Once in a Blue Moon (34 page)

Jessalyn entered a room that was decorated in a soft color scheme of ocher and citron and a mismatch of styles that all somehow seemed to go together. "You have done wonders with the house already," she said.

Emily flushed as she set the vase of flowers on a pier table between a pair of silver candlesticks. "Much of this furniture came from my mother's attics."

It occurred to Jessalyn that she knew all about catching pilchards and training racehorses, yet she was sadly lacking in domestic talents. Emily might be a corn merchant's daughter, but she was better suited to be an earl's wife than Jessalyn would ever have been.

"We can afford very little at the moment," Emily said in a cheerful lilt, sounding as if she truly did not care that the whole world knew her husband to be on the precipice of ruin. Yet Jessalyn noticed that she nervously fingered the fringe of the tippet she wore around her shoulders. "Caerhays says Wheal Patience should start paying its way soon. He is hoping for a windfall of profits to settle the interest on those monstrous railway loans."

"There is the baby," Jessalyn couldn't keep herself from saying. "And the settlement that will come to you from your father once the child is born."

Emily pressed her palm to the swell of her stomach. "Oh, yes, there is that. The babe might come in time, and it might be a boy. But though I couldn't bear to see Caerhays flung into Fleet Prison, I cannot help wishing he didn't have to be saved in that way. He is so proud. I think that he would so much rather save himself." The blue eyes she lifted to Jessalyn's face were shadowed with worry and a kind of sick yearning. "He is not the sort of man to have married for money. Oh, I know he claims it is a Trelawny tradition, but he says it with such a bitterness in his voice—"

Emily froze at the rap of bootheels on the stone-flagged floor of the great hall. Color flooded her cheeks, and she seemed to hold her breath. Then they heard the deep rumble of Duncan's voice and an answering giggle from Becka.

"Oh!" Emily exclaimed with a soft little sigh. "I thought it might be... He's gone to Penzance to coddle his precious locomotive. Something arrived by the stage from a foundry in Birmingham yesterday. Copper tubes, I believe he said, although what on earth their purpose is I haven't the least notion."

Emily's face came alive as she spoke of the earl, and her gaze kept drifting to the door as if still she hoped he would pass through it, even though he was not expected.

Jessalyn pictured the two of them discussing his inventions over their coffee cups at breakfast. Or they could have walked along the beach at Crookneck Cove, chasing the gulls and the waves and laughing while he promised that she would be one of the first to ride on his new locomotive. Perhaps it was at night, when he held her in his arms, that he whispered of his dreams, asking her to share in them, while she touched his man's body, touched his man's soul.

And Jessalyn had had to look away from Emily's bright and lovely face because she could not bear such thoughts.

Yet now, in the dark and empty hours of the storm-ravaged night, they came to her again, unbidden, unwelcome, unbearable. Emily lying in McCady's arms, touching, touching...

She pushed herself away from the window. Suddenly she wanted to feel the violent fury of the rain beating against her face, to be swallowed by the black night, to be buffeted and plundered by the wind. She wanted to fling out her arms and embrace the storm, to be ravished by it.

She threw off her night clothes and struggled into Mrs. Babbage's rough fustian dress, not bothering with shift or stays. She had no cloak, but she knew there would be a set of oilskins and seaboots in the kitchen, for no Cornish house would be without them. Taking up a candlestick, she stepped into the hall.

Only a single glass taper lamp lit the dark walnut-paneled passage. She passed Emily's door and then his. They did not share a bedroom, but then no fashionable couple of the
ton
did. Somehow she found herself pausing in the middle of the hall, ears tensed for a sound, his voice, his footstep, beyond the old-fashioned iron-banded barrier to his chamber.

The door swung open, so startling her that she nearly dropped the candle. Hot wax splattered, missing the dish and burning her hand. She stared up at him, eyes wide, as she sucked the stinging web of skin between her finger and thumb.

The room was dark behind him, except for the flickering orange glow from the fire. Shadows lay like blades across his face. He was bare from the waist up. A light mat of dark hair limned the bulges and hollows of his chest. He stood with one arm braced, his hand pressing so hard against the jamb that the veins stood out against his skin. She could imagine the power of him, how he would feel beneath her hands.

