Chapter 11

It was noon the next day before Kit could drag himself from the house, and even then, he cycled gingerly through the fields feeling like a tortured cat. Mrs. Pengilly from the neighboring farm had delivered his milk—loudly—well before seven. When the clock struck eleven, and he'd forced himself to stagger down into the kitchen, he'd failed to eat a bite of the breakfast he found congealed between two plates on the table. No fault of Mrs. Pengilly's, of course. He'd employed her for the better part of a year, and the wholesome meals never varied. Squinting against the light, he'd dunked hard bread in sugared black coffee until his brain revived enough to sift through the final events of the night.

Buying a bottle of port from the barkeep, passing that bottle back and forth with Raleigh as they lurched down Fish Street? Banging on the door of Takada's boardinghouse until the landlady threw it open, iron skillet in hand?

That had been real.

Riding home along the cliffs as the moon broke through the clouds, illuminating Muriel on a high promontory, naked but for those shooting boots, locks of coppery hair snaking around full, rose-tipped breasts? Climbing up to her on a perilous stair like the one that led to Svensson's studio, kissing her rain-wet lips as waves rose all around them?

That had been a dream.

She'd looked for all the world like a wicked Venus.

Now he tried to keep his bleary eyes on the rutted, half-dried mud of the path. Muriel wasn't naked on a ledge in the middle distance, awaiting his kiss.

She was, however, wearing those shooting boots.

It was the first thing he noticed when he finally came upon her, near Porthminster Beach, where the sands gave way to shingle and granite outcroppings. She was lying flat on a large rock, gazing into the water pooled in its center, those rubberized boots sticking out behind her. He stopped, transfixed, seized by an arousal so extreme he wondered if he were still dreaming, or at the least, still drunk. His pounding skull and sloshing guts refuted both possibilities.

She hadn't noticed him, so he cleared his throat.

No reaction.

"Penny," he attempted, too low. His voice didn't carry above the sound of the waves. The sea looked green as it broke between black boulders.

"Tide's coming in," he announced, overloud.

She turned her head. Her straw hat shaded her eyes. The curve of her lips did not seem friendly.

"You," she said.

"When it's high, these rocks are cut off from the beach." He already wished he'd picked a different opening.

She lifted her chin. This exposed more of her lovely face, and its rancorous expression.

"I know," she said flatly.

"It happens faster than you'd think. Don't want to look up and discover you're stranded. Or that we're stranded together."

He laughed.

She didn't.

"Well," he said. "G'morning." He scrambled up onto the rock and lowered himself down beside her.

"It's not morning." She turned back to the pool. "And I'm not inclined to take advice on tides from a man who fails to track the most basic effect of the Earth's rotation."

He wrapped his arms loosely around his knees. This was going about as well as he'd expected.

"Unsolicited advice," she added.

"I was stuck out here once myself," he said. "That's why I mentioned it." He scowled. Nothing like justifying your condescension with a testimony to your idiocy. "I'd the idea to paint a picture, of the sirens from the Odyssey. We stayed out too long and had to swim for it."

"We?" She rolled up onto an elbow. From this angle, he could see her eyes, dark and assessing.

"Me. And the models. I had to go back later for my easel, and the harp and the robes."

The crests of her cheeks grew rosy.

"Let me guess," she muttered. "The models. Josephine, Annabelle, and Violet."

He bit back a smile. "I'd no idea you were so lyrical."

"You are the one who paints sirens." She lay flat again and lowered her face over the pool. "Seaweed is too homely."

Her telling blush had warmed the air between them. Now, he felt a distinct chill.

"I sought you out today for a reason." His mouth was gritty, as though he'd swallowed sand on his walk over the dunes. "I thought perhaps we could talk."

"We don't have anything to talk about." She tugged up her sleeve, dipped her bare forearm into the water, and scooped a flat pink plant toward the surface.

He leaned forward to watch and caught a floral scent. Her scent. No primroses grew on this patchwork of wave-lashed granite.

He'd sought her out for several reasons, and it grew harder by the moment to rank or disentangle them. Winning the wager with Deighton. Surely that was primary. But if he could find his way back to art, by painting differently, and to a different end, for Muriel and her cause—that might matter even more. And if both goals could be attained with near simultaneity while he eluded his past? While he seduced and was seduced in turn?

A most favorable outcome indeed.

