Once in a Blue Moon

by Penelope Williamson

  Once in a Blue Moon by Penelope Williamson

  Once on a wild and windswept moor...

  Those who knew spoke of the infamous Trelawny men in hushed, shocked whispers. But to flame-haired Jessalyn Letty, wild, captivating child of the storm-tossed Cornish moors, McCady Trelawny was the most fascinating man she had ever met. Few knew of the dream that burned in McCady's secret soul -- a dream destined to change the world. But Jessalyn knew and shared his passion. Only she believed in his miraculous vision... and in the love he awoke in her hungry, yearning heart.

  Once upon a sweet and dangerous passion...

  Dark, consuming fires drove McCady far from his tarnished past -- and from the bewitching lass who aroused a passion stronger than his own will. But when he returned, that laughing, barefoot girl of that sunlit summer was no more: in her place was a woman... a bold, courageous beauty who would force him to choose between passion and pride, honor and hatred. Only Jessalyn's sweet faith could redeem him -- and conquer his scarred devil's heart with a tenderness he had never known... and a love that comes along only... Once In A Blue Moon.

  "YOU LOVE HIM, TOO, DON'T YOU?"

  A tightness squeezed Jessalyn's chest, and tears stung her eyes. She was too soul-weary to lie. "It seems that I have loved him my entire life."

  The tide washed against the rocks, again and then again. Emily ripped up a handful of marram grass, sending a tiny avalanche of pebbles splashing into the sea. "I am his wife, but you are his ... I was going to say heart, but that's not it. His obsession, I suppose."

  Jessalyn held herself still, afraid to move, afraid to speak.

  Emily twisted around, and her face in the deepening twilight looked brittle as old parchment. "But he is my husband. Caerhays is mine."

  Jessalyn's breath stopped in her throat. "I know... I know."

  Emily's shoulders hunched, and she smothered her mouth with her knuckles. "Oh, God, I love him so. He is my night and my day." She pulled down her fists, tilting her face to the night sky. "And he—he is kind to me, but that is all."

  Published by Dell Publishing a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1993 by Penelope Williamson

  ISBN: 0-440-21108-5

  Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada May 1993

  This one is for my father...Because you taught me that if I want to hold the moon in my hands, all I have to do is reach for it.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  The blast from the explosion slammed through the air. It rolled across bleak moorlands, bounced against black cliffs, and rumbled out to sea. For a hitch in time all was still again. Then the ground shuddered and heaved like an old man suppressing a cough.

  The noise startled a pair of goats that had been eating a prickly dinner of hawthorn. They stood frozen a moment, ears perked, long beards twitching, before bolting up the cliff path. Their hooves sent a tiny avalanche of stones onto the head of the girl who stood motionless on the beach below.

  Jessalyn Letty had been scavenging along the edge of the tide. A howling Cornish gale had lashed itself to death on the beach the night before, and the pickings should have been easy. If lucky, she would find something she could use, luckier still something to trade, and luckiest of all something to sell for good, hard coin.

  She had been about to pick up a broken spar when at the sharp crack of sound she straightened and whirled, her hand to her mouth. The stones pelted her head, and she twisted around again. She looked up, shading her eyes from the glare of the afternoon sun. A pair of goats flashed their tails at her before disappearing over the lip of the cliff.

  A silence fell over the beach. Even the gulls and the choughs had ceased their screeching. A thin column of smoke spiraled upward, barely noticeable against the pale blue of the sky. Jessalyn picked up her skirts and began to run, her bare feet digging troughs in the sticky sand.

  She climbed the cliff path as fast and sure as the goats. But at the broken-down stile in the stone hedge she hesitated. It had been years since she'd ventured onto Caerhays land. Not since that summer a gamekeeper had pointed an old blunderbuss at her and threatened to shoot her for trespassing. "With that orange head o' yourn it'd be like shootin' a pumpkin off a post," he'd snarled, his lips peeling back over rotted teeth. "Jist like shootin' a pumpkin off a post. Splat!" He'd laughed, slapping the stock of the gun and sending Jessalyn pelting for home.

