Once in a Blue Moon (9 page)

"Tell me, coz, do you like"—Clarence had been about to say
killing
people, but he changed it at the last moment— "being a soldier?"

McCady lifted his shoulders in a lazy shrug. "What would it signify if I didn't? There are only three paths open to the younger sons of impoverished earls: politics, the army, or the church. I prefer to break laws, not make them, and heaven preserve me from the church."

"Heaven preserve the church from you," Clarence said, and then flushed, pleased in spite of himself that he had made his worldly cousin laugh.

McCady pushed himself off the mantel and went to the side table for another brandy. Clarence opened his mouth to warn him to go easy on the stuff, then shut it. "Are you still planning to make a run to France this summer?" he said instead.

McCady blessed him with a cocky, devil-be-damned smile. Clarence had never been able to resist that smile. He could understand how Lieutenant Trelawny had managed to lead his men on a charge that had meant almost certain death. In that moment, with McCady looking at him like that, Clarence would have followed him through the gates of hell itself.

"Ever hear of
La Belle Amie?"
McCady said. "She's a three-masted schooner out of St.-Malo, carrying coal and lumber. And a broad-beamed, saucy mademoiselle she is, for hidden beneath a false bottom in her hull will be a hundred tuns of tax-free brandy." His smile turned wicked. "Come a-smuggling with me, Clarey. If you dare."

Clarence forced a laugh. "Maybe I shall."

A log settled in the hearth with a hiss and a crackle. Clarence watched his cousin. McCady stood with one boot braced on the ottoman, his brooding profile turned toward the fire. Another manly pose. With his long, dark hair falling over his forehead like a damned Byronic hero, with his shirt neck opened to the last button and the firelight glinting off the hairy brawn of his chest, he looked dangerous and disreputable. Women would find him fascinating.

A sweet, innocent girl would find him irresistible.

Clarence felt a flutter of unease as he remembered the look of shining hero worship that he had caught in Jessalyn's eyes. She was so young, so innocent. He needed to protect her from rakes like McCady Trelawny, who would seduce her, use her, and discard her without a moment's regret. Just as the old earl had used and discarded his mother. More than anyone, he understood that against the

Trelawny charm even the most virtuous were not immune. Why, even now a part of him pitied his poor cousin, who was only an heir of the legacy he had been born to. Lechery and debauchery—they were in the Trelawny blood, as much as part of their heritage as wild dark eyes and dying young. For a moment Clarence wondered, if he was indeed the earl's son, why he was not similarly afflicted. But then he shrugged off the notion as immaterial. What mattered was Jessalyn. It was his
duty
to protect her.

And as he looked up into his cousin's shadowed face, even then a part of him thought that by saving Jessalyn, they all would be saved.

He cleared his throat. "You should not have taken Miss Letty up with you on the locomotive. She is of an age now where she must have a care for her reputation."

Something flared in McCady's eyes, there and gone before Clarence could divine its meaning. "The irrepressible Miss Letty—all mouth and legs and a laugh like an ill-tuned pianoforte." He took a sip of brandy, staring hard at Clarence over the rim of the glass. "Are you sweet on her, Clarey?"

Clarence felt telltale color flood his face. "She has no one to protect her except that old woman, who is half mad, I swear."

There was a slight curl to McCady's lips that Clarence didn't like. "Clarey, Clarey... are you trying to serve me a warning? Are you afraid I'll seduce her? Is she even seducible?" He looked up at the ceiling as if he were giving the question serious consideration. "Yes, I do believe she is, and if she isn't, I can always force her. My father raped a serving wench once. I watched him do it."

"Why are you always saying things like that?" Clarence demanded, his cheeks growing hot. "You might be wild, but I cannot believe you are truly evil."

"Such touching faith. Misguided but touching." A trace of amusement eased the hard lines around McCady's mouth. "Ah, hell. Your precious Miss Letty is safe from my lusty appetites. There are plenty of guinea hens in Penzance to satisfy my base urges, should they"—he widened his eyes in a suggestive manner—"arise... But she's a ripe little peach, Clarey, and if you don't pluck her soon, someone else will do it for you."

