When Neal descended the narrow, crooked stairs, the lamps were still lit and the walls held the night’s chill. The world was hushed. Outside, the birds slept—the nightjars returned to their nests, the skylarks and thrushes not yet risen.
This morning he wouldn’t wait. If Muriel did not appear before he’d finished his tea, he’d bloody well rouse her and not with a breakfast tray.
Let her try to maintain her ruse now that he’d decided to put it to the test.
She was already awake, sitting out in the little tea garden with Mr. Phillips. He hid his surprise, stood for a moment in the back doorway, watching. The golden flowers of the laburnum tree seemed the sole source of light in that dim courtyard. Muriel and Mr. Phillips had chosen the table directly beneath the hanging bunches of blossoms. Their heads were tipped together, hair pale as moth wings.
He would have given a small fortune to know what they said.
Who was she when she wasn’t playing a part? When she refilled an old man’s teacup, listening intently to some tale of travelers past, or when she ducked out of a bakery with a grinning little girl clinging to her hand . . .
He turned away, slipped down the hall, bolted tea, frizzled bacon, and eggs with butter by the window in the sitting room. His eyes felt sandy from a sleepless night. The dreams that had beckoned were all rose-scented softness, delphinium-blue eyes, sighs of pleasure. Asleep, he was defenseless, always on the verge of surrendering to some sweet treachery, so he’d fought off slumber.
Outside, in some farmyard, the roosters began to crow.
He pushed back his chair.
He would not surrender.
He reached the top of the hill and looked down to where Muriel still struggled upward, snatching at branches as her thin-soled city shoes slid in the fallen leaves. He’d set a brutal pace, up the woodland’s steepest slope. A footpath wound around the hill—the footpath he’d followed last night to Mrs. Odgers’s—but that gradual ascent was entirely too pleasant for what he had in mind.
Not a ramble. An ordeal.
Muriel would cry for mercy before the sun had time to climb above the trees.
Except . . .
She did not.
As he led her, whistling, along the needlessly tortuous route, she fell farther and farther behind. But whenever he paused, she caught up to him, sweaty and smiling.
Once she disappeared amid thick trees, and at last he scrambled back down the muddy track, expecting to discover her doubled over, vanquished, begging for him to put an end to their march.
She was crouching beside a rotted log, uncovering the base of a dandelion plant so she could inspect the rosette of toothed leaves.
“They’re smooth.” She looked up at him, big-eyed, hopeful. “And spotted.”
“Wrong species,” he said shortly. “This way.”
He was off again, climbing the embankment with long strides. Putting distance between them before he could soften.
She’d stopped to root around in the muck for his mother’s dandelions.
The variety she’d been inspecting wasn’t even close to the one he’d described. She had no eye for leaf margins, or surfaces.
But she’d made an attempt to help him. She’d muddied her hands making it.
Not because she cared. He had to remind himself. Because she knew it would move him, this display of thoughtfulness. She manipulated shamelessly.
Finally—the sun shone directly overhead—he had to rest. His heels were bleeding—damn Hessians—and he felt bedeviled by thirst. He tossed his empty specimen box onto the carpet of bluebells and boosted himself up onto a boulder. There he stood, drinking from his water flask, gazing between the trees toward the headlands, waves of green turf brightly spangled with tormentils.
He couldn’t hear the sea, but he could smell it. The salt on the air.
A sound alerted him that she’d reached the high ground.
She crashed through the ferns, staggering as her skirt snagged on a thorny blackberry, and then she swayed, a scant yard away, hand pressing her ribs, wincing as she breathed. She thought herself unobserved. Didn’t bother trying to hide her exhaustion. Her dress was filthy at the hem, with threads unraveled from tiny tears in the skirt and bodice. She had twigs in her hair, and a red line across her cheek where she’d been whipped by a thin elastic branch. Her eyes seemed to glow.
He’d never seen her look so discomposed.
She looked like less of a beauty in that moment.
And more beautiful.
He sat down on the boulder, swinging his legs over the edge. She startled at the sight of his boots, hand flying from ribs to throat.
“There you are,” she said, all cheeriness, craning her neck. The smile returned to her face. “Such a pretty spot.” She circled the boulder, unable to disguise a slight limp. Her heels fared worse than his, he’d wager. But she made a good enough show of admiring the blackthorn trees and the bluebells.
“Enjoying yourself?” he asked.
“Immensely.” She answered without hesitation. “Are we going to walk out to those cliffs?”
Were they going to saunter across the flat, grassy heath?
He smiled.
No, they were not. They were going to plunge headlong into ravines and labor through swamps until one or both of them collapsed.
“We’re going to the river,” he said. “A branch of it runs through the valley to the estuary.”
Her eyes had locked on the water flask in his hand. Slowly, he lifted it to his lips, drank deeply.
