Once in a Blue Moon

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 23

Against a smoky red sky they were but dark shadows, like the ghost riders of legend coming to steal his soul. They galloped across the hilltop, then made a broad, sweeping turn, coming toward him across the misty downs, and it seemed that he could feel the thrum of their hooves, melding with the fierce beat of his heart. His mouth tightened when he picked out the blood bay. His hands curled, as if he were already wrapping them around her throat.

The horses thundered past a copse of old beeches, and sunlight glinted off the spyglasses in the trees, shimmering like silver raindrops. The touts were out in full force that morning, picking up dps for their legs from this last training gallop before the big race.

The blood bay peeled off from the others, joining a one-armed man who sat on a hack, watching. The rider on the bay reined up. After a moment the one-armed man turned around in his saddle and pointed.

McCady Trelawny's mouth stretched into a hard smile. She was coming.

She pulled up and dismounted, to approach him on foot. Plumes of steam flew out the bay's nostrils, wreathing her head. She was muffled up to the eyebrows against the dawn chill in a man's woolen coat and cap. Her face was luminescent in the misty light; her eyes were enormous.

She pulled off her cap and tossed hack her head. Her hair fell over her shoulders, a waterfall of molten copper. He thought that he had never known anything so beautiful. He felt a sudden and terrible need to gather her into his arms and bury his face in that hair.

He yanked the folded-up Morning Post out his coat pocket and thrust it in her face. "Is this true?"

"Yes." Her eyes turned dark as storm-bellied clouds as they filled with some emotion he couldn't name.

He flung the paper away and seized her by the shoulders. He brought his face so close to hers he could see his breath flutter the wisps of her hair. "Goddamn you, Jessa. You are mine."

She wrenched away from him, backing up. "I belong to no one but myself! It is my life, to do with as I want. If I want to marry for money—"

"Money!"

Her chest hitched with a little sucked-in breath. "Yes, money. What is so terrible about that? You did it. Perhaps I'm tired of being poor."

He searched her pale, beautiful face. "You're lying."

"McCady, please..." She sucked her lower lip into her mouth, then pushed it back out again, and to his bitter fury he was filled with such a fierce need to kiss her that he had to clench his teeth against a moan. "Please," she said again. "Don't make this any more difficult for me than it already is."

"It bloody well should be difficult."

Her words didn't match the haunted look in her eyes. She was lying. He knew her. In some ways he knew her better than he knew himself. She would never marry Tiltwell for his fortune. She would never marry any man unless she fancied herself in love with him.

Love with him...

Pain and savage fury clawed at his chest. It was the worst pain he'd ever known, so intolerable he wondered how he stood it. He wanted to kill her. He wanted to crush her to him and smother her mouth with his. He wanted to thrust himself inside her, hard and deep, until she admitted thai she was his, and only his.

His hands closed around her arms, and with a vicious jerk he brought her crashing against his chest. He slammed his open mouth down hard on hers in a kiss that was rough and desperate. Her hands curled around the lapels of his coat, and she melted against him, meeting his thrusting tongue with her own and, ah, God, but he had never tasted anything so sweet. She smelled of horse and wet grass and Pears primrose soap, and for that heartbeat out of time she filled his universe.

Until she tore her mouth from his and pushed against him so hard he almost stumbled. She backed away from him, slowly shaking her head, pressing trembling fingers to her wet and swollen lips. Her eyes were like great liquid moons in her pale face.

He filled his lungs and expelled the ache in his chest into the air. "Jessalyn, for the love of God, don't..." The words spilled out of him, unbidden, lacerating his pride. "Are you going to marry Clarence Tiltwell?"

"Yes."

"To hell with you then," he snarled, and spun on his heel, his hitching stride cutting a swath through the thick grass. "McCady!"

His back flinched as if lashed with a whip, but he didn't turn around. He felt the loss of her as a raw agony deep within him, a mortal illness. But he kept going, and he did not look back. Not even when he heard the sobs tear out of her chest, sounding as if they were ripping apart her heart.

The devil's heart, Topper thought. The night was as black as the devil's heart.

