“Squally weather,” sighed Loveday as wind rattled the parlor window.
“Not as I know by.” Emmeline’s response sounded sour.
Lavinia made a noncommittal noise and continued writing. She’d been perched for hours in a wretched stick-back armchair, but in her story, the dauntless duchess was enduring worse discomforts, pulling the oars of the pinnace as shots whistled overhead.
Courageous lady! She’d just sacked her husband’s estate and the pinnace rode low in the water, weighed down by the ancestral jewels.
A small thump made Lavinia glance up. Emmeline had thrown down her sewing.
“I’m going out,” she announced, rising. “I told the vicar I’d bring round his bread.”
“Infamous.” Loveday dropped her own sewing into her lap and addressed her sister with exasperation. “You told Kelyn you’d finish up that pelisse. At this rate, the boys will be breeched before you’re done.”
“All the more reason to stop now.” Emmeline sashayed to the window and craned her neck to peer up at the sky. “It’s not even raining.”
“It’s raining all sorts!” Loveday’s chair creaked with the force of her protest. Lavinia bent again over her notebook. Rain wasn’t a bad idea. The men firing from the shore would lose sight of their target in the mist.
“I’m not sugar that I’ll melt,” Emmeline grumbled, dragging back to her chair.
“That you’re not,” agreed her sister tartly. But there was no strong acid in her voice.
“Finish up the pelisse,” she said. “Then you can run around wet-shod and dripping, and I won’t say a word. Although you’d do better to follow Mrs. Pendrake’s example. She knows how to take advantage of a slaggy day. She must have written a dozen pages!”
Oh, why involve her in it? Lavinia laid down her pencil and tried to match Loveday’s sweet smile. She was far more convivial than Emmeline, the chit. Plainer too, although her looks would be vastly improved if she didn’t tie up her hair in that matronly bun and wear such dismal dresses—dull brown and gathered all wrong for her figure.
“I’m only writing notes.” Lavinia adopted a modest tone, covering the exposed page with the palm of her hand. “A few additions for my little book on the shrubs of China.”
“I don’t know how she saw any shrubs in China,” muttered Emmeline, stabbing her needle into her sewing, an unpromising wad of red flannel. “This morning it was fine and she couldn’t be stirred.”
Lavinia froze her smile on her lips. Emmeline wasn’t a chit. She was a minx. Did she truly insist on war?
“Hush.” Loveday attempted to shush her sister. “Her work is important, and we must let her attend to it.”
Lavinia picked up her pencil with a gracious nod. Good of Loveday to champion intellectual women. But she found she couldn’t write another word. Emmeline’s barb had gotten under skin.
The day had dawned bright and clear. Lavinia had woken with the household—the roosters could have roused the dead—but she’d stayed in the small upstairs bedroom until the murmur of voices in the kitchen quieted. Only when she felt assured that Neal was well on his way did she creep down the stairs for her tea.
For all that she’d longed to accompany him, she couldn’t botanize all day in the sun without a bonnet. If she’d known clouds would blow in, she might have risked it.
Emmeline sniffed. In certain instances, such a sniff registered as a comment in itself. In other instances, it proved the opening salvo.
“She could work on her book anywhere, anytime,” said Emmeline.
So. The minx persisted. Well, Lavinia could handle a minx. They abounded in Society. Time-tested processes existed for establishing precedence among them. Here in Kyncastle, Lavinia would have to cut corners and establish dominance by any means necessary.
As an intellectual woman, she elected to take the high ground.
“Are you addressing your sewing?” she asked, looking up. “For you are not addressing me, and I do not think you address your sister. She has too much good sense to listen.”
A dignified reproach, one that enlisted Loveday, isolating Emmeline across the battle line with only her maltreated flannel as an ally. Emmeline, however, did not raise the white flag. She eyed Lavinia boldly.
“Neal brought you all the way here,” she said, her voice every bit as dignified as Lavinia’s, and equally reproving. “I should think you’d want to see what he had to show you.”
Vexing. The minx had a point. And Lavinia did want to see what Neal had to show her. If it weren’t for that cursed bonnet, she’d be by his side at this very moment, soaked and uncomplaining, checking every dandelion leaf in the parish for purple specks.
She felt her chin pucker as she repressed a frown. Emmeline noticed and pressed her advantage.
“Instead, off he went alone to Juliot woods.” She shook her head sadly and gave her curls a consoling pat. They were exactly the kind of curls Lavinia had always desired, fat and glossy. A very average shade, though. Mouse brown. “He looked disappointed,” she continued. “You think highly of yourself, and you don’t think of anyone else at all.”
“Emmeline!” Loveday gasped.
Lavinia’s instinct was to flinch, but instead she pressed her lips into a smile. “I cannot work on my book anywhere, anytime, as you suggest. In London, I am run off my feet. There’s always something to do. Parties, bazaars, dances, plays—so much stimulation! Every moment, a new engagement. I don’t think you’ve been to London?”
Loveday answered for Emmeline.
“Not since she was a little girl,” she said. Loveday was decidedly not a minx. She was more of a lamb, or a dove. She wanted to keep the peace between her sister and their guest.
“We all went when Uncle Digory and Aunt Heddie lived in Croydon,” she explained. “But Emmeline had lately pinned her hopes on Neal. He was living in full fig. A very nice part of London. What was it called?”