He breathed deeper, the air both salty and sweet. A loose lock of Muriel's hair was drifting in the pool, the dark filigree not unlike a marine plant itself.

This woman. She teased his senses, heightened his awareness. She distracted him from brooding over Lucy, but she also appealed to him in part because she reminded him of Lucy: frank and uninhibited, with a rough-and-tumble way of carrying herself, and eyes so sharp her glances could slice.

If there was a contradiction there, he didn't feel inclined to ponder it.

He studied her as she studied the narrow branchlets of the tiny plant.

"That was last summer," he said. "When I painted the sirens. This summer, I haven't painted a midge. A dot on canvas is more than I can manage."

She let the scrap of seaweed slip away. She withdrew her arm from the pool, rivulets running down her skin. "I don't understand."

"Something shifted." He shifted, on the rock, which dug uncomfortably into his sit bones, and looked out at the bay, rough with last night's rain.

He could sense her waiting and tried to find the words.

"The urge to paint used to seize me. It used to drive me out of bed in the middle of the night. I was determined to make great art. To be a great artist."

"You do. You are."

He looked over. She'd risen to her knees and seemed much closer, her face near to his. The wet lock of hair had tangled in the top buttons of her gown.

Her eyes were very bright. "That columbine study was just something pretty, you said. But I thought it much more than that."

Admiration of this sort used to puff his chest. Now he slouched, resistant.

"Do you know what all great artists have in common? The ones considered truly great?"

A line appeared between her brows.

"They're men." He answered his own question. "The exceptions prove the rule. Why is that?"

She drew back. "You assume that I agree."

"It isn't debatable. Raphael. Da Vinci. Michelangelo. Rubens. Rembrandt. Turner. I could go on and on. There's no list you or anyone could produce of female equivalents."

"Perhaps that is not because women are deficient." Her eyes were cutting him now, narrow and angry. "But because we haven't had the same opportunities."

He nodded. "It is far more difficult to achieve greatness as an artist if, for example, your education excludes study of the nude model, as is the case for female students at the Royal Academy Schools."

She'd put up her chin to argue. He saw the moment she realized that he'd said nothing to contradict—a quizzical little flutter of her lids.

He continued, the words coming faster. "And, of course, far fewer women attend the Academy in the first place. You need training to paint. Also, time and space. Money can buy a man all three. But not a woman. Her training is categorically inferior. Her time isn't considered her own. She can't close a door that her husband, father, son, or brother can't open. She is encouraged to limit her expression, to devote herself to ordering a household. She's taught that invention is beyond her. A man may face material obstacles to becoming an artist, but even a well-resourced woman has to battle social expectations, continually. How much less likely is she to paint a masterpiece?"

Muriel regarded him in stunned silence.

He felt a surge of pleasant anticipation.

"Mr. Griffith," she said coolly. "How much less likely are women to do anything when men will not stop yammering?"

The surge piddled into a nauseating slosh.

"Why, yes," he attempted, rubbing his brow. "That is what I meant."

"And what you exemplified."

"Erm." He felt as though his finger were poking his own brain. He used to silence male blowhards with that same pointed look Muriel was giving him now. He'd miscalculated, speaking so authoritatively from an experience she'd no idea they shared.

"You don't need me to tell you about women," he muttered.

"Or the tides," she reminded him. "Or the connection between women and the tides, as symbolized by sirens."

At this last, his lips tugged into a smile. She was thorough when it came to withering commentary.

"Just so," he agreed. "I've learned my lesson."

"I doubt it," she said, but she was softening visibly, her gaze more curious than outraged. "All right. Women rarely paint masterpieces, for the reasons you mentioned. What does that have to do with your painting? Or not painting, as the case may be?"

"It's why I stopped. I won't allow my works to confirm a harmful myth about the mystical talent of the artist."

"Oh, you won't?" Something about her tone made him uneasy.

"No, I won't." He persisted anyway. "Stories about artistic prodigies obscure the social conditions that determine the lion's share of success."

"Unbelievable." She was shaking her head.

"What is?"

"Your arrogance."

"Oh." He frowned. "That's what you gather from this? That I'm arrogant?"

"You are insufferably arrogant. And I am sorry I ever praised you. You don't think too highly of yourself to paint seaweed. You think too highly of yourself to paint at all."

"Look here." He bristled. "I wasn't suggesting that I am a mystically talented prodigy. I referred to all that nonsense as myth."

