Chapter 16

She and Griffith said very little to each other for the first several miles. They rode out of St. Ives, toward Zennor, and continued west on a rutted coastal path that hugged the cliffs, the sheer drop down to the azure water below too dizzying to contemplate. The wind blew strong and fitful, and it snatched at her breath and gave her yet another ceaseless task, apart from the steering and the pedaling: slapping at kitelike flights of her skirt. It was only when the path wound away from the cliffs, through hedged fields, that speech seemed possible. It wasn't a path anymore but a dirt lane, wide enough for two cyclists to ride abreast, and the air was sweet and still.

"Am I holding you back?" she asked, and he slanted her a look from beneath the brim of his cap.

"No."

The monosyllable didn't encourage further dialogue.

"You should catch up if you want." She tried again. "I know the way, more or less. Due west. If there's a fork in the road, I'll point myself at the sun."

"The sun's directly overhead."

"It is now." Her brows pulled together. She was attempting to consider his preferences, and he was making it difficult. "I assure you the sun will set in the west."

"Ah, yes," he said. "Because of the Earth's rotation. You've mentioned it."

She glanced over. His profile seemed hard, all ridges, the humorous curve of his lips compressed to a flat line.

"I thought you might mind that the others are so far ahead."

"I don't mind."

"They're probably gloating."

"They're probably bugling." He shrugged a shoulder, then sat up straighter, removing his hands from the handlebars. "Reason enough to stay out of earshot."

She had to will her eyes back to the road. He looked indolent, controlling the Rover effortlessly with his legs, arms crossed.

"I can't go very fast." Her front tire hit a stone and the impact vibrated from her wrists to her elbows to her teeth. She clenched her jaw.

Was she being considerate, urging him to ride ahead? Or cowardly?

"It's quite all right. I'm not in top form today." He paused. "Long night."

That was an understatement. It was also an opening.

She took a deep breath. "I know."

"You know?" Finally, some feeling in his voice. "You know what?"

"That you had a long night." Her blood began to rush through her veins, faster than her pedaling warranted. "I rode to your house."

"When?"

"Right after dinner. And then I…waited a bit."

From the corner of her eye, she saw him reach out slowly and wrap his fingers around his handlebars.

"And why's that?" he asked softly.

"I wanted to talk." She swallowed. The hedges had fallen away, and they were in open country, unbroken green scattered with rock formations, gray and strange against the horizon.

"I'd clammed up earlier. It was a rather feeble response." She stole another glance at him and thudded through a pothole, deep and avoidable. "I planned a whole speech. But you were occupied elsewhere."

He returned her sidelong look. "And now you want to know where I was and what I was doing?"

She blushed. She did, most definitely. "That's beside the point." She nerved herself, eyes back on the road. "I want to say what I intended to say. If you're interested in hearing it."

"Very."

Dammit. Her mind blanked.

After a minute, he made a noise, something between a knowing sigh and a scoffing laugh. "Right. Well. In that case…"

"I lied," she blurted. "There wasn't a caterpillar."

"No caterpillar," he repeated. "Noted. Is that all?"

She shook her head.

"I touched you to touch you." It was little more than a whisper. He heard her, though. She could feel the air thickening between them.

She licked her lower lip and tasted salt. "Since we met, I haven't gone an hour without recalling the feel of your mouth on mine."

The little silence was filled with the skittering ping of unsettled stones, the mechanical whir and creak of the bikes.

She was gripping the handlebars with such force she thought she might rip them away from the frame.

"I don't kiss people very often. Or ever, really. Only my husband, and only in the beginning. This is new for me—all of it. I want you." Cold sweat slid down her neck. She was saying more than she'd intended, her tongue loosened by the sleepless night, by the landscape, vast and wild, remote from her everyday life.

"But I have been wrong about you," she continued. "Again and again."

"I'm glad you were wrong about the cat," he murmured. "I couldn't live with myself."

She dared a glance. His hands were off the handlebars, tucked under his biceps. He wore a faint, ironic smile, but his eyes smoldered with quiet intensity.

"I don't want to get this wrong now," she said. "Yesterday, I was all mixed up by what you told me. To be honest, I'm still a bit mixed up. But we have ten days to…" Her voice caught. She wasn't sure how to exit the sentence.

Griffith's smile widened. "Ten days to see how mixed up we can make each other? What a glorious prospect."

Glorious? Try chaotic. Reckless. Irresistibly enticing.

Her feet went clumsy on the pedals. This wasn't the moment for her knees to turn to water. She focused on riding.

"Out of curiosity," he drawled. "How long did you wait for me?"

She bristled. "Out of curiosity, what time did you return?"

An impasse. He broke it by laughing.

She glared at him.

"The sun was coming up." He held her gaze. "I regret that I wasn't there to answer your knock."

The look in his eyes…

She had to swerve to keep their front wheels from touching.

"But I didn't expect you." He sounded amused.

"I should have expected you'd be out." She engaged her protesting muscles and corrected her course, surging up the slight rise in the road.

