Once in a Blue Moon (41 page)

Jessalyn knelt beside her while the bell rang announcing the next race and a fight between two gentlemen broke out in the seats below her. While the sun melted the last of the mist so that the downs seemed suddenly to be bathed with a brilliant light and the breeze came up again, bringing with it the smell of horses and the turf. And the sweet, hot taste of winning.

"Oh, Gram..." she whispered. And closed the old woman's lifeless fingers around a mother-of-pearl snuffbox.

The mulberry brocade curtains were snapped open with such cheerful force their rods rattled.

McCady Trelawny lifted his face off his desk and looked at the world through blurred eyes. The bright sunlight streaming through the window stabbed into his head like an awl. "Bloody hell," he groaned.

He looked daggers at the cruel fiend who was masquerading as his manservant. Duncan regarded him out of solemn golden brown eyes. A nun in a brothel couldn't have looked more innocent. "I thought ye rang, yer nibs."

McCady swallowed. His mouth tasted as if a rat had crawled in it to die. There was a toddy glass sitting beside his elbow with a swallow of brandy left in it. He used it to wash the foul taste from his mouth and get his blood to flowing.

"It lacks a half hour before ten, sir."

"What of it?" the earl snarled. He thought about pouring himself more brandy, but some fool had left it sitting beside the chair before the ash-filled fire grate. He squinted at the cut-crystal decanter in the far, far distance. Some fool had also drunk it empty.

"Ten o'clock, sir," Duncan repeated. He was busy trying to see how loudly he could plump pillows and collect the pieces of clothing that some fool had left strewn about the room. "Ten o'clock is when Mr. Tiltwell and Miss Letty are getting buckled."

"And I say again: What of it?"

McCady wanted to plant his fist in his valet's babbling mouth, but it would have required a considerable expenditure of energy to do it. Besides, the impact of the blow could easily ricochet up his arm and do serious damage to his throbbing head.

Since the bloody curtains were open, he decided to get up and look out the bloody window and see what the bloody hell kind of bloody day it was. Red and brown chimney pots poked into a putty sky, their cowls spinning slowly in the still air. Traffic and people bustled on the street below, as if they all had somewhere to go and something important to do once they got there.

In the distance he could hear church bells.

From almost anywhere in London, he thought, one could see the great dome and twin spires of St. Paul's Cathedral rising above the roofs and chimney pots. St. Paul's, where she would become Mrs. Tiltwell. He glanced at the clock. In twenty minutes.

He supposed she and Clarey would make their home in London. If he was careful, he need never see her. They would not be sharing the same friends or the same interests. Clarey would drag her to all those routs and balls and assemblies at Almack's and make a pinch-mouthed boring and bored matron of her in five years. She would fade in London, like a plucked primrose. To him she ought forever to be a wild child of barren moors and rocky beaches.

It was odd, he thought, how one person could make such a difference in another's life. Once his world had been etched in grays. Then one summer day he had met a girl with hair the color of a sunrise, a freckled nose, and a wide, laughing mouth, and for a time his world had become colored with joy fire.

He pictured himself going back to the beach at Crookneck Cove and living that moment all over again. Only this time he would have a fortune and a dream to lay at her feet. A dream to keep the shining light in her eyes as he took her to his bed. And a fortune to keep her there, in his bed, after the hunger had died.

Or perhaps... or perhaps a miracle would have happened and the hunger would never have died.

"It may nae be my place to say so, sir," Duncan said as he put a glass into his lordship's hand. "But something havey-cavey's going on. I would've wagered my hope of heaven that it was yer ugly phiz Miss Letty loved."

"You sentimental cabbagehead. She's marrying him for his money."

