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A hundred subtle emotions were marching across his eyes.
She wondered if hers looked similar.
He glanced at his sketchbook. “I’ll just observe the seaweed, if that’s all right.”
They adjusted themselves, looking down into the water, no longer touching, the sea air moving between them. Muriel emptied her mind of the past and the future, and she watched the underwater plants sway in currents invisible to the eye.
25
I haven’t doomed myself, she thought as she rode along the edge of the moor. This may yet end well. The wind blew hard from the north, heavy with the threat of rain, and the clouds pressed down, gray as the scattered moorstone. Steering a straight course was next to impossible, though hunched on their low-mounts, she and Kit had an easier time than the men inching along ahead, their tall, flimsy bicycles looking ready to spin in circles, like enormous weathervanes.
She wasn’t worried about the storm, still miles off, pulling strength from the sea. It had chased them inland, beneath spiraling birds, all the way to Bodmin Moor, the sight of which made her blood sing. On similar heathland, she’d first found comfort and purpose. The desolate, gorgeous, pulse-thumping landscape served as a reminder.
There was hope for life after Kit Griffith.
Over the past four days, she’d tried to reckon with her realization at the cove—that despite her firmest resolve, she was falling in love—and to catch herself mid-plunge. She might as well have tried to reverse gravity. It wasn’t just her lust-crazed lobster eyes on stalks. The feeling was that of her whole heart popping out, swollen and tender, extending beyond the protection of her ribs.
The night before last, at the inn in Callington, she’d drifted in and out of sleep, her limbs intertwined with his, the sensation delicious and so satisfying it seemed complete—warm and rounded off. Yesterday, as they pedaled toward Bude, she’d experimented with the idea that this time together was enough. Yes, she was smitten, but that didn’t spell disaster—her life spinning out of control, whirling around some incipient lack. She’d carry the fullness of these golden moments with her. By dusk, mental clarity had faded with the light, and as she dismounted at their destination, the gooseflesh was spreading on her arms. When Kit walked past her into the hotel, his sidelong glance knocked the air from her lungs. Knocked the notion of golden moments from her mind. It wasn’t enough. The time. The closeness. Her want yawned wide, and it terrified.
Today, she didn’t feel that terror, the sense that her heart might leap from her chest altogether and leave a billowing void. She drew strength from the moor’s solidity, the granite within the rolling hills. This liaison wasn’t everything. Its loss would be bearable. The earth itself gladdened her, as it always had—soil woven with roots, sending up green fuses that met the sun and exploded in life. She could smell summer-warmed rock and dry heather and the wind’s wet edge of rain. Renewal, not doom.
This may yet end well.
A swirl of young starlings caught her eye. They streamed above and grew smaller and smaller, disappearing over the moor.
She’d lagged behind Kit, so she accelerated, coming up on his left.
“Do you think we’ll make it to Newquay?”
He hollered as a gust tipped him toward her. “I think we might get blown clear to France!”
France. Where James’s poetical chemist ate apricots in a rosemary-hedged villa. Those two lovers had been sundered by circumstance and neither resisted, content with a fond farewell.
She hollered back. “I’ve never been!”
At that instant, the wind tore her hat from her head and sent it whipping toward France without her. Kit vaulted to the ground and was after it, neck craned to track its tumble through the unruly sky. And that was why he caught his foot in the bramble and pitched forward onto his face.
By the time she’d jerked her own bicycle to a stop and run to him, he’d rolled over onto his back. She dropped to her knees in the prickly grass. His cap was gone, and his hair was rumpled, but his eyes were open, and his gaze seemed to strike through to her core.
“Penny,” he drawled. He wore a wry smile. They’d been arranged just so before, her kneeling, him sprawled out. On that previous occasion, other names had hovered on his lips.
“Penny with the hat that ended up in Normandy.” She flopped over and lay beside him, looking up at the racing clouds through the branches of a stunted hawthorn. “Penny with the penchant for sea lettuce.”
“The one and only Penny,” he murmured, which shouldn’t have made her heart skip. He’d given her that nickname because its reference was singular. “My spine’s been dented.” He sat up with a groan. “Should have taken this off.” He swatted at his knapsack.
“It’s so lovely here.” She shut her eyes and sank her consciousness into her heels and tailbone, her elbows and the back of her head, flattening more of her body against the ground. When she opened her eyes, she felt simultaneously heavy as the whole world and vanishingly small.
“Do you remember when we met, you said you wake up bewildered, and I said I do too.” She watched tiny leaves shake loose from the hawthorn and fly. That hoary old hawthorn had grown over decades into the very shape of the wind, the whole of it bent like a bow, leaf after leaf shooting free.
“I remember,” Kit responded after a pause. “It’s a feeling of being adrift, in time or space.” He cleared his throat. “Or in yourself.”
“Do you ever feel the opposite?” She shut her eyes again. “As though you know exactly where you are, and who you are, and everything else turns around that certainty?”
She heard his intake of breath. “Rarely.”
“It’s a rare feeling. I feel it in places like this.” She felt it also in his arms.
New York lacked for heath, and moors, but surely, in the forests of the Hudson River Valley, there’d be some mossy clearing or forgotten orchard where she’d know such peace again—alone, but not lonely.
