence.
“I am afraid if I sleep, I will wake back there.”
Ceci turned toward him.
Duncan did too.
Archie did not look at either of them. His gaze remained on the ceiling, mouth set in a line too tired for wit.
“Or worse,” he said. “I will wake here and realize I have forgotten the sound of Sabrina’s voice.”
Ceci climbed onto the bed beside him.
Carefully. Slowly.
The mattress dipped.
Archie turned his head. “If the doctor asks, you attacked me.”
“I will tell her you provoked me.”
“Likely.”
She rested beside him on the uninjured side, leaving space for his ribs, and laid her hand over his heart. It beat beneath her palm.
Steady.
Present.
Duncan remained near the window. Ceci looked at him. “Come here.”
He hesitated.
Archie lifted his hand. “Dax.”
That was all.
Duncan came.
He sat on the edge of the bed first, as if modern mattresses had rules he did not yet know. Archie’s fingers found him. Ceci shifted back enough to make room, and Duncan stretched out on Archie’s other side with a stiffness that lasted until Archie turned his face toward him.
“Is this allowed?” Duncan asked.
Ceci almost laughed, then saw his expression and did not.
The question was not about the bed.
She touched his cheek. “Here? Yes.”
Archie’s thumb moved over Duncan’s knuckles. “In this room? Yes.”
Duncan closed his eyes.
The breath he released seemed to empty years from him.
Ceci leaned over Archie carefully and kissed Duncan.
The kiss was slow. No urgency, although desire stirred at once.
No locked door against scandal. No bell downstairs.
No Voss on the threshold. Only the three of them in a room where the lights could be switched off by a modern button, and the house had already given its permission in paper, stone, and silence.
Duncan’s hand slid into her hair. Archie’s hand settled at her waist. She kissed Archie next, mindful of his mouth, his ribs, the pain medication softening the edges of him without dimming the heat in his eyes.
His lips parted under hers, and the sound he made was quiet enough to be private even in Duncan’s arms.
“Careful,” Duncan said.
Archie smiled against Ceci’s mouth. “I love when you pretend that word will save us.”
“It might save your ribs.”
“Less inspiring.”
Ceci kissed the corner of his mouth, then his jaw, then the pulse at his throat. Archie went still beneath her. Duncan’s hand tightened in her hair.
She lifted her head.
Both men looked at her. Heat moved through the room, gentler than at Hawarden, deeper perhaps because it had nowhere to rush.
Archie was injured. Duncan was grieving. Ceci was exhausted.
Their bodies knew all of that and still reached.
She placed her hand on Duncan’s chest.
Then Archie’s.
“We go slow,” she said.
Archie’s eyes warmed. “We have a doctor’s order.”
“We have my order.”
Duncan’s mouth curved. “Better.”
She leaned into him, and he kissed her with a tenderness that made her ache.
Archie watched them, fingers tracing lightly at her waist, his gaze dark and open.
Then Duncan bent over him and kissed him too, one hand braced beside Archie’s shoulder, careful of every injury.
Ceci watched their mouths meet in the dim lamplight and felt something inside her settle. This was not the past intruding.
This was not the future offering spectacle.
This was now.
Archie reached for her without breaking from Duncan, and she came down beside him, fitting herself into the careful space available.
Hands learned new limits. Duncan’s sweater was soft beneath her fingers.
Archie’s breath caught when she that tender spot under his ear.
Duncan’s mouth found the back of her neck, then paused there, reverent and warm.
No one hurried.
They could not take everything the night had denied them.
Not yet. The body had its own laws, and Archie’s bruised ribs were sternly enforced by pain.
But intimacy did not require conquest. It lived in the slow opening of hands, the careful arrangement of legs, the brush of a mouth at a collarbone, the shared breath when desire rose and was honored without being forced.
Archie laughed once, quiet and dazed, when Ceci’s socked foot tangled in the blanket.
“This is less elegant than I hoped.”
Duncan’s voice came low near her ear. “It is better.”
Ceci closed her eyes.
Yes.
Better.
Eventually, the kisses slowed. Archie’s medication and exhaustion caught up with him. His hand remained curled in Duncan’s sweater, as if even sleep required proof. Duncan stayed awake longer, gaze fixed on the ceiling, Ceci tucked against his side. She knew he was thinking of the house in 1938.
The front door.
Sabrina’s hand raised in farewell. Grace standing straight enough to break.
“Duncan,” she whispered.
“I’m here.”
“I know.”
His arm tightened around her. After a moment, he said, “I do not know how to be here.”
“No one does yet.”
“That should comfort me.”
“It won’t tonight.”
His mouth brushed her hair. “No.”
She lifted herself enough to look at him. “We’ll learn.”
Duncan looked from her to Archie, already asleep, then toward the dark window where the house reflected back the shape of them.
“We will,” he said.
It sounded less like confidence than a vow. Ceci lay her head back down. For the first time since she had walked up to Old Hawarden, she slept in the right century. And when she dreamed of the red gate, it was closed.