Once in a Blue Moon (32 page)

He took her arm leading her deeper within the shelter of the dairy's low-thatched eaves. Her heart started to hammer again. It was beating so hard Becka feared she was having a heart stroke.

"Do I seem woeful to ye, Miss Poole?"

"Well... ais, ee do, betimes." She looked up into his face, struck nearly breathless suddenly with fear and excitement and a growing wonder. She was out here alone in the dark with a man who was handsome enough to be a prince. And who was lowering his head and parting his lips as if he were about to kiss her.

His mouth captured hers, held it fast a moment, then began to move with gentle, insistent pressure. When he ended the kiss an eternity later, Becka sucked in a great draft of air as if she'd been drowning.

"Cor!" she exclaimed. "Why did ee do that?"

He brushed her lips with his again. "It seemed the moment called for the doing of something frivolous."

Suddenly he lifted his head, sniffing the air. She thought he was going to sneeze. She hoped he hadn't caught her rheumy chill by kissing her. Her lips still tingled from where they had touched his. His lips had been the strangest combination of soft and hard. And they had been hot, too, and sort of melting, the way the top of a candle is just after you blow it out. In truth, she had rather liked the feel ol them. She wondered how she could get him to do something frivolous again.

"Do ye smell smoke?" he said.

"Eh?" She drew in a deep breath, wrinkling her nose. She smelled the cheese and the sea and lavender water... and, aye, she smelled smoke. "Mebbe Miss Jessalyn couldn't sleep and she got up to stir the fire."

He stepped out from beneath the shelter of the dairy, and she went with him. She noticed something odd at the parlor window where Napoleon had slipped through ear
lier. An orange light, looking fractured and wavy through the mullioned glass.

She was just about to point this out to him when the roof erupted into flames.

His hot breath seared the back of her neck.

She ran down a path choked with brambly vines that burst into fiery pinwheels and sent sparks shooting into the air. She ran and ran, and still he was there, breathing against her neck, burning her skin. Tongues of hellfire licked at her legs, scorching, melting. A red-hot wind roared and crackled, consuming her screams. Yet she could hear him still, calling out to her, offering sweet promises she knew were lies, and she would not stop running, she would not turn around to look into his face. Because once she saw his face, she would be forever damned.

He laughed his devil's laugh.
You may as well look, Jessalyn, oh, yes. Because you cannot escape me. You can never escape me. You surrendered your soul to me when you were sixteen, and I
own
you now. So you may as well look...

He seized her around the waist, enveloping her in a lover's embrace, and where he touched her she turned into fire. He spun her around, and his hot breath bathed her face, and though she kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she knew he smiled his devil's smile.
Mine. At last, at last you are mine... kiss me, Jessalyn. Become one with me and you will live forever.
Her will dissolved, betrayed by old powers, dark longings. She opened her eyes and looked into bright sunbursts floating in black pools, burning sunbursts, devouring sunbursts. His eyes, his eyes, McCady's eyes...

She screamed...

And woke up in hell.

The wall at the foot of her bed was a sheet of fire. Thirsty flames licked at the old silk paper melting it into instant ash. Black smoke billowed like wind-tossed clouds. Orange and yellow lights danced, reflected in the looking glass and windowpanes.

She sat up, blinking in confusion, not sure if she was dreaming still. Then she felt the heat and sucked in a breath choked with smoke, and she knew the fire was real. Throwing off the bedcovers, she leaped from the bed.

"Gram!"

At the door she paused. Smoke curled beneath the threshold in ghostly fingers. Flickers of eerie red light shone on the polished floor. Her hand reached out, hovering, afraid of what lay on the other side of the door.

The brass latch was so hot it seared the skin off her palms. She screamed from the pain and from terror, flinging open the door. The flames, fed by fresh air, flared with a whoosh.

The sudden fierce blast of heat drove her back, sucking the breath from her lungs. The fire hissed along the black oak floorboards, raising blisters that popped and curled like thick boiling soup.

She plunged through the flames and ran down the smoldering Turkey carpet to Lady Letty's room. Heat undulated in waves from the front stairwell. A pall of ocherous smoke hugged the ceiling. In the kitchen below, something was whistling and popping like the fireworks at Vauxhall Gardens.

Jessalyn reached for the latch, whimpering in expectation of the pain, but although the metal was hot, it wasn't burning. She pushed open the door and slammed it quickly behind her.

The fire had not reached this room yet, but the smoke was so bad it was like trying to peer through a wool blanket. Years' worth of varnish in the wood paneling released noxious fumes that blinded her eyes and tore at her throat, stealing her breath. Choking, Jessalyn groped her way to the bed.

