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“Convenience,” he echoed, and she cringed.

“Perhaps that sounded glib.”

Suddenly, her front wheel dropped into a crater. The road was all craters. She could only brace herself and judder.

“This way!” Griffith waved as he turned, cutting a diagonal across the heath that swept down toward the sea.

She was gasping when she finally reached him, a stitch in her side, but soon her wheels were rolling on their own, pulled by gravity.

She felt lighter, speeding through the heather, cooled by the fragrant breeze.

Griffith had flung out his arms.

When the slope leveled, he put one hand on the handlebars and twisted toward her, his grin conspiratorial.

“My mother hoped I’d marry a title. Forced me to take classes in deportment. I despised them.” He steered around a boulder, not a moment too soon. “Until I met Emma Sidnall.”

“Of course there was an Emma.” Muriel began to apply her weight to the pedals again, pushing through the goldenrod and eyebright.

He rode closer to her. “It never felt like convenience. More like recompense. All that vigilance, and yet some of us shared a blissful secret, right under everyone’s nose. There are things I miss.”

Her mouth went dry. She wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to ask. Men were motivated by sexual feelings. It made sense that they might want to couple with other men. But from what she understood, women responded to erotic advances with varying degrees of reluctance. The urge to initiate manifested rarely and—to judge by Esmé’s reaction—indicated moral decay, or infirmity. She’d known pairs of women who traveled together, who lived together—for the companionship. Did they also crave each other’s bodies? Did their affectionate caresses culminate in bliss?

If two lovers happened to be women, one of them had to initiate. Did that mean one played the man’s part? Was that why Griffith began to gravitate toward male attire? Or had he assumed a new identity all at once, to escape marriage to a lord?

“What about you?”

She blinked. Griffith had posed a question to her.

“Me?” She pedaled more quickly. “There weren’t any etiquette classes, or Emmas.”

After their marriage, Esmé had taken pains with her elocution, but she didn’t feel like revisiting those humiliating lessons.

“I fed chickens and collected eggs, and scrubbed things, and swept things. I took care of my younger cousins and did the bidding of the older ones. I didn’t have a mother to hope I married anyone, let alone someone with a title. And I didn’t share any blissful secrets, with anyone.” She considered, then offered an amendment. “Well, James. But only in the sense that I knew he had something blissful going on with the son of his father’s stable manager.” She scowled. “Unfortunately, his father suspected. One day William was gone.”

James had been heartbroken.

Griffith seemed to digest this. “They’re aristocrats, I take it?”

“His father’s a baron.”

“And you descend from farmers. How did it happen, then? How did you and Raleigh become such great friends?”

She’d rather not revisit that either, not at present.

“He is a great friend,” she said brightly. “He’s going to repair the fence I knocked down.”

She related the story of her mishap, pitching it in a far more comic register than she’d have thought possible, hours before, when she’d lain dazed on a tussock with a wooden rail on her chest, blinking at the indifferent spray of stars. He didn’t mock her, and he didn’t try to turn the subject back to their intimate histories. He related a series of mishaps, which put her own blundering into welcome perspective. Less welcome: her increased apprehension about the dangers posed to cyclists by geese.

They intersected a path that passed through a grim mining village, just a few granite terraces perched on a cliff, overlooking an engine house—this one still functioning, pumping water from the tin mine. There was a tavern, sooty and dark. They stopped for lunch, and she nodded off so many times over the hard bread and cheese that he eventually slid onto her bench, to act as a buttress.

After lunch, she rode even slower, and they didn’t speak at all as they rounded the peninsula, sharing the exalted feeling that often surged in travelers when they reached Land’s End, the westernmost point of England. The sea, so blue in the distance, boiled white around the columns of rock that rose near the crinkled brown cliffs. Gulls and cormorants wheeled above the high summit of the headland. The bright green turf was dotted with wildflowers. She felt no urge to collect them, even when they dismounted to stretch their legs. Everything seemed perfect in its place.

The sun was low by the time they curved east, following the southern shore, a succession of small headlands and coves, the cliffs rusty pink. When they clattered up to the Treryn Dinas Inn, their destination, its whitewashed façade was glowing in the dusk. Griffith and the man behind the desk talked in circles, until it became apparent that the Mutton Wheelers had paid for their rooms, and Griffith gave his coin instead to the skinny boy who carried her panniers up the stairs. Muriel followed him and found herself in a garret with a floor that sloped nearly as steeply as the ceiling and a bed shoved so close to the wardrobe its doors didn’t open.

Just as well she’d scarcely a spare garment to hang.

When she descended the creaking stair to the vaultlike dining room, she found Griffith at a small table with a tankard before him. The Mutton Wheelers were the only other diners, but they’d finished their meal and risen from their chairs to crowd around Deighton, who sat hunched over a large notebook, writing, or drawing.