Once in a Blue Moon (21 page)

Before long, Clarence thought—with grim satisfaction and a piercing quiver of guilty joy—the only trace of a Trelawny to be found in Brooks's would be their names, fading on the pages of the betting book.

A servant appeared and relieved Clarence of his walking stick, hat, and gloves. He crossed the hall, his bootheels clicking on black and white tiles. He paused to check his appearance in a gilt-framed mirror, adjusting his intricately tied cravat and smoothing back his blond hair. He mounted the stairs, past Roman busts resting stone-faced in their niches. Tonight he felt like those Roman Caesars—a conqueror.

He entered a small parlor on the second floor. The only other occupants were two men checking the Weatherby Racing Calendar off against the studbook. They nodded a greeting, then went back to their serious calculation of the horses and their odds. Clarence asked the wine steward to broach a bottle of the best port.

The room was all masculine refinement: crimson damask wallpaper and red brocade curtains. Clarence flicked back the tails of his coat and sat down in one of a matching set of tufted green leather chairs before the fire. He adjusted the buff and blue cockade in his lapel, which proclaimed him to be an avid member of the Whig party.

Two years ago he had been elected a member of Parliament, representing the Cornish borough of St. Michael. He had an income of more than thirty thousand pounds a year, and in another two years he expected that figure to double. Recently he had purchased a house on Berkeley Square between a baron and a marquess, where soon he hoped to be setting up his nursery with Jessalyn as his wife. And now, something he hadn't even allowed himself to think of before, something he wanted so badly that he knew already he would be devastated if it didn't come to pass.... His patron had hinted over dinner last night that a knighthood might one day be forthcoming.

A rush of exquisite pleasure thrummed through him.
A knighthood.
Sir Clarence Tiltwell. Sir Clarence.

He turned his head at the soft fall of footsteps on the green and red patterned carpet. The club's majordomo approached, followed by the tall dark presence of the twelfth earl of Caerhays.

"This way, my lord," the majordomo said.

My lord.
Clarence noted the deferential way the servant treated his titled cousin, which was slightly less deferential than the way the servant had treated him. Oh, it was nothing overt—a flicker of an eyelid, a certain set of the mouth —but Clarence was aware of it. He swallowed down a sour taste in his mouth.

The cousins' eyes met, and McCady's dazzling smile broke across his tanned face, like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. As always, Clarence found himself irresistibly drawn to that smile. He looked up at his cousin, and his chest felt tight with a strange and convoluted mixture of love and hate, envy and longing.

"Mack. Sit down, please. Some port?" he said as McCady settled with lazy grace into the facing wing chair. The rich leather made a sighing sound as it absorbed his weight. Clarence deliberately hadn't addressed his cousin by his tide. The truth was he couldn't choke it past his throat. A knight, he thought with bitterness, was nothing to an earl.

McCady leaned forward, reaching for the port, and gaslight from the cut-glass luster shimmered off the gold loop that pierced his ear. Clarence frowned. An English gentleman should never make such an uncivilized spectacle of himself.
If I were the earl...
he thought, as he had thought so often in his life. But no matter what he did, no matter how lofty his accomplishments, nothing would ever correct the appalling injustice surrounding the circumstances of his birth.

But then Clarence's frown faded as he reminded himself of the power he had over the man sitting across from him. His cousin, his brother...

"I am afraid I have some unwelcome news," Clarence said.

McCady tilted back his head and finished off the wine in one swallow. He said nothing, but the whitening of the knuckles on the hand that clutched the glass revealed his inner tension. By now, Clarence thought, hoped, McCady Trelawny, the
earl
of Caerhays, must be growing very desperate indeed.

The cousins had seen a lot of each other during the last two years. Since McCady had formed the British Railway Company, the first of its kind, for the conveyance of passengers and freight between Falmouth and London. Since Parliament had set up a committee to oversee the scheme. Since Clarence Tiltwell had maneuvered for himself an appointment on that committee.

