In the silence that had fallen between them, he became aware once again of the slow, sucking noise of the pump. It was a slithery sound, like skin rubbing against hot, moist skin. Her gaze flashed to his face, then away again, too swiftly for him to read her thoughts. She moistened her lips, drawing his own gaze down to her mouth.
"Did you build this engine? My lord."
"Yes. Miss Letty."
She looked the pump engine over, nodding grimly as if this confirmed her worst expectations of him. But then she surprised him by saying, "It is a fine engine."
"Thank you.... I didn't think you'd be coming back to Cornwall," he said. God, he thought, this conversation is inane. Why couldn't they talk about what really mattered?
Why had he never been able to talk to anyone about what mattered?
Her wide mouth quivered, nearly smiling. There had always been such a joy within her, he thought, a fire that could never be doused no matter what life forced her to endure.
"We're only here for a short time, my lord. We'll be going up to Epsom Downs come May, for the Derby."
"Blue Moon is healthy then? He'll be able to compete?"
"The Sarn't Major thinks so." She raised her head and fastened her wide, smoky gaze onto his face. "You are still convinced we crimped that race, aren't you? My lord."
"I believe the collision was deliberate, yes. I shouldn't trust that jockey of yours were I you. Miss Letty."
Anger darkened her eyes to the color of the sea at night. "Topper would never do such a thing."
"Your loyalty is admirable, Miss Letty. I wonder..." A strand of her hair had come loose to wrap around her neck. He lifted it between two fingers. It felt like silk and looked like liquid fire. He tucked the curl back up beneath the rolled brim of her hat, allowing his fingertips to linger at her temple. He could see her trembling. "I wonder, if you truly cared for a man... I almost think you would forgive him anything."
He saw understanding flash behind the flat grayness of her eyes. He waited, breath suspended, for her response. Although he didn't know what she could possibly say that would ease the ache in his chest.
"No," she said. "Not anything..."
"Lookit, Miss Letty! Lookit!"
A little girl in pink pinafore and black pigtails burst through the door. She wore a gap-toothed smile so wide the corners of her mouth nearly touched her ears. In one grubby fist she clutched what to McCady's eyes looked like a bunch of weeds.
She skidded to a stop and held the scraggly posy up to Jessalyn. The weeds had been pulled up by the roots, and they trickled dirt onto the newly swept floor. "I picked these for ee, Miss Letty."
Jessalyn accepted the bouquet of weeds with a smile that pierced straight through to McCady's heart. "They're beautiful," she said softly. "Thank you, Little Jessie." She brought the posy up to her face, her nose wrinkling as she fought to hold back a sneeze. McCady caught a pungent whiff of wild garlic. He turned his head to hide a smile.
A pair of jackdaws flew across the open window, black wings flashing, drowning out the thump of the engine with their raucous cawing. "Look!" Little Jessie cried.
McCady's head jerked around, following the direction of the little girl's pointing finger. The sky was empty now, but something had disturbed the jackdaws. He strode to the window, leaning out. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a man running down to the sea, slipping in and out among the rocks, a thick-chested, shaggy-haired man in a miner's coat and ragged drill trousers.
"It was Grandda!" Little Jessie cried, her voice shrieking louder than the crows.
"Jacky Stout," Jessalyn said. She shivered, and McCady was surprised to see fear shadow her eyes.
"Who?"
"Jacky Stout." Jessalyn gathered the little girl against her legs, resting her palm on her head. "Little Jessie is the baby we found here in the mine that day." Startled, McCady looked down at the child. The pale, fey face that stared back up at him stirred a distant memory. She had a sharply pointed chin and tilted catlike eyes. Her black braids hung nearly to her waist, and a hole in her pantalets revealed a scabbed knee. Surely this child was too old. But then it had been over five years. "Jacky Stout is her grandfather," Jessalyn said.
"I remember him. I thought he'd been hanged for poaching"
"I don't like Grandda," Little Jessie said. "He hit me once an' called me a—a bastid. Mam says he's good for nothing but gallow's fodder."
