Once in a Blue Moon (45 page)

He hadn't told the guv'nor that part, though. That he hadn't been able to bring the hammer down a second time. That he'd done only the one hand.

This was why it was important that he do this job right. He had planted enough black powder in the railbed to make a bang loud enough to rattle the pewter in the kitchens all the way up in London Town. Enough powder to blow a hundred loco-whatsits into nails and kindling.

A chill roached up Jacky's spine, and he whipped around, peering into the copse of trees behind him. A pair of jackdaws sat on a tree branch, cawing at each other. A rabbit bounded off into the gorse, its white tail flying. Jacky rubbed his ripe nose and shrugged. He was hearing things only because his nerves were on edge. This was private land, patrolled by dogs and guards to keep the curious away, needed especially today what with all the crowds drawn to watch the trials of the loco-whatsits. No, there was no need to worry about anyone sneaking up on ol' Jacky Stout unawares. The guv'nor owned this land; that was why Jacky Stout was here, good and alone, with a burning candle and enough black powder to make one bleedin' hell of a bang.

The guv'nor had said the loco-whatsit would be coming through the tunnel at about four o'clock. Jacky pulled
a
gold-plated repeater's watch out of his coat pocket. The guv'nor had given it to him, a little token of appreciation for taking care of the boy's hands... hand. Jacky cast another look at the spalling hammer and shivered. He squinted at the black numerals on the watch face. He hadn't dared tell the guv'nor that he didn't know how to tell time.

He heard it first, a huffing sound like a teakettle simmering on a trivet over a hot fire. Steam billowed out the mouth of the tunnel in thick white puffs. Swearing, Jacky flung the hammer out of his lap, snatched up the candle dish, and climbed, clawing and scrambling, over the hedge. A fire-breathing iron monster on wheels came hurtling out the tunnel, a red and blue monster.

"Bleedin' Christ!" Jacky exclaimed. Red and blue!

He skidded to a halt, the sweat streaming down his face, his chest heaving. Red and blue, bleedin' hell! The loco-whatsit he wanted was supposed to be yellow and green.

As he trudged back to his lookout behind the hedge, Jacky Stout went over the guv'nor's instructions one more time. The moment the green and yellow loco-whatsit came out of the tunnel, he was to light the fuse. He had already marked off the 450 paces from the mouth of tunnel and set the charge in the rock bed that supported the rails. He'd done it just the way he'd set that charge down in Wheal Patience. He had drilled a hole in the rock with a steel borer and dropped a case of black powder in the hole. He'd pushed an iron nail into the powder and packed clay around it. Then he'd pulled out the nail, leaving a thin hole in the clay. Through this he had threaded a hollow reed filled with fulminating powder for the fuse.

"You see the nose of her coming out of the tunnel, you light the fuse," the guv'nor had said, and he had drawn a lot of scriggly lines on a piece of paper and babbled nonsense about loco-whatsits traveling at such and such a speed and taking such and such amount of time to go such and such a distance. Jacky hadn't understood a word of it, and he didn't have to. He knew what he had to know: powder at 450 paces from the mouth of the tunnel; set the fuse when the green and yellow loco-whatsit came out.

The muscles of McCady's arms bunched and strained as he slung a shovelful of coal into the firebox. Sweat stung his eyes. A whiff of primroses drifted past his nose.

He flung the hair out of his face with a toss of his head as he swung around and thrust the shovel blade into the pile of coal. But his gaze was on the tall, slender girl in a wine-colored riding habit. A yellow straw bonnet covered hair the color of a sunrise at sea, but enough sunshine had found its way beneath the wide brim to tint her cheeks a gold-flecked pink. She looked delectable.

With him on the footplate and her standing on the ground, the top of her head came to the middle of his chest. She leaned forward, as if to speak to him, and slid her hand inside the gaping, unbuttoned neck of his shirt. Soft fingers slid over his sweat-slick flesh, pulling gently on his chest hair and lightly scraping across one nipple. A quick, sensual, secret caress that no one had seen, and that sent an immediate fire to his groin hotter than anything he had going in the belly of the
Comet.