Clarence looked down into his brandy glass, hiding the anger that flared at his cousin's words. Jessalyn was
his.
She was his, and he would destroy the man who tried to take her from him. Whether that man be friend, cousin... or
brother.

Jessalyn and her grandmother arrived at End Cottage the next afternoon to learn of a most shameful tale. It seemed that while the cat Peaches had been increasing all spring and summer, it had not been entirely with fat.

"She had babies!" Jessalyn exclaimed at the sight of the tiny kittens, hardly bigger than mice, suckling at Peaches's white belly. The cat had delivered her litter during the night, and she had chosen the worst possible place to do it —in the corner of a stall occupied by a cinnamon-colored mare called Prudence. Jessalyn had found them when she'd gone to perform her daily chore of mucking out.

"She was pregnant, Gram, and we didn't know it!"

"You watch your tongue, gel," Lady Letty said. "Such a word is never to be uttered in polite society. Use such language within my hearing again, young miss, and you'll be tasting soap for a week."

Jessalyn wanted to point out that they were in a stable, not polite society, but she knew from past experience that her grandmother's threat was not an idle one. "I wonder who the father is," she said instead.

"Father, ha!" Lady Letty shot a killing glance at the unfortunate Peaches. "Let that be a lesson to you, gel. It don't matter what species they are, 'tis always the females who are left to bear the fruit of the sin."

Even Peaches, who was not the most intelligent of cats, soon perceived that her kittens were in danger of being trampled by the mare's big hooves. She decided to move her household into the kitchen. But to do so, she had to negotiate the dangers of the courtyard where lurked her nemesis, the black-backed gull. She had good reason to fear for her babies. The enormous gulls had been known to steal little lambs off to their nests to feed on later.

Hissing all the while between her clenched teeth, Peaches carried her kittens one by one from the stables into the house. Armed with a stout stick, Jessalyn walked along beside her.

Sea-washed sunlight dappled creeper-covered walls and glinted off the diamond panes of the mullioned windows. With its red and yellow patterned brickwork and tall ornamental chimney stacks, End Cottage always looked cheerful, even beneath the gloomiest fog. Jessalyn loved the house. It didn't matter that the rooms were small and dark or that the black oak paneling was wormholed and the paper stained with damp. End Cottage had been her home for all of her life that she cared to remember. It was warmth and security and love.

For a moment her mind was filled with other memories, dark memories, of a house in London with narrow, shrouded windows and thick, tense silences. They had never shouted at each other, had her mother and father, but she had learned all about anger in that dark house. She had learned what love was and what it was not.

But today, here at End Cottage, sunlight shone through the thick windowpanes, painting watery patterns on the kitchen's flagstone floor. It had always been Jessalyn's favorite room, mostly because of the smells, which today came from the bacon and mutton and hams that hung curing from the rafters. Peaches had chosen the wooden seat of a beehive chair that sat before the hearth as a new nest for her babies, and she settled down before the fire to suckle. Jessalyn counted the kittens. Earlier there had been five, now there were only four.

Her heart pounding in her throat, she ran back to the stable. And that was how Lieutenant Trelawny found her— on her hands and knees in a horse stall, trying to rescue the last kitten. For some reason Peaches had abandoned the poor thing, burying it beneath a pile of straw.

When she heard a step on the packed earth floor, Jessalyn thought it was Becka come to help her. "What an unnatural mother that Peaches is, Becka. She's given up on one of her babies just because he's runty."

"A terrible thing to do, I grant you. Especially as we cannot all be such splendid examples of virile manliness."

Jessalyn straightened with a snap. She blinked, looking up at a splendid example of virile manliness through the dusty sun bars that streamed through the stable's open door.

"Hullo, Miss Letty. It is Miss Letty, isn't it? Or have I the honor of addressing her runty brother?"

