Once in a Blue Moon (12 page)

The ladder seemed to go down forever. Finally she reached the first level. She took a deep breath of air that was old and stale, like the crypt beneath a stone church. Her smoky, flickering candle cast shadows on water-slimed walls, but the supporting timbers above her head seemed sound enough. She called his name several times but got no answer.

Now that she was down here, she realized there was actually little she could accomplish. She dared not go more than a few steps beyond the main shaft without risk of getting lost herself. This was not an adventure out of the pages of a blue book, and rather than save the day, she was more apt to make it worse. Although it wouldn't be very heroic of her, she knew the sensible thing to do would be to ride to Mousehole and fetch a couple of the old tinners to do the rescuing.

She had her foot on the ladder, prepared to climb back out of the shaft, when she heard it—a faint, mewling cry. She froze, her breath trapped in her throat, ears straining, and just when she had herself convinced that she had imagined the whole thing, she heard it again. Louder this time, almost a scream, like someone in pain.

Three tunnels led off from the main shaft. She thought the cry had come from the widest one, and she took it, climbing and slipping over piles of attle and other mining refuse. She paused a couple of times, trying to listen for the cry above the loud thumping of her own heart, but she didn't hear it again. Before long the way began to narrow, and soon she was walking bow-backed like an old crone. The tunnel sloped downward and was intersected by numerous crosscuts and winzes. But these were much smaller —just big enough to allow the passage of a man bent double, wheeling a barrow.

She had expected it to be cold underground, but it was hot, and before long she was sweating. Under the ground... Tons of earth and rock and seawater pressing down, putting a strain on the prop timbers, old wood, weak and probably rotting—

Stop it,
she told herself sharply. "Lieutenant!" she shouted, and her voice echoed back at her,
tenant... ant...

She was beginning to think that she ought to return to the surface after all and ride for help, when the way ahead of her widened, spilling into a big cavern.

Holding the candle above her head, she turned in a slow circle. The candle drew smoky patterns in the air, its feeble flame revealing the marks of old excavations and dark mottled veins in the rock. The place smelled rotten, of stagnant air and dead things. A crack in the stone seeped water in a small pool that was dark and smooth as bottle glass.

She heard the cry again. So faint this time that she was not quite sure she
had
heard it. She waited, holding her breath.... There it was again.

"Lieutenant!" she shouted, starting toward the direction of the cry.

And stepped into a black hole.

She twisted sharply, her flailing hands grasping at air. Her hips and knees banged into rough rock, and then her feet hit something wooden, a ladder, skidded along the rungs of a ladder. One of her scrabbling, clutching hands found the side rail, and she grabbed it, halting her fall with a hard jerk that wrenched her arm and tore a harsh cry from her throat. Pebbles and dirt rained down around her, falling into emptiness.

She hung, swinging by one arm, gasping and sobbing with terror. The candle had gone out, dropped when she fell, and the darkness was absolute. She had fallen into a shaft that led down to a new level, and the ladder, nailed into the rock, had saved her life.

Slowly she searched with one foot, found a rung. She put her weight on it, and the wood gave way with a splintering crack. She slid down the ladder several more feet, ripping her glove and tearing the skin off her palm. Her scream echoed back at her.

She hung, sucking at the foul, hot air and trying not to cry. Her arm shrieked with pain.

She shouted for help, her voice bouncing up into the cavern and down, down, down.... Shouted until her throat was raw and she couldn't breathe. It felt as if there were a vise around her rib cage, pressing against her lungs, slowly strangling her. The pain in her arm and across her shoulders became so intense it was a scream in her mind. But the fingers of the hand that grasped the ladder were growing numb. She could not hang like this much longer. She was suffocating, and it was so hot... so hot... like hell.

She would have to help herself, or she would die down here. Throwing her weight sideways, she swung like a pendulum, grabbing for the other side rail. Missed. Swung around again. Missed. Swung. Had it.

The relief of taking some of the weight off her right arm was so exquisite she sobbed. But she allowed herself the luxury of only a few moments' rest. She pulled her leg up and put the toe of her boot on the first rung she could find. She applied the barest pressure, heard it crack. All the rungs were completely rotten.

But the side rails seemed sturdy enough. She made sure she had a good grip with her left hand. Sucking in a deep breath of the hot, stagnant air, she let go with her right hand and slid it up the rail as far as she could reach, gripped, and pulled. Let go with her left hand, reached up, and pulled. Inch by painful inch she crabbed her way up the side of the shaft. It took an eternity. Sometimes she had to stop and rest. And test the rungs again, which were always rotten. She cried the whole time because it hurt so much. She told herself it didn't matter that she cried, because there was no one to see it.