"The carrier pigeons have just come in with the
Essex Lightning's
time," she said, shouting a little to be heard over the hissing, simmering boiler. "Seventy-two minutes."

Dammit, that's fast.
McCady thought. He grunted as he hefted another shovelful of coal. According to the rules, each entrant had to start with the water in his boiler cold and no fuel inside the firebox. Every minute it was now taking him to build up a head of steam was already being counted against his time. The boiler hissed and sucked. Seventy-two minutes. Bloody hell. He wanted to win so badly he could taste the wanting in his mouth, rusty and salty, like blood. He wanted to do it for her.

He had the fire stoked good and hot now. He thrust the shovel straight up into the coal pile and looked down at his wife. His whole body stilled as a feeling that was piercing and sweet shot through him. She was a rare woman, his Jessalyn. He knew that he was nothing without her. Yet because of her, he had the moon and the stars within his grasp.

Jessalyn, his wife, put her fists on her hips and threw back her head to lance his heart with her wide, shining smile. "I should like to come along with you, Lord Caerhays."

He leaned over, offered her his hand, and pulled her up onto the footplate beside him. He thought of that first locomotive ride that long-ago summer: the way she had kept brushing against him, breathing on his neck as she asked her questions in that excited little-girl way, and the purity and innocence about her, the laughing joy. He had wanted her then as he had wanted nothing else in his life before. He still wanted her in that same way.

Now, just as he had done that summer, he put his hands around her slender waist and lifted her into the tender, where she would ride with the coal baskets and water butt. "This one isn't to going explode now, is it?" she teased, and he knew that her thoughts moved along with his, in tandem with memories. Memories that now tasted only sweet.

He leaned over and kissed her mouth, soft and gentle. "We're going to win this, Jessalyn."

She looked at him with eyes that were gray and enduring, like the cliffs of Cornwall. "Make her go fast, McCady. Neck or nothing."

Flashing her a devil-be-damned smile, he turned around and depressed the pedal, while deftly working the two small valve handles in proper unison until the engine began to move, scorching, as always, the backs of his knuckles on the firebox. Valves and cranks and spindles all began to move so fast he would have lost a finger or two if he hadn't done this a thousand times before.

The locomotive clanked and rattled and coughed as it chugged into motion, slowly at first; then it began to pick up speed. Spent steam puffed into the air, carried back to them by the breeze, dampening their faces and smelling of coal soot. They left the Crooked Staff behind them, but crowds of people lined the tracks, cheering and whistling, beating on drums and blowing on horns. Jessalyn laughed and waved and called out to an enormous woman wearing trousers, who tossed what looked like a big yellow onion into her lap.

It all turned into a blur of color and noise, though, as the
Comet
started to fly. The first part of the course was on a downhill slope, and soon they were singing along the rails. Well, perhaps
singing
was not quite the word. Even with the spring suspension he'd invented, the
Comet
moved with a rollicking up-and-down thrust, like a galloping hunter. He would have to work on that, McCady thought. He wanted her rocking like a baby in a cradle.

The wind pulled at his hair and whipped at his shirtsleeves. He could feel the throbbing power of the engine vibrating through the soles in his boots, the pulsating throb-thump, throb-thump that always seemed to him to be mimicking the heartbeat of life. A thatched cottage was there, out the corner of his eye, and then gone in the time it took to blink. Running along the rails through a deep cutting in the earth, then out across an open field stubbled with newly cut hay. Over a three-arched wooden viaduct, looking down into a brambly gill and a trickle of silver water. Ahead of them a hole in the face of a hill, like a wide-open mouth, yawning bigger and bigger, like the maw of a cannon.

I built this,
McCady thought, with a sudden rush of pride. A
Trelawny has actually built something.
Something that would last.