She lurched to her feet, brushing the straw off her knees. Her hands fluttered over the front of her clothes, as if she could magically whisk away the boy's shabby blue fustian jerkin and whipcord trousers that she was wearing and replace them with the latest fashion in sprigged muslin. She settled for brushing back her hair, which had fallen out of the binds of a frayed pink ribbon.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded, her voice made sharp by nervousness and excitement.

Her hair fell into her face again. She reached up, but he pushed her hand aside. He tucked the wayward curl behind her ear, then trailed his fingers down the side of her neck, as his piercing gaze moved slowly over her face. She quelled an impulse to shiver. She had never known anyone, man or woman, to touch so often as he did. Somehow he even managed to touch with his eyes. She wondered if he did it with everyone and what he meant by it.

"I thought to see if you might wish to go riding," he said. "And to give you this."

"What is it?"

He pretended to contemplate the object in his hand with utmost seriousness. "It could be a hat. That is, it has the look and shape of a hat. Although it might be a pair of breeches in disguise."

Jessalyn seized the bonnet, flapping its brim in his face like a fan and laughing. "Don't be a silly goose. I mean, why have you brought me a hat?"

"It is to replace the one you so gallantly sacrificed on my behalf."

It was not the one that she had so admired at the fair, the one he had insisted did not suit her. It was an adorable little cottage bonnet made of chip straw and decorated with a posy of primroses the exact pale yellow shade, like whipped lemon custard, of the primroses that grew around the paddock fence.

She tied the wide satin ribbon beneath her chin. Tilting her head, she smiled at him. "How do I look?"

"Stay away from the goats. They might mistake you for lunch."

She knew he hadn't meant to hurt; it was his way to be flippant. Yet she had wanted him to tell her she looked pretty. Even if it wasn't true.

Her fingers trembled as she tugged at the bow, and her chest felt tight. "I shan't wear it riding, though. It will only get soiled."

"Miss Jessalyn!" Becka Poole burst through the stable door, wringing her apron. "That Peaches, she don't know what she be about, esquiring them poor kits onto that chair. One of them nearly tumbled right off and into the fire—" She skidded to a halt when she caught sight of the lieutenant. Quickly turning her head, she pulled her hair over her cheek to hide the scar.

But she still managed somehow to gawk at him out the corner of her eye. "You be the gennelman what nearly killed Miss Jessalyn with his iron horse. Tes a wonder I didn't fall away dead on the spot when I heard tell of it. I was prostitute all of last night, I was, with me scattered nerves."

"She means shattered nerves," Jessalyn said. Lieutenant Trelawny was getting that cross-eyed look most men got when they listened to Becka talk.

"Aye, me scattered nerves. Miss Jessalyn will tell ee, sur. The least little thing overturns me poor nerves."

"Becka suffers from indifferent health." Jessalyn's voice was muffled, for she had dropped down on her hands and knees again to crawl beneath a pile of hay. She emerged with straw sticking out all over her head like pins from a cushion and the kitten cradled in her hands.

"Poor hungry little spud," she crooned as she put the mewling piece of orange fluff into Becka's open palms. "We might have to feed him with a sugar tit. I don't trust that wretched Peaches to be a proper mother."

"No, nor me neither, miss. I tell ee, already one nearly fell into the fire. Nearly emasculated, it was."

Becka Poole sauntered from the stable with the kitten just as the Sarn't Major entered. He, too, came to an abrupt halt when he caught sight of the lieutenant. His thick lips pouched out, and his head sank into his shoulders like a toad's. Black eyes the color of old ink stared unblinking. Then he spit through his teeth, spun around on his heel, and left.

Jessalyn waved her hand at his disappearing back. "Don't mind the Sarn't Major; he's always sour enough to pickle cucumbers. He doesn't like people, only horses."

Lieutenant Trelawny was staring at the now-empty door, a bemused look on his face. "What an odd household you have," he said.

"It's Gram. She collects misfits and strays the way other people collect butterflies."

"She pins them to a board?"

Her head fell back, and her laughter filled the stable until the sound of it, rusty and grating like an old gate, echoed back at her. She caught the last of it by sucking hard on her lower lip. She could feel his eyes on her, on her mouth.