"More rest would have been wise," he said conversationally. It seemed toiling up hills didn't affect his breathing in the least. "But Ponsonby and I can get carried away."

She panted. "You were with Mr. Ponsonby?"

"And a couple of bottles. A classic combination."

She gulped for air. The road had leveled. And last night, Griffith hadn't been cavorting with a paramour, but drinking with a friend—heavily, to judge by his raddled appearance.

"It's an unhealthy combination," she told him. "James says alcohol causes degeneration and disease of the nervous system."

"Does he say it while swilling sherry?"

"Physician, heal thyself." She sighed. "It doesn't make it less true. I'm not judging."

"What, then? Fretting? Fussing?" His indignation was obviously feigned. Beneath it, he seemed pleased, as though no one had fussed over him for some time.

And maybe no one had.

Her heart gave a sudden lurch.

She trained her attention straight ahead. "I saw the sunrise too."

"Good God." His tone changed. "You waited all night."

"I fell asleep for some of it."

"On the drenched ground?"

Maybe she'd taken brazen honesty a step too far.

"I wouldn't say drenched. A bit damp, perhaps."

The pause extended. Then he said: "You should have let yourself in."

She made a face. "I'm not accustomed to letting myself into other people's houses."

"Desperate times."

"I wasn't desperate." She bit her lip. Was that how he saw her?

"Besides," she muttered, "we can't all be rakes like you, climbing trellises and crawling through windows."

"No climbing or crawling required. The door wasn't locked." He veered around something gristly. "I've never climbed a trellis myself."

She snorted. "What about an iron downpipe? Or a knotted lace curtain lowered from a garret balcony?"

"I appreciate the image." His voice was dry. "But I moved through the world seen as a woman for the first three decades of my life. Which means I followed a different version of the rake's rule book."

"Oh." Her breath puffed out. She felt awkward and almost painfully curious. "Trellises play a smaller role?"

He gave her a wry look. "Did you ever have to sneak past a chaperone to get a private word with a female acquaintance? Limitless energy goes toward governing what a woman says to a man. How she says it. Where and in whose company. But no one thinks twice if two wallflowers slip out of a ballroom. If a girl shuts herself up with another girl in the parlor, or even in her bedchamber."

"So you wouldn't scramble up to a balcony under cover of dark." She swallowed. "You'd just…call at the front door and walk up the stairs."

She pictured him in a gown, slinking through a lady's boudoir, slinking up to the lady herself, who watched him approach in her vanity mirror, shivering with anticipation.

She realized she was shivering, and she shifted on the dense leather seat, newly aware of the pressure it exerted on her inner thighs.

"Don't you miss the convenience?" she asked.

"Convenience," he echoed, and she cringed.

"Perhaps that sounded glib."

Suddenly, her front wheel dropped into a crater. The road was all craters. She could only brace herself and judder.

"This way!" Griffith waved as he turned, cutting a diagonal across the heath that swept down toward the sea.

She was gasping when she finally reached him, a stitch in her side, but soon her wheels were rolling on their own, pulled by gravity.

She felt lighter, speeding through the heather, cooled by the fragrant breeze.

Griffith had flung out his arms.

When the slope leveled, he put one hand on the handlebars and twisted toward her, his grin conspiratorial.

"My mother hoped I'd marry a title. Forced me to take classes in deportment. I despised them." He steered around a boulder, not a moment too soon. "Until I met Emma Sidnall."

"Of course there was an Emma." Muriel began to apply her weight to the pedals again, pushing through the goldenrod and eyebright.

He rode closer to her. "It never felt like convenience. More like recompense. All that vigilance, and yet some of us shared a blissful secret, right under everyone's nose. There are things I miss."

Her mouth went dry. She wasn't exactly sure what she wanted to ask. Men were motivated by sexual feelings. It made sense that they might want to couple with other men. But from what she understood, women responded to erotic advances with varying degrees of reluctance. The urge to initiate manifested rarely and—to judge by Esmé's reaction—indicated moral decay, or infirmity. She'd known pairs of women who traveled together, who lived together—for the companionship. Did they also crave each other's bodies? Did their affectionate caresses culminate in bliss?

If two lovers happened to be women, one of them had to initiate. Did that mean one played the man's part? Was that why Griffith began to gravitate toward male attire? Or had he assumed a new identity all at once, to escape marriage to a lord?

"What about you?"

She blinked. Griffith had posed a question to her.

"Me?" She pedaled more quickly. "There weren't any etiquette classes, or Emmas."

After their marriage, Esmé had taken pains with her elocution, but she didn't feel like revisiting those humiliating lessons.

"I fed chickens and collected eggs, and scrubbed things, and swept things. I took care of my younger cousins and did the bidding of the older ones. I didn't have a mother to hope I married anyone, let alone someone with a title. And I didn't share any blissful secrets, with anyone." She considered, then offered an amendment. "Well, James. But only in the sense that I knew he had something blissful going on with the son of his father's stable manager." She scowled. "Unfortunately, his father suspected. One day William was gone."