They plunged into the tunnel, and the sudden, dense blackness after the bright light was startling. At first McCady could see nothing, and the noise of the engine sounded louder than the inside of a thunderstorm. Then his eyes picked out the glow leaking around the door of the firebox and sparks shooting out of the smokestack. The black world filled with smoke and steam and the rebounding echoes of his wife's lusty laughter.

They burst out of the darkness into sunshine. He blinked back a rush of tears that came from the suddenness of the bright light. And the sight of his darling Jessalyn with her head thrown back, still laughing.

And suddenly, in that moment, he believed. He believed that the shining light would never die in her eyes, that the passion they shared would last forever. Even if he failed today, even if he faced poverty and disgrace, he would never lose her. Always she would be his Jessalyn, his wife. He believed this, was as certain of it as he was certain of his next breath. He believed that they would have children and grow old together, living dreams and disappointments, tragedy and joy. But together, always together.

Green and yellow. Jacky Stout scrambled over the hedge and ran down the incline, leaping in and out between the cover of the rocks, like a bounding hare. He paused behind the trunk of a lone hawthorn, then dashed to the railbed Green and yellow, green and yellow—

Bleedin' hell.

Dashing like that had nearly put out his candle. He took his hat off and gently flapped the brim at the smoking wick until it flickered into a flame. He put the flame to the reed fuse. It caught with a spit and a hiss.

After whipping around, he ran at
a
crouch, making for the hedge. He leaped over it and slid to the ground, his shoulders pressing against the stones, his legs thrust straight out, his big belly and chest heaving and huffing.

He peered through the crack. There it was, green and yellow, and about in line with the hawthorn tree. Four hundred and fifty paces. He started to laugh. Any second now, any second and bang. Green and yellow, green and yellow... Bang! Green and...

Something behind him. A scrape of leather on rock. His skin prickled all over as if he'd just brushed up against a wasp's nest, and he whirled, shading his eyes with his hands against the glare of the sun. He saw the black, blunted end of the spalling hammer....

Clarence's stomach churned. He took out his watch, glanced at the time, then stuffed it back into his pocket. The
Comet
would just be hitting the tunnel right about now.

"He's a right un, is his nibs."

Clarence looked up into the hooked-nose face of the biggest woman he had ever seen in his life. At least he thought it was a woman, although her sex was open to some debate. Clarence pulled out his handkerchief and held it up to his nose. The woman reeked of onions.

"A hell-born babe, but with a soft heart underneath for all that."

Clarence drew in a careful breath through his handkerchief before he took his nose out.
"I
beg your pardon?"

"His nibs. Caerhays. A navvy now, he knows his woman can swing a pick good as any man. But fancy a gentleman thinkin' such a thing—cor! 'Tis rare for a nob to honor his woman like his nibs's just done, bringing her along with him to run his iron horse as if she 'twere his equal. A soft heart underneath for all that, eh?"

All the blood seemed to rush from Clarence's head, and for a moment he swayed dizzily. He gripped the woman's iron-hard forearm. "Are you telling me Lady Caerhays is on the
Comet?"

"Ais. Right 'longside up there with him, as if she 'twere his equal. And a right pretty picture she made, too. Lookin' like a queen."

"But he couldn't have. He
couldn't
have."

The woman opened her mouth...

And the world exploded into a great, coughing roar.

He'd killed her. Oh, God, he had killed her.

Clarence Tiltwell sat in the fading light of late afternoon, behind a scarred and ink-spotted desk in his room at the Crooked Staff Inn. His eyes burned with unshed tears, and sobs kept welling in his throat. He'd open his mouth, trying to let them out, but they wouldn't come. Over and over he'd do that, open his mouth and gulp at the air, like a drowning man.

