CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 8
She twisted sharply, her flailing hands grasping at air. Her hips and knees banged into rough rock, and then her feet hit something wooden, a ladder, skidded along the rungs of a ladder. One of her scrabbling, clutching hands found the side rail, and she grabbed it, halting her fall with a hard jerk that wrenched her arm and tore a harsh cry from her throat. Pebbles and dirt rained down around her, falling into emptiness.
She hung, swinging by one arm, gasping and sobbing with terror. The candle had gone out, dropped when she fell, and the darkness was absolute. She had fallen into a shaft that led down to a new level, and the ladder, nailed into the rock, had saved her life.
Slowly she searched with one foot, found a rung. She put her weight on it, and the wood gave way with a splintering crack. She slid down the ladder several more feet, ripping her glove and tearing the skin off her palm. Her scream echoed back at her.
She hung, sucking at the foul, hot air and trying not to cry. Her arm shrieked with pain.
She shouted for help, her voice bouncing up into the cavern and down, down, down.... Shouted until her throat was raw and she couldn't breathe. It felt as if there were a vise around her rib cage, pressing against her lungs, slowly strangling her. The pain in her arm and across her shoulders became so intense it was a scream in her mind. But the fingers of the hand that grasped the ladder were growing numb. She could not hang like this much longer. She was suffocating, and it was so hot... so hot... like hell.
She would have to help herself, or she would die down here. Throwing her weight sideways, she swung like a pendulum, grabbing for the other side rail. Missed. Swung around again. Missed. Swung. Had it.
The relief of taking some of the weight off her right arm was so exquisite she sobbed. But she allowed herself the luxury of only a few moments' rest. She pulled her leg up and put the toe of her boot on the first rung she could find. She applied the barest pressure, heard it crack. All the rungs were completely rotten.
But the side rails seemed sturdy enough. She made sure she had a good grip with her left hand. Sucking in a deep breath of the hot, stagnant air, she let go with her right hand and slid it up the rail as far as she could reach, gripped, and pulled. Let go with her left hand, reached up, and pulled. Inch by painful inch she crabbed her way up the side of the shaft. It took an eternity. Sometimes she had to stop and rest. And test the rungs again, which were always rotten. She cried the whole time because it hurt so much. She told herself it didn't matter that she cried, because there was no one to see it.
A hysterical giggle burst from her throat. As if anyone could see anything in this black hole. In a way that was the worst part. The utter impenetrable darkness. Until now she hadn't known what darkness was. Always before, even on a moonless night in a shuttered room, there had been some light. She hadn't known that darkness could be felt. She thought that if she were ever to be touched by Satan, he would feel like this darkness—hot, thick, utterly lonely. She giggled again, reached up with her right hand... and felt air.
Startled, she jerked her hand back, scraping her knuckles on the floor of the cavern. Relief flooded through her, so strong it left her dizzy and shaking.
But it was much harder hauling herself over the lip of the shaft than it had been to pull herself up the rungless ladder. Once she lost her purchase and slid back down several feet—agonizing feet that she had to pull herself back up again. She cursed then. She cursed God and herself and McCady Trelawny, oh, especially Lieutenant Trelawny, whose fault it all was and who should have been here by now to rescue her.
But then at last, at last, she was safe, lying on the cavern floor, her chest heaving, breaths coming in stertorous gasps, her muscles burning and cramping, and sweat running into her eyes and stinging all her scrapes and scratches. Lying still... until she began to think again to understand that the danger wasn't over, not over at all. Somehow she had to find her way out of a mine honeycombed with tunnels and crosscuts and winzes, in the pitch-darkness.
She heard it again, that faint cry.
She sat up, feeling the darkness with her outstretched hands. She didn't have a light or hope of one. The haversack with the tinderbox and extra candles was at the bottom of the shaft. She would have to feel her way, crawling carefully on her hands and knees, so that she wouldn't step off into any more holes.
She crawled. She made sure her shoulder brushed against rough stone at all times, and she felt the way ahead of her with her outstretched hands. The mewling cry, growing ever louder, pulled her on. Eventually she decided it could not be a man making that sound. An animal, perhaps. A small animal.
She thought at first that she was imagining things, her eyes after so much darkness playing tricks on her. Water glinting on stone, the round shape of a pit prop. Then she realized she was seeing things: the walls and roof of the tunnel, the rock and attle, even the rusted head of an old pick. She stood up and stumbled forward, toward the source of the light.
