Chapter 23

Kit watched a stripe of pale dawn light lengthen across the floorboards. When it reached halfway to the door, he stirred, easing away from Muriel, sliding from beneath her soft limbs and silky curtain of hair. He crept to his own room, where washing up and packing were the work of a moment, then clattered down the narrow stair to breakfast. In the taproom, the smell of hot grease overpowered the beeriness, and a girl in a white cap bustled between tables delivering plates piled with sausages and eggs. He caught her eye, placed a large, indiscriminate order, and plunked himself into a high-backed chair at a table near the open fire. Butterfield and Kemble, already seated, looked up from their plates.

"You're chipper," observed Butterfield, his tone ungracious. "Enjoyed your night?"

"Yes, rather." Kit leaned back in his chair. During those first strained seconds on the threshold of the parlor, he'd wondered if he'd made a mistake, if the night were about to transform from midsummer dream into nightmare. A great fist had seemed to close inside his chest, choking off the air. Then Muriel had picked up Octavia's song, her voice unexpectedly melodic, her throat flushed pink. His heart began to beat again, and the shuttered faces of his friends opened one by one. They hadn't all welcomed him with tact or comprehension. Hester used his old name repeatedly, and Celeste had remarked, with affectionate relief, that he looked the same and that she'd feared false whiskers. But by and large, the interactions had been comfortable, familiar in a way that didn't depend on his filling his prior mold. Only when he'd realized that Octavia had led Muriel onto the terrace did his emotions roil out of his control. He'd quickly contained his agitation. Muriel knew how to handle herself. And if she decided to dally with a female lothario, who was he to stop her? Bedding a woman didn't confer ownership. Still, his pulse had run high until she'd reappeared, at which point, he'd dashed forward and swung her into his arms. And later, he'd unbuttoned and unlaced every scrap of her clothing, and dragged his hungry mouth all over, licking every delectable inch of her skin, and…

"We would have enjoyed it too." Butterfield's sharp voice whisked the happy reminiscence from Kit's mind. "You and Mrs. Pendrake went to meet that gorgeous little creature—Miss Swanwick, was that her name? You could have been a trump and invited us along."

Mutton Wheelers at a sapphic gathering. Kit suppressed a shudder. "It was a private party."

"A party." Butterfield frowned. "I knew it. How many ladies? They were probably in want of gentlemen if there was dancing."

Now Kit suppressed a grin. "They were not in want of gentlemen."

"Says you." Kemble thrust his head forward. "I say you are in want of the fraternal spirit. Have we moved in on your territory? No! But you haven't so much as thrown us—"

Kit interrupted. "My territory?"

"Mrs. Pendrake." Kemble sounded impatient. "She's a nice bit of raspberry. And we don't even look at her! Then another fine piece turns up, and you keep her for yourself as well."

"You could look at Mrs. Pendrake, you know." Kit thanked the waitress as she set his coffee in front of him before turning back to Kemble. "You could talk to her. The key is treating her like a human being."

"Kemble doesn't know." Butterfield dabbed at his mustache with the corner of his napkin. "He's a Neanderthal."

"And you're a prig." Kemble poked at his tomato. "Five years on and you think you're still head boy."

That hit a nerve. Butterfield's nostrils flared. He folded his napkin neatly and returned it to the table.

"At least I can think." His gaze turned inward, and his next muttered words had the well-worn pathos of a mental refrain. "I should have gone to Oxford."

"Wish you had." Kemble shoveled the tomato into his mouth and spoke with a bulging cheek. "I should have beat that Frenchie. But you broke my focus."

"Why didn't you go to Oxford?" asked Kit, more to steer the conversation away from beating Frenchies than because he cared to find out.

"I am the firstborn Butterfield." Butterfield pushed his mushrooms to the rim of his plate with the back of his fork. "Firstborn Butterfields join the family firm at eighteen." He gave Kit a thin smile, all but hidden by his mustache. "Egg is going instead. He'll come up this term. I expect he'll get sent down again promptly."

Kit considered defending the unpromising adolescent on principle. It hardly seemed worth the trouble.

