Once in a Blue Moon (3 page)

Somebody ought to warn him about the current, she thought. But she didn't want that somebody to be her. She didn't want to have to look into those piercing dark eyes and see within them the knowledge that she had watched him undress. That she had watched him walk naked into the sea.

He should have been killed in the explosion.

Or at least badly scalded. The blast had gone backward, out the butt end of the boiler, and it had only been sheer, blind, stupid luck that he'd been standing in front. Uncharacteristic luck for a Trelawny, most would say. But although he had been momentarily concussed by the shock of the blast, otherwise he hadn't gotten a blister. He would have emerged from the disaster relatively unscathed if that skinny redheaded wench hadn't come hurtling through the door like shot out of a cannon and trampled him.

The sea tugged at his legs. He pulled against the current, fighting it a moment, then swam free. A sharp pain sizzled in his thigh. He set his teeth and kicked harder.

He had thought the physical exercise would keep at bay the brooding thoughts about his latest failure. But they crowded around him anyway, cawing and flapping their black wings like vultures. He had been so sure he'd had the answer this time, that this time what he'd seen in his head he could build into a reality. He had this idea...

That a carriage could be made to run on steam power. Like a locomotive, only on a regular road, not tracks. A horseless carriage... But it would require an engine that had yet to be invented, lighter and more compact, yet many times more powerful. The solution, he thought, had to lie in the fire tubes. Not the single-pass and twin flues that existed in the steam engines of today, but a multitubular system of many small flues—twenty or more—that would raise the evaporative power of the boiler enormously. In theory so many fire tubes should have enabled him to increase greatly the steam pressure per square inch within the boiler and, by extrapolation, the power of the engine.

In practice the boiler had blown all to bloody hell.

That was why he had conducted the experiment alone, in the isolated and abandoned enginehouse of Wheal Ruthe, instead of at the foundry in Penzance. That way, if something went wrong, he was the only one at risk.

He'd been living on borrowed time anyway. He should have died at Waterloo a year ago along with everyone else. Waterloo... The vultures in his head flapped their wings and shrieked, and suddenly his nostrils were assailed with the rotten-egg stench of exploded gunpowder, the ripe smell of spilled blood, the rancid odor of fear. He ducked his head beneath a wave and kicked hard, gasping at the pain that shot up into his groin, swallowing seawater, and tasting blood. Tasting death. Tasting...

Cold.

The water had suddenly turned bitter cold. He tried to change direction, to turn back toward the shore, but the current had him gripped like a fist, sucking and pulling him farther out to sea. He kicked out with his legs and dug into the water with his arms. The current pulled and sucked and tugged, and he might have been a leaf caught in a whirlpool. It was almost as if the water around him had taken life, and the brute, malevolent power of it shocked him. He fought, bending all of his will and strength against the sea, and the sea was winning. He almost laughed. He had always known, even after surviving so much, that when he finally did die, it would be through his own bloody stupidity.

And then, as if it had only been toying with him all along, the sea gave one last tug and let him go.

He rolled over onto his back, his chest heaving. He floated, feeling with relief the tide carry him back toward the shore. Beneath the ragged gasps of his own harsh breathing and the lap of water around his ears, he heard another sound. He thought at first that it was a gull screeching. A sick gull.

He trod water, bobbing like a cork in the troughs of the waves as he looked toward the beach. The skinny redheaded wench had emerged from behind her rock and was now standing up to her knees in the surf, hands cupped around her mouth, hallooing him.

He ignored her, turning over to float on his back. His leg throbbed. Sometimes the pain became so fierce it was like a white heat behind his eyes. At first the bastard butchers who called themselves barber-surgeons had said that he would die unless the leg came off. When he'd proved them bloody liars, they'd said he would never walk again. He had proved them wrong on that count, too, but even he was forced to admit the leg was still weak. And it hurt. Every single waking moment when he wasn't drugged with alcohol, it hurt as if the teeth of hell were gnawing on his flesh.