It was an adit—a narrow hole cut through earth and rock to the outside world to let in air or, more often, to drain out water. This adit ran upward at a sloping incline like a laundry chute. Jessalyn peered up the chute, at a small circle of light, at gray scudding clouds... and a grist sack, caught on a finger of rock, swinging like a hammock. The grist sack squirmed and emitted a squeaky, mewling cry.
There were steplike indentations cut into the rock that miners called stopes, which resulted from the removal of the ore. She was able to climb up the stopes far enough to reach the sack. She thought that someone had tried to dispose of a litter of kittens by throwing them into the adit, and the sack had gotten caught on the finger of rock on its way down.
Until she touched it... Then she saw that it was a baby, a human baby.
She had a harder time making it back down the stopes with the grist sack and its fragile contents in her arms, but at last she was on firm ground again. The ragged bundle cried and wriggled as Jessalyn gently unwrapped it. The baby, a girl, was extremely tiny, hardly more than a day old. She was covered with dried blood and mucus from the birth, and her cry was weak. But she was alive.
Jessalyn wrapped the baby back up in the sack. She leaned against the rough tunnel wall, drawing deeply of the fresh, salt-laden air.
A harsh shout floated down to her. "Miss Letty, damn your eyes! Answer me!"
She cupped a hand around her mouth. "Hellooo! Lieutenant!"
A hail of stones fell past the hole in the rock. His upside-down face took the place of the sky, cutting off most of the light. The adit, she realized, must open out right beneath the cliff path. She was so relieved to see him she laughed out loud. "There you are," she said. "Where have you been?"
There has never been any doubt where I have been, damnation. The question is, Where the bloody hell have you been?"
She laughed again. "You have not been properly brought up, Lieutenant Trelawny. Your speech has far too much of the attle gutter in it. I've been meaning to bring it to your attention for some time now."
"Hellfire, rape, and sodomy."
She nearly choked on another gurgle of laughter.
"What the devil are you doing down there and quit giggling. I cannot abide giggling females."
Perhaps it was the sudden relief after being frightened near half to death, but she felt slightly giddy. She looked at his hard mouth and wanted to kiss it. It also seemed too much of an effort to explain the whole story to him, so she edited out all the interesting bits, the way the Reverend Troutbeck was always doing to the stories in the Bible.
"You were gone so long I thought something had happened," she said. "I came down to look for you, and I got a trifle lost."
"No one can be a trifle lost." He was getting quite red in the face. Doubtless because he was hanging upside down. "You are either completely lost or you aren't lost at all. Is this an innate talent you have for turning the simplest expeditions into unmitigated catastrophes, or do you have to practice at it?"
"Don't be beastly. It isn't nice."
His head disappeared from the hole.
"Lieutenant!"
"Don't move—don't you move a bloody inch. I'm coming to get you."
"Thank you, but—"
"Think nothing of it. An afternoon spent crawling through dark and slimy tunnels and hollering myself hoarse has always seemed the epitome of entertainment to me."
"Lieutenant. I have a baby."
His head reappeared. "How in the bloody hell can a virgin have a baby? And don't tell me it was an immaculate conception; that story just won't wash a second time."
"I didn't have her, you silly goose. I found her. Here. Just now."
"Of course. It stands to reason that you would go looking for trouble and find a baby."
She laughed again and sat down on a stope, clutching the baby to her breast. It wasn't long before she heard the hollow echo of his footsteps and saw the glow of his candle on the stone walls.
He set the candle down on the stope and with gentle fingers peeled back the sack from the baby's head. "Is he all right?"
"It is a she, Lieutenant. Can't you tell the difference?"
The corners of his mouth creased in a quick smile. "Not from this end." Then he did the most unexpected thing. He traced the curve of Jessalyn's jaw with his knuckles, and even in the dim light she could tell that his hand was shaking. "You've scratched your face," he said.
Their gazes held for a moment; then his dropped to her mouth. She ran her tongue over her lower lip, swallowed. "I—I think the baby's cold," she said. "All she's wearing is a sack."
She wasn't sure he'd heard her. The flame of the candle was reflected in the flat darkness of his eyes; his face had turned hard.
He broke abruptly away from her, shrugging out of his coat. He took the baby in his hands, wrapping her up in the warm woolen material. Although she had been crying steadily, a thin, pathetic mewl, since Jessalyn found her, now she quieted.
"She likes you," Jessalyn said.
"The sentiment isn't mutual. The brat just piddled all over my coat." At the sound of his voice, which had been deep and slightly rough, the baby started to cry again.
"She's probably hungry," Jessalyn said. "The poor little spud."
"Well, don't look at me. I haven't the right equipment."