At least that was what she had said. Only he didn't believe her. But believing the alternative was even worse: that she was marrying Tiltwell because she loved the man more than she loved.... Damn her! What made her so bloody different from all the other women in the world? He hadn't wanted to feel this way about her. He didn't think it was
possible
to feel this way. It was nothing more than an itch between the legs and a fire in the blood. His mocking words echoed back at him:
I take the girl to bed, and it's gone by morning.
Yet if that was true, then why was losing her hurting so badly? The pain of losing her seemed to have settled into his chest, gone soul-deep, until it had become a part of his every breath, every heartbeat.

"She's marrying him for his money," McCady repeated, emphatically. But it didn't ease that bloody ache in his chest.

Duncan heaved an enormous sigh. "That's as may be—"

"That is
precisely
how it is." McCady took a big gulp from the glass in his hand, thinking it was brandy, and nearly choked on the bitter tar-water that went down his throat. "Bloody
hell!"

Duncan clicked his tongue over the condition of the fern that sat on the plant stand beside the window. "This puir thing's not long for this world," he said, lifting one curling brown frond. "If I dinna know better, I would think someone has deliberately been pouring poison down its throat every morn. D'ye remember, sir, that time in bluidy Spain, when we had to get across that bridge, and there were over fifty Frenchies holding it, and only the five of us? Do ye remember what ye told us on that day?"

McCady shot him such a hard glare that his eyeballs ached from it. "No, I do not remember, and what is more, I don't give a devil's damn."

"Ye said: 'Let's just take the bluidy thing and put the bastards out of their misery.'"

McCady stared at the manservant, but he wasn't really seeing him. He was looking into his own future, and all he could see was a terrible, wrenching loneliness. It grew so quiet in the room he thought he could hear his heart beat. He saw a woman with wild red hair, lying on a bed; he saw Clarence Tiltwell plunging his hard sex between those long, long legs, sucking her taut brown nipples, plundering that laughing mouth with his tongue.

"Duncan..."

Duncan lifted one perfect blond brow. "Aye, yer nibs?"

"Have my highflyer brought around."

"Bloody hell!"

Even perched high as he was on the seat of his phaeton, McCady couldn't see around the enormous country wagon filled with bales of straw that blocked The Strand. They were wedged into a jam of hackneys, dogcarts, landaus, and gigs. Ahead of him he could hear shouts and curses, a braying donkey, and the bleat of a brass horn. And in the far distance, the crashing cymbals and rolling drums of the daily parade of Horse Guards as they marched from their barracks to Hyde Park. Marched as they did every morning at ten o'clock.

He jumped down from the phaeton and started running.

He slammed into a boy who had chosen that moment to duck into the street with a shovel and bucket to collect dung. He picked the boy up, dusted him off, and started running again.

He rounded the corner into Temple Bar and collided with a man adorned head to toe with the buttons he was hawking. He looked back to apologize and almost tripped over a street sweeper's broom. He banked and caromed his way down the crowded street like a billiard ball run amok.

He cut through an alley that smelled of soapsuds and nearly garroted himself on a clothesline that was strung between two doorknobs. An enormous pair of female unmentionables somehow wound up wrapped around his head like a turban. He peeled them off and sent them whipping through the air, to knock the wig off a passing barrister.

He ran up Ludgate Hill, blowing like a sperm whale. The cathedral loomed before him, with its twin towers and great white dome. He thought he would make it in time, and then the fourteen-foot pendulum of the great bell begin to toll.

He jumped a bollard, and pain speared up his crippled leg. He sprinted up the stone steps and banged through the doors. He paused for a moment to catch his breath and allow his eyes to adjust to the sudden dimness. She was there, at the other end of the nave, by the iron and wooden choir, standing before an archbishop of the Church of England. She was there, and Clarence Tiltwell had taken her hand to place his ring on her finger.

"Jessalyn!" McCady shouted, his voice bouncing off the frescoed ceiling. He ran down the nave, past marble columns and saintly statues and gaping mouths. "Jessalyn!"

She and Clarey both whirled, their faces stiff with shock. "How dare you..." the groom began, and ended up stepping into McCady's swinging fist. And then, because he knew how good it would feel to do it, McCady rammed a knee hard in Clarence Tiltwell's groin.

