He thought of Jessalyn, of how he had killed her, and it was like that, as if the current had gotten him.
He closed his mouth around the muzzle.
It tasted bitter, of burned sulfur and cold metal, of death. He took the barrel out of his mouth and licked his lips, swallowed. He slowly set the pistol onto the blotter in front of him and wiped his sweating, shaking hands on his doeskin pantaloons.
He didn't know someone had come into the room until he heard the door click shut.
"Ullo, guv'nor."
His head flung up, and he stumbled to his feet. The boy Topper stepped into the light cast by the candle branch. Clarence felt his jaw sag open in shock, for the boy seemed more wraith than human. His eyes wild in a pale and skeletal face. His lips pulled tight against his teeth as if he was holding back a laugh. Or a scream.
Clarence's gaze jerked down to the boy's hands. One was wrapped in bloodstained splints and bandages, the fingers splayed and clawed like a falcon's talons. The other was thin and white, and very whole, and gripping the handle of a spalling hammer. The hammer's poll shone black and wet in the flickering light.
Topper held up his mangled hand, and Clarence's teeth sank into his lower lip, trapping back a whimper. "He did for me, your bullyboy," Topper said.
"But you—you didn't obey orders?" Clarence whined, his voice rising in the end as if in a question, as if Topper was being unreasonable not to understand that if one didn't obey orders, one was punished for it.
Topper hefted the spalling hammer as if he was about to throw it, and Clarence flinched. "Aye, well Stout did for me, so I did for him. I smashed his bleedin' head in. Now I've come to do for you."
Clarence snatched up the pistol and pointed it at the boy's chest. "I'll shoot."
Topper looked from Clarence's face to the pistol and back to his face. He seemed a little surprised but not frightened. He thought a moment, and then his mouth pulled into a smile so tight it didn't even reveal the gap in his front teeth. He shrugged his bony shoulders. "So, if not today, guv'nor, then I'll do for you tomorrow. I can wait. I've nothing better t' do, eh? Can't ride the bleeding 'orses no more, can I?"
"They'll hang you on a six-shilling gibbet, boy," Clarence said. At least he thought he said it. He felt his lips move, but he couldn't hear for the blood roaring in his ears.
Topper shrugged again. "It don't make no nevermind what's done to me. I've got the sooty warts. You heard of the sooty warts, guv'nor? The climbing boy's sickness? I'd just as soon hang tomorrow as watch me privates rot off and take a year adyin'.
"Nay, I likes it better this way," Topper said, and he stroked his own cheek with the poll of the hammer. He did it gently, like a lover's touch. "Think on this, guv'nor. I'll be out there somewheres, ready to do for you whenever the notion takes me. Tomorrow, mebbe, eh? Or the day after.
Then again, mebbe not. Ye see, I ain't got nothin' to lose, and when a bloke's got nothin' to lose, he don't care what 'appens. 'Cept fer revenge. But even revenge is cold comfort when ye're in yer grave, so it's best to draw it out real good whilst ye're alive, eh? Like it's a pleasure just lookin' at ye right now and seein' ye sweat."
Clarence licked his dry lips, and the gun in his hand trembled slightly. A part of him was contemptuous of the boy's lack of will. Another part of him wanted to sob with relief, and the bowel-loosening residue of fear. And a whole different part of him didn't care about any of it. She was dead. What did it matter, what did any of it matter, when she was dead?
Topper had to stuff the handle of the hammer through his belt in order to lift the door latch with his one good hand. He paused at the threshold, turning, and this time the smile parted his lips, revealing the missing teeth. He looked young then, like a schoolboy all set to play some prank while the master was gone from the lecture room. "Oh, by the way, guv'nor. Did ye hear the news? His lordship, the earl o' Caerhays—he came home a winner. Won it 'ands down, he did."
"What?" Clarence felt his heart stop. Then start up again in harsh, pounding strokes that sounded like a cannon volley going off inside his head. "But the explosion..."
