Once in a Blue Moon

by Penelope Williamson

  She stood up, and he spun suddenly around, fixing her with those penetrating dark eyes. Caught gaping at him, she flushed and looked away, pretending a sudden and avid interest in her surroundings.

  The mine had been closed down long ago. Over the years sand drifts, blown in by the wind, had built up in the corners of the enginehouse. The entrance to the main shaft had been boarded up, but the rotting timbers now sagged in the middle like an old mattress. The Cornish called them bals, these old abandoned mine shafts. All sorts of refuse wound up in the old bals, from sacks of unwanted kittens to unwanted bastards.

  But there were also signs of recent occupation. Scraps of paper covered with fine-lined drawings fluttered in the draft of air coming through the open door. A broken kettle lay on its side, leaking tea onto the stones. And scattered throughout the room, the remains of whatever it was that had exploded.

  He had squatted onto his haunches to poke with a stick at a flat piece of iron that had a jagged, scorched edge. He picked up a length of twisted copper pipe, frowned at it a moment, then tossed it away. His mouth took on a sulky curve.

  "What happened?" she asked, then wished she hadn't. In the dripping silence her voice had sounded much too harsh and loud. And childlike.

  He stood up and turned to face her in one quick, graceful motion. "Obviously," he said, drawling the word, "it was a matter of too much pressure per the square inch. It could have been a weakness in the boiler plating. But I suspect the fault lies more with the lire tubes. What do you think?"

  "I don't know," she said honestly, for he might as well have been speaking Chinese for all she'd understood of it.

  "Then why the bloody hell did you ask?"

  "I was only making conversation."

  "Well, kindly go make it somewhere else."

  She would do that, leave him. It would serve him right; he truly was insufferable and rude. She didn't leave, though. Instead she studied the remains of what she now understood to be some sort of experiment with steam. She did know that steam engines were used to pump water from working tin mines. But such engines were monstrous things, with boilers near the size of a farmer's cart and great beam rods. The boiler he'd been working with couldn't have been any bigger than a brass drum. It appeared to have been built into a wooden framework that had rested upon a pair of wooden trestles. The force of the blast had blown the framework and the trestles into kindling.

  Dear life... the fool man was fortunate he hadn't been killed.

  Her gaze went back to him. There was a taut, arrogant set to his wide mouth and a tension in the way he stood before her, not moving, almost as if he expected her to challenge him. Or to sneer at him.

  He hadn't shaved for at least two days; he looked disreputable, like a Gypsy or a vagabond. And he cursed worse than a drover. It was possible, since he was here working in the old enginehouse, that he had something to do with mining. But in spite of all his bloody thises and bloody thats and the scars and calluses on his hands, his clothes were too fine, his speech and manner too polished for him to be a mere tinner or tutworker or even a core captain.

  "Have you been hired by the earl to reopen the mine?"

  He said nothing. But it was as if her question had released the tension within him, for he uncoiled suddenly like a tripped spring. He swore foully and swung around, making for the door, and she noticed for the first time a definite hitch in his stride.

  "You've injured your leg!"

  She caught up with him just outside the door. He leaned against the weathered bricks, breathing heavily and rubbing his thigh. A grimace twisted his lips.

  "Perhaps I should fetch Dr. Humphrey after all."

  His head jerked around, and he impaled her with his fierce dark eyes. "Who appointed you my nursemaid, wench?"

  "I am not a wench."

  He looked down his long, thin nose at her. "You are a rather gawky, gangly thing. Nevertheless, I think one can safely assume that you are—"

  "Of course, I'm a we—female. I only meant that you are not to address me in such a familiar manner. I am Miss Letty to the likes of you."

  He looked her over again, starting with her scratched and sandy bare feet, and moving with slow insolence up her body to take in the torn, scorched, and soot-stained frock. By the time he got to her hair—which fell about her face in wet, tangled clumps and doubtless looked as ratty as last year's gull's nest—the grimace on his mouth was replaced with a sneer.