“South Kensington.” Emmeline scowled.
“Very nice,” Lavinia murmured. And then before she could stop herself: “A bit out of the way of things.”
“Is it?” Loveday began to sew again. “He moved to Truro before she could make her visit. Poor dear. She was inconsolable.”
Loveday wanted to keep the peace, but her talents lay elsewhere. Sewing, for example. Her needle flashed steadily. Emmeline narrowed her eyes.
“I was meant to be there for the whole Season,” she hissed, skewering her flannel, then giving it a twist. “Tomas and Neal had agreed, and then Neal left.”
This was too good. Lavinia showed her teeth, smile widening.
“The Season is the worst, for women intellectuals,” she said. “You think you’re going to spend a dull day doing your work, and then, the next thing you know, the Prince of Wales is entertaining, and Sarah Bernhardt is going to be there, and you simply cannot refuse the call. The distractions are endless. I’m sure it’s hard to believe in a place like this, where the hours stretch on forever because there’s so little to fill them.”
“I should hate it,” said Loveday placidly. “Large crowds make me short of breath. There’s not enough air in London. Who is Sarah Bernhardt? A friend of yours?”
“She’s an actress,” snapped Emmeline. “A terrifically famous one. Really, Loveday, she’ll think we live under a rock.”
“But you do live under a rock.” Lavinia smiled brightly. “These tall cliffs rising all around are so striking. It’s the charm of Kyncastle, isn’t it? And Sarah Bernhardt is a friend.” Lavinia had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing at Emmeline’s expression. Certainly, friend stretched the truth. She had met her idol, though, on two occasions, once in London and once in Paris. The second time, they’d exchanged a full sentence. “It was a perfectly reasonable question. You don’t give your sister nearly enough credit.”
“You have no siblings.” Emmeline glared. “Perhaps you should reserve judgment.”
“I always wished for an elder sister.” Lavinia smiled at Loveday before resting her gaze on Emmeline. For a moment, she considered her, that English rose prettiness, which Emmeline clearly thought wasted on fishermen and farmers. Then she moved in for the kill.
“Elder sisters always seemed to me a great boon,” she said. “Except . . .” She let her gaze roam slowly down from Emmeline’s face before meeting her eyes again. “I could not abide the hand-me-down clothes.”
Emmeline went white and she clutched her sewing to her breast, an attempt to cover up her printed cotton frock. The frock was childishly simple and more than a little faded, with telltale darts where the fabric had been taken in. Emmeline bent her head, but not before Lavinia saw the shimmer in her eyes.
Tears. Lavinia bit her lip. Vain, silly girls were always the most sensitive.
No one moved. Finally, Emmeline turned, her torso rigid. Lavinia recognized that stiff, brittle posture. It had been hers this twelvemonth in London.
I am armored against your insults.
She wondered if she had been as unconvincing.
“Is that Kelyn calling?” Emmeline said to her sister. “I might be needed in the kitchen.”
She stood, still clutching her sewing, and walked from the room. Loveday looked after her, then looked at Lavinia, surprise and hurt in her eyes.
“I do think I hear Kelyn,” she said quietly. “If you’ll excuse me.”
Lavinia rose with Loveday but stood stock-still in the modest parlor. The room suddenly seemed colder, and deathly quiet. This pang in her stomach—an unwelcome mix of contrition and shame.
Victory was hers. Queen of the Kyncastle minxes. A worthless title. It did her as much good as Duchess of Cranbrook.
She walked to the window. A view of the neighboring cottage, smaller than the Traymaynes’, potted geraniums on the windowsills splashing the gray afternoon with color. She shut her eyes, leaned her forehead against the cool glass.
How old was Emmeline? Eighteen? The youngest daughter of the household, a girl who read gossip columns, collected the pictures of the beauties advertised in the illustrated papers, followed the career of Sarah Bernhardt. A girl who dreamed—like so many pretty girls before her—that her face would someday make palace doors swing open.
A lifetime separated eighteen and twenty-four.
Suddenly, Lavinia felt old, old as time itself. In London, she’d kept accounts, kept track of the social ledger—girls scoring off one another, their relative positions weighted at the outset by factors beyond their control—birth, wealth, beauty. She’d enjoyed tallying her points. What a prize had awaited her!
George’s face swam in the darkness. She opened her eyes, lifted her hands, cooled her wrists against the glass.
Debutantes favored temporary self-serving alliances over friendship. Close competitors formed sets, each pleased to see her own sparkle increased by her radiant company. Each ready to claw her confidantes when the moment came to distinguish herself. That was the law of the jungle. Not the jungle. High Society’s human zoo.
Cora, Agnes, Elise—they’d tittered after her broken engagement. After her papa went to jail, they’d turned their backs. Showed her their hard, jutting backsides.
This Season, bustles were de rigueur. And for the very first time, she hadn’t been able to afford a visit to the dressmaker. The other girls grew larger, built out with cushions and steel hoops, and she diminished in contrast. Her silhouette advertised her sudden, mortifying poverty.
If Cora had been the unfortunate instead, or Agnes, or Elise, Lavinia would have been the one to titter, to sweep past, backside swaying like the hindquarters of a horse.
Those were the rules. Winners rarely questioned them.
She could remember—barely—days when she didn’t calculate, when the world wasn’t divided into rivals and conquests. And she could remember with stark clarity the day she’d scraped her palms swinging in the linden trees with Effie.
