Once in a Blue Moon (8 page)

He aimed a venomous look at his son that promised trouble later. Clarence flushed and looked away.

As if indifferent to the storm raging around him, Lieutenant Trelawny had jumped onto the steam engine to shovel more coal into the firebox. Henry Tiltwell started forward. Then, as if remembering his own dire predictions, he took a hasty step back. "This is my land, my tramway.
I
forbid this spectacle. Do you hear me? I forbid it!"

He was shouted down by several of the guests. Having heard about the iron horse that had blown up in Wales, they now hoped to be witness to a similar gruesome exhibition.

Jessalyn was the only one to step up for a closer look at the invention. The frame for the boiler was made of wood strengthened by iron plates. It rested on two large wheels in front and two much smaller wheels in back. To her eyes, the engine seemed a tangled coil of metal tubes and pipes. Hitched to the locomotive, like a cart to a pony, was a tender loaded with wicker baskets of coal and a big water barrel.

The boiler began to sing as it raised more steam. It hissed and breathed as if it were alive, and steam issued from every joint like sweat. It swayed and shuddered on the tramway tracks like a great beast gathering itself to spring. Jessalyn stared at the man who had created the beast, fascinated by the way the sweat stood out on his face and the muscles of his arms and back bunched and flexed beneath his thin lawn shirt as he heaved coal into the glowing red mouth of the firebox. She could not imagine an earl's son engaging in such rough manual labor. Her grandmother, she knew, would be scandalized, yet for some reason the sight excited her.

She called up to him. "I should like to come along with you, Lieutenant Trelawny."

He turned and looked down, and their gazes met. A passionate heat blazed in his eyes, brighter than the fire he stoked. She knew his own excitement had nothing to do with her, but Jessalyn felt weightless suddenly, as if she had just stepped off a cliff and discovered that she could fly.

He slammed the damper shut with a clang and jumped down in front of her. "This is not a merry-go-round."

He had rolled up his sleeves above his elbow, and sweat glistened on the skin of his forearms. The wind pressed his shirt against his chest and ruffled the lace at his throat. She wanted to touch him, though she wasn't sure in what way. Just touch him.

"You claim that it's safe," she said. "What better way to prove it?"

"Miss Letty, young ladies do not ride on locomotives."

"Why not? Who says so? We ride on horses and drive in carriages. I drove a jingle this afternoon, even though Gram said it wasn't quite the done thing. Please, Lieutenant Trelawny. I would consider it an honor to ride on your splendid machine."

He stared down at her, his mouth hard. He drew in a sudden, sharp breath. "I ought to be kicked from here to London for doing this. You won't thank me for it later, you know." His hands fell around her waist, and he lifted her onto the footplate, coming up after her. "Don't touch the back of the firebox," he warned. "It's hot."

"Jessalyn!" Clarence came striding toward them. "What are you doing? Mack, you can't possibly allow her to—"

Henry Tiltwell slammed a heavy palm into his son's chest. "Let her go with him if she wants. This nonsense was your idea, boy. And it's her neck."

"Jessalyn, come down from there this instant," Clarence commanded, although he had stopped behind the barrier of his father's hand.

Jessalyn pretended not to hear him. The engine vibrated beneath her feet, making her belly tingle. There was life within this monster that breathed and shuddered and trembled, a life that had sprung directly from the heart and mind of the man beside her.

He was studying a pair of dials on the boiler. She leaned over his shoulder, and the wind blew his hair against her neck. "This one is not likely to explode, is it?" she asked, only half teasing.

He glanced sideways at her, bringing their faces closer together. His lips twisted into a wry smile, and she felt her mouth break into a wide grin, heard herself giggle. It was as if she were two Jessalyns: the girl who stood before this strange man, breathless, her heart fluttering with fear and excitement, and the wiser girl, watching from a distance and seeing what a fool she was making of herself, what a child he must think her to be.

"Are you getting cold feet?" he asked.

Actually her feet were becoming quite warm. The metal footplate absorbed heat from the firebox, so that it was like standing on top of a sizzling frypan.