“The terrain is a bit rough, and a bit prickly,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “The brambles grow in thickets. But you’ve an interest in the genus, so you won’t mind the tangle.”
Her smile wobbled. After too long a beat, she nodded.
“Shrubs.” She said the word grimly, plucking ineffectively at the twig in her hair. “I can’t seem to get enough of them.”
At this, he laughed despite himself. She wouldn’t give up easily. Fine. He was willing to dedicate hours to the project.
“Here.” He handed down the flask, watched as she gulped water like a child. Kneeling to pick bluebells in Kyncastle, he’d looked up at her as the sun burnished her hair and skin, made her gleam like some goddess of the cliffs. Now he perched above her, and she appeared small and breakable, utterly within his power.
He’d trained himself to tend to fragile things. Specimens. Seedlings.
His impulse was to jump down from the rock, settle her on a dry tussock, remove her shoes, rub ointment onto her blistered heels, refill his flask at the spring, and bring it back to her, dripping with sweet, cool water.
This situation required a different approach. Rougher handling.
“I almost forgot,” he said. “I have a treat for you.”
He lowered himself to the ground, lifted the flask from her hands, and dropped it in a pocket, then reached inside his coat.
Her brow smoothed. She was ready for a treat, a kind gesture that restored the balance between them.
He would not feel guilty.
He fetched up a silver cigarette case. It had belonged to James. Whenever he flipped it open, he felt like James, like he was physically inhabiting a memory.
He’d watched James make the gesture he made now a thousand times.
“Mugwort,” he said, extracting a cigarette and offering the case. “Or mostly. I blend it with mullein, tobacco, and a bit of mint. In one of your letters—”
Every time he used the phrase, he saw her tense.
He lit his cigarette, sent smoke spiraling toward the treetops. “In one of your letters,” he repeated, “you said you smoked Turkish cigarettes. You’ll prefer these, I promise you.”
“Smoke?” She laughed. She saw the look on his face and a thin line appeared between her brows. “I was joking, of course.”
“Not at all.” He pressed the case into her hand. “You picked up the habit on those long ocean voyages and keenly regret that London’s social mores don’t permit a lady to indulge. Why would you deny it now?”
She bit her lip, staring at the neat row of slender cylinders.
“Tobacco appeals to me less these days,” he continued, beginning to find the fun of the situation. “It’s poison in large quantities. We use it to fumigate the nurseries, or make it into a wash to kill greenfly on the bushes. But a pinch mixed judiciously with herbs . . .” He shrugged, took a long draw, and blew a lazy ring that twisted slowly in the motionless air. “You told me you were eager to try it.”
“Of course,” she murmured, shoulders sagging. Then she pushed them back, took a cigarette between her fingers, and set it between lips pursed as for a kiss. For a moment, he admired the absurdity, then he struck the match.
The coughing fit was instantaneous. Her eyes watered as she caught her breath.
“Very nice,” she wheezed, and puffed again, letting the smoke fill her open mouth and roll out.
“Mmm,” he said. “Hold on to the case, then. They’re all for you. Shall we?”
She was coughing as she followed him along the edge of the heath and then down into the valley.
They reached the river at a narrow bend, disturbing a heron that ran a few steps on its long, thin legs, then opened its wings, flying over them, awkward and magnificent. Muriel gasped as its shadow swept her face. The look she gave him was pure wonderment.
Dammit. He didn’t want to share such moments with her, such looks.
She should have broken hours ago.
He clenched his jaw against an answering smile. They’d keep walking. Over mudflats exposed by the ebb tide, along creeks that split off the main river, cutting channels through the mossy banks.
It was cooler by the river, refreshing, and he redoubled the pace, skirting the bracken, ignoring the little white flowers that rose from downy stems, likely catchfly, rare enough to merit a second glance in other circumstances.
He’d given up even the pretense of collecting.
The river turned sharply, and the trees drew closer together. He took the bend and accelerated. Muriel had fallen behind once more, and so he heard, rather than saw, her protest.
He turned at the cry. She’d thrown herself down on a thick bed of moss and lay with her hands beneath her head, looking up at the green canopy.
“We’re rambling too fast,” she said, propping herself on an elbow as he picked his way back to her. “I want to appreciate the mosses. Like Laura Odgers does,” she added, with a touch of asperity.
He dropped down beside her, stretching out his legs.
“Laura Odgers studies moss. She doesn’t sleep in it.”
“I suppose you would know how she sleeps.” She looked away. “I didn’t hear you come back last night.”
Ah. So she’d lain in her dark room listening for his return.
Because she was jealous? Or . . . because he’d frustrated her plan to dig her claws into him more deeply?