Her mother had confined her to the nursery for an entire month.
You’re not to think of playing outdoors until your hands are white and smooth and you can prove to me they will stay in that condition. A duke’s daughter can run about like an urchin because her breeding is in her blood. You, Lavinia, must always remember that you are only as well-bred as you appear. Show me that you can be prettier than Effie, and I will take you to the milliner’s to pick out whatever you like.
How she’d missed clambering in the garden with her favorite playmate! It wasn’t the same afterward, hanging back, watching Effie exert herself fiendishly. Hoping she’d tear her stockings or smudge her face, so she, Lavinia, could parade past the adults. Pretty. Perfect.
Where had being the prettiest gotten her?
She turned from the window and surveyed the empty room. If she were alone here, it wasn’t because of her silhouette, or her papa’s theft. She needed to figure out how to relate differently.
She tucked her notebook under her arm and walked slowly toward the kitchen. She’d not spent much time in kitchens. This one was cavernous and warm with a good, savory smell. Steam and smoke mingled. She entered tentatively, stubbing her toe on the uneven slates. An enormous chimney rose over an oven topped by a great stone slab on which pots bubbled. Dried beef and herbs hung from a ceiling rack. Oak sideboards filled with cups and willow-patterned dishes flanked the long table.
The three Traymayne women stood by the fire, where Tomas’s wife, Kelyn, was stirring curdled milk in a brass pan. They fell silent as Lavinia approached.
Lavinia came up to them and cleared her throat. What to say?
I’m sorry might be a good start. I’m sorry, Emmeline, that I taunted you about your dress. If I still could, I would take you to hobnob with the nobility in Belgrave Square, and you should see for yourself how it compares to your country pastimes.
Suddenly, she ached to tell them the truth, to tell them who she was, the whole story of all she’d had and all she’d lost. She didn’t want to be excused but understood.
No words came. She forced open her lips.
“I thought I’d see if I could help with anything,” she said, surprising herself. And, from the looks of it, the other women as well. They exchanged glances. Emmeline responded first.
“Soufflé isn’t on the menu.” She folded her arms. Lavinia saw that she’d cast her sewing on top of the wood in the wood bin. Kelyn stepped away from the fire, face flushed, and fanned herself.
“I’ve no need of help,” she said. “Though I thank you for asking.”
“Oh,” said Lavinia. She looked from woman to woman. Loveday and Emmeline resembled each other strongly at that moment, with their straight backs and the fire picking out the tawny lights in their brown hair. Kelyn was round and dark, cut from a different cloth. But all three shared something, an intimacy that manifested in the way they stood, an easiness among them.
A lump rose in Lavinia’s throat. “Well,” she managed. “In that case.” She couldn’t go on.
As she turned away, Kelyn spoke again.
“I don’t need the help,” she said. “But if you’ve an interest in Cornish baking . . .”
Lavinia turned back eagerly. Kelyn was smiling. Her dimples made sweet dents in her cheeks. Kitchen work hadn’t spoiled her looks or her disposition, or depreciated her innate quality, which was undeniable, and refreshingly distinct from her consequence.
“A great interest.” Lavinia made the affirmation with such fervor that she believed it herself. Which made it almost true.
“When I’m finished with the cheese, then.” Kelyn nodded. “You and I will bake the saffron buns. We’ll find a spare apron.”
“She can use mine.” Emmeline piped up with suspicious enthusiasm.
Lavinia smiled. She’d have to check the pockets for hornets.
“Thank you,” she said, to all three of them.
“In return, you’ll tell us about China,” said Kelyn. “I have so many questions.”
“I’ll describe every hillside,” Lavinia promised, and pressed her notebook more tightly to her side.
Sheltering beneath an outcropping of rock with Reverend Henry Curnow, Neal watched the rain fall in sheets. Thick mist blanketed the sea, and the dark jagged cliffs across the harbor poked out like the turrets of a ruined castle. Impossible not to imagine gazing upon them with a fairer companion than the good reverend.
He could feel Muriel’s hair tickling under his chin as she nestled against him, feel the warmth and pressure of her body. Imagination conjured sensation—the two of them standing front to back, dry in the slate alcove as the storm crescendoed in the theater of the sky.
Rain slapped him in the face.
“Chr—” He wiped his streaming brow, biting off the word. Curnow was an old friend of the family, a passionate rambler and botanist in his own right, given to quoting Bishop Newton in his sermons.
True philosophy is the handmaid of true religion and the knowledge of the works of nature will lead us to the knowledge of the God of nature.
Even so, churchmen of all stripes frowned on blasphemy.
“Curses,” Neal finished, and Curnow laughed his deep laugh. A big man, he sent his voice up from the center of his frame, where it resonated wonderfully. His parishioners were touchingly vain of him.
Fit for a cathedral was what they said. Didn’t stop the farmers from falling asleep in the back pews. Or the gentry from grumbling about the cost of restoring the parish church.
“A bad gale this is.” Curnow shook his head. “I know you don’t mind a drenching, Neal, but I won’t have your skull cleaved in two by flying slates. The church will be going to pieces in this wind.”
Neal leaned out from the alcove, squinting up the cliff path. He could see a thin sliver of the church between the rocks, the black tower holding fast against the racing clouds. Still standing. Curnow wanted to tour him through the nave so he could see the plants growing beneath the holes in the roof.
