Page 54

“One of those dreams where you’re being chased,” she said simply, and with her smile seemed to dispel the last shadow of it.

He bent to retrieve her notebook, which had slid off her lap onto the floor. She wrote in it diligently, what he wasn’t quite sure. Maybe she described the Cornish landscape, or recorded her thoughts for a future volume of her “Recollections.” He resisted the urge to open it, passed it to her. A card slipped from beneath the cover, fell into the narrow space between their bodies. He fished it out.

“Useless,” she sighed, taking it from him. “I wrote out a dozen of them before I realized we wouldn’t have little pencils for the ladies to fill in the names of their partners.” She turned the card over. Instead of numbers and blank lines, this side listed dances. “It’s just as well. The musicians didn’t follow the order anyway. And it was a marvelous ball regardless.” Her voice purred, and she leaned back against the seat, head tipped up, eyes closing again, that full, rosy, tempting mouth slightly curved with satisfaction.

He looked at her.

She was beautiful.

No, she was achingly beautiful.

She was not Muriel Pendrake.

He worked the square of thick white paper out from between the thumb and forefinger of the woman who sat beside him, studied the black script. Muriel Pendrake wrote on the whole a clearer hand, less ornamented, the letters upright and narrow. Even allowing for the more decorative style of calligraphy a woman might adopt for a dance card rather than correspondence, he could not reconcile the Ws, nor, most saliently, the Ps.

The P of that Polka was never the P of Pendrake.

He drew in his breath as the woman listed toward him, her weight settling again on his arm, his shoulder.

She was not Muriel Pendrake.

But perhaps he made too much of the inconsistency. An errant P wasn’t enough to prove a person was someone else entirely.

And yet, the certainty lay against his mind like a knife blade. As soon as his thoughts began to take shape, the certainty cut.

Thinking hurt.

The past days scrolled through his head, rife with vague suspicions he’d been quick to dismiss, so powerful was his ruling misconception. Now, in light of his discovery, the sum of inconsistencies indicted him as a fool. The little blank looks that punctuated her claims to some knowledge she never demonstrated . . . her aversion to dirt, to sun . . . her unwillingness to discuss any of the topics they’d introduced in their letters . . .

His throat felt dry, his eyes hot.

She’d asked immediately for “Recollections of a Plant Huntress.” A manuscript densely informative as to the topography of little-visited Chinese provinces. Christ. Was she a spy? A beautiful player of the Great Game, posing as Muriel Pendrake so she could get her hands on that manuscript, send it to Russia?

Nonsense. If she were a spy, she’d have done a better job at the impersonation, packed her trunk with specimen boxes instead of silk dresses.

Unless . . . ah, another twist of the knife. Unless she packed the silk dresses not to convince, but to distract, to overwhelm his judgment and appeal to his idiot vanity, his proven lust for pretty blond women, knowing he’d make allowances because he’d wish to believe his attraction was mature, intellectual, destined to deepen and endure.

But then . . . it seemed unlikely that Russian intelligence had made a study of his foibles.

You’re not so special that they would have needed to make a study. An unflattering voice in his head pointed out the embarrassing truth. Your self-delusions and attractions are the common sort.

Even so. There had to be another explanation. He couldn’t quite believe that this deception—however disquieting—rose to the level of international intrigue.

Perhaps she was a tart hired by a rival firm.

His brain worked better when he was moving. Walking, riding, swimming. If he had to sit still, he tended to jiggle his foot, tap his fingers. He needed a physical counterpoint for his mental activity. The wonderful thing about choosing a life as a plant hunter, and then finding himself the proprietor of the most successful plant nursery in England, was that, by and large, he avoided sitting still altogether.

That had been his goal when he went down from Oxford. An existence in which chairs played only a supporting role. A bad pun, but a sound principle. These days, he could dictate his business correspondence, delegate sedentary tasks, sit when and for how long he chose.

At the moment, fool that he was, he sat trapped, motionless, supporting the weight of this slumbering woman. Her soft, even breathing taunted him. His muscles were tense, but he didn’t twitch. His own breathing made no sound.

Despite everything, he couldn’t allow himself sudden movement. Something kept him frozen. He didn’t want to disturb her.

A tart. He tested the idea. A tart sent to glean information. Every year, the Varnham Plant Catalogue came out advertising new cultivars, and orders poured in. Certificates and medals from the Royal Horticultural Society and the Royal Botanic Society followed. This spring, his best gardeners had been breeding a hardy winter-flowering begonia.

If Edevane & Fernsby discovered which dwarf Andean species Varnham’s gardeners had crossed before the information was made public, they could experiment with their own winter-flowering begonia, try to get it to market first, claiming the credit and capturing the sales.

Muriel Pendrake—the real Muriel Pendrake—might have told old Edevane that Neal had tried to poach her for Varnham. That might have raised his ire, allowed him to justify to himself an unscrupulous plan.