Chapter 24

"I wish there were still wolves in England."

Griffith's statement hovered in the dark wood, tempting fate.

"To make the sheep less complacent," he explained, although Muriel hadn't asked. "They've lost the instinct to scatter." He made a scattering motion with his hands.

"To the left," she said, as the path forked. She was following directions she'd received from the innkeeper's wife. Griffith was following her—out of obligation, obviously. He'd brought his sketchbook, but he didn't seem interested in their destination—a cove known for its rock pools—and he didn't seem interested in discussing their evening with the Hesperus Ladies Club either, shrugging at her questions when he could easily have fleshed out various characters and their relationships.

No, he was interested in, precisely, sheep.

He'd griped about their role in the aborted road race for the duration of the walk.

"A solid wall of fleece!" He was still going. "Absolutely immovable. They were less like sheep and more like the foundation stones of the Bank of England."

"A monument," she muttered, unable to hold back. "A memorial to the great road race to Mevagissey that wasn't."

"It was a race." He hopped over a root—hopped higher than necessary. "I was going to win it. Until we hit that blockade of sheep and had to call it off."

"The sheep. Yes, you've mentioned them."

"They'll get mentioned in the next edition of the British Almanac." Griffith scowled at the treetops. "They were a phenomenon. They composed the most numerous, slowest-moving, inconveniently positioned flock of recorded time."

She shook her head, amusement warring with annoyance. And disappointment as well.

She felt far too aware of the fact that they were alone, and that he'd made no move to kiss her. Far too aware of what her disappointment signified—she'd expected him to kiss her.

She cut another glance at him. He was rambling along, his gait athletic and almost hostile in its careless muscularity. The premature conclusion of the race had left him with too much unexpended physical energy. Or was his agitation the result of erotic restlessness?

Last night, after they'd returned to the inn, after he'd undone her with his clever fingers and wicked tongue, he might have lain awake, pent up with dissatisfied desire. He might have dreamed of release with someone else.

He might have dreamed of Lucy.

He met her gaze, briefly.

"I could almost believe Deighton plotted the whole thing," he said, not for the first time, and began to rehash the idea. It involved an implausible relay of telegrams, errand boys, and farmers.

She focused on guiding them out of the wood and across a sloping heath. The path to the cove started behind the barrow on the clifftop and wound steeply down to the granite boulders that backed the beach. She scrambled over them and dropped onto the beach proper. The tide was low, the tiny crystalline waves breaking some twenty yards away. Kelp carpeted the dry sand, sun-bleached and salt-encrusted. The air stank of sulfur.

She headed for the low-water mark, passing pools that glimmered like mirrors between the wide black rocks.

"Here!" she called back to Griffith, climbing onto a rock that delimited the upper boundary of the largest pool, rich with marine life. "I see a dozen species." None particularly rare, or worth collecting, but all as beautiful as jewels in the sun-struck water.

He came up beside her.

She kept her eyes trained on the pool. "They're mesmerizing, aren't they?"

She could feel him looking at her.

"Are you mesmerized?" he asked lightly. "Perhaps it's in the stars—your destiny is algolgalology."

"Algology," she corrected. "And no, I'll have had my fill of algae after this. My destiny is mycology. I can picture myself hunting mushrooms in the Catskills."

"Mushrooms." He sounded dubious. "The seaweed of the forest."

She gave a helpless laugh and a small shake of her head.

"The Irish moss of the mountains," he continued, encouraged. "Although, on second thought, the Irish moss of the mountains is likely…moss. The regular kind. And the sea lettuce of the mountains is lettuce. Does lettuce grow in the mountains?"

"Wild lettuce does." She sighed, feeling weary. He would persist in ridiculousness. "Anything else you want to say?"

There was a little silence.

"Forgive me." He spoke in a frank tone. "I've been acting like an ass."

Her gaze shot up and she met his changeable gray-blue eyes, a mix of storm cloud and sky. Their beauty took her breath away.

