Once in a Blue Moon Read online

  Jessalyn's mouth fell open. "How—?"

  "Simple deduction, m' dear. You've a look about you as if you've just seen your runner beat the pack to the post by a furlough and you'd a hundred pounds extra laid by on the winner. Only one thing besides a fat purse will put that look into a Letty's eyes. I ask myself who's young and male and new to the countryside, and only one candidate leaps to mind."

  "But when did he—why is he— He's a Trelawny!" Jessalyn found her chair with the backs of her knees and subsided into it. "Not the earl surely?"

  Lady Letty tapped her snuffbox with a blunt-nailed finger. "The late earl had three boys, but I reckon this one would be the youngest. I remember they went and named him after a horse at his christening, some Irish nag the earl had backed in the Newmarket Whip the day he was born. Mc-something. He was only a little tacker when last I saw him. That would be at his father's funeral in '01. Fell down some stairs in a drunken stupor and broke his neck, the late earl did. He'd be in his twenties now—the younger son, not the dead earl, of course—and doubtless up to his hocks in debt and well on the path to perdition. There's bad blood in that family, bad blood. Dangerous to know are the mad earls of Caerhays... They all die young, violently, and in disgrace."

  Jessalyn had heard the stories. How Charles Trelawny, the tenth earl of Caerhays, had died fifteen years ago of a broken neck after falling down a flight of stairs. In his cups as usual, some said. Though others insisted it wasn't too much port that had murdered the earl but the jealous husband of one of his many mistresses. He was succeeded by his eldest son, another Charles, who had died of a ruptured spleen after falling from his horse during a wild midnight ride. In his cups, they said again. Though others said his soul had been fetched to hell by the ghost of a man he had killed in a duel.

  Now the second son, and current earl, was living a life of dissipation in London and not likely to see his next birthday. The mad earls of Caerhays... Jessalyn tried to remember what the gossips said about the third son. That he had bought himself a cheap commission in a line regiment and nearly gotten himself killed last year at Waterloo.

  "Gram? Do you know what..." She tried to remember if she'd ever heard a particular rank mentioned in connection with the youngest Caerhays heir. She settled on captain. "Do you know what Captain Trelawny is doing in Cornwall? Has he left his regiment? Is he here to stay, to manage the estate?"

  "What's to manage? Caerhays was bled dry years ago. The Trelawnys have never cared tuppence for their Cornish lands. Would have sold em off long ago were they not so heavily entailed. Nay, he's here on recuperative leave, so they say, but he's spent most of his time working at the foundry in Penzance, pursuing some cork-brained, addlepated experiment having to do with steam locomotion. Disgraceful behavior it is, such that even a Trelawny cannot hope to live down. Just like a common blacksmith, no better than a tutworker really." Lady Letty shuddered. "Getting calluses on his palms and dirt beneath his nails. 'Tain't the done thing at all."

  Into Jessalyn's mind flashed an image of long, dark fingers thrust through wet hair. There hadn't been any dirt beneath his nails. But the hand that grabbed her ankle had been rough and had held on to her with a hard, taut strength....

  The parlor door flew open, and Becka Poole pranced in, bearing a tray of seedcake in one hand. She put the back of her wrist to her head like a tragedienne traipsing the boards of Covent Garden.

  "God's me life, me nerves be frazzled worse'n a hangman's rope. And there's a gret big pain in me chest. Heart pulpy-taties, I be havin'—"

  "Palpitations," Lady Letty said with a sigh, and tossed down a hefty swallow of port.

  "Aye. Pulpy-taties. I'd better be takin' a double dose of rhubarb powder afore retirin' this night, else I'll not be gettin' a wink o' sleep."

  Becka Poole's hearty snores floated down from the attic, croaking and creaking like a pondful of frogs.

  Jessalyn rolled onto her stomach and pulled the pillow over her head. Normally she could sleep through anything. She was famous for it in truth—ever since she had slept through a Cornish flagh, a great storm that had uprooted a big elm tree and sent it crashing like a battering ram through her bedroom window. Tonight the air was still, with no sounds to disturb her except for the distant whisper of the surf, the occasional cry of a curlew, and Becka's snores. A small but comforting fire burned in the grate, and a hot brick had been rubbed between the sheets of her old-fashioned box bed. All in her world was as it should be, as it had always been since her first night at End Cottage, and yet...