He stood up, heavy and stiff, as if his legs had turned to stone. He went to his portmanteau and took out the ivory inlaid case of French flintlock dueling pistols he always carried when traveling. A man couldn't be too careful, he thought, as he lifted one of the deadly weapons from its slot in the velvet-lined case. Not too careful, oh, no, not with highwaymen and footpads allowed to roam loose around the countryside and do their murderous deeds.

He rubbed his thumb over the pistol's engraved silver mounts. It was of a hunting scene, a man on horseback following the pack, tallyhoing as he jumped a fence. Clarence always felt a pang in his chest when he looked at the scene, for it made him think of his father. Not Tiltwell, of course. Henry had always hated hunting. No, his
father...
Caerhays.

He brought the pistol and its case back to the desk with him and lit the candles in the pewter branch to see better what he was doing. He stroked the smooth, cool barrel. He turned the wooden stock over in his hand and pointed the pistol at his face.

Once, when he was a boy, he had gone swimming off Crookneck Cove, and for a few horrifying moments he had been caught in the current. That day he had felt a terror as black as the bowels of hell, a terror made all the more horrible by his utter helplessness in the face of it. He had wanted to explain how it was all a mistake, that he hadn't really meant to go swimming, that he would never, ever do it again, that forever and ever he would always be a good boy if only this once, this one time, he would be spared the punishment he deserved. But the current hadn't cared about little Clarence Tiltwell. The current would have drowned him in spite of all his pleas and promises.

He thought of Jessalyn, of how he had killed her, and it was like that, as if the current had gotten him.

He closed his mouth around the muzzle.

It tasted bitter, of burned sulfur and cold metal, of death. He took the barrel out of his mouth and licked his lips, swallowed. He slowly set the pistol onto the blotter in front of him and wiped his sweating, shaking hands on his doeskin pantaloons.

He didn't know someone had come into the room until he heard the door click shut.

"Ullo, guv'nor."

His head flung up, and he stumbled to his feet. The boy Topper stepped into the light cast by the candle branch. Clarence felt his jaw sag open in shock, for the boy seemed more wraith than human. His eyes wild in a pale and skeletal face. His lips pulled tight against his teeth as if he was holding back a laugh. Or a scream.

Clarence's gaze jerked down to the boy's hands. One was wrapped in bloodstained splints and bandages, the fingers splayed and clawed like a falcon's talons. The other was thin and white, and very whole, and gripping the handle of a spalling hammer. The hammer's poll shone black and wet in the flickering light.

Topper held up his mangled hand, and Clarence's teeth sank into his lower lip, trapping back a whimper. "He did for me, your bullyboy," Topper said.

"But you—you didn't obey orders?" Clarence whined, his voice rising in the end as if in a question, as if Topper was being unreasonable not to understand that if one didn't obey orders, one was punished for it.

Topper hefted the spalling hammer as if he was about to throw it, and Clarence flinched. "Aye, well Stout did for me, so I did for him. I smashed his bleedin' head in. Now I've come to do for you."

Clarence snatched up the pistol and pointed it at the boy's chest. "I'll shoot."

Topper looked from Clarence's face to the pistol and back to his face. He seemed a little surprised but not frightened. He thought a moment, and then his mouth pulled into a smile so tight it didn't even reveal the gap in his front teeth. He shrugged his bony shoulders. "So, if not today, guv'nor, then I'll do for you tomorrow. I can wait. I've nothing better t' do, eh? Can't ride the bleeding 'orses no more, can I?"

"They'll hang you on a six-shilling gibbet, boy," Clarence said. At least he thought he said it. He felt his lips move, but he couldn't hear for the blood roaring in his ears.

Topper shrugged again. "It don't make no nevermind what's done to me. I've got the sooty warts. You heard of the sooty warts, guv'nor? The climbing boy's sickness? I'd just as soon hang tomorrow as watch me privates rot off and take a year adyin'.

"Nay, I likes it better this way," Topper said, and he stroked his own cheek with the poll of the hammer. He did it gently, like a lover's touch. "Think on this, guv'nor. I'll be out there somewheres, ready to do for you whenever the notion takes me. Tomorrow, mebbe, eh? Or the day after.

