CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 27
The letters COMET had been scripted with dripping green paint onto the locomotive's bright yellow boiler. The O sagged at the top, like a boiled egg with one end bitten off it, and the T lay at a drunken angle, nearly on its side. It was crossed by a long, sweeping slash, which might have been a comet's tail, although somehow Jessalyn doubted such had been the artist's intent.
Her contemplative gaze went from the lopsided lettering to the bent head and broad shoulders of her husband, who was on one knee, oiling the hub of a bright green wheel. "McCady, what addlepated fool painted—"
"I didn't do it," he said, quickly. Too quickly. He cast her a sheepish look as he straightened. "It was some other addlepated fool."
Jessalyn sucked in her lower lip to catch a laugh. "Dear life. Whoever he was, he must have been frightfully foxed at the time."
Her husband pursed his lips, blowing his breath out in a soft whistle while he took a rag out of his pocket and polished imaginary streaks and thumb prints off the Comet's copper firebox. He was trying to look innocent, and being a Trelawny, he was failing miserably at it.
More laughter bubbled up in Jessalyn's chest, and she barely restrained herself from whirling around on her toes and letting it out all spill out of her from pure joy. It was a glorious day. Thin clouds wreathed the sun, bathing the countryside in pale marzipan colors. The air felt smooth as milk against her skin. It also battered her ears.
They said that more than ten thousand people were lining the tracks along the twenty-mile course of the trials. The air was a din of coach horns, pie hawkers, neighing horses, and screaming babies. The starting point for the trials was right across from the Crooked Staff Inn, which had already sold out of gin and was fast depleting its stock of ale. Many of its customers were the navvies, those rough and tough men who had dug out the cuttings and the tunnels and laid the tracks for McCady's railway. And when they weren't digging and drinking, they liked to wrestle.
A match that had been going on for quite some time was suddenly decided by the winner's bodily picking up the loser and throwing him overhanded like a cricket ball at a stack of ale barrels. The winner turned, dusting off his hands at a job well done, and Jessalyn was astonished to see this behemoth was a woman.
She was further astonished to discover the behemoth making a beeline right at her. She backed up a step; the behemoth kept coming. She backed up another step. She was just about to pick up her skirts and run when the behemoth smiled.
"You be his woman?" the behemoth bellowed out of her deep chest, and Jessalyn was nearly knocked off her feet by the powerful odor of raw onions.
She smothered a sneeze with the back of her hand and tried to breathe through her mouth. "Whose woman?"
"Why, his nibs's, o' course. The earl what built this tramway."
Jessalyn wondered if the behemoth meant to wrestle her for the right to ravish McCady's body. She would do a lot of things for that man, she decided, but a woman must learn to draw the line somewhere. She pointed to the Comet. "He's over there."
"Aye. He's a right un, is his nibs." The woman took a big yellow onion out of her pocket and bit into it like an apple. She was dressed like a navvy in corduroy trousers, stout boots, and a brightly colored scarf knotted around her neck. She had muscles to rival Duncan's. "Many was the time he swung a pick right 'longside the rest of us, building this tramway. Not too proud to dirty his 'ands and lift a tot or two o' gin with the likes of us." She eyed Jessalyn up and down, her nose quivering. It was big and hooked like a lamplighter's pole. "You be his woman or not?"
"I suppose I am. We're married. Actually."
"Not married long, I'll wager. I seen the way he been lookin' at you." The navvy woman threw back her head and hooted like a coach horn. "Cor! Ye're pretty enough, I'll grant ye that." She reached out and gripped Jessalyn's arm, squeezing hard. "But ye'll be needing t' put some flesh on yer bones, if ye expect t' be keeping up with his nibs. He told me oncet that he were going to build a railway from one end o' this isle t' other. Fancy that."
Jessalyn smiled with pride. "But he will. From one end of England to the other."
"That he will, cor! That he will." The woman turned onion-watery eyes onto Jessalyn. "I have little uns t' feed, but maybe afterward ye might want to lift a tot or two with me. The stories I could tell ye about that man of yours. He's a hell-born babe, but with a soft heart underneath for all that. Aye, a soft heart underneath," she said, hooting again as she lumbered off.
Left alone for a moment, Jessalyn smoothed down the bodice of her wine-colored merino riding habit. She wet her palms with her tongue and ran them along the sides of her hair, smoothing back any stray strands. She looked down, saw dust on the toes of her half boots. Quickly she pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and brushed them off. Dear life. Why did she always wind up looking like a ragamuffin? All these people here today. They all would be watching her when she stood up by his side on the Comet, and she wanted to do him proud.
