Varnham Nurseries consisted of thirty-seven acres, ten for ornamental trees and seven more for tree stock. Neal toured Lavinia around the remaining twenty acres, avoiding the botanic gardens, open to the public and always crowded in June, walking her through the hothouses and conservatories.
He was talking too much. She didn’t really want to know about the boilers and ventilation systems, or about Varnham’s patent superphosphate. But she kept asking questions, looking with interest, not only at the blue lobelia and scarlet geraniums, but at the glaziers installing new panes of glass and the garden boys laughing with one another as they sieved soil into pots.
In the third sweltering stove house of orchids, though, she began to fan herself vigorously and he had to hustle her out into the cooler, dryer air.
“That’s enough orchids for one day,” he said, leading her down the path toward the orange walk.
“There are more orchids?” She sounded almost scandalized.
He laughed and took her arm. It felt bizarrely comfortable, strolling with her on these grounds. It had felt bizarrely comfortable earlier in the day when they’d taken a cab from the train station to his town house in the center of Truro, surprising his housekeeper, Mrs. Lampshire, who’d looked at Lavinia, polished her spectacles furiously on her apron, then looked again.
Just passing through for the night on the way to Plymouth, he’d explained, ignoring the tray in the hall piled with calling cards, refusing to think about the letters waiting on the desk in his study.
Mrs. Lampshire brought them tea and saffron buns with raised brows and a rigid step, but when Lavinia seized a bun with delight and inquired about the recipe, her demeanor changed in an instant. Before he could blink, they were all in the kitchen and Mrs. Lampshire was halving, toasting, and buttering the buns, the proper enjoyment of which, she claimed, was requisite to proper baking.
Clear butter had spilled over Lavinia’s lip and she’d chased it with her tongue, and he’d chewed his own bun through a grin that hurt his cheeks, unable to tear his eyes from her.
If she hadn’t asked to see the nursery, he might have proposed they take a turn in his own small garden, where the hornbeam hedge provided just enough privacy.
“More orchids,” he confirmed, heart tripping as her hip bumped his thigh. “There’s more everything. We trial more varieties of plants than they do anywhere else in Europe, excepting Kew.”
Was he bragging? If he was, it wasn’t on his own behalf. He couldn’t take credit for Varnham’s century of success. Nonetheless, he liked her wide eyes, her slightly dazzled smile.
“I hadn’t quite realized,” she murmured. “When you said you went about planting trees, I formed a different picture.”
The path wound by the toolshed and the potting and packing houses, and he waved at the trainee gardeners trooping out with wicker baskets, the straw and mats protecting the delicate plants for shipment.
“That first year I planted plenty of trees. I weeded too. I mulched. I loaded coal with the stokers. Cleaned pumps. Treated blight. Propagated shrubs with the head gardener. I packed orders with the trainees.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to come on hiring and firing, making decisions about the future of the business, without understanding how it all works from the ground up. Some of the permanent staff are the sons and grandsons of Varnham employees. They weren’t going to trust me so easily. Nor were our clients, for that matter.”
“Because you’re not a Varnham.” She pulled away and stopped, facing him.
Why, she really was curious. About the nursery. About his role in it. He nodded slowly.
“That’s right. Richard Varnham founded the nursery in 1790 and ever since, the proprietorship has passed father to son.” Tightness in his throat made the words emerge like gravel. “I represent an unwelcome change.”
Unwelcome to him above all.
“Look.” He pointed. They’d reached the orange walk, a living wall of orange, citron, lime, and lemon trees. The fruits between the shiny leaves were green. No tiny suns yet. But he could see that she’d lost herself in memory. She hadn’t lied about those childhood moments in the glasshouse. Her blue eyes shone and she breathed deep, inhaling the sweet-sharp tang of the air.
Stay. He felt the urge to say it aloud, as he had in the woods at Mawbyn. Forget France. Stay and fight.
He didn’t speak. She hadn’t even trusted him with her surname. Mrs. Stowe was how she’d introduced herself to Mrs. Lampshire, cutting her eyes at him imploringly. A lie. She was hiding from her husband, yes. But she also hid from him.
Tomorrow she’d be gone.
She drifted to the fountain, perched on the marble lip. She wore one of her fussy silk gowns, gray trimmed with pink, but her hauteur had melted away. Her posture was relaxed, expression unguarded. She dipped her fingers in the water.
“How did it happen, then?” she asked, looking up. “How did you become the proprietor if no one wanted it . . . including you?”
She was perceptive. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, kicking away a pebble. Why was it still so bloody hard to talk about?
