The stone was kept in the artifact chamber adjacent to the library. Catriona knew the room like the back of her hand. She had played here at her mother’s feet, pretending to be an archaeologist, too, between the rusting swords from the Danes, the Roman coin collections and cracked amphoras from Bath, and headless marbles of unknown origins. This was her nursery, and she gladly opened it for Charlie.
He seemed more interested in the antique weapons on the east wall. Of the stone, he said: “It’s rather small, isn’t it.”
“I suppose,” Catriona said.
“What does this one here mean?” Charlie pointed at a symbol at random.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Papa hasn’t taught me yet.”
“Does it really come all the way from Egypt?”
“Aye. An Egyptian colleague from Alexandria loaned it to my father.”
“Wicked.”
“When I’m grown up, I’ll be an archaeologist, too,” she informed him.
Charlie smiled at that. “You can’t.”
“Why not? I know Latin and Greek quite well already.”
“But you’re a girl.” There was no derision in his tone, it was just a fact of life.
“So?” she said. “My mother used to dig.” Her voice broke a little when she said mother out loud. Mother was buried for nearly a year now.
“True,” Charlie conceded. “But Lady Wester Ross—well, you know what they say about her.”
She hesitated. “What do they say?”
“That she wasn’t a mother-woman,” Charlie said, his fingers tracing hieroglyphs in no particular order. “And you want to marry one day, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said reflexively.
Mother-woman. Charles must have overheard the term from an adult conversation; perhaps the staff had gossiped, perhaps his parents had during a carriage ride to or from one of the castle dinners. Mother-woman would become lodged in her brain like a piece of shrapnel.
Charlie gave her a lopsided smile. His eyes were the color of new moss. A spark glinted in their depths like a tiny sun. “We should marry one day, Kitty. It would make one grand estate out of our two.”
She stood in stunned silence, not knowing where to look, or what to say, in the face of such an awesome announcement. Her belly fluttered with clear excitement, though. Yes, she would love to marry such a golden boy.
“What are those funny swirls?” Charlie pointed at the framed parchment on the wall above the stone.
Relief flooded her. This, she knew how to answer. “That isn’t swirls, that is Arabic script. Look. This here, this is the first letter, called aleph. In Greek, it’s the letter alpha. In our Latin alphabet, it’s been shortened to just A.”
“I know alpha,” Charlie said, amused. “I’m at Eton.”
Eton. She envied him his attendance at the prestigious school, there was nothing like it for girls. Admittedly, though, she didn’t like the idea of leaving the castle.
“Now look at this parchment,” she said, and pointed to the print next to the Arabic one.
“Looks like a child finger-painted that one,” Charlie scoffed.
“It’s a print of the Phoenician alphabet,” she explained. “The first ever alphabet. It was invented in the Levant. The first letter is called aleph. The second, beyt. Aleph-beyt, alphabet, you see?”
“Astonishing,” muttered Charlie, his gaze straying toward the wall with the armory.
“Papa says these letters are based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, but much simplified,” she pressed on. “Aleph is the word for ox, so it’s probably based on the hieroglyph that depicted an ox head. But because the Phoenicians created a consonantal alphabet, it connected the written to the spoken word and could be adopted and adapted by other languages.” It felt as though her mouth were propelled by a steam engine; her lips were moving without a conscious command from her brain, and she couldn’t stop. “It’s the foundation of our Latin alphabet, too. If you turn our A upside down, you can still see the head of an ox with horns.”
Charlie looked inward, obviously envisioning an A upside down, and then he turned to her with a smile spreading over his face. “You’re so clever.”
He gave one of her braids a playful tug, and her face went warm.
“I ought to send you letters from Eton about my tutorials,” he said. “My Greek tutor is a beast. My Latin one, too. They are all miserable.”
Her heart clanged against her ribs. Letters, just for her. Home was empty since Mama had gone. Her father was still physically present, but he was as vacant as the castle, and he no longer taught her Latin and Greek. Her governess was a nuisance, thinking she knew best when she clearly wasn’t very intelligent; she accused Catriona of being brash just because she asked questions. It would be lovely to have someone think of her enough to write her letters.