"What you saw that day was an experiment for a steam-powered road carriage," he said. "This is different. This time I know what I'm doing."

"I am relieved to hear it. I wouldn't want to meet my end as little bits and pieces strewn along Mr. Tiltwell's tramway."

He laughed, and she felt the heat of his breath against her cheek. There was not much room on the tiny footplate. Every time one of them moved, their bodies would touch: Hip would rub against hip; her shoulder would brush his arm; his thigh would press against her bottom. She was so very aware of him. Of his smell: grease and soot and male sweat. Of the hard strength of his man's body where it touched hers. Of the fire burning in his dark eyes, revealing the brain behind the power that throbbed and pulsed around them.

She stared up into his face. She couldn't understand why, but the sight of him made her chest hurt. "How does it work?"

"Well, to put it simply—"

"Very
simply, please," she said, laughing.

"Very simply then. The water in the boiler is heated until it produces steam. The steam from the boiler is admitted into the cylinders." He pointed to one of a matching pair of fat tubes bolted to the boiler. "When the steam enters the cylinder, it expands, pushing the piston—a thick bar, sort of like a hammer—which moves the rod, there"—he pointed at an iron arm that ran from the cylinder to one of the big front wheels—"which turns the driving wheel."

She lifted her smiling mouth and bright eyes up to his. "It's wonderful!"

A dark flush stained his cheekbones. She thought it odd that he would be embarrassed, but perhaps he had received little praise in his life. "The spent steam escapes through the chimney stack into the air," he finished, his gaze averted now from hers.

He reached for a metal lever, and his bare arm pressed against her breast. The monster sucked and breathed around them while Jessalyn stood motionless, unable to breathe at all.

He jerked back as if he'd just brushed against the hot metal of the firebox, and Jessalyn's own flesh burned where he had touched her.

"Perhaps it would be better if you rode in the tender," he said, his voice rough.

Before she could object, he lifted her into the car behind them. She found a place to stand between the baskets of coal and the water butt. He depressed a pedal with his right foot, while pulling on a metal pin and releasing a lever with his left hand. The smokestack huffed and puffed, blowing steam into the air. The pistons slid through the cylinders with hammerlike thuds, and the great beast came truly alive.

The locomotive lurched forward, thumping and hopping like a giant locust. Puffing and grunting and snorting, it clattered along the iron tracks toward a setting sun that cast pink shadows across ripening fields of barley and wheat. The steady thrust, thrust, thrust of the piston seemed to enter Jessalyn's blood until her heart beat along with the pulsing engine. She clutched her hat to keep it from being snatched away by the wind, and she laughed out loud. She knew she had galloped faster many times, but riding a horse had never been like this. This was the only thing man had invented that moved
itself.

She saw the stone walls of Larkhaven through billows of steam. She thought she spotted her grandmother on the terrace, but they were already past it before she had time to wave. They crested a hill, then lumbered along the down-slope, picking up speed. At the base of the hill the rails cut across a small lane. Straddling the tracks, like a fat brooding hen, was a cart stacked high with hay. A farmer stood beside his balking mule, his mouth open in a perfect O of horror.

Lieutenant Trelawny bellowed at him to move his bloody arse. The farmer remained frozen a moment longer, then brought a stick down hard over the back of the mule. The mule didn't budge.

Jessalyn leaned over and shouted to be heard above the infernal clanking of the engine. "Perhaps we had better stop!"

"We can't!" he shouted back at her.

"What?"

"There aren't any brakes!"

Dear life... She covered her face with her hands. But not seeing was worse than seeing. She peeked through her fingers. The mule pricked its ears and took a step. The cart jerked forward. Very slowly. The locomotive tore along the rails, blowing smoke and roaring like a lunatic dragon.

The cart had not quite cleared the tracks when they hit it. The blunt nose of the locomotive clipped the very end of the wagonload of hay, and the world turned into a swirling, dusty yellow cloud.

The collision didn't faze the locomotive; it lurched and chugged along the rails without a pause. Jessalyn looked back over her shoulder, laughing and plucking bits of hay from her hair and eyes.