"And where is young Egg?" He sipped his coffee and looked around the room.

"In the courtyard with Prescott, wiping off the bicycles." Kemble glared at Butterfield's mushrooms, then at his own. "This training diet will be the death of me. No cutlets. No pork chops. No pudding. No pastry." He looked up as Kit's plate arrived, heaped with fried eggs and potatoes, two kinds of pudding, sausages, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, fried bread, and a double serving of bacon.

"No bacon," he whispered, as though in pain.

Kit laughed and nudged the plate toward him. "Help yourself."

"Thank you, I will." Kemble speared a piece eagerly. Butterfield shook his head.

"What?" Kemble snarled. "Deighton's not here."

"Is he wiping off bicycles?" Kit didn't think it likely.

"He's negotiating with the proprietor," said Butterfield. "It's one of our objectives for this club run—getting more hostelries to affiliate with the CTC."

"Commendable." Kit raised his coffee, the toast ironic, but the sentiment more or less sincere. The Cyclists' Touring Club was the largest cycling organization in England, and one of the few that included women. Its mission to facilitate cycle touring involved securing discounted lodging rates for members and printing an annual directory of the establishments that offered them, along with maps and other guides. He thought back to the wheelmen gathered around the notebook at the Treryn Dinas Inn.

"You're recording the club run," he said as realization struck. "For the next edition of the British Road Book?"

"For a Cornish Road Book," corrected Butterfield. "The CTC wants more routes through Cornwall. More places of interest. More detail on road conditions. We're including paths too, for the adventurous. Noting everything down." He was noting Kit's plate, with a face that belonged in a Renaissance painting of a martyred Christian saint.

"You can have some too." Kit sighed. "Just leave me the eggs and potatoes."

Butterfield hesitated, glancing at Kemble, who'd pounced on the puddings.

"Perhaps a sausage," he murmured.

Kit finished his potatoes while Butterfield ate sausage with quick, furtive bites and Kemble grunted with rapture. His brain had snagged on an appalling thought.

He gave it voice. "Deighton's a consul, then?" CTC consuls were scattered throughout Great Britain. They brought inns and hotels under contract, and also supplied local information and aid to touring cyclists. Ideally, they encouraged esprit de corps among followers of the wheel—all followers of the wheel, men and women, old and young.

"He is." Butterfield took a second proffered sausage from Kit's plate. "As of this spring."

"Consul for Bristol?"

"Consul for Penwith."

Worse and worse. "He lives in Bristol."

"He plans to spend the bulk of every cycling season in St. Ives."

Kit brightened. There was a very large, very aggressive, Harris Tweed–wrapped wrench in Deighton's plans. "Shame his father's packing him off to Scotland."

"Scotland?" Butterfield and Kemble spoke in unison.

"Scottish office." Kit had no idea what sorry fate Scottish office signified, but from the looks on their faces, the other men did.

"Glasgow." Butterfield balled his napkin in his hand. "He never said."

Kemble blanched. "Good God. They don't mean to send me to Glasgow with him? I can't go to Scotland. I have a fiancée."

"You remembered," said Butterfield dryly.

"I'll wire my father." Kemble pushed back his chair. "Tell him to ignore whatever he hears from St. Ives."

"Tell him to ignore the chairman of the company?"

"Why not? Chairman's a bloody lunatic, and everyone knows it. He'll get some other bee in his bonnet, and…" Kemble coughed as Deighton stalked up to the table. He looked even taller in the low-ceilinged room, pale cowlick nearly brushing the rafters.

He barked, "What the devil are you two eating?"

"Nothing." Butterfield stuffed the evidence into his mouth. "Poached herring," he mumbled.

"You were eating sausage and talking about my father." Deighton's face mottled with red.

"Bacon," said Kemble bravely, straightening his back. "In my case, it was bacon."

At that moment, a great marmalade cat, dozing by the fire, stretched himself, took a tottering step, and hopped onto the empty chair at the head of the table.