“It was supposed to be James, Charles Varnham’s son. Only son.” He didn’t think he could manage more unless he sat. He joined her on the fountain.
“James,” she said thoughtfully, and placed the name. “You fought the condors together in the Andes.” The corner of her mouth lifted. Her eyes, though, her eyes were grave.
“Fought condors. Found orchids. Traveled to volcanic peaks and through hard-frozen snow and mosquito-filled jungles. Crossed the pampas.” He returned her half smile. “He was three years older, a member of a Thames swimming club. We met at a race, nearly tied for first place. Or, that’s how he liked to describe coming in second.” He felt his smile twitch.
James never beat him once in competition, a fact Neal used to bring up as often as possible.
“Charles wouldn’t have hired me as a plant hunter if it weren’t for James. From my own father, I knew how to collect, make herbarium specimens, pack live plants, but I’d no commercial experience. James wanted to go to South America. Wanted it so badly he said he’d take a contract with Edevane & Fernsby if Charles wouldn’t send him.” He laughed. That had been a night. “Charles relented, of course. James wasn’t finished, though. He wanted me to go with him.” He paused. She was focused on him, lips parted.
“Charles said . . .” He’d never told anyone what Charles had said. He took a breath. “Charles said, You’ll either keep each other safe or get each other killed. I don’t know which.” He drilled his knuckles into the marble. “We know now.”
She was shaking her head. “Charles didn’t blame you. He made you the proprietor of Varnham. He knows it wasn’t your fault.”
Her chin had that stubborn tilt. She took his part without even knowing the story.
“He’s fond of me.” He looked away from the compassion in her eyes. “James and I did well. We had good luck, and also good nerves, strong stomachs. Every expedition we sent back cases of specimens, plants, bulbs, seeds. We introduced new species of passion flower, lily, nasturtium, myrtle, cypress . . .”
A few of their discoveries had become commercial successes, and a few had excited interest among the botanists at Kew. Charles was never lavish with his praise, but he was proud. Both of them knew it.
He sighed. “Between expeditions, I spent much of the time at the Varnhams’ town house in London. Especially after my father died. In part, it was so I could tend and study South American plants with the head gardener at the London nursery. But in part . . . I’d missed too much. Nessa’s wedding. Jory’s wedding. My father’s illness, his—”
He broke off. He felt the old knot forming in his stomach.
“They welcomed me back, make no mistake. I was the one who avoided them. I couldn’t bear to feel like an outsider.”
“You’re a Traymayne.”
His heart thudded queerly in his chest. She’d said it with assurance, as assurance, like it meant something precious. “And?”
“And you stick by each other. You protect each other. You love each other. You join each other’s ridiculous societies.” She touched his hand. He stopped punishing his knuckles and grasped her fingers. “You share much more than a name. It’s deeper. It’s a whole way of being. You’ll always have it, no matter how far you wander.” She hesitated.
“No matter your disagreements with your mother,” she said slowly. “When you’re truly an outsider, like me, you start to see families for what they are. Yours is something special.”
She glanced down, but not before he glimpsed envy and something else, some naked longing, in her eyes.
He exhaled. He was a Traymayne, in exactly the way that she meant. He’d known it once, forgotten, relearned the hard way.
But she was Lavinia, just Lavinia. Alone in a way he could scarcely understand, especially if she didn’t let him try. He lifted her hand to his lips, wishing he could bring her inside his circle of protection, which she was right in pointing out had never really broken.
“What happened next?” she asked softly.
He lowered her hand. “Charles was a bachelor for years, had James late in life. He wanted to step down, hand the business over. But I convinced James that we should go on one more expedition. Just one more.”
Her fingers tightened on his. He stared over her shoulder at the orange walk and beyond, at the shining glasshouses in the distance, the gorgeously landscaped green acres that were James’s birthright. Not his.
“We were in Misiones, in northern Argentina, camped for the night. We should have stayed by the fire, but it was hot, and we could hear the river, and I had one of my raving-mad impulses, jumped up, said I’d be the first one in the water.”
He realized he’d gripped her back, too hard. He was mashing her fingers. He risked a glance at her, was staggered by the receptivity he saw in her eyes. She was ready to hear anything he had to say.
He turned his gaze back to the rolling green grounds. He’d lived with the regret, the remorse, for too long now.
“I said I’d race James to the bank. I knew he couldn’t ever resist a challenge. I didn’t know he’d taken off his boots. I started running, and he followed, and—
His throat closed and she kissed his bruised knuckles as he watched the sunlight dazzle on glass.