She looked at him. He held the baby cupped in his scarred, fine-boned hands. It didn't seem possible that a man's hands could be at once so frighteningly strong, and yet so gentle. Tender and violent.
"I hate it when you do that," he said.
She looked up to find his eyes on her. "Do what?"
"Smile at me as if you know something I don't know."
"I was thinking that most men turn pale with fear when they are handed a baby, yet you hold her as if you've had plenty of practice...." Her voice trailed off. His father was said to have sired bastards all over Cornwall, and he was a Trelawny, his father's son.
He was looking at the baby not at her, and he spoke in his teasing drawl. "But I am terrified, can't you tell? Babies and winsome virgins always put a quiver in my knees and a quake in my heart."
She started to smile, and something cracked within her chest. A piece of her cracked and tore loose and fell away from her, fell into a black hole more terrifying than a mine shaft. His face was nothing but shadows; she couldn't see him, she didn't know him. Yet she felt within her very soul a need for him in her life, the way the earth and the sun and the air were needed in her life—elemental, essential, eternal. And she felt, too, a terrible fear that this need might never go away.
He kept the baby, and she followed him in a daze. Her skin felt tight all over, too small for her body. She thought that if he touched her, if he so much as looked at her or spoke to her, she would fly all apart like an exploding steam boiler. Her chest hurt, and her eyes burned, as if she had to cry. Or had already cried too much.
He climbed the ladder first. Kneeling at the edge of the pit, with the baby tucked into the crook of his arm, he held out his hand to her. Jessalyn looked up at him, her eyes narrowed against the harsh light. She took his hand, and as she came up out of the dark hole, his gaze raked the length of her.
She knew tear tracks had streaked the grime on her cheeks. Her hair was tangled and wet with sweat, her riding habit in shreds at the knees and elbows and gaping open at the bodice where she'd lost several buttons. Her hands showed raw and bloody through the rips in her gloves.
"I fell down," she said when she could no longer bear his silence. Her smile trembled at the edges. "I feel a bit wonky, but I'm really quite all right."
He made an impatient movement. "Down what, for God's sake—a shaft?"
"Yes." She couldn't meet his eyes. She didn't know why she should feel so ashamed. Except that things were always happening to her around him, and she always felt like such a beetlehead afterward. He was staring at her, saying nothing, and she knew how childish she appeared in his eyes.
They had left Prudence, hobbled, to graze among the moor heather. Jessalyn had her foot in the stirrup and was about to haul herself up into the saddle when she suddenly hopped down and took off running back to the mine.
The primrose bonnet lay on the windowsill where she had left it, a splash of yellow on the gray stone. The sight of it did something to her chest, and she felt it again—that cracking and tearing away within her, as if pieces of her heart were breaking off. What happens to you, she wondered, when you need someone and they need you not at all? She snatched up the hat and ran from the enginehouse as if she were fleeing it and not the fear within herself.
She ran toward him, trying to tie the bonnet on her head at the same time. But its big brim kept falling over her eyes, and she was laughing by the time she came up to him. Her laughter trailed off like a squeaky wheel when her gaze settled on his taut mouth. "What's the matter?"
"Just get on the bloody horse."
She got on the horse. He handed the baby up to her, then mounted behind her. His arms came around her to take the reins. She breathed, and her breast pressed against his arm. So she stopped breathing altogether, then sucked in a draft of air with a sharp gasp. He urged Prudence into a trot, and her breast bounced against him, and she went rigid.
"Where are we going with the brat?" he asked, the words warm and moist against her ear.
She breathed. She could feel the heat of his arm now through her clothes and his. "We're taking her to Mousehole, back to her mother," she said.
"Won't her mother just throw her away again?"
She breathed. And her nipples hardened, rubbing almost painfully against her cotton shift. Her breasts had never felt this way before. Not even when the Gypsy boy had touched her. There was such a squeezing tightness in her chest that suddenly she couldn't bear it. She squirmed, and he shifted, breaking the contact, and she was sorry afterward that she had moved.
"I think it was probably her father, Salome Stout's father, who threw the baby away," she said. "She has to be Salome's baby, you see, because Salome is the only one in these parts who's been preg—in a delicate condition. They say the man who did it to her, who gave her the baby, was a sailor out of Falmouth, and he couldn't marry her because he has a wife already. I suppose Jacky Stout tried to get rid of the baby because he didn't want another mouth to feed. It couldn't have been shame that drove him to it. Jacky Stout knows no shame."
