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Grasshoppers were shrilling.

She wouldn’t go so far as to throw rocks at the windows?

Damn it all. She dropped, kneeling to rake her fingers through the cool grass. Where were the rocks? The lawn was mostly rock, or that’s how it had felt when she kept landing on her arse. Now not a pebble.

She sat, drawing up her legs. She’d wait. Alone, in the dark, on the damp ground. That didn’t seem desperate. Or pathetic.

She waited, sitting, and then she waited curled up on her side, and then she wasn’t waiting but sleeping, which she only discovered when she started awake, cold and stiff in pitch-blackness. Sandy-eyed, she squinted at the engine house, at where she thought it was. Had he come home while she slept? What time was it now? Good Lord, was it already tomorrow?

Had she just made a worse hash of things?

She needed to pack. And sleep in a bed.

Could she do both?

Her knees chirped like crickets as she unbent her legs. She rode, not on the path between farms, but on the path to Tregerthen Farm. That is, she rode directly into a fence.

15

The pale morning sun shone down on Titcombe Hall with appalling brightness. As Kit coasted up the drive, he saw, through slitted eyes, a vast sea of hats and parasols.

So much for his hope that the morning hour would depress attendance. St. Ives’s visitors had turned out in droves. He dismounted and pushed his Rover through the crowd, getting briefly stuck in the narrows between clustered pieces of wicker furniture.

“We arrived six days ago, and I’ve never been so dull in all my life.” This was uttered by a girl whose skirts frothed over the sides of her chair. “The social calendar is sand, more sand, and if you’re lucky, a starfish.”

“What about this lovely party?” protested the girl whose chair was pulled close to hers. “It’s not sandy in the least!”

Kit freed himself and threaded his way to a more sparsely occupied swath of lawn. A violinist was playing in a bower. Nearer the house, festooned tables had been laid with a breakfast buffet. Deighton Senior stood by the main entrance, looking florid and furious, neck bulging from his collar. A blond woman in ice-blue silk stood at his side, surveying the scene with a cold, unblinking gaze.

Kit stopped surveying them and surveyed the scene as well. Unease hollowed his chest. He didn’t see…

There.

A burst of elation filled the sick, empty pit inside him. There. That gleam of penny-colored tresses. He accelerated. But at that moment, the owner of the penny-colored tresses changed course, presenting her profile. Sweetly freckled, short nosed. Utterly unfamiliar.

Elation fled. He parked himself by a hedge, indulging the deluded notion that his green serge jacket would allow him to blend into the shrubbery.

“Godspeed, young man,” said the first person to wander past, a bespectacled grandmotherly woman, kind and twinkly. The next passersby snickered.

Yes, he was most certainly visible.

Did his head look as though it were about to explode?

He wished he hadn’t stayed out drinking with Ponsonby until dawn.

No, he wished he were still drunk.

His nerve endings felt knife-edged.

She wasn’t here. Did she mean to come at all?

“Too low.”

This time it was a portly gentleman in an excessively tall topper. He’d approached with a woman—his wife, to judge by her long-suffering expression.

“Undignified,” he said. “A saddle yea high.” He thwacked the Rover’s leather seat with his cane. “You might as well ride a Newfoundland.”

Kit grunted. “The Newfoundland might disagree.”