Her expression remained unchanged.

"You gave up painting," she said. "Gave it up out of pity, I take it? Pity for the unknown women who never attained their full potential?"

"Pity? Lord, no." He laughed a strained laugh. "In solidarity, perhaps. But it's more complicated."

"I see." She crossed her arms. "Women find it difficult to take lovers, far more difficult than men do. You haven't given up that practice."

He cleared his throat. "I don't claim to have made any systematic renunciation."

"Oh, so you're not England's Gautama Buddha?" Her voice dripped with sarcasm. "You want to remain a wealthy, pleasure-seeking rake, just not one who plies a brush?"

He smiled with clenched teeth. Perhaps this was all going rather worse than he'd expected.

"Solidarity with womankind," she mused. "How do you square that with refusing a woman's commission?"

"I don't." He held her gaze and spoke quietly. "I refused your commission because accepting did not feel possible."

She must have heard his sincerity. She bit her lip. One of her hands crept up, curled fingers nestled in the notch of her throat.

"There is a physical element." He admitted it stiffly. "These days, when I contemplate painting, I get headaches—like someone is twisting screws into my skull. A blank spot opens in my vision. It's not darkness. It's nothingness."

Her eyes were widening.

"My hands go numb." He shoved his hands under his biceps, two tight fists. "I chose to set aside my brush. Picking it up again won't be as easy."

She looked shaken, either by the disclosure itself, or by the fact that he'd made it, that he'd spoken to her in a voice rubbed raw. They were inches apart, face-to-face on a lonely rock, the sea rushing past on both sides.

He felt shaken too.

She recovered more quickly. Her brilliant eyes cleared, and the set of her jaw showed her resolve.

"You must talk to James," she said, with firm decision.

Longing produced a sudden cramp in his heart. She trusted Raleigh absolutely. His closest friendships had once been characterized by that same unwavering assurance.

"I did," he said hoarsely. "We talked last night. Not about that, about other things."

"So, you are responsible for his state." Her brows lowered. "I went into his room this morning and found him snoring on top of the bed with his shoes on."

"He shares the responsibility." Kit eased back, putting more distance between them. "If he knows how to cure a hangover, I hope he shares that too." A rueful smile edged his lips. "I feel like hell."

She was quiet.

"Wouldn't you rather he cure whatever keeps you from painting?" she asked after a long moment.

He tipped his head. "The social ill?"

"Your particular complaint." She seemed to be trying to look inside him. "It could have to do with the nerves."

"I'll manage on my own." He flicked his wrist, dismissive. "Nerves can be steeled."

"Indeed, they cannot," she said. "That's a figure of speech. You need a doctor."

Frustrated amusement crinkled his brow.

"You are relentless," he told her. "I need that. I need you. That's what I came here to say. I'm ready to paint again. Ride with me on that bicycle tour, and I'll paint anything you please."

"I don't think that's a good idea." Muriel was staring at Griffith's face. Usually, when she spoke with people, she stopped actively seeing them. That was how conversation worked. You didn't watch someone's mouth move. All the fleshy details faded away, so you could concentrate on the animating intelligence.

But Griffith never faded. His wicked beauty announced itself over and over, like a bloody trumpet. It was vexing in the extreme.

Too many parts of her felt too aware. Her damp forearm was rippling with gooseflesh, but then so was the dry, sleeved one.

She gripped her elbows.

"Headaches for you," she said. "Vexation for me."

Miles and miles of vexation.

Her own head hurt as she tried to assimilate all the new information.

"What awakened you to the woman question?" Her frown deepened. "Was it waking up with a suffragist?"

He gave her a wry look, his gray eyes glinting. "I count many suffragists among my friends."

"How uncharacteristically evasive." She said it in her sweetest voice. "I am correct, then. Your politics is based on pillow talk."

"Would that be so bad? If I listened to the women I bedded?"

Her gaze faltered under his. Esmé had educated her, and rewarded her progress, delegating tasks of increasing professional importance. But he hadn't listened to her, not when she'd expressed opinions that didn't conform with his own.

Nor had they shared a pillow.

She raised her eyes to find Griffith watching her.

Her mouth went dry, and her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. "I have seaweed to collect."

"Penny," he said, and his use of that silly nickname fluttered her pulse. "I'd hoped to be restored to your good graces."

"When were you ever in my good graces?"

He raised his brows.

