CHAPTER 3
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 there 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."
The pieman, mollified by the sale, ceased his complaining. He selected a quince jam tart, wrapped it in paper, and pocketed the coin with a one-handed flourish. Jessalyn dragged Becka out of sight of the kiddley tent, giving her the tart to stifle her flow of protests over the pieman's rudeness. Jessalyn strode so fast through the booths and stalls that Becka had to run to keep up.
They emerged into a clearing where a cockpit had been scooped out of the sand. Men crowded around the makeshift ring, shouting and laughing, waving bank notes and fistfuls of coins. There was a smell in the air around the pit, almost a stink, of hot breath, human sweat, and the brassy odor of money.
Within the pit a pair of cocks with shaved necks and sharpened spurs were circling each other. One of the birds emitted a low-throated rattle that reminded Jessalyn of the sound the wind made as it whipped through the gorse.
"Ye ought t' lay a shilling on that red-breasted cock," Becka said, stuffing the last of the pastry into her mouth. "He's got a fire in his eye. Me da always said, bet on the bird what got the fire in his eye."
Gram was the one for betting on cockfights. Jessalyn couldn't even bear to watch them. Just then the cocks flew at each other in a fury of spraying blood and feathers. Jessalyn started to turn aside, but the crowd had closed in around her, pinning her next to the ring.
"Aagh! That pie was some awful," Becka said, licking her fingers. "She be stuck in me throat now. I'll be needing a pint to wash 'er down." Her new hair ribbon swaying, Becka pushed her way through the men, heading toward a tent that sported a banner advertising Bang-Up ginger beer.
Jessalyn had opened her mouth to call after the girl when she saw him again. That Trelawny man. He stood on the other side of the cockpit, the sun at his back. His tall, lean body cast a shadow across the blood-splattered sand. She could not see his face, yet she knew he looked at her. For one suspended moment the bellows and shrieks of the cockfight faded until all Jessalyn could hear was the beat of her pulse, thudding hard and fast in her throat.
Someone jostled her, breaking the spell. She pressed her way through the crush, almost running. Back among the tents and booths again, she looked over her shoulder to see if he followed... and slammed into the chest of a dragon.
She barely kept the scream from getting past her lips, before her wits informed her pounding heart that the dragon wasn't real. She had walked into the middle of a group of costumed strolling players who were passing out handbills for that night's performance.
The gilt and spangled dragon clutched at her with his claws. He roared a laugh, breathing gin fumes, not fire. "Eh, girlie, wha's yer hurry? Give us a kiss."
Jessalyn struggled in his scaly embrace. For a dragon he was a pathetic specimen, missing a wing and two teeth, his green paint chipping. She elbowed him in the belly. He wheezed a fumy breath and let her go. When she looked behind her again, that Trelawny man was nowhere in sight. Obviously he was not the sort, she thought with a sudden smile, to rescue fair damsels from gin-breathing dragons.
Alone now, Jessalyn walked aimlessly past a stall selling ships and whelks in bottles. A caning man offered to reweave a chair seat for her while she waited. Beside him, tied to a stake, was Toby, the learned pig that could guess, so his master claimed, the date of her birth and predict her future. She was tempted to ask the pig whether the man she married would be fair or dark, when her gaze fell on the most beautiful bonnet in the world.
The booth was the most splendid one along the row, for it was covered with a canvas roof, striped and fringed like a Moor's tent. The awning shaded a trestle counter piled high with a colorful profusion of fur and velvet and straw. But one hat stood out above all the others.
Jessalyn picked up the hat and stepped out from beneath the awning to study it better in the fading sunlight. It was tall-crowned, made of midnight blue curled silk and trimmed with enormous rose passionflowers. She smiled at the woman behind the counter. "How much is it?"
"Two pound ten, miss."
"Two pound ten!" Jessalyn didn't need to pretend her shock at the price. "Is this a hat you're selling or the crown jewels?" She laughed, and the sound of her laughter floated over the noise of the fair so that several people turned to stare and then smiled and laughed along with her.
"Don't buy it."
Jessalyn whirled, her fingers gripping the hat's wide brim, crushing the stiff silk. She looked up into a pair of dark, penetrating eyes. "Why are you following me?"
"It's an insanity, you know."
Something swelled inside her chest, making it difficult to breathe. "What?"
"It's an insanity, a mental aberration. Bedlam is full of those who do it."
She wondered why she couldn't make any sense of what he was saying. It was as if she had suddenly sprouted windmills in her head. "Do what?"
"Why, believe that they are constantly being followed by others with evil designs upon their persons. I assure you that I have not been following you, Miss Letty. Nor do I have any sort of design upon your person, evil or otherwise. Fate simply seems to be disgorging you into my path."
"Like Jonah and the whale?"
