Chapter 25

I haven't doomed myself, she thought as she rode along the edge of the moor. This may yet end well. The wind blew hard from the north, heavy with the threat of rain, and the clouds pressed down, gray as the scattered moorstone. Steering a straight course was next to impossible, though hunched on their low-mounts, she and Kit had an easier time than the men inching along ahead, their tall, flimsy bicycles looking ready to spin in circles, like enormous weathervanes.

She wasn't worried about the storm, still miles off, pulling strength from the sea. It had chased them inland, beneath spiraling birds, all the way to Bodmin Moor, the sight of which made her blood sing. On similar heathland, she'd first found comfort and purpose. The desolate, gorgeous, pulse-thumping landscape served as a reminder.

There was hope for life after Kit Griffith.

Over the past four days, she'd tried to reckon with her realization at the cove—that despite her firmest resolve, she was falling in love—and to catch herself mid-plunge. She might as well have tried to reverse gravity. It wasn't just her lust-crazed lobster eyes on stalks. The feeling was that of her whole heart popping out, swollen and tender, extending beyond the protection of her ribs.

The night before last, at the inn in Callington, she'd drifted in and out of sleep, her limbs intertwined with his, the sensation delicious and so satisfying it seemed complete—warm and rounded off. Yesterday, as they pedaled toward Bude, she'd experimented with the idea that this time together was enough. Yes, she was smitten, but that didn't spell disaster—her life spinning out of control, whirling around some incipient lack. She'd carry the fullness of these golden moments with her. By dusk, mental clarity had faded with the light, and as she dismounted at their destination, the gooseflesh was spreading on her arms. When Kit walked past her into the hotel, his sidelong glance knocked the air from her lungs. Knocked the notion of golden moments from her mind. It wasn't enough. The time. The closeness. Her want yawned wide, and it terrified.

Today, she didn't feel that terror, the sense that her heart might leap from her chest altogether and leave a billowing void. She drew strength from the moor's solidity, the granite within the rolling hills. This liaison wasn't everything. Its loss would be bearable. The earth itself gladdened her, as it always had—soil woven with roots, sending up green fuses that met the sun and exploded in life. She could smell summer-warmed rock and dry heather and the wind's wet edge of rain. Renewal, not doom.

This may yet end well.

A swirl of young starlings caught her eye. They streamed above and grew smaller and smaller, disappearing over the moor.

She'd lagged behind Kit, so she accelerated, coming up on his left.

"Do you think we'll make it to Newquay?"

He hollered as a gust tipped him toward her. "I think we might get blown clear to France!"

France. Where James's poetical chemist ate apricots in a rosemary-hedged villa. Those two lovers had been sundered by circumstance and neither resisted, content with a fond farewell.

She hollered back. "I've never been!"

At that instant, the wind tore her hat from her head and sent it whipping toward France without her. Kit vaulted to the ground and was after it, neck craned to track its tumble through the unruly sky. And that was why he caught his foot in the bramble and pitched forward onto his face.

By the time she'd jerked her own bicycle to a stop and run to him, he'd rolled over onto his back. She dropped to her knees in the prickly grass. His cap was gone, and his hair was rumpled, but his eyes were open, and his gaze seemed to strike through to her core.

"Penny," he drawled. He wore a wry smile. They'd been arranged just so before, her kneeling, him sprawled out. On that previous occasion, other names had hovered on his lips.

"Penny with the hat that ended up in Normandy." She flopped over and lay beside him, looking up at the racing clouds through the branches of a stunted hawthorn. "Penny with the penchant for sea lettuce."

"The one and only Penny," he murmured, which shouldn't have made her heart skip. He'd given her that nickname because its reference was singular. "My spine's been dented." He sat up with a groan. "Should have taken this off." He swatted at his knapsack.

"It's so lovely here." She shut her eyes and sank her consciousness into her heels and tailbone, her elbows and the back of her head, flattening more of her body against the ground. When she opened her eyes, she felt simultaneously heavy as the whole world and vanishingly small.

"Do you remember when we met, you said you wake up bewildered, and I said I do too." She watched tiny leaves shake loose from the hawthorn and fly. That hoary old hawthorn had grown over decades into the very shape of the wind, the whole of it bent like a bow, leaf after leaf shooting free.

"I remember," Kit responded after a pause. "It's a feeling of being adrift, in time or space." He cleared his throat. "Or in yourself."

"Do you ever feel the opposite?" She shut her eyes again. "As though you know exactly where you are, and who you are, and everything else turns around that certainty?"