McCady hunkered down on his heels so that he was eye to eye with her. Little Jessie. Without thought his hand came up to cup her cheek, as if needing to touch her to prove that she was real. For so long that summer had seemed more dream to him than memory.
"I doubt it was your grandfather," McCady said softly. "It was probably some curious tinner come from far afield and looking for work."
"It was Grandda," Little Jessie insisted.
He looked up at Jessalyn, and although her face had gentled, he caught the lingering shadows of fear in her eyes. He wanted to ask her about Jacky Stout and why she was so afraid of him when she had not been afraid that summer. But his wife came tripping through the door just then, her pretty face alight with happiness. Jessalyn stepped back with a guilty flush, as if she'd been caught doing something wicked just by speaking with him.
"Oh, you must come see!" Emily cried. "Jessalyn... my lord." Color blossomed on her cheeks as her gaze fell on her husband. "You must come. They are having a hurling contest. Some of the miners are trying to see who can heave an old pit prop the farthest." She captured a smile with her hand. "I have never known the like."
Shrieking with excitement, Little Jessie ran to Emily, and Jessalyn followed more slowly. McCady straightened but remained where he was. The engine tender came in to stoke the fire, and the place suddenly seemed crowded.
The engine tender threw open the damper, releasing a great blast of heat. He shoveled in more coal and the fire blazed higher. The two women and the child stood within the great arched doorway, backlighted by blue sky and green sea. Laughing, Emily said something to Jessalyn. McCady waited, his heart suspended for Jessalyn's answering laugh. But it didn't come.
After that he told himself he would stay away from her. But he felt as if there was something alive inside him that had to be fed and instead he was slowly starving. So he kept seeking her out, with his eyes, with his nerve endings. And when he saw her break away from everyone and walk alone to the cliffs, he followed her.
The swiftly running tide swallowed the narrow beach, making a soft, rushing sound, like a pulse. She sat upon a rock hoary and shaggy with weeds and lichen. He sat beside her. She stiffened, but this time she made no move to run away. There were only the two of them and the gulls.
His hands trembled to touch her. He clenched them into a fist between his spread knees.
He spotted a single primrose growing in a bit of dirt within the cleft of a rock. He plucked the flower, twirling the stem between his fingers. The moon was coming up early in the afternoon sky, pale and half spent. It was not a blue moon.
"It is so wild and beautiful here," she said, breaking the silence between them. "Yet I was thinking of how this will all look in a few months, covered with mining attle and gritty black slag heaps."
He did not look where she did—at the yellow water gushing from the adit at the foot of the cliff, already staining the sand, swirling like spilled paint into the sea. He looked at her. Wisps of hair, the color of a campfire at night, curled about her face. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent. Her mouth... her mouth...
He looked down and saw that he had crushed the primrose in his fist. He opened his hand, letting the bruised flower fall into the muddy sea. "I thought you would be pleased that I have opened the mine," he said.
"Oh, I am, I am. I was only being selfish."
A moment passed in silence as they watched a small plover scurry over the dripping rocks, a sand eel wriggling in its beak. She started to push herself up, and he helped her with a hand beneath her elbow. A gentleman's touch, an acceptab
le touch, a proper touch. But once they were on their feet, when he could have let go, when he should have let her go, he did not. He could feel her heat through the thin muslin sleeve of her dress, feel her trembling. "Jessalyn..."
She pulled her arm from his grasp. "I wish—" She stopped the words by sinking her teeth into her lower lip, hard enough to leave imprints like tiny cuts.
He stared into her face. Her wide gray eyes impaled him, piercing his heart. "What do you wish?" I would bring you the stars in the palms of my hands if I thought that it would only make you laugh again.
"I wish that you would leave me alone, my lord. I wish that you would go away forever and leave me alone."
"Cor, Becka girl. Ee've got about as much sense as a peahen with no head."
Becka Poole pulled her fringed shawl close beneath her neck and folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself. He wasn't coming. He had said he would, but he wasn't going to come. Like as not he was back in his room at Caerhays Hall right this very minute, sitting afore the fire, toasting his toes, and laughing to think of her outside all alone at midnight, a prey for corpse lights and with a gale abrewing.