“If it’s not Elatine hexandra sprouted in the font, I’ll eat my hat,” said Curnow, touching the wide brim. “And you might find your dandelion in the aisle.” He sighed. “Not today, though. Will you stay a spell?”
“Through tomorrow.” Neal angled himself behind a projection of rock. “Then we head west.”
Curnow’s broad face looked suddenly bland. Too bland. He was trying not to smile. It was the we that had done it.
When Neal had dropped in at the vicarage after the deluge drove him from Juliot woods, he’d spoken of Muriel in neutral tones, but the old man’s ear had pricked at once. Just as quickly, he’d tried to mask his interest, bringing out his notes and a medal-worthy collection of Hepaticae.
Curnow was one of dozens of local botanists contributing invaluable lists for Neal’s flora. He also belonged, covertly, to another group—no less sizable, it seemed, in number. Neal thought he might call it the Neal Traymayne Bachelor Relief Society. His mother was the president, of course. Neal wouldn’t put it past her to have written to Curnow, asking him to scour the parish for well-read young women with established aptitudes in fields including, but not limited to, geology, entomology, zoology, and botany.
“Tomorrow, then.” Curnow rubbed his damp whiskers. “We’ll walk up together, with this Mrs. Pendrake if she’s amenable.”
He produced a pipe, but another wet gust seemed to make him rethink the plausibility of a satisfactory smoke. Sighing, he returned it to his pocket. “I hope that by your next visit the church is no longer the site of botanical interest.”
“I’d drink to that,” said Neal, grinning. His father and Curnow used to meet for pints in Kyncastle’s only pub and talk long past closing, standing in the street and projecting their voices—as only drunken professors and parsons could—so that the whole village was privy to their conversations. As a boy, Neal would hang out the window to listen. Even then, the topics included the parish church’s various dilapidations. “It’s been a long time coming.”
Curnow’s thoughts seemed to have hewed to Neal’s.
“Your father knew how to tip a glass.” He looked at Neal. His eyes were close and deeply set under heavy gray brows.
“He rejoices with us now,” he added, in a lower register. “But on a farther shore.”
Neal let the back of his head rest on the rock. Platitudes. They occurred in speech and in thought and let the mind paper over any manner of unpleasant truths.
“I can accept a god as first cause.” The rock bit into his skull, just hard enough to hurt. “But I cannot believe my father’s drinking ale in heaven.”
“What do you believe?” Curnow’s voice held only gentle curiosity. Neal studied the rain. It had slowed to a patter, the sheets disaggregating into drops.
“That he’s soil. That he’s mixed with quartz and serpentine and carbonate of lime and foraminifera and sedges and grasses, and fresh and salt water.”
The words scraped a little in his throat. If what he said was truth, he didn’t know how to feel about it. Death was both more and less final than he’d learned on Sundays.
Scripture inspired Curnow, but time and again he’d demonstrated his willingness to entertain ways of thinking that deviated from chapter and verse. His reply had a musing quality.
“He’s Cornwall, then.” He spoke slowly. “Is that what you mean? He’s not away or above or beyond. He’s the shore itself, this one, right here.”
“Essentially.” Neal rolled his head on his neck and the rock bit harder. “But materially, he’s more Penzance, where they put his body in the ground.” Neal could feel Curnow’s gaze. Perhaps he’d gone too far. The pause lengthened.
“You’re not going to argue?” Neal said at last. “Tell me about the difference between the body and the soul?”
Curnow laughed and the sound reverberated. “As the Lord as my witness, I don’t argue with Traymaynes. I only pray for them.”
Neal’s lips quirked. “Blue sky,” he said, and pointed.
Curnow was still looking at him. “I always thought your father would prepare a flora,” he said. “He knew every inch of the county.”
“He didn’t have a long enough retirement.” Again, the tightening in his throat. Two years to the day after he’d moved back to Penzance, Digory Traymayne was dead. “The project will take a decade.” Neal would be lucky if it took only a decade. He had to collect material, visit libraries and herbaria, confirm records. Almost every botanist he’d written in the county had written back offering to help. Even so, the compiling and organizing alone would be a massive undertaking, and he’d have to fit it in around his work for Varnham.
“That’s why you’re doing it.” Curnow struck a match. He puffed his pipe, the richly scented smoke welling around them. “For him. Though you don’t believe he’s looking down on you from one of those clouds and smiling.”
Neal lifted his head and stepped out from the alcove, holding his hands palm up. Coolness sprinkled his palms. Light poured through a black-rimmed hole in the clouds directly overhead. Curnow joined him on the path. Did he want an answer?
About why he was preparing the flora.
About whether or not he thought the sun sparkling on the feldspar in the cliffs was a sign of his father’s approval.
Neal stretched his cramped shoulders. Motives were twisty things that grew in shade. He made decisions for a whole tangle of reasons.
“This won’t hold,” said Curnow, surveying the sky.
“I might risk it.” Neal tapped his thumb against his specimen box. Perhaps he would go a bit farther up the path, collect some bluebells to dry for Muriel. But not if Curnow was going to labor and slide back to the village.
“Shall I put you home?” he asked Curnow, politely and in his very best dialect. Curnow rewarded him with a chuckle.
“I can put myself home well enough,” he said. Despite his years, and his size, he walked miles and miles in a given week, collecting plants, birding.