  She had crawled back over the cliff hedge again the very next day, keeping a wary eye out for the odious gamekeeper and his ancient blunderbuss. Her heart had pounded in time with the beating waves below, but in excitement, not fear. She had been sure she would catch smugglers in the act of hauling brandy casks up the rocks or pirates burying chests full of gold in the sand, for the Trelawnys were notorious for their lawless, wicked ways. But all she'd found were weeds and stagnant ponds and an enormous old manor house crumbling into dust.

  But that had been years ago, and the gamekeeper was long gone. The current earl was in London gambling and drinking himself to death, so they said. The house was still closed up; the mines were shut down. There should have been no thing or person to cause such an explosion on Caerhays land.

  As Jessalyn clambered over the stile, her skirt caught on a blackthorn vine. She tried to work it loose, then gave an impatient tug. The muslin cloth came free with a loud rip, and she jumped off the stile onto a path choked with gorse. The ground was rough with broken stones that gouged her bare feet as she ran. The column of smoke had long since bled into the sky. The moors lay still and empty.

  She topped a rise. In a narrow gill, thick with hawthorn and wind-tortured elms, stood a large brick tower that once housed the pump engine for a tin mine called Wheal Ruthe, long since played out. Tall gorse nearly concealed the arched entrance, but she could see white tendrils curling out the upper windows. An old mule track ran down to the abandoned mine, and Jessalyn took it on the fly.

  Sucking in a deep breath and holding it, she plunged through a door choked in a thick white cloud, and...

  It was like being slapped in the face with a hot, wet cloth. She cried out at the shock of it. And cried out again when a black specter loomed out of the boiling cloud, staggering toward her.

  They smacked into each other, foreheads cracking together like a pair of cymbals. The specter fell backward, its head slamming hard on the stone-flagged floor, and Jessalyn, carried along by her momentum, ran right over it. Then she, too, skidded onto the floor, skinning her palms and knees, knocking the breath from her chest.

  She knelt on all fours, hunched over, wheezing and gasping. The inside of the enginehouse was smothered with steam. It clogged her nose and throat, and for a moment she was sure she would suffocate. At last she sucked in a soggy breath of air, and then another. She craned her head and peered back through her outstretched arms to see the thing that she had trampled.

  A young man lay sprawled on the floor, his arms flung out from his sides like a fallen crucifix. A dark angel cast out of heaven.

  She crawled over to him. Pushing herself upright onto her knees, she bent over and patted his cheek. It was rough with beard stubble, yet the skin beneath was startlingly soft and warm. Touching him like that seemed too intimate a thing to be doing, so she picked up his hand and slapped it instead. He didn't stir. She slapped it again, harder.

  The stranger's hand was much larger than hers, but lean, with long, scarred fingers and callused palms. Suddenly it seemed improper even to be holding his hand, and she returned it carefully to his side. She sat back on her heels unsure of what to do next.

  In the blue books that she often borrowed from th
e circulating library at Penzance, the hero was always loosening the heroine's clothing when she fell into a swoon. But there was nothing for her to loosen; the stranger wore no collar or cravat, and his shirt was already opened at the neck. Moisture sheened the smooth tawny skin of his throat. As she watched, a drop trickled down to disappear into a light mat of dark hair and twisted white cloth. Jessalyn looked away, drawing in a deep breath. She licked her lips, tasting soot and sulfur.

  The air was clammy and so hot. It was like being inside a teakettle as it simmered over a roaring fire. She pushed wet hair out of her face, knocking her bonnet askew. She struggled with the knot of ribbon beneath her chin, then yanked the suffocating hat off, her fingers tangling in its ragged ostrich plume that was now sadly drooping in the damp. She looked back down at the stranger's bare chest, at the place where the drop of water had disappeared. Muscles and sun-darkened skin jerked as he tried to suck in air.