Then again, mebbe not. Ye see, I ain't got nothin' to lose, and when a bloke's got nothin' to lose, he don't care what 'appens. 'Cept fer revenge. But even revenge is cold comfort when ye're in yer grave, so it's best to draw it out real good whilst ye're alive, eh? Like it's a pleasure just lookin' at ye right now and seein' ye sweat."

Clarence licked his dry lips, and the gun in his hand trembled slightly. A part of him was contemptuous of the boy's lack of will. Another part of him wanted to sob with relief, and the bowel-loosening residue of fear. And a whole different part of him didn't care about any of it. She was dead. What did it matter, what did any of it matter, when she was dead?

Topper had to stuff the handle of the hammer through his belt in order to lift the door latch with his one good hand. He paused at the threshold, turning, and this time the smile parted his lips, revealing the missing teeth. He looked young then, like a schoolboy all set to play some prank while the master was gone from the lecture room. "Oh, by the way, guv'nor. Did ye hear the news? His lordship, the earl o' Caerhays—he came home a winner. Won it 'ands down, he did."

"What?"
Clarence felt his heart stop. Then start up again in harsh, pounding strokes that sounded like a cannon volley going off inside his head. "But the explosion..."

Topper cackled a laugh. "Well, that was a surprise, that explosion. Blew a good twenty feet out o' them shiny new rails. Lucky fer his lordship he'd just gone steamin' past that bit when the bleedin' thing blew." The laughter remained on Topper's face, but his eyes dimmed, turned crafty and hard, and Clarence thought this was far worse than the madness of before. "Mebbe the iron horse was faster than you figured, guv'nor. Or mebbe your bullyboy counted his paces wrong. He always was a stupid un, was Stout. Big an' mean, but stupid."

Clarence stared at the door, watching it swing shut, hearing the latch fall into place again, but he wasn't really aware of any of this. There was this great flapping sound inside his head, as if a thousand crows were flying off at once. She lived, lived, lived. She was alive! And then, on the heels of this stunning joy, came incredible terror.

If she lived, then so did Caerhays.

He sat back behind the desk and picked up the pistol. He turned the chair around so that he could look out the window. A group of men were playing skittles in the alley between the inn and the stables. Some navvies seemed to be having a drinking contest, passing jugs around and slapping one another on the back. An old woman pushed a cart among them, and Clarence smelled roasting chestnuts on the breeze that came through the open crack in the sash. The sun was hugging the tops of the hills, turning the cornfields a burned red, the color of her hair. And glazing the iron rails of McCady's dream, turning it into a ribbon of fire. He would know, Clarence thought, he would know who was responsible for that explosion.

The sun fell behind the hills and it began to grow dark. The yard below had quieted, except for a barking dog and scullery maid drawing water from the well. And the occasional bellow of laughter coming from the open windows of the taproom below.

Clarence watched the hack come trotting along the new rails from the direction of Exeter, watched the man turn into the yard of the Crooked Staff, watched him dismount, tossing the reins and a coin at the stableboy, watched him disappear beneath the thatched eaves that sheltered the entrance to the inn.

Clarence picked up the pistol and turned the chair to face the door.

Bootheels rapped on the bare wooden floor of the hall. Clarence watched the latch depress and turn. He gripped the smooth, oily stock of pistol so tightly his fingers hurt. The door swung slowly open.

He looked into his cousin's face, his
brother's
face, and pulled the trigger.

The pistol's cock swung forward, and sparks flashed as the flint scraped the frizzen. Clarence's hand jerked, and his eyes squeezed shut in anticipation of the bang and recoil.

And nothing happened.

McCady kept coming right at him, and for a moment darkness dimmed Clarence's eyes, and he wondered if he would faint. He flinched when McCady took the gun from his hand.