Proof enough that she was getting too attached, and that her own inability to modulate her feelings would be her doom.

"But you're not an ass." She cleared her throat and smiled. "I heard you're a Leo."

Now he laughed. "I'm sure you heard a lot of things from Miranda and the rest." He hesitated, a shadow chasing the mirth from his face. "I realized on the ferry that I find the notion somewhat disconcerting."

She drew in her breath, surprised.

The shadow vanished. His look was bright again, and teasing. "Ass isn't a sign of the zodiac, by the way, although it probably should be."

"Probably." She agreed automatically, peering up at him with new eyes. He was slouching with his customary rakish grace, cycling cap perched at an angle on his wind-mussed hair. He wore his self-assurance so easily. It could make you suppose he never needed to be assured.

She remembered the way he'd stood, frozen, on the threshold of the parlor in the Falmouth Hotel. She felt like the ass. All afternoon, he'd filled the air between them with obsessive monologues, and she'd failed to note the nervous undercurrent that sped his excited speech. She'd seen only the workings of an outsized competitive streak, and sexual frustration.

"You are disconcerted," she said slowly. "By the party."

He waved this away. "Not as disconcerted as I was by all those sheep."

"Kit."

"I like it when you say my name." His eyes flashed.

"God almighty," she muttered.

"That too."

She gave his shoulder a soft shove, and he caught her wrist, trapping her hand. His expression darkened.

"I don't like that you heard that other name," he confessed, voice tight. "I know you won't say it, but I don't like that you could even think it. I don't like that it's in your head."

"It's not." She responded instantly. "It is not in my head. I promise you. My head was far too full of Gilbert and Sullivan."

His former name had glanced off her. A different name stuck.

But this wasn't the moment to ask about Lucy.

She pulled away from him and snapped to attention, shoulders back, chin high. "I know the Kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical!"

She gave him a salute, panting and slightly off-balance.

He smirked. It was a strange, sweet kind of smirk, filled with humor and relief and tenderness.

"You are the very model of a modern Major-General." He stepped into her, arm wrapping her waist. "What are my orders?"

The low growl ignited a fuse that ran all the way down her spine.

Burn for me. Burn for me as I do for you.

One couldn't command such a thing.

His sinful lips had parted, and his eyes mirrored the light, like the rock pools, and with a sharp inhalation, she caught herself before she softened and forgot everything but the warmth of his mouth, the intoxicating scent of his skin.

"Seaweed," she murmured, breaking the circle of his arm. "Make your sketches."

"I was hoping for make love to me on this rock." He sighed and sat, legs crossed, sketchbook on his knee. "Seaweed it is."

She sat too, heartbeat slowing, and gazed into the pool. "This is what I wanted you to observe. Living plants. Their shapes and colors, how they move and catch the light." She glanced up and intercepted his stare. "You can stop observing me." She gestured toward the pool.

He grinned. "Your face is at least as riveting as that algae."

"You sound like James." She screwed up her face, but she knew her cheeks had gone pink. "The seaweed is down there."

"What was your original lecture topic? You never told me."

"Oh." For an instant, she gaped, nonplussed, then a warm glow spread in her chest. "Taxonomic practices. It sounds dull, but it's something I thought about a great deal during my last years in China."

"And?" He transferred his sketchbook to the rock and drew up his legs. "What did you think?"

"I won't lecture you." Her laugh was self-conscious.

"Please." His eyes held genuine interest. It melted the last of her reserve.

"Are you familiar with Kew Gardens?"

"I've been there, to the conservatories. And I've strolled around the grounds. They're lovely."

"They are lovely. But Kew is much more than a glorified park. It houses the largest collection of plant species in the world. The directors have been sending botanists to every corner for decades, bringing plants here, taking plants there, changing where plants are grown and at what scale. My husband was one of those botanists. He collected for Kew, and for plant nurseries in London and Truro, and he brought me with him. He died, of a fever, in Hong Kong. I continued."