She felt someone's gaze on her, and she looked up into the dark, piercing eyes of her hell-born babe. She blushed to have him catch her fussing, yet she could not help asking, "How do I look?"
His gaze roamed the length of her, up, down, then up again, and a drowsy heat came into his eyes. "All I can say is that when I get you alone tonight, you had better be out of it fast. Or I won't be answerable for its condition come morning."
"McCady, honestly. If you persist in ripping off my clothes, I'll soon be reducing to wearing nothing but rags."
He flashed an unrepentant grin and had opened his mouth to say something more, when one of the government officials who was running the trials hailed him and drew him aside to sign a document festooned with ribbons and seals.
Nervous excitement made Jessalyn fidgety. At least an hour yet remained to be endured before it would be the Comet's turn to run the trial. Each locomotive started separately, at times staggered a half hour apart. The engine to cover the twenty miles in the least amount of time would win, and winning meant a contract from Parliament to supply the engines for all of England's railways for ten years to come. Winning meant untold wealth and a dream come true.
But as Gram had so often said, "You mustn't jump the fence, gel, before you trot out the stable door." So Jessalyn strolled past the other locomotives to size up their competition. One, painted an apple red and with blue wheels, seemed twice as big as the Comet.
She joined her husband who was squatting on his haunches on the Comet's footplate and scowling into the empty interior of the firebox. "That Falcon looks awfully big and powerful, McCady. Do you think we can beat her?"
He flung a glance down the tracks at the other locomotive. "She's too big. See, she's so heavy she has to be mounted on six wheels to carry her load. She'll never make it up that long grade outside Exeter. No, the one we have to worry about is the Essex Lightning."
He nodded with his chin at a sleek-looking iron horse painted orange with black trim. "She's fast," McCady was saying. "But her weakness is in the positioning of her boiler. The way they've got it lying on its side like that makes it inaccessible in the event of a breakdown. But she is fast, curse her."
"We're faster," Jessalyn said emphatically, for she did not doubt it.
McCady flashed her a stunning smile as he jumped off the footplate. She looked up into his beloved dark angel's face. Today the shadows had been banished from his eyes, allowing the golden sunbursts to come shining through. She had never seen him so joyous.
Love for him filled her heart, squeezing her chest. She had to say it, even at the risk of seeing the shadows creep back in and swallow the suns. "I love you, McCady Trelawny."
"Jessa..." His hands fell on her shoulders, gripping them so tightly she felt a sting of pain. His throat worked, as if he were having a hard time pushing out the words. "Jessalyn, I..."
"What?"
"I..." There was a harsh tautness to his face now. His gaze jerked away from her to the Essex Lightning. The muscles along his jaw bunched.
"McCady, what's the matter?"
"I... There's someone I need to talk to." He crushed her against his chest, kissed her on the mouth in that fierce, rough way of his, and strode away from her so fast he was almost running.
She watched him until he had disappeared among the navvies drinking and wrestling in the Crooked Staff s yard.
She would never completely understand him. She supposed that was what made him so exciting to be with. And the thought of spending the rest of her life with her exciting hell-born babe was so wonderful that her face broke into a wide smile as she went in search of the navvy woman to lift a tot or two. And to hear more stories about how McCady Trelawny's railway had got built.
Clarence Tiltwell's thin mouth curved into a faint sneer as he watched the red and blue locomotive huff and puff its lumbering way down the track toward Exeter. The Falcon. What a silly, fanciful name. As if that that clattering, thumping monstrosity could ever hope to emulate the sweeping, soaring flight of the noble hawk.
The next entrant had started to fire up its boiler, and steam rose white in the still air with a whistling sigh. It was odd, Clarence thought, but there seemed to be a tingle in the air, like a hot summer's day after a lightning storm. A part of him couldn't help being caught up in the excitement, the way he had been caught up that summer when he and McCady had built the locomotive to run on his father's tramway. He remembered those long afternoons in the Penzance ironworks, McCady putting the engine together and he mostly watching. And listening as McCady talked and spun dreams in the air. He had wanted to believe in those dreams, yet he had not wanted to believe. And in the end he had been glad of McCady's failure.
Today the Falcon carried sandbags packed into the carts that were hitched one after the other behind her like a cranberry string. But suddenly Clarence could picture the way it would be if the carts were filled with coal and bales of hay. And carriages hooked up, too, carriages with wheels made to go on rails, all filled with people. He could see it just the way McCady had described it that summer, and a bittersweet ache filled his chest. He wanted to go back and live again those afternoons in the ironworks, with the blast furnace making the sweat pour off their chests, and the hammers battering their ears. And McCady talking and spinning dreams and flashing that devil-be-damned smile.