Suddenly the locomotive gave a wild lurch, bucking like an unbroken colt. A grinding screech ripped through the air. Jessalyn heard him cry "Hang on!" But the warning came too late, for she was already flying through the air.

Blue sky, green fields, and brown earth came at her in a whirl of color, reminding her of the merry-go-round.

Until she slammed hard into the ground and the world went black.

"I told you to hang on, dammit." It was Lieutenant Trelawny's voice, and there was a hard edge to it.

Something sharp and spiky poked into her back. Jessalyn squirmed, trying to find a more comfortable position while her dazed mind tried to focus on where she was and how she came to be here, lying on this prickly bed of gorse. She opened her eyes and saw a pair of black, glossy boots.

Her gaze traveled up the splendid length of him. His chest and shoulders blocked out the setting sun. She liked the shape of him, she decided; she liked looking at him. He did not look at all pleased with her.

She laughed up at him and said in a deep Cornish burr, "I've thistles stuck in me dairy-air."

For a moment she thought he might laugh along with her. Instead his lips tightened, and he hunkered down next to her. "Lie quiet a moment. You've a bump on your head the size of a gull's egg." He brushed the hair off her brow, his touch gentle and strangely intimate.

She struggled up onto her elbows. "No, I'm all right. Truly." But the world tipped sideways, and she swayed.

"Do you ever do what you're told?" His hand gripped her arm, not at all gently. "Next time I want you to do something I shall have to remember to ask for its exact opposite."

She pulled free of him, pushing herself to her feet. She walked on unsteady legs over to where the locomotive tilted at an angle, its nose buried in the sod. The steaming, clattering, and clanking monster now stood quiet, a slain beast. Pieces of broken rails lay scattered about, looking as if they had been squashed by the foot of a giant.

She felt him come up beside her. "What happened?" she asked.

"The rails gave way. We were going too fast and the engine is so heavy it knocked the iron plates to pieces."

"What a pity, for now everyone will think your locomotive a failure."

"Everyone would be right." Below his haughty cheekbone a muscle jumped. She ached for him. She wanted to gather his head to her breast, to stroke her fingers though his hair and tell him it didn't matter what others thought.

She touched his arm instead and felt the muscles harden beneath the warmth of his skin. "Oh, no, Lieutenant Trelawny. With power such as this—with power such as this, a man could change the world."

For a moment the shadows in his eyes lifted, and she saw a sort of bewildered hurt mixed with hope. But then he blinked and looked away.

They both turned at the sound of hoofbeats. Clarence bore down upon them on his big sorrel gelding. His father and a few of the other guests, drawn by curiosity, loped along behind him.

"Jessalyn!" Clarence cried, sliding off his horse before them. His eyes widened at the sight of the derailed locomotive. "My God, Jessalyn, are you all right? Mack, what the deuce were you thinking of? You should never have subjected her to the rigors, not to mention the dangers of—"

"God's life, Clarence," Jessalyn snapped. She had forgotten what a prosy old stick he could be at times. "There's no need to enact a tragedy. I'm perfectly all right apart from a slight lump on my head."

"And a few thistles in her pretty arse," Lieutenant Trelawny added.

His drawling remark startled a whoop of loud laughter out of Jessalyn. She tried to stop it with her hand and nearly choked.

"She's hysterical," Clarence said. His color high, he glared at his cousin. "There, you see. The shock has made her hysterical."

Henry Tiltwell and his cronies came trotting up to them. Tiltwell's laughter boomed out over the rolling fields. "Come a cropper, did you, boy? Your iron horse came a cropper, what?" He roared at his joke, and the others joined him.

Lieutenant Trelawny stood rigid before their laughter, his face blank. But Jessalyn had caught the flash of pain in his eyes before he shuttered them, and she couldn't bear it. "You fools!" she shouted, whirling to confront the laughing men. "You are all addlepated, cork-brained fools!"

It stopped their laughter, but only for a moment. "Came a cropper!" Henry Tiltwell bellowed again, slapping his thigh.

