Chapter 21

Glide on.

He willed it as he faced front, heart pounding. Perhaps she hadn't noticed him. Perhaps she'd been gazing at the ships in the harbor. Perhaps she wasn't about to hail him with a name that would cause the world to come crashing down.

"Mr. Griffith." Egg spoke around a mouthful of orange. "Do you know the young lady?"

He pretended the contest absorbed him.

It did, in a way. A French sailor arm wrestling an English chappie in sportswear, witnessed by a motley collection of crewmen hailing from ports of call the whole world over. It was a fit subject for a painting—not for a Pre-Raphaelite, perhaps. For a painter of modern life.

"Mr. Griffith!" Egg spoke louder.

Hellfire.

Kit turned his head.

"Mr. Griffith," echoed Grace Swanwick.

He turned completely. She stood a foot away, and the knowledge in her damselfly blue eyes was absolute.

"Miss Swanwick," he said.

Knowledge in her eyes, but not judgment. Hope and dread warred in his chest.

Grace was unpredictable. She'd worked as an actress before Annie Groombridge had succeeded in wooing her from the stage, and her taste for drama knew no bounds. When Kit had met her, she was singing in Annie's Mayfair drawing room, the main attraction at the Hesperus Ladies Club's Saturday salon. They'd shared an instant rapport, which Annie had disliked at least as much as she'd disliked his trousers.

Had Annie come with her?

His eyes swept up the street. More sailors. Peddlers. Cornish women with baskets.

"I'd heard you'd gone to Cornwall." Grace's voice was pure and sweet. She could make a magistrate sob with a song.

Kit met her gaze. She'd lifted her manicured brows.

"But seeing you…" She twirled her parasol, allowing a theatrical pause, rosebud lips pursed, hand pressed to her shapely bosom. Kit realized that Deighton, Prescott, Egg, and several grinning sailors were hanging on her every word. "It is quite the surprise."

"I hope a pleasant one." Deighton stepped forward eagerly. "If not, but make it known, and I'll remove him from your company, and mine. I only fraternize with gentlemen."

Grace perused Deighton's person, from his monogrammed club cap to his canvas shoes. Her eyes swung back to Kit.

He caught his breath.

She smiled at Deighton. "No need to trouble yourself. Mr. Griffith is a perfect gentleman."

Kit exhaled through his nose.

"And you are?" Grace asked, still smiling. Kit glanced at Muriel. She was looking at Grace, her expression well-disposed and curious.

"Colin Deighton," said Deighton.

"Roger Butterfield!" cried Egg, at the same time, jostling Prescott, who'd also stepped forward.

"My wheelmen." Deighton glared as he acknowledged them.

Kit stopped tracking the introductions and explanations. His eyes had wandered up the street again. No Annie Groombridge. But there was Charlotte Tempest-Smythe, exiting a shop. Miranda Ellis followed. They headed his way.

Bugger.

"The hook! Dash it, man. The hook!" Butterfield began to shout again as the crowd erupted. Kit's head whipped around.

Kemble's opponent had forced their conjoined hands back to center.

Deighton rushed toward the post, clapping his arm around Butterfield's shoulder. Together, they bellowed insulting encouragement as a contingent of seamen in wooden clogs tried to drown them out by stomping the cobbles.

"Mr. Griffith." Grace drifted closer, addressing him alone, in a low, intimate tone. "But I can't call you mister. It's so…formal."

He hardly cared what she called him, or how she needled him, now that he felt assured she wouldn't let the wrong thing slip.

He shrugged. "Kit, then."

"Kit." Her eyes twinkled. "The surprise is pleasant. You've been missed at our salons. We wish you'd come back."

His smile had a cynical edge. "I doubt that's the prevailing opinion."

"Oh, don't let Annie sour you." She leaned even closer. "Henrietta hosts the salons now. She would be delighted by your presence. I'm sure she'll tell you so herself."

"Lady Chettam's here?" Kit's gaze flew up the street. Miranda and Charlotte had stopped to talk with a third woman he didn't recognize.