A hysterical giggle burst from her throat. As if anyone could see anything in this black hole. In a way that was the worst part. The utter impenetrable darkness. Until now she hadn't known what darkness was. Always before, even on a moonless night in a shuttered room, there had been
some
light. She hadn't known that darkness could be felt. She thought that if she were ever to be touched by Satan, he would feel like this darkness—hot, thick, utterly lonely. She giggled again, reached up with her right hand... and felt air.

Startled, she jerked her hand back, scraping her knuckles on the floor of the cavern. Relief flooded through her, so strong it left her dizzy and shaking.

But it was much harder hauling herself over the lip of the shaft than it had been to pull herself up the rungless ladder. Once she lost her purchase and slid back down several feet—agonizing feet that she had to pull herself back up again. She cursed then. She cursed God and herself and McCady Trelawny, oh, especially Lieutenant Trelawny, whose fault it all was and who should have
been
here by now to rescue her.

But then at last, at last, she was safe, lying on the cavern floor, her chest heaving, breaths coming in stertorous gasps, her muscles burning and cramping, and sweat running into her eyes and stinging all her scrapes and scratches. Lying still... until she began to think again to understand that the danger wasn't over, not over at all. Somehow she had to find her way out of a mine honeycombed with tunnels and crosscuts and winzes, in the pitch-darkness.

She heard it again, that faint cry.

She sat up, feeling the darkness with her outstretched hands. She didn't have a light or hope of one. The haversack with the tinderbox and extra candles was at the bottom of the shaft. She would have to feel her way, crawling carefully on her hands and knees, so that she wouldn't step off into any more holes.

She crawled. She made sure her shoulder brushed against rough stone at all times, and she felt the way ahead of her with her outstretched hands. The mewling cry, growing ever louder, pulled her on. Eventually she decided it could not be a man making that sound. An animal, perhaps. A small animal.

She thought at first that she was imagining things, her eyes after so much darkness playing tricks on her. Water glinting on stone, the round shape of a pit prop. Then she realized she
was
seeing things: the walls and roof of the tunnel, the rock and attle, even the rusted head of an old pick. She stood up and stumbled forward, toward the source of the light.

It was an adit—a narrow hole cut through earth and rock to the outside world to let in air or, more often, to drain out water. This adit ran upward at a sloping incline like a laundry chute. Jessalyn peered up the chute, at a small circle of light, at gray scudding clouds... and a grist sack, caught on a finger of rock, swinging like a hammock. The grist sack squirmed and emitted a squeaky, mewling cry.

There were steplike indentations cut into the rock that miners called stopes, which resulted from the removal of the ore. She was able to climb up the stopes far enough to reach the sack. She thought that someone had tried to dispose of a litter of kittens by throwing them into the adit, and the sack had gotten caught on the finger of rock on its way down.

Until she touched it... Then she saw that it was a baby, a human baby.

She had a harder time making it back down the stopes with the grist sack and its fragile contents in her arms, but at last she was on firm ground again. The ragged bundle cried and wriggled as Jessalyn gently unwrapped it. The baby, a girl, was extremely tiny, hardly more than a day old. She was covered with dried blood and mucus from the birth, and her cry was weak. But she was alive.

Jessalyn wrapped the baby back up in the sack. She leaned against the rough tunnel wall, drawing deeply of the fresh, salt-laden air.

A harsh shout floated down to her. "Miss Letty, damn your eyes! Answer me!"

She cupped a hand around her mouth. "Hellooo! Lieutenant!"

A hail of stones fell past the hole in the rock. His upside-down face took the place of the sky, cutting off most of the light. The adit, she realized, must open out right beneath the cliff path. She was so relieved to see him she laughed out loud. "There you are," she said. "Where have you been?"

There has never been any doubt where I have been, damnation. The question is, Where the bloody hell have you been?"

She laughed again. "You have not been properly brought up, Lieutenant Trelawny. Your speech has far too much of the attle gutter in it. I've been meaning to bring it to your attention for some time now."

"Hellfire, rape, and sodomy."

She nearly choked on another gurgle of laughter.

"What the devil are you doing down there and quit giggling. I cannot abide giggling females."

Perhaps it was the sudden relief after being frightened near half to death, but she felt slightly giddy. She looked at his hard mouth and wanted to kiss it. It also seemed too much of an effort to explain the whole story to him, so she edited out all the interesting bits, the way the Reverend Troutbeck was always doing to the stories in the Bible.

"You were gone so long I thought something had happened," she said. "I came down to look for you, and I got a trifle lost."