Jessalyn had always held a particular aversion for the fisherman ever since she had caught him tying a tin plate to a dog's tail. Her jaw clenched with anger as she thought of this man who would dump his own grandchild, by-blow or not, down a bal. "Just wait until I get my hands on that Jacky Stout. He won't be abandoning any more babies. I will put the fear of God into him, and I heard that dubious snort, Lieutenant."
She felt him smile against her neck, and she shivered. "I assure you, Miss Letty, that I have never uttered such an uncivilized sound as a snort, dubious or otherwise, in my entire life."
"Hunh."
"Now hear who's snorting."
The sun was setting by the time they arrived in Mousehole. Granite and slate cottages tumbled like a child's spilled blocks down a hillside and into a horseshoe-shaped harbor. But it was picturesque only from a distance. Rotting lobster baskets, tangled coils of rope, and pieces of broken spar littered the uneven stones of the old quay. The place stank of decaying fish, and the steady thump and clatter of the tin stamp battered their ears.
They passed no one along the way, except for an old man who sat on his front stoop, mending a sail. He lifted his head and stared at them, his toothless mouth falling open as if his jaw had come unhinged. Jessalyn pointed out the broken-down cottage where Jacky Stout lived with his two grown daughters, Bathsheba and Salome. There had been a Magdalene, but she had died two years ago of the spotted fever.
Like the rest of the Mousehole cottages, the Stout home had steep stone steps that led to an upper floor where the family lived. Below was the fish cellar, where every year pilchards were packed in rows and left for a month or so to allow the blood and oil to drain. Although the season was still a couple weeks away, the reek of rotting pilchards was so strong Jessalyn had to breathe through her mouth to keep from gagging.
Lieutenant Trelawny kicked aside a pile of sacks and smelly fishing tackle that blocked the front door. Waving a gust of gnats away from her face, Jessalyn knocked.
The man who flung open the door had a thick face badly pitted by the pox, like a frostbitten leaf. His belly, stout as an ale barrel, was covered by a smock frock that was smeared with fish scales and reached as far as a pair of leather gaiters and hobnailed boots. He was unshaven and slightly drunk.
"What d' ye want..." Jacky Stout began. Then his snake gray eyes caught sight of the lieutenant, and he tried on an obsequious smile. "Sur."
"We want to see Salome," Jessalyn said.
"That ye can't, Miss Letty. Proper sick, she be."
He started to shut the door, but Jessalyn put her foot across the threshold. "Don't you try to gammon me, Jacky Stout. Salome isn't sick. She's just had a baby. This baby."
Jacky's gaze, which had wandered everywhere else, had yet to alight upon the bundle in Jessalyn's arms. He licked his lips. "That can't be hers. Salome's baby died. Died last night. Born dead, she be. He be. 'Twere a boy. Born dead."
Jessalyn raised her brows in mock surprise. "Why, what a strange coincidence. Salome's baby born dead last night, and here this afternoon I find another baby tossed down an adit at Wheal Patience like so much unwanted rubbish. They say coincidences come in bunches, did you know that, Mr. Stout? I'm wondering what the magistrates would say if they knew the bird in your Sunday pot isn't always chicken, but one of Squire Babbage's prime pheasants. What do you suppose the magistrates would make of that coincidence, Mr. Stout? A man could get transported for poaching, so they say. A man could even hang. Just like a man could hang for trying to murder a helpless baby—"
The door was snatched from Jacky's hands, and a girl with a mane of wild, tangled black hair stood, swaying, on the threshold. She wore only a thin, tattered shift, and her eyes were like two bruises on her bleached face.
"Me baby!" she cried, holding out pale, trembling arms. "Ye've brought back me baby. Oh, please, give 'er to me."
The look of tear-filled joy on the girl's face more than convinced Jessalyn that she'd had nothing to do with the abandonment of her child. Jessalyn gave the baby to her mother, helping her inside. The girl stumbled over to a sagging, straw-filled pallet and collapsed upon the edge of it, moaning and weeping and stroking the baby's face again and again.
She lifted eyes full of horror and hatred and searched the room until she found her father. "Ye told me she had died."
"'Tes what ye get, ye slut, for gettin' yer belly knocked up. An' who's got t' feed it now, eh?" Jacky Stout threw a baleful look at Jessalyn, then turned his back on her and poured gin down his throat from a stone jug.
The cottage smelled of fish and moldering roof thatch. Besides the single pallet, the only other furniture was a rough table tacked together from flotsam washed up from the sea and several mismatched stools. The single window was stuffed with rags, the only light coming from a tallow candle stuck in a turnip and a smoky dung fire.