"I left her just now, at the curiosity shop. We're staying the week at the Falmouth Hotel. Henrietta. Myself. Amelia, Octavia, Rosanna, Miranda, Charlotte, Dorothea. Have you met Dorothea? You'll adore her. Who else? Hester and Celeste, of course. Virginia. You remember Virginia Potter? She's got a new mash. The girl looks exactly like Maggie, but you mustn't say so. We don't mention Maggie in front of either of them. Maggie is not here. Neither is Annie. Hardly any of us have seen her in months. I haven't. I moved out."

"And moved in with Lady Chettam," Kit guessed. It made a certain—dramatic—kind of sense as Grace's next move, leaving the grande dame of the Hesperus Ladies Club for her rival. Annie Groombridge and Lady Chettam had feuded before, over lovers, and over precepts, and the club had remained intact. But Grace was special. Annie had been besotted. "Is that why Doris and Mrs. McLaren aren't with you? There are factions?"

Grace sighed. "Some people are being silly. But everyone here is lovely, and that's what matters. You must pay us an evening visit."

Kit hesitated. "We're leaving early in the morning."

"I wasn't asking you to stay until morning." Grace peered up at him through her lashes. "Would you?"

The coquettishness was deliberately overdone.

His lips twitched. "Not a chance."

"I understand." She smoothed her mahogany chignon. "You're spoken for at the moment."

She cut her eyes at Muriel, who'd moved a ways off and sat on the steps of a stucco-fronted building, throwing dice with an elderly sailor.

He didn't realize he was wearing a moony expression until Grace laughed her musical laugh.

"It's all right," she said. "I'm spoken for too. You're both invited."

He hesitated again. Had she refused to grasp the fundamentals?

"You're inviting me," he murmured.

"Yes," she agreed.

"The gatherings are ladies only."

"Annie again." She made a face. "Silly goose. I think she's scared of toms."

"I've gone a bit beyond tom."

"So you have." She considered him.

"I don't intend to go back," he added quietly. "If I visit this evening, I visit as who I am."

She considered him for another moment.

"Well, then. Mr. Griffith." She nodded. "Half past nine."

She did glide on, her gait so smooth it seemed her feet didn't touch the cobbles. Kit's eyes bounced back to Muriel. His old and new lives had collided again. And yet, he didn't feel bruised this time, but rather bemused, and unexpectedly hopeful.

The warm night air was tipsy with the scent of wallflower and rose. Muriel found herself wishing the walk to the Falmouth Hotel were longer.

"Can we take a turn in the garden?" she asked Griffith, a figure of shadow and moonlight beside her. They could already see the lit-up hotel windows glowing through the trees.

"Let's," said Griffith, and linked their arms.

They fit together so well, strolling, their slow strides matched. When she kicked at her skirts, he pulled her into him, absorbing her little skip into their rhythmic pace. She kicked at her skirts often. She was glad she'd found a simple floral-print gown ready-made in her size, something to wear that wasn't shin-length with oil stains on the hem, but she struggled to readjust to all that cumbersome fabric about her ankles.

"I'm underdressed," she said grimly, picturing Miss Swanwick, beautiful and beribboned. For his part, Griffith had changed into an evening coat and trousers, his silk cravat folded crisply at his throat. It seemed he'd packed everything a man of fashion might require into that knapsack of his, except a top hat. He'd gone hatless, and left his hair unruly, which gave his elegance an appealingly raffish touch.

She almost wanted to see him stand again beside Miss Swanwick, to scratch some aesthetic itch. They made a gorgeous combination, like an iris paired with a peony.

She kicked at her skirt and sighed. "What if they won't let me through the door?"

"I'm more worried they'll try to keep you." There was a smile in his voice. "You will fascinate Octavia Jenkins."

"She takes an interest in botany?"

"She takes an interest in redheads."

"I'm not a redhead." She flushed. "You said they're a stargazing society."