James had been heartbroken.

Griffith seemed to digest this. "They're aristocrats, I take it?"

"His father's a baron."

"And you descend from farmers. How did it happen, then? How did you and Raleigh become such great friends?"

She'd rather not revisit that either, not at present.

"He is a great friend," she said brightly. "He's going to repair the fence I knocked down."

She related the story of her mishap, pitching it in a far more comic register than she'd have thought possible, hours before, when she'd lain dazed on a tussock with a wooden rail on her chest, blinking at the indifferent spray of stars. He didn't mock her, and he didn't try to turn the subject back to their intimate histories. He related a series of mishaps, which put her own blundering into welcome perspective. Less welcome: her increased apprehension about the dangers posed to cyclists by geese.

They intersected a path that passed through a grim mining village, just a few granite terraces perched on a cliff, overlooking an engine house—this one still functioning, pumping water from the tin mine. There was a tavern, sooty and dark. They stopped for lunch, and she nodded off so many times over the hard bread and cheese that he eventually slid onto her bench, to act as a buttress.

After lunch, she rode even slower, and they didn't speak at all as they rounded the peninsula, sharing the exalted feeling that often surged in travelers when they reached Land's End, the westernmost point of England. The sea, so blue in the distance, boiled white around the columns of rock that rose near the crinkled brown cliffs. Gulls and cormorants wheeled above the high summit of the headland. The bright green turf was dotted with wildflowers. She felt no urge to collect them, even when they dismounted to stretch their legs. Everything seemed perfect in its place.

The sun was low by the time they curved east, following the southern shore, a succession of small headlands and coves, the cliffs rusty pink. When they clattered up to the Treryn Dinas Inn, their destination, its whitewashed fa?ade was glowing in the dusk. Griffith and the man behind the desk talked in circles, until it became apparent that the Mutton Wheelers had paid for their rooms, and Griffith gave his coin instead to the skinny boy who carried her panniers up the stairs. Muriel followed him and found herself in a garret with a floor that sloped nearly as steeply as the ceiling and a bed shoved so close to the wardrobe its doors didn't open.

Just as well she'd scarcely a spare garment to hang.

When she descended the creaking stair to the vaultlike dining room, she found Griffith at a small table with a tankard before him. The Mutton Wheelers were the only other diners, but they'd finished their meal and risen from their chairs to crowd around Deighton, who sat hunched over a large notebook, writing, or drawing.

They straightened when they saw her. Butterfield, with the mustache. The younger Butterfield, much slighter, and sweet-faced, now that he wasn't blowing into a bugle. The two whose names she'd forgotten, one bulky and fair, the other lean, with black eyes and a shadow on his jaw.

"Mrs. Pendrake," said Mr. Deighton, with crisp correctness.

That was all. Not one of them spared her another glance.

"Sorry," she said to Griffith sometime later, starting awake and kicking his shin under the small table in the process. His toe came down on hers, the pressure light but insistent, trapping her foot.

"I'll go up to bed," she said, cheeks heating. She'd almost dipped her face in her bowl of half-eaten beef stew.

The word bed seemed to drift in the candle smoke. She had to say something else.

"I want to get an early start tomorrow," she added brightly. "So I can walk the shore before we ride."

"To what end?" His eyes shimmered in the candlelight. "You opted to leave your equipment behind."

"It was all too heavy." She shifted her foot, just a little, to better feel his weight bearing down. Her pulse was racing. "I still want to look, in case there's something extraordinary. I have a collecting bag, and I could always borrow a jar from the kitchen."

Actually, she doubted the kitchen shelves held glassware. The inn seemed too battered for anything delicate to have survived the centuries. The stew bowl looked like a hollowed cobblestone, and her wine had arrived in a dark gray pewter cup.

"But I'd rather bring you down to the seaweed than the seaweed up to you." She smiled, fiddling with the heavy, unnecessary knife beside her bowl. "You should see the plants in a natural pool, if possible. You'll get a fuller sense of them."

He was silent.

She stopped her fiddling.

"Which will help with your pictures," she explained. The shifting light in his eyes made her suddenly wary. "You do have a sketchbook?"

At his nod, her tension eased. "I've meant to ask about the bladderwrack. You painted it? No trouble?"

He looked down at his hands, lashes black fans against his cheeks. "None."

He lifted his foot away and she slid hers back, feeling silly and sleepy and strangely bereft.

She stood.

"Don't do anything gladiatorial," she advised, glancing at Deighton. Griffith tipped back his head and smiled. Her eyes plummeted from his sharp jaw to the line of his throat and down to his collar, cinched by lilac silk. Was his pulse racing too? Because she couldn't think how to say good night without embarrassing herself, she turned on her heel.

She had packed a shift, as it turned out. During her last few moments of scantily clad consciousness on the lumpy mattress, she imagined him climbing to her window, then remembered, with disappointment, that the dismal little room lacked windows altogether.