Her irritation subsided quickly; this was a rare opportunity to share a meal with him, alone, outside her kitchen.
The fa?ade of the oyster bar was painted fire-engine red; inside, the room smelled of brine and woodsmoke. Nautical lamps in different sizes lined the mantelpiece of the fireplace, the polished brass catching the light. A blackboard on the wall advertised a pint-and-oysters special. They were the only guests, outside the regular lunch hour. Elias requested a table in one of the two bay windows. It felt illicit, lunching in bright daylight with her lover in a public place. When the waitress arrived, Catriona hid her hand where a ring should have been under the table.
“We won’t have the oysters in for another six weeks,” the waitress informed them. “There’s fish soup, and fish pie.”
“What about champagne?” Elias asked.
“We have that, sir, a dry Perrier-Jou?t.”
He ordered a bottle.
Catriona took off her glasses and slipped them into her jacket pocket. Briefly, her surroundings blurred. Elias remained in focus; he was indecently good-looking and had mischief in his eyes. Champagne at noon.
“This excursion was a complete shot into the brown,” she pointed out. “It hardly merits a celebration.”
“It was a what?”
“Oh—it’s a phrase to describe a failure. A shot gone astray, far off target.”
He nodded, unruffled. “All the more reason for champagne.” His lashes lowered a fraction. “Don’t forget it’s not even noon—this could become the best day of your life just yet.”
The waitress arrived with a dusty champagne trolley, the neck of the perspiring bottle sticking up from a plain wooden ice bucket. When she made to pour the drinks, Elias told her he’d take care of it. He filled Catriona’s glass with Perrier, then his, and he raised his goblet with a soft Salute.
The first sip was unexpectedly refreshing. Crisp and tart. The bubbles pearled against her palate.
“From what I gather, Mrs. Weldon isn’t obsessed with her husband at all,” she said after drinking some more. “She said, ‘I curse the day I married him.’?”
She related the bizarre events in the Weldon library in full.
Elias topped up her glass.
“It still sounds as though there was a misunderstanding,” he suggested. “Your idea is . . . unconventional. It would confuse anyone at first.”
She shook her head. “She seemed scared. I’d rather not trouble her. The poor woman, how dreadful, to be afraid of your own husband, in your own home, even when he’s already gone.”
Elias leaned a little closer. “I wondered about this,” he said softly. “You said you don’t want to, or can’t marry. Why? Are you afraid?” he prodded. “To marry a bad man?”
She made a small sound, like a resigned sigh.
“Various reasons,” she said. “You saw me jump from the carriage near St. Giles a while ago, didn’t you?”
“I have already forgotten it,” he said politely.
“I haven’t. I feel crowded rather too easily.”
He looked at her blankly.
“I need a lot of time alone,” she clarified. “I require my own, quiet space.”
He regarded her with a level stare. “Wouldn’t you have your own wing of the manor?”
“Ideally, yes.” She could feel the champagne bubbles in her brain. “The trouble is, I just can’t hear myself well when I’m surrounded by people, and when the noise persists for too long, it feels as though I’m disappearing.”
He mulled it over. “Send your husband away on business when he is underfoot.”
She shook her head. “I worry it wouldn’t end well.”
“You are very certain about something you have never tried.”
“Remember the book about powerful women I never finished writing?”
A nod. Her glass was full again, too. She narrowed her gaze at it, but she took a drink.
“I said I stopped writing because I realized the futility of the book for my political goals,” she explained, “but the truth is, I also stopped because it gave me the morbs. It turned out that the women on my list were either backstabbed by their lovers or died bad deaths. Often both. Elissa of Carthage took her own life over unrequited love. Cleopatra, seduced by two men, then she poisoned herself; Boudicca, again, poisoned herself. Hypatia, flayed alive. Joan of Arc, first venerated, then executed. Elizabeth I—heartbroken over Lord Dudley; Isabella of France and Catherine the Great, just grim, how their kings betrayed them. I stopped after Tamara of Georgia—her husband came after her not once, but twice, with a rebel army. It’s probably just the price everyone pays for power, but it’s my impression that women who hold their own pay double, just because they are women. I see it in people’s faces every time I hand them a pamphlet, or when I retreat for some solitude during a house party. When I exist for my own pleasure or have a conviction, it invites resentment. If queens across the ages can’t have it all, what chance do I have?”
A complex emotion stood in Elias’s eyes. “I think I understand,” he said, “but not everything can be experienced through abstract analysis. Some things need to be lived.”
He reminded her of Hattie, scolding her for her faith in patterns. “Unfortunately, real life can’t be undone quite so easily,” she muttered.
The waitress reappeared with two bowls of fish soup.
“Have you considered,” Elias said when she had left again, “that you could marry a man who loves you?”
Catriona lowered her spoon, a downward smile curving her lips. “Hmm, I should have thought of that.”
“You should have,” he said, his gaze intent. “He would raise an army for you, not against you.”
He had dropped his voice to a seductively smooth murmur, and it made her skin prickle more deliciously than the drink in her glass. Her fingers clenched, nervously. He kept doing this, flirting away with her as though she were a desirable siren rather than a bit odd. Was it the distance between their cultures? Did the same traits hold different meaning depending on where one was in the world? Perhaps it was because the shape of their relationship wasn’t predefined. She didn’t have to pour herself into the role of a wife or an acquaintance for him, bumping into all the rules and expectations that came with each. Lovers had some leeway, to like each other for one’s own sake.
“An army just for me,” she said. “Fancy that. The truth is, I would be content with him letting me be when I need it.”
He nodded. His thumb was lazily stroking up and down the fragile stem of his goblet. “What else?” he asked. “What else do you need from a husband?”
She was tipsy, and disturbed, because this was no longer a hypothetical discussion, or was it. “I confess I haven’t thought too hard about it.”