She visibly tensed. “Aye.”
She kept spooning soup into her mouth until her father asked: “Have you made any progress?”
She pressed her lips together. “I need a wee bit more time.”
“What are you writing about?” Elias prodded.
“I don’t know yet,” she said in a flat tone. “I don’t know what I’m writing about.”
“It takes time for a good thought to ripen,” the earl explained. “Pluck the fruit too soon and it shall be hard and bland.” He refilled his glass. “We support genuine scholarly exploration in this house, and rumination and percolation are part of the process, even though to the untrained eye it may look like idleness. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Khoury?”
“Certainly,” he said, and, to keep the attention off his nonexistent processes: “Have you written a book before, Lady Catriona?”
“Not one,” she said with forced calm.
Her eyes were hidden behind the fiery reflection of the candles in her glasses. Perhaps it was her eyes shooting flames at him.
“Not one?” The earl regarded her with a furrowed brow. “You wrote a whole anthology.”
“Have I?”
“Aye, the one about women in positions of power.”
“Papa, I never finished it.”
“How curious—that must have slipped my mind.”
Her stoic expression gentled. “Well,” she said. “You’re preoccupied with greater things.”
“Time passes so quickly, and I forget sometimes.”
Footmen detached from the walls and collected empty bowls. The main doors opened, and two more footmen arrived with the next course. A draft went through the hall until they left again. For a while, no one spoke, the silence punctuated only by the clink of heavy old silverware on fine china plates, the opening and closing of tureens, the cork popping off another bottle of wine. Elias politely praised the blandly seasoned lamb shanks.
“Have some more,” the earl insisted. He studied his daughter, who mechanically picked meat off a bone with her knife. “You never finished that anthology,” he said. “I remember now, but I still don’t understand why.”
Lady Catriona put down her cutlery and reached for her wineglass. Her plaid fell open at the front, revealing a low, square neckline and the elegant, winged lines of her collarbones. Elias raised his gaze to the wall behind her and focused on the portrait of a grim-faced Scotsman. He imagined he heard her soft throat work as she swallowed. He was stretched on some resplendent torture rack where the lure of her fine skin pulled him to one direction and basic manners to the other.
“The book was pointless,” she said at last. Her glass was almost empty.
“Now, now,” her father protested, “your work is always excellent. Why not tidy it up, rather than begin something new?”
“Father, let us not bore poor Mr. Khoury with my failed academic endeavors.”
“I could not be bored by you,” Elias said. Damn. “By your conversation.”
The lady gave a soft huff. “Very well,” she said. “A few years ago, I began drafting an anthology about powerful women since antiquity.”
“Powerful women,” he echoed. “Such as?”
Her chin tipped up in a silent challenge. “Such as Elissa of Carthage.”
“Eh,” he said ruefully. “A Phoenician princess.”
“I wrote the book with the intention to support women’s suffrage,” she continued.
“We are suffragists in this house,” the earl explained. “We advocate for a woman’s right to vote and to be coequals with men in all spheres of life, particularly in marriage.”
The daughter’s carelessness around politics at the dinner table was encouraged by the father, then. Personally, Elias would have steered the conversation back to proper subjects like wine or the weather, but when in Rome . . .
“Our opponents argue that women ought to be kept out of the public sphere and remain rightless in our own homes because we are too emotional and too irrational to govern ourselves, least of all the political fate of a nation,” Lady Catriona went on. “I thought—quite na?vely—if only there were sufficient proof, black on white, that women have been capable leaders and scholars for millennia, then there would be no basis for such arguments.”
“This sounds logical rather than na?ve,” Elias remarked.
A humorless smile curved her lips. “The trouble is, Mr. Khoury, that people aren’t interested in either logic or facts, not when it’s at cross-purposes with their convenience and convictions. I soon realized that too many husbands in Britain would feel greatly inconvenienced by the presence of an equal in their own home. They would dismiss my work.”