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“No.”

“You left because it didn’t make sense for you to remain in a Sisterhood.”

“Correct.”

“But then why such distress? Surely your Sisters supported your decision.”

He gave a strangled laugh and turned back to her, lifting her hand and threading their fingers together. His palm felt as warm as the rock.

“Lucy thinks I’m Judas.”

Lucy.

She tightened her grip on his hand. Of course. His headaches and numbness, the blackness that swallowed his vision when he lifted the brush—all symptoms of heartbreak.

“Lucy is your…Sister?”

“We founded the Sisterhood together. No one knows me better.”

“Then she can’t think you’re Judas.” It burst out, with the ring of truth. How could Lucy know him and think such a thing?

His eyes clung to hers, vulnerability in their depths, and then his irises turned steely.

“We vowed to take the art world by storm, as women artists. To support each other, as women artists. To champion women in the arts. I betrayed that vow.”

“By being who you are?” She sat motionless. “You can still champion women in the arts. You’re not a woman artist yourself, but you know what it’s like to be a woman artist, and you can lend your support as a man. It might go further, in fact.”

“That’s the rub.” His face set in harsh lines. “Everything I do goes further, because I’m a man. We vowed to fight that reality, not benefit by it.”

“But that’s too simple.” She slid toward him, until their folded legs touched. “Earlier this summer, I had dinner with a Russian naturalist in London. He’s writing about the significance of cooperation in the animal kingdom. It’s brilliant work, a challenge to Darwin’s focus on competition. The whole table debated his ideas in the liveliest fashion. After he left the restaurant, someone told me he’d been jailed in Russia for fomenting revolution with the peasantry. And that he was born a prince.”

There was a pause. Griffith’s face didn’t alter.

“Sometimes people in better circumstances use their resources to fight,” she said, pulse racing as she held his gaze. “And everyone benefits in some way from unjustness, even overworked, malnourished factory girls in Whitechapel. They make their tea from plants grown on plantations in India that pushed families off their land. We’re all of us bound up in the same web, and evil is done in our names every minute of the day. I never thought about the tea plantations when I was a girl. I never thought, I am a citizen of Britain, and this is a cup of blood from the colonies. There were things I didn’t question. I question more now, but I still don’t have the answers. You can leave painting to your Sisters and sell safety bicycles, because safety bicycles help emancipate women, but do you know where they get the rubber for the wheels? The Amazon. The rubber tappers are subjected to unthinkable brutalities. I’m not suggesting we do nothing about human suffering. On the contrary, I think we should do everything we can. But that involves participating in the world we’re trying to change. You can’t participate blamelessly in the world. Blamelessness can’t be a precondition for action.”

The lines in Griffith’s face cut deeper. He looked exhausted.

“I know,” he said. “Lucy does too. If I had to guess, I think she feels more abandoned than righteous. I’m acquainted with that sensation, and what it does to you. I felt it when she married, despite my best efforts. It wasn’t the same between us. He came first. The duke.”

Muriel was quiet. Lucy had married a duke, and Griffith was jealous, and she was becoming well acquainted with that sensation indeed.

“I didn’t tell her. I moved to Cornwall, and I didn’t tell her why. I let her think it was the light. The goddamn painterly light.” He shut his eyes briefly. “I was going to tell her, but she figured it out before I had the chance. She went to my show this winter in London. She didn’t know it was mine. Kit Griffith meant nothing to her. But she recognized my style. We were each other’s best critics. She made me the painter that I am—that I was.” He released Muriel’s hand, and spread all ten of his fingers in frustration. “I visited her not long after. She came to the door, and she looked at me like I was…” The fingers balled into fists.

“Kit.” Muriel rose to her knees and touched his face, the proud promontories of his cheekbones. She looked at him like he was him—the man who made her heart beat faster and her mind expand. The man who made her whole being ache as though every particle had tensed to keep her from tumbling off some ledge.

Irony registered as a painful twist inside her chest. It took him all but admitting he loved another woman for her to admit the truth.

She was already tumbling.

His eyes swept her face, and he kissed her. His arms slid up her back. Instantly, her body was languid as honey. The air buzzed all around her, and their tongues slid together, slow and sweet. He pulled away first.

She gave him a wobbly smile, breathing hard. “Make love to me on this rock?”

He raised his brows. “What about the seaweed?”

“Good point.” She heaved an exaggerated sigh. She’d meant it as a joke, after all. “Never mind, then.”

“Damn.” He put on a rueful expression. “I’ve lost my touch as a seducer.”