The breath whooshed out of Clarence like a boiling teakettle, and he sank to his knees, cradling himself.

McCady turned to Jessalyn. She looked as if she had been the one to take a fist in the jaw. All the color had drained from her face, leaving her eyes looking flat and glittering, like beaten silver. He stared at her as if she were the only woman on earth, ignoring the archbishop, who was bleating like a hen whistle, "I say, I say, I say, you can't do this."

"You're coming with me," McCady said, softly so as not to frighten her.

"No!" she whispered on a sharp expulsion of breath. But he grabbed her wrist anyway and hauled her with him back down the nave.

"Stop him!"

Until now the few wedding guests had been too shocked to interfere, but at the archbishop's command several of the gentlemen started forward.

Tall wrought iron candlesticks, with three flaming branches, were bolted to the end of each pew. With a strength he hadn't known he possessed, McCady wrenched one free and threw it like a fiery javelin at the legs of his pursuers.

And then he was running again and dragging Jessalyn after him.

He had her wrist in a tight grip, but still, she could have pulled free of him. That she did not gave him hope. As they pelted through the streets, it occurred to him that he was going to need his phaeton, and he had left it abandoned behind a hay wagon in the middle of The Strand. To his relief he saw that a beadle had drawn the carriage to one side of the street and was holding the horses' heads, a look of outrage purpling his pie-round face.

"Sir!" the beadle expostulated. "You cannot leave this vehicle here."

"You are quite right," McCady said, flinging Jessalyn like a sack of hops up onto the high seat. "If you would kindly remove yourself from my path, I shall remove myself from yours."

It wasn't until they reached the relative calm of Regent's Park that he was able to look at her. Her hair flowed over her shoulders and bare arms, a living lire, held in place by a wreath of tiny white flowers. Her wedding dress was elegant, but of a pale somber gray as befitted her mourning state. Her face was as gray as the watered silk of her gown, and her lips were bloodless.

"Jessalyn?"

Slowly she turned her head, and he looked into a pair of stormy eyes.

"Perhaps ye might likes t' adjourn now to one o' the nice wedding chambers we gots upstairs," Mr. Hargraves said, producing a smile that was missing a few teeth.

The man was used to nervous grooms and brides, for he was one of the professional witnesses who performed Gretna Green's clandestine marriages. Mr. Hargraves witnessed marriages out of his taproom when he wasn't standing behind his bar of brassbound barrels, serving up wets to the local tipplers.

McCady took his wife's elbow and led her around watermarked wooden tables and benches toward the stairs. She caught her foot on an uneven flagstone and lurched into him. Immediately she stiffened and pulled away. She was unsteady on her feet, but then he, too, still felt the jolt and sway, like the pitch of the sea, that came from spending hours in a carriage.

They had not exchanged more than a half dozen words in the days and nights it had taken them to travel here from London. Before they had left the outskirts of town, he stopped long enough to hock his sword to pay for their food and the changes of horses along the way. He also bought straw for her feet and wrapped her in blankets like a human sausage.

It was while he was gently tucking the wool close beneath her chin that she spoke to him the one and only time. "I suppose you are dragging me off somewhere to ravish me," she said.

"By all means I intend to ravish you." He tried on a smile as he stroked her cheek with the back of his curled hand. "After I have married you."

She said nothing then, merely looked at him out of immense gray eyes that sent a piercing stab of fear into his chest. If she truly loved Tiltwell, then she would never forgive what he had done.

They rode in silence, except for the clink and rattle of the traces, the rumble of the wheels, the ring of the horses' hooves on the hard road. He couldn't get her to eat when they stopped at the coaching inns, though she drank a glass of purl once, standing before a fire in the inn's yard.

He couldn't get his fill of looking at her. There was so much he wanted to say, things he knew he should say, explanations for what he had done. But he couldn't begin to find the words. He doubted he could adequately explain it all to himself. He knew that he had taken her only because he could no longer bear his life without her.