Once in a Blue Moon (31 page)

And Pears primrose soap.

He opened his eyes and saw her reflected in the engine's great brass cylinder. He drank in the sight of her, at once both delicate and wild. She stood at the window, the one that faced the sea. A nimbus of light surrounded her so that she seemed an illusion that would vanish if he so much as breathed. He couldn't see her face, only the slender curve of her back and one gloved hand that rested on the sill. For a moment he thought he saw a hat with yellow primroses sitting there beside her. But it was only a trick of the light or perhaps of memory.

He went to her, ducking under the great beam as it swung down. The bootheel of his crippled leg scraped on the stone floor. She started and spun around. Her face paled, and he saw fear leap into her eyes.

"Don't!" he cried, flinging out a hand. He barely brushed her arm, but something surged and crackled between them, as powerful as the charge of a lightning bolt. She rubbed the place where he had touched her, although her beautiful, intent eyes never left his face. "Don't run away," he said.

Her eyes widened, and her chest hitched as she sucked in a sharp breath. "I'm not running away. I'm not...."

Now that he had her attention he didn't know what to do with it. There was nothing he could say to her. It was ludicrous to think they could ever be friends. A man did not become friends with a woman whose laugh, whose smile, whose very smell left him hard and aching with want.

In the silence that had fallen between them, he became aware once again of the slow, sucking noise of the pump. It was a slithery sound, like skin rubbing against hot, moist skin. Her gaze flashed to his face, then away again, too swiftly for him to read her thoughts. She moistened her lips, drawing his own gaze down to her mouth.

"Did you build this engine? My lord."

"Yes. Miss Letty."

She looked the pump engine over, nodding grimly as if this confirmed her worst expectations of him. But then she surprised him by saying, "It is a fine engine."

"Thank you.... I didn't think you'd be coming back to Cornwall," he said.
God,
he thought,
this conversation is inane.
Why couldn't they talk about what really mattered?

Why had he never been able to talk to anyone about what mattered?

Her wide mouth quivered, nearly smiling. There had always been such a joy within her, he thought, a fire that could never be doused no matter what life forced her to endure.

"We're only here for a short time, my lord. We'll be going up to Epsom Downs come May, for the Derby."

"Blue Moon is healthy then? He'll be able to compete?"

"The Sarn't Major thinks so." She raised her head and fastened her wide, smoky gaze onto his face. "You are still convinced we crimped that race, aren't you? My lord."

"I believe the collision was deliberate, yes. I shouldn't trust that jockey of yours were I you. Miss Letty."

Anger darkened her eyes to the color of the sea at night. "Topper would never do such a thing."

"Your loyalty is admirable, Miss Letty. I wonder..." A strand of her hair had come loose to wrap around her neck. He lifted it between two fingers. It felt like silk and looked like liquid fire. He tucked the curl back up beneath the rolled brim of her hat, allowing his fingertips to linger at her temple. He could see her trembling. "I wonder, if you truly cared for a man... I almost think you would forgive him anything."

He saw understanding flash behind the flat grayness of her eyes. He waited, breath suspended, for her response. Although he didn't know what she could possibly say that would ease the ache in his chest.

"No," she said. "Not anything..."

"Lookit, Miss Letty! Lookit!"

A little girl in pink pinafore and black pigtails burst through the door. She wore a gap-toothed smile so wide the corners of her mouth nearly touched her ears. In one grubby fist she clutched what to McCady's eyes looked like a bunch of weeds.

She skidded to a stop and held the scraggly posy up to Jessalyn. The weeds had been pulled up by the roots, and they trickled dirt onto the newly swept floor. "I picked these for ee, Miss Letty."

Jessalyn accepted the bouquet of weeds with a smile that pierced straight through to McCady's heart. "They're beautiful," she said softly. "Thank you, Little Jessie." She brought the posy up to her face, her nose wrinkling as she fought to hold back a sneeze. McCady caught a pungent whiff of wild garlic. He turned his head to hide a smile.

A pair of jackdaws flew across the open window, black wings flashing, drowning out the thump of the engine with their raucous cawing. "Look!" Little Jessie cried.

McCady's head jerked around, following the direction of the little girl's pointing finger. The sky was empty now, but something had disturbed the jackdaws. He strode to the window, leaning out. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a man running down to the sea, slipping in and out among the rocks, a thick-chested, shaggy-haired man in a miner's coat and ragged drill trousers.

"It was Grandda!" Little Jessie cried, her voice shrieking louder than the crows.

"Jacky Stout," Jessalyn said. She shivered, and McCady was surprised to see fear shadow her eyes.

"Who?"

"Jacky Stout." Jessalyn gathered the little girl against her legs, resting her palm on her head. "Little Jessie is the baby we found here in the mine that day." Startled, McCady looked down at the child. The pale, fey face that stared back up at him stirred a distant memory. She had a sharply pointed chin and tilted catlike eyes. Her black braids hung nearly to her waist, and a hole in her pantalets revealed a scabbed knee. Surely this child was too old. But then it had been over five years. "Jacky Stout is her grandfather," Jessalyn said.

"I remember him. I thought he'd been hanged for poaching"

"I don't like Grandda," Little Jessie said. "He hit me once an' called me a—a bastid. Mam says he's good for nothing but gallow's fodder."

McCady hunkered down on his heels so that he was eye to eye with her. Little Jessie. Without thought his hand came up to cup her cheek, as if needing to touch her to prove that she was real. For so long that summer had seemed more dream to him than memory.

"I doubt it was your grandfather," McCady said softly. "It was probably some curious tinner come from far afield and looking for work."

"It was Grandda," Little Jessie insisted.