The redheaded wench was jumping up and down now, flapping her arms like a demented hen. What in bloody hell did she want? He'd have to go back anyway; he hadn't the strength to challenge the sea again. He imagined that the sight of him emerging naked from the surf would probably send her squealing up the cliff path like a scalded pig. He rolled over onto his side, his arm stroking forward, hand knifing into a wave. He spit salt water from his mouth and grinned.

She didn't run. But when he got within a few feet of her and stood up in the breakers, she jerked, scuttling backward like a little sand crab. She stared wide-eyed at him, her face turning the color of crushed mulberries. By the time he stopped in front of her, her gaze was rigidly focused over his shoulder.

He used his drawling gentleman's voice. "Did you want something, Miss Letty?"

"I..." She faltered, and he saw her throat work as she swallowed. The wind billowed her hair into a cinnamon cloud around her head. The sea rose and fell around them like a breath.

He sloughed the water off his chest with his hands. Her gaze jerked back to him a moment, then swerved away again. The sea sighed.

She was very young. She had a bony face, with a broad forehead and flaring cheekbones that were dusted with freckles. But it was her mouth that dominated her features. A large, full-lipped mouth, that even drawn in tightly as it was now, seemed on the verge of breaking into a smile or a laugh. It was odd, for she looked like no one else he'd ever seen, yet he felt he knew her.

"You have a punch like a Billingsgate stevedore, Miss Letty."

Her lips pressed tighter together, and her chin shot up, although she continued to look away from him. "In spite of your odious behavior, I never intended to strike you," she said, so prim and proper he had to light a laugh. "That, at least, was an accident."

"Indeed? Then I shudder to contemplate what mayhem you could commit should you ever be deliberately provoked."

One corner of her mouth trembled slightly, and for a moment he thought it would break into a smile. He caught himself holding his breath, waiting, and the sea moaned.

"I thought to warn you," she said. She still wouldn't look at him. "The undertow is bad in this cove. Especially after a storm. And the current..."

He took the two steps necessary to bring himself up next to her, and before she could run off, he cupped her chin with his curled fingers and turned her head to face him. She looked up at him, her gaze wide open and startled. Her eyes were a flat pewter gray, hiding nothing. He saw fear and wonder and a budding sexual excitement. He had forgotten—no, he had never known what it was like to be so innocent.

She licked her puffy lower lip. "The, uh... the current is treacherous in this cove."

He stroked the strong bone of her jaw with his thumb. The sea breathed, inhaling... exhaling.... "Are you playing nursemaid again, Miss Letty?"

A tremor ran through her. She jerked away from him with such violence she swayed backward and sat down in the surf with a splash. Her gaze went up the length of him, eyes wide and lips parted as she took in the blatant change in his body.

"Permit me to assist you, Miss Letty." He leaned over and held out his hand to her as if they were in a drawing room.

She knocked his hand away. She flailed, trying to get to her feet, but her legs kept getting tangled in her wet skirt. At last she made it upright, dripping and shuddering. She pushed her wind-whipped hair back out of her face. Her lips trembled, and her skin was now so pale he could have counted every freckle.

"I see what you mean about the treacherous current," he said.

"You"—her eyes had grown dark, like the belly of a thundercloud—"you can go throw yourself down an old bal for all I care!"

She turned and sloshed with stiff dignity out of the water. She got halfway to the cliff path before she broke into a run. She ran like a little girl, her hair russet as a lateen sail flapping behind her, her arms splayed out from her sides.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted after her, "I remain your most humble and obedient servant, Miss Letty!" He expected her to turn around for a final, parting shot. Or at least to fire one last salvo with those gunmetal eyes.

He was surprised, and a little disappointed, when she did not.

"Poor Peaches," Jessalyn said, a gurgle of laughter turning her voice husky. "Is that nasty old bird tormenting you?"

The fat orange cat hissed and cackled, then spit for good measure. The object of her enmity was an ugly black-backed gull. The gull, big as a goose, sat atop the paddock fence, tantalizingly near. Yet cat and bird both knew that bird could take flight long before fat cat could pounce.