"What are you doing still up?" he demanded in a voice as dark and shadowed as the rest of him. "I thought you had a headache."

Her breath came out in a soft whistle. "I—I thought to go for a walk along the cove."

"It's high tide. The sea is battering the cliffs, and there's no beach to walk on. It's too dangerous."

He took a step closer to her, into the hall. Water dripped from his long, windblown hair, and his wet buckskins lay plastered to his flesh, slick and shiny like the coat of a seal.

She wet her lips, swallowed. "Yet you braved the storm."

He said nothing.

"Well, perhaps I'll read then. If I might borrow a book?" He shrugged, and the naked muscles of his chest flexed. "Of course."

She turned and walked with stately dignity down the hall, although her insides were frothing and frizzing like a glass of effervescent lemon. Behind her the old wood creaked like dry bones.

She stopped and spun around so abruptly he nearly walked into her. His hand grasped her arm. He let it go immediately, but it was not soon enough. Jessalyn had to fight for the breath to speak.

"I can find my own way down."

He gave no answer, and when she turned and descended the stairs, he came after her.

He opened the door to the library for her. But he straddled the threshold, so that she had to walk by him, so close her sleeve brushed his bare chest. He smelled of the rain and wet leather and the cool night air. Her nipples, naked of a modest shift, tightened and scraped against the coarse fustian. Never before had she been so aware of her own body. She felt all tight and hot, as if her flesh were swelling and pressing against her skin.

He lit an ormolu patent lamp that sat on the massive pedestal desk. Papers were spread in disarray beneath it. Cost sheets, she noticed, for Wheal Patience. Covered in red ink.

He splashed brandy into a toddy glass, drank it down, and poured another. Carrying the freshened glass, he went to the hearth and tossed more coal onto the fire. Flames leaped up the chimney, brightening the room and bronzing his skin with a soft golden glow. Never had she been more aware of him as a man. The strong, slender sinews of his sun-browned hands. The way his naked chest expanded and subsided with his every breath. The way the damp leather breeches clung to his slender hips and long, lean thighs.

He spun around suddenly, and the firelight danced off the facets of the glass in his hand. He lifted it and one brow in a silent offer.

Her mouth was so dry she had to swallow before she could speak. "No. Thank you."

He took a step toward her, and she scooted around him as if he were a snake lying across her path. She put the desk between them and pretended to be fascinated with the contents of the podium bookcases, which were mostly empty.

His voice came from behind her. "We haven't much of a collection, I'm afraid. The Trelawnys have never been ones for scholarship, and books are easy to dispose of when one is sadly dipped and in need of the ready in a hurry."

She lifted her head and saw his reflection in the grilled glass doors. His face was dark and brooding. Their gazes met and held as if locked, and Jessalyn stopped breathing. Outside, the wind moaned and the rain beat violently against the tightly closed shutters.

She fumbled open the case and pulled out a slim red leather volume, not even bothering to check the title.

He set the toddy glass down with such force it chimed like a dinner bell. When she turned around, he was in front of her, blocking her escape. She backed up until her bottom struck the sharp corner of the desk. Her name, carried to her on the sudden wash of his hot breath, was drowned out by the howl of the wind.

Rivulets of water had trickled from his hair onto his shoulders and chest. It glistened on the bare flesh, matting the hair into swirls around his nipples, funneling down over ridges of muscle, following a dark arrow to the waistband of his tight, low-slung buckskins, where they gaped open, the top two buttons left negligently undone.

She jerked her startled gaze back up to his face.

He took a step toward her, and her breath left her chest in a low, keening moan. His mouth had taken on a ruthless slant, and the yellow sunbursts flared bright and hot in his eyes. He smelled of brandy now and a feral heat. A leashed violence seemed to shimmer in the air around him like heat waves off a smithy's forge. As if he were a wild animal that had been caged too long and had gone suddenly mad from his captivity.

He will take me,
she thought,
take me here on the floor of the library with his wife upstairs.
He would take her, fiercely and hungrily, the way a man took a woman he wanted.

And she would let him.

Suddenly he spun away from her. His back shuddered, and the words sounded torn from him. "Get out of here, Jessalyn. Now."