Those afternoons before Jessalyn had come between them.
He knew she was here today, and his gaze sought her out, although he would not go to her yet. That was for later, when she would need him, need his comforting arms, his soothing words. For now he only wanted to look.
She was easy to find, a tall woman with hair the color of autumn leaves. She was no different, and somehow that surprised him. He would have thought that it would show on her face—all those nights in a Trelawny's bed. Yet she was the same girl, a girl with too-bright hair and a too-wide mouth and a leggy way of moving that always reminded him ol an unbroken colt. The same Jessalyn whom he had kissed before the Midsummer's Eve bonfire six years ago.
As he watched her, a vivid look came over her face, and her whole body seemed to shimmer with breathless excitement. For a moment Clarence thought that she had seen him, that the wide, laughing smile was for him. He actually started toward her. But then McCady Trelawny came out the swinging door of the Crooked Staff, sauntering toward her.
She hurried to meet him at a little tripping run. He said something that made her laugh, and the joyous, raucous sound of it rose like whistling steam into the air. McCady slid a possessive arm around her waist and pulled her against him, and Jessalyn stood at his side, smiling, as if she belonged there.
A man with shaggy hair and pock-mottled skin sat with his back pressed against a high stone hedge. He was gnawing on a hunk of bread and cheese and swilling it down with a pail of ale. On the ground next to him were a burning candle in a dish and an opened canister of fulminating powder. From time to time he peered through a crack in the hedge and looked down the gently sloped gully toward the mouth of a tunnel newly hewn through a hillside of yellow granite.
Jacky Stout finished his dinner, mopping the sweat off his face with a filthy rag that left behind smears of black powder. His gaze dropped down to the spalling hammer in his lap, then quickly jerked away. He couldn't look at the hammer anymore without feeling a bit queasy in his innards.
God, the boy had screamed.
Squawked like a chicken right before its throat is cut. But the sound the hammer had made was even worse—a horrible scrunching sound, like stepping on one of those big black beetles that live down in the mines. Blood had spurted everywhere, and the bones had pierced through the bruised flesh, jagged and white. Jacky was sobbing as loudly as the boy when he had raised the hammer high again.
He hadn't told the guv'nor that part, though. That he hadn't been able to bring the hammer down a second time. That he'd done only the one hand.
This was why it was important that he do this job right. He had planted enough black powder in the railbed to make a bang loud enough to rattle the pewter in the kitchens all the way up in London Town. Enough powder to blow a hundred loco-whatsits into nails and kindling.
A chill roached up Jacky's spine, and he whipped around, peering into the copse of trees behind him. A pair of jackdaws sat on a tree branch, cawing at each other. A rabbit bounded off into the gorse, its white tail flying. Jacky rubbed his ripe nose and shrugged. He was hearing things only because his nerves were on edge. This was private land, patrolled by dogs and guards to keep the curious away, needed especially today what with all the crowds drawn to watch the trials of the loco-whatsits. No, there was no need to worry about anyone sneaking up on ol' Jacky Stout unawares. The guv'nor owned this land; that was why Jacky Stout was here, good and alone, with a burning candle and enough black powder to make one bleedin' hell of a bang.
The guv'nor had said the loco-whatsit would be coming through the tunnel at about four o'clock. Jacky pulled a gold-plated repeater's watch out of his coat pocket. The guv'nor had given it to him, a little token of appreciation for taking care of the boy's hands... hand. Jacky cast another look at the spalling hammer and shivered. He squinted at the black numerals on the watch face. He hadn't dared tell the guv'nor that he didn't know how to tell time.
He heard it first, a huffing sound like a teakettle simmering on a trivet over a hot fire. Steam billowed out the mouth of the tunnel in thick white puffs. Swearing, Jacky flung the hammer out of his lap, snatched up the candle dish, and climbed, clawing and scrambling, over the hedge. A fire-breathing iron monster on wheels came hurtling out the tunnel, a red and blue monster.
"Bleedin' Christ!" Jacky exclaimed. Red and blue!
He skidded to a halt, the sweat streaming down his face, his chest heaving. Red and blue, bleedin' hell! The loco-whatsit he wanted was supposed to be yellow and green.