Thus far Parliament had granted the BRC permission to lay only a single, experimental line between Plymouth and

Exeter, a distance of some forty miles. Yet the cost of laying those forty miles of track had been staggering, for it had required huge engineering feats: a viaduct, numerous cuttings and embankments. The tunnel alone had taken almost six months to dig—all done by navvies with pick and shovel. It was an enormous gamble for McCady and his company. For only if the committee deemed the experiment viable would Parliament grant the BRC the right to build the remainder of the line.

The committee, Clarence thought,
my committee,
had the power of life and death over McCady Trelawny's railway. Over McCady's dream.

"A division has developed within the committee," Clarence now said, his gaze focused on his cousin's taut face, "a division between those favoring steam power locomotives to operate the new railway and those who want the more traditional method of rope haulage by a fixed engine."

McCady's arrogant mouth tightened slightly. "Rope haulage? You cannot be serious."

"Very serious, I'm afraid. We have voted that the way to resolve the disagreement is to hold trials to determine which method is most effective."

McCady muttered a foul word beneath his breath, and Clarence bit back a smile.

"You can still build your locomotive and run it in the trials," Clarence said. "But others will be allowed to compete as well. The trials will be held in August, over twenty miles of the completed portion of the line. There will be rules and stipulations—I won't go into those now. The winner will be granted the license from Parliament allowing him to supply the British Railway Company with the engines necessary to operate the public tramway."

"That contract was to come to me," McCady said, his voice deceptively soft, and Clarence felt a clenching of fear in the pit of his stomach. He would rather have faced a regiment of highwaymen on Hounslow Heath than McCady Trelawny in an angry and dangerous mood.

Clarence wet his lips. "There are those on the committee—"

"Bugger your bloody committee."

"—who don't trust your judgment," Clarence went on. The fear was fading; he mustn't forget that the power was all his now. This wasn't a knoll in Belgium, and McCady couldn't slash through his enemies with a sword. "They find it difficult to put their faith in an ex-lieutenant from a rather unfashionable line regiment, just recently come into a bankrupted title. A title you inherited from a brother so reviled for his degeneracy that even the devil would cut him dead if he met him on the street. A brother who shot himself, leaving twenty thousand pounds' worth of gaming vowels that have yet to be paid."

"I am not my brother. And the vowels will be paid."

With what?
Clarence wondered, though he didn't say so aloud. "Of course, you are not the complete rakeshame your brother was." He allowed himself a small smile. "But then neither can you claim to be a saint. In truth, there are only one or two on the committee whose feelings against you are so personal. The others merely believe steam locomotion is dangerous and unworkable. You must admit it has not proven very effective thus far."

"That is because it has never been given a chance—" McCady cut himself off. He stared at Clarence with a furious intensity that lifted the fine hairs on the younger man's neck. "Are you one of those
others,
Clarey? Dammit, I deserve that contract. The rail line wouldn't exist if it weren't for me. I
built
the bloody thing!"

The other two men looked up from their studbook as McCady's harsh voice disturbed the genteel silence. "Shhh," one hissed. McCady cast a look in their direction that said,
Bugger off.
He had never cared what others thought of him. There were times, many times when Clarence envied his cousin the freedom that such indifference must bring him.

"There is no need to shout at me," Clarence said, pitching his voice low and hoping his cousin would follow suit. "You can be assured that I argued your point of view. But we must tread warily, Mack. The truth is, Parliament are still very nervous about this whole railway affair. And there are powerful interests opposing it most vigorously—landowners, barge- and stagecoach operators, toll collectors... well, I hardly need name them to you."

"Christ, Clarey." McCady leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. He looked like a man with his back to a cracking dike, trying to hold back a flooding tide with his fingertips. "I cannot wait until August for that contract. I need to raise ten thousand quid by the first of July to meet the interest on my notes or the BRC goes under, and I go with it."