His cousin looked the gun over with the critical eye of a soldier and tsked, shaking his head, admonishing Clarence as if he were a raw recruit. "Clarey, Clarey... Damp powder. Rust in the barrel. I'm surprised the bloody thing didn't misfire and blow your hand off."

"I swear I didn't know about her," Clarence grated out of a throat raw with fear. "I didn't know you'd taken her up with you on the
Comet.
I swear it, Mack. I swear, I didn't know. I wouldn't have seen her hurt for the world. Not the world."

McCady cocked a brow at him, but he said nothing. He hooked the leg of a wainscot chair, pulling it around so that he could sit down on the other side of the desk. Clarence watched, mesmerized, as his cousin's slender, steam-blistered hands pulled the ramrod from the pistol's recess and extracted the unfired ball and powder from the barrel.

"Mack..."
This is like the current at Crookneck Cove,
Clarence thought.
You explain and explain, and it doesn't do any good.
"I would never hurt Jessalyn. I love her."

"You remember, Jacky Stout, Clarey?" McCady said, and Clarence's chest tightened with renewed fear, squeezing all the breath from his lungs.

McCady took a small swatch of oiled linen from the pistol case and used the ramrod to thrust it up and down the barrel. "You and I did a bit of smuggling with him once— that time someone peached on us to the gaugers." He brushed away the burned gunpowder off the priming pan. He looked up, pinning Clarence with his fierce dark gaze. "Someone bashed poor old Jacky Stout's head in this afternoon. He lived for a while, though. Long enough to talk."

Suddenly his hand shot out, gripping Clarence by the throat. He came up out of his chair, jerking Clarence to his feet. He brought their faces so close together that Clarence could feel the heat of McCady's breath and see strange, glowing lights in his cousin's dark eyes, like tiny, flaring fires. They were the eyes of the man who had slashed and slashed with his sword until the bodies of the enemy piled up around him, and the taste in Clarence's mouth was that of the gun barrel, cold and bitter, and of death.

McCady's lips pulled back over his teeth. "You burned down her house, you bloody bastard. You had her horses nobbled, and you crimped her races. You
hurt
her."

"I only wanted her to marry me. I would have been good to her. I could have made her happy."

McCady opened his fist and let Clarence fall. Clarence's rump hit the edge of the chair, and he had to grip the desk to keep from falling. "You will resign your seat in Parliament," McCady said.

Clarence licked his lips. His mouth was so parched he couldn't swallow. "You have no proof. No real proof."

"I don't need proof. I have influence." McCady took the powder flask from the pistol case and primed the pan. "You understand influence, Clarey, how it works? I know your patron, Lord Arbrury. Close we are, Lord Arbrury and I. Bosom bows." He tapped more of the black powder down the barrel and compressed it with the ramrod. "His only son and I fought on the Peninsula together, and he has this quaint notion that I once saved the boy's life. A nasty word in his ear about you from me, and you could run for cowherd in the poorest borough in Wales and lose." He wrapped a small linen patch around a lead ball and rammed it down on top of the powder.

He looked up again, and Clarence saw no mercy in his eyes. "When I am through with you and your reputation, Clarey, my man, there won't be a club or residence in all of London that won't be denying you the door. No more invitations to Lord So-and-So's rout. No more house parties at the duke of So-and-So's Somerset estate. I am going to take away everything you have ever wanted in this life, Clarey, and then leave you alive to live without it."

It was too much for Clarence; he couldn't take it all in. He knew it was terrible, this punishment that McCady was promising him, but he could focus on only one horror right now. "Please don't tell Jessalyn what I did. Please, don't tell her."

"She already knows. She knows it all. And she never wants to see you again, Clarey. Ever."

A great hollowness pressed down on Clarence's chest. He looked out the window. The dog had stopped barking; the scullery maid was gone. He felt empty inside, a vast emptiness like a great barren desert. He really had lost her, for good. Forever. He wondered how he was going to stand it. "But I love her," he said.