“I may have read about that.”
He looked up in time to catch the faint smile on her lips. Of course she knew already. She had simply tested his reaction to these facts. She was thinking two moves ahead, both on and off the chessboard, it seemed. It did however reveal that she had a degree of personal interest in him, too.
“Perhaps Britain will progress that way one day, thanks to your campaign,” he said in an amicable tone.
She moved her mouth as if she had tasted something sour. “We have reason to hope,” she said. “Scotland already passed a good Property Act a few years ago. England shall follow.”
She sent a pawn to d5, a juicy little bait for his pawn on c4. Did she really think he’d fall for that?
“On the mountain, our revolutionaries are our factory girls,” he said. “The amila. They remind me of your suffragists.”
She slanted her head at an attentive angle. “How so?”
“They ignore convention and strike fear in the hearts of the elders.”
“Amila,” Lady Catriona repeated.
“Female factory worker,” he translated.
“I admit I fail to see how performing manual labor in probably poor conditions equates to women’s liberation,” she said earnestly.
Her bluntness kept catching him off guard. How to improve working conditions in the factories was indeed one of the points of contention he had with his uncle.
“It’s not straightforward,” he conceded. “You need to take a long view.”
He moved his bishop, Bg2, leaving her pawn well alone. She countered with her second knight to c6. Interesting. He ought to seriously focus on his next move.
“The girls used to care for the silkworms at home,” he said instead. “It’s always been important work—the mountain economy depends on the worm—but it was domestic work. Then the entire French industry fell into trouble some twenty years ago when their worms caught a blight; the French pack them too tightly, they don’t care well for them. In the mountains, we keep them in a nice, ventilated room, and they are hand-fed mulberry leaves by the girls. When silk production moved from France to Mount Lebanon and our people began building their own factories, they asked the girls to come in, to process the cocoons, too.”
He was talking with his hands now, but Lady Catriona was focused on him, riveted as though he were reading her her fortune. It could keep a man talking, such an interested face.
“So now girls board with girls from other regions, instead of only knowing home,” he explained. “They exchange new ideas and earn a wage. They don’t have banners or agendas, but it still changes what women do and how families function. These girls will raise the next generation one day. The hand on the cradle, as you say here.”
“Are the girls allowed to keep their wages?” she wanted to know.
“Oh yes.” He grinned. “They drive a hard bargain with factory owners, too—threatening to collectively go and work for the competition. It works like a charm.”
He had memories of a fuming Khalo Jabbar feeling bested by a bunch of thirteen-year-old girls in braids. His uncle came from a generation where women were quiet and lowered their gaze to the floor in the presence of a man, but the amila were loud when they spoke with one voice. A late retribution on behalf of the first cohorts of girls in the factories in the sixties, Elias thought. With his keen eye for opportunity, Jabbar and other men of business had collected the many orphans after the civil war to harness their destitution for profit. The new generation, however, had both roots and teeth.
“Why don’t the men go into the factories?” Lady Catriona asked.
He scoffed. “No man wants to work under a foreman. And they can’t all be the foreman.”
“I see. But what of the girls’ honor?”
This sobered him. No father liked to send his daughter to work outside the home under a stranger.
“The problem is,” he said, “that you can’t eat it, the honor.”
“No,” she agreed, “you can’t.”
“So when hunger knocks on the door, the concept becomes . . . malleable.”
He tapped his fingers on the table. Hunger was never far from Mount Lebanon these days, though it shouldn’t be that way. Twenty years ago, the mountain economy had eagerly gripped the long arm of Western capitalism; the looms were running day and night and the volume of silk thread shipping out of Beirut had shot up exponentially. And yet many peasants found that their debt cycles and dependencies were getting worse. Meanwhile, as the truce endured, villages grew instead of being decimated by clashes. Prying enough food from the rocky slopes, from the dead lands, had always been a challenge even for the skilled, and the number of mouths to feed increased by the day. So the girls went into the factories, and the men went abroad. Steamers were waiting in the ports of Beirut and Sidon to carry away boatloads of sons and husbands, and sometimes independent women, pushed by limited opportunities and pulled by the promise of freedom and fortune. They left for Egypt or the United States, but also to Brazil, Cuba, the Caribbean. The roofs of Zahlé and Zgharta turned red with expensive Italian tiles and new mulberry groves spread over the mountains, courtesy of remittances.
When émigrés returned, with their pockets stuffed with money from work as lowly as peddling, they usually took a bride and left with her, but not before infecting more young men with travel fever. Khalo Jabbar began looking at his squadron of sons and nephews with a warning eye when these men came to the village. If you leave, don’t bother to return. Jabbar needed them with their boots on the ground on Mount Lebanon, in the factories, in the Silk Office, and in the Church, to build his own little empire within the empire. Had there been parents to whom Elias could have sent his fortunes, he would have been very tempted to conquer exciting new horizons. As it was, his parents were gone, and their land was left. So he stayed.
His chess partner was watching him with her bottomless gaze, clearly waiting for more.
“And this”—he waved his hand—“is how the peasant girls bring revolution.”
“You approve of it,” she observed. “The revolution.”
“I like a revolt, now and again,” he replied. “Keeps a system healthy.”
He liked playing chess with her quiet eyes on him and her scent in his nose, French lavender and delicate female skin. Unsurprisingly, he had no clue where to move his next piece.
She placed her hand next to the chessboard, notably closer to his side of the table.
“Conversing with you is very educational,” she said in a low voice. She sounded a little breathy, too.
His gaze narrowed at her. She blinked, but she didn’t look away. On the table, her hand trembled but stayed put. Her behavior was different today. Why had she come? He leaned forward slightly, as if having a closer look at her face, the gentle curve of her jaw, the pale rose of her lips, would reveal her secrets to him.