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She swallowed hard, looked down at the cobbles.
When she looked up, Neal was gone.
Chapter Ten
When Neal descended the narrow, crooked stairs, the lamps were still lit and the walls held the night’s chill. The world was hushed. Outside, the birds slept—the nightjars returned to their nests, the skylarks and thrushes not yet risen.
This morning he wouldn’t wait. If Muriel did not appear before he’d finished his tea, he’d bloody well rouse her and not with a breakfast tray.
Let her try to maintain her ruse now that he’d decided to put it to the test.
She was already awake, sitting out in the little tea garden with Mr. Phillips. He hid his surprise, stood for a moment in the back doorway, watching. The golden flowers of the laburnum tree seemed the sole source of light in that dim courtyard. Muriel and Mr. Phillips had chosen the table directly beneath the hanging bunches of blossoms. Their heads were tipped together, hair pale as moth wings.
He would have given a small fortune to know what they said.
Who was she when she wasn’t playing a part? When she refilled an old man’s teacup, listening intently to some tale of travelers past, or when she ducked out of a bakery with a grinning little girl clinging to her hand . . .
He turned away, slipped down the hall, bolted tea, frizzled bacon, and eggs with butter by the window in the sitting room. His eyes felt sandy from a sleepless night. The dreams that had beckoned were all rose-scented softness, delphinium-blue eyes, sighs of pleasure. Asleep, he was defenseless, always on the verge of surrendering to some sweet treachery, so he’d fought off slumber.
Outside, in some farmyard, the roosters began to crow.
He pushed back his chair.
He would not surrender.
—
He reached the top of the hill and looked down to where Muriel still struggled upward, snatching at branches as her thin-soled city shoes slid in the fallen leaves. He’d set a brutal pace, up the woodland’s steepest slope. A footpath wound around the hill—the footpath he’d followed last night to Mrs. Odgers’s—but that gradual ascent was entirely too pleasant for what he had in mind.
Not a ramble. An ordeal.
Muriel would cry for mercy before the sun had time to climb above the trees.
Except . . .
She did not.
As he led her, whistling, along the needlessly tortuous route, she fell farther and farther behind. But whenever he paused, she caught up to him, sweaty and smiling.
Once she disappeared amid thick trees, and at last he scrambled back down the muddy track, expecting to discover her doubled over, vanquished, begging for him to put an end to their march.
She was crouching beside a rotted log, uncovering the base of a dandelion plant so she could inspect the rosette of toothed leaves.
“They’re smooth.” She looked up at him, big-eyed, hopeful. “And spotted.”
“Wrong species,” he said shortly. “This way.”
He was off again, climbing the embankment with long strides. Putting distance between them before he could soften.
She’d stopped to root around in the muck for his mother’s dandelions.
The variety she’d been inspecting wasn’t even close to the one he’d described. She had no eye for leaf margins, or surfaces.
But she’d made an attempt to help him. She’d muddied her hands making it.
Not because she cared. He had to remind himself. Because she knew it would move him, this display of thoughtfulness. She manipulated shamelessly.
Finally—the sun shone directly overhead—he had to rest. His heels were bleeding—damn Hessians—and he felt bedeviled by thirst. He tossed his empty specimen box onto the carpet of bluebells and boosted himself up onto a boulder. There he stood, drinking from his water flask, gazing between the trees toward the headlands, waves of green turf brightly spangled with tormentils.