  She drew herself up. "I do not know who you are... sir," she said, imbuing this last word with such contempt as to leave him in no doubt she thought the courtesy undeserved. "But one thing you most certainly are not is a gentleman. A gentleman would at least thank me for trying to save his life."

  "You flatten me like a tin stamp, try to torch me with an ostrich feather. Then you pounce on me and kiss me when I am too weak to defend my virtue—"

  "I didn't kiss you!"

  "And now you are claiming to have saved my life? Kindly warn me when next you set out upon your errands of mercy, so that I might at least have the providence to duck."

  "You, sir, are not only rude, you are as mad as a snake catcher." She thrust her chin in the air, spun on her heel, and stalked up the mule path.

  He caught her in two strides, snagging her arm and hauling her back around, slamming her up against his chest. "Just a bloody damned minute. I'm not through with you—"

  "I am more than through with you." She spat the words at him, pushing with her forearms against his chest. "And I did not kiss you."

  "You were thinking about it." His mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile. "A thought, as they say, is as good as the deed."

  "I was not... I would never... I declare to God, you are the most preening, overweening, puffed-up... puffed-up bullfrog! And that is an insult to the frog."

  She wrenched her wrist free from his grasp with such force her fist went flying. It cracked into his jaw like the snap of a slingshot.

  "Christ!" he exclaimed, staggering backward. "Bloody hell, you little—"

  Jessalyn didn't hear what he said next. She ran.

  She didn't stop running until she had reached the hedge. She leaned against the rough stones, fighting for breath.

  Something fluttered in the wind, catching her eyes. A scrap of faded blue muslin snagged on a blackthorn vine. Her chest tightened, and she felt a ridiculous urge to cry. She had too few clothes that she could afford to leave pieces of what she did have scattered around the countryside. Yet she knew it wasn't the ripped frock that had her so close to tears. She was filled with a jumble of strange emotions that tumbled about in her breast like beans in a rattle.

  The wind blew her hair into her eyes, and she pushed it back with her hands. It was a worse mess than she'd thought—twisted and tangled like reefer knots. The sun beat down on her upturned face, doubtless bringing out a hundred blasted freckles. She'd left her hat back there... with him. But she would rather be spitted like a goose and roasted over a hot fire than go back for it.

  Her knuckles ached. She pressed the back of her hand to her hot cheek. Dear life... He had a way of talking that made a person feel like an addlepated fool. She'd gotten even, though—landing him a facer and calling him a bullfrog. She laughed aloud, a shaky laugh that cracked at the end. That had certainly put the man in his place. Cut to the quick he probably was, wounded in the jaw as well as the heart. Like as not he would never get over it.

  She laughed again, and a colony of rooks took flight in a flap of black wings, cawing alarm. She watched them flutter in a row across the sky, like a trailing mourning ribbon.

  She looked down at herself. Her dress was a ruin; she was grimy with dried steam and soot. She suddenly wanted very badly to be home, where it was safe and things were familiar, the way they had always been. But she'd left her half boots at the cove. Before anything else she would have to climb back down and fetch them, for they were her only decent pair of shoes.

  As she descended the cliff path, she wa
s shocked to see that the tide nearly covered the beach. The sea had taken back the piece of broken spar it had spewed up earlier. Swirling foamy water ate at the white sand and swallowed the granite blocks that tumbled down from the bluff.

  She hunted around the salt-encrusted rock where she had sat down earlier to take off her half boots, stockings, and wool garters. She remembered leaving them on the rock before she'd walked the beach, taking such pleasure in the feel of the sand oozing up between her bare toes. The rock, she remembered, had been swathed in dried seaweed. Now the nubbly greenish brown strands glistened wet and slick.

  "Blast it!" she shouted, the words getting snatched away by the wind. Just as a greedy, overreaching wave had snatched up the only shoes that still fitted her big, ugly feet. "Blast it..." she said again, more softly this time. And then, because he had used the words to such good effect, she added, "Bloody hell."

