Page 8

“Brown oak,” she muttered.

“I should have suspected.” The man leaned back against the seat, throwing a boot up on one knee. “Complete ignorance regarding British trees and shrubs? I quote you.”

He sounded delighted and clapped his hand on his knee, which was bouncing. Even sitting, he gave the impression of boundless physical energy. No wonder he had to trot around and around the globe. “Tell me. How did you identify it?”

“Oh. Well.” She craned her neck for another look. Too late. “Anyone could spot a brown oak.”

“No, indeed,” he said. “You have a remarkable eye. Anyone could spot it’s half-dead and likely to topple on the privy, I won’t argue there. But it’s a damn good trick to gauge that the wood within is stained when you can’t see any fruiting bodies of the Fistulina hepatica. I only know it’s brown oak because I’ve been here in August.”

Ah. Brown oak referred to some quality within the tree. Her cheeks burned, a flush spreading beneath the hives. Damned good trick. He’d attributed her idiotic statement to a deeper understanding. Why, how unexpectedly marvelous, this presumption of intelligence. No one had ever thought her intelligent. Pretty, yes. Quick-witted, perhaps. Intelligent? No. Somehow she had never thought to mind. A little burst of retrospective anger was quenched by a sweet rush of gratification. Unearned gratification, a voice whispered, but she silenced it, settling in beside him on the seat.

“I suppose you’ll keep surprising me,” the man said. Her instinct was to respond with a saucy smile. Instead, she returned his look, direct, on the level.

“I suppose I will,” she said.

Chapter Two

Mrs. Pendrake did not appear to be enjoying the ride. She sat rigidly, arm braced against the door. Her eyes were enormous. Blue eyes. The color of the forget-me-nots threading the hedges.

A bump sent them both a few inches up into the air.

Neal rapped the roof with his knuckles, just for show. Cornish drivers were all madmen.

If the devil himself tried to slow them, they’d run him off his feet. Which made for great good fun. He’d always liked a breakneck pace. Well, not always. Not during that lightning storm in Argentina. His horse had spooked as he mounted and dragged him half a mile dangling from the stirrup. The episode had been a bit too painful, and a bit too on the nose. He’d very nearly been sliced to ribbons by the variety of pampas grass he’d been sent to collect. But in every other circumstance, the faster the better. Improved the circulation.

The road curved dramatically, and the driver cracked the whip, accelerating into the turn. Mrs. Pendrake gasped. Her hives looked livid. The color had drained from her face, accentuating the patches of inflammation.

There could be no doubt. Faster was not better in the mind of his future wife. An amusing divergence. He could tease her about it into their dotage. The exception that proved the rule. They were, after all, eerily compatible.

She is you. That was what his friend Simon Hitchens had told him after hearing her lecture on Lilium regale, the regal lily of the Chinese Empire, at the Royal Botanic Society. But prettier, and in petticoats.

The cab tipped, eliciting a cry from Mrs. Pendrake, high-pitched and feminine. She covered her eyes. Had she covered her eyes while boating over the Yeh-Tan rapids? Or clattering down snowy ravines in that donkey cart? Her manuscript never mentioned mortal terror, and her encyclopedic observations of the terrain indicated obsessive, unabating attention. She left so little out a reader could be excused for asking himself if she so much as blinked.

A thunk as the left wheel returned to earth.

“Dear Lord,” she whispered, and he realized she’d begun to pray.

Might she be overly pious, then? The cab swerved again and Mrs. Pendrake yelped in a new register.

“Christ,” she swore, revealing—to his relief—a healthy eclecticism in relationship to ecclesiastical propriety.

“Do something,” she hissed, and he rapped again on the roof. The driver didn’t slack the pace but neither did he increase it.

“We’ll be quite all right.” Neal smiled. To no effect, as her face remained buried in her hands. “There are hardly ever any bang-ups.”

He put the toe of his boot on his tin specimen box, which was rattling against his portfolio on the cabin floor. Doing damage to the loosely packed plants. A shame, but no tremendous loss. He’d walked to the train station on a lark, and the area of the moor he’d explored on the way was already well botanized. Reverend John Jenkins, of St. Neot, maintained excellent records as far west as Kilmar Tor.

He’d wanted to wait for Mrs. Pendrake before venturing into less-trammeled territory.

And now she was here, in the flesh. Expiring with terror.

“Can you smell the lady’s bedstraw?” He inhaled deeply, through his nose and his mouth. The evening air had a honied taste.

She lifted her head, bracing herself again against the door, but made no response. She seemed to be holding her breath.

Perhaps it wasn’t the speed that troubled her. She might suffer from claustrophobia. His brother Perran, newly appointed to the faculty of the medical college at the London Hospital, was co-writing a paper with a French professor on the subject of extreme dread of enclosed spaces. At Christmas, he’d expounded on the topic to Neal as they roved the family home in Penzance looking for the children, whose zealotry in hide-and-seek made it abundantly clear that they were not among the afflicted. Indeed, Perran’s youngest son—the winner—had to be sawed out of a cupboard. Neal did think he’d experienced a touch of claustrophobia himself, during stormy transatlantic voyages, and during afternoon teas in those sealed-up London sitting rooms stuffed with marble bric-a-brac.

They weren’t enclosed per se on this country lane. But the towering hedges leaned so close to the sides of the cab that ferns and foxgloves slapped the windows. Sometimes a stone clattered audibly against the fender. He could see how it wasn’t unlike plunging down the long green gullet of a sea monster.