She heard his intake of breath. "Rarely."

"It's a rare feeling. I feel it in places like this." She felt it also in his arms.

New York lacked for heath, and moors, but surely, in the forests of the Hudson River Valley, there'd be some mossy clearing or forgotten orchard where she'd know such peace again—alone, but not lonely.

She opened her eyes. The clouds looked darker. She didn't want to move.

"Penny. About your lecture."

She registered his tone with faint alarm.

"I have something to tell you."

She sat up, into the wind. "What is it?"

"There's no painting of the bladderwrack. I tried, but…" His jaw tensed. "I failed. Still can't draw a midge. Or a kelp."

She drew back. She'd suspected, hadn't she? She'd discounted her intuition, choosing instead to believe a lie.

"You said you'd painted it." Her voice was thin and accusing, and she burrowed her gloved fingers deep into the grass.

He went a shade whiter beneath his tan. "I'd hoped to make it true. I was afraid if you knew, you'd give up on me. I was afraid I'd give up too."

"You are giving up." It was written all over his face. "Why now?"

"We're almost back where we started." He slumped, his bleak expression fit for the gallows, as though the loop they'd been cycling around Cornwall was a noose and their return to St. Ives would cinch it tight around his neck.

It seemed years ago that they'd passed by Land's End, the western- most point on the circumference of their journey, and passed through the Lizard, the southernmost. Now that they'd reached the Devon border in the village of Kingsand, and swung north as far as Bude, and west again, they were closing in on victory—one sort of victory.

"We'll win the bet," she whispered.

"You'll fulfill your side of the bargain." He ran a hand over his face. "It is evident that I cannot fulfill mine."

Resignation wasn't his way. He looked and sounded unfamiliar.

"You still might," she protested, and he gave her a bitter smile that seemed wrong for his mouth.

"I can't even draw you." His eyes moved over her, and she wondered at his inflection. Should it be easier to draw her than a midge, or a plant? Yes, for him, aficionado of the female form.

Dark emotion welled. She'd once offered to let him paint her body, and with every passing day, she found herself offering more of herself, finding more of herself, body and soul, and it was turning her inside out.

The terror returned with the force of all she could lose, borne on a gust of wind that stung her cheeks like a slap.

"I don't give up on you," she said, through numb lips.

He stared, eyes nearly black, and then he looked away.

"Shigeki Takada will take the commission instead, I'm almost certain. He's not a flower painter either, but he's meticulous and harmonizes his tints like no one else. His pictures won't disappoint." He looked back at her, wind plastering his soft hair to his hard cheekbone. "I am sorry."

He was. She could see it. He was sorry, sad and sorry, and after all, his disappointment had to outweigh her own. He was an artist who couldn't make his art. She couldn't imagine anything comparable—banishment to the moon, perhaps, where nothing grew.

She reached for his hand and squeezed.

"You're not angry?"

"I'm not angry," she confirmed.

"Another thing about your lecture, then." His gaze sharpened. "Your friends, the botanists who invited you to New York. You said they haven't written. Have you written to them?"

"I sent a letter before I left for St. Ives."

He nodded. "You explained your plan? Told them that you'll critique Heywood's intervention and the ways botany has been put in service of the powerful more generally?"

Her hand twitched in his. "I asked logistical questions pertaining to my arrival."

He kept looking at her.

"Kit," she said. "Celebration and sea lettuce aside, there remains a very strong possibility my talk will create conflict." She'd thought he understood. "I don't want the Satterlees implicated in my quarrel."

"It's not your quarrel. You are not belaboring a personal grievance. You are taking a stand in accordance with your principles. Do the Satterlees share them?"

He appeared resigned no longer. His eyes were silver fire.

"I believe they do," she said softly. He had understood. He'd understood everything. He'd listened to what she'd told him, and he challenged her now on a point of strategy. He advocated for a collective effort, and it made sense that he would. He'd come of age rabble-rousing with his Sisters, musketeers of the brush and chisel.

All for one, and one for all.

"Then write them," he said.

"I could." She licked her lips. They might support her, if pressed, but at what cost? "Heywood wields enormous influence."

"More reason to band together. The Satterlees are from New York, yes? They must have yet more friends. Heywood's voice is louder than yours, and theirs, but perhaps not louder than a chorus."

She hesitated, hit by a wave of longing. His being was as beautiful as his face. How had she ever thought him vain and capricious? The surface glitter distracted from the substance.