He laughed. "That's what they say. I'm sure they stargaze from time to time, and Miranda Ellis writes horoscopes under a nom de plume. But it's a little joke. They're women born under the same star, so to speak."

Muriel slowed, looking up at the stars. "I've heard James use a similar expression. Men born under the same star. He also says men for whom Greece is the holy land. Or men who are like the Greeks. Because of something in Plato's Symposium. I haven't read it."

"A symposium was a drinking party." Griffith's voice turned dry. "Chaps got soused and said all sorts of things."

"You've read it?" She glanced at him from the corner of her eye. "But you don't care for the Greeks?"

"Eros shook my mind," he murmured, "like a mountain wind falling on oak trees."

His tone brought gooseflesh to her arms, as though a mountain wind really were blowing over them.

"That's Plato?" she breathed.

"That's Sappho, the greatest female poet of antiquity. Her poetry tells us more than Plato's philosophy about the creative life and the bittersweetness of desire. The Hesperus Ladies Club takes their name from one of her fragments. Sappho called Hesperus of all stars the fairest."

"The evening star." Muriel stopped completely, head tipping further back. "I don't see it. There's the Plough. There's the North Star." She pointed. "That's your star, I think."

"The steadfast star?" He sounded amused. "My sweet, I'm far from constant."

It was a warning, gently put and worth heeding. He wouldn't be constant with her. But she'd meant something else, something deeper.

"I disagree." She started them walking forward again. "You've been committed to the same three things your entire life."

"Arrogance. Overconfidence. What was the third?"

"Art, love, and justice," she said softly. "Those are the three."

Silence stretched.

"That's rather grand, isn't it?" He shook his head, but his voice had a gratified gruffness. "Which star is yours?"

She studied the heavens, all the tiny white fires, impossibly distant.

"I've spent a lot of time like this, on ships at night, looking up. You feel doubly small, between the sky and the sea." For a moment, the turf seemed to rock beneath her, everything solid melting away. She leaned into him, anchoring herself with his warmth and strength. "When you're weeks on a steamer, there's nothing familiar but the stars. They make a pattern in the blankness, so you know you're somewhere instead of nowhere."

"Yours is the North Star too, then," he said. "The navigator."

Her throat swelled. She liked it too much, the idea that they shared a star.

"You did learn celestial navigation?" He nudged her, teasing. "Or did the sailors only teach you dice?"

"Teaching me dice was more lucrative for them." She giggled as she kicked her skirt, and he used it as an excuse to pull her all the way into an embrace. His fingers traced lightly up her ribs.

"I know what you're trying to do." She slapped at his hand. "It won't work."

His mouth pressed into her hair, and warm breath seeped to her scalp. She melted against him, and then his lips nuzzled her ear, and she gave a strangled shriek of laughter.

"It did work." His whisper tickled all the more.

She hadn't known her earlobes were so vulnerable. She writhed at the delicious torture, until he stopped her laughter with a kiss. He tasted of citrus and sorcery.

This already felt like part of her life. This ticklish, breathless joy. She could surrender to it, here, now. There was no harm in a thrilling summer fling.

So long as she didn't fall in love.

She wouldn't. She was resolved.

With a sigh, she wiggled from his arms and resumed the walk, her damp mouth tingling. "We'll be late."

"It's fashionable to be late." He caught up to her with a long stride. "But we can stargaze another night."

Another night. Seven remained, on the road. Seven more in St. Ives.

And then they'd part.

She turned her eyes on the hotel. "What goes on at meetings of the Hesperus Ladies Club?"

"A little of this, a little of that. There's food and drink, singing and dancing. Poetry recitations. Masques. Tableaux vivants. Bridge. Whist. Faro. The occasional lecture. The occasional lovers' quarrel." He sounded ever so slightly wistful.

"You went often?"

"Whenever I could." He paused. "Until the hostess forbade male attire."

She glanced at him. His jaw had clenched. "Why would she do so?"