“More’s the pity,” he added, and Neal remembered with a jolt that his wife had died the winter before last. Whatever look passed across his face, Curnow caught it and shook his head, smiling, to banish it.
“Tomorrow to the church,” he said. “With Mrs. Pendrake.”
When Neal reached the patch of flowers, he couldn’t help but step off the path, spread his arms, and try to feel what Muriel felt as she first beheld the magnificence of the harbor, ultramarine water framed by those steep, crenellated cliffs. He stepped right to the very verge, and that was when he let his eyes sweep down and saw, on a little jutting ledge, Muriel’s straw bonnet.
He saw it, and at the same time, he apprehended a way to reach it. Where he stood, the cliff dropped with sheer verticality a hundred feet down to the churning waves. Not even a raven could find purchase. But the ledge was several yards to his right, nearer to the bend in the path, the level elbow that marked the spot where the steep climb to the church began in earnest. The cliff was lower there, stepping down in stages.
The rocks would be wet. He jogged down the path, stood his specimen box against the boulder, folded his coat on top, and walked carefully to the cliff edge across slippery turf. He dropped into a crouch and lowered his legs over the side.
This was why his mother’s hair turned white overnight. It wasn’t South America, per se, that she feared, but the impulse that sent him there. That had always sent him up or down cliffs, trees, even buildings. The gatehouse at Eton. Tom Tower at Oxford.
He’d joked about his mother scaling cliffs. She did have long experience scrambling to difficult-to-access places, sometimes using fixed ropes. She was considered and bold. He was impulsive and too bold. Raving mad.
Risking his life for a bloody bonnet. Probably ruined already by rain.
His knuckles cracked and strained as he descended, gripping the small bulges of rock. His toes sought the cracks in the slate. At any moment, the clouds could burst again, wash him off the face of the cliff. Quickly, then. The muscles in his shoulders burned and seemed to separate from the bones. He reached a portion where the cliff became less perpendicular and he could sidle along a narrow ridge, catching his breath, before he lowered himself again into space, clinging to the corner of a slab, tensing his stomach, pedaling his legs in slow circles until he found his holds. When he came level with the ledge, he braced himself and worked his arm through the knotted loop of ribbon. He kept climbing down, bonnet batting the cliff, until he could rest both feet on a wider brow of rock. It became an even wider shelf, projecting backward under a low arch. A cave, formed as a vein of some softer mineral eroded over the years. He stood beneath the archway, swung the bonnet around on his arm, whooping. His heart was bashing itself against his sternum.
Raving mad. James used to say it of both of them, and they’d whoop together, frozen or half-naked, on whatever improbable promontory.
Gulls mewed faintly. The eeriness of their calls brought to mind all the legends he’d been told as a child, of witches, ghosts, and pixies. They sounded almost human. He whooped again and tested his nerves by looking down. He was perhaps twenty-five feet from the base of the cliff. The water swirled, mesmerizing. A gull shrilled, just as faintly, but this time something about the sustained, hopeless note made him search for the source. Nothing. The wind and rain had chased the birds to their roosts. He looked again, down at the water, and then back at the harbor with its moored fishing boats, at the white cottages. His eye had snagged. There. He squinted. Farther out than the moorings, a small vessel bobbed on the waves. Upside down.
Dear God. He saw them now, two dark heads and beating arms. Fool boys, thinking they could best it, rowing out in dirty weather for a lark.
You were raving mad, until you were a corpse.
How long would it take to climb back to the path, run through the village to the harbor? Too long.
Down was always faster. Could he spring far enough out into the water to avoid getting sucked down and smashed on the rocks? Some questions weren’t worth asking. He let the bonnet drop from his arm. Down he went.
Lavinia was experiencing a sublime pleasure, the idea of which would once have made her peal with incredulous laughter. She was biting into a warm golden-yellow bun that she’d baked with her own two hands. What unparalleled satisfaction.
Granted, Kelyn had started the process in the wee hours of the morning, steeping the saffron in milk, mixing the dough, setting it to rise, but she’d explained the stages so thoroughly as they kneaded that Lavinia could imagine she’d participated from the onset. Anyway, who cared to make such fine distinctions?
She had worked the springy dough and watched the buns burnish, and now the crust was squeaking between her teeth and the butter was dripping over her lips, and it was simply divine.
She’d never have guessed. In a kitchen, you combined dry things and wet things and added labor and heat and the things metamorphosed before your eyes. Magic. More likely science, but again, who cared?
Loveday was telling an amusing story about Neal as a boy. They’d been off to a cove with marvelous sands stippled with shells and deep pools for bathing, and as they rode in the wagon on the long journey home, Neal had taken a caraway seed off her biscuit and told her that if she planted it she’d have a whole crop of biscuits come September.
“Did you plant it?” Lavinia’s laughter came out of her nose. Snorting wasn’t ladylike. And snorting in a kitchen with flour in your hair, eating standing up, straight off a tray?
Who cares, who cares, who cares.
“Of course I believed him.” Loveday had halved her bun and was spreading it thickly with clotted cream. “He’s very convincing. Perhaps you don’t know that yet.”
“Perhaps she does,” said Kelyn. Lavinia thought the dimple in her round cheek looked delicious, like a currant in a cake. Everything was delicious. “She’s here, after all.”