A humped shadow by the fire stirred and became a girl sitting on a stool. She got up and came toward them, walking as if her hips were connected to swivels. Bathsheba Stout had a pointed, fey face, soot black hair, and slanted tawny eyes. Of the two sisters, Jessalyn would have thought Bathsheba more likely to be the one to bear a child out of wedlock. But then perhaps she was too experienced to get caught.
The baby was suckling at her mother's breast now, and Jessalyn couldn't help staring. Salome's breast was large and veined, like a cantaloupe. The baby's mouth pulled hard at the brown, distended nipple; Jessalyn wondered what it felt like, if it hurt. Her gaze moved up to the girl's white face, which wore a mixture of fear, anguish, and a stubborn pride.
"Ye won't peach to the magistrates, will ee, about what me da tried t' do? Please, miss, he won't do nothin' else t' harm the babe now that ye're on to him. Sheba and us, we'd starve without Da, without what he brings in from the fishin'. There bain't any work for the likes of us."
Jessalyn's hand fell on the girl's shoulder. She could feel the sharpness of bone beneath the thin shift. "I overheard the Reverend Mrs. Troutbeck mentioning last Sunday after evensong that she has need of a new scullery girl. I could put in a word for you."
"Oh, miss, ee are ever so kind," Salome said, but the fear did not leave her eyes. She pulled the baby tighter to her breast. "But what about me da?"
"I won't go to the magistrates," Jessalyn said. If the Stout daughters closed ranks to protect their father, there would be little proof anyway. "But if he ever threatens you or the child again, you must promise to come to me."
Bathsheba, taking advantage of Jessalyn's preoccupation with her sister, had sidled up to Lieutenant Trelawny. Her amber gaze traveled the length of him before settling on his face. "I hope ee don't think I'd nothin' do with dumpin' the poor l'il un down an old bal. I thought she'd died, same as Salome."
The lieutenant looked her over, slow and easy. "You seem to have borne up well under the tragedy, Miss Stout." Jessalyn snorted.
Bathsheba gave Jessalyn a baleful look that was a mirror of her father's, then turned back to the lieutenant wearing a butter-wouldn't-melt smile. "I think of ye livin' up there in that gret big house, all by yerself, wit'out no one t' turn a hand. I could come do fer ee, sur. From time t' time, like. Mebbe bring ee some fresh mackerel when me da gets hisself a netload."
The lieutenant produced one of his rare and dazzling smiles. "I have always been partial to fish."
Jessalyn snorted again, louder. Do for him. Oh, Sheba Stout would do for him all right. And nine months hence there would be more fodder for the bals.
He could stay and flirt with Bathsheba the rest of the day; Jessalyn had better things to do. She issued a final warning to Jacky Stout, who kept his pride by ignoring her, then started for the door.
But the lieutenant's hand fell on her arm, holding her back. "Stout," he said, and there was the sharp crack of command from the parade field in his voice, "you will acknowledge Miss Letty when she speaks to you."
Jacky Stout's back jerked. He turned slowly, wiping his mouth with his wrist. "Sur?" The surliness was gone from his face, leaving fear.
"Henceforth, when Miss Letty addresses you, you will doff your cap in respect. And you will remember, too, that what is found on Caerhays land belongs to the Trelawnys and what is ours, we protect. I would pray, were I you, that the babe has a long and healthy life."
A warmth suffused Jessalyn at his words. No one had ever done that for her before; no one had ever stood as her champion. For a moment she allowed herself to wonder what it would be like to have him there always. At her side.
But once outside, when she was about to mount Prudence and she felt his hands, warm and strong, pressing into her flesh, she said, "You will kindly remove your hands from around my waist, Lieutenant."
He lifted her into the saddle and stood grinning up at her. "This sudden and totally female behavior on your part wouldn't by chance have anything to do with Miss Bathsheba Stout?"
"You preened and ruffled your tail feathers like a strutting turkey cock. While she looked at you as if she were a hungry black-backed gull all set to pounce."
His grin deepened. "Actually she puts me more in mind of a plump and succulent little pouter pigeon."
Jessalyn jerked Prudence's head around and drove the mare into a trot. If he was going to be that way, he could walk home. His laugh followed her into the dusk, a laugh that was almost all breath, low and husky.
She heard the clatter of boots on stone. She turned around and nearly screamed as he vaulted up behind her onto the mare's back in a trick worthy of the Gypsy boy. His arms clutched her waist and his breath stirred the hair at her neck. "Don't be a silly goose, Miss Letty."