Yes, yes, apparently that was what he wanted, if that was what it took to have her. Her cold demeanor suggested that she didn’t share the sentiment. She seemed afraid, reluctant. In fact . . . if she weren’t trapped with him, alone and at his mercy, she might be making a proper scene. The realization sank into his consciousness like a toxic cloud, withering any youthful delusions and virginal idealism to a husk. He released her abruptly. She rubbed her wrist with some exaggeration, but the look in her eyes changed from fearful to sad. “Elias,” she said. He walked out the side entrance without a backward glance.
He left Beirut for the village to lick his wounds, but everyone at the mountain mansion was up in his business: the cousins, his aunt, the cats. His grandmother noticed something was wrong, so she personally brought him plates with cut-up fruit, but the sweet slices had an aftertaste of onion because someone hadn’t changed the knife. He was packing a bag to go and find some peace when Khalo Jabbar returned—unsurprisingly, the news of Elias’s doomed proposal had reached Jabbar through the grapevine on his way home. Instead of brooding undisturbed in a hermit cave, Elias saw his dignity flayed in his uncle’s study.
“You want to marry, you come to me. Make any decision? You come to me—I am calm, rational,” Jabbar shouted, his hands chopping air in every direction, “you, what are you? A heavy idiot! Your brain is an ornament! This is my life, I’m surrounded by donkeys.” He stuck his head out of the study door and yelled for his sons, and when one of them dared to venture forth, Jabbar skewered him, too: “Damn your father, could you not take him to someone?” He pointed at Elias. “Here, I present you Majnoun Nayla, making us look stupid just because he glimpsed a woman.”
His own temper boiling, Elias decided to become an émigré there and then. Anticipating this, Jabbar sent for him half an hour later and revealed that he was putting him and Nassim in charge of running their fledgling British outpost in Manchester. “Nassim’s English is bad, and he is only eighteen,” he said to Elias, “you should go with him and protect him from himself and the British.”
His hand forced because he loved his cousin, Elias was on a boat to England a few days later, too far from the mountain to cause further furor but still bound to the family business. Clever Jabbar. In truth, he was clever; it took Elias a few more years to appreciate the blood, sweat, and cunning politicking Jabbar provided to make his clan untouchable in a place of revolving conquests, but, young and heartbroken at the time, that day he began to plan his exit.
“All great love stories are unrequited,” Nassim told him on his first day of staring at the horizon from the steamer railing, “that’s the hallmark of true love, the unrequitedness.”
Elias, suffering from seasickness for the first time he could remember, told him to go away.
“Life is full of misery, and most is caused by women,” Nassim offered the next morning.
On the third day, he arrived with a bottle of arak. Elias refused to drink it; the way past pain was right through the hot hell of it. Later, he learned that Nayla had been married to an Italian count soon after he had gone. To he who has enough money, a princess is his bride.
* * *
—
Elias entered the residential part of Oxford that bordered the meadow, a brooding expression on his face. These days, he possessed the means to woo the daughter of an earl, certainly one whose estate was in such pecuniary decline. He had worked hard for this position; he had put off finding a wife and focused on expanding, amassing, investing, driven in part by a fiery determination that he would not be denied again over his status. His hand clenched around the hilt of his walking stick. In an ironic twist, his wealth was rather low on the list of obstacles now. She was a British aristocrat while he wasn’t even from her world; he would become persona non grata in Britain the moment he succeeded at taking the artifacts. She was also keenly aware that she wasn’t free. Most women of his acquaintance, East or West, were kept in luxury and ruled their homes, which seemed to sufficiently dull the sting of any restrictions placed upon them, but Catriona was an activist and gilded bars probably still looked like bars to her. Was he equipped to manage with such an unconventional wife? Whichever road they could choose to finish what they had started, it led to chaos.
Once he reached the main street, he walked straight to Oxford’s telegraph office and sent a message to Nassim. He would go to London on Monday to meet Nassim’s contact. He would set a plan in motion that would bring home the loot. A few days away from St. John’s might help quell the mad want ticking in his veins.