Jessalyn fled the room and didn't stop until she was safe within her own bedchamber with the door shut and bolted behind her. She leaned against the wall, her chest jerking with the effort to get enough breath.

Nothing had happened. He hadn't touched her, barely spoken to her, only looked at her. Yet she felt ravished.

Jessalyn walked across the soot-dusted stones of the courtyard, her wooden pattens clattering, echoing like pebbles dropped down an empty well.

All that was left of End Cottage was the tall ornamental chimney stack. With its scalloped cap and red and yellow checkered brickwork, the chimney looked sad and lonely thrusting up among the broken, blackened beams and charred rubble. Like a gaudy strumpet long past her prime.

Jessalyn tasted the grit of ash on her teeth. The smell of burned wood pinched her nose. The sadness and loneliness were there, too, within herself. She had known love in this house, and security. She told herself that it was not the house that had made her feel these things. The essentials in her life remained: the people she cared for and who cared for her and Cornwall, with its moors and cliffs and, always, the enveloping sea.

The patch of primroses still bloomed against the paddock fence. She picked one, stroking the starburst of yellow petals across her cheek, closing her eyes to let its faint, sweet scent banish the scorched smell of destruction.

An angry yowl broke through her thoughts. Napoleon streaked across the courtyard until he was almost upon her, then skidded to a stop and sauntered slowly, as if he hadn't been all
that
pleased to see her. Laughing, she bent to pick him up. "Where have you been, you wretched cat?" she said, rubbing noses with him. He'd been missing since the fire, and she'd feared he had run off for good.

Napoleon burst into a raucous purr. But after a moment the fickle beast squirmed to be let down. Tail swishing, he began to stalk a robin that was searching among the stones for moss to build a nest.

Jessalyn set out across the headland toward the cliffs. The rain had started the gorse to blooming, so bright a yellow it hurt the eyes. The moors were a palette of earthy colors from the pea green of new grass to the light biscuit brown of salt-scrubbed rocks. But the sea was all sulky gray, muttering and grumbling across the sand. In the cove below a flotilla of fishing boats was dressing sails to catch a sudden shift in the wind. A pair of sea gulls flapped across the sand, fighting over a fish head.

A patch of familiar blue linsey-wool fluttered on the sea side of the cliff hedge. Jessalyn called out Becka's name.

The girl started to run, then stopped, turning her face into the stones. Her shoulders shuddered, and Jessalyn heard choked and strangled sobs. She approached slowly, not wanting to frighten the girl into hying off.

She touched her bent head. "Becka, m'love. What has happened?"

Becka's answer came out muffled by tears and a red cotton kerchief.

Jessalyn used her fingers to stroke the sweat-damp strands of hair off Becka's face. "Is it Duncan?"

Becka blew loudly into the kerchief, then took her nose out. It was pink as a gooseberry, and her plump cheeks were white and blotched with tears like a soggy bun. But the scar looked red and welted, newly cut. "Me heart, she be b-brokennn!" she cried, the last syllable ending in a wail.

Jessalyn gathered Becka into her arms, stroking her heaving back. "If he has compromised you, m'love, I shall compel him to marry you."

Becka shied away from her. "Ooh, God spare me. I bain't never marryin' Mr. Duncan. Never!" Her eyes grew round as jingle wheels. "Ee can't force me, can ee?"

"No, of course not. Not if you don't want to."

Becka's plump chin took on a stubborn tilt. "Good. 'Cause I doesn't. Why, what would he be wantin' with the likes of me? I'd be of no more use to him than a mule with a wooden leg." She flung back her hair, twisting her face toward the merciless eye of the sun. "Look at me! What man wants a woman what looks like this?"

"Someday there will be a man, a decent, kind man, who will love you for what you are," Jessalyn said softly.

Becka dashed tears out of her eyes. "Oh, aye, mebbe if he be ugly as a two-headed toad hisself, but not un like Mr. Duncan." She drew in a deep, shuddering sigh. "And he hasn't complicated me neither, 'cause I haven't been lettin' him do no coosing around. Well, mebbe I did allow him to kiss me oncet. Mebbe twice. But no more. And though me heart be broken into a million crims, ee won't see me going all historical—ascreechin' and atearin' out me hair over a man. Look at me hands, calm they be."