Topper cackled a laugh. "Well, that was a surprise, that explosion. Blew a good twenty feet out o' them shiny new rails. Lucky fer his lordship he'd just gone steamin' past that bit when the bleedin' thing blew." The laughter remained on Topper's face, but his eyes dimmed, turned crafty and hard, and Clarence thought this was far worse than the madness of before. "Mebbe the iron horse was faster than you figured, guv'nor. Or mebbe your bullyboy counted his paces wrong. He always was a stupid un, was Stout. Big an' mean, but stupid."
Clarence stared at the door, watching it swing shut, hearing the latch fall into place again, but he wasn't really aware of any of this. There was this great flapping sound inside his head, as if a thousand crows were flying off at once. She lived, lived, lived. She was alive! And then, on the heels of this stunning joy, came incredible terror.
If she lived, then so did Caerhays.
He sat back behind the desk and picked up the pistol. He turned the chair around so that he could look out the window. A group of men were playing skittles in the alley between the inn and the stables. Some navvies seemed to be having a drinking contest, passing jugs around and slapping one another on the back. An old woman pushed a cart among them, and Clarence smelled roasting chestnuts on the breeze that came through the open crack in the sash. The sun was hugging the tops of the hills, turning the cornfields a burned red, the color of her hair. And glazing the iron rails of McCady's dream, turning it into a ribbon of fire. He would know, Clarence thought, he would know who was responsible for that explosion.
And he would come hotfoot here to kill him.
The sun fell behind the hills and it began to grow dark. The yard below had quieted, except for a barking dog and scullery maid drawing water from the well. And the occasional bellow of laughter coming from the open windows of the taproom below.
Clarence watched the hack come trotting along the new rails from the direction of Exeter, watched the man turn into the yard of the Crooked Staff, watched him dismount, tossing the reins and a coin at the stableboy, watched him disappear beneath the thatched eaves that sheltered the entrance to the inn.
Clarence picked up the pistol and turned the chair to face the door.
Bootheels rapped on the bare wooden floor of the hall. Clarence watched the latch depress and turn. He gripped the smooth, oily stock of pistol so tightly his fingers hurt. The door swung slowly open.
He looked into his cousin's face, his brother's face, and pulled the trigger.
The pistol's cock swung forward, and sparks flashed as the flint scraped the frizzen. Clarence's hand jerked, and his eyes squeezed shut in anticipation of the bang and recoil.
And nothing happened.
McCady kept coming right at him, and for a moment darkness dimmed Clarence's eyes, and he wondered if he would faint. He flinched when McCady took the gun from his hand.
His cousin looked the gun over with the critical eye of a soldier and tsked, shaking his head, admonishing Clarence as if he were a raw recruit. "Clarey, Clarey... Damp powder. Rust in the barrel. I'm surprised the bloody thing didn't misfire and blow your hand off."
"I swear I didn't know about her," Clarence grated out of a throat raw with fear. "I didn't know you'd taken her up with you on the Comet. I swear it, Mack. I swear, I didn't know. I wouldn't have seen her hurt for the world. Not the world."
McCady cocked a brow at him, but he said nothing. He hooked the leg of a wainscot chair, pulling it around so that he could sit down on the other side of the desk. Clarence watched, mesmerized, as his cousin's slender, steam-blistered hands pulled the ramrod from the pistol's recess and extracted the unfired ball and powder from the barrel.
"Mack..." This is like the current at Crookneck Cove, Clarence thought. You explain and explain, and it doesn't do any good. "I would never hurt Jessalyn. I love her."
"You remember, Jacky Stout, Clarey?" McCady said, and Clarenc
e's chest tightened with renewed fear, squeezing all the breath from his lungs.
McCady took a small swatch of oiled linen from the pistol case and used the ramrod to thrust it up and down the barrel. "You and I did a bit of smuggling with him once— that time someone peached on us to the gaugers." He brushed away the burned gunpowder off the priming pan. He looked up, pinning Clarence with his fierce dark gaze. "Someone bashed poor old Jacky Stout's head in this afternoon. He lived for a while, though. Long enough to talk."
