“The accommodation is excellent,” he said.
It was a grand flat, reserved for visiting fellows or students from abroad. An oak table stretched under the room’s chandelier, long enough to seat half a dozen guests for dinner or card games. A row of diamond-panel lead windows with stained-glass flower vignettes lined the outer sandstone wall like breakable paintings. Next to the fireplace, a door led to a bedchamber with a small antechamber. The antechamber was fronted by a narrow stone balcony with views over the grounds, where Elias planned to smoke in peace and feast his eyes on lush, well-tended green in the middle of July.
Lady Catriona’s attention snagged on the fireplace. His neck heated. On the mantelpiece sat several large, airtight jars with olives, skinned apricots in sugar syrup, and bright pink pickled turnips in brine. Stowaways in one of his trunks. His family was convinced that there was no food abroad.
She held out the envelope. “I took some notes for you—the times when the scouts come in the morning to sweep and light the fire, when they collect laundry, and the locations of shops and pubs with decent lunch offers in the vicinity.”
He took the letter from her hand. “Very helpful. Thank you.”
He placed the list onto the table, next to his chessboard that he had set up for later in the evening. He caught her staring at the board then, a little like a hawk before it swooped. Remembering the unfinished game of chess on the table in the great hall in Applecross, he asked: “Do you play, ma’am?”
She looked away quickly. “Not in a while. I’m afraid we must make haste. The dons like their food and start dinner punctually.”
His quarters were located on the upper floor of St. John’s Canterbury Quadrangle, a two-hundred-year-old building with musty corridors, steep flights of stairs, and the particular crookedness brought on by the weight of centuries. Lady Catriona navigated the way with telling ease. Her lodgings had to be in the same building since her father was a don at St. John’s. But, Wester Ross wasn’t presently in residence. He had left his daughter alone in a quadrangle full of men.
In the cloisters, they encountered a group of dons in academic dress who greeted her respectfully in passing.
“Will they turn me away for not wearing the gown?” Elias asked. He was only half joking. At Cambridge, formal dinner had required academic regalia of everyone.
Lady Catriona shook her head. “They shall make an exception, given the circumstances of our arrival.”
“You’re not wearing one.”
They entered the Front Quadrangle. “Women aren’t permitted to wear them,” she replied. She kept her eyes on their destination, presumably the doors to the dining hall.
He slowed. “I thought you were faculty.”
MacKenzie near bumped into him from behind and she gave a displeased snort. The chaperone was taking “to be on someone’s heels” a little too literally.
Lady Catriona cast him a sidelong glance through her spectacles. “I have a position here thanks to my father,” she said. “Allowing me to wear the academic regalia would take it a step too far, wouldn’t it?”
This was almost certainly a trap. “Would it?” he asked, tempted to see it snap.
“Now, if women were allowed to properly matriculate and sit the same final exams here as the male students, they might be deserving of the gown,” she mused. “But, according to leading physicians, such educational exertion will cause swelling to the female brain, damage to her reproductive organs, and usher in the collapse of society. Hardly worth the ephemeral glory of wearing the academic gown?”
“I see,” he said dryly.
He was used to ribald, provocative women well enough—he had lived in close quarters with French bohemians for years—but this here wasn’t seduction; rather, the opposite. He had encroached with casual conversation, inching across the line she had drawn in the sand in the sheep stable, and she was warning him off. She had said reproductive organs to his face.
During the dinner, his eyes kept returning to her. She was engaged in discussion with her dinner partner, a gray-haired professor, a few seats down across the table. She obviously wasn’t shy. She was selectively reserved, and the innate insouciance of a moneyed lady shone through in her interactions with men. Perhaps unsurprising, as she and her father were a law unto themselves in their Dickensian castle, with only curmudgeonly staff for company. Their roots reached deep into the Applecross rock plateau. It fascinated Elias. He had told her he was from Zgharta, which was only half-true—his mother was indeed from the mountain, but his father had grown up on the coast. Mountains and sea were indomitable forces; they molded their inhabitants rather than the other way around. His mother’s people had become inward focused and embodied the fierce stubbornness required to turn rocks into fertile gardens, while his father’s side had kept their eyes on the horizon, curious, mobile, counting strangers as opportunities rather than as threats. His parents’ blood now mixed in his veins. Two souls resided in his chest. It had left him a born negotiator, successfully adaptable to most places, but on the other hand he was neither fully here nor there. Lady Catriona struck him as her own center of gravity. She would be the same peculiar woman in London as in Beirut.