It was empty.

"Gram!"

She fell to her hands and knees, searching the floor with her outstretched hands. Gram wasn't in the room, she wasn't here, oh, God, what if she left and Gram was still in here somewhere, unconscious, suffocating, burning...

The ceiling above her head exploded into flames.

"Gram!"

Sobbing, Jessalyn pushed herself half upright. She banged into the nightstand by her grandmother's bed, bruising her hipbone. She didn't even feel it. Pain was everywhere, with every breath.

Something clawed at her ankle, and she screamed before she realized it was Lady Letty. She fell back down to her knees again and wrapped her arms around the old woman's thin shoulders. She felt Lady Letty's chest jerk with her harsh breathing.

Streams of smoke were now pouring beneath the door. She tightened her grip on her grandmother. The old woman reached up, grasping her hand. "Leave me... too old..."

A jar of barley water sat on the nightstand above her. Jessalyn ripped pieces off the bottom of her night rail and soaked the cloth strips, tying one over her nose and mouth and doing the same for Gram. For a moment the sweet malty smell of barley filled her nostrils, but it was soon replaced by the smoke.

She hauled her grandmother upright as easily as she would lift a portmanteau. Fear and youth and determination made her strong.

Bearing almost all of Lady Letty's frail weight, Jessalyn carried her to the door. The only way out of her grandmother's bedchamber was into the hall and down the stairs. The room's large double mullioned windows overlooked the courtyard, a straight two-story drop onto granite stone. She could perhaps survive such a fall with only a broken bone or two, but not Gram.

Jessalyn staggered through the flickering tongues of fire, bent over, half dragging Lady Letty toward the stairs. Her throat was raw. Every time she swallowed it felt as if she were eating the flames. The heat seared the inside of her lungs and roasted her skin. Her ears hurt from the roaring noise the fire made, louder than any wind, louder than the angriest of seas.

Snakes of flame curled up the stair banisters and slithered along the steps and risers. Jessalyn stopped and looked down, and it was like staring deep into the heart of a blast furnace. The fire was a living thing. Red and orange and yellow flames fed and consumed and went on to feed again, growing ever brighter and hotter and hungrier. The world below had taken on a red glow, as if it had been submerged in a pool of blood.

Lady Letty dug her nails into Jessalyn's arms, shaking her. "Can't get out that way, gel," she choked.

Jessalyn blinked and shuddered. She looked down and saw only death. Panic squeezed out what little air she had left in her lungs. Gram was right, they would never make it down the stairs and out the front door alive. There remained only her room. It was a short drop from the window onto the roof that sheltered the front parlor, and a longer drop to the ground, but to dirt, not stone.

They turned back. A fiery beam fell from the ceiling, barely missing Jessalyn's head. She didn't even see it. She burned her hand on the door latch again; this time she made not a sound. The old-fashioned box bed, where she had gone to sleep last night and all those nights of her childhood, was now a flaming pyre. She propped Lady Letty against the wall beside the window, the only wall not burning. Using a chair as a battering ram, she broke through the wooden casement and thick diamond panes The raucous fire drowned out the sound of shattering glass.

Jessalyn hefted Lady Letty over the ledge, out onto the roof, then turned back with some half-formed thought of trying to make it up to the attic to save Becka. Suddenly the door exploded, and flames roared into the room as if out of the mouth of a fire-breathing dragon. Searing heat buffeted her, throwing her back against the shattered window frame. Sobbing and choking, Jessalyn crawled on her hands and knees out onto the rough cedar shingles, and though she cut herself on the broken glass, she didn't feel it.

They stood together, straddling the blunted peak of the gently sloping hipped roof, sucking in drafts of sweet, cold air. The sea wind whipped at Jessalyn's hair and the ragged skirt of her night rail; it felt like ice against her blistered skin. But the fire blazed on in the parlor below, and the thin cedar strips beneath her bare feet were hot and growing hotter. She knew that it was only a matter of seconds before the shingles, too, would burst into flames.

A flutter of movement in the paddock below caught her eye, and she heard her name, snatched away by the wind.

"Becka!" she cried, shocked that it came out only a croak. "Get the ladder! In the stables!"

Becka was shouting and pointing. Jessalyn saw Prudence, the only horse still living at End Cottage, gallop out the open door of the stables, followed by a man with the ladder beneath his arm. She heard a sizzling crackle, felt a wave of heat break against her legs. The parlor roof had caught fire.

And then the man was on the burning roof with her, taking Gram from her arms. It was Duncan, the earl's manservant.