The gull squawked and Happed its wings; Peaches hissed. Laughing, Jessalyn stroked the cat's marmalade-and-cream-striped backbone. "You have him thoroughly frightened now, m' love," she cooed. Peaches began to purr beneath Jessalyn's hand, her front paws kneading the weathered wood of the windowsill.

The evening was quiet but for the whisper of the surf and the reedy chirring of a nightjar. The sea caught the last light of a dying sun, shimmering purple like a cup of plum wine. End Cottage was only a hundred yards from the sea, but the cliffs were steeper here than they were at Crook-neck Cove, the beach narrower and usually covered by the tide.

Peaches cast one last baleful look at the gull and then with an air of supreme indifference thumped down from the sill and waddled over to the hearth. Last year Peaches had been a skeletal stray, near death from exposure and starvation. Now she was so fat she could barely make it back and forth between the window and the fire.

Jessalyn took the cat's place at the window. She had been restless all evening, tingly and effervescent inside, like a tub of fermenting cider.

The wind came up again, lifting a corner of loose thatch on the stable. The air smelled heavily of the sea and of the hay that had just been gathered and ricked that week. There was a sweet smell, too, from the primroses and daffodils, splashes of bright and pale yellow, that grew along the paddock where a sorrel-colored colt cavorted around a rubbing post.

Folk around the county called End Cottage a stud farm, although that was being generous. Once, years ago, her grandparents had bred horses to race on the great tracks near London Town. Sir Silas Letty, Jessalyn's grandfather, had been known as a bang-up sporting man who always ran his horses fairly, a man who played deep but covered his bets. In those years the Letty stables had acquired a modest reputation among the other members of the Turf, winning just enough today to support the enormous costs of racing tomorrow.

Jessalyn's grandfather had died long before she had come to live at End Cottage, and in the years since his death the Letty luck had gone tepid and then cold. One by one the prizewinning studs and mares had been sold until only the old and the lame and the losers remained.

Jessalyn had never attended a racing meet, never stood at the finishing post and watched her horse nose out the favorite by a whisker. All she'd had were her grandmother's stories. Stories told in the winter evenings by the fire while a wet and woolly Cornish gale blew outside. Stories told so often that she knew just how it would be: the clang of the starting bell, the jockeys flashing by in a rainbow of colored taffeta, the thunder of a hundred hooves beating at the turf... and the sweet, hot taste of winning.

Someday, Lady Letty would say, with the light of the fire —or perhaps it was the dream—sparkling in her eyes... someday, when the right horse came along, they would go to Newmarket and Epsom Downs for the season, and they would race again. Someday, someday...

They had high expectations of the sorrel filly in the paddock, foaled just that spring, such expectations that they had named her Letty's Hope.

A man came out the barn carrying a halter. Jessalyn waved, but he did not wave back. He carried the halter in his right hand, and he had to put it in his teeth to open the paddock gate, for he had only the one arm. The other he had left on a battlefield in the Peninsula five years ago. Small, bandy-legged, and dark, he was as Welsh as his name, Llewellyn Davies. But Jessalyn and her grandmother called him Sarn't Major, which had been his rank in the army. The rest of the folk in the county avoided speaking to him altogether; he was not a friendly man.

A latch lifted with a click behind her, and Jessalyn turned. Her grandmother entered the parlor with a rustle of black bombazine skirts. Although she used a cane, Lady Rosalie Letty was not bent over. A tall woman, she carried her height with pride, her back and shoulders straight and stiff as a lance.

"Close the window, gel," Lady Letty said in accents rough with the burr of Cornwall. "The fire's smeeching."

Jessalyn pulled the old mullioned window shut with a protest of its rusty hinges, then stooped to poke at a fire of furze and bits of driftwood, coaxing out a reluctant flame. Lady Letty lowered herself onto one end of a battered and patched settee. The settee had once been purple but was now faded by sun and age to a sickly puce. She lifted a quizzing glass to her eye, and her sharp gaze honed right in on the nail of Jessalyn's big toe that was poking through her jean house slipper. The old woman's lips pulled and twisted.