That cursed kiss. He'd never let her live it down.

She went crimson. "I was much affected by the sun that day."

"It's sunny now." He studied her with interest. "Are you feeling a similar effect?"

She was feeling it, God help her. A fluttering within and a buzzing without. The beauty of the brisk, bright day, the rocks and the sea—a foil for the beauty of the man who sat before her.

"No," she muttered. "You're blocking the sun. And casting a shadow on the pool. No, don't move. I might as well find another."

She began to gather her scattered belongings: discarded gloves, pocket lens, chisel, hammer, oyster knife.

"Have I wronged you in some way?"

"Pardon?" She looked over, oyster knife in hand. He'd dressed more casually today, in a Norfolk jacket, with a gray cap instead of a topper, and he'd crossed his legs and propped his chin on his fist. The total effect was of boyish expectancy.

"Have I wronged you?" he repeated.

She scowled. She didn't like what the question made her confront.

Had he wronged her? He'd almost collided with her on the cliff path, but that was because she had started forward without looking, a fact he'd never mentioned. He'd kissed her, but that was because she had fibbed to James about seduction. He'd declined her commission, but even if he hadn't offered an explanation, she should have accepted his decision. She'd known as much in the moment, known that she was reacting too dramatically.

Clarinda Chiswick, and whatever poor cats had crossed the wrong quad at Eton—they might have more cause to complain.

"No, you have not," she conceded. "You haven't wronged me."

"Not you." He narrowed his eyes, suspicious. "Someone else?"

It wasn't worth it. She shook her head.

"What did you and James talk about?" she asked brightly.

He stared. After a moment, he shrugged.

"How you've been shabbily treated by a botanist in New York. It angered me. I find anger inspiring, as a painter."

"That is what changed your mind about the commission?"

"In part."

A possibility occurred to her, belatedly, and brought with it a hot rush of embarrassment. Good gracious. James hadn't been so drunk he'd joked to Griffith about exchanges involving nights in beds?

She winced. "James didn't propose anything scandalous?"

"No." Griffith smiled his indecent smile. "What did you have in mind?"

Damn her mind. It was suddenly a jumble of sweat-glazed images, clinging lips and legs, clasped hands, a tangle of mauve sheets, window curtains fluttering.

This was proof positive. Collaboration with Kit Griffith was a terrible idea. Erotic fascination without esteem—it felt lewd, sullying.

Exciting.

"A transaction." She sounded breathless. "That's all. You paint. I cycle. Nothing else."

"What else is there?" he murmured, a new glint in his eyes.

Her heart began to drum. "You start painting tomorrow. You can pick up the specimens at the Towans."

"You can drop them off at the bicycle shop. It's in the engine house near Tregerthen Farm. You start cycling tomorrow."

Fair enough. She gave a curt nod. Then, afraid he was going to shake her hand, she busied herself with packing her basket.

"Extraordinary."

When she turned her head, she saw that Griffith was lying at the edge of the pool. He twisted to grin up at her, holding her pocket lens up to his eye. His eye seemed to jump out at her, magnified to twice its size. The lens revealed, in minute detail, the curves of his lids, the black fringe of his close-set lashes. A silvery-gray star rayed out from his pupil. The rest of his iris was deepest, darkest blue.

Sensation shivered up her spine.

"Give me that." She reached for the lens. He handed it over and returned his attention to the pool.

"They look like chrysanthemums," he said, gleeful.

"The anemones?" She didn't need to see for herself. She'd already scrutinized the pool, poked the walls and turned over the little rocks. But she found herself stretching out awkwardly beside him. She rested her chin on her hands, her right elbow brushing his left.

"What's that one?" he asked, ignoring the contact, or perhaps he hadn't noticed. "A slug? Queer little thing."

"A sea hare." She glanced at him, at his perfect profile outlined against the sky.

He cut his eyes toward her. "I don't know that I've looked properly into a rock pool since I was a child. It reminds me of the colorful fripperies in a dress shop. All bright ribbons and beads and flounces."

"Slug spawn and fish ova and Rhodospermea," she said dryly. "Very fashionable."

He laughed, and she felt a delicious thrill.

"What's that?" he asked, looking down again. He reached out and touched the water's surface.

She tried to extend the line of his finger, to visualize where he pointed. The shallow pool was not more than two feet in length, studded with barnacles and anemones, sandy bottom a mix of empty shells and tiny locomoting creatures. Snails. Marine spiders. Who knew? The tattered oarweed fronds were stitched with wiggling red annelids.