She had smiled at her own little joke, but he didn't return the smile. He stared at her, and because looking away from him would be the act of a coward, she stared back. His high-boned face held a strange disquiet, and his mouth was set in a thin, hard line.
"My, my," he finally said. "There is a wit beneath all that red hair." He took the bonnet from her nerveless fingers. His hand brushed hers, and a shiver fluttered across her chest, as if a chill wind had come up. Yet the evening had fallen suddenly still. "This hat would not do at all for you," he said. "It is meant for a more mature woman."
Of course, he would think of her as a child. She felt awkward and bedraggled in her speckled dimity frock with its frayed hem and the mended spot on the skirt where she'd caught it on a nail and in her serviceable leather half boots that pinched. She would never be the kind of woman who could wear such a hat and carry it off.
"I thank you for your opinion," she said. "Now if you will excuse me, please, I have business elsewhere."
"Where elsewhere?"
"There." She flung a finger past him, toward the setting sun, and only belatedly noticed where she had pointed. To her horror she saw the Reverend Troutbeck waddling toward her on his fat, bowed legs.
"Miss Letty, here you are at last," the reverend said, panting. "We've been waiting for you." The pastor gestured behind him, where a crowd had started to gather around a gibbet. Suspended from the crossbeam of the gibbet was a row of horse collars. The heads of three widely grinning boys poked out of three of the collars; the fourth was empty.
"A grinning contest!" the Trelawny man exclaimed, shock and laughter in his voice. "You are going to be in a grinning contest."
"No, no," Jessalyn protested. Her cheeks felt so hot she was sure they were on fire. "There has been a mistake. Not a mistake precisely, but a misinterpretation. Of something I said. Or rather, of something I neglected to say..."
The Reverend Troutbeck launched into a discourse about the contest, of how it had become a sort of tradition at the last few Midsummer's Eve fairs, as a way of raising money to reslate the church roof. The congregation, he said, made wagers on whose grin was the widest and whose could last the longest.
Jessalyn couldn't bear to look at the man beside her, but she could feel his gaze on her mouth. She quelled a sudden urge to wet her lips.
"Are you certain you are not mistaken, Miss Letty?" he said, drawling the words. "The good reverend here seems to be of the opinion that you've agreed to be in the competition." He waved a languid hand at the horse collars. "Indeed, he has saved you a place."
The reverend's face, florid and fat as a summer pumpkin, beamed above his grease-stained stock. "Our Miss Letty is a past champion."
"Then our Miss Letty has her title to defend, of course." The Trelawny man bowed at her, mockery in every line of his body. "Please, do not let me detain you."
There was nothing for it. She had to go through with it, to put a brave face on it. Or rather, grin on it. Jessalyn followed the reverend toward the gibbet. She mounted the steps slowly, her head high, her back stiff, as if she were Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine. She thrust her head through the horse collar, fighting off a cowardly desire to up and hang herself here and now, since she had a gibbet right to hand. So she had a big mouth. But dear life, only a cork-brained, addlepated wet goose would go and make a spectacle out of herself by entering a grinning contest.
She had never felt less like smiling.
The hurdy-gurdy ground out its tinny song as around and around they went—the wooden horses with their legs flying high, tails and manes streaming in the wind. Jessalyn had never seen such a wonder before, and she laughed out loud.
The horses had been painted all the bright colors of a peacock's tail and were anchored to a wooden platform by poles through their middles. The platform turned by means of an intricate mesh of chains and gears that were powered by a pair of live donkeys turning a treadmill. A barker dressed in a black checkered coat called out to the passersby to come and ride the merry-go-round.
"It seems we meet again, Miss Letty."
He came toward her out of the falling darkness, limping slightly. He stopped to stand before her, one thumb hooked on his fob pocket, his hip cocked forward. That Trelawny man. She wondered why he kept seeking her out. She wanted him to leave her alone.
"Why are you doing this? What do you want with me?"
He almost smiled. "What do you suppose I want with you?" He paused, and his words hung in the air, full of threat. Or a promise. "I want, as it happens, to chide you for costing me a guinea," he said.
"I cannot imagine what you are talking about."
"The good reverend so bragged of your prowess in flashing your ivories that I laid a guinea on you. He assured me I could not lose."
"That should teach you then, sir—never to bet on a sure thing."
He laughed, and the deep, throaty sound seemed to resonate in her blood. He took a step closer to her. She felt his nearness like the heat of a candle's flame.
She averted her head, sure that he would be able to read her feelings in her face. She couldn't understand this strange effect he seemed to have on her. She disliked him, in a way he frightened her. Yet her whole body leaped and came alive at the mere sight of him. It was like being given one of those electric charges that she'd read about in the newspaper, which had caused dead frogs to jump across the room. She smiled at the silly thought.
