“It’s an heirloom,” he said, surprising himself.
Lady Catriona glanced up with soft eyes. “Did someone in your family make it?”
He gave a nod. “My paternal grandfather. Shall we begin?”
He opened with a pawn move to d4. Lady Catriona immediately moved her knight, Nc4, and he fortified his left flank with another pawn, c4. She planted a pawn on e6, and only then did she scribble the status into her book. Her responses to his moves had been rapid; she clearly knew the opening. They were on the verge of a proper chess match rather than a flirtation.
He leaned back in his chair to slow them down.
“Have you had a successful morning?” he asked, launching Point Number Three on his plan, the passion. “Women’s revolution is on its way?”
She rolled her pencil between her thumb and index finger. “I can’t quite tell whether you are mocking me,” she said.
“I wouldn’t dare.”
Her fingers were slender and straight, and the backs of her hands looked unnaturally smooth as though she spent all her time indoors. Her fingernails were noticeably short, though, and ink smudged the side of her middle finger like a bruise. There was a bump, from always holding a pen. In its own way, it was a working woman’s hand.
“Tell me,” she said, “how is the situation for women’s rights in your homeland? For married women?”
“Ah. It’s simple,” he said. “When the time comes for marriage, the head of the house gives the bride to whoever offers the largest number of camels. There she goes.” He clapped imaginary dust off his hands.
MacKenzie’s clicking knitting needles fell silent. Lady Catriona regarded him without blinking. “But you don’t really trade in camels in Mount Lebanon,” she said haltingly.
There went his banter, rolling out of sight like a tumbleweed. Well done, Abu Charm.
“It was a joke,” he said. “There are few camels indeed. More importantly, Lady Catriona, we don’t just barter women to the highest bidder.”
“You don’t?” she said. “Interesting. I thought that custom was universal.”
On the board, he moved another pawn, to g3.
“As a rule, rights depend on the community,” he said. “Muslim women in Ottoman territories have been entitled to purchase, inherit, and bequeath property since I can remember. They run businesses. They don’t usually take their man’s name. Then there is the matter of wealth—the more fortunate we are, the more value we all place on a woman’s education.”
“I may have read about that.”
He looked up in time to catch the faint smile on her lips. Of course she knew already. She had simply tested his reaction to these facts. She was thinking two moves ahead, both on and off the chessboard, it seemed. It did however reveal that she had a degree of personal interest in him, too.
“Perhaps Britain will progress that way one day, thanks to your campaign,” he said in an amicable tone.
She moved her mouth as if she had tasted something sour. “We have reason to hope,” she said. “Scotland already passed a good Property Act a few years ago. England shall follow.”
She sent a pawn to d5, a juicy little bait for his pawn on c4. Did she really think he’d fall for that?
“On the mountain, our revolutionaries are our factory girls,” he said. “The amila. They remind me of your suffragists.”
She slanted her head at an attentive angle. “How so?”
“They ignore convention and strike fear in the hearts of the elders.”
“Amila,” Lady Catriona repeated.
“Female factory worker,” he translated.
“I admit I fail to see how performing manual labor in probably poor conditions equates to women’s liberation,” she said earnestly.
Her bluntness kept catching him off guard. How to improve working conditions in the factories was indeed one of the points of contention he had with his uncle.
“It’s not straightforward,” he conceded. “You need to take a long view.”
He moved his bishop, Bg2, leaving her pawn well alone. She countered with her second knight to c6. Interesting. He ought to seriously focus on his next move.
“The girls used to care for the silkworms at home,” he said instead. “It’s always been important work—the mountain economy depends on the worm—but it was domestic work. Then the entire French industry fell into trouble some twenty years ago when their worms caught a blight; the French pack them too tightly, they don’t care well for them. In the mountains, we keep them in a nice, ventilated room, and they are hand-fed mulberry leaves by the girls. When silk production moved from France to Mount Lebanon and our people began building their own factories, they asked the girls to come in, to process the cocoons, too.”