Mrs. Odgers, plump, vigorous, and voluble, had kept him late, first rehanging the henhouse door and nailing together new nest boxes, then chatting over several courses—garden vegetables, chicken, fresh berries—and only afterward displaying her specimens, saving the one in which he’d indicated the most interest, the Bryum roseum in fruit, for last.
He hadn’t minded her delaying tactics in the least. An old family friend, she was like an aunt to him, and besides, he’d wanted to linger elsewhere, anywhere but at the inn with Muriel.
On the way back into the village, he’d stopped at the Three Crowns for a pint and stayed for two.
He pressed his fingertips into the moss, rose moss, the tiny green whorls intricate as lace.
“It was a long night,” he said. Was his smile fittingly sphinxlike? He maintained it until she flicked her eyes to him. She’d been getting sun these last days. He couldn’t tell if she’d colored. She was certainly frowning.
Good.
“So, does it still remind you of China?” He waved at the alders, at the river glinting as it curved along the bottom of the valley.
“Tremendously.” At once, she assumed her specialist air, gave their surroundings a once-over, and nodded sagely.
Nice try.
“What in particular?” he prodded her, noting the pulse in her eyelid as she gazed down at the moss.
“The woody plants,” she said, and sat up, tucking her legs beneath her. “But also—”
She met his eyes. “Looking at someone’s back as I walk. It’s a very particular sensation.”
He inhaled. Not the squirming evasion he’d expected. No, she’d mounted a flank attack. He’d been behaving badly. He knew that as well as she did. But for just cause.
He’d apologized needlessly to this woman before. She wouldn’t startle him into begging her pardon.
“You don’t mention that sensation in your book.” He lifted a leg, rotated his ankle, which exacerbated the pinch of the cracked leather.
“I don’t mention any sensations in the blasted book.” She scowled. “I told you, that’s the problem with it.”
“A literary problem. But perhaps better for your departed husband’s reputation.” He raised his brows. “It doesn’t sound as though your additions would be complimentary.”
He couldn’t help but glance at her fisted hands, the rings on her fingers. Had she borrowed them—stolen them—to complete her costume, a pretty picture of enticing widowhood? Were they her jewels, relics of her own ill-fated marriage?
She was thinking of a particular man when she spoke about love. She couldn’t have conjured ex nihilo the emotion he’d glimpsed, for example, that night at Crawthevyn Inn, or that evening in Kyncastle.
“I can be scientific about it.” She tossed her head, and a thin lock of hair snaked down around her shoulder. She pushed it behind her ear, lips thinned. “I will replace the chapter on how to pack bulbs with a chapter on how to classify men. Discuss the varieties in terms of characteristics and uses. I’ll have to provide basic descriptions as well. My husband was a showy specimen. You, less so.”
He blinked. Why—she’d insulted his appearance. Good thing he didn’t harbor any illusions in that regard. He’d polished his manners enough to move between worlds, but a man couldn’t do much about his face.
“But it turns out you’ve more similarities than differences,” she continued, then broke off, ripping up a handful of moss.
“We walk too fast,” he offered, and at this bit of glibness, she glanced at him sharply and scrambled to her feet.
“Never mind,” she said, brushing off her skirt.
He stood. “What do we have in common, Mr. Pendrake and myself?”
Surrounded by so much green, her blue eyes looked pure and clear as rainwater.
“You can’t be trusted,” she said.
It was too much. Coming from her, it went beyond boldness. It was insanity. He could not be trusted?
“Clearly, your new chapter is aimed at experts,” he said, biting off the words. “I’m afraid you’ll need to explain your criteria for the benefit of the layman.”
“You lie to yourselves.” She tugged fiercely at a thread dangling near her waist, but her gaze did not leave his. “Which permits you to believe you’re not lying to others. Which means that women end up cruelly deceived, and you think nothing of it.”
“I can’t speak for your husband.” Before he could stop himself, he reached out, stilled and lowered her fingers, snapped the offending thread. “But I’ve never deceived you. If this is about last night, about Laura Odgers, I—”
“I couldn’t care less about Laura Odgers.” Her lips turned down. Not a pout.
Not not a pout.
“Maybe you care for Laura Odgers, maybe you don’t.” She narrowed her eyes. “What matters to you is whether your mother cares for her. Isn’t that what Elizabeth discovered?”
His jaw dropped. He closed his mouth with effort. Closed it hard.
“Let’s leave my mother out of it.” He said it through gritted teeth.
“Easy enough for me.” She shrugged. Her gaze wavered, and she looked down the bank, at the river. Her voice dropped, murmured like the slow current. “I wanted the man I loved to put me first. I put him first, before everything.”
He swallowed. The blue thread had wrapped around his fingers, and he shook it off.
