This was almost certainly a trap. “Would it?” he asked, tempted to see it snap.
“Now, if women were allowed to properly matriculate and sit the same final exams here as the male students, they might be deserving of the gown,” she mused. “But, according to leading physicians, such educational exertion will cause swelling to the female brain, damage to her reproductive organs, and usher in the collapse of society. Hardly worth the ephemeral glory of wearing the academic gown?”
“I see,” he said dryly.
He was used to ribald, provocative women well enough—he had lived in close quarters with French bohemians for years—but this here wasn’t seduction; rather, the opposite. He had encroached with casual conversation, inching across the line she had drawn in the sand in the sheep stable, and she was warning him off. She had said reproductive organs to his face.
During the dinner, his eyes kept returning to her. She was engaged in discussion with her dinner partner, a gray-haired professor, a few seats down across the table. She obviously wasn’t shy. She was selectively reserved, and the innate insouciance of a moneyed lady shone through in her interactions with men. Perhaps unsurprising, as she and her father were a law unto themselves in their Dickensian castle, with only curmudgeonly staff for company. Their roots reached deep into the Applecross rock plateau. It fascinated Elias. He had told her he was from Zgharta, which was only half-true—his mother was indeed from the mountain, but his father had grown up on the coast. Mountains and sea were indomitable forces; they molded their inhabitants rather than the other way around. His mother’s people had become inward focused and embodied the fierce stubbornness required to turn rocks into fertile gardens, while his father’s side had kept their eyes on the horizon, curious, mobile, counting strangers as opportunities rather than as threats. His parents’ blood now mixed in his veins. Two souls resided in his chest. It had left him a born negotiator, successfully adaptable to most places, but on the other hand he was neither fully here nor there. Lady Catriona struck him as her own center of gravity. She would be the same peculiar woman in London as in Beirut.
Her eyes met his across the table, solicitously. He was a guest, after all.
He wondered whether her passion for justice extended beyond her cause for women’s rights. Was she aware that Mr. Leighton’s antiquities in the Ashmolean were wanted back in the Levant? Would she care? It was Wester Ross who had to care, since it was his introduction to Mr. Leighton that Elias needed. But Wester Ross wasn’t here, and until the earl returned, he’d better keep his distance from the daughter. Elias was, in fact, not an expert on Phoenician antiquities—and Lady Catriona’s eyes missed nothing.
Chapter 5
There she is!” Hattie squeaked the moment Catriona stepped foot into her friend’s drawing room at Oxford’s Randolph Hotel.
Three smiling young women rose from the sofa as one and rushed to her. There was a crush of silk and satin skirts when their arms hugged her tight, and she endured being kissed and squeezed while she breathed in the familiar scents of flowers and vanilla. When they let go, she adjusted her spectacles with a sheepish grin.
“I’m terribly pleased to see you, too,” she said.
“When I received your message yesterday, I screeched,” Lucie said, her gray eyes bright like polished silver. “I never screech.”
“I can confirm that she did, indeed, screech—happily, of course,” Hattie said, and her red curls bobbed around her face as she nodded. “Have you had any breakfast? Come, sit down, dear, have some tea.”
“And have some lemon cake,” Annabelle suggested as her gaze covertly searched Catriona’s face. Catriona touched a hand to her cheek; yes, she might have forgotten to eat regular meals at Applecross while trying to summon a topic for her book.
She took off her gloves and sank into the soft armchair where she usually sat during their informal morning meetings, when it was just the four of them and an étagère full of cakes. Hattie’s drawing room was large enough to accommodate twenty or more people, however, and judging by the rows of chairs facing the blackboard and speaker’s desk, they had hosted a suffrage meeting recently. Lucie’s hasty handwriting was scrawled across the blackboard:
Amending the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act—victory imminent?
The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1878 & Writ for Restitution—the next battlefield!
Hattie kept her rooms at the hotel since she had another year left in her studies of the fine arts, and she divided her time between Oxford and her marital home in London. The evolution of the room mirrored the nationwide growth of the Cause: when Oxford University had admitted female students for the first time three years ago, only a handful of local women had joined them here for debates on suffrage; the banner above the mantelpiece had been taken down after every meeting; the speaker’s desk was kept hidden in a wardrobe. Since Hattie had married and her husband supported the Cause, they now had a permanent, well-equipped space for planning revolution. Meanwhile, suffrage membership numbers across Britain had swelled, more chapters had formed, and there were talks about organizing local chapters in a national union. Maintaining the current momentum, however, seemed to hinge almost entirely on whether the House of Commons would pass the Property Act amendment in late summer.
Catriona eyed her eager-looking friends with some trepidation. If they were counting on her full availability for the Cause, she would have to disappoint them. If they planned on drawing her into the social scene, dinners, charity, occult séances, or whatever the fashion, again, her time was scarce.
Hattie poured her some tea. Annabelle heaped frosted cakes onto a plate with silver tongs, looking elegant and willowy in a dusky pink gown and with a gleaming coil of hair falling over her shoulder. Lucie, icy-blond and dainty in a snug blue dress, put her elbow onto the sofa arm and studied Catriona with an expectant expression.
“Now,” she said, “what brings you back into our fold, my friend?”
She might as well have said my lost sheep. As the leader of the chapter, Lucie had taken Catriona’s retreat to Applecross during a “heated phase” rather personally. The problem is, Catriona had explained to her, there is never not a heated phase with the suffrage movement, so, good day.
“I’m to help Wester Ross’s new colleague from abroad to acclimatize here,” Catriona said, careful to keep her tone and expression neutral. The last thing she wanted was to explain anything at all about Elias Khoury.
“Trust some crusty old gentleman to interfere with your summer plans,” Hattie said, and wrinkled her upturned nose, “but it’s our gain—your clever head was much missed.”