The hands she held out were red and work-chapped and nail-bitten, and tears welled in Jessalyn's eyes. She closed her fingers around Becka's rough ones, but Becka jerked away from her and took off running down the cliff path. Jessalyn thought about following, but she could offer the girl little comfort. It was that wretched Duncan she had to see and get set straight on a thing or two.

She returned to the hall, only to be told by one of the earl's two stable hands that the manservant had gone down to Wheal Patience. Something had got to rattling in the pump engine, the boy said, and Duncan was one of the few coves around these parts, besides the earl, who knew how those infernal things were put together. Determined to have it out with the man immediately, Jessalyn set off for the mine.

She passed a mule train, heavy with panniers of tin bound for the coinage hall in Penzance. Perhaps some of the red ink on the earl's cost sheets would soon be turning to black, she thought. As she got within sight of the mine, she heard a party of bal-maidens singing in the washing hut and the thump and clatter of the tin stamp.

The engine had just been coaled; thick smoke belched from the chimney, drifting across the scarred moors. Behind it rolled the sea, a bottle green, the color of Clarence Tiltwell's eyes. Odd that she would think of him now. Or perhaps not so odd, after all this talk of marriage. If she married anyone now, it would be Clarence. Yet still she straddled the fence, unable to tell him yes or no.

She found Duncan within the enginehouse, hunkered down before the boiler. A piece of the brass plating had been removed, and he had his hand thrust inside a mess of tubes so tangled they looked like a plate of Italian noodles. He was wrenching at something with a spanner, and she wondered how he kept from scorching his fingers. Steam hissed and plopped in scalding drops onto the floor, and she could hear a steady throb thump and the suck and splash of water, which meant the pump was working.

The enginehouse had lost much of the gaiety of opening day. It was the hub of a working mine now, filled with strips of canvas, miners' picks and shovels, storm lanterns, and kegs of blasting powder. Already the whitewashed walls were turning ocherous from the coal smoke, and the miners' dirty boots had left tracks of congealed grease and dried mud on the stone floor. Duncan, however, looked magnificent—stripped down to shirtsleeves and a yellow swansdown waistcoat that matched his hair, the muscles of his arms and back bunching with each twist of his wrist.

The mine was between shifts, and so the house was empty of people. Besides Duncan, there was only a single tinner, who was even now climbing onto a round iron bucket the Cornish called a kibble, lurching into the shaft, bumping out of sight, and leaving Jessalyn alone with McCady's manservant.

He turned and looked up at the sound of her footsteps. "Miss Letty? If ye're looking for his nibs, he's gone down—"

She stopped before him, her hands fisted on her hips. "You have broken Becka's heart, and I demand to know what you are going to do about it."

He tossed the spanner onto the stone floor with an angry clatter. He stood up, wiping his palms on a stained rag. "Her heart is no more broken than mine be. She willna have me."

Jessalyn's eyes widened in surprise. "You've asked her to marry you?"

"Aye, I've tossed her the handkerchief a'right," he said, the words coming out in a bitter rush. "And she tossed it right back at me. She told me she was a drunken tinner's ugly daughter, and I shamed her with my offer because I didna mean it, and if I meant it, I'd likely regret it. She said I'd soon get so pucky-sick of her scarred face, I'd be out for a lark with any moll or whore-bird who caught my eye, thereby shaming her even worse."

"Oh, Becka..."

He jerked his head. "Oh, aye. She thinks 'tis nae but lust as put the words into my mouth. She thinks some sort of witch she calls a knacker has put a lust spell on me. She even gave me something to counteract the magic." He tugged open his shirt and drew out a shriveled brown-green lump that was strung through the middle with a bit of twine. He held it up, shrugging. "Aweel, I had to put it on. I'd ae hurt her feelings otherwise. Do ye know what 'tis?"

"It's a mummified frog."

He dropped the charm as if it had suddenly been jolted into life with one of those electric currents and had tried to leap out of his hand. Jessalyn laughed, and after a moment his laughter joined with hers, though he sobered first. "Oh, Becka..." Jessalyn sighed. She stared at the man's averted face, at the finely sculpted nose and cheekbones, the sensual lips. "You must know you are a very handsome man, Duncan. I should imagine you are... well, that women might..."