“He stepped on a viper.” He tried to say it without transporting back to that night, but the memory was too vivid. He was there in the jungle, enclosed by dense vegetation that all but swallowed James’s shout.
“It bit him on the foot. We were too far from Posadas. I knew it, but I got him on the horse anyway. We rode until he begged me to stop. I’d wrapped his ankle as tight as I could to slow the venom, but he tore off the wrapping. His leg was so swollen he couldn’t bend his knee. He was bleeding from his gums. His nose.”
“Neal,” she whispered, and he realized she was calling him back to himself. He fixed his eyes on her face.
“I should have let him stay there, talked to him while he could still hear me. But I dragged him back onto the horse. He was in agony but we rode all night. For what? He wasn’t breathing when we reached Posadas.”
“You had to try.” Her eyes were too bright. Her insistence moved him. He swallowed.
“He’s buried there. All those cases of flowers I sent across the ocean to Varnham . . .” He could hear his voice getting huskier. “And I left James behind in that red dirt.”
She pressed closer to him, pulling their clasped hands onto her lap, the silk cool against his skin. They listened for a moment to the fountain.
“It worked out well for me. That’s what some people say.” His shoulders tightened. Why was he telling her this? The rumors had salted the wound. Within two weeks of accepting Charles’s offer, he’d tried to resign. “Here I am, head of Varnham. A usurper, if not a murderer.”
She didn’t gasp. Her gaze held steady. “People will say anything. You know the truth, and Charles knows the truth.” She hesitated. “I know the truth.”
Slowly, his muscles were loosening. Christ, he’d been maudlin. Embarrassment mingled with relief. As bizarre as anything else: the confidences she could elicit from him, and the easement she offered with a few words, a look from those bluebell-blue eyes. Jacinthe de bois eyes.
He almost smiled, managed a nod, dismissing the subject. “It was just idle talk.” And it had been. Painful, but short-lived. He’d developed solid relationships with old and new clients, worked like a dog to prove himself to the gardeners, laid most, if not all, of the rumors to rest. But she was still looking steadily. Not fooled by his casual tone.
“Charles Varnham was right to trust you,” she said, and smiled at him, a smile of such loveliness his breath caught. “You’re devoted to this place, to his legacy. To James.”
He itched to wrap his arms around her. Was he really going to put her on a steamer, wave once from the dock, and return to his life as though this whole episode had been a fairy-dusted dream?
“You said I can’t be trusted,” he reminded her.
Her hand turned in his, and her gaze wavered. He put a finger under her chin, tipped her head up.
“I should have said I can’t trust you.” She breathed the words, and they stared at each other. He’d seen her features blurred with pleasure, heard her breath break, felt her clutch around him, but this look was somehow more intimate. “You are different from . . .” Her voice dipped. “George.”
He was holding his breath, willing her to say more.
“You’re capable of the kind of love I used to dream about.” The sadness in her eyes seemed to tinge the sunlight blue.
The growl in his chest escaped. Dammit, she denied him too much to speak of love. Every particular of her history.
“Tell me who you are.” He forced her chin higher. “Give me more than just Lavinia, betrayed by George. What of your family? Your friends?”
He felt her chin trembling, caught her whole face in his hands.
“If you can trust me, if you can tell me the worst, I can face it with you, whatever it is.”
She ducked her head, breaking his hold.
“Why are you running?” He spoke to her hair, the tip of her nose, the curve of her bottom lip.
Her chest heaved. At first, he thought it the prelude to a sob. Then he realized it heralded decision.
She looked up. Her expression arrowed through him.
She was illuminated, hope in her eyes, and fear. Her lips parted.
“I don’t know where to begin,” she said, voice tremulous but urgent. “I suppose it started—”
“Mr. Traymayne!”
Both of their heads jerked around.
“I didn’t realize you were back.” Robert Glendinning, one of Varnham’s chief hybridists, was approaching along the path pushing a wheelbarrow of shell sand. He was a wide man, bearded, with a gleaming bald head, the perfect foil for his slender companion, a striking woman, with a strong jaw, a Roman nose, and a mass of coppery hair.
She froze, her garden knife pointed at Neal’s heart.
“Mrs. Pendrake has been bored among the gladioli.” Glendinning was all smiles. “So we spent yesterday with the fuchsias. We took cuttings from the Alba, and if I do say . . .”
He didn’t. Neal was already on his feet, dimly aware that Lavinia hadn’t moved. Muriel Pendrake, the real Muriel Pendrake, came right up to him, shifted the knife to her left hand, and gave his right a firm shake. Her gaze met his squarely.