  She sucked in a deep sigh, tasting salt. Clouds were building up in back of the cliffs, turning the sea flat and gray like tarnished pewter, smothering the sun. A gull wheeled overhead, screaming: please... please... please... A gust of wind blasted the sand hills, flattening the marram grass, molding her skirt to her thighs. Behind her, a trickle of stones cascaded down the cliff. She looked up, expecting the goats.

  And saw him.

  She didn't stop to think. She ran into the shadows cast by the cliff face and hid behind a boulder that was hoary with lichen and surrounded by a screen of sea rush. She couldn't stop herself, though, from peering through the stiff-stemmed reedy grass to watch him come.

  He went all the way to the edge of the tide, then stopped. He stood with his back to her, and the sea lapped at his boots. The wind made the sleeves of his white shirt luff like sails. He stood still, staring out to sea. But there was a skittishness about him, like a high-strung racehorse awaiting only the snap of the flag to burst into a gallop.

  Jessalyn subsided back behind the rock and buried her face in her hands. Dear life, once again she had behaved like an utter nodcock. A one-eyed mole couldn't have missed seeing her standing like a lone fence post in the middle of the beach. She should have waited until he'd come her way, then walked past him, cutting him dead. Instead she had run away to hide like a child. He was probably waiting with glee for her to come out so that he could once again exercise his sardonic tongue at her expense.

  She sneaked another look. To her shock she saw that he had thrown off his shirt. He bent over and pulled off his boots. He straightened, and his hands fell to his waist, and the next thing she knew he was peeling his buckskins down over his bare hips. She saw him through a haze thrown up by the breaking waves. He stood facing the sea, his man's naked body hard and dark against the white of the sand and the spumy mist. He moved, startling her. But he was only walking into the surf. She saw where an ugly red scar curled around his upper thigh like a whip lash, before a wave rolled over, crashing against his stomach, covering him.

  This was a dangerous place to bathe, even on the best of days. And the day after a storm...

  He dived into the first breaker. She held her breath until he emerged beyond it. But a second later a new wave engulfed him. It seemed an eternity before his head appeared again, black against the rolling mud gray water. He swam toward the Devil's Jawbone, a jagged rock that thrust up like a shark's tooth from the seabed and had torn the keel out of many a vessel run afoul of it. There were often mysterious currents around the Devil's Jawbone that came from nowhere and sucked swimmers out to sea.

  Somebody ought to warn him about the current, she thought. But she didn't want that somebody to be her. She didn't want to have to look into those piercing dark eyes and see within them the knowledge that she had watched him undress. That she had watched him walk naked into the sea.

  After the insulting way he had behaved toward her, for the price of a tin penny-mug she ought to let him drown.

  He should have been killed in the explosion.

  Or at least badly scalded. The blast had gone backward, out the butt end of the boiler, and it had only been sheer, blind, stupid luck that he'd been standing in front. Uncharacteristic luck for a Trelawny, most would say. But although he had been momentarily concussed by the shock of the blast, otherwise he hadn't gotten a blister. He would have emerged from the disaster relatively unscathed if that skinny redheaded wench hadn't come hurtling through the door like shot out of a cannon and trampled him.

  The sea tugged at his legs. He pulled against the current, fighting it a moment, then swam free. A sharp pain sizzled in his thigh. He set his teeth and kicked harder.

  He had thought the physical exercise would keep at bay the brooding thoughts about his latest failure. But they crowded around him anyway, cawing and flapping their black wings like vultures. He had been so sure he'd had the answer this time, that this time what he'd seen in his head he could build into a reality. He had this idea...

  That a carriage could be made to run on steam power. Like a locomotive, only on a regular road, not tracks. A horseless carriage... But it would require an engine that had yet to be invented, lighter and more compact, yet many times more powerful. The solution, he thought, had to lie in the fire tubes. Not the single-pass and twin flues that existed in the steam engines of today, but a multitubular system of many small flues—twenty or more—that would raise the evaporative power of the boiler enormously. In theory so many fire tubes should have enabled him to increase greatly the steam pressure per square inch within the boiler and, by extrapolation, the power of the engine.