"Stay back!" Muriel must have entered the room while everyone's attention was occupied. She flung herself between Deighton and the table, arms outspread. "Don't touch him!"

"Touch who?" Deighton's jaw slackened in shock. "The woman's raving." He looked to Kit for confirmation. Kit looked at Muriel, who'd scooped the cat into her arms.

"I'm not raving," she said, composed but with fire in her eyes. "I won't stand by and let you misuse a defenseless animal."

Deighton's jaw firmed and his brows lowered. "That's a sack of fleas you're holding. I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole."

"Better than beating it with a ten-foot pole," Kit remarked. "Delighted to hear you've put your school days behind you."

"What do you mean?" Deighton rounded on him. "My school days?"

"The years you spent learning Greek and Latin, and torturing cats."

"Griffith." Deighton's face was now purple. "We do not talk about school. It's not done."

"Sir Reggie did it." At Muriel's low assertion, Deighton rounded again, looming over her. His whole body quivered with rage.

She cuddled the cat protectively, then put up her chin. "It's true, then. You are a torturer of cats."

Deighton twitched, as though in denial. But no denial followed.

Nothing followed.

"The ferry leaves in a quarter hour," he said at last, and turned on his heel.

Kit spent the thirty-minute crossing to St. Mawes wedged between his bicycle and the side of the steamer. Most of the people on deck were locals, and therefore more interested in talking with the seven cyclists about their mounts than in admiring the sights.

"Which kind is faster?" chirped a gap-toothed boy of six or seven. He'd just been wrestled away from the life buoys hooked on the side of the pilothouse and was now attempting to climb Deighton's ordinary.

"The kind with the big front wheel," said Deighton, yanking the boy off the bike by the collar of his coat.

"The kind with the diamond frame," said Kit, indicating his own machine with a deliberately cocksure smile.

Deighton held the boy aloft, ignoring his windmilling arms and legs, and fixed Kit with a glare of feverish intensity. He hadn't calmed since leaving the taproom.

Needling him would be immature, and inexpedient.

Kit almost listened to his better angels and kept his mouth shut.

"The champion racer Teddy Hale set the hundred-mile road record on a high wheeler like that one." He pointed at Deighton's ordinary. "And then, a year later, he broke that record on a safety like this one." He flicked his bell so it emitted a short, cheery note of introduction.

"Hale's high wheeler wasn't like mine." Deighton gesticulated furiously with the boy, who shrieked with delight. "He rode an inferior model. My high wheeler—the New Rapid—is the best bicycle on the market."

Kit snorted. "Not by a long chalk."

As the ferry churned out of the shipyard into open water, he and Deighton went tit for tat with bicycle specifications, listing increasingly technical details in increasingly loud voices to an increasingly bored crowd. One woman seemed riveted even as they compared crank spindles and seat lugs, but it turned out she was trying to retrieve her son. Only Butterworth and Kemble kept hanging on every word, and—perhaps Kit was delusional—particularly on his words, the ones pertaining to the Rover's design and fittings. Muriel was out of earshot, closer to the prow, flanked by Prescott and Egg, all three of them gazing across the estuary toward the Roseland Peninsula.

Her shouts finally released him from the verbal duel. "Shark! Oh, how wonderful. Look!"

He and Deighton fell silent. Heads snapped around.

"It's a giant!" Prescott's exclamation floated back as well.

"By gad, look at that maw!" enthused Egg, his screeches even louder. "I never! What a blooming monster!"

Passengers jostled into the prow—not so many that Kit felt less penned in, but enough to block Muriel from his line of vision.

"Feed him Jago!"

The gap-toothed boy had been given a sweet and stood pressed into his mother's skirts, docile as a lamb, but this suggestion caused him to leap into the air. The girl who'd made it—his sister—seized him around the waist.

"No!" he howled, and twisted free. He beelined to Deighton for protection, clambering over the New Rapid's tiny back wheel and threading himself between the wheelman's legs.

"You again." Deighton's face registered confusion and shock in equal measure. "Get off."

The boy clung to Deighton's calf. "Jenny's going to feed me to the shark!"