  Yet there was an ache in her chest, a muted ache that had been swelling all evening, like a pan of dough set to rise on the windowsill.

  "Bloody hell." Jessalyn punched the pillow, then rolled onto her back, staring wide-eyed at the shadow-filled dark. She counted Becka's snores, getting as far as forty-one, before she kicked off the covers and got up.

  Lighting a candle, she went over to the cheval looking glass that stood beside her clothespress. She tilted the mirror so that she could look at the full length of herself, frowning at what she saw. The hem of her night rail gaped several inches too short, showing off her thin legs and big feet. The last time she'd gone to Penzance to be fitted for a new dress the mantua-maker had poked her ribs and said she was as skinny as a new-spawned herring. She hadn't grown any curvier in the intervening months, though she had certainly grown taller.

  You are a rather gawky, gangly thing....

  She picked up the candle and moved closer to the mirror. Gram said her hair was a loamy color, like the last russet leaves of autumn before they were stripped by the winter winds. That was a lot of flummery; red was red. She would have plucked out every single hair from her head if she could have been assured it would grow back blond. Gram also said she had strong, enduring bones, that she would be thankful for such bones when she was forty. But forty was old; of what use would good bones be then? It was her mouth anyway that spoiled her face. It was a clown's mouth, wide and red.

  She stuck two fingers into the sides of her mouth and pushed her lips apart, wiggling her tongue and making her eyes bulge out like a cockchafer's. She started to laugh, but the laughter caught in her throat.

  She knew she wasn't pretty, but it hadn't seemed to matter before. Well, perhaps it had always mattered a little....

  A man like him, though. He was handsome, even in his hard-mouthed way. And an earl's brother, too. He could have any girl he set his fancy for. She could tell that just by the way he talked, that cocky, teasing way he had of talking, that girls, women, always took to him. Anyone he fancied.

  He wouldn't look twice at a girl like her.

  She turned away from the looking glass. An old walnut bureau with peeling varnish stood next to the window, listing to starboard, for it had lost one of its feet. Jessalyn went to it and took out the journal that Gram had given her for her birthday four months ago. She ran her palm over the tooled Spanish leather, dyed an emerald green. With reverent care she opened the cover, breathing deeply the smell of crisp, new paper. The leaves were slick and smooth like silk, gilded gold on the edges. She had never written in it. She felt an odd reluctance to spoil the pristine whiteness of the pages. It was beautiful and expensive and one of the few gifts anyone had ever given to her.

  Yet she yearned suddenly to preserve the memory of today. It would be like pressing the first primrose of the new year between the covers of a book to take out later, during the coldest, darkest day of winter. The petals would be dry and flattened, and the bright gold of spring would have faded to a dull yellow. But the memory would be there still—in the soft whiff of a lingering scent and the shape of the flower, a starburst of petals frozen forever in time.

  After a frustrating search through the bureau, she found a pen and standish that still had a bit of wet ink left in it. She gathered this up, along with the journal and candle. Settling onto the bed, she wrapped her arms around her drawn-up legs. She was content just to sit for a moment and watch a blister of grease run down the c
andle and into the dish. She dipped the pen in the inkwell and scrawled out the date in appalling penmanship.

  She brushed the soft quill across her cheek, back and forth. She thought of him walking out of the sea, naked, strong, and beautiful. And she smiled.

  The night was still and quiet now, except for the scratch of pen across paper.

  I met a man today...

  CHAPTER 3

  "I got a pain in one of me motors."

  Becka Poole opened her mouth wide and stuck a grimy finger inside. "Rith hereth." Tilting her head, she pulled aside her wren brown hair to show off the roasted turnip parings she had tied behind her ear. "I've tried turnips snips, as ee can see. An' I did rub me feet with bran at bedtime. But them cures bain't workin'. The motor, she still be throbbin' something fierce. I bin prostitute with un for nigh on a month now."

  The mountebank stared at Becka, blinking rapidly. His eyes slid over to Jessalyn a moment, and he cleared his throat. "Afflicted with the toothache, are we? I have here a paste of fish eyes that has had miraculous results. Though others prefer a fumigant of rosemary and sage..."