"Several reasons, the most understandable being self-preservation. The neighbors were looking askance. At myself, Octavia, and Harry. I'm a dandy, as you know. Octavia dressed like a dragoon. Harry favored kilts." He gave a shrug. "Octavia switched to gowns with lace jabots, but Harry and I figured we'd rather bugger off. I'd been planning to relocate anyway. Not long after, I left for Cornwall."

"And became a man," she said, and blushed. "Maybe that's not the way to put it. Began to live as the man you always were." She blushed brighter. "I'm sorry if I've misspoken."

"Language is a crude medium." His teeth flashed, luminous in the dark. "Intention matters. Tonight, some of the ladies might call me by my old name, out of habit. And some might do so out of disrespect. I'd rather not hear that name, either way. But there's a difference."

Her shoulders had hitched with indignation. "It sounds like a continuum of disrespect to me. They should make the effort."

"My truculent one," he murmured. "Don't go scouring the grounds for acorns just yet. Perhaps they will make the effort. Miss Swanwick did."

"You're a man." She gnawed her lip. "You could join a gentlemen's club instead."

"And spend my evenings surrounded by gentlemen? It happens so often already. I'm not fond of men en masse." An ironic smile tipped up the corner of his mouth. "They're too embattled, always trying to prove their natural superiority, which gives the lie to the whole idea. The smart ones know it, so they're anxious and aggressive. I prefer the ladies of Hesperus."

Light from the lower hotel windows spilled onto the grass ahead. They passed in and out of bright squares, walking the length of the building toward the entrance.

"Your father's a successful businessman." She was thinking aloud. "Your mother wanted to wed you to a duke."

"A viscount would have done for her," he said dryly. "But yes, in essence."

Her brow furrowed. He'd grown up with every luxury, in one of London's affluent districts. Towering plane trees enclosing quiet streets. Redbrick townhomes built around garden squares.

Eyes and ears monitoring a daughter's every move.

"Didn't they have you closely guarded?" she asked.

"Apparently not, if I cavorted with sapphists." His eyes met hers, silvery with mischief. "But that's your question, isn't it? Did I elude my protection officers, or were my parents unfathomably lenient?"

"Your mother mustn't have been." Muriel remembered what he'd said of her. "She forced you to take deportment classes. She was trying to fit you into a mold."

"For a time. Mine was the stronger will." He raised a shoulder and let it drop. She knew he was willful. At the moment, he seemed pensive.

"Not to mention my father undermined her at every turn," he continued, a line between his brows. "He comes from a stolid West Midlands family of carpet manufacturers. No one wanted him to go to London, to dabble in finance. They swore he'd end up bankrupt and bedeviled. He felt like the black sheep. I think it made him tolerant of nonconformity. And my notoriety didn't hurt his reputation in the city. He's notorious himself, after a fashion. Known for wild investment schemes and unorthodox ideas. He likes thumbing his nose at polite society. He supported my enrolling in the Royal Academy Schools. Eventually, I lopped my hair and started running up bills at the tailors', wearing three-piece suits to dinner. Even then, he didn't balk. He called it enterprising."

Griffith grinned and brushed his hair back from his forehead. A lock sprang forward. If they had more nights together—a hundred, or a thousand—she'd brush that lock back herself, again and again. She'd become accustomed to the silken feel of it against her palm, and the skin of her inner thighs.

She swallowed. "What did your mother call it?"

"Enterprising wasn't the word." His grin faded. "The day I cut my hair she went sick to bed, and the next evening she sent false curls to my room. She wanted me to pin them on when I went to church and to balls. I obliged for several years. On my twenty-sixth birthday, I told her I was finished. No more church. No more society parties. I stopped sleeping at home."

"Those garrets in Chelsea," she sighed, with a flutter of her lashes. As she'd hoped, his grin resurfaced.

"I spent most nights on a cot in a friend's studio." Humor sparked in the depths of his eyes. "My mother took it badly—at first. But within a few weeks of my moving out, she'd transferred her energies to her dishwashing machine and quite forgotten me."

Muriel's brows winged upward. "Did I hear you correctly? She transferred her energies to her dishwashing machine? Not to her nieces or her cocker spaniel?"

