His face heated. He felt both caught and falsely accused. “I require no particular reason to flirt with you.”
“I’m well aware that I was your pawn sacrifice,” she continued, calmly, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Ensorcel the earl’s daughter to secure her cooperation, wasn’t it? Her feelings are a small price for retrieving stolen artifacts. And you know, I do agree with that.” She nodded. “I would have done the same, in your place.”
Pressure built behind his eyes. She was misconstruing last night so terribly that he had a physical reaction to it, but yes, there had been a ploy to seduce her, too.
He gestured, impatiently. “Believe me that kissing you—”
“Please,” she said, cutting him off. “Pretend that never happened.”
She missed his stare by a hair: the stubborn, avoidant look of an animal that tried to defuse aggression by avoiding direct eye contact. He shook his head, as if that would clear his mind. It had been muddled since last night, since trying to figure out how to finish what they had started in the library. The decent way to do it involved asking the earl for his daughter’s hand; but, given the circumstances, it was also the most outlandish way, and so he was still in a state of nonconclusion.
“Tayyeb, tayyeb, habibti,” he finally said. “As you wish.”
He would still be in the Common Room every day at one o’clock with a chess game they had yet to finish.
Chapter 14
Saturday afternoon, Catriona wrote an urgent note to Wester Ross to see her in Oxford in case he happened to be in London the coming week. The sooner justice was done, the better. As an added benefit, she would never have to see Elias again. I require no particular reason to flirt with you. Her smile was so dry, her lips might crack. He wasn’t the first to use her for her brains or connections; everyone she had fancied before him had done it and patterns were nothing if not consistent. There was a cruel irony in finding herself reduced to the very thing she had worked so hard to cultivate, her academic position. It was as though a woman could have either a brain or a heart, and whichever way, she was allowed only half a life.
She spent another hour copying her letter of appeal about the writ for restitution for a fresh batch of men of influence. This, at least, was time and effort well spent on worthy work, and her moving pen kept the ghosts at bay. Unfortunately, her first wave of correspondence had elicited only two kinds of responses so far: silence, and utter nonsense. After signing the last letter, she tapped her pen against the rim of the ink bottle and put the cap back on. She sat in her chair and stared into the walled fellows’ garden outside the window behind her desk. Her breathing was slow and careful. With her hands idle, her ghosts drifted closer. She could make out Charlie. Charlie had been the first to hurt her the way she had just been hurt again.
Charles, son of neighboring Baron Middleton, had called on the Campbells to see the hieroglyph stone. She had been ten, he had been twelve, with a slim build and silky blond hair that framed his finely drawn face in perfect waves. She had seen him on occasion since nursery days, but that day, when he stood in the library waiting in vain for Wester Ross, she had really seen him. A sensation had fluttered low in her belly. It had been a familiar feeling but only from reading about particularly beautiful, valiant characters in one of her novels. It had made her want to hide from him, but when it became obvious that her father had forgotten about his visitor, she had crept from her reading place and offered to take him to see the hieroglyphs.
The stone was kept in the artifact chamber adjacent to the library. Catriona knew the room like the back of her hand. She had played here at her mother’s feet, pretending to be an archaeologist, too, between the rusting swords from the Danes, the Roman coin collections and cracked amphoras from Bath, and headless marbles of unknown origins. This was her nursery, and she gladly opened it for Charlie.
He seemed more interested in the antique weapons on the east wall. Of the stone, he said: “It’s rather small, isn’t it.”
“I suppose,” Catriona said.
“What does this one here mean?” Charlie pointed at a symbol at random.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Papa hasn’t taught me yet.”
“Does it really come all the way from Egypt?”
“Aye. An Egyptian colleague from Alexandria loaned it to my father.”
“Wicked.”
“When I’m grown up, I’ll be an archaeologist, too,” she informed him.
Charlie smiled at that. “You can’t.”
“Why not? I know Latin and Greek quite well already.”
“But you’re a girl.” There was no derision in his tone, it was just a fact of life.
“So?” she said. “My mother used to dig.” Her voice broke a little when she said mother out loud. Mother was buried for nearly a year now.
“True,” Charlie conceded. “But Lady Wester Ross—well, you know what they say about her.”
She hesitated. “What do they say?”
“That she wasn’t a mother-woman,” Charlie said, his fingers tracing hieroglyphs in no particular order. “And you want to marry one day, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said reflexively.
Mother-woman. Charles must have overheard the term from an adult conversation; perhaps the staff had gossiped, perhaps his parents had during a carriage ride to or from one of the castle dinners. Mother-woman would become lodged in her brain like a piece of shrapnel.
Charlie gave her a lopsided smile. His eyes were the color of new moss. A spark glinted in their depths like a tiny sun. “We should marry one day, Kitty. It would make one grand estate out of our two.”
She stood in stunned silence, not knowing where to look, or what to say, in the face of such an awesome announcement. Her belly fluttered with clear excitement, though. Yes, she would love to marry such a golden boy.
“What are those funny swirls?” Charlie pointed at the framed parchment on the wall above the stone.
Relief flooded her. This, she knew how to answer. “That isn’t swirls, that is Arabic script. Look. This here, this is the first letter, called aleph. In Greek, it’s the letter alpha. In our Latin alphabet, it’s been shortened to just A.”
“I know alpha,” Charlie said, amused. “I’m at Eton.”
Eton. She envied him his attendance at the prestigious school, there was nothing like it for girls. Admittedly, though, she didn’t like the idea of leaving the castle.
“Now look at this parchment,” she said, and pointed to the print next to the Arabic one.
“Looks like a child finger-painted that one,” Charlie scoffed.
“It’s a print of the Phoenician alphabet,” she explained. “The first ever alphabet. It was invented in the Levant. The first letter is called aleph. The second, beyt. Aleph-beyt, alphabet, you see?”