  In practice the boiler had blown all to bloody hell.

  That was why he had conducted the experiment alone, in the isolated and abandoned enginehouse of Wheal Ruthe, instead of at the foundry in Penzance. That way, if something went wrong, he was the only one at risk.

  He'd been living on borrowed time anyway. He should have died at Waterloo a year ago along with everyone else. Waterloo... The vultures in his head flapped their wings and shrieked, and suddenly his nostrils were assailed with the rotten-egg stench of exploded gunpowder, the ripe smell of spilled blood, the rancid odor of fear. He ducked his head beneath a wave and kicked hard, gasping at the pain that shot up into his groin, swallowing seawater, and tasting blood. Tasting death. Tasting...

  Cold.

  The water had suddenly turned bitter cold. He tried to change direction, to turn back toward the shore, but the current had him gripped like a fist, sucking and pulling him farther out to sea. He kicked out with his legs and dug into the water with his arms. The current pulled and sucked and tugged, and he might have been a leaf caught in a whirlpool. It was almost as if the water around him had taken life, and the brute, malevolent power of it shocked him. He fought, bending all of his will and strength against the sea, and the sea was winning. He almost laughed. He had always known, even after surviving so much, that when he finally did die, it would be through his own bloody stupidity.

  And then, as if it had only been toying with him all along, the sea gave one last tug and let him go.

  He rolled over onto his back, his chest heaving. He floated, feeling with relief the tide carry him back toward the shore. Beneath the ragged gasps of his own harsh breathing and the lap of water around his ears, he heard another sound. He thought at first that it was a gull screeching. A sick gull.

  He trod water, bobbing like a cork in the troughs of the waves as he looked toward the beach. The skinny redheaded wench had emerged from behind her rock and was now standing up to her knees in the surf, hands cupped around her mouth, hallooing him.

  He ignored her, turning over to float on his back. His leg throbbed. Sometimes the pain became so fierce it was like a white heat behind his eyes. At first the bastard butchers who called themselves barber-surgeons had said that he would die unless the leg came off. When he'd proved them bloody liars, they'd said he would never walk again. He had proved them wrong on that count, too, but even he was forced to admit the leg was still weak. And it hurt. Every single waking moment when he wasn't d
rugged with alcohol, it hurt as if the teeth of hell were gnawing on his flesh.

  The redheaded wench was jumping up and down now, flapping her arms like a demented hen. What in bloody hell did she want? He'd have to go back anyway; he hadn't the strength to challenge the sea again. He imagined that the sight of him emerging naked from the surf would probably send her squealing up the cliff path like a scalded pig. He rolled over onto his side, his arm stroking forward, hand knifing into a wave. He spit salt water from his mouth and grinned.

  She didn't run. But when he got within a few feet of her and stood up in the breakers, she jerked, scuttling backward like a little sand crab. She stared wide-eyed at him, her face turning the color of crushed mulberries. By the time he stopped in front of her, her gaze was rigidly focused over his shoulder.

  He used his drawling gentleman's voice. "Did you want something, Miss Letty?"

  "I..." She faltered, and he saw her throat work as she swallowed. The wind billowed her hair into a cinnamon cloud around her head. The sea rose and fell around them like a breath.

  He sloughed the water off his chest with his hands. Her gaze jerked back to him a moment, then swerved away again. The sea sighed.

  She was very young. She had a bony face, with a broad forehead and flaring cheekbones that were dusted with freckles. But it was her mouth that dominated her features. A large, full-lipped mouth, that even drawn in tightly as it was now, seemed on the verge of breaking into a smile or a laugh. It was odd, for she looked like no one else he'd ever seen, yet he felt he knew her.

  "You have a punch like a Billingsgate stevedore, Miss Letty."

  Her lips pressed tighter together, and her chin shot up, although she continued to look away from him. "In spite of your odious behavior, I never intended to strike you," she said, so prim and proper he had to light a laugh. "That, at least, was an accident."

  "Indeed? Then I shudder to contemplate what mayhem you could commit should you ever be deliberately provoked."