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“This will open up soon,” he said. “Any moment now.”

Mrs. Pendrake remained silent. Her shoulders slid up around her ears. He felt the muscles in his forehead tightening.

“These aren’t your springy Midlands hedgerows.” He tried to draw her attention to the window. “They’re solid, filled with stone. Proof perfect that our driver has never, in his long career, made the slightest miscalculation.”

Nicely done, Traymayne. He suppressed a wince. Not the most assuring line of reasoning. Her grimace confirmed it.

“Are the crashes always fatal?” The question emerged like an accusation.

“When they do happen . . .” He abandoned the sentence and began again. “Our driver hasn’t ever crashed and won’t ever crash. That was my point. There now, look.”

The hedges fell away from the road and they were bowling along the crest of a hill, the land undulating into the distance, green fields striped by the flowering hedges. The setting sun sent ruddy light slanting through the clouds. The lane unspooled smoothly before them.

She slumped forward, her whole body relaxing. He, too, relaxed, scrubbing a hand through his hair. There was something communicable about anxiety. His awareness of her agitation had coiled him tight as a spring. He made a mental note to ask Perran if he knew the Greek for that phenomenon.

She heaved a breath and cast her eyes about.

“Much better,” she said, and turned to look out the window. “Are those sheep?”

He tilted his head, peering over her shoulder. “Cows.”

“Hmm. On the small side, then.” She pressed closer to the glass. He refrained from comment. The creatures were far away, pale dots on the pastures. But, well, they were very cowlike all the same. British Whites and Jerseys. A zoologist she was not.

“And which way is the sea?”

“That way.” He had to reach over her to point. As he did so, he glanced down at her hair, blond, elaborately coiled and curled. The locks that had tumbled down were pin straight. His mother had always claimed there was an inverse relationship between the outside and inside of a woman’s head. The more overdeveloped the hairstyle, the more underdeveloped the cognitive powers.

“We’re not heading toward Fowey?” She remained turned toward the window and spoke with studied casualness. Yet he saw her shoulders tense.

“No,” he replied slowly. “We’re heading north. Fowey is south. Why? Do you have some reason to go there?”

“No!” She turned abruptly and pressed back into her seat. Her gloved fingers skimmed her reddened cheeks, then she folded her hands tightly in her lap. “Just a point of reference. Do you think we’ll get more rain?”

He hesitated. There was something deadly and familiar about that tone of voice, about that exact question. Usually, it presaged prattle. Or else an uninspired dialogue punctuated by increasingly awkward silences. Rarely did it indicate interest in natural conditions and their effects on human, plant, or animal behavior. But perhaps he should take her at her word.

“Rain?” He studied the clouds—billowing, a bit dirtied by their fierce transit over the heights of the moor—and shrugged. “My mother always says the weather in Cornwall is good in a novel, bad for a picnic. It’s a windswept, wild place, or it is in this district, at any rate.”

Mrs. Pendrake spoke with an odd quaver in her voice. “I like novels and picnics.”

To his immense surprise, her lower lip bumped out. A localized swelling. But no, it couldn’t be attributed to a sudden intensification of her symptoms.

Mrs. Pendrake was pouting.

He stared, aghast. She didn’t notice. The tension that had gripped her when she’d mentioned Fowey seemed to have dissipated into girlish sadness, drooping head and all. “It will be a long time, I fear, before I’m reacquainted with either, novel reading or picnicking.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, at a loss. Was he meant to comfort her? Or was her sulk some devilish prank?

He had thought himself ready for this encounter. He had prepared by ruthlessly uprooting any expectation. By opening his mind to every possibility. What if her voice grated? What if he didn’t find her pretty, as Simon had? If there was no physical rapport whatsoever? Secondary issues. The relationship he desired rested on a foundation of intellectual affinity and common interests. Everything else would grow in time.

His parents’ relationship presented the model. Their profound mutual understanding had strengthened each of them in their pursuits while also nourishing their decades-long union. Whereas he had always let impulse and attraction guide him, with disastrous results. He was planning the antithesis of seduction. With Mrs. Pendrake, he would establish a reasonable, affable, equable, equitable connection.

Conversation, of course, formed the cornerstone. They’d already laid it together. Not in person, no, but on paper. When he’d first written to her in April, she’d been five weeks back in London from Hong Kong. Their letters, while growing friendlier over the past two months, less strictly professional, remained focused on botany. She wrote about the talks she was delivering at the Royal Botanic Society and at field clubs, about the botanical prizes she’d presented to schoolchildren in Newcastle upon Tyne. He wrote about the flora of Cornwall he was compiling, a massive undertaking, years from completion. She admitted that she, too, found herself fascinated by the native plants of the British Isles, which she’d long neglected in favor of faraway blooms. They’d shared few personal details, but the omissions told their own story. The omissions, and Hitchens, a trump when it came to digging things up. Dinosaur bones or Society secrets—he had a knack for uncovering both. Mrs. Pendrake, soon to enter the fourth year of her widowhood, remained romantically unattached.

At the end of May, she’d sent him her manuscript to read, “Recollections of a Plant Huntress in China, Mongolia, and the Malay Archipelago,” and he’d reciprocated with an invitation, asking her to accompany him on an expedition across Cornwall, which would kill two birds with one stone. She’d have the opportunity to educate herself on native plants, and he’d gain the help of a masterful collector as he worked on his flora.

There was a third bird in this neat little scenario.

At the end of the expedition, he would propose. If she didn’t accept, he’d present her with the evidence and wait for her to reconsider based on the merits of the case. Either way, they’d be engaged in time to surprise his mother at the midsummer festival and fulfill her dying wish. Perfect.