She touched her hagstone for luck just as lightning flared in a liverish sky. The wind had come up, high and thick with salt. It whistled like a pierced pig's bladder and set the boughs of the hawthorn and wild nut trees streaming out like flying witch's hair.
She huddled against the stone wall of the little dairy where she had arranged to meet him. Inside, some cheeses were starting to ripen, and their smell came to her on the wind. As did the sweet scent of lavender water. She had splashed a whole bottle of it all over herself before she'd changed into her best Sunday meeting frock. She hoped she hadn't overdone it.
Something curled around her legs, and she caught a scream with her hand before it could come flying out of her mouth. It was that wretched cat, Napoleon. She had just managed to calm her thudding heart when for some reason known only to himself the beast started yowling as if he'd just caught his tail in a mousetrap.
"Hist yer noise," she whispered loudly, flapping her hands at him. Dear life, she had to shut him up, or Miss Jessalyn would be out in two shakes to see what had him so overset. "Shoo, now. Off to bed with ee."
The runty orange cat streaked across the courtyard and leaped onto the front parlor windowsill. The window must have been left open a crack, for he pushed it with his paw and disappeared inside.
"Miss Poole?"
Becka whirled around, nearly leaping out of her skin. She pressed her hand against her breastbone because her heart was beating fit to burst out of her chest. Lightning flashed. He looked like a painting she had seen once of the Archangel Gabriel, his golden hair swirling in the wind, his tall, broad-shouldered body silhouetted against a black sky.
"I was thinking 'tis nae likely I'd be finding ye out this night after all," he said. He was wearing only a shirt that fluttered with his hard breathing. She wondered if he'd run all the way. She hoped not. Running wasn't good for the lungs, especially when they got to heaving like bellows against the walls of the chest. "Nae with this wind," he added.
"Oooh, this wind! 'Tes blowin' so hard a body needs two hands to hold down the hair on his head."
His smile glimmered like a silver trout in the dark. He had the straightest teeth, and they were very white. It occurred to her suddenly that she didn't often see him smile.
"Were ee born on a Wednesday?" she asked. "'Tesn't good to be born on a Wednesday. I were born on a Tuesday. Wednesday's child be full of woe. Tuesday's child—"
He took her arm leading her deeper within the shelter of the dairy's low-thatched eaves. Her heart started to hammer again. It was beating so hard Becka feared she was having a heart stroke.
"Do I seem woeful to ye, Miss Poole?"
"Well... ais, ee do, betimes." She looked up into his face, struck nearly breathless suddenly with fear and excitement and a growing wonder. She was out here alone in the dark with a man who was handsome enough to be a prince. And who was lowering his head and parting his lips as if he were about to kiss her.
His mouth captured hers, held it fast a moment, then began to move with gentle, insistent pressure. When he ended the kiss an eternity later, Becka sucked in a great draft of air as if she'd been drowning.
"Cor!" she exclaimed. "Why did ee do that?"
He brushed her lips with his again. "It seemed the moment called for the doing of something frivolous."
Suddenly he lifted his head, sniffing the air. She thought he was going to sneeze. She hoped he hadn't caught her rheumy chill by kissing her. Her lips still tingled from where they had touched his. His lips had been the strangest combination of soft and hard. And they had been hot, too, and sort of melting, the way the top of a candle is just after you blow it out. In truth, she had rather liked the feel ol them. She wondered how she could get him to do something frivolous again.
"Do ye smell smoke?" he said.
"Eh?" She drew in a deep breath, wrinkling her nose. She smelled the cheese and the sea and lavender water... and, aye, she smelled smoke. "Mebbe Miss Jessalyn couldn't sleep and she got up to stir the fire."
He stepped out from beneath the shelter of the dairy, and she went with him. She noticed something odd at the parlor window where Napoleon had slipped through earlier. An orange light, looking fractured and wavy through the mullioned glass.
She was just about to point this out to him when the roof erupted into flames.