  He was having trouble breathing in the thick steam. Jessalyn wondered if she dared leave him to go for Dr. Humphrey. She heard a rustling behind her and jerked around, half expecting to see the doddering and bewigged physician materialize out of the steam. Nothing was there except for a tangled heap of metal and wood—what was left of whatever it was that had exploded. The pile of rubble shifted and settled again, emitting a hiss, as if it were something living that was now slowly dying. Red lumps of smoldering coal lay scattered nearby.

  Coal, Jessalyn thought. Coal that was still burning, hot enough to set alight a candle... or a feather.

  Once Polly Ungellis—the village fish jouster, who made a bare living gutting pilchards and was prone to fits—had fainted in church, and the Reverend Mrs. Troutbeck had revived the potty old woman by burning a feather beneath her nose. The particular feather responsible for Polly's resuscitation had been part of the plumage of a chicken. But Jessalyn doubted the species of the bird mattered.

  She looked down at the bonnet in her lap. It had come from a pawnshop in Penzance and had been in fashion, so Gram had said, the year Napoleon divorced Josephine. Old and shabby though it was, it was still her only hat, and its pride was a long, thick ostrich plume, dyed a primrose yellow, that curled across the front. Since its only other ornament was the frayed blue ribbon that banded the crown, the bonnet would be left sadly bereft without its feather.

  Before selfishness could get the better of her, she ripped the plume out from beneath the ribbon trim. After pushing herself to her feet, she ran over and thrust the tip of the ostrich feather beneath a glowing piece of coal. There was a hiss and a sputter as it caught fire suddenly, flames shooting up the quill in a whoosh. Startled, she dropped the burning torch. It floated to the floor, trailing sparks and—

  "What in bloody hell are you doing?"

  She spun around. The stranger was half sitting up, leaning on one outstretched arm. With his dark hair falling over his forehead and his shirt pulled off one shoulder and gaping open at the throat, he looked more than ever like a fallen angel. His bare chest expanded and subsided with his heavy breathing. She knew she was staring at him stupidly, yet she couldn't seem to move or speak; she couldn't even manage a breath.

  Then she felt a fierce heat on her leg.

  She looked down and saw a flickering yellow tongue eating a hole in her periwinkle blue muslin skirt. She beat at it with her hands, smothering the flame. "Wait a moment, please," she said. "My skirt's on fire."

  Suddenly the whole thing struck her as vastly amusing— here she was calmly announcing to a total stranger that she was on fire while she frantically tried to put herself out— and she laughed aloud. But when she heard the sound of her own laughter, squeaking like a seldom-used pump handle, she cut herself off. She glanced up. The stranger was staring at her as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. He groaned and hunched over, burying his face in his hands.

  She went to his side, kneeling in front of his spread thighs. She tried to keep from laughing again, because he didn't look like the sort of man who would share her warped sense of the ridiculous.

  "Do forgive me for trampling you like that," she said, and in spite of her best intentions, a giggle escaped along with the words. "To barge into a room unannounced is not quite the thing, of course, but I thought the building was on fire, and I could hardly leave you to burn to death—not that I knew you were in here, of course, but it stood to reason somebody was.... Are you all right?" Except for a whitening of the hands pressed against his face he hadn't moved or made a sound. "How do you feel?"

  She began to wonder if the explosion might have damaged his eardrums. Leaning closer, she shouted, "Are you having trouble hearing me? I said, how do you feel?"

  His head jerked up, his eyes winced shut. "My hearing was quite adequate, thank you, until you took it upon yourself to blast my eardrums." He lowered his face into his hands again, cradling it as if it were a cracked eggshell. "And I feel—since you insist upon a bloody report—like a team of mules has been playing football with my head."

  He looked oddly vulnerable, with his shoulders bowed and his head bent, exposing the bare nape of his neck. His fingers were thrust through wet dark brown hair. She touched the back of his hand.

  He flung his head up, and she recoiled as if stung. He stared at her with eyes as black and deep as a mine pit. There was something strange, something penetrating, about his eyes; it seemed as he looked at her that he could see right through her, into her heart.

