“Astonishing,” muttered Charlie, his gaze straying toward the wall with the armory.
“Papa says these letters are based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, but much simplified,” she pressed on. “Aleph is the word for ox, so it’s probably based on the hieroglyph that depicted an ox head. But because the Phoenicians created a consonantal alphabet, it connected the written to the spoken word and could be adopted and adapted by other languages.” It felt as though her mouth were propelled by a steam engine; her lips were moving without a conscious command from her brain, and she couldn’t stop. “It’s the foundation of our Latin alphabet, too. If you turn our A upside down, you can still see the head of an ox with horns.”
Charlie looked inward, obviously envisioning an A upside down, and then he turned to her with a smile spreading over his face. “You’re so clever.”
He gave one of her braids a playful tug, and her face went warm.
“I ought to send you letters from Eton about my tutorials,” he said. “My Greek tutor is a beast. My Latin one, too. They are all miserable.”
Her heart clanged against her ribs. Letters, just for her. Home was empty since Mama had gone. Her father was still physically present, but he was as vacant as the castle, and he no longer taught her Latin and Greek. Her governess was a nuisance, thinking she knew best when she clearly wasn’t very intelligent; she accused Catriona of being brash just because she asked questions. It would be lovely to have someone think of her enough to write her letters.
“Yes,” she said. “You may write to me.”
His letters came every fortnight, and she answered, three or four pages to one of his. She composed essays for him, sometimes translation, for it was like play to her while he seemed to struggle. When he came home during the summers, his arrival felt as though Persephone were rising to the surface after her months in the underworld: the rooms were warmer and the colors burned brighter when he walked through the entrance. Life fell into a rhythm where Charlie’s letters and visits constituted the emotional high points. The year she stopped wearing her hair in braids, her governess suggested a boarding school, and Catriona resisted. She’d never miss Charlie’s visits, and while her father was absent-minded, she felt his loneliness bleeding through his patchy suits, and nothing would remove her from the castle in case he should want her company. Wester Ross indulged her and finally hired proper tutors. Her knowledge became far superior to what Charlie had acquired at prestigious Eton, but she loved him anyway. She loved him for his quick wit, his spontaneous laugh. He made her think life could be a light, easy thing after all.
When he was sixteen, Charlie became wide-shouldered like his father. He carried his new manliness with confidence; she, however, spent days staring at her own changing body in the mirror, unsettled by the uncontrollably burgeoning bits. There was a mismatch between the image she held of herself and her reflection, for this new body was deemed unsuitable for her passions, the swimming, the digging, the visceral hunger for knowledge. She was becoming stuck in the kind of body that had killed her mother while she had tried to bring new life into the world. All the pliant softness was the embodiment of weakness, if not a death trap. When she went down to Oxford that year, her father’s colleagues noticed the new body, too, and her skin crawled under their perusal with a fierce annoyance and an unfamiliar sense of shame. The changed appearance changed the way she thought about Charlie, too. She now imagined doing unspeakable things with him, straight from the books her father didn’t know she had been reading.
When he turned eighteen, he wrote of the grand tour he had planned before shuffling off to Cambridge: Wouldn’t have passed those awful entrance interviews without you, Kitty Cat!
Not a word about a proposal. Hot tears ran down her cheeks while she penned a reply that sounded utterly delighted for him. During the party for his departure, she stood pressed against the wall of the small ballroom at Middleton House down in London, watching him whirl pretty girls across the dance floor. Sometimes, his eye caught hers, and he smiled. Shortly after midnight, she asked a footman to pass Charlie a note. She waited for him in the library. There, the disaster happened. First, he didn’t seem too keen to see her, he kept glancing past her, his gaze searching. “Did you send the note? Asking me to come here?”
A question stirred at the back of her mind: had he expected someone else?
“It’s just a goodbye gift,” she said, and pulled the book from her extra pocket in her skirt.
Charlie turned it over in his hand. “Ivanhoe?”
“First edition of the first volume,” she said, sounding too keen. He smelled of Charlie and exertion, an intimate mix that caused the edges of her vision to blur.
His smile showed teeth. “Splendid.”
He seemed tense, ready to bolt from the potential scandal of being here alone with her. She closed the gap between them with one determined step and rose to her toes. His green eyes were unfamiliarly close and wide. She pressed her mouth to his. Warm and smooth. Like the sturdy petal of an exotic plant, tasting of rum and tobacco. His hand was on her waist, and, stirred by the warm pressure, her new body made sense in this moment, too. Next, she stumbled forward into nothingness. Charlie had retreated abruptly. He had put the back of his hand over his mouth and his pale eyebrows were arching high in shock.
Mortification set her face on fire. “I’m sorry.”
He dropped his hand. “Well, that was a little forward,” he said with a flustered laugh. “That’s all right,” he added quickly. “Too much punch, hm?”
The forced lightness in his voice made him sound alien.
Her mouth was dry as desert dust. “Yes,” she said. “I had a bit much.”
“Whew,” Charlie said, still in this jaunty new tone. “Well, good. I was worried there for a moment.” He gave her a conspiring look, which she met with a blank expression.
He ran a hand over his hair. “Goodness,” he said. “I would have felt like an utter cad, had I ever given you the impression that I, ah, harbored romantic inclinations toward you.”
Something sharp cut right through her chest, the feeling so horrifying that she glanced down to see if a knife hilt was sticking out from between her ribs. She saw the swell of her breasts, encased in white tulle. She was wearing this fluffy thing for him. A cold sensation rose inside her, all-consuming like the tide of an icy sea. She couldn’t seem to see very well.
“No,” she said, looking at him, trying to clear her vision by blinking. “You never gave the impression.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she heard him say. “Little Tipsy Head. You were my best chum up there in that windy place, you do know that, don’t you?”
Chum. Chum?
Steps sounded outside the library. Charlie ducked and stilled.