Page 13 of The Runaway Duchess

“Your ale,” she said to Neal. She pursed her lips at Muriel. “Your Möet.”

Muriel followed Mary’s retreat with her eyes, then looked at the glasses on the table.

“They’re both ale,” she said.

“Yes.” Neal cleared his throat. “So they are. Well then. Cheers.” He lifted his glass. She stared at him for a long moment.

“À votre santé,” she said at last, and clinked her glass against his. He couldn’t help but laugh at the way she screwed up her face as she drank. He’d never seen a pint of ale met with such determination. As she set down the glass, she caught his smile, and suddenly she was laughing too.

“How is it?” he asked.

“The worst Möet I’ve ever had in my life.” She took another sip, fanning smoke with her free hand. The room, he noted with chagrin, was growing smokier, and so warm that more than one miner had stripped to his shirtsleeves. Best to fall back on some safe subject, familiar to them both.

“In your last letter,” he began, but she cut him off, her fanning hand making a sudden chop.

“Please,” she said. “Let’s talk about something we didn’t discuss in our letters. It will be so much more entertaining.”

The bar erupted in laughter, as if the spirit of Crawthevyn Inn had declared its agreement.

He tipped the cool ale down his throat, considering.

“How did you first come by your interest in plants?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Flower shows. Same as any girl.” She traced a finger up and down her glass. Maybe it was too predictable a question, too impersonal. She’d meant she didn’t want to talk about plants. Another question pushed against his teeth.

Why did you agree to meet me? If this were a simple flirtation with a pretty widow, he would ask her exactly that, among other things, his eyes communicating possibilities. What do you most hope to discover on our excursion? But he’d had too many summer flings. This would be different. He would take care preparing the ground. This would last for all seasons.

“I do know.” She looked up, looked straight at him. Her eyes were darker by candlelight. Delphinium blue.

“My friend’s mother kept a glasshouse in the garden when I was very young. It’s one of my first memories, standing inside looking up at trees stuck all over with tiny glowing yellow suns.”

“Lemons.” He smiled.

“Tiny suns.” She shrugged. “It felt like magic. I’m sure that sounds silly.”

“It doesn’t,” he said, and meant it. His father had studied the chemistry—the capture of light in carbon bonds, the production of starches by green cells. He had one way of describing a lemon. But there were other ways.

“Tell me,” he said. “Did you get to taste any of that sunlight? Did this friend’s mother show you other wonders?”

She dropped her eyes. “She died soon after.” A pause as she drew her finger around the rim of her glass.

“And you?” she asked. “How did you first come by your interest in plants?” She made her lips a little bow of smiling interest.

She didn’t want to linger in that glasshouse. Very well, then.

“My father was a professor of botany.” He could talk easily about his father now. For years, his grief and guilt hadn’t permitted it. Digory Traymayne had died of a long illness, but not so long that Neal returned from South America in time.

“A professor of botany,” she repeated, as though it were a foreign phrase.

He had been so much more than a professor of botany—a doctor, a writer, a gentle and loving spirit.

“He was on the faculty at the University of London. We moved from Cornwall so he could take the post.” It had seemed at the time, to him, the death knell of his merry boyhood. A dramatic reduction in gaiety and freedom. Life contracted. No more running along the tops of hedges. No more riding in hay wagons or chasing turkeys through the orchard. And worst of all, no more splashing in the sea, bathing in deep pools accessible only by sheep tracks through the rock and heather.

“As a toddler, I used to sit on Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Plants to reach the breakfast table.” He swallowed more ale. “Perran’s first word was Cruciferae, Nessa’s was Caryophyllaceae, Jory’s was Leguminosae, Jenni’s was Rosacea, mine was Umbelliferae. I’m not serious, of course. But you get the idea.” He shrugged. It was only barely an exaggeration.

“A big family.” She sounded thoughtful, maybe even wistful. “Those are your siblings? Perran, Nessa, Jory, Jenni.”

He nodded. “I’m the youngest. The one who gave our parents a world of trouble.”