"So you'll write?"

She shook herself. "I will consider it."

A pleased smile drifted across his mouth. "You need comrades." He reached out, caught a loose lock of her windblown hair, and gave it a gentle tug—a comradely tug.

Her huge, unprotected heart lurched.

She managed to smile back. "Such as you?"

He inclined his head. "If you'll have me."

She swallowed hard and locked his gaze. That was just it. She wouldn't have him. She'd have distant affinity, another correspondent, albeit one whose letters didn't go into the pigeonholes of her desk. She'd keep them beneath her pillow, or in the carved box she'd ported around the world, battered container of her few sentimental trinkets.

"Comrades," she croaked, and pumped his hand, which made him laugh and tug her to her feet.

They'd been riding for less than half an hour when thunder burst the iron-gray vault of the sky. Kit felt a corresponding explosion in his head. The ground seemed to shake. Day turned to night, pitch-black and demon-ridden. The wind's moan became a roar, and raindrops hard and sharp as teeth bit his face.

He tried to speak to Muriel, but wind snatched the words away. Wind had unraveled her chignon, and her shining hair fanned, twisted, and fanned again. Her face was pale and undaunted. It told a story: she'd traveled the world and weathered worse.

He didn't signal for them to stop. She had the look of a woman who'd ride through hellfire, and besides, there was nowhere to stop. The moor might have been the middle of the sea, for all the harborage it offered.

His vision flickered. Brilliant blades of lightning carved the clouds.

Muriel's rippling hair flashed red.

In that moment, he couldn't tell if he'd been struck by a bolt, or if she had. The illumination was blinding in its intensity and outlined every detail of her face. He felt seared, and his nerves jumped when the thunder crashed. He realized he was pedaling faster, out of a mad impulse, as though he could throw out his arms and pull the lightning from the sky, pull it away from her. He wanted to protect her with his life.

Hubris.

He twisted and called out, feeling both agitated and absurd. "You weren't struck by the lightning?"

"I don't know." She caught up to him, eyes wild and bright with excitement. "Would my fingers still be this cold?"

"You're laughing." He squinted and confirmed it for himself with a low mutter. "She's laughing."

She bared her small white teeth. "I told you I love storms."

The wind rayed her hair around her head.

The inside of his chest felt molten.

Shewas the storm. For two weeks, she'd been sweeping through him, frenzying his blood, flooding him with desire, leaving great swaths of happiness and whirlpools in his thoughts that went round and round a question he couldn't ask, or even finish.

What if, what if, what if.

But he'd brood about that later.

"Take care when you brake," he advised her. "The road is treacherous." He turned his eyes on it. If they slid over the verge, they'd plunge into the pathless waste where gorse would claw them to a standstill.

The rumble of thunder was constant now. There was more debris in the wind than rain.

"It's like being shaken in a box of rocks!" Muriel's shout sounded muffled.

"What's not to love?" he shouted back. If she laughed in response, the thunder drowned it out. Something pricked his jaw, and something else pricked the corner of his eye.

He didn't think she was laughing, not anymore.

They battled forward.

In the distance, tiny twin flames appeared, burning through the murk. They seemed to hover, and then to lower down from the air.

A trumpet blasted, and blasted again.

His first thought was of the end. The end of the world. A great red dragon whipping his tail, casting the stars to earth, as in William Blake's illustrations for the Book of Revelation. And then he blinked and understood.

Bicycle lamps. The Mutton Wheelers were coasting down a hill, coming toward them.

A dumbfounded laugh escaped his lips.

The storm was apocalyptic indeed if it had prompted Deighton to double back to ensure their safe passage.

He raised his arm. After a long moment, Deighton saw him and did the same. Egg blew the halt, and the wheelmen stopped, dismounted, and turned their machines. No one said a word as Kit and Muriel joined the column. Egg blew another call, and they were off.

The pace was slow uphill. Kit had rain in his eyes, in his mouth, in his ears. When the ground leveled, he tried to call for a halt, but it was like shouting underwater. No one heard. As they began to descend, into a wooded valley, the mud beneath their wheels moved with them. They weren't riding anymore but sliding. The wind kept slapping them with stinging debris. And then a drenching gust hit like a fist. Kemble went over, knocked flat into Butterfield, and Prescott and Egg crashed into them from behind. It was no good braking. Kit swung wide and shot off a ledge, or that was how it felt. All he knew was that his wheels left the ground. His stomach rose up, and then the bicycle came down, hard, and he bounced off the seat into a heap of muddy leaves.