“I’m glad that I’m here,” said Lavinia, adding a spoonful of cream to her bun. Loveday paced to the window.
“I don’t know why Emmeline isn’t here,” she said. “It doesn’t take an hour to walk a loaf of bread down the lane.”
“She’s attentive to the vicar.” Kelyn stacked dirty bowls on the table. “I only hope she brought the umbrella. It sounds like Bedlam broke loose.”
Indeed, the wind had started howling and the house gave a great shudder. They all jumped as the front door banged.
“That’ll be the storm,” said Kelyn, but a moment later, Emmeline burst into the kitchen, hair plastered to her cheeks, eyes wild.
“Yestin and Tristan,” she gasped. “In the harbor.”
“And Davy?” Loveday started forward.
“He’s there, he’s taking the boat out after them.” Emmeline gulped air. “And Neal, he saw them first. He jumped—he jumped from the cliff.”
“God protect us!” Kelyn’s hands pressed her heart.
“The vicar watched him go in, but the waves were so high.” Emmeline’s voice rose in pitch. “He doesn’t know . . . He didn’t see . . .”
Loveday was already brushing by her, hurtling down the hall, and Lavinia realized she was running too. The wind knocked her breath away as she stepped out into the gale. The little stretch of midafternoon calm had allowed the storm to regroup, to double its force. She was half-blinded by rain, tripping behind Loveday, who seemed to fly over the cobbles. Other villagers had come to their doors, and some were already out, ahead of them, feet pounding the winding streets. A shout had gone up, become general.
“The Strout boys!”
“The harbor!”
The shore was thronged with men, and Loveday shoved her way between them, Lavinia insinuating herself into the gaps, stumbling as her feet sank in the sand. Fishing boats were tossing in the water, tilting so far to left and right that their masts splashed the waves. Beyond the headlands, the sea was roaring, breakers dashing themselves to vapor, so the spray rising and the rain falling became a single frothy veil. Again and again, the veil was rent by a surge of dark water. The day itself was drowning. Here and there in the bay, black rocks broke the surface of the water, collared by foam. Was that Davy’s boat tumbling over the billows? And Neal—where was Neal?
“Tide’s running in.” A woman moaned near Lavinia’s ear. Lavinia spun and bumped Emmeline, who gripped her arm like a vise. Her face was stark. Around them, the crowd expanded, became a damp mass of elbows, shoulders, and hips. Lavinia was knocked this way and that. She could no longer see the water. Voices merged with the explosive thunder of the sea. Emmeline pulled her forward, and they struggled closer to the pier. There was Loveday, clasped in the arms of an enormous black-clad man. Her sobs were harsh as the wind.
“More boats are going out.” The man’s deep, carrying baritone reached them. “Fear not, child. God is with them.”
“What’s happened?” Emmeline cried, and a woman at her side answered.
“He’s been run into the reef, poor Davy Strout.”
“Smashed? The boat?” Emmeline’s fingernails cut into Lavinia’s skin. The woman drew up her shawl, shaking her head.
It couldn’t be borne. Lavinia broke Emmeline’s grip and clambered up onto a piling. She had to see. The wind almost bowled her over, but she held herself upright. The rain had slowed and more of the sea was visible, the agitated surface striped with foam. The man—the vicar—he hadn’t misled. Two boats were halfway to the headlands, their crews pulling hard on the oars. She realized her fingers had twisted together with brutalizing force. The bending bones would snap. Her rings would slice her pinky in half. Men were leaning from the first boat, straining to pull something from the water. A boy. They had him under the arms and then he was over the side. She searched the bay, sweeping her eyes from left to right
“Davy!” The name burst from her. “He’s there. He’s there!” It didn’t matter what she said. No one out on the water could hear her. But the second boat was approaching the rock to which Davy clung. They’d seen him.
Neal. She tottered as the wind slacked. Where was Neal? In her nightmares, she found herself often on the Thames embankment, watching as George was fished from the river. He was wearing the charcoal-gray lounge suit he’d worn on the ferry to Dieppe. His eyes stared through her.
In those nightmares, she couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. The horror unfolded again and again. The man she loved, whose warm body had been her delight, cold and stiff.
Now, she watched from the shore as Neal floundered somewhere in that crushing volume of water.
Where? As the sea rocked, she saw debris in the trough between waves. A plank of the shattered boat. Two figures holding on to it.
“There!” She was yelling for all she was worth. “There!” And, as before, no one could hear. But the men in the boats didn’t see the plank, its human burden. They were moving in the wrong direction.
The horror unfolded. She changed nothing. Couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. No. No. No. Fate’s witness. Fate’s victim. No. She jumped from the piling, fell forward onto her knees.
“There!” She could speak even if no one heard. She would keep speaking until they did. She would scream until her throat ran with blood. And she could move. She had control of her limbs. She could act, would act. She ran through the crowd to the edge of the water and then she was wading. The sea lapped her shins, cold as ice. She waded parallel to the harbor, toward the cliffs, pointing, her voice ripping out of her.
“There! He’s there!” A swell lifted the water to the height of her waist, and she flinched but didn’t stop, didn’t let it carry her over. Another swell pushed harder, tugged her skirts so she staggered. Oh God, if she fell, if the water rolled her, rolled over her . . . She found her footing.
The crowd on the shore had taken notice. She could hear the shouts, a tumult of voices, and then, as more and more people understood, as they tracked her movement, her extended arm, a collective call rang out.