“Neal,” she said warmly. “I can call you Neal? What a ridiculous mix-up!”
Hours later, Neal sat in the dining room at the Red Lion Hotel, jerking his gaze between Muriel past and Muriel present, feeling more mixed-up than he’d ever felt in his life.
Muriel present—Muriel two—no, the one and only Muriel exhibited none of the reserve she’d demonstrated in her letters. Her prose might be airless, but she herself was a breath of fresh air. More than a breath. A rollicking gust.
At the moment, she was launched on an explanation of her side of the mix-up.
“It’s an epic tale,” she’d said at the nursery. “I’ll need a pint to do it justice.”
She had her pint now, and she narrated with singular vivacity. He could scarcely follow the twists and turns of the plot, not least because his swift glances at Lavinia broke his concentration.
Lavinia looked . . . not vivacious. She sat bolt upright, her posture rigid, watching Muriel with a fixed smile on her lips.
Neal glanced at Muriel, cut his eyes back to Lavinia, then rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. His divided focus was making his head pound.
Muriel deserved attention. He redoubled his effort, concentrating on her words.
Her story had begun at Paddington Station, when the cabbie had driven off before she could collect her portfolio. She’d hopped into another cab and started after him.
“We gave furious chase,” she said, shaking her glass so that the ale lipped the rim. “Or rather, we tried to give furious chase, but the London traffic moves like treacle. We were furiously stuck behind an omnibus. I realized I was better off on foot . . .”
As she kept talking, with increasing animation, Neal felt dizzied by a possibility. What if this vivacious woman was also an imposter? What if the Muriels kept multiplying? His eyes slid to the front door. A third Muriel might fling it open at any moment.
Nonsense, of course. Lavinia’s deceit had warped his mind.
His gaze returned to Lavinia and their eyes met. She’d been looking at him. She seemed to read his passing thought, or at least, the censure in it. Her smile faltered.
Dammit.
Muriel was laughing as she described her frenzied sprint down the street, how she’d dodged hooves and wheels, screaming blue murder.
“A Good Samaritan came to my aid, because he thought my child had been stolen. He went haring off, quick as lightning. When he reached the cab and recovered the portfolio, he was terribly out of sorts. Didn’t think it worth the risk to life and limb. But you know differently. I have a new species of primula in there! Among other treasures.” She grinned at Neal, and suddenly he found himself grinning back.
Yes, this was Muriel. The right one.
She wrapped up her account neatly as a potboy brought another round of beer.
In the end, she’d missed the train, returned home, waited for Neal’s letter, received nothing, dispatched a missive to Truro, then followed on its heels.
“I like this hotel,” Muriel commented, waving across the room at another party of diners just being seated. “The Mephams. I met them this morning. We walked the shoreline. It was beautiful, and fascinating. Glendinning says there’s an algologist I should meet. Underton?”
“Underwood.” Neal nodded. “Of course. I’ll introduce you.”
“Splendid!” Muriel beamed and turned to Lavinia. “And what do you think of the algae?”
Lavinia marshaled her forces and beamed back at Muriel.
“I’ve never thought of it.” She kept her chin high. A few days ago, if she’d been quizzed about some woody, shrubby, soppy, or mucky thing, she would have put on her best Pendrakean expression and pretended knowledge.
Confronted with Muriel Pendrake herself, she had no such recourse. Nothing but her own ignorance to fall back on, her own empty head, decorated with a pretty smile.
Now Muriel would exchange a pained look with Neal, and they’d draw closer together and discourse about fascinating muck to their hearts’ content.
Birds of a feather. A society of two perfectly suited plumes.
Muriel didn’t look at Neal. She looked straight into Lavinia’s eyes with unfeigned warmth.
“How was the botanizing in Mawbyn? Anything of interest?”
Lavinia’s throat felt scratchy, so she took a small sip of ale.
A friend. That was how Neal had introduced her. Lavinia Stowe. We’ve been out in the field.
“Mosses,” she managed.
“Tomorrow you’ll have to show me what you collected.” Muriel addressed Neal and Lavinia, smiling upon them both. “I adore bryophytes.”
Her waving tresses gleamed in the light like beaten copper. She was so statuesque. So vivid. So legendary. And on top of it: so horridly likable. She’d accepted Lavinia’s presence without batting an eye. She tried to include Lavinia in their discussion, as though they were all three fellows in science. Potential friends.
Lavinia hooked a lock of hair behind her ear. Her own tresses had seen better days. The ends were dry, and the roots had gone greasy.
“Is your husband joining us?”
Lavinia didn’t startle. Too many years of sustaining flank attacks in Society. But the question stopped her breath.