As he trudged back to his lookout behind the hedge, Jacky Stout went over the guv'nor's instructions one more time. The moment the green and yellow loco-whatsit came out of the tunnel, he was to light the fuse. He had already marked off the 450 paces from the mouth of tunnel and set the charge in the rock bed that supported the rails. He'd done it just the way he'd set that charge down in Wheal Patience. He had drilled a hole in the rock with a steel borer and dropped a case of black powder in the hole. He'd pushed an iron nail into the powder and packed clay around it. Then he'd pulled out the nail, leaving a thin hole in the clay. Through this he had threaded a hollow reed filled with fulminating powder for the fuse.
"You see the nose of her coming out of the tunnel, you light the fuse," the guv'nor had said, and he had drawn a lot of scriggly lines on a piece of paper and babbled nonsense about loco-whatsits traveling at such and such a speed and taking such and such amount of time to go such and such a distance. Jacky hadn't understood a word of it, and he didn't have to. He knew what he had to know: powder at 450 paces from the mouth of the tunnel; set the fuse when the green and yellow loco-whatsit came out.
But no one had warned him how bleedin' difficult it was going to be to see colors when the bleedin' thing was coming out a black hole into bright sunlight and wreathed in steam and smoke.
The muscles of McCady's arms bunched and strained as he slung a shovelful of coal into the firebox. Sweat stung his eyes. A whiff of primroses drifted past his nose.
He flung the hair out of his face with a toss of his head as he swung around and thrust the shovel blade into the pile of coal. But his gaze was on the tall, slender girl in a wine-colored riding habit. A yellow straw bonnet covered hair the color of a sunrise at sea, but enough sunshine had found its way beneath the wide brim to tint her cheeks a gold-flecked pink. She looked delectable.
With him on the footplate and her standing on the ground, the top of her head came to the middle of his chest. She leaned forward, as if to speak to him, and slid her hand inside the gaping, unbuttoned neck of his shirt. Soft fingers slid over his sweat-slick flesh, pulling gently on his chest hair and lightly scraping across one nipple. A quick, sensual, secret caress that no one had seen, and that sent an immediate fire to his groin hotter than anything he had going in the belly of the Comet.
"The carrier pigeons have just come in with the Essex Lightning's time," she said, shouting a little to be heard over the hissing, simmering boiler. "Seventy-two minutes."
Dammit, that's fast. McCady thought. He grunted as he hefted another shovelful of coal. According to the rules, each entrant had to start with the water in his boiler cold and no fuel inside the firebox. Every minute it was now taking him to build up a head of steam was already being counted against his time. The boiler hissed and sucked. Seventy-two minutes. Bloody hell. He wanted to win so badly he could taste the wanting in his mouth, rusty and salty, like blood. He wanted to do it for her.
He had the fire stoked good and hot now. He thrust the shovel straight up into the coal pile and looked down at his wife. His whole body stilled as a feeling that was piercing and sweet shot through him. She was a rare woman, his Jessalyn. He knew that he was nothing without her. Yet because of her, he had the moon and the stars within his grasp.
Jessalyn, his wife, put her fists on her hips and threw back her head to lance his heart with her wide, shining smile. "I should like to come along with you, Lord Caerhays."
He leaned over, offered her his hand, and pulled her up onto the footplate beside him. He thought of that first locomotive ride that long-ago summer: the way she had kept brushing against him, breathing on his neck as she asked her questions in that excited little-girl way, and the purity and innocence about her, the laughing joy. He had wanted her then as he had wanted nothing else in his life before. He still wanted her in that same way.
Now, just as he had done that summer, he put his hands around her slender waist and lifted her into the tender, where she would ride with the coal baskets and water butt. "This one isn't to going explode now, is it?" she teased, and he knew that her thoughts moved along with his, in tandem with memories. Memories that now tasted only sweet.
He leaned over and kissed her mouth, soft and gentle. "We're going to win this, Jessalyn."
She looked at him with eyes that were gray and enduring, like the cliffs of Cornwall. "Make her go fast, McCady. Neck or nothing."
Flashing her a devil-be-damned smile, he turned around and depressed the pedal, while deftly working the two small valve handles in proper unison until the engine began to move, scorching, as always, the backs of his knuckles on the firebox. Valves and cranks and spindles all began to move so fast he would have lost a finger or two if he hadn't done this a thousand times before.
The locomotive clanked and rattled and coughed as it chugged into motion, slowly at first; then it began to pick up speed. Spent steam puffed into the air, carried back to them by the breeze, dampening their faces and smelling of coal soot. They left the Crooked Staff behind them, but crowds of people lined the tracks, cheering and whistling, beating on drums and blowing on horns. Jessalyn laughed and waved and called out to an enormous woman wearing trousers, who tossed what looked like a big yellow onion into her lap.