"That must have been difficult." The gentleness in his voice was like a caress, its warmth seeping inside her, through the cracks in her wall of self-protection. She'd built that wall up over years, and he was bringing it down, in a matter of weeks.

"It wasn't," she said, too curtly. "Esmé's life was his work. He married me because I could help facilitate that work, and by the time he was gone, I knew exactly what to do to carry on his legacy."

Griffith kept looking at her, and she sagged a little and let herself feel comforted by his steady regard.

"I was seventeen when I met him," she said softly. "On the heath, in fact. I was malingering from my cousin's shop, and he'd gone out to botanize. He didn't live in Hampshire. He was visiting a friend. I took him through the cornfield to the beech wood, and to a clearing where I'd found a white wild orchid, and he seemed impressed I'd paid such attention to the landscape, as though it were an accomplishment and not a form of woolgathering. It was beyond gratifying. He was nearly twice my age, worldly and intelligent—an assistant to the superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. He told me he was sailing for India, on a commission from a nursery. We boarded the steamer four days after the wedding. Our marriage was my apprenticeship as a botanist. That's what he wanted—an apprentice who'd stay by his side. And I wanted to learn. Well, I wanted to leave—leave Hampshire—first and foremost. In certain respects, we fulfilled each other."

She took a breath, shifting her gaze from Griffith's handsome face, too intent, and too ruminative, as though he were fitting together the pieces of her life.

"I never considered anything but taking up his commissions, not seriously. He'd trained me so well. I felt he was with me, every time I described a specimen or packed a bulb. I could hear his voice, advising me."

"You still hear him," said Griffith, low. "That was his voice, wasn't it? In the tree. He told you that your fear was a nuisance."

She studied the clouds.

Looks like rain,she could say.

She said instead: "I hear him less now."

How had she let this get so off track? She'd meant to talk about her lecture, not her marriage.

"I hear him less," she said. "And I consider his work—my work—in a different light. Mostly, we shipped ornamental plants to London. Pretty shrubs. We classified them first, according to norms set by Kew. Plants do have names before they're discovered by British botanists—names and local uses. But you need standardized nomenclature if you're trying to order the natural world in its entirety—to understand the whole. I was eager to contribute to that understanding, to compare morphologies and pursue the mysteries of photosynthesis, and hybridize lilacs in every shade of the rainbow. I took it for granted that Kew was the center of the world, the place where discoveries were made and knowledge was stored. Bit by bit, I realized how much local knowledge was being erased, and not to further some greater good. To enrich the empire. Naming and codifying species means better coordination between botanic stations in the colonies. Improving varieties means better yields on farms run by colonial planters, while workers sicken and die. I can't lecture on trade or foreign policy, so I chose taxonomy, as a way into a larger conversation about the consequences of merging a scientific system with an economic system. That was the idea, in a nutshell."

She waited as he mulled it over.

"Not dull," he said, cocking his head, gaze appraising.

"Also, not happening." She crossed her arms.

"Because of the tosser."

"Heywood." She nodded. "He's a professor at Columbia University and directs the lecture series, so he gets the final word."

"He disagreed with your analysis."

"Doubtless he would have. But no, that's not it. He only saw my title. He thought I should discuss something suited to my sex. He didn't explain himself, but his title for my new lecture made it obvious." She frowned. "?‘Gatty's Girls: Celebrating the Female Love of Botany.'?"

Griffith's eyes narrowed. "Why did he pick Gatty?"

She shrugged. "It's the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Mrs. Gatty's very popular book, British Sea-Weeds, in which she describes seaweed collecting as a charming pursuit and recommends it to women as an opportunity for light exercise and moral reflection."

"Not to mention debauchery on seaside rocks."

"She doesn't," said Muriel dryly. "She was extremely respectable. Hence Heywood's approval."

"Right." Griffith was thinking. "Why don't you give your original lecture anyway?"