"I never trust people who smile suddenly for no reason," he said.
She looked up at him. He was staring at her with lazy-lidded eyes. "Oh, they always have a reason," she said. "You are only angry because you don't know what the reason is, and you suspect that they are secretly laughing at you."
"All the more reason then not to trust them."
Mesmerized, she watched the creases alongside his mouth deepen as he spoke. There was a bitter conviction in his voice and a tautness to his lips, as if he had learned about trust the hard way.
A silence fell between them. She knew she ought to say something; otherwise he would think her sadly dull. He would make his excuses, bow in that mocking way of his, and depart. A moment ago she had wanted him to leave her alone. Now, perversely, she didn't. She searched for a topic of conversation, but her head was suddenly as empty as the Reverend Troutbeck's collection plate.
The hurdy-gurdy was being cranked to a resounding crescendo, and the spinning horses whirled faster and faster, until they became blurs of color, like streams of spilled paint. Chinese lanterns flickered in the dusk, giving the illusion that the horses were alive.
Jessalyn's breath came out in an unconscious sigh. "That looks like such fun."
"Shall we find out?"
Before she knew what he was about, he had seized her hand, dragging her along after him. "It's for children!" she cried, but he didn't seem to hear. He dipped two fingers into his fob pocket and fished out a couple coins, which he tossed at the startled man in the checkered coat.
He lifted her onto the spinning platform and leaped up after her. He must have put all his weight onto his wounded leg, for he stumbled slightly and a grimace of pain flashed across his face. She reached out to him, to steady him. But he shook off her hand and, seizing her around the waist, hoisted her sidesaddle onto a blue horse's back. Laughing, she grabbed the pole as the world whirled by. He took the mount behind her. His legs were so long he dwarfed the horse. She laughed again, but not at him.
Their gazes met, and he smiled. The first true smile that she had seen from him. It melted the starkness of his face and turned the creases at the corners of his mouth into boyish dimples. She could still feel the imprint of his hands on her waist, like a lingering warmth. Around they went, riding on the wind and her laughter, and the Chinese lanterns became spinning stars. She wanted it to go on and on and on.
The merry-go-round wound slowly down. The music died, along with his smile. Too soon he was beside her. His hand slid beneath her elbow to help her dismount, then let her go. She had to catch her breath, as if she and not the horses had been galloping around and around. She turned to look at him. The dusk had deepened into darkness. The lanterns cast harsh shadows over the fairground and on his face.
The wind snatched at a lock of her hair, plastering it across her mouth. He plucked it free, the rough seam of his leather glove just brushing her lips. He rubbed the lock of hair between his fingers as if feeling its texture before he tucked it behind her ear, touching her again, and Jessalyn's stomach clenched with a strange hollowness that was close to pain. Or hunger. She wanted something, but what that something was she couldn't name or imagine.
He stepped back, and Jessalyn released the breath she hadn't even known she was holding. "Thank you for your charming company, Miss Letty," he said. "Perhaps someday we shall go riding together on the real thing."
She stared up at his face, at those piercing eyes and hard mouth. Dangerous to know... He both drew and repelled her. There was something dark and seductive about him; to come within his presence was like walking into a spider web. She knew she ought to tell him that it would be improper to call on her when they had not been formally introduced, but her throat and chest were suddenly so tight she couldn't speak.
"Jessalyn!"
She spun around to see a tall young man striding toward her. He waved his hat in the air, and the lanterns gilded his hair into a golden halo. "Clarence!" she exclaimed, laughing with surprise and delight.
"I thought it just possible that I might find you here," he said as he came up to her. "But I didn't dare to hope...." He seized her hands and looked down at her warmly, with eyes that were bottle green and a winsome smile that revealed the small gap between his two front teeth. Then his gaze slid beyond her, and his eyes narrowed.
Jessalyn turned around just in time to see the Trelawny man's broad back disappearing into the crowd. She felt strangely bereft, like a puppy that has been taken to the crossroads and abandoned.
"Were you with McCady Trelawny?" Clarence said, surprise in his voice.
"What?" She became aware that Clarence was still holding her hands and studying her face. She pulled away from him, forcing out a laugh. "Oh, no, I don't even know Mr. Trelawny. Not at all. Not to speak to, that is. Well, perhaps to speak to, but I don't really know him, if you know what I mean..."
Clarence was grinning at her. "Jessalyn, you are babbling. You always babble when you're nervous. Or when you have something to hide."
He knew her too well, did Clarence Tiltwell. They had spent so many hours of their childhood together, swimming, fishing, riding. They had shared their dreams and their secrets. But that was long ago; the dreams and the secrets had been those of children. She hadn't seen him much after he had been sent away to Eton and had then gone on to university. She realized suddenly that he was a man now, very much the London buck in his snuff brown coat and fawn-colored ankle button trousers. He had always been fair and slender, like his mother.