  The man rummaged among the nostrums and remedies laid out on the tailgate of his gaily painted wagon. He had a lopsided-looking face, for his nose was crooked and his right eye drooped. But he was dressed splendidly, in a laced hat and a gaudily embroidered waistcoat.

  While he argued with Becka that fish-eye paste had it all over turnip parings when it came to curing toothaches, Jessalyn studied the mountebank's other offerings. There were corn plasters and cough drops and trusses for any kind of rupture one might experience. Jalap and wormwood for fever, rotten apple water for pox marks, and a perfumed pastille to overcome the stink of tooth decay. A small dark green bottle with a cork stopper claimed her attention. The label said it was a cure for the...

  Jessalyn peered more closely at the handwritten label. "What is the Secret Disease?" she wondered aloud.

  Becka pulled Jessalyn aside, juggling her paper-wrapped medicines. "That ye hadn't ought to be askin', Miss Jessalyn," the girl said in a loud whisper. "'Tesn't proper for a lady to be askin' sich things."

  "Why is it that the very things one most wants to know about are the very things one isn't allowed to know?"

  "Eh?"

  Jessalyn was about to elaborate further on this injustice when Becka shrieked in her ear and pointed behind her. She whirled to see a trio of runaway pigs bearing down on them. The pigs, their little trotters slashing through the sand, their dewlaps swaying in the wind, were being chased by a man in greasy leather leggings, who was bellowing and brandishing a staff. There was only one place for Jessalyn and Becka to go, and that was backward... into the mountebank's wagon.

  As Jessalyn tried to explain afterward, nothing would have happened if the mountebank had had the foresight to set the wheel brake. She and Becka struck the tailgate hard with their hips, sending cures and nostrums flying and the wagon rolling and swaying like a drunken sailor down the grassy slope and into the south end of the Penzance Midsummer's Eve Fair.

  The first thing in the wagon's path was a crockery stall. Teacups, plates, and platters hit the hard-packed sand with a shatter of pottery and a tinkle of glass. A fishmonger's cart was next to fall, followed by a trapper's display and a tent with a gold banner that said homemakers' emporium in tall red letters. The wagon—wearing a set of fish scales, rabbit skins, and shards of broken pottery and trailing skeins of purple yarn—finally came to rest against a rope ring, where a pair of half-naked woman pugilists were fighting for a gold lace cap.

  The mountebank, chasing after his wagon, had managed thus far to escape repercussion for the damage done by his wayward vehicle. Everyone was too surprised to do more than shriek and gape. But he stood not a chance against the woman pugilists. They advanced on him, swinging their fists. The crowd around the ring started making bets on which woman could land the most blows.

  Jessalyn stared at the pandemonium, her hand over her mouth. Only she wasn't covering up shock or horror, but rather a wicked urge to burst into whoops of laughter.

  "God's me life!" Becka exclaimed, her eyes round. "Look at what we've done."

  Jessalyn turned, laughter bubbling out of her throat, and saw him.

  He stood beside a sheep pen. That Trelawny man. He wasn't laughing. Indeed, he wasn't even smiling; she doubted he was capable of getting his lips to go into anything other than a sneer. He leaned against a wooden post, long legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded over his chest, and a curly brimmed beaver tilted at a rakish angle over one eye. He had on all his clothes for a change.

  For a moment she was back on the beach again, the sea breathing and sighing around them, his dark gaze caressing her face, and feeling the roughness of his thumb stroke her jaw. Heat surged up her neck into her cheeks. She turned her back on him.

  Becka was still gaping at her. "Cor, Miss Jessalyn. We've gone an' made a proper mess of things again. What m' lady will have t' say about this latest, I'm sure I do not know." She clutched at her chest. "Oooh, I feel me pulpy-taties comin' on."

  Jessalyn knew that he still watched her, and her color heightened. "It was hardly our fault. Blame that addlepated fool with the pigs. Look, Gram has given us a whole pound to spend. I think I shall buy myself a new hat." She pushed a lank strand of hair out of Becka's eyes. The girl tended to wear it combed forward, trying to hide the scar on her cheek. "And we can get you a new ribbon for your hair."