She shook her head. "The new lecture has already been advertised. I need to engage with the topic. After I got the letter, I paced a hole in James's carpet wondering how. I decided to lecture against the female love of botany. Women can do more than notice and admire. We can make inquiries and conduct experiments. We can challenge received ideas. We're not only hobbyists. We can study, and work, and manage our own careers. I wrote it all out, and I included the story of the lecture itself, how Professor Heywood picked seaweed as my topic based on a biased assumption—which incidentally proved he was rot as a scientist and should probably get the sack."

Griffith seemed to be hiding a smile.

She coughed. "It was a bit zealous."

The smile emerged. "Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb."

"Blazes." She had to laugh. "You're back to sheep."

He lifted a brow. "It was the relevant proverb."

"I burned that lecture." She put her palms on the rock. Its surface was very smooth and very warm. "I burned it after I saw your watercolor."

"Did you?" His expression became inscrutable.

"The way you painted the columbine. I can't describe the artistry. The effect, though. I can describe that." She searched for the words. "Your watercolor reminded me that nature overflows the mind. That you have to feel to know. Artists don't lose sight of that. Scientists do."

"Anyone can lose sight of anything," he said, but he was staring like he'd never lose sight of her again.

Heat crept up her cheeks.

"It occurred to me I was making a mistake in speaking against the female love of botany. Not only because I don't want to get hanged by an audience expecting ardent descriptions of coralline. Because it's tantamount to accepting Heywood's terms, and the division between amateurs and professionals. There's a connection to be made between the refusal to take women seriously and the exclusion of native experts, the disparagement of different ways of knowing and the theft of resources. I'm going to address that, and the need to transform how and why we do botany altogether. But I'll get there via celebration."

She rose to kneeling, leaning out over the pool. Beneath the surface, plants formed a fairy-tale forest in miniature, pale pink and emerald, with fuzzy bursts of crimson.

"With your paintings in the lecture hall, the audience will feel like they're in a rock pool."

She dipped her finger in the water, drawing a silver circle above the Plocamium cartilagineum, then reached further to brush the feathery tips of its red branches.

She withdrew and saw that Griffith's face had darkened, his eyes more storm cloud than sky. Her gaze fell to his sketchbook.

She hesitated. "Has it come back?"

"Come back?" He echoed her blankly.

"The headaches and numbness. You painted the bladderwrack, but perhaps you're suffering a recurrence, as with malaria."

He gave a slow shake of his head. "It's not a recurrence."

"Good." She bit her lip. His face didn't communicate good. He looked away from her then, out to sea. She tried to think of something else to say, but she'd been talking herself blue, and so she let the silence stretch.

Her heart beat in her ears—ten loud beats—before he spoke.

"I told you I had two real families in London."

She nodded, but of course he couldn't see her, so she said, "The ladies of the Hesperus Club. And your Sisters in art."

"My Sisters in art," he repeated. "The Pre-Raphaelites formed their Brotherhood. We formed a Sisterhood, while we were students at the Royal Academy Schools. Four of us. Musketeers of the brush and chisel. Three painters and a sculptor. I was the rabble-rouser. I spent nearly as much time perfecting our manifesto as I did painting." He paused. "I broke with them officially in May. It broke my relationship to painting. It broke something inside me."

"I see." She did, and she didn't. She bit her lip, puzzling it out. "Was there some disagreement about artistic principles?"

"No."

"You left because it didn't make sense for you to remain in a Sisterhood."

"Correct."

"But then why such distress? Surely your Sisters supported your decision."

He gave a strangled laugh and turned back to her, lifting her hand and threading their fingers together. His palm felt as warm as the rock.

"Lucy thinks I'm Judas."

Lucy.

She tightened her grip on his hand. Of course. His headaches and numbness, the blackness that swallowed his vision when he lifted the brush—all symptoms of heartbreak.

"Lucy is your…Sister?"

"We founded the Sisterhood together. No one knows me better."

"Then she can't think you're Judas." It burst out, with the ring of truth. How could Lucy know him and think such a thing?

His eyes clung to hers, vulnerability in their depths, and then his irises turned steely.

