Page 75
They straightened when they saw her. Butterfield, with the mustache. The younger Butterfield, much slighter, and sweet-faced, now that he wasn’t blowing into a bugle. The two whose names she’d forgotten, one bulky and fair, the other lean, with black eyes and a shadow on his jaw.
“Mrs. Pendrake,” said Mr. Deighton, with crisp correctness.
That was all. Not one of them spared her another glance.
“Sorry,” she said to Griffith sometime later, starting awake and kicking his shin under the small table in the process. His toe came down on hers, the pressure light but insistent, trapping her foot.
“I’ll go up to bed,” she said, cheeks heating. She’d almost dipped her face in her bowl of half-eaten beef stew.
The word bed seemed to drift in the candle smoke. She had to say something else.
“I want to get an early start tomorrow,” she added brightly. “So I can walk the shore before we ride.”
“To what end?” His eyes shimmered in the candlelight. “You opted to leave your equipment behind.”
“It was all too heavy.” She shifted her foot, just a little, to better feel his weight bearing down. Her pulse was racing. “I still want to look, in case there’s something extraordinary. I have a collecting bag, and I could always borrow a jar from the kitchen.”
Actually, she doubted the kitchen shelves held glassware. The inn seemed too battered for anything delicate to have survived the centuries. The stew bowl looked like a hollowed cobblestone, and her wine had arrived in a dark gray pewter cup.
“But I’d rather bring you down to the seaweed than the seaweed up to you.” She smiled, fiddling with the heavy, unnecessary knife beside her bowl. “You should see the plants in a natural pool, if possible. You’ll get a fuller sense of them.”
He was silent.
She stopped her fiddling.
“Which will help with your pictures,” she explained. The shifting light in his eyes made her suddenly wary. “You do have a sketchbook?”
At his nod, her tension eased. “I’ve meant to ask about the bladderwrack. You painted it? No trouble?”
He looked down at his hands, lashes black fans against his cheeks. “None.”
He lifted his foot away and she slid hers back, feeling silly and sleepy and strangely bereft.
She stood.
“Don’t do anything gladiatorial,” she advised, glancing at Deighton. Griffith tipped back his head and smiled. Her eyes plummeted from his sharp jaw to the line of his throat and down to his collar, cinched by lilac silk. Was his pulse racing too? Because she couldn’t think how to say good night without embarrassing herself, she turned on her heel.
She had packed a shift, as it turned out. During her last few moments of scantily clad consciousness on the lumpy mattress, she imagined him climbing to her window, then remembered, with disappointment, that the dismal little room lacked windows altogether.
17
When they set out the next morning, the fog had settled thick and wet in the valley, veiling the beaches and the bay. One bugle call became two, then three, then four, the shrill notes slicing at Kit’s ears. He and Muriel were bringing up the rear of the column, and he wanted to fall back further, to separate from the wheelmen and spend another day in relative quiet, and with her alone.
She’d braided her hair, one thick, gleaming plait that hung over her shoulder. Right at that moment, it possessed more vivid color than anything else in existence. He couldn’t stop looking at it as they cycled out of the village onto a narrow road that seemed to tunnel through gauze.
It was a good time to remind himself that she was bound for New York.
Whatever transpired between them, an ocean would soon intervene.
He’d learned to begin liaisons with the end in view, with finality as the main, mutually established fact. No muzzy-headed, naked whispering that projected forever togetherness. He kept the boundaries crystal clear, for everyone’s sake.
The burnished tip of Muriel’s braid seemed to smear his eyes with rich pigments. Cadmium red. Burnt sienna.
He hadn’t done this in months—matched the world to his palette.
He looked away, overwhelmed by a predicament too complex to contemplate in its totality.
Last night, when Muriel had fixed him with that searching, dark gaze and asked about his painting, he’d slammed shut. He’d retreated from their newfound candor. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that his first artistic efforts had yielded nothing but crumpled paper and a painful sense of vertigo.