Suddenly his hand shot out, gripping Clarence by the throat. He came up out of his chair, jerking Clarence to his feet. He brought their faces so close together that Clarence could feel the heat of McCady's breath and see strange, glowing lights in his cousin's dark eyes, like tiny, flaring fires. They were the eyes of the man who had slashed and slashed with his sword until the bodies of the enemy piled up around him, and the taste in Clarence's mouth was that of the gun barrel, cold and bitter, and of death.
McCady's lips pulled back over his teeth. "You burned down her house, you bloody bastard. You had her horses nobbled, and you crimped her races. You hurt her."
"I only wanted her to marry me. I would have been good to her. I could have made her happy."
McCady opened his fist and let Clarence fall. Clarence's rump hit the edge of the chair, and he had to grip the desk to keep from falling. "You will resign your seat in Parliament," McCady said.
Clarence licked his lips. His mouth was so parched he couldn't swallow. "You have no proof. No real proof."
"I don't need proof. I have influence." McCady took the powder flask from the pistol case and primed the pan. "You understand influence, Clarey, how it works? I know your patron, Lord Arbrury. Close we are, Lord Arbrury and I. Bosom bows." He tapped more of the black powder down the barrel and compressed it with the ramrod. "His only son and I fought on the Peninsula together, and he has this quaint notion that I once saved the boy's life. A nasty word in his ear about you from me, and you could run for cowherd in the poorest borough in Wales and lose." He wrapped a small linen patch around a lead ball and rammed it down on top of the powder.
He looked up again, and Clarence saw no mercy in his eyes. "When I am through with you and your reputation, Clarey, my man, there won't be a club or residence in all of London that won't be denying you the door. No more invitations to Lord So-and-So's rout. No more house parties at the duke of So-and-So's Somerset estate. I am going to take away everything you have ever wanted in this life, Clarey, and then leave you alive to live without it."
It was too much for Clarence; he couldn't take it all in. He knew it was terrible, this punishment that McCady was promising him, but he could focus on only one horror right now. "Please don't tell Jessalyn what I did. Please, don't tell her."
"She already knows. She knows it all. And she never wants to see you again, Clarey. Ever."
A great hollowness pressed down on Clarence's chest. He looked out the window. The dog had stopped barking; the scullery maid was gone. He felt empty inside, a vast emptiness like a great barren desert. He really had lost her, for good. Forever. He wondered how he was going to stand it. "But I love her," he said.
He saw McCady move out the corner of his eye, and he turned his head.
The pistol came up until it was pointing between Clarence's eyes. The muzzle seemed enormous, the maw of hell. And McCady's words seemed to come shooting out of the bore, killing him. "She is mine, Tiltwell. Learn to live with it."
McCady's finger tightened on the trigger.
To Clarence's bitter shame he felt himself begin to tremble like an old man with the ague. Hot tears filled his eyes and started splattering onto his cheeks. He squeezed his lids shut and waited, waited... and made a spastic little jerk when he heard the click of the falling door latch. He opened his eyes; McCady had gone. He looked down. The gun sat on the blotter in front of him. Loaded and ready to fire.
McCady paused at the top of the stairs, his hand resting lightly on the newel-post. He waited a few moments, waited for the sound of a shot, but it didn't come. And that, he thought, answered one question at least.
A Trelawny would have pulled the trigger.
It took him awhile to find her, and in those moments an irrational panic squeezed his chest that he might never find her again.
He had seen Clarey's face when the man had at last comprehended that Jessalyn was lost to him forever. McCady understood well that kind of hell. He had to find her now and reassure himself that she was still his.
He came upon her standing on top of a small rise a few hundred yards down the road, past the navvies' turf huts and flickering campfires. He could barely see her in the deepening twilight. She stood with her feet spread apart, her hands loose at her sides, and she was looking down into the cutting below, where the iron rails lay like a great seam across the freshly scarred earth. His boot disturbed a stone. She turned, and her face broke into a dazzling smile that stopped his heart.
He wanted her.