Jessalyn noticed the scowl and ducked her head to hide a smile. "I'm that sorry about losing the boots, Gram," she said. She'd confessed earlier to Lady Letty that the sea had stolen her half boots while she'd been scavenging. She had told her grandmother nothing at all about the explosion. Or the stranger.

Lady Letty thumped her cane on the carpet, snagging the tip in the threadbare nap. "Tis not the loss of the boots themselves, m' dear. Tis the senselessness of it. It's long before time that you stopped behaving like a wild tommy-rigg. Remember who you are—a lady born. Ladies do not walk the beach barefoot."

"Yes, ma'am," Jessalyn said, although she doubted true ladies, even poor ones, went scavenging in the first place. She sat across from her grandmother in a moth-eaten wing chair, folding her hands primly and bringing her holey-shod feet together. She cast a glance up at Lady Letty in time to catch the love softening the old woman's fierce gray eyes, before the wide mouth pressed into a pretended scowl.

The first time Jessalyn sat in this chair her legs had barely been long enough for her feet to touch the ground. That had been a month after her father's funeral, the day her mother had dragged her down to Cornwall and dumped her into her grandmother's care. Dropped her off like a suit of old clothes, no longer fashionable and no longer wanted.

"So the flighty, vain little fool don't want the bother of a daughter now, and she thinks to pawn you off onto me, eh?" Lady Letty had said, peering at Jessalyn through her quizzing glass and not looking as if she had much use either for a skinny six-year-old with fiery red hair and a freckled nose and scabs on her bony knees. But then Lady Letty had laughed and said, "Good God, gel, you're the spitting image of myself at your age." And Jessalyn had thought that perhaps her grandmother thought this a good thing.

"You'll find it ain't easy being a Letty," her grandmother had gone on. She'd flung up a gnarled hand to stop Jessalyn from speaking, although Jessalyn's tongue had been stiff in her mouth, incapable of moving. "No matter that you're her daughter, your father was a Letty. You're of Letty blood, and a Letty I shall make of you. A Letty and a lady, by God."

Being a Letty had turned out to be easy. Being a lady was another net of fish entirely.

It wasn't that she set out to be a hoyden. It was that she could never decide upon the correct and proper way to behave—"the done thing," as Lady Letty called it—until the situation had already come and gone. It was a deficiency in her character, which her grandmother insisted with a perverse sort of pride into turning into an accomplishment.

"Never you mind," Lady Letty would say after Jessalyn had succeeded in making a particular fool of herself. "One must always do the done thing, of course, but there is the ordinary way of doing a thing, and there is the Letty way. Sometimes one must do the unexpected thing, the Letty thing, and tell 'em all to go hang."

The trouble was Jessalyn didn't want to tell them all to go hang. Sometimes she wanted to do the done thing the way everyone else did it—to fit in, to belong, to be a proper young lady who would no longer be a bother of a daughter. Sometimes. At other times... other times she felt like a kite, blowing only where the wind took her. She wanted to break free, to make of herself what she would be.

Sometimes she didn't care if she ever saw her mother again.

The door opened with a bang, startling Jessalyn back into the present. A serving girl entered, carrying a tea tray. She closed the door behind her with a smart slap of her hip, then set the tray on a gateleg table.

The girl straightened with a groan, rubbing the small of her back. "Me blessed life, what a day she bin. Seems like 'tes nothing but heftin' and tottin' and luggin' I bin doin' since cockcrow. 'Tes a wonder I haven't got spasms in me back, it is. 'Tes a wonder I ain't prostitute with exhaustion."

Lady Letty rapped her cane on the floor.
"Prostrate.
How often must I tell you, you fool gel, that the word is
prostrate."