“There! He’s there!”
The whole village was chorusing, the chant rising, equal to the gale. And the second boat, it was turning, beating toward the cliffs. She was shaking violently. She couldn’t feel her legs, her feet. The waves pushed and dragged, tireless, wearing her down. She tucked her arms, hands fisted under her chin. The first boat shot past, its grim crew leaping out into the shallows, tugging it up onto the sand. Lavinia turned and saw Davy holding his brother in his arms, splashing to shore. Tomas and the vicar ran to him, and together they lowered him onto the vicar’s black coat. When she turned back to the sea, the second boat was only yards away. Neal sat among the men, hair black and dripping, shirt plastered to his broad shoulders.
He didn’t stare through her. He stared at her. And then that boat, too, had passed. She heaved her legs to change course, her skirts tangling. She could move faster now, back to the pier along the water’s margin. Ahead, the other boy was being carried from the boat, coughing and twisting. Tomas knelt by the first, lifting and bending his arms and legs. Loveday and Davy stood pressed together.
“He’s breathing.” Tomas looked up at them as a woman broke vigorously through the crowd. She gathered the boy into her arms and rocked him with unspeakable tenderness, then widened her arms so the second boy could lean into them. She never stopped murmuring, and as Lavinia approached she made out the words, a steady stream of threats and dire warnings.
That would be their mother.
“Get them home to the fire.” Tomas stood, hand on his forehead, expression haggard.
“Muriel!” Loveday caught sight of her and held out her hands.
At what moment had the transition taken place, formality giving way to familiarity? It had begun in the kitchen, with shared endeavor, and then, the tempest, the crisis, had stripped all of them down, not only her and the Traymaynes, but the whole village. They were joined by fear, hope, common purpose.
She grasped Loveday’s hands and Loveday gasped. “You’re cold as ice.”
“Bloody hell,” Tomas growled. “What’s this I hear about you diving off a cliff?”
Neal had come up behind her. She turned as Davy charged, clapping him in an embrace. “God love you for a maniac.” Davy let go abruptly, pivoting to expel water. He’d swallowed a fair quantity.
Neal shook wet hair from his eyes. “I was most of the way down already.”
“Bird’s nest? Or was it some blasted rare moss that caught your eye?” Tomas’s gruffness made poor cover. He’d been well and truly frightened. It was written in the lines of his face.
“A bonnet, in fact. On a ledge.” Neal’s gaze slid over and found hers. She was too cold to laugh. She blinked at him. She didn’t doubt that he’d gamble with his life for a bit of vegetation. But for her bonnet?
“Tomas, don’t keep them talking,” Loveday touched her brother’s sleeve. “They’ll catch their death of cold. All three of you need to get out of those wet clothes.”
Bad luck that Lavinia was still looking at Neal. Had her face betrayed her at the phrase? Get out of those wet clothes. He might as well take his shirt off now. The wet cotton molded to the muscles of his arms and chest. His trousers seemed suctioned to his thighs. Her throat felt very tight.
The crowd was dispersing. Everyone was cold and wet, even those who hadn’t dunked in the sea.
“And I need to go lock the twins in their room until they’re forty-five, so they never make such damnable mischief.” Tomas shook his head. Imagining his own sons out on that boat. “What were those boys thinking?”
Davy coughed. “Thinking it’d be fun, I’d wager. They’ll catch it from Mum, you’d better believe. I should help get them home.”
He joined the small knot of people clustered around the boys. Most of the men, like Davy, were thatched with straw-colored hair, and the women and reedy girls sported blond braids. Strouts. They began to walk up to the village, still in a huddle. Loveday and Tomas followed. Families took care of each other here.
None of Lavinia’s relatives had written her or her mother during or after the trial. They maintained what Lavinia had once thought a necessary and universal distinction.
There was family, and then there were poor relations.
“Why were you in the water?” Neal’s voice was husky. They fell into step behind the others. She slanted a look up at him.
“They were going in the wrong direction, the boats.” She glanced back at the bay. The wind had calmed and the water looked dark and glassy. “I saw you, you and that boy, but I couldn’t make myself heard.”
“So you strode into the sea to save us.” Neal smiled faintly.
“You make it sound dramatic.” She swallowed and stopped short. He was teasing her, but his eyes shone with peculiar intensity.
And it was real. This moment. She had stridden into the sea, just as he said. She had. Not Muriel Pendrake. That intense look was for her alone. Her chest expanded.
“I suppose you do have me to thank for your life,” she conceded, as her heart—given more space to soar—fluttered wildly against her ribs.
He laughed, gave an admiring shake of his head. Admiring but also . . . negating.
“You were magnificent,” he said. “But I was paddling us toward the Cow Tooth. It’s what they call that round flat rock. There.” He pointed. “You can barely see it. It disappears at high tide, but even then if you climb atop, the water doesn’t reach your knees.”
Unbelievable.
“So you had everything under control.” She stared at him. “Cliffs, storms, inaccessible bonnets, drowning boys—all fun and games to Neal Traymayne.”
“About your bonnet.” He pushed back his hair. “It was the one casualty. I might be able to retrieve it tomorrow, although I can’t vouch for its condition.”
“Retrieve it?” Now she gaped. He was joking, yes. She knew him well enough to recognize the glint in his eye. But he meant it. He’d go down the cliff again. “Have you a death wish?”