He wanted her with a fierce hunger that made him tremble, as if he had not had a woman in years. But it was she he wanted. Not just any woman, not the most beautiful woman in the world. He wanted her, with her raucous, lusty laugh and her sunbeam smile, with her long legs and bony knees. He wanted to hear the little breath-catching sighs she made when he entered her and feel her hair sliding across his naked belly. He wanted Jessalyn, his Jessa. And what made his happiness complete, what made him want to whoop and shout and laugh aloud, was that he knew, he knew she wanted him in just the same way.
He thought that he should say all these things to her, that it was important she understand, but he couldn't find the words. They piled up in his throat and got stuck there, so instead he crushed her against him and spoke with his kiss. A kiss that quickly turned so raw and hot that he had to break away.
"McCady!" she gasped, straightening her straw hat, which he had knocked askew. Her bosom trembled with her panting breaths, and she licked her lips. He wanted to kiss her again, but there was something he had to tell her first.
"Jessa—"
"I'm glad you've come, for I've been thinking," she said, her voice bright with excitement and happiness. She slipped her hand into his and turned so that they looked together down the rock and gorse-tufted hillside. "What do you see?"
He shook his head. He had eyes only for her. "I don't know; it's rather dark. Rocks and grass, some trees." She emitted a soft snort of exasperation, and he laughed. "All right, I see a railway. My railway."
Her grip tightened on his hand, and she brought it up to cradle against her breasts. He looked at her face, at the sharp curve of a cheekbone, at the full swell of her lips. Awe filled his heart at the thought that she was his, awe and a sweet ache.
"Don't you understand?" she said, her face vivid. "Even if they had managed to stop you, they could not have stopped it, the idea of it. You had gone too far, taken the idea too far. This"—her hand flashed in the darkness— "this is going to change the world. It is the future."
She turned her face, and her gaze captured his, pure and deep, like a hidden spring. "And this is our future." Slowly she moved his hand down her body until it was pressing low against her belly. She gave a sudden, gurgling laugh and leaned into him to rub her cheek against his chest, still clutching his hand. "We're going to have a baby, McCady."
The breath eased out of him in a great sigh, and tears of piercing joy stung his eyes. "God."
Her laughter, rusty and squeaking like a old pump handle, filled the night. "Well, yes, He did have something to do with it. But so did you, my love."
My love.
She had never called him that before. A warmth, a sweet and gentle warmth, enveloped him. He wanted her to know something, he had to tell her that... He tried for the words, but his tongue felt stiff as old leather. "Jessa, I..."
She looked up at him, smiling, expectant, and dammit, he couldn't get his throat to work. She cupped his cheek with her soft hand. "Silly goose. Are those flowers tha
t you're crushing in your fist for me?"
He had spotted them growing along the top of a hedge while he'd been searching for her and on impulse he'd picked them. They were primroses of the pale yellow color that always made him think of her and of that long-ago summer. He handed them to her now, feeling slightly foolish.
And then he felt inordinately pleased with himself when her mouth broke into a wide smile of pure delight. She buried her face in the starred yellow blossoms, breathing in their scent. She lifted her head, and he thought she would smile again when her face quickened with excitement and she pointed toward the village behind him. "Oh, look, McCady! Look at the moon."
It rose over the tops of the distant trees, a great golden ball in the deep velvet purple of late twilight. Like a ripe, juicy peach ready to be plucked out of the sky.
She breathed a soft sigh and leaned into him, her head falling on his shoulder. "Is it a blue moon, do you think?"
"I don't know," he said, his throat full. To him it didn't matter. Since that night he'd made her his wife, all his moons had been blue. Rare and special and filled with...
"Jessalyn, I..." God, why were the words so hard to say? He lived for her. She was his hope of paradise and in a way his glimpse of hell. The hell that he would suffer should he ever lose her. And this he understood at last was...
"Love. I love you, Jessalyn."
AUTHOR'S NOTE
McCady Trelawny is, alas, only a figment of my imagination, although it is certainly within the realm of historical possibility that he could have lived to invent his steam-powered locomotive and to build his railway.
Once in a Blue Moon Page 43