The girl's lace cap bobbed in harmony with her head. She had a face plump as a bun with two black currants for eyes. It might have been a pretty face except for the jagged scar that ran from the corner of her left eye nearly to her mouth. When she was twelve, her miner father in a drunken rage had swung a pick at her head, laying open her cheek. Like Peaches and the Sarn't Major, Becka Poole was another of the misfits and castoffs that Lady Letty was always taking in.

Like me,
Jessalyn thought.

"Aye, m'lady," Becka said, with a smile so sweet it could almost make one forget about the scar. "That's just what I do say. Prostitute."

Directing another fierce scowl at the girl, Lady Letty took a tortoiseshell snuffbox out of her pocket. She flicked the lid open with one hand in spite of fingers that were bent and gnarled with rheumatism. Raising a pinch of the pungent powder to her nose, she sniffed delicately. Lady Letty's skin was laced with tiny wrinkles like a dried apple, but age had not eroded the bones beneath. Hers was a strong face that conveyed the strength of her will and character.

For as long as Jessalyn had known her, Lady Letty's hair had been dark gray, the color of the tin ore brought up from the Cornish mines. But Jessalyn had heard it said that once her grandmother's hair had been like a flame. Once that formidable old woman had been young with a laughing mouth and a saucy way of walking and talking. She had been a bal-maiden, a girl who worked in the mines.

The story went that Rosalie Potter had been walking home after her shift at Wheal Ruthe when a well-set-up gentleman had come riding by. Silas Letty was of proud and ancient lineage, a son of a landed Cornish gentry family that could trace its name back to the Battle of Hastings. Silas had taken one look at that laughing mouth and all that red hair and had fallen in love. Nothing would do but that he must have his bal-maiden. But being a Letty, he had done the unexpected thing and married her, instead of simply bedding her.

Later Silas had been elected to Parliament and gone to London, where he had done a service for the king, some secret favor that nobody was allowed to speak of, and the king had made him a baronet. Once again Silas had done the unexpected thing: He had accepted the baronetcy to please his king. But Silas had still thought it a trifling thing. Unlike other families, the Lettys did not need a title to increase their consequence.

The tide did please Sir Silas in one way. For Rosalie Potter—onetime bal-maiden, who had been born and brought up by the scruff of her neck in a hovel next to the gritty slag heaps of Wheal Ruthe—his Rosalie became a lady.

It was such a wonderful story, more romantic than any tale Jessalyn had ever read in the library bluebooks. Once upon a time a beautiful bal-maiden had captured the heart of a baronet, a man so far above her he might as well have been living on the moon.

Jessalyn's sigh turned into a frown. She wondered what her grandmother would make of a man who had scars and calluses on his hands and swore worse than a costermonger. Who experimented with steam contraptions that blew up and took off all his clothes in front of her to go swimming in the sea. Who had looked at her and touched her—

"Have you fleas, gel?" Lady Letty snapped. "Tain't the done thing to squirm in one's chair like a hooked herring."

"That'd be the exposition what's got her nerves on edge, m'lady." Becka Poole, finished with her arrangement of the tea service in its proper order on the table, straightened with another melodramatic groan. "Look at me own hands. Shakin' they be, like a leaf in a gale."

Lady Letty smothered a snuff sneeze with her handkerchief. "Exposition? What sort of exposition?"

"The gret big sort, m'lady. It happened this afternoon whilst ee was gone up to Mousehole wi' the Sarn't Major. I was just sittin' down to a dish o' tea when, without a breath o' warning—crash! Boom! And the ground she be rumblin' like an old hag's chest when she snores. Gret big exposition it was. 'Tes a wonder I didn't fall away dead on the spot."

Jessalyn got up to poke at the fire, hiding her face from her grandmother's tin gray gaze. She was sure that with one look Lady Letty would see instantly all that had happened today. That she had lain on a man's body—never mind that it was an accident, done in all
innocence...
Watched that same man walk naked into and out of the sea. She had
not
kissed him, though... Dear life.

"Becka," Jessalyn said, more sharply than she'd intended, "could you cut up some seedcake, please, to take with our tea?"