“Let’s get out of here,” he hissed when all was quiet again. He dropped the Ivanhoe on a side table.
“You did say we should marry,” she said when his hand was on the doorknob.
His head jerked round to her. “What?”
Her mouth smiled, making light of it. “In the artifact room. The day you came to see the stone from Alexandria.”
Charlie frowned. “Why, I was nine years old when I said that.”
“Twelve. You were twelve.”
His confused expression did not change, and she understood that whether nine or twelve, he had been a child and only an imbecile would put stock in the word of a child.
“You said our estates would have made one grand estate,” she added, loathing herself as the words came out of her mouth.
Charlie’s inane smile returned. “Indeed, they would have made a grand estate. But aren’t you married to your books in any case?” He cracked the door open and listened into the corridor. “Come. Let’s go back. Do me the honor of a dance?”
She couldn’t move. One step out of this room and she’d fall into an abyss, a world without Charlie. I can change, she wanted to say. I will sew my book pocket shut. Just don’t leave me, don’t leave me. You are my only friend. She followed him down the corridor. A group of his friends, brimful with punch, poured around the corner and absorbed them. Somehow, Charlie and she became separated.
She never remembered how she returned to the Campbell town house. Her mind was racing round like a mad rat in a cage. Had there been a magical phrase that could have set the wheels in motion in her favor? A gesture she could have made to change his mind? She should have told him that she loved him. Her journey to Applecross passed by in a fog, and the days blurred together while she lay on her bed in the tower room, next to his letters. She had been useful to him. Chum. As a woman, she was deficient in his eyes, missing some vital component to be considered for the wife role. Her uncertainty in how to be in such an ill-fitting body was apparently visible to outsiders. It confirmed it: something was wrong with her.
Her father came to her room and sat in the chair while she had her face buried in a pillow. He wanted to know if Charlie had done something to her, something he ought to discuss with Charlie’s father. No, he had done nothing. He wasn’t interested.
“It feels as though I’m dying,” she sobbed. “I wish I were dead.”
The earl was shocked. “Child, such violent emotions are not normal, not healthy.”
He would know. She had heard him howl the night Mama and the baby had died.
The next day, Wester Ross told her she would attend a boarding school in Switzerland.
“It’s an etiquette school for ladies,” he added when she was too stunned to speak. “Your mother wasn’t here to guide you. Mrs. Keller and her teachers will help you to become a proper woman.”
She glared in disbelief. “I’m not going there.”
He gave her a gloomy look. “It would break my heart to force you,” he said. “However, don’t think that I won’t.”
An iron band seemed to snap around her chest, and it tightened until all air was squeezed from her. She fell back onto the bed.
“If I were the only person in the world,” she said to the ceiling, “how would I even know I was a woman? Who would tell me? Who would make me? I would just be me. Why can’t I just be me?”
The earl was quiet for a moment. “An interesting hypothesis,” he then allowed. “But no one is ever just themselves.”
It occurred to her that he looked old; he was barely forty but there were grooves bracketing his mouth and his dark curls were shot through with gray. Perhaps that was why she had relented. She still had left Applecross feeling betrayed, with two dramatic conclusions in her luggage:
Love was cruel.
Men were misery.
When she found her way back to Wester Ross a year later, she was rather more disillusioned than before. It had turned out that men had no monopoly on causing misery. Or perhaps it was a fault within her person, that her oh-so-clever brain had a blind spot when it came to reading the person she adored. It didn’t matter, though, because fixating on a man and marriage had been a childish thing to do for someone like her. She needed peace, not love. She needed freedom, not the status conferred to a wife.
* * *
—
Voices carried into the study. A group of St. John’s fellows strolled past the windows in lazily billowing gowns. They were taking a turn in the garden before going to dinner. Catriona put a hand on her stomach, trying to determine whether she was hungry. She supposed she could eat something; but she might see Elias, or perhaps Peregrin. Under her hand, her stomach felt hollow. Listlessly, she sorted her campaign letters into a tidy stack. Avoidance was her preferred method of dealing with her romantic disappointments—she had never set foot in the Middleton town house again, and she had never called on Alexandra after she had left boarding school, even though her old friend resided in Chelsea with her diplomat husband these days. It seemed her world would just become smaller and smaller over time as she’d have to avoid more and more places and people. On the one hand that sounded comforting, quiet and safe, just her and good books and cozy blankets, on the other hand, it didn’t seem right, not yet, not like this. Solitude that wasn’t freely chosen was no better than loneliness.
Perhaps she shouldn’t abandon her experiment entirely. Perhaps she ought to try to salvage what she could. There was no point in practicing feeling normal in Elias’s presence, but she could certainly practice not giving a damn.
Chapter 15
Monday’s suffrage meeting, just as Catriona had feared, was delayed in favor of forming a circle around the cake table to discuss Elias Khoury. Hattie had shared the turn of events about his true identity with Annabelle and Lucie after Catriona’s hasty departure from Blackstone House.
“So, the trouble is that the licenses Leighton presented were issued by a corrupt official?” Lucie asked, two steep lines of concentration between her brows.
“I’m not certain he even had a license for everything that’s in that room, though the official was likely corrupt, too,” Catriona said. “However, even if the paperwork was perfectly in order, the point Mr. Khoury raises is whether an imperial administration is ever entitled to give away indigenous artifacts.”
“I’m not a lawyer,” Annabelle said in a serious, subdued way, “but I know that looting cultural treasures has been frowned upon since Cicero.”
“Pillaging is officially forbidden since the 1874 Brussels Declaration,” Catriona said, “but this wasn’t a war, and Mr. Khoury is determined to strike a deal in any case rather than rely on the law.”
Hattie, who had followed the conversation from her couch while nibbling on a sugar cube, raised her hand. “I’m the first to say give art back to where it belongs, but wouldn’t the pieces be safer here? No one will make things disappear from the British Museum anytime soon.”