  He made her uncomfortable, and she looked away. A silence stretched between them. The old soot-encrusted walls of the enginehouse dripped water. The pile of rubble hissed and settled.

  "I was scavenging the beach at Crookneck Cove..." she said. She turned her gaze back to him. He was looking at her mouth with those fierce dark eyes. "When I heard this terrible noise," she stumbled on, acutely conscious of the movement of her own lips. "And then I saw the smoke; at least I thought it was smoke...." Again she faltered. She sucked on her lower lip, then realized what she was doing and stopped. "So I came here to investigate and I saw smoke pouring out the windows. That is, it wasn't smoke, of course, but I thought it so at the time...." She waved a hand. "I thought the place was afire."

  "Indeed?" He looked at the smoldering remains of the ostrich plume that had once adorned her best and only hat. "And when you discovered it wasn't on fire, you decided to remedy the situation by setting it alight yourself?"

  "You were having such trouble breathing, and I only thought to try to resuscitate you. I'll have you know I sacrificed a perfectly good hat on your behalf." Honesty compelled her to add, "Well, it was not precisely new, but it was still serviceable."

  His lips curled down slightly at one corner. "Forgive me if I am not overcome with gratitude. But then I wouldn't have needed resuscitating in the first place if you hadn't laid me out cold with your thick head."

  She caught the gasp of outrage in her throat. She had never met anyone like him before, so disdainful and ungallant, so blatantly arrogant. She wanted to say something clever and cutting that would put him in his place.

  "It would have served you right if I had left you to suffocate to death," she said, which was neither clever nor cutting.

  And certainly no match for him. He looked pointedly at the door. "Please," he said, "do not let me detain you further."

  She pushed herself to her feet and whirled, heading for the door. It was not one of her better exits. Her heel caught on the hem of her skirt, and she barely kept herself from toppling forward like an axed pole.

  His hand lashed out, grabbing her ankle. She tried to tug free, hopping on one foot. "Let... go... of me."

  He let go. She teetered backward, flapped her arms, teetered forward. She stumbled a step, trying to regain her balance, and tripped over his boot as he started to come up. They slammed together like two skittles struck by a ball. She clutched at his shirt, and he fell back, taking her with him.

  He lay perfectly still beneath her. Hip to hip, stomach pressing against stomach. One of her thi
ghs wedged between his spread legs. Hot, moist steam drifted over them. She sucked in a deep breath, chest pushing against chest. They were so close her face hovered over his, their lips almost touching.

  "Oh," she said.

  His lips parted. She felt his breath leave his chest before it caressed her face. She felt the rumble of his voice before she heard the words. "Before this goes any further, hadn't we ought to be introduced?"

  There were creases at the corners of his mouth that deepened when he moved his lips. "Uh..." she said.

  He breathed. "I see. You are now trying to impress me, and someone has told you I prefer my women mysterious and monosyllabic."

  There was a thick, rushing sound in her ears, and her head felt heavy and clogged up with the steam. She decided she didn't like his mouth. It was too hard. "Who— who are you?" she said.

  His eyes widened slightly. "I believe I asked you first."

  His eyes weren't black; they were a dark, dark brown.

  With streaks of gold shooting out from the centers, like tiny exploding suns. "What?" she said.

  "I really would like to continue this scintillating conversation"—he arched his back, heaving against her—"but you're as bloody heavy as a sack of wet meal."

  "Uh!" she grunted as he stood up, dumping her like a sack onto the floor.

  Her skirt was rucked up around her thighs, revealing the lacy edge of her pink cotton opendrawers, which had grown so short for her in these last months they no longer covered her bony knees. Hot color flooded her face—not so much because he could see her bare legs as because he would know she was so poor she couldn't even afford new underthings.

  She yanked her skirt down, glancing sideways at him to see if he watched her. But he had his back to her. He was studying the pile of scrap left by the explosion, his hands fisted on his hips, and she studied him in turn. He wore tight buckskins tucked into top boots. His shirt was made of fine cambric, and as wet as it was, it was nearly transparent. She could see the flesh of his back move as he sucked in a deep breath.