Page 13 of A Shore Thing

I can’t believe you’d do such a thing. I can’t believe you’d betray us all.

The ice in Lucy’s voice traveled through his veins until it reached his heart.

He’d intended to stay in London until Twelfth Night. He could hardly remember the excuses he’d given his parents. The next morning, he was on the train out of the city.

Motion caught his eye. Two men were hailing him from the edge of the cliff, waving from behind their easels. Johannes Bernhard and Shigeki Takada.

Last summer, they’d drunk barrels of ale in each other’s company and covered miles of canvas with paint. This summer, Kit was keeping his distance.

He waved back, but he was already rolling his bicycle in the opposite direction, hopping onto the saddle.

After that shattering confrontation with Lucy, he’d found himself unable to sustain focus on large pictures. He’d spent the late winter and spring dabbling, producing but a few small color sketches.

Until the fifteenth of May. That was when he’d finally written Lucy a letter, formally withdrawing from the Sisterhood.

I can no longer be your Sister, he’d written. But I hope to remain your friend.

He hadn’t managed so much as a scribble since. For him, art was over.

He pedaled for home, where he could hide from all this goddamn painterly light.

—

Once home, he spent the remainder of the afternoon taking apart his best high wheeler—a New Rapid, the same model as Deighton’s—and putting it back together, assuring himself that his mechanical steed was in peak condition. Reassembly complete, he considered decoration. For a joust, destriers wore rich caparisons embroidered with heraldic symbols. He could paint gold bezants on the black steel, to signal that he rode for Cornwall.

His fingers trembled, then closed into a fist. No, he wouldn’t—couldn’t—paint gold bezants, or anything at all.

His nails were cutting half-moons into his palms when a decisive knock made the door jump in its frame.

Muriel Pendrake’s face appeared before him. He could feel the ghost of her kiss, butterfly soft. Her lips had opened beneath his. In that moment, she’d wanted more.

With a good rake, seduction had a tonic effect.

A low dose wasn’t always sufficient.

He hoped she’d decided to follow the doctor’s orders. That she’d come to find him. That she’d come for more.

He wiped at the grease on his hands with a rag.

The door jumped again.

His heart jumped too.

Florence, he’d say. I’ve been expecting you.

“Holroyd?” Another knock. “Blast. Sorry. Bungled it. Griffith, I mean. Griff, it’s me.”

The unmistakable voice sent Kit rocketing around his worktable. He flung open the door and stared, disbelieving, at the one old friend in the world he could greet without fear.

5

“Thomas Everett Ponsonby!” He launched forward to clap Ponsonby hard on the back. Ponsonby wrapped him in a bear hug, then dragged him out of the doorway. They wrestled for a giddy moment, both hooting like schoolboys. Ponsonby was several years younger—Kit had already gained admission into the Upper School of Painting when Ponsonby’d entered the Royal Academy as a probationer—and their friendship remained incorrigibly laddish.

“I say.” Ponsonby stepped away, panting and laughing. “Quite the formidable tower you’ve got yourself.”

“It’s an engine house.” Kit grinned up at the tall, narrow building. “Part of a tin mine originally.”

He’d bought the granite shell for next to nothing, then drained down his trust fund to hire the carpenters and masons who’d installed floors and pierced the walls with windows.