CHAPTER 19
His hot breath seared the back of her neck.
She ran down a path choked with brambly vines that burst into fiery pinwheels and sent sparks shooting into the air. She ran and ran, and still he was there, breathing against her neck, burning her skin. Tongues of hellfire licked at her legs, scorching, melting. A red-hot wind roared and crackled, consuming her screams. Yet she could hear him still, calling out to her, offering sweet promises she knew were lies, and she would not stop running, she would not turn around to look into his face. Because once she saw his face, she would be forever damned.
He laughed his devil's laugh. You may as well look, Jessalyn, oh, yes. Because you cannot escape me. You can never escape me. You surrendered your soul to me when you were sixteen, and I own you now. So you may as well look...
He seized her around the waist, enveloping her in a lover's embrace, and where he touched her she turned into fire. He spun her around, and his hot breath bathed her face, and though she kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she knew he smiled his devil's smile. Mine. At last, at last you are mine... kiss me, Jessalyn. Become one with me and you will live forever. Her will dissolved, betrayed by old powers, dark longings. She opened her eyes and looked into bright sunbursts floating in black pools, burning sunbursts, devouring sunbursts. His eyes, his eyes, McCady's eyes...
She screamed...
And woke up in hell.
The wall at the foot of her bed was a sheet of fire. Thirsty flames licked at the old silk paper melting it into instant ash. Black smoke billowed like wind-tossed clouds. Orange and yellow lights danced, reflected in the looking glass and windowpanes.
She sat up, blinking in confusion, not sure if she was dreaming still. Then she felt the heat and sucked in a breath choked with smoke, and she knew the fire was real. Throwing off the bedcovers, she leaped from the bed.
"Gram!"
At the door she paused. Smoke curled beneath the threshold in ghostly fingers. Flickers of eerie red light shone on the polished floor. Her hand reached out, hovering, afraid of what lay on the other side of the door.
The brass latch was so hot it seared the skin off her palms. She screamed from the pain and from terror, flinging open the door. The flames, fed by fresh air, flared with a whoosh.
The sudden fierce blast of heat drove her back, sucking the breath from her lungs. The fire hissed along the black oak floorboards, raising blisters that popped and curled like thick boiling soup.
She plunged through the flames and ran down the smo
ldering Turkey carpet to Lady Letty's room. Heat undulated in waves from the front stairwell. A pall of ocherous smoke hugged the ceiling. In the kitchen below, something was whistling and popping like the fireworks at Vauxhall Gardens.
Jessalyn reached for the latch, whimpering in expectation of the pain, but although the metal was hot, it wasn't burning. She pushed open the door and slammed it quickly behind her.
The fire had not reached this room yet, but the smoke was so bad it was like trying to peer through a wool blanket. Years' worth of varnish in the wood paneling released noxious fumes that blinded her eyes and tore at her throat, stealing her breath. Choking, Jessalyn groped her way to the bed.
It was empty.
"Gram!"
She fell to her hands and knees, searching the floor with her outstretched hands. Gram wasn't in the room, she wasn't here, oh, God, what if she left and Gram was still in here somewhere, unconscious, suffocating, burning...
The ceiling above her head exploded into flames.
"Gram!"
Sobbing, Jessalyn pushed herself half upright. She banged into the nightstand by her grandmother's bed, bruising her hipbone. She didn't even feel it. Pain was everywhere, with every breath.
Something clawed at her ankle, and she screamed before she realized it was Lady Letty. She fell back down to her knees again and wrapped her arms around the old woman's thin shoulders. She felt Lady Letty's chest jerk with her harsh breathing.
Streams of smoke were now pouring beneath the door. She tightened her grip on her grandmother. The old woman reached up, grasping her hand. "Leave me... too old..."
A jar of barley water sat on the nightstand above her. Jessalyn ripped pieces off the bottom of her night rail and soaked the cloth strips, tying one over her nose and mouth and doing the same for Gram. For a moment the sweet malty smell of barley filled her nostrils, but it was soon replaced by the smoke.
Once in a Blue Moon Page 29