His beautiful mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile. "Aye, ye've the right of it. I shave this phiz of mine every day. I know I've got what ye might call pleasing features. And I won't deny there's been a time or two when I've used them to get beneath a woman's skirts. But a straight nose and a well-shaped mouth... they're all chance. A good heart doesna lie behind a handsome face, no more than evil goes about dressed as ugliness." He looked at her out of tawny eyes that were pure and deep as springwaters. "There is in Miss Poole a sweetness, a goodness of heart the like of which I've never met before. I would count myself the luckiest man in the world if she would consent to share my life. And I would spend that life making sartain she never regretted her choice."

"Oh, Becka... Perhaps if I talked to her, I might convince—"

He shook his head, and his mouth softened into a gentle smile. "Nay. Don't ye worry, Miss Letty. I'll talk her round to my way of thinking, given time." The smile deepened, crinkling the tiny fan lines around his eyes. "And my word as a gentleman's gentleman: I willna take her to my bed till it can be as my wife."

But Jessalyn was beginning to wonder if perhaps more ardent lovemaking on Duncan's part might be just what was needed to convince Becka of the sincerity of his feelings. She had opened her mouth to offer a delicately worded suggestion when the stone floor shivered beneath her feet as if the earth had caught an ague.

Her startled gaze flew to Duncan's face. He had his head cocked toward the main shaft. A heartbeat later a great blast shook the enginehouse, and the ground heaved violently, knocking Jessalyn to her knees. Clouds of brown dust billowed out of the pit. A faint odor of sulfur singed the air.

Shouts rebounded up the walls of the shaft; boots rang on stone. Through a haze of dust and smoke, Jessalyn saw a head top the ladder, eyes blinking molelike in a blackened face. In the stunned silence that had followed the explosion, Jessalyn could hear water dripping. The candle in the miner's hat flickered in the gloom.

"There's been a fall on the seventh level!" he shouted as Duncan sprang forward to help him. "A bad un. There's four, mebbe five trapped." He hacked a cough. "Air's gone thick with dust. And tes flooding."

Another man climbed out the pit in a temper, jerking the hard hat off his head and flinging it at the wall. "The shorings all come down on the back half of the winze. Some bleedin' fool set off powder down there."

More miners spilled out of the black hole in the ground, looking like bog creatures with their muddy faces and wet, filthy clothes. One especially, with his squat-legged, thick-bellied body and greasy, shaggy hair. He held a hand up to his hat, shading his mud-splashed face with his arm. Hunching his back, he ducked under the great swinging beam rod, disappearing behind the pump engine. But for a flash of a second their gazes had met—and Jessalyn could almost have sworn she'd been looking into the snake gray eyes of Jacky Stout.

Just then someone cried out from below that a man was coming up on the kibble with a broken arm. Jessalyn had hurried over to the shaft head to see if she could help when an echo came to her as if carried along on the gauzy ribbons of smoke and dust:
If ye're looking for his nibs, he's gone down—

She seized Duncan's arm so hard she nearly pitched the both of them into the pit. "Where is Lord Caerhays?"

The face he turned to her was ash gray. "One of the tutworkers discovered a new tin-bearing lode. His nibs and the mine captain went down to see it for themselves." The color seemed to blanch from his eyes as he spoke. "The seventh level. He's on the seventh level."

Jessalyn shook her head hard, as if by doing so she could shake off his words. "No. Oh, God..."

Something pressed against her chest, cutting off her breath. He was down there, in the ground, buried beneath tons of rock and dirt, the black water rising, filling his mouth, smothering his screams.... Get him out, she had to get him out.

A pile of mining gear and tackle lay heaped in one corner. She ran over to it; her hands clawed through metal and wood. She picked up a shovel, then saw something better: a rock drill. She started back to the shaft head.

Duncan tried to pry the heavy iron drill from her shaking grip. She tugged back. She couldn't bear the thought of McCady's dying down there while she did nothing. "Let go of me, damn you."

"Ye canna go down there, Miss Letty," Duncan said, laying a big hand on her shoulder, stilling her. "Ye'd only be in the way. And there's Lady Caerhays, she'll be needing ye."