“Tell me?”
“Because they thrill me. How they soar, and swoop at great speed. They are pure freedom. On my life, I would never clip the wings of a falcon.”
“A wife is not a bird.”
“Indeed,” he said. “So imagine how much more I would care for her happiness.”
Words, words come easy, she thought, though he sounded rather convincing. There was, of course, the matter of the artifacts between them, which they had managed to ignore in plain sight thus far, such was the power of crazed passion. She would never expect him to give the pieces up, on the contrary, but the situation was the pin waiting to strike their soap bubble. Perhaps she was already dreaming when she had an idea of how to solve that situation. The next morning, the fuzzy plan that had seemed quite brilliant just hours earlier struck her as completely unhinged. By noon, she thought that the line between madness and genius was a fine one, and that she was, possibly, on to something.
During daytime, they played chess, a feeble attempt at maintaining some civility in Cadogan House. For this purpose, they had dragged the round side table from the bedchamber’s fainting couch to the middle of the room. Today, the players were in a state of undress, Elias bare-chested and in Ottoman pajama trousers, Catriona in a plain white cotton robe that was missing its cord. Behind them, the bed was rumpled.
I’m not certain I would make that move, Catriona thought as she watched Elias’s knight advance.
He looked up with hooded eyes. “If you covered up,” he said, “I might be able to hold a thought.”
She flushed and made to gather the robe over her exposed breast.
He grabbed her knee below the table. “Don’t,” he said, and she laughed.
After the lunch at Acton’s oyster bar, they had stayed on the District Railway until Charing Cross, which was close to the British Museum. The curator for the Department of Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor had been away, but his assistant had given Catriona the earliest available appointment for discussing the special exhibition—Saturday morning. In the likely case they secured a transfer date during the meeting, Catriona’s official missions in London would be completed.
She let go of the lapels of her robe, and Elias’s gaze dropped to her breasts.
“Why did you do this?” he asked, nodding at her piercing while he touched his own chest.
She glanced down. He seemed to like the small barbell well enough; he would gently tug and tongue at it when they were together. This was the first time he asked about it.
“I think at the time, I wanted to impress a German princess,” she said.
Elias was quiet. His face underwent various subtle transformations as he processed her statement. Her ears were red, she could feel the tips glow. There had been no need for such honesty, and it was not immediately clear to her why it had been important for her to tell him.
“The chess player,” he said at last.
“Yes.”
His gaze was very direct. “Do you still want to impress her?”
She did not think so.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
Except for the extravagant piece of jewelry, little was left of the girl she had been in the piercing parlor in Paris.
Elias slowly tilted his head, as if to say Very well, then.
“Black to move,” he said.
She obliged.
Later, when they returned to the bed, she imagined he was holding her hips more firmly and thrusting into her a little harder than usual. He wouldn’t suffer jealousy well, she understood, taking in his austere face and black eyes while he moved inside her; no, she couldn’t see him with the blasé attitude aristocrats so often displayed toward their spouses’ special friends. He was like her, intense in his emotions. She wouldn’t share him, either.
Afterward, he sat in the armchair by the open window with his legs stretched out and smoked a cigarette. He was in half profile, and the well-defined curve of his bare shoulder gleamed in the sunlight.
She reclined in the pillows, absently fingering the piercing.
The idea to have it done had been hatched in Bern. It had been winter and the river Aare wound through the city smooth and still like a frozen blue snake. The students’ demeanor toward Catriona had been just as frosty, thanks to the stupid chimpanzee incident. Alexandra had still liked her. The night Catriona had learned about nipple piercings, all the girls who shared her dorm except Alex had snuck out to a not-so-secret party in Georgina Rowbotham’s room. Catriona had lain next to Alexandra in Alexandra’s narrow bed, careful to keep her hip and shoulder from touching her friend’s, and they were reading an article about Paris in an American travel magazine. In great detail, a scandalized journalist was warning the reader about a parlor that offered intimate piercings.