Her hands clenched into fists at her sides. She hated them for their ignorance and their cruelty, for mocking the man who had built that wonderful locomotive, simply because it did not fit into their tidy world. Lieutenant Trelawny stood apart, alone, and she felt his aloneness as an empty hole deep within her own self. She had no idea of how her eyes shone as she looked at him, bright as beacons on a black night.

At twenty-two Clarence Francis Tiltwell thought of himself as a man. Yet he could never enter the library at Larkhaven without feeling a sick clenching deep in his gut. As a boy the only times he had ever been summoned to this room was to receive a thrashing. Now, pulling open the heavy wooden doors, he felt all of ten years old again and scared.

Turkey rugs of muted colors covered the floor, and green velvet curtains shrouded the windows. The walls were decorated with hunting paraphernalia—old spurs, whips, horns, and a collection of antique matchlocks and crossbows. Books bound in green and gold-blocked calf filled glass-fronted cases. It was a man's room, but it could not be said that the room reflected the man within it. Henry Tiltwell hated hunting, and as far as Clarence knew, he had never willingly read a book in his life.

The man Clarence called Father was ensconced in a hooded maroon leather chair behind an enormous mahogany pedestal desk. He did not ask Clarence to sit down, but Clarence sat anyway, taking a small satisfaction in this defiance.

"You will kindly explain to me," Henry said in his bull-throated voice, "why you brought McCady Trelawny here to disrupt my party with that belching monster."

"As it happens, he brought himself." Clarence dared a small, taunting smile. "Not that it signifies, for he should hardly need an invitation. He is, after all, your nephew."

"He's an insolent bastard!"

The word
bastard
reverberated like the clap of a church bell in the room's heavy velvet silence. Clarence's smile twisted into one of bitterness.

The green cut-glass lamp on the desk gave an unhealthy tinge to Henry Tiltwell's heavy jowls and pouchy eyes. He could not meet the younger man's gaze but toyed instead with the rings and seals on his fob. He had big, splayed hands. They were a tutworker's hands, though he had never wielded a pick.

In moments like these Clarence was glad the man was not his father.

Except that he
could
be his father. Because his mother had refused to, or couldn't, say which man had fathered him. She had, after all, been sleeping with both men at the same time—her husband and her sister's husband, that lecherous rake the earl of Caerhays. Clarence could never understand why Henry Tiltwell had forgiven her. If she had been his wife, he would have killed her.

"I want you to stay away from the Letty girl," Henry said, and Clarence had to drag his thoughts back with a wrench. "That peculiar friendship was bad enough when you were a boy; it could have disastrous consequences now. I don't want any hole-in-the-corner marriages or paternity suits. I've bigger plans for you than to see you leg-shackled to some provincial chit, who is tarred with peasant blood and has no dowry to speak of."

"I doubt in any event that Lady Letty would look favorably upon the suit of a tutworker's grandson," Clarence said, but mostly to himself. Henry still frightened him and probably always would.

"What? Speak up, curse it."

Clarence lifted his head. "I have no intention of marrying for a number of years yet, sir," he said, which was the truth, though only a part of it. He had every intention of making Jessalyn Letty his wife. But he needed to make a fortune first. His own fortune.

His mother had died last year. There was nothing to prevent his father from marrying again, and rumors had reached him lately that Henry was looking. If another son, an indisputable son, was to blossom suddenly on the Tiltwell family tree, Clarence had no doubt that he would be disinherited as fast as a new will could be drawn.

So in the meantime, as long as Henry held the purse strings, Clarence would dance to the man's tune. It was not in him to starve in any garrets for the sake of pride and principles. Whether he was Henry Tiltwell's true son or not, he would use the man's influence and connections, not to mention the Tiltwell capital, to build his own fortune.

McCady Trelawny sprawled in a chair before the fire, his booted feet on a red leather ottoman, a glass of brandy cupped in his palm. It was a sprawl that somehow still managed to convey ancient breeding and sophisticated elegance. It was a sprawl Clarence knew he could never affect if he lived to be a hundred.

Clarence paused in the doorway to his bedroom. McCady looked up at him with heavy-lidded eyes and said in his mocking drawl, "You look as though you could use some brandy to chase away the mulligrubs."

