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She shrugged. “It’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Mrs. Gatty’s very popular book, British Sea-Weeds, in which she describes seaweed collecting as a charming pursuit and recommends it to women as an opportunity for light exercise and moral reflection.”
“Not to mention debauchery on seaside rocks.”
“She doesn’t,” said Muriel dryly. “She was extremely respectable. Hence Heywood’s approval.”
“Right.” Griffith was thinking. “Why don’t you give your original lecture anyway?”
She shook her head. “The new lecture has already been advertised. I need to engage with the topic. After I got the letter, I paced a hole in James’s carpet wondering how. I decided to lecture against the female love of botany. Women can do more than notice and admire. We can make inquiries and conduct experiments. We can challenge received ideas. We’re not only hobbyists. We can study, and work, and manage our own careers. I wrote it all out, and I included the story of the lecture itself, how Professor Heywood picked seaweed as my topic based on a biased assumption—which incidentally proved he was rot as a scientist and should probably get the sack.”
Griffith seemed to be hiding a smile.
She coughed. “It was a bit zealous.”
The smile emerged. “Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.”
“Blazes.” She had to laugh. “You’re back to sheep.”
He lifted a brow. “It was the relevant proverb.”
“I burned that lecture.” She put her palms on the rock. Its surface was very smooth and very warm. “I burned it after I saw your watercolor.”
“Did you?” His expression became inscrutable.
“The way you painted the columbine. I can’t describe the artistry. The effect, though. I can describe that.” She searched for the words. “Your watercolor reminded me that nature overflows the mind. That you have to feel to know. Artists don’t lose sight of that. Scientists do.”
“Anyone can lose sight of anything,” he said, but he was staring like he’d never lose sight of her again.
Heat crept up her cheeks.
“It occurred to me I was making a mistake in speaking against the female love of botany. Not only because I don’t want to get hanged by an audience expecting ardent descriptions of coralline. Because it’s tantamount to accepting Heywood’s terms, and the division between amateurs and professionals. There’s a connection to be made between the refusal to take women seriously and the exclusion of native experts, the disparagement of different ways of knowing and the theft of resources. I’m going to address that, and the need to transform how and why we do botany altogether. But I’ll get there via celebration.”
She rose to kneeling, leaning out over the pool. Beneath the surface, plants formed a fairy-tale forest in miniature, pale pink and emerald, with fuzzy bursts of crimson.
“With your paintings in the lecture hall, the audience will feel like they’re in a rock pool.”
She dipped her finger in the water, drawing a silver circle above the Plocamium cartilagineum, then reached further to brush the feathery tips of its red branches.
She withdrew and saw that Griffith’s face had darkened, his eyes more storm cloud than sky. Her gaze fell to his sketchbook.
She hesitated. “Has it come back?”
“Come back?” He echoed her blankly.
“The headaches and numbness. You painted the bladderwrack, but perhaps you’re suffering a recurrence, as with malaria.”
He gave a slow shake of his head. “It’s not a recurrence.”
“Good.” She bit her lip. His face didn’t communicate good. He looked away from her then, out to sea. She tried to think of something else to say, but she’d been talking herself blue, and so she let the silence stretch.
Her heart beat in her ears—ten loud beats—before he spoke.
“I told you I had two real families in London.”
She nodded, but of course he couldn’t see her, so she said, “The ladies of the Hesperus Club. And your Sisters in art.”
“My Sisters in art,” he repeated. “The Pre-Raphaelites formed their Brotherhood. We formed a Sisterhood, while we were students at the Royal Academy Schools. Four of us. Musketeers of the brush and chisel. Three painters and a sculptor. I was the rabble-rouser. I spent nearly as much time perfecting our manifesto as I did painting.” He paused. “I broke with them officially in May. It broke my relationship to painting. It broke something inside me.”
“I see.” She did, and she didn’t. She bit her lip, puzzling it out. “Was there some disagreement about artistic principles?”