He had started to say something else when behind him Letty's Hope let out a sharp whinny. Turning, he leaned his forearms on the stall door to take a better look at the filly. Jessalyn stared at him openly. He wore a snuff-colored riding coat and fitted doeskin breeches tucked into spurred long boots. The sight of him this morning left her feeling slightly breathless.

"She's a fine-looking filly," he said. He was smiling at the horse, the creases deep at the corners of his mouth, his eyes a little sleepy-looking.
He should do it more often,
Jessalyn thought,
smile more often.

She joined him by the stall. "Her dam, Prudence, was out of Flying Betty, who won the Newmarket Whip twelve years ago. The sire was out of Silver Blaze. He won over twenty thousand pounds in stakes and four hundred hogsheads of claret in his prime." The filly bumped her arm, seeking a pat. Jessalyn rubbed the blaze on her forehead. She told him about her grandmother's dream to race in one last Derby. "That is why we've named her Letty's Hope."

"And what of your parents?" he asked after a moment.

"My father died when I was six. My mother lives in London." She had not seen her mother since that day she had been left here at End Cottage. At first she had lain awake at night, her throat tight and aching with unshed tears, wondering if her mother would ever come back for her. But her mother hadn't come, and now Jessalyn no longer wanted her to.
I
rarely think of my mother anymore,
she told herself, and most of the time it was true.

The lieutenant watched her saddle Prudence, not offering to help, as if he sensed that she was enough of a horsewoman to want to handle her own tack. She owned a sidesaddle, but she preferred to ride astride, and he made no comment on her choice. His own horse, a big bay with a black mane and tail, was tied up to the paddock rail. The courtyard was otherwise empty except for the gull, which had not yet given up on the idea of kittens for dinner.

"Where is your groom?" he asked as they prepared to mount.

Jessalyn glanced up uneasily at the shuttered windows of the room where her grandmother lay napping. Lady Letty would never countenance her riding unescorted with the lieutenant.

She put her foot in the stirrup, and he gave her a boost up, his hands gripping her hips. "We have no groom," she said, settling into the saddle. And feeling the lingering imprint of his man's hard hands on her body, which was disturbing and frightening, and in some mysterious way, wonderful. "There's only the Sarn't Major, and he's busy."

One of his hands still cupped her calf. She shouldn't have been able to feel the heat of it through the stiff leather of her boot, but she did.

"We can't go riding unchaperoned," he said. "People will talk."

Even if they only met brown rabbits and grouse chicks on their way, by tomorrow everyone breathing within twenty miles would know that Lieutenant Trelawny and Lady Letty's hoyden granddaughter had been seen riding alone together across the moors. "Let them talk," she said, waving an airy hand. "Why should we care a rap for
a
bunch of useless, clacking prattle-bags?"

"You'll care. Once they start crucifying you for it."

She didn't like the set of his mouth, so brooding and serious. She wondered what had been done to him to make him this way, so bitter against the world.

"I hardly know whether to believe my ears," she said. "All this talk about propriety coming straight from the mouth of a founding member of the Dishonorable Society to Alleviate Boredom and Complacency. You are letting the club down, Lieutenant."

His hand fell, and he stepped back. "Don't say later that I didn't warn you."

She watched him mount his horse. There was a look of infinite weariness on his face now, and the eyes that stared back at her held black secrets. They had seen too much, had those eyes. He was a Trelawny, and he had done things, wicked things, that would make her shudder if she knew of them. He had warned her, and she ought to take heed. But it wasn't gossiping tongues she had to fear. It was he.

They rode side by side through the back gate, toward the cliffs and the sea. A stiff silence came between them that was broken only by the click of hooves upon stone and the creak of saddle leather.

"That is a bang-up mount you have, Lieutenant," she finally said for lack of a better topic, though in truth she thought the bay too shallow through the chest, his tail too high-set. He was likely to become winded in the stretch.

He gave her a look with those piercing dark eyes that made her think he had divined her unspoken aspersions against his horse. "The nag serves my purposes, and he had the advantage of having been cheap off the block."