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Given that he was botanizing the ingredients for a hellbroth, it might not matter that she’d developed witch locks and a stoop.

He laughed. “There’s plenty of bloody cranesbill as well, and navelwort. But let’s leave it all be for now. I was actually hoping to find something else.”

She filled her lungs as he approached, easing the stitch, until the pain sharpened and burst. She straightened. Thank God. This regimen of stuffing oneself with potatoes and marching felt like murder. For her, anyway. Nothing seemed to strain Neal physically. Walking, running, brawling with birds, jumping walls. He had an unusually lithe tread. Most men, however graceful in the ballroom, kept their hips stiff when they walked. Neal’s body moved sinuously as he took rolling, irregular steps. For him, the ground wasn’t something to stomp. It was something to study and cultivate. He took care as he placed his feet.

“At first, I thought you might be paying your respects.” She didn’t clamber over the stile but stopped when she reached the low stone wall. Farther down its length, the stones had loosened and lay in a tumble, so that the churchyard merged with the wild hillside. The funereal order of the grand cemeteries she’d visited made death seem so formal and tiring. Here, life and death observed no discernible boundary. All was natural, and somehow less fearsome. She had to acknowledge the strange appeal.

“There are Traymaynes aplenty in this ground.” The wall reached as high as Neal’s upper thigh and he gave it a critical look as he leaned against it, testing it with his weight. “I always greet my grandparents.”

“The churchyard—it’s so peaceful,” she said. He heard the appreciation in her voice and smiled.

“As good a place for eternal rest as any. The church itself is in a sore state. See those?” He pointed at shadowy depressions in the dimming heath.

“Those are slates,” he said. “Blown from the roof.”

Slates didn’t interest her. She looked instead at his extended hand. A blade of grass stuck to his knuckle and dirt caked his nails. He lowered the hand, brushed it absently against his trousers. She swallowed.

If the fact that she’d fled the Duke of Cranbrook didn’t prove she’d gone mad, her reactions to this unwashed gardener removed all doubt. She admired pretty men in suits, with gloves and top hats. Dirty nails, thick wrists, muscled forearms, that wide, hot, salty neck—her pulse wouldn’t race if she were in her right mind. Elizabeth, at least, had gotten him scrubbed for tea.

“No one has been buried in the churchyard for years. Services, weddings, funerals—everything has moved to St. Symphorian down in the valley. I come up here for the dandelions.”

Did he? That was a bit of luck. “Look no further.”

She bent, broke off a stem from the plant at the base of the wall, flourished it. “Voilà!”

Triumph was sweet. Muriel Pendrake herself couldn’t have acted with more swift decision. She grinned. As it turned out, she quite excelled as a plant huntress, so long as dandelions were the quarry.

She did wish the stem wouldn’t ooze that milky sap onto her fingers.

He glanced at the dandelion in her hand, then leaned over the wall, studying the plant, its cluster of fuzzy yellow heads. “Pick me a leaf?”

She complied, removing the leaf neatly, a scientific cut through the base of the leaf with her fingernail. She passed it to him, arranging her face into an impassive yet intellectual expression.

“See the rough hairs?” he asked, stroking up the leaf with his thumb. She moved closer, stretching her neck.

“The one I want has glabrous leaves, flecked with purple.”

Alas, as enjoyable as it was to play scientist, to be taken seriously, dandelion leaves interested her less than slates.

She studied the lids of his downcast eyes instead. No need to plead insanity when it came to those eyelashes. They were thick as wings. The lashes swung up. His gaze focused.

“Hmm,” she said, pulling back slightly. “Yes, I see.”

She stroked the tip of her nose with the dandelion head, before she realized that the gesture didn’t suit her. She wasn’t a girl on a stroll through Hampstead. She was a woman of science.

Stuff it all.

The tiny, fuzzy petals tickled like feathers and were about as fragrant. She tried to keep her voice impassive.

“So,” she said. “This dandelion won’t do?”

It was vexing, to surrender her triumph, and also her illusions about dandelions. Wasn’t their homely charm based on their lack of variety? They popped up everywhere, and they were all the same.

Oh well. Not the rudest of her various awakenings.

She moved her fingers down the stem and lifted the dandelion higher so its head nodded agreement.

“I found a new species.” Neal grinned, flashing his white teeth. Another objectively attractive feature. She was only half-mad, perhaps. Except, she found his strong, unshaven jaw equally attractive, with its wide angle balancing his cheekbones and the dramatic hollows of his cheeks. Even the bump on his large nose. She liked the crude firmness of his face. His lips, too, were firm—not pillowy like George’s—but precisely cut, the bottom lip almost squared off. She watched his lips as he spoke.