Mr. Khoury nodded, but now it looked as though he was biting his cheeks to trap a grin.
His debonair demeanor was unsettling. Was she acting overly missish? It was easy for him to feel this way, she supposed. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. Was there a Mrs. Khoury back in Mount Lebanon, or was he just a rake? He radiated the vitality of a healthy, active young man, but the fine smile lines around his eyes suggested he was past the age of five-and-twenty. He was likely married, and the thought made her already queasy stomach plummet. Pathetic. As if this man’s marital status made any difference to her. A meaningful silence ensued, until a needy baaa from the pen ruptured the tension. The lamb was still there, watching Mr. Khoury with its ears twitching back and forth. This, too, seemed to amuse him. He was probably used to shameless bids for his attention, one more reason to utterly ignore him. It felt as though his attention remained trained on her back like a poised arrow as she stalked off.
His presence stayed with her. She was brushing out her hair for bed in her dimly lit tower room, and her face still burned as though she had spent too much time in the sun. Her stomach kept clenching with a diffuse, anxious anticipation. She knew this feeling. It had happened three times before, starting with Charles Middleton and ending with her best friend’s brother-in-law, Lord Peregrin. Three times was enough to make a pattern, and the pattern said romantic attachments were not for her. In fairness, it wasn’t a romantic attachment she thought of when picturing Elias Khoury’s competently stroking hands; rather, something deep inside her stirred, like a forgotten captive in a cell when the light came in. As though her passion were still alive and there was hope that she hadn’t yet kissed her last kiss. This needed to be stomped out quick. False hope was one of the cruelest, most time-wasting tricks humans played on themselves.
She put her brush down on the vanity table. In the mirror, her face was a placid, pale shape. A slight tension between her brows was the only indication of internal upheaval. This was why people thought of her as cool and collected, when in truth she just had a faulty transmission between her emotions and her facial muscles. It hid a multitude of sins.
Behind her, MacKenzie stopped transferring hot coals from the hearth into the bed warmer and glanced at her.
“It’ll be lovely for you to see your friends again at Oxford, no?” she said placably. She knew Catriona did not take sudden interruptions to her work schedule lightly.
“I suppose,” Catriona said, and opened the jar with lavender crème. “I miss them, of course. Unfortunately, it crushes all hopes I had for writing the book.”
“Why is that?”
“My friends are in Oxford because our campaign requires exacting coordination until Parliament reconvenes and hears our bill.” She dabbed cool crème onto her cheeks. “Which means the moment I’m back, they will coax me into endless cake feasts and suffrage work.”
Between that and assisting Elias Khoury, she could kiss her ruminations goodbye.
MacKenzie frowned. “I thought the Duke of Montgomery put the Property Act through the House of Lords just a few months ago? What more suffrage work can they possibly give you now?”
“The House of Lords was a grand hurdle, but there are still the MPs in the House of Commons. Unless we convince them to vote in our favor by the end of the summer, all our work of the last years was for nothing. Lucie will find a task for me.”
And because the Cause was most important, and Lucie, Annabelle, and Hattie were the sisters she had never had, she would crumble and try to fit too much onto her plate.
MacKenzie was shaking her head; in her opinion, women’s suffrage was a fancy idea by the gentry, for the gentry. She closed the lid of the bed warmer and came to her feet.
Catriona rose. “Hold on.”
When she tried to take the pan from MacKenzie, the older woman made a brusque motion with her head. Catriona stood by empty-handed while MacKenzie swished the bed warmer round under the covers. Every year since MacKenzie’s fiftieth birthday, Catriona had offered her early retirement, and it always elicited the same response: a polite Thank ye and a glance that said and who’ll look after you then? MacKenzie lived in the Shieldaig village, but whenever Catriona came to stay, she returned to the castle during the week unless one of her daughters had a new baby. To this day, MacKenzie seemed to have trouble separating nine-year-old Catriona, newly bereft of her mother, from the adult woman she had become.
“I must practice my Arabic,” Catriona said. “Mr. Khoury suits me for practicing.”