Was he pointing to a jellyfish? A sponge?

"I can't identify many zoophytes," she confessed. "I'm not an expert on seaweed either, truth be told."

"Raleigh already told it. Some tosser changed your lecture topic."

"Professor Charles Heywood." She made a face. "I'm a British woman, so I must speak of seaweed. That's what British women do."

"Is it?" He sounded bemused.

"It's the stereotype in professional botanical circles. British women are seaweed enthusiasts. We collect indiscriminately and stick our innumerable specimens into scrapbooks in our shell-stuffed parlors. The professional scientists think more important work happens in laboratories than parlors. The scientists tend to be men, in case you're wondering. The women tend to be amateurs. Their contributions to science are largely ignored, or absorbed by their male correspondents."

She looked at him. He was looking at her. At such proximity, she could distinguish the blue in his moody irises without magnification.

Her throat constricted. She couldn't remember what she had been going to say next. His lashes lowered just a fraction. Her gaze dropped to his lips. She went so still that her breath stopped in her lungs. It was with a convulsive gasp that she jerked her head to the side and pushed up from the pool's ledge.

She stared at the curve of the bay, at the distant crescent of the beach, and then, horrified, at the swirling water that divided the rocks from the shore.

"Blast." She shot up to her knees. Griffith rose to his knees too, languidly, and considered the breaking waves.

"I warned you," he drawled.

"Warned me?" If only she could spit purple poison, like a sea hare. "You distracted me! I'd have moved to higher ground long before now if left to my own devices."

"We'll never know." He shrugged.

"You might never know. I know!"

This amused him, or the situation amused him. He was smiling faintly as he replied.

"The water's not deep yet. We can wade to the dunes. Give me your basket."

"I don't trust you with it." She jammed her tools and her gloves between the chutney jars. She stood in haste, then bent to grab the handle. The basket bumped against her legs and clanked.

"Suit yourself." He was up in an instant and bounding down the rock's slope, leaping out into the water with a whoop. He spun around to face her, and a waist-high swell knocked him sideways.

"Deuced cold," he called cheerfully. "Deeper than I thought. Can you swim? Beatrix couldn't swim. That complicated the last exodus."

Beatrix. One of the models.

"I'm not a siren," Muriel muttered. "But I can swim."

"What?" called Griffith.

"Soak your big head!" she yelled.

He grinned and snatched off his cap, shoving it inside his coat. He let himself tip over with a whoop and a splash, and floated on his back, limbs splayed.

"I've got something!" He righted himself and lifted a fistful of lime-green leaves.

"Sea lettuce." Muriel sighed.

"Do you want it?"

"No."

"Plenty of it, if you change your mind." He flopped over again.

It was hard to stay annoyed with him, splashing around as he was, like a drunken seal. Hungover seal. She skated down the rock on her backside and dropped into the sea, rising at once onto her tiptoes as the frigid water lapped her ribs, the basket clutched to her chest. A wave nearly overset her, and she staggered as she tried to kick her legs free from her twisted skirts.

"May I?" He appeared beside her, hair plastered to his forehead. She let him hook the basket over his elbow. He was taller, after all.

The next wave floated her into him, and he caught her around the waist, only for a moment. But as they waded toward the beach, his hand closed around hers, and she didn't tug free. It all felt suddenly, disturbingly good. The cold swirl of the sparkling waves. His warm, tethering grip. The way her feet kept lifting from the ground.

"I haven't gone swimming once since we arrived," she said, and he tutted and shook his head.

"I have to do this, then," he said. "To appease the holiday gods." He released her hand and turned, grabbing it again as he dove backward, pulling her with him. She shrieked and swam, or rather half swam, given the awkward drag of her clothes and boots.

When they reached dry sand, dripping and bedraggled, exhilaration turned them toward each other, and Muriel grinned up into his face, before she remembered herself and stepped away, catching her breath, reclaiming her basket, and her hand.

"I'm rather glad that happened," he said, a twinkle in his eye.

She shot him a dirty look. "That makes one of us."

He smiled, unconvinced.

She wasn't convinced either. That was the bigger problem.

Sand clung heavily to her boots as she trudged up the beach. He didn't pursue her, just called out as she neared the first bathing tent.

"Until tomorrow!"