Page 27

“I was raised around more snobs than books,” she said. “A few stuffed birds, yes, but many more stuffed cravats.”

He came up beside her. The wind sent a few loose strands of hair streaming over her shoulder. The ends tickled his cheek like spider silk. She took the inflorescence from his hand and considered it narrowly, the individual flowers drooping, each a blue-purple bell, petals curled back to reveal pale yellow anthers.

“Poor Elizabeth didn’t know the Latin for this plant, so you feared to introduce her to your intellectual sisters.” She mocked him. With the sea as her backdrop, her eyes seemed to draw and concentrate the very essence of blue.

The bluebell in her hand looked washed out in comparison.

“Hyacinthoides non-scripta.” He took it back, twirling the stem between his fingers. “I did introduce her to my sisters. It was all very . . . amiable.”

Muriel snorted. “And your mother? How did that introduction go? You must have dreaded the day.”

He hooked the tickling strands of her hair with his finger and pushed them against the wind. “My mother was in London to see her specimens in the exhibit at the new Natural History Museum. And to see me, of course.”

“Of course.” She was watching him with unnerving attention.

“A tea was arranged.” It had not gone well. And yes, dammit, he had dreaded it.

As the wind gusted, he took a deep breath, filling his lungs. Otto of rose mingled with the briny scent of the sea, and the subtler scents of the wild grasses and sunbaked stones. He usually walked along this cliff alone. Muriel’s presence somehow shifted his perceptions. Intensified the contrasts of the terrain, the clarity of the airy fathoms overhead, the density of the ancient cliff walls, the dizzy fall to the waves that folded blue upon blue upon blue. His senses felt awake. So awake his brain seemed to be lagging behind.

“And?” she prompted.

The blasted tea. She was damned curious about his engagement. He cleared his throat. What he needed was to rest his eyes. Blue sky, blue sea, blue silk, those spellbinding irises. No respite anywhere.

“And,” he said. “And, we drank tea. Discussed the Boat Race.” It was the one event on the Society calendar that his mother couldn’t do without. She made a special trip every year so she could shout at the top of her lungs for Cambridge and proclaim to anyone who even looked in her direction that her daughter went to Girton.

“That was that.” He shook his head. “No one quizzed Elizabeth on the morphology of the Plesiosaurus.”

She laughed. “Nonetheless you sat in judgment, you and your mother, noting the shortage of scientific facts stored in her mind, as Society snobs might note the shortage of crustless sandwiches and good silver.”

“I am not a moralist,” he said, irked by the satisfaction in her voice, then doubly irked that she’d goaded him into protest. God, she could be provoking when she tried.

“I don’t find inherent virtue in science.” Now he sounded like his adolescent self, ready to hold forth in a Traymayne family debate. Her brows were arched at a wicked angle. Blast it.

“If two people want a marriage based on crustless sandwiches, I wish them every joy.” He lifted a shoulder in a lopsided shrug.

“But you want a marriage based on dinosaur bones,” she murmured, in that dry tone she’d used at dinner. Now he was triply irked. Because he found he liked her provocations, her irreverence, and heaven help him, his positive response was not strictly cerebral.

“What if I did?” He grinned. “Is it snobbery to know what’s important to you and what isn’t? My parents agreed on the importance of dinosaur bones, bryophytes, and children, and on the unimportance of most everything else. If they were snobs, they were the same kind of snob and as happy as the day they married thirty years on.”

The corners of her rosy mouth wilted slightly.

“Perhaps they were happy,” she said, turning back to look at the water. The wind molded her dress to her thighs. He glimpsed the rounded contours, the shadowed blue valley between them. “Perhaps they weren’t. Things are seldom what they seem.”

Her head tilted and her features blurred. Suddenly, the scene before him lost its saturation, seemed to gray. It became the picture of loneliness. A woman of ageless sorrow posed on a cliff in the dying day.

He knew only the barest outlines of her married life. The professional triumphs that yielded cultivars sold in every nursery in Britain. The few private details she’d shared about her elopement. The accounts he’d read in horticultural journals about Esmé Pendrake’s death in Hong Kong, a fever that came on as he and Muriel prepared to ship home.

Things are seldom what they seem.

She’d been lied to, he realized. Misled and mistreated. Of course Pendrake hadn’t changed completely. There were no bonified reformed rakes in the fossil record. Those only existed in novels. Romantic fiddle-faddle. Once a scapegrace, always a scapegrace. Pendrake had hurt her, and badly. He could read it in her face, her posture. He should have read it between the lines in her manuscript, in what she didn’t say.

Christ, she must have found his idealization of her marriage hopelessly naive.

We’ll never make a proper cynic of you, Alan had lamented over him on more than one occasion. Too bloody healthy. Get a canker, won’t you, Neal, and let it fester? It had been a while since Alan had made that particular gibe. Not since Neal had come back from Argentina, and James hadn’t.

She shifted to look at him. Her eyelids had tightened and her eyes seemed longer and thinner, their expression worldly, weary, older than her years.

“Your mother is not well, is she?” she asked.