Muriel hadn’t meant to attack, of course. She’d asked the question with charming frankness.
Lavinia’s eyes fell to her rings, which must have twinkled as she moved her hand, capturing Muriel’s attention. The gold looked heavy, the jewels outsized. She wanted to make her hand into a fist and stuff it under the table. If someone could have told her that one day, she’d feel the impulse to hide her diamonds . . . that she’d long to flaunt instead some bit of arcane knowledge about iguanodon teeth, or the genus Taraxacum . . .
She’d have laughed. She and George would have laughed together.
“No, my husband isn’t joining us.” She lowered her hand in her lap, the movement slow and graceful. “I wish he were, though.”
She looked down at her plate to avoid seeing if Neal reacted. If he didn’t react.
How strange. After all her recent revelations and reversals, she suddenly wished that George sat beside her.
She and George had been birds of a feather, like Neal and Muriel. If he were here, she wouldn’t feel the odd one out.
“Next time, then?” Muriel turned back to Neal. “I forgot to say, about the pitcher plants . . .”
Lavinia faded into the background. If George were here, he would arch his brow at Neal and Muriel, shake his head, drawl in her ear, his voice caressing and contemptuous, as familiar to her as her own.
My Vinnie. A wallflower among the botanists.
If George were here, he would turn Truro upside down until someone produced a bloody bottle of Möet.
She sipped her ale. When she looked at last to Neal, he was leaning on his elbow, head angled toward Muriel, talking easily. In Latin. Not entirely in Latin, of course. But Latin enough that Lavinia was shut out completely.
Eventually, they segued into English, so they could debate the theories of Charles Darwin.
Finally, Lavinia rose to make her exit. Neal and Muriel sat surrounded by empty glasses, locked in a heated exchange about intelligent design.
Neal broke off as she stood, looking up at her in confusion, almost as though he’d forgotten who she was. Or more accurately: as though he’d remembered he hadn’t known in the first place.
“I’ll accompany you,” he said, but she shook her head. His house was around the corner from the hotel. And he’d been mid-sentence, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. She could see how eager he was to express the idea forming behind them.
“You were about to make a point,” she said. “Science isn’t incompatible with faith because . . .”
She left them to it.
It was well past midnight when she finally heard Neal’s footsteps in the hall. She hadn’t wished that he’d stop at her room, that he’d knock. That would only have made things harder.
He hadn’t stopped.
He hadn’t knocked.
She rose early, but not before Mrs. Lampshire. The kind housekeeper hurried about, spectacles winking in the gaslights. She was confused, clearly, that Lavinia was leaving so early. And leaving alone. But she packed saffron buns for her journey and roused the other members of Neal’s small staff to see her safely off to the station.
Wrapped in her warmest shawl, Lavinia waited on the platform with her trunk.
The train wouldn’t depart until nine. Under normal circumstances, Neal would wake long before.
But these weren’t normal circumstances. He’d been out late, drinking deeply, communing with Muriel.
What a poor Mrs. Pendrake Lavinia had made! The contrast confirmed it.
She gave a small cough, pulling her shawl more tightly around her. A crumb of the saffron bun she’d been nibbling had lodged in her throat. That was why her eyes were watering.
Swallows swooped about. The sun was burning away the mist, but there was a chill in the air.
She’d traded her wedding ring to the clerk for the shillings he had in his pocket plus a first-class ticket, but not to Plymouth. To London.
The ticket’s value was only a fraction of the ring’s worth.
But already, she felt lighter.
With Cranbrook in Fowey, she could return to Harcott House. Take the chance and tell her mother the truth. The Yardleys weren’t the Traymaynes. Her parents had failed her dreadfully. She’d failed them too. But it mightn’t be too late. Perhaps she and her mother could unite. Figure something out. Her mother could face Cranbrook for her, and . . . what?
Her mind blanked. But she had no better hope, not really. Sailing to France with a pirate was one thing. Boarding an oniony steamer to Roscoff alone was quite another. She’d lain in bed before dawn, imagining Paris, the life she’d lead there, shut out of her favorite shops by penury, friendless and deplorable. She’d imagined arriving at Le Manoir, imagined those stone angels turning their backs to her.
At least her mother would give her a chance.
The thing was done now. Decided. Irreversible.
Even though she kept her gaze fastened on the east, in the direction of the city center, she didn’t wish that Neal was climbing out of the next coach, or the next.
She didn’t wish that he’d appear, that he’d sprint toward her. Wait. Don’t go.
She was the last person on the platform. The last person to board the train.