“And what did he put first?” He spoke softly too, unsure how she’d led him into this conversation, which, for all the trappings of falsity, contained some raw kernel of truth.
She meant what she said. He’d stake his life on it. God help him that he wanted to know about this other man, this man who’d hurt her so badly.
But she didn’t answer. Instead, she gave herself a shake.
“I’m hungry,” she said.
“How unfortunate.” He stared at her lovely profile, the straight line of her nose, the curve of her lips, the defiant tilt of her chin. He was the one hurting her now.
Different. It was different. He was different. Completely.
He shook his empty specimen box, patted his coat pockets, smiling slightly at the exaggerated theater.
She was watching him, mutinous.
“It seems I forgot to pack our lunch. Luckily, nature provides.” He permitted himself a grin.
“In one of your letters . . .” he began, and she drew a sharp breath. Oh, she was close, very close, to breaking.
“You described catching your meals in the Min River.” He peered down at the river, but he could see her startled, displeased movement out of the corner of his eye. “Wait until you gut a Cornish trout and cook it on a stick over an open fire. Nothing like it. You’ll never go back.”
“Go back?” She made a strange sound, not quite a laugh. Some wildness had overthrown her. She reached out blindly to steady herself, pressed her fist into a tree trunk.
“No,” she said. “No, I won’t. You’re right about that, at least.”
Again, this impulse to soothe her, to sweep her into his arms.
You’re right, she’d said. There was no going back.
They’d soon see what else he was right about.
A gull cried, and he started forward, catching her hand and tugging her after him, so that they bounded together, a breathless, exhilarating descent to the river’s edge. She tripped on a root and would have fallen, but he pulled her close to his side, bearing her weight as the bank crumbled into soft clay. He lurched to keep their balance and laughed, her wildness doubling within him.
Maybe he’d leave her here, on this riverbank, hot and hungry, to fend for herself.
As soon as the ground leveled, she jerked away and darted ahead of him, so that, for a time, he followed her as she clambered over stones. She had to bend her slim back as she went, scrambling over logs.
“That’s a promising pool,” he said, and she pivoted with a gasp, startled to find him so close behind her. She’d gone quickly, but nowhere near quickly enough.
If she’d thought to prove a point by outstripping him . . . well. What a disappointment for her.
“And . . . there’s some succulent mud.” He stepped around her and squatted at the base of a willow. They’d taken a fork, and the river had narrowed, trees crowding in, the shadowy banks thick with moss. Reluctantly, she came to him and stood while he turned over the damp soil. When he rose, he took her wrist and placed the writhing knot of worms into her palm.
Elizabeth would have screamed. At which scream he would have winced, remembering his mother’s exasperation at displays of daintiness.
The fair woman before him—blotchy with exertion, sweat darkening the hair at her temples—she didn’t flinch. She kept her arm rigid, lowering her face to inspect the worms, nose wrinkled with distaste.
He produced the line, and the hook, from his pocket, handed them to her.
“Bait the worm on the hook,” he said. “I’ll find a spot for us. The fish will rise from that eddy, and we’ll want to stay behind it.”
He turned, walked a few steps, glanced over his shoulder. She was standing perfectly still, looking down at her outstretched hands, a bleak expression on her face. She felt his gaze and slowly raised her head.
“Muriel Pendrake.” He purred it, and she tried—valiantly—to smile. But she knew, already she knew. Her throat moved convulsively.
“The worms aren’t cooperating,” she said, with a lightness that jarred with the fear he read plainly in her eyes. “In China, they leap onto the hook.”
Her struggling smile suddenly widened. She hoped to dazzle him with that heart-clutching prettiness. To stave off the inevitable.
The time had come.
He prowled back to her. The light filtering through the leaves dappled her with gold.
He’d always been susceptible to dappled things. Fawns. Finches. Foxgloves. He’d avoided noticing the sweet freckles forming across the bridge of her nose.
“Muriel Pendrake,” he repeated. Silky. Threatening.
“Yes?” Her smile faded. She was shaken. Exhausted and shaken. He was the immediate cause of that troubled expression, but she had created the situation. She was to blame, she and her lies.
“I like the sound of it, that’s all.” He looked down at her. “Don’t you?”
She made an uncertain motion and more slippery hair fell down to frame her face. She couldn’t push it back, not with her hands filled with mud, worms, the hook and length of line. She was helpless, stippled with light, rather like a trout herself.
He’d caught her. Now what would he do with her?
He laced his fingers together, settled his chin on them, to keep from touching the shining lock, rubbing his fingertip over her cheek.
“Muriel. Pendrake.”
Her eyes begged him to end her torment. He could clasp her to his chest, taste the sun and the shadow on her skin, put it off—this reckoning—for another hour, another day.
That was a reprieve, though, not a resolution.
“What’s your real name?” he asked.