"We vowed to take the art world by storm, as women artists. To support each other, as women artists. To champion women in the arts. I betrayed that vow."

"By being who you are?" She sat motionless. "You can still champion women in the arts. You're not a woman artist yourself, but you know what it's like to be a woman artist, and you can lend your support as a man. It might go further, in fact."

"That's the rub." His face set in harsh lines. "Everything I do goes further, because I'm a man. We vowed to fight that reality, not benefit by it."

"But that's too simple." She slid toward him, until their folded legs touched. "Earlier this summer, I had dinner with a Russian naturalist in London. He's writing about the significance of cooperation in the animal kingdom. It's brilliant work, a challenge to Darwin's focus on competition. The whole table debated his ideas in the liveliest fashion. After he left the restaurant, someone told me he'd been jailed in Russia for fomenting revolution with the peasantry. And that he was born a prince."

There was a pause. Griffith's face didn't alter.

"Sometimes people in better circumstances use their resources to fight," she said, pulse racing as she held his gaze. "And everyone benefits in some way from unjustness, even overworked, malnourished factory girls in Whitechapel. They make their tea from plants grown on plantations in India that pushed families off their land. We're all of us bound up in the same web, and evil is done in our names every minute of the day. I never thought about the tea plantations when I was a girl. I never thought, I am a citizen of Britain, and this is a cup of blood from the colonies. There were things I didn't question. I question more now, but I still don't have the answers. You can leave painting to your Sisters and sell safety bicycles, because safety bicycles help emancipate women, but do you know where they get the rubber for the wheels? The Amazon. The rubber tappers are subjected to unthinkable brutalities. I'm not suggesting we do nothing about human suffering. On the contrary, I think we should do everything we can. But that involves participating in the world we're trying to change. You can't participate blamelessly in the world. Blamelessness can't be a precondition for action."

The lines in Griffith's face cut deeper. He looked exhausted.

"I know," he said. "Lucy does too. If I had to guess, I think she feels more abandoned than righteous. I'm acquainted with that sensation, and what it does to you. I felt it when she married, despite my best efforts. It wasn't the same between us. He came first. The duke."

Muriel was quiet. Lucy had married a duke, and Griffith was jealous, and she was becoming well acquainted with that sensation indeed.

"I didn't tell her. I moved to Cornwall, and I didn't tell her why. I let her think it was the light. The goddamn painterly light." He shut his eyes briefly. "I was going to tell her, but she figured it out before I had the chance. She went to my show this winter in London. She didn't know it was mine. Kit Griffith meant nothing to her. But she recognized my style. We were each other's best critics. She made me the painter that I am—that I was." He released Muriel's hand, and spread all ten of his fingers in frustration. "I visited her not long after. She came to the door, and she looked at me like I was…" The fingers balled into fists.

"Kit." Muriel rose to her knees and touched his face, the proud promontories of his cheekbones. She looked at him like he was him—the man who made her heart beat faster and her mind expand. The man who made her whole being ache as though every particle had tensed to keep her from tumbling off some ledge.

Irony registered as a painful twist inside her chest. It took him all but admitting he loved another woman for her to admit the truth.

She was already tumbling.

His eyes swept her face, and he kissed her. His arms slid up her back. Instantly, her body was languid as honey. The air buzzed all around her, and their tongues slid together, slow and sweet. He pulled away first.

She gave him a wobbly smile, breathing hard. "Make love to me on this rock?"

He raised his brows. "What about the seaweed?"

"Good point." She heaved an exaggerated sigh. She'd meant it as a joke, after all. "Never mind, then."

"Damn." He put on a rueful expression. "I've lost my touch as a seducer."

A hundred subtle emotions were marching across his eyes.

She wondered if hers looked similar.

He glanced at his sketchbook. "I'll just observe the seaweed, if that's all right."

They adjusted themselves, looking down into the water, no longer touching, the sea air moving between them. Muriel emptied her mind of the past and the future, and she watched the underwater plants sway in currents invisible to the eye.