Page 36 of The Runaway Duchess

“He’s Cornwall, then.” He spoke slowly. “Is that what you mean? He’s not away or above or beyond. He’s the shore itself, this one, right here.”

“Essentially.” Neal rolled his head on his neck and the rock bit harder. “But materially, he’s more Penzance, where they put his body in the ground.” Neal could feel Curnow’s gaze. Perhaps he’d gone too far. The pause lengthened.

“You’re not going to argue?” Neal said at last. “Tell me about the difference between the body and the soul?”

Curnow laughed and the sound reverberated. “As the Lord as my witness, I don’t argue with Traymaynes. I only pray for them.”

Neal’s lips quirked. “Blue sky,” he said, and pointed.

Curnow was still looking at him. “I always thought your father would prepare a flora,” he said. “He knew every inch of the county.”

“He didn’t have a long enough retirement.” Again, the tightening in his throat. Two years to the day after he’d moved back to Penzance, Digory Traymayne was dead. “The project will take a decade.” Neal would be lucky if it took only a decade. He had to collect material, visit libraries and herbaria, confirm records. Almost every botanist he’d written in the county had written back offering to help. Even so, the compiling and organizing alone would be a massive undertaking, and he’d have to fit it in around his work for Varnham.

“That’s why you’re doing it.” Curnow struck a match. He puffed his pipe, the richly scented smoke welling around them. “For him. Though you don’t believe he’s looking down on you from one of those clouds and smiling.”

Neal lifted his head and stepped out from the alcove, holding his hands palm up. Coolness sprinkled his palms. Light poured through a black-rimmed hole in the clouds directly overhead. Curnow joined him on the path. Did he want an answer?

About why he was preparing the flora.

About whether or not he thought the sun sparkling on the feldspar in the cliffs was a sign of his father’s approval.

Neal stretched his cramped shoulders. Motives were twisty things that grew in shade. He made decisions for a whole tangle of reasons.

“This won’t hold,” said Curnow, surveying the sky.

“I might risk it.” Neal tapped his thumb against his specimen box. Perhaps he would go a bit farther up the path, collect some bluebells to dry for Muriel. But not if Curnow was going to labor and slide back to the village.

“Shall I put you home?” he asked Curnow, politely and in his very best dialect. Curnow rewarded him with a chuckle.

“I can put myself home well enough,” he said. Despite his years, and his size, he walked miles and miles in a given week, collecting plants, birding.

“More’s the pity,” he added, and Neal remembered with a jolt that his wife had died the winter before last. Whatever look passed across his face, Curnow caught it and shook his head, smiling, to banish it.

“Tomorrow to the church,” he said. “With Mrs. Pendrake.”

When Neal reached the patch of flowers, he couldn’t help but step off the path, spread his arms, and try to feel what Muriel felt as she first beheld the magnificence of the harbor, ultramarine water framed by those steep, crenellated cliffs. He stepped right to the very verge, and that was when he let his eyes sweep down and saw, on a little jutting ledge, Muriel’s straw bonnet.

He saw it, and at the same time, he apprehended a way to reach it. Where he stood, the cliff dropped with sheer verticality a hundred feet down to the churning waves. Not even a raven could find purchase. But the ledge was several yards to his right, nearer to the bend in the path, the level elbow that marked the spot where the steep climb to the church began in earnest. The cliff was lower there, stepping down in stages.

The rocks would be wet. He jogged down the path, stood his specimen box against the boulder, folded his coat on top, and walked carefully to the cliff edge across slippery turf. He dropped into a crouch and lowered his legs over the side.

This was why his mother’s hair turned white overnight. It wasn’t South America, per se, that she feared, but the impulse that sent him there. That had always sent him up or down cliffs, trees, even buildings. The gatehouse at Eton. Tom Tower at Oxford.

He’d joked about his mother scaling cliffs. She did have long experience scrambling to difficult-to-access places, sometimes using fixed ropes. She was considered and bold. He was impulsive and too bold. Raving mad.

Risking his life for a bloody bonnet. Probably ruined already by rain.

His knuckles cracked and strained as he descended, gripping the small bulges of rock. His toes sought the cracks in the slate. At any moment, the clouds could burst again, wash him off the face of the cliff. Quickly, then. The muscles in his shoulders burned and seemed to separate from the bones. He reached a portion where the cliff became less perpendicular and he could sidle along a narrow ridge, catching his breath, before he lowered himself again into space, clinging to the corner of a slab, tensing his stomach, pedaling his legs in slow circles until he found his holds. When he came level with the ledge, he braced himself and worked his arm through the knotted loop of ribbon. He kept climbing down, bonnet batting the cliff, until he could rest both feet on a wider brow of rock. It became an even wider shelf, projecting backward under a low arch. A cave, formed as a vein of some softer mineral eroded over the years. He stood beneath the archway, swung the bonnet around on his arm, whooping. His heart was bashing itself against his sternum.

Raving mad. James used to say it of both of them, and they’d whoop together, frozen or half-naked, on whatever improbable promontory.

Gulls mewed faintly. The eeriness of their calls brought to mind all the legends he’d been told as a child, of witches, ghosts, and pixies. They sounded almost human. He whooped again and tested his nerves by looking down. He was perhaps twenty-five feet from the base of the cliff. The water swirled, mesmerizing. A gull shrilled, just as faintly, but this time something about the sustained, hopeless note made him search for the source. Nothing. The wind and rain had chased the birds to their roosts. He looked again, down at the water, and then back at the harbor with its moored fishing boats, at the white cottages. His eye had snagged. There. He squinted. Farther out than the moorings, a small vessel bobbed on the waves. Upside down.

Dear God. He saw them now, two dark heads and beating arms. Fool boys, thinking they could best it, rowing out in dirty weather for a lark.

You were raving mad, until you were a corpse.

How long would it take to climb back to the path, run through the village to the harbor? Too long.