Clarence's chest puffed with righteous anger. "And did you think the way out of your difficulty was to take the thousand pounds you did have and hazard it all on a deuced
horse?"

The reckless smile of the born rebel flashed across McCady's face. "Desperate circumstances require desperate measures. If the bloody nag had won..." He lowered his head, thrusting his fingers through his hair. "Ah, hell, Clarey."

Clarence looked from his cousin's bent head into the dark, winking red eye of his port, hiding the satisfaction he felt. He brought the glass to his lips, savoring the fruity bite of the wine on his tongue. Clarence walked past Fleet Prison nearly every day; he had stared often at the poor wretches thrusting their tin cups through the iron bars, begging for pennies.
Pray remember us poor debtors...

A sudden, sick elation filled him as he reached for the decanter, pouring them both more wine. An ancient name and tide would not spare McCady Trelawny from conviction in a bankruptcy court. And for a man of his fierce arrogance and pride, such a place as Fleet Prison would break him. The way you broke a seasoned hickory stick... by putting your foot on it and pushing hard and slowly, until it cracked with a noise like a scream.

"I saw Jessalyn Letty today."

The statement, coming from nowhere, so startled Clarence that he jerked, nearly knocking over the decanter as he went to set it back on the table. In all these years, not since that ghastly summer, had McCady ever once mentioned Jessalyn. Clarence tried to keep his face blank, but he doubted he succeeded very well. "Really? And where was that?"

"Newmarket."

Clarence frowned. He might have known McCady would come across her there. It illustrated just the sort of scaff and raff she exposed herself to by frequenting the racing scene. He bridled at the thought of all the money wasted on those so-called Thoroughbreds that Jessalyn had inherited from her mother. Coddled in their expensive lodgings, eating their heads off, all for a chance in a few races a year, which they invariably lost. He laid the blame for the entire nonsense at Lady Letty's door. Once Jessalyn was his wife, he would put a stop to it. He would dispose of every one of those worthless nags and forbid her to set foot within a mile of a racecourse.

"I suppose she lost as well," Clarence said, his frown deepening. Jessalyn's propensity for gambling was another thing he would curb once he became her husband.

McCady shrugged. "Miss Letty and I did not part on the best ol terms five years ago, and thus our reunion was not a congenial one. Pity that, for she grew up to be exceptionally beautiful."

McCady toyed with the stem of his wineglass, looking almost bored, yet there was a brooding set to his mouth, and strange shadows moved within the dark depths of his eyes. Clarence felt a shudder of alarm. McCady might have scrupled to seduce Jessalyn when she was only sixteen, but at twenty-one she would be fair game. That terrible summer would start all over again. Once more he would be forced to stand aside and watch while the girl he loved succumbed to that powerful and degenerate Trelawny charm.

But not this time... He was no longer the calf-hearted boy he had been that long-ago summer. Now he was rich and powerful in his own right, and Jessalyn Letty was
his.

He felt his lips stretching into a tight smile as a place deep within him grew hard and cold. "What a happy coincidence that you should mention Miss Letty, Mack. Indeed, you might wish to offer me congratulations, for I have just this week asked Jessalyn to do me the honor of becoming my wife and—"

The fragile port glass shattered in McCady's hand. Dark ruby wine dripped off his fingers, looking like blood.

Clarence half stood, holding out his handkerchief. "Good God, man, you don't know your own strength."

McCady took the delicately embroidered linen, wiping his hand. "She has accepted you?" he asked, his voice so devoid of emotion they might has well have been discussing the weather.

Leaning back, Clarence put three fingers into his fob pocket. He rubbed the two gold sovereigns he always carried for luck. "Of course, she has accepted, but then it was always understood between us that we would marry someday. We've set a date for the first week in June, but truthfully, old boy"—he leaned forward and put on a just-between-us-men smile—"I don't think I can wait that long."