  A sweet smile broke over Becka's face. "That'd be loverly, miss."

  They walked down into the fair, giving a wide berth to its damaged end. Penzance was a seaport, as well as a market and coinage town for tin. On this afternoon, scores of stalls and tents, selling all manner of goods from bootlaces to frying pans, had been set up on the sand hills that bordered the harbor.

  They meandered down a path of rough, tufted grass that had been trampled flat by many feet. The air was filled with shouts and drunken laughter, the tatting of a penny trumpet, and the grating shrieks that came from the knife grinder's stall. Pens of bleating sheep, squealing pigs, and bellowing oxen all added to the din. Penzance fairs were rowdy occasions, wrestling, cockfighting, and swilling ale and gin in the taverns they called kiddleys being the favorite ways for Cornishmen to waste an idle afternoon.

  They stopped before a booth selling fripperies. Becka agonized over a choice among poppy red, sun yellow, and parrot green ribbons. She finally selected the yellow one because, she said, she found it soothed her poor tired and overworked eyes.

  Next door was a stall that sold nothing but secondhand foot apparel. Jessalyn spotted a pair of fawn-colored calfskin shoes that laced up the front. They were slightly worn down at the heels, but she would rather have had them anyway, instead of the new half boots of stiff black leather that were even now pinching her feet. Two days ago the Sarn't Major had made an unexpected and most propitious sale of a five-year-old saddle horse to Squire Babbage. Because of this windfall, Jessalyn had gotten a new pair of half boots, and they were all still feeling quite flush at End Cottage.

  Becka's ribbon had cost a halfpenny, and the rest of Jessalyn's pound was now burning a hole in her reticule. It was a family trait, Gram often said and with more pride than regret, that a Letty held on to money only long enough to wager or spend it.

  They passed a spice booth next, and Jessalyn stopped to revel in the exotic scent of cinnamon and cloves and ginger. The smells always stirred something within her: a desire to taste of strange and forbidden things. Her revelry was broken by a one-legged beggar in a tattered army coat, who held a hand beneath her nose. She gave him a shilling.

  A roar of raucous laughter burst from the beer tent next door. Turning, Jessalyn caught sight of a dark, sharp-boned profile. That Trelawny man again. She lingered within the shadow cast by the spice booth, where she could watch him unobserved.

  He looked very much the gentleman today in a narrow-waisted black coat with gilt buttons, tight beige pantaloons, and tasseled Hessians. But t
here was a suppressed wildness about him that made a lie out of his refined clothes. He stood with one booted foot braced against a bench, drinking a pint of porter. He was talking to a couple of rough-looking men. As she watched, one spoke to him, and the Trelawny man threw back his head and laughed. A shaft of sunlight streaking through the tent's open door highlighted the tanned sinews of his exposed throat above the starched white neckcloth. She wondered if he knew that the men he was being so free and easy with were gaugers.

  Gaugers, preventive men, customs officers—whatever one called them, they were the most hated individuals in Cornwall, more hated even than Catholics. A man known to consort with gaugers wouldn't be welcome for long. Not where every man from the baker to the vicar had been known on occasion to make a run to France to smuggle back a shipload of tax-free brandy, silk, or salt. A man seen drinking in a kiddley with gaugers could end up some dark night in a ditch with a mining pick in his back.

  She wasn't about to warn him though—oh, no, not this time. He could go to perdition without any interference from her.

  Just then he turned his head, and across the length of the crowded, noisy tent their gazes met—his smoky and lazy and... knowing. He knew that she had been standing there for some minutes, gawking at him like a moonstruck shopgirl. Her face burning, Jessalyn whipped around and nearly collided with a perambulating pieman.

  "Ere now! Whyn't ye watch where you's going? Ye about tipped me pies in the mud!" The man steadied a tray that was loaded to overflowing with pies, biscuits, and sweet cakes.

  "Gis along wi' ee!" Becka cried, suddenly appearing at Jessalyn's side. She shook her fist in the pieman's face. "Pies in the mud, ha! Pies what taste like mud, more like."

  Jessalyn could feel that Trelawny man watching her. The commotion was drawing other eyes as well. "I'll take one," she said, thrusting a penny at the pieman. "A jam tart, if you please."