"Dishwashing machine." He nodded. "She hates it when the servants chip the china. The machine is for washing dishes without excessive handling. You place them on wire racks that rotate on a wheel inside a boiler as a pump sprays hot water and soap."

"This machine works?" Muriel blinked. "She built it?"

"It works, and she's built several versions—or had them built. She doesn't hammer the metal, but she designed the thing, and it's bloody brilliant. If she were a man, she'd work as an engineer." He shook his head. "I can't even convince her to apply for a patent. She wants my father to do it."

He looked frustrated.

"Your mother is technological," said Muriel, musing. "You must have her to thank for your aptitude with bicycles."

His frustration transformed into startlement. "I suppose. I never thought of it that way. She disapproves of women bicycling." He frowned and laughed at the same time. "But she could probably improve on the Rover if she put half her mind to it. At the least, she could invent a better luggage carrier. Perhaps I should ask her."

"Would you really?"

"Good God, no." He crossed his arms. "I try not to introduce any unnecessary surprises into our correspondence. And I don't plan on visiting anytime soon, or anytime ever. In letters, I can omit. In person, I'd have to compromise."

She scrutinized his face. There it was, the willfulness. She could see it in the set of his jaw.

He caught her looking and smiled. "My brothers established a precedent for long absence. We're already a family that exists mostly on paper."

"Where are they? Your brothers?"

"Argentina. They're heavily involved in railways and refrigerated beef. I don't think they'll ever settle back in England. They both married Anglo-Argentine women. I've little to say to my brothers, so I fill my letters with illustrations of owls and hedgehogs for the children." They were moving through a pool of light, and she saw his features sharpen. "I haven't written in a while."

They'd almost reached the steps that led to the hotel's main entrance.

"My studio felt more like home to me than the house where I was raised," he said. "And my Sisters in art felt more like family than my kinspeople. The ladies of the Hesperus Club felt like family too. I couldn't talk to them about painting, but I could breathe among them, without the weight of the assumptions that pressed me everywhere else."

Muriel nodded. Their lives had been so different. But she understood what he meant. "The heath was home to me," she said quietly. "Not the rooms over my cousin's shop."

"You chose heath plants as your family?" The tenderness of his smile made her heart squeeze.

"And James. He rode on the heath. We'd meet by the pond and talk. But I never felt lonely there, even when I was alone."

They'd climbed the steps. In front of the door, he turned to her. "Did you often feel lonely?"

His expression was serious. Pale fire shone in his eyes. Her heart squeezed harder.

As a child, she'd studied and stroked and sniffed every flower and tuft of grass, so they could grow in her mind when she was back at her deadening labors or lying in the dark under the slope of the roof. But nothing kept the loneliness at bay for long.

Sometimes she'd wanted to howl from the ache of it.

He read the answer in her face and touched the pad of his thumb to her cheek. "Do you still feel lonely?"

She hesitated, chest constricting. She controlled her life now. It was, by and large, the life she wanted. And yes, the ache persisted, often below her notice.

Not when she was with him.

Music was filtering through an open window.

She tipped her head toward the sound. Given the grandness of the hotel, she expected the strains of melody to resolve into a chamber work by Haydn, Mendelssohn, or Mozart. Instead, she heard voices mount into a raucous chorus.

Her brows came together. "That isn't Pirates of Penzance?"

Griffith's gaze kept smoldering. But after a moment, he smiled, allowing the deflection.

"Lady Chettam is fond of comic opera." He turned back to the door and tugged it open. "We'll follow our ears."

Their ears—and a lanky, eager-to-please porter—led them between pillars and across the tiled mosaic floor of the hotel's entrance hall to a private drawing room.

Inside, chandeliers twinkled, casting specks of starry light onto the occupants, most of them on their feet, swaying with their arms around each other's waists or clapping their hands. A tall woman in a red guardsman's jacket strutted between the armchairs, belting words with astounding velocity.

"In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-General!"

The woman spun on her heel, saw Griffith, and cut off her song.