“I learned French long before I studied English,” he confirmed. “I attended a Jesuit school in Paris when I was a boy.”
An unexpected discomfort constricted his chest the moment the words left his mouth: a bewilderment that he had shared private, superfluous details about his person with her. Her eye contact was shaky, but she had still listened to him with a gravity that had simply drawn the words from him. The compassionate tilt of her lips said she sensed that Paris had not made for a happy time in his life. For a moment, their gazes clung and probed deeper. It was the sort of connection that left a piece of insight behind in each other, a deepening of mutual understanding that couldn’t be undone. He glanced away. He had come to Britain to take things away, not to give something of himself.
Someone loudly cleared their throat behind them. The queue had moved on, and they had allowed for a gap to form.
When it was his turn at the clerk desk, he sent a telegram to Nassim:
Dearest cousin
Plans have changed. Inshallah I am in Oxford tonight already.
Your affectionate cousin
Eli
* * *
—
Their train soon rumbled south. Elias had found a place in a coach just behind Catriona’s coach, and his fellow passengers kept to themselves, so he looked out the window where the gentle landscape of the lowlands slipped past. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose over industrial structures. He was preoccupied; his prolonged absence would impact the business operations in Beirut and his uncle wouldn’t be pleased, though this was Uncle’s status quo in any case. In obtrusive intervals, he thought about sex. Usually, the fantasizing was diffuse, smooth bodies of women he had never met, faces he couldn’t properly see, but today, he thought of the nymph by the lake. Her skin had the luster of pressed silk in the sunlight. In his imagination, she was pleasantly surprised to see him. She leaned slightly back against the boulder and smiled at him, and he went to her. He ran his palms over her softness, from her throat to the enticing curve of her bottom, thoroughly, leisurely, until he felt her body loosen and her breasts were heavy in his hands. He tasted her rosy lips, still wet with lake water. He wrapped her long black hair around his fist and took his place between her thighs. He steered his mind away then, because a rude feeling heated his cock, and these tight Western trousers hid nothing.
He opened his satchel, where he kept his chessboard, carefully wrapped in cloth, and A Comprehensive Work about the History, Nature, and Culture of Scotland. He found his last page in the book and sank himself into passages about the fertile soils of Fifeshire, about Scottish inheritance laws and political treaties. He studied the chapters about sheep pastoralism with great intensity, as if there were clues to a treasure hidden between the lines.
Under a pale blue sky, the train rolled into Oxford’s railway station shortly before six o’clock in the evening. At half past six, Elias had settled in his new lodgings at St. John’s College and was unpacking his suitcases. He washed and shaved. At seven o’clock on the dot, Lady Catriona knocked on his door. She stood at a distance when he opened, as though she had just taken a step back. The ugly tartan shawl still hung around her shoulders, though she had changed into a blue dinner dress. She held an envelope in her hand. Behind her, the chaperone hovered, a little droopy after the long day.
“How do you find your accommodation,” the lady asked politely. She had snuck a decidedly less formal glance at his sharply tailored black-tie attire and now her face was a little pink. Interesting. He stepped aside to reveal the bright, spacious reception room.
“The accommodation is excellent,” he said.
It was a grand flat, reserved for visiting fellows or students from abroad. An oak table stretched under the room’s chandelier, long enough to seat half a dozen guests for dinner or card games. A row of diamond-panel lead windows with stained-glass flower vignettes lined the outer sandstone wall like breakable paintings. Next to the fireplace, a door led to a bedchamber with a small antechamber. The antechamber was fronted by a narrow stone balcony with views over the grounds, where Elias planned to smoke in peace and feast his eyes on lush, well-tended green in the middle of July.
Lady Catriona’s attention snagged on the fireplace. His neck heated. On the mantelpiece sat several large, airtight jars with olives, skinned apricots in sugar syrup, and bright pink pickled turnips in brine. Stowaways in one of his trunks. His family was convinced that there was no food abroad.
She held out the envelope. “I took some notes for you—the times when the scouts come in the morning to sweep and light the fire, when they collect laundry, and the locations of shops and pubs with decent lunch offers in the vicinity.”
He took the letter from her hand. “Very helpful. Thank you.”
He placed the list onto the table, next to his chessboard that he had set up for later in the evening. He caught her staring at the board then, a little like a hawk before it swooped. Remembering the unfinished game of chess on the table in the great hall in Applecross, he asked: “Do you play, ma’am?”
She looked away quickly. “Not in a while. I’m afraid we must make haste. The dons like their food and start dinner punctually.”
His quarters were located on the upper floor of St. John’s Canterbury Quadrangle, a two-hundred-year-old building with musty corridors, steep flights of stairs, and the particular crookedness brought on by the weight of centuries. Lady Catriona navigated the way with telling ease. Her lodgings had to be in the same building since her father was a don at St. John’s. But, Wester Ross wasn’t presently in residence. He had left his daughter alone in a quadrangle full of men.
In the cloisters, they encountered a group of dons in academic dress who greeted her respectfully in passing.
“Will they turn me away for not wearing the gown?” Elias asked. He was only half joking. At Cambridge, formal dinner had required academic regalia of everyone.
Lady Catriona shook her head. “They shall make an exception, given the circumstances of our arrival.”
“You’re not wearing one.”
They entered the Front Quadrangle. “Women aren’t permitted to wear them,” she replied. She kept her eyes on their destination, presumably the doors to the dining hall.
He slowed. “I thought you were faculty.”
MacKenzie near bumped into him from behind and she gave a displeased snort. The chaperone was taking “to be on someone’s heels” a little too literally.
Lady Catriona cast him a sidelong glance through her spectacles. “I have a position here thanks to my father,” she said. “Allowing me to wear the academic regalia would take it a step too far, wouldn’t it?”