She followed him down the ladder. Her bare feet touched the earth, cool and moist, and her legs began to tremble. Her head reeled, and she swayed on her feet. "Miss Jessalyn!" Becka cried, seizing her around the waist.

"Oooh, Miss Jessalyn, don't
ee
faint here. Come over where 'tes safe."

Duncan carried Lady Letty to the grove of wild nut and hawthorn trees, out of harm's way of the flying cinders and choking smoke. Jessalyn, supported by Becka, followed.

He propped Lady Letty against the trunk of a tree. In the red glow cast by the fire, the old woman's face looked smeared with blood, and her gold-tasseled nightcap gave her a macabre look. Kneeling beside her, Jessalyn touched her cheek. "Are you all right, Gram?"

Lady Letty looked once at the blazing house, then turned her head aside. "Die..." She choked, her chest shuddering and jerking as she gasped for air. "Should have left me to die."

Fresh tears spilled from Jessalyn's burning eyes. She sat back on her heels, rocking, as the tears streamed down her cheeks. "Oh, Gram..."

Lady Letty's chest convulsed with another bout of racking coughs.

"The auld lady's swallowed a lot of smoke," Duncan said to Jessalyn, but she didn't seem to hear; she just kept rocking and weeping in a terrible silence. He straightened, and his big hands settled on Becka Poole's shoulders, pulling her around to face him. "Can ye run fast, lass?"

Becka swallowed hard and nodded.

"Run then and fetch the doctor."

Her eyes wide on his face, Becka nodded again. Duncan bent his head and planted a kiss that was hard and rough on her lips before he spun her around, giving her a little shove. "Off wi' ye then, my wee one."

Becka took off, running along the cliffs, just as a horse came galloping down the lane from the direction of Caerhays Hall. For a moment it seemed he would not stop, that the earl of Caerhays would send his horse plunging into the flames. Terrified by the fire, the animal reared so far back on his haunches his hind legs shot out from beneath him. The earl rolled off the horse's bare back and got to his feet, shouting. He threw back his head and bellowed like a man gone mad, "Jessalyn!"

Duncan reached him in time to stop him from dashing into the flaming house. He grasped Caerhays by the shoulders much as he had held Becka only moments ago. The earl wore only breeches and boots, and the manservant's fingers dug deep into hard flesh that was hot and slick with sweat.

"She's out, man. She's safe."

Dark eyes stared back at Duncan, crazed eyes that reflected the flames. The earl's head fell back, his lids squeezing shut, and his chest jerked once, hard, as if he were repressing a sob. Or a scream.

Something
was
screaming. Duncan flung his head back and looked up. A small orange cat paced the peak of the highest roof, yowling in fear and fury.

"Napoleon!"

Jessalyn Letty came flying out of the trees. By the time they understood what she was about, she was already halfway up the ladder. Duncan got to her first, hauling her back down. She flailed, sobbing hysterically. He wrapped his arms around her, trying to still her. The cat screeched.

Caerhays started up the ladder.

"Sir, no!" Duncan thrust Jessalyn away from him and grabbed the earl's boot. Caerhays kicked him in the chest and sent him staggering backward. "For mercy's sake, sir," Duncan shouted as the earl went over the top of the head step, "'tis only a cat."

Lord Caerhays swung around, and his mouth twisted into a crooked smile, a smile that was young and full of reckless bravado, and to Duncan's shock he felt himself smiling back. "What the hell, she loves the bloody thing," Caerhays said, and he ran up the slope of the flaming roof, the leather soles of his boots scrabbling for purchase on the burned and cracked shingles.

Bending at the knees, McCady swung his arms back and jumped up. He grabbed the edge of the cornice with his fingertips and hung there a moment, then jackknifed his legs and pulled himself onto the steep slope of the higher roof.

Flames and smoke swirled around him; it seemed impossible that he would not catch on fire. Something snapped inside Jessalyn then, and she came to herself. Horror widened her eyes as she understood the danger the man she loved had put himself into for her sake. "McCady, no!" she screamed. "Come back!"

It was unlikely he even heard her. He crawled up the burning roof, arms and legs splayed like a crab's. He hefted himself onto the peak, lying across the pointed edge. He stretched out a hand toward Napoleon, but the frightened cat scurried out of his reach. Balancing precariously, he stood up and walked along the peak, and his tall, broad-shouldered body was silhouetted against a sky that glowed orange like
a
sunrise. Napoleon crouched, gathering himself, preparing to leap onto the tall ornamented chimney stack. McCady lunged, seizing the cat by the scruff of its neck just as the ridgepole and rafters collapsed beneath him in a billow of fire.