Cousins. Clarence and that Trelawny man—they were cousins.
Jessalyn remembered now.... His mother's sister had been married to the late earl of Caerhays. They were all dead now—Clarence's mother, the sister, and the earl. There had been some scandal. The kind of scandal that produces a rush of hot whispers that is always cut off when someone young and female enters the room. It meant, of course, that someone had been caught in the marital act with someone one wasn't married to.
"Jessalyn?"
Jessalyn looked up at Clarence's face, searching for a resemblance to his dark cousin. Except for their height, the two young men couldn't have been more different.
He studied her just as intently. "You've changed," he said. "Grown up."
"So have you." They shared a slow smile that was ripe with memories.
"Where is your grandmother?" he said abruptly. "Surely she isn't allowing you to wander the fair alone. Especially now that you're all grown up."
Jessalyn laughed, feeling suddenly carefree again. "Well, I did have a chaperone of a sort. But she was seduced away by ginger beer."
He offered her his bent arm. "They'll be lighting the bonfire soon. Shall we go watch?"
They left the fair, walking along the top of the seawall. The bay bristled with masts from all the brigs, cutters, and ketches, like the spines on a porcupine's back. The smell of tar and rope and rusted chain was heavy in the air. They spoke of Lady Letty and the stud farm, of his life at Cambridge, and the party his father was giving at their country manor house, Larkhaven, on the morrow. Jessalyn smiled and laughed with the young man who walked beside her, and all the while a part of her was aware of, was looking for his dark-haired, dark-eyed cousin.
To take advantage of traffic from the fair, the fishmongers had set out their wares along the wharf. Shining wet mackerel and bass lay on granite slabs, next to piles of huge black oyster bags and herring barrels. A fishwife, in her leather apron and scarlet petticoat, screamed at them as they walked by: "Ye-oo! Ye-o-o! Buy me fresh cockles an' whelks-o!"
"Remember that last Midsummer's Eve," Jessalyn said, "before you were sent away to school." They had discovered, quite unattended, a barrel of freshly tapped ale behind one of the kiddley tents. It had been Jessalyn's idea to taste of the forbidden fruit. "We both became pickled as herrings and got caught trying to sneak into one of those tawdry halfpenny peep shows."
Clarence stooped to retrieve a lobster that had escaped from a wriggling, smelly brown basket. "And I got a rare good thrashing for it, too."
She looked down at his bowed shoulders, at the edges of his blond hair that curled out from beneath his hat. She felt a rush of fondness for him. "Poor Clarence. I was always getting you into trouble, wasn't I?"
He looked up at her and smiled. "It was always worth it."
They walked up the center street that climbed to Market Place. Torches made of old sailcloth dipped in tar had been set up along the way. Many of the houses had candles burning in their windows and doorsteps.
A great bonfire, made of old pit props, spars, and broken masts, had been heaped into the middle of the cobbled square. They arrived just in time to see the pile of wood doused with pilchard oil and set alight. The bonfire burned brightly and high and was reflected a dozen times over in the bow windows of the houses around the square.
They stood around the fire, drinking noggins of beer laced with rum and waiting to get at the potatoes roasting in the embers. A lemon moon rolled across the sky. The wind came up from the sea, bringing with it the smell of fish and a promise of morning fog.
Clarence had gone quiet beside her. She turned to look at him. He had an odd expression on his face, a kind of tenseness. He dipped his head toward her, and she realized suddenly that he was going to kiss her. She started to turn her head aside and then at the last moment did not. His lips were warm and dry. They brushed her mouth briefly and were gone.
He took her hand, but she pulled it away.
"You should not have done that," she said.
"I beg your pardon," he said, not sounding at all contrite. "I don't know what came over me."
"Nevertheless, you shouldn't have done it."
She shouldn't have allowed it. All of Penzance had seen him kiss her. Her grandmother would hear of it. All of Cornwall would hear of it, and the scandal broth would have them before the altar getting married by the end of the week.
"No. I should not have done it," Clarence said softly, his breath brushing against her cheek. "Yet."
The bonfire collapsed, sending up a fountain of flames and sparks. In the sudden flare of light, Jessalyn caught sight of the Trelawny man standing on the fringes of the crowd. The fire glazed the sharp bones of his cheeks and brows, creating dark hollows beneath. The flames shimmered in his eyes, so that it seemed a hotter fire blazed deep within him. He reminded her more than ever of what she had thought the first time she had seen him... a fallen angel.
She wondered how long he had been there, watching her. Watching them. She turned to see if Clarence had noticed him. When she glanced that way again, he was gone.