He looked up at Jessalyn, and although her face had gentled, he caught the lingering shadows of fear in her eyes. He wanted to ask her about Jacky Stout and why she was so afraid of him when she had not been afraid that summer. But his wife came tripping through the door just then, her pretty face alight with happiness. Jessalyn stepped back with a guilty flush, as if she'd been caught doing something wicked just by speaking with him.

"Oh, you must come see!" Emily cried. "Jessalyn... my lord." Color blossomed on her cheeks as her gaze fell on her husband. "You must come. They are having a
hurling
contest. Some of the miners are trying to see who can heave an old pit prop the farthest." She captured a smile with her hand. "I have never known the like."

Shrieking with excitement, Little Jessie ran to Emily, and Jessalyn followed more slowly. McCady straightened but remained where he was. The engine tender came in to stoke the fire, and the place suddenly seemed crowded.

After that he told himself he would stay away from her. But he felt as if there was something alive inside him that had to be fed and instead he was slowly starving. So he kept seeking her out, with his eyes, with his nerve endings. And when he saw her break away from everyone and walk alone to the cliffs, he followed her.

The swiftly running tide swallowed the narrow beach, making a soft, rushing sound, like a pulse. She sat upon a rock hoary and shaggy with weeds and lichen. He sat beside her. She stiffened, but this time she made no move to run away. There were only the two of them and the gulls.

His hands trembled to touch her. He clenched them into a fist between his spread knees.

He spotted a single primrose growing in a bit of dirt within the cleft of a rock. He plucked the flower, twirling the stem between his fingers. The moon was coming up early in the afternoon sky, pale and half spent. It was not a blue moon.

"It is so wild and beautiful here," she said, breaking the silence between them. "Yet I was thinking of how this will all look in a few months, covered with mining attle and gritty black slag heaps."

He did not look where she did—at the yellow water gushing from the adit at the foot of the cliff, already staining the sand, swirling like spilled paint into the sea. He looked at her. Wisps of hair, the color of a campfire at night, curled about her face. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent. Her mouth... her mouth...

He looked down and saw that he had crushed the primrose in his fist. He opened his hand, letting the bruised flower fall into the muddy sea. "I thought you would be pleased that I have opened the mine," he said.

"Oh, I am, I am. I was only being selfish."

A moment passed in silence as they watched a small plover scurry over the dripping rocks, a sand eel wriggling in its beak. She started to push herself up, and he helped her with a hand beneath her elbow. A gentleman's touch, an acceptable touch, a proper touch. But once they were on their feet, when he could have let go, when he
should
have let her go, he did not. He could feel her heat through the thin muslin sleeve of her dress, feel her trembling. "Jessalyn..."

She pulled her arm from his grasp. "I wish—" She stopped the words by sinking her teeth into her lower lip, hard enough to leave imprints like tiny cuts.

He stared into her face. Her wide gray eyes impaled him, piercing his heart. "What do you wish?"
I would bring you the stars in the palms of my hands if I thought that it would only make you laugh again.

"Cor, Becka girl. Ee've got about as much sense as a peahen with no head."

Becka Poole pulled her fringed shawl close beneath her neck and folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself. He wasn't coming. He had said he would, but he wasn't going to come. Like as not he was back in his room at Caerhays Hall right this very minute, sitting afore the fire, toasting his toes, and laughing to think of her outside all alone at midnight, a prey for corpse lights and with a gale abrewing.

She touched her hagstone for luck just as lightning flared in a liverish sky. The wind had come up, high and thick with salt. It whistled like a pierced pig's bladder and set the boughs of the hawthorn and wild nut trees streaming out like flying witch's hair.

She huddled against the stone wall of the little dairy where she had arranged to meet him. Inside, some cheeses were starting to ripen, and their smell came to her on the wind. As did the sweet scent of lavender water. She had splashed a whole bottle of it all over herself before she'd changed into her best Sunday meeting frock. She hoped she hadn't overdone it.

Something curled around her legs, and she caught a scream with her hand before it could come flying out of her mouth. It was that wretched cat, Napoleon. She had just managed to calm her thudding heart when for some reason known only to himself the beast started yowling as if he'd just caught his tail in a mousetrap.

"Hist yer noise," she whispered loudly, flapping her hands at him. Dear life, she had to shut him up, or Miss Jessalyn would be out in two shakes to see what had him so overset. "Shoo, now. Off to bed with ee."

The runty orange cat streaked across the courtyard and leaped onto the front parlor windowsill. The window must have been left open a crack, for he pushed it with his paw and disappeared inside.

"Miss Poole?"

Becka whirled around, nearly leaping out of her skin. She pressed her hand against her breastbone because her heart was beating fit to burst out of her chest. Lightning flashed. He looked like a painting she had seen once of the Archangel Gabriel, his golden hair swirling in the wind, his tall, broad-shouldered body silhouetted against a black sky.

"I was thinking 'tis nae likely I'd be finding ye out this night after all," he said. He was wearing only a shirt that fluttered with his hard breathing. She wondered if he'd run all the way. She hoped not. Running wasn't good for the lungs, especially when they got to heaving like bellows against the walls of the chest. "Nae with this wind," he added.

"Oooh, this wind! 'Tes blowin' so hard a body needs two hands to hold down the hair on his head."

His smile glimmered like a silver trout in the dark. He had the straightest teeth, and they were very white. It occurred to her suddenly that she didn't often see him smile.

"Were
ee
born on a Wednesday?" she asked. "'Tesn't good to be born on a Wednesday. I were born on a Tuesday. Wednesday's child be full of woe. Tuesday's child—"