Clarence didn't want any brandy. But he went anyway to the ormolu side table and poured a finger's worth into a toddy glass. He wet his lips, but didn't swallow.

McCady's brooding gaze was on the fire, giving Clarence the opportunity to study his cousin's taut, well-bred face. He could never sort out his feelings when he was with McCady. At times he was sure he loved him like a brother. A
brother
—and he could even see the irony in that. He loved him, but he was not sure he liked him. Perhaps he only wanted to
be
Mack Trelawny. But that wasn't true either because he abhorred the Trelawny vices. He didn't much care for the taste of spirits, so he drank only in moderation. He never gambled; to risk money on the turn of a card or the fall of the dice seemed the height of foolishness to him. He liked girls well enough, but he'd never been moved to bed each one that looked his way. The Trelawny vices, all the vices that McCady had in such abundance.

Perhaps he only wanted to be the man McCady Trelawny had the potential of becoming but never would be. For what was it that they said? The Trelawnys all died young, violently, and in disgrace.

They had never spoken about the possibility that they might be half brothers.

McCady had gotten up to splash more brandy into his glass. He stood before the fire, looking down at it a moment, then threw back his head and tossed most of the brandy down in one swallow. He swung around to brace his shoulders against the mantel, fixing Clarence with his penetrating gaze. The flames were reflected in his eyes, the flames and nothing else. Clarence could rarely tell what thoughts went on behind those dark, shadowed eyes. Sometimes he suspected that McCady was secretly laughing at him, and that hurt.

"I still cannot believe it when I see you in that uniform," Clarence said. "I never had you pegged for a soldier."

McCady's mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile. "Doubtless my superior officers would agree with you."

"I suppose you'll be off to rejoin your regiment soon, although you'll have little to fight now that old Boney's been breeched. Where are you billeted? I trust it's somewhere close to London."

"The 54th is hardly such a fashionable regiment. We've been sent to the West Indies."

"Good God."

McCady's laugh held a tinge of bitterness. "I doubt God has much to do with the place, so I should be quite at home there. They say there is little to do but play for high stakes and fornicate with the native girls."

And die, Clarence thought, of some exotic tropical disease. For they also said the life expectancy of a man sent for duty to the West Indies was six months. But he tilted his brandy glass in his cousin's direction, as if toasting to his good fortune. "So you'll get yourself a bevy of brown-skinned wenches to frolic with in the tropical sun and forget all about dreary old England and steam locomotion."

A pain so dark it might have been agony flared in McCady's eyes before he veiled it with his lids. He looked down at his glass, but it was empty. "And forget about steam locomotion," he said, but softly, as if to himself.

An intense emotion squeezed Clarence's chest, making him feel light-headed. It might have been dismay. But it might also have been relief. He wasn't sure why, especially since he himself had invested heavily in his cousin's experiments with steam and motion, but Clarence had secretly hoped all along that they would fail. For all that he loved McCady, Clarence preferred him best like this—trapped and slightly desperate. Defeated.

Except that he wondered if it was really possible to defeat his cousin. There had been a story going around the London clubs that after Waterloo, Lieutenant Trelawny had been found on the battlefield, grievously wounded in the thigh and nearly dead from exposure and loss of blood. He had been carried back to one of the hospital tents to have his leg amputated. But when the barber-surgeon leaned over him, to give him a bullet to bite down on, he had grabbed the man's throat with a grip, the surgeon had said later, like a blacksmith's vise. "You saw off my leg," McCady had snarled, "and I'll come for you even if I have to crawl. I'll come for you, butcher, and I'll cut off your balls."

There must be some truth to the story, Clarence thought now with a shudder, for McCady had kept his leg. They also said that the sleeve of his sword arm had been stained black-red up to the armpit. The surgeons had thought it was another wound at first, until they realized it wasn't his blood at all, but the blood of the enemy soldiers he had killed. Clarence shuddered again. McCady had always been a little wild—he was a Trelawny after all—but it was hard to imagine the boy of their school days at Eton being capable of such savage violence. Until one looked into those dark, shadowed eyes.