"No one can be a
trifle
lost." He was getting quite red in the face. Doubtless because he was hanging upside down. "You are either completely lost or you aren't lost at all. Is this an innate talent you have for turning the simplest expeditions into unmitigated catastrophes, or do you have to practice at it?"

"Don't be beastly. It isn't nice."

His head disappeared from the hole.

"Lieutenant!"

"Don't move—don't you move a bloody inch. I'm coming to get you."

"Thank you, but—"

"Think nothing of it. An afternoon spent crawling through dark and slimy tunnels and hollering myself hoarse has always seemed the epitome of entertainment to me."

"Lieutenant. I have a baby."

His head reappeared. "How in the bloody hell can a virgin have a baby? And don't tell me it was an immaculate conception; that story just won't wash a second time."

"I didn't
have
her, you silly goose.
I
found her. Here. Just now."

"Of course. It stands to reason that you would go looking for trouble and find a baby."

She laughed again and sat down on a stope, clutching the baby to her breast. It wasn't long before she heard the hollow echo of his footsteps and saw the glow of his candle on the stone walls.

He set the candle down on the stope and with gentle fingers peeled back the sack from the baby's head. "Is he all right?"

"It is a she, Lieutenant. Can't you tell the difference?"

The corners of his mouth creased in a quick smile. "Not from this end." Then he did the most unexpected thing. He traced the curve of Jessalyn's jaw with his knuckles, and even in the dim light she could tell that his hand was shaking. "You've scratched your face," he said.

Their gazes held for a moment; then his dropped to her mouth. She ran her tongue over her lower lip, swallowed. "I—I think the baby's cold," she said. "All she's wearing is a sack."

She wasn't sure he'd heard her. The flame of the candle was reflected in the flat darkness of his eyes; his face had turned hard.

He broke abruptly away from her, shrugging out of his coat. He took the baby in his hands, wrapping her up in the warm woolen material. Although she had been crying steadily, a thin, pathetic mewl, since Jessalyn found her, now she quieted.

"She likes you," Jessalyn said.

"The sentiment isn't mutual. The brat just piddled all over my coat." At the sound of his voice, which had been deep and slightly rough, the baby started to cry again.

"She's probably hungry," Jessalyn said. "The poor little spud."

"Well, don't look at me. I haven't the right equipment."

She looked at him. He held the baby cupped in his scarred, fine-boned hands. It didn't seem possible that
a
man's hands could be at once so frighteningly strong, and yet so gentle. Tender and violent.

"I hate it when you do that," he said.

She looked up to find his eyes on her. "Do what?"

"Smile at me as if you know something I don't know."

"I was thinking that most men turn pale with fear when they are handed a baby, yet you hold her as if you've had plenty of practice...." Her voice trailed off. His father was said to have sired bastards all over Cornwall, and he was a Trelawny, his father's son.

He was looking at the baby not at her, and he spoke in his teasing drawl. "But I am terrified, can't you tell? Babies and winsome virgins always put a quiver in my knees and
a
quake in my heart."

She started to smile, and something cracked within her chest. A piece of her cracked and tore loose and fell away from her, fell into a black hole more terrifying than a mine shaft. His face was nothing but shadows; she couldn't see him, she didn't know him. Yet she felt within her very soul
a
need for him in her life, the way the earth and the sun and the air were needed in her life—elemental, essential, eternal. And she felt, too,
a
terrible fear that this need might never go away.

He kept the baby, and she followed him in
a
daze. Her skin felt tight all over, too small for her body. She thought that if he touched her, if he so much as looked at her or spoke to her, she would fly all apart like an exploding steam boiler. Her chest hurt, and her eyes burned, as if she had to cry. Or had already cried too much.

He climbed the ladder first. Kneeling at the edge of the pit, with the baby tucked into the crook of his arm, he held out his hand to her. Jessalyn looked up at him, her eyes narrowed against the harsh light. She took his hand, and as she came up out of the dark hole, his gaze raked the length of her.

She knew tear tracks had streaked the grime on her cheeks. Her hair was tangled and wet with sweat, her riding habit in shreds at the knees and elbows and gaping open at the bodice where she'd lost several buttons. Her hands showed raw and bloody through the rips in her gloves.

"I fell down," she said when she could no longer bear his silence. Her smile trembled at the edges. "I feel a bit wonky, but I'm really quite all right."

He made an impatient movement. "Down what, for God's sake—a shaft?"

"Yes." She couldn't meet his eyes. She didn't know why she should feel so ashamed. Except that things were always happening to her around him, and she always felt like such a beetlehead afterward. He was staring at her, saying nothing, and she knew how childish she appeared in his eyes.