"No, she's not." Deighton gave his leg a shake. "She's a little girl. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice."

"What are little boys made of?" Jenny crouched in front of Deighton's wheel, staring at Jago through the spokes. "Everything that tastes nice to a shark!"

Jago wailed.

"None of that," Deighton scolded him. "You're a man, remember."

"I'm a boy," sobbed Jago. "Sharks think I taste nice."

"Boys grow up to be men," snapped Deighton. "Men don't cry."

"We could feed Mr. Bicycle Man to the shark instead," said Jenny gravely through the spokes. "The shark might like him better."

Jago sniffed and nodded. He tugged Deighton's leg as Jenny tugged the wheel.

"Madam!" Deighton called to their mother, a touch of panic in his voice. "Madam!"

Kit angled his body away, tuning out the sounds of the tussle, which anyway merged with the general clamor on deck and the noise of the engines below. He studied the approaching landmass, houses clustered near the harbor, a verdant hill rising behind, topped by St. Mawes Castle. He'd first seen the castle at the National Gallery, in a painting by Turner. The canvas was washed with late-summer light, the sails of the pilchard boats like sheets of beaten gold, the hulls rosy, and the beach rosy too, flecked with silver fish.

The light today shone strong and clear, and the wind came fitfully from the west.

He imagined Muriel in the ship's prow, saw the scene as though it were a painting—not by Turner. No one could match Turner's sensitivity to landscape, but he peopled his canvases with puny, awkward figures, dismissible poppets, and the painting Kit pictured dwelled on Muriel herself. He styled her like the Lady of Shalott, in a medieval kirtle, hair unbound, but she didn't lie dead-pale in her boat, embowered by flowers of mourning. She stood proud and her dark eyes looked with unswerving brilliancy and directness on the world.

This went deeper than mere imagining. He was painting, albeit inside his head. He began to tingle all over, a combination of his own sudden giddiness and the restless salt breeze. If he did manage to put down real pigment, he'd weave all of his feelings into his brushstrokes. Muriel as the Lady of Shalott would draw the gaze with her beauty, but her eyes would ultimately direct the viewer's away.

Lookwith me, not at me. Her eyes would beam this message. Let me show you what I see.

A shark. Slug spawn. Seaweed. The rainbow's end. The evening star.

He laughed aloud—didn't he eschew romantic delusions? He needed to remember that she saw him, and that she might not see him as he wanted to be seen.

She might not see him as a man.

He sobered at once. The tingling became a sting, and he hunched his shoulders against the wind.

He wasn't a Neanderthal. Or a chappie. He hadn't been a schoolboy, bullied and bullying, taught to dominate his emotions by dominating others—human or animal. He felt glad of it. Most days, he wouldn't wave a wand and make himself his parents' beloved baby son at birth. Most days, he was bloody glad he'd been a Sister, and a sapphist.

Hadbeen.

He wasn't either now.

Did Muriel understand that, really? Perhaps the party had been a mistake. He needed a clean break. An existence that began the day he moved to Cornwall.

His stomach knotted, and when he soothed himself with the thought that it didn't matter what Muriel understood—she sailed out of his life by September—he felt it wrap around itself and pull into a hurting figure eight.

He'd rather the Mutton Wheelers make him sick than his own mind. He turned his attention back to the deck. Both children were gone. Their mother was likewise nowhere in sight.

He raised his brows musingly at Deighton. "I'd have heard the splash if you'd thrown anyone overboard."

Deighton pointed with his very square chin. A nearby parasol, held over a seat at a suspicious angle, began to giggle.

"They're hiding." He smiled an evil smile. "Up for a bit of fun?"

"I should have clarified," said Kit. "I'm not for throwing anyone overboard."

"Forget the brats." Deighton pulled at the brim of his cap. "This is about you and me. Let's race to Mevagissey."

Kit tightened his grip on his Rover.

He could say no, of course. Swallow his pride. Take the ribbing. Seem that much weaker. That much more womanly.

Dash it all. He didn't believe in those correlations, in that way of thinking.

But he was already saying, "Let's."