It all turned into a blur of color and noise, though, as the Comet started to fly. The first part of the course was on a downhill slope, and soon they were singing along the rails. Well, perhaps singing was not quite the word. Even with the spring suspension he'd invented, the Comet moved with a rollicking up-and-down thrust, like a galloping hunter. He would have to work on that, McCady thought. He wanted her rocking like a baby in a cradle.
The wind pulled at his hair and whipped at his shirtsleeves. He could feel the throbbing power of the engine vibrating through the soles in his boots, the pulsating throb-thump, throb-thump that always seemed to him to be mimicking the heartbeat of life. A thatched cottage was there, out the corner of his eye, and then gone in the time it took to blink. Running along the rails through a deep cutting in the earth, then out across an open field stubbled with newly cut hay. Over a three-arched wooden viaduct, looking down into a brambly gill and a trickle of silver water. Ahead of them a hole in the face of a hill, like a wide-open mouth, yawning bigger and bigger, like the maw of a cannon.
I built this, McCady thought, with a sudden rush of pride. A Trelawny has actually built something. Something that would last.
They plunged into the tunnel, and the sudden, dense blackness after the bright light was startling. At first McCady could see nothing, and the noise of the engine sounded louder than the inside of a thunderstorm. Then his eyes picked out the glow leaking around the door of the firebox and sparks shooting out of the smokestack. The black world filled with smoke and steam and the rebounding echoes of his wife's lusty laughter.
They burst out of the darkness into sunshine. He blinked back a rush of tears that came from the suddenness of the bright light. And the sight of his darling Jessalyn with her head thrown back, still laughing.
And suddenly, in that moment, he believed. He believed that the shining light would never die in her eyes, that the passion they shared would last forever. Even if he failed today, even if he faced poverty and disgrace, he would never lose her. Always she would be his Jessalyn, his wife. He believed this, was as certain of it as he was certain of his next breath. He believed that they would have children and grow old together, living dreams and disappointments, tragedy and joy. But together, always together.
They had the rest of their lives.
Green and yellow. Jacky Stout scrambled over the hedge and ran down the incline, leaping in and out between the cover of the rocks, like a bounding hare. He paused behind the trunk of a lone hawthorn, then dashed to the railbed Green and yellow, green and yellow—
Bleedin' hell.
Dashing like that had nearly put out his candle. He took his hat off and gently flapped the brim at the smoking wick until it flickered into a flame. He put the flame to the reed fuse. It caught with a spit and a hiss.
After whipping around, he ran at a crouch, making for the hedge. He leaped over it and slid to the ground, his shoulders pressing against the stones, his legs thrust straight out, his big belly and chest heaving and huffing.
He peered through the crack. There it was, green and yellow, and about in line with the hawthorn tree. Four hundred and fifty paces. He started to laugh. Any second now, any second and bang. Green and yellow, green and yellow... Bang! Green and...
Something behind him. A scrape of leather on rock. His skin prickled all over as if he'd just brushed up against a wasp's nest, and he whirled, shading his eyes with his hands against the glare of the sun. He saw the black, blunted end of the spalling hammer....
And then he saw nothing.
Clarence's stomach churned. He took out his watch, glanced at the time, then stuffed it back into his pocket. The Comet would just be hitting the tunnel right about now.
"He's a right un, is his nibs."
Clarence looked up into the hooked-nose face of the biggest woman he had ever seen in his life. At least he thought it was a woman, although her sex was open to some debate. Clarence pulled out his handkerchief and held it up to his nose. The woman reeked of onions.
"A hell-born babe, but with a soft heart underneath for all that."
Clarence drew in a careful breath through his handkerchief before he took his nose out. "I beg your pardon?"
"His nibs. Caerhays. A navvy now, he knows his woman can swing a pick good as any man. But fancy a gentleman thinkin' such a thing—cor! 'Tis rare for a nob to honor his woman like his nibs's just done, bringing her along with him to run his iron horse as if she 'twere his equal. A soft heart underneath for all that, eh?"
All the blood seemed to rush from Clarence's head, and for a moment he swayed dizzily. He gripped the woman's iron-hard forearm. "Are you telling me Lady Caerhays is on the Comet?"
"Ais. Right 'longside up there with him, as if she 'twere his equal. And a right pretty picture she made, too. Lookin' like a queen."
"But he couldn't have. He couldn't have."
The woman opened her mouth...
And the world exploded into a great, coughing roar.