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And he was off, bounding the rest of the way down the slope.

Muriel hitched up her skirts and followed. There was no overtaking James on this occasion. He disappeared into the throng as she reached level ground.

She’d bet the beaches were empty. Every holidaymaker in St. Ives seemed to have turned up for the joust, as well as several of the artists—at least she assumed the tweedy men in deerstalker hats were artists. As she squeezed between them, she could smell the turpentine.

A roar erupted.

She went up on her tiptoes, peering between shoulders.

Griffith and Deighton were pedaling a collision course. Each leaned low over the handlebars, reducing his opponent’s target. Deighton’s face was contorted in a snarl. Griffith wore a faint smile.

They whooshed past each other, Griffith swerving at the last minute, Deighton’s lance glancing off his shoulder.

“Are those billiard cues?” James materialized at her elbow.

“Every chalk mark is a point,” explained an excited, half-grown boy. He was no doubt imagining staging his own joust at the earliest convenience.

A man had climbed the fence. “Go, go, go!” he was yelling, pumping his fist in the air. He called down to a younger man in a matching striped jacket. “Deighton’ll chalk him good this time.”

Muriel caught a glimpse of his thin face, dominated by a mustache of surpassing lustrousness. A wheel-shaped badge glinted on his lapel.

She asked James, “Is he in Deighton’s cycling club?”

“That’s Butterfield.” He nodded. “We’re among Mutton Wheelers.”

Muriel noticed two other men in striped jackets, then her eyes strayed back to the pasture. Griffith and Deighton were riding toward each other again.

James touched her elbow. “Shall we move along?”

Before she could answer, a collective gasp rose from the crowd.

“No, no, no!” shouted Butterfield.

She pushed forward and got her foot on the lower slat of the fence, climbing up then leaning out to see between the waving arms.

Griffith and Deighton were moving now in the same direction, Griffith hurtling forward on his bicycle, Deighton propelled backward off his, the tip of Griffith’s billiard cue pressed to his throat.

The thud was swallowed by the cheers and the groans.

“Let me through!” That was James, swinging his leg over the fence. “I’m a doctor!”

7

The crowd swarmed the fence, and Kit leapt to earth, letting his New Rapid wobble on, riderless. Within moments, the bicycle was surrounded by laughing young men—tony trippers from London, excited to muck up their brogues. They lifted it above their heads and paraded around the pasture.

“Well met!” yelled Ponsonby. Kit looked in the direction of the voice, saw a flash of red, his friend’s bright hair bobbing toward him.

Bloody hell but there were a lot of people.

He’d imagined a handful of spectators, and that’s what he’d said to Wilmot Curnow when he’d asked the farmer for use of the pasture.

He hadn’t asked for this.

This was chaos.

Deighton’s fault, obviously. He must have made a circuit of the best hotels, bragging about his tourney in lobbies all around the bay.

Well, he’d hoisted himself upon his own petard.