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Nothing followed.

“The ferry leaves in a quarter hour,” he said at last, and turned on his heel.

—

Kit spent the thirty-minute crossing to St. Mawes wedged between his bicycle and the side of the steamer. Most of the people on deck were locals, and therefore more interested in talking with the seven cyclists about their mounts than in admiring the sights.

“Which kind is faster?” chirped a gap-toothed boy of six or seven. He’d just been wrestled away from the life buoys hooked on the side of the pilothouse and was now attempting to climb Deighton’s ordinary.

“The kind with the big front wheel,” said Deighton, yanking the boy off the bike by the collar of his coat.

“The kind with the diamond frame,” said Kit, indicating his own machine with a deliberately cocksure smile.

Deighton held the boy aloft, ignoring his windmilling arms and legs, and fixed Kit with a glare of feverish intensity. He hadn’t calmed since leaving the taproom.

Needling him would be immature, and inexpedient.

Kit almost listened to his better angels and kept his mouth shut.

“The champion racer Teddy Hale set the hundred-mile road record on a high wheeler like that one.” He pointed at Deighton’s ordinary. “And then, a year later, he broke that record on a safety like this one.” He flicked his bell so it emitted a short, cheery note of introduction.

“Hale’s high wheeler wasn’t like mine.” Deighton gesticulated furiously with the boy, who shrieked with delight. “He rode an inferior model. My high wheeler—the New Rapid—is the best bicycle on the market.”

Kit snorted. “Not by a long chalk.”

As the ferry churned out of the shipyard into open water, he and Deighton went tit for tat with bicycle specifications, listing increasingly technical details in increasingly loud voices to an increasingly bored crowd. One woman seemed riveted even as they compared crank spindles and seat lugs, but it turned out she was trying to retrieve her son. Only Butterworth and Kemble kept hanging on every word, and—perhaps Kit was delusional—particularly on his words, the ones pertaining to the Rover’s design and fittings. Muriel was out of earshot, closer to the prow, flanked by Prescott and Egg, all three of them gazing across the estuary toward the Roseland Peninsula.

Her shouts finally released him from the verbal duel. “Shark! Oh, how wonderful. Look!”

He and Deighton fell silent. Heads snapped around.

“It’s a giant!” Prescott’s exclamation floated back as well.

“By gad, look at that maw!” enthused Egg, his screeches even louder. “I never! What a blooming monster!”

Passengers jostled into the prow—not so many that Kit felt less penned in, but enough to block Muriel from his line of vision.

“Feed him Jago!”

The gap-toothed boy had been given a sweet and stood pressed into his mother’s skirts, docile as a lamb, but this suggestion caused him to leap into the air. The girl who’d made it—his sister—seized him around the waist.

“No!” he howled, and twisted free. He beelined to Deighton for protection, clambering over the New Rapid’s tiny back wheel and threading himself between the wheelman’s legs.

“You again.” Deighton’s face registered confusion and shock in equal measure. “Get off.”

The boy clung to Deighton’s calf. “Jenny’s going to feed me to the shark!”

“No, she’s not.” Deighton gave his leg a shake. “She’s a little girl. What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice.”

“What are little boys made of?” Jenny crouched in front of Deighton’s wheel, staring at Jago through the spokes. “Everything that tastes nice to a shark!”

Jago wailed.

“None of that,” Deighton scolded him. “You’re a man, remember.”

“I’m a boy,” sobbed Jago. “Sharks think I taste nice.”

“Boys grow up to be men,” snapped Deighton. “Men don’t cry.”