He lay on his stomach, dazed, feeling not pain but a kind of heaviness, only dimly aware of the rain pattering on his back, as though he'd become one with the mud. He was some time tottering to his feet. He dragged the Rover from a bush and staggered with it toward the scene of the crash, the wind shoving at his back. He let the Rover go, let it tip, when he saw the other machines scattered over the earth, Muriel's among them.

Penny!This time it was like shouting in a dream. He was screaming soundless screams. Because he saw her now too, or at least he saw a lock of hair bright against the hard, wet ground and the curled fingers of a gloved hand. The rest of her was obscured by the circle of crouching wheelmen, all staring down with expressions of horror.

His approach had a nightmarish slowness.

Prescott turned a pale face to him. "We've killed her!"

"It's your fault." Kemble met his gaze, eyes wild. "Bringing a lady on a run. You killed her!"

"I'm not killed." It was Muriel's voice, faint but more than faintly annoyed. "Give me some air."

The wheelmen opened the circle, Egg releasing a tiny, relieved sob. Kit realized he was on his knees, and that the rain was sluicing straight down from the sky with the gushing velocity of a cataract. He helped Muriel stand, and they splashed after the wheelmen to the relative shelter of a tree.

Deighton punched the trunk. "This was a bad idea."

"Evidently." Kit raised his brows as Deighton shook out his hand, teeth bared in a grimace. "Also, we should have walked downhill." He turned his gaze to Muriel, watching as she shifted gingerly, testing each bone and joint. She was white to the lips, excepting the streaks of mud on her cheek, but her eyes were clear and focused, and nothing seemed broken.

"No, I mean she was a bad idea." Deighton moved his jaw from side to side. "This farce has gone far enough. She can't continue."

Muriel's brows met. "I'm not staying here."

"It's too dangerous for you to ride on. You were already lagging so far behind, I had to turn the column around for you. Then you fell."

"Everyone fell."

"I did not fall, madam." Deighton's right eyelid was twitching. "You will stay here, with Griffith. I will stop at the next village and have someone send a carriage."

"That's not how this works," interjected Kit. "If she wants to ride on, she rides on."

"You want her to ride on." Deighton widened his stance, edging Egg out of the protection of the tree's canopy. "You put your own interest above a lady's safety."

Kit frowned. "Convenient, is it not? Your concern for her safety furthers your interest."

"Griffith." Kemble was frowning too. "Facts are facts. She has…organs."

"Organs." Egg looked acutely embarrassed, in addition to bruised, scraped, and very, very wet.

"The brain is an organ," Muriel reassured him.

"Women have a limited supply of animal vigor," announced Deighton, glaring vigorously all around him. "When they overuse their brains, it depletes a certain other organ."

"Hair?" guessed Egg.

"Hair isn't an organ," said Prescott.

"Then why does thinking too much make you bald?" asked Egg.

"I refer to the female organ." Deighton went red. "The necessary one, for wives, and mothers."

The wheelmen were all suddenly concentrating on their muddy shoes.

Did Muriel want to be a mother? Kit felt and instantly resented a sharp little jab in his gut.

Her eyes had focused on Deighton.

"A woman using her brain depletes nothing. Except perhaps the egos of mediocre men invested in the idea that they're automatically superior to half of humankind. Research finds that the female brain is no different from the male brain." She drew a breath. "Which I confess, in present company, I doubt."

Butterfield murmured to Deighton out of the side of his mouth. "That was an insult."

Deighton made a belated sputtering noise.

Egg tittered.

Deighton barked at him. "Go wipe off the bikes."

"In the pouring rain?" Egg blinked.

"We're riding to Newquay," said Deighton. "It's not riding to us. We're wasting time."

Kit shook his head. "Riding in this storm is dangerous, period. For once, why don't you use the correct organ?"

Deighton's lip curled. He opened his mouth and roared. But no, it wasn't Deighton roaring. This roar was loud as thunder, and went on and on, longer than any human breath.

Muriel reacted first, running toward the sound, Kit giving chase. The ground sloped steeply, and Muriel skidded to a stop at a precipice, which, Kit realized, was disturbingly close to the spot he'd landed when he'd flown off his bike.

It provided an unobstructed view down into the valley.

Deighton, Kemble, Butterfield, Prescott, and Egg were only a moment behind, and so all seven of them stood and watched as the dark wave swept through it, destroying everything in its path.