“Not at all.” He shrugged. “Or—not anymore.”
She understood then. He was so kind, so straightforward, so admiring, so different from other men she’d known, that she hadn’t realized until now.
“You are atrociously arrogant.” She couldn’t help but look again at the jagged cliffs, the drop down to the sea. What a good opinion he had of his own physical prowess! She shifted her gaze to scowl at him, at the wide neck, broad shoulders, and thick arms he esteemed so highly. “What would your sisters say?”
“They’ve known me to climb worse.” He was grinning. He really hadn’t experienced a moment of fear, getting spun about in that crushing water, with his life and the lives of those two boys hanging in the balance.
Perhaps it wasn’t arrogance, but a mental infirmity. But of course, plant hunters were lunatics. She’d lost sight of that essential fact because Muriel Pendrake made it all seem so mortally dull in her manuscript. Why, just the other day he’d laughed about battling condors in the Andes!
“Also, I am a member of the Swimming Association of Great Britain.” As he uttered this ridiculous line—with a breeziness that indicated perfect awareness of its absurdity—he pushed up his sleeves, and she saw that the hairs on his arms were standing on end. How long had he been in the water? He must be congealing with cold. But he seemed completely unconcerned. He was enjoying himself. The danger had passed and now he relished the aftereffects. Any scrapes or bruises would be his to wear as badges of honor. Fool man.
“My friend Alan—who fought the one-sided duel with his writing—we joined together,” he continued. “We’re passionate advocates of the sport. I sponsor a club in Truro, or rather Varnham sponsors it. Alan edits a weekly swimming paper, The Swimming Record. He’s won dozens of quarter-mile championships himself. Timed races in artificial pools. He can’t get enough of them. I prefer tidal swimming myself, rivers and ocean, the long-distance challenges. Shorter races too. Jump from a boat at London Bridge and swim to Greenwich.”
The Thames. Her breath stuttered. How casually he said it. Jump from a boat.
“This wasn’t the day I’d have picked for a diving competition.” A water droplet running down his forehead rolled off the bump on his nose, fell, and divided at the corner of his mouth. He licked it away with the tip of his tongue. “But I beat my personal record.”
He stood there, dripping with brine, large, confident, casual, joking about everything that had happened. It wasn’t a joke, what they’d all just experienced. It had been a harrowingly close call. A reminder. So what if he was skillful, strong, young, thought himself bloody invincible.
Fate didn’t care what he thought.
He turned, started walking again toward the village, but she didn’t move. She was rooted in place.
“What if you’d drowned?” The question came out with ugly force, a bark. “Who would care about your personal record then? He broke his damned neck, but what a dive, forty feet.”
Her heart had ceased to flutter and beat thickly. Doom-doom. Doom-doom.
“You could have drowned,” she said. “Anyone can drown.”
George in his charcoal-gray suit, eyes staring, flopped onto the shore by rivermen. Shivers moved up her spine.
He’d turned back around, and he watched as her mouth worked. His face became grave. Slowly, he reached out, cupped her elbows, exerting just enough pressure for her to know she could choose.
They were in public. But no one else lingered so close to the shore. Lights were twinkling above them in the village, signs that the villagers had returned to their houses, their fires. Her breath grated in her throat and her weight tipped toward her heels. Resisting him.
“Anyone can drown. Anyone can die in any number of ways.” He said it in a low voice. All his sunniness—suddenly clouded. He was looking not at her but at a point over her shoulder. He, too, saw someone’s blank face, staring eyes. With a jolt, she recognized his haunted expression.
But he blinked away the apparition, focused. On her. Wet, his lashes were more winglike than ever, black and curved.
“The miracle is—we’re alive.”
His hands on her elbows felt warm and steadying. Between those dark, beating wings, his eyes beckoned. She didn’t realize her weight had pressed forward into her toes until he was bending over her.
His face was cold. But his breath blew hot and sweet, and his tongue warmed the curves of her lips. She swayed closer, twitched at the contact with his clammy shirt. Her soaked skirt made an upside-down funnel and the cold traveled up from it, against gravity. He drew back a fraction of an inch, fingers massaging along her jawline, and then he settled his mouth on hers. A lingering kiss. The heat they built there, at that junction—it flickered through her. Her lips were vibrating.
She pulled away. “Your teeth,” she said. “They’re chattering.”
“Are they?” He sounded bemused. “I hadn’t noticed.” He chafed his biceps, stamped his feet. Literally. His feet. She stared.
He was barefoot.
He grinned at her with clenched teeth, grinding them together.
“Careful,” she muttered. “You’ll chatter your thick skull.”
He laughed as though he weren’t about to freeze solid.
The moment had been real. But it couldn’t last.
He was an unshod arrogant lunatic gardener, and she was a flibbertigibbet who didn’t know a Chinese shrub from a hill of potatoes.
A married flibbertigibbet.
What she’d felt in the Traymaynes’ kitchen—that had been real too, the warmth of the fire, of Loveday and Kelyn’s laughter, of the dough in her hands.
If only she could be who everyone thought she was.
She took Neal’s hand, his broad palm stretching hers.
“Toasted saffron buns,” she said. “That’s the answer. We must make haste.”
Toasted saffron buns. A delicious, temporary solution to all life’s woes. He tugged her forward and they set off across the sand.