He sagged against the lean-to wall, his chest heaving in panic, sucking in great whistling breaths that smelled of horse sweat and fresh dung. It was so bloody dark. He yearned for a candle, but he daren't risk one, not with the Sarn't Major asleep and snoring like a hedgehog in the tiny hayloft between the rafters and the thatch.

Straw rustled as he approached Blue Moon's box, and Topper started, barely swallowing the scream that rose in his throat. He rubbed a shaking hand over his face. It was slimed with sweat, though the night was cool. Gawblimey, he was jumpy as a flea on a hot bakestone.

The big bay greeted him with a soft snort and a nudge of his velvet nose. Tears stung Topper's eyes. I can't do it, he thought, I ain't doin it —even as he uncorked a jug and poured the contents into the bay's water bucket.

Poured a dram of canary wine laced with enough rat bane to kill every horse in England.

"Look what I've got fer ye, me bonny lad," he crooned into Blue Moon's pricked ear, and the words tasted of straw. The bay bumped his head against the wooden bucket, but Topper held it just out of reach. Blue Moon loved the wine; it was a special treat they gave him after every race or hard gallop.

I can't do it...

The spalling hammer had slammed into the floor with such force it had left a round dent the size of a tea plate in the wood. It was what Topper kept seeing over and over in his mind's eye, the hammer going up and coming down, again and again. On his hands.

A strangled whimper escaped out his tight throat. He clenched the water bucket so hard it slopped over into the straw. Blue Moon nickered and bumped his arm.

"I'm sorry, m'love, but I got to do it. Sorry, so sorry..."

He held out the bucket, and Blue Moon lowered his head.

With a harsh, strangled sob, Topper whirled and flung the bucket against the wall. It landed short, hitting a hay bale with a muffled thud and splash. But Topper didn't know it, for he'd already disappeared into the dark night.

"Topper's gone missing," the Sarn't Major said. He was looking at his boots, not at her, but Jessalyn had seen the sheen of wetness in his eyes.

She leaned her elbows on the stall door. Blue Moon stared blankly back at her, but then it was race day, and he always looked bored on race day. "All those accidents..."A sigh caught in her throat; she felt weighted with such an immense sadness. Clarence and now Topper —it seemed as if all the people in her world were not as she had thought them. She felt betrayed, her heart violated. "I thought it was just our dismal Letty luck. But it was Topper all along."

The Sarn't Major grunted as he pried open the bay's mouth and peered at his tongue, then sniffed at the horse's breath. "If he's nobbled him, I can't tell it. But it makes no never mind. With Topper gone missing, we ain't got no knight."

Jessalyn entered the box. She rubbed her hand over the sleek blood bay coat, down over his haunches, to the hock that had been injured last fall. It felt sound. "I shall ride in his place," she said.

The Sarn't Major spit into the straw. "Can't. Ye're a female."

"So? They can't disqualify us for breaking a rule that doesn't exist. Wearing jockey's togs, and as tall and thin as I am, no one will know. Just say I'm your new lad." Her mouth trembled into a forlorn little smile. "I don't expect we would have won anyway."

The Sarn't Major frowned at her over the bay's broad back. He pursed his thick lips, hunched his head into his shoulders, and spit into the straw again. "Me an' Blue Moon'll meet ye at the weigh-in then. But mind ye keep yer head about ye and yer mouth shut. Ye start to blatherin', and they'll spot ye fer a female quicker'n a cat can pounce."

Topper's black and scarlet taffeta shirt and moleskin breeches hung on a peg on the wall. The Sarn't Major had lovingly cleaned them himself; he'd even pressed out the wrinkles with a hot smoothing iron. The taffeta made a whispering sound as she lifted it off the peg. Jessalyn felt tears well in her eyes, and left alone now, she allowed them to fall.

At the scuffling sound of leather on gravel, she whirled, expecting the boy.

McCady Trelawny filled the lean-to's open doorway. He lounged with one shoulder propped against the wooden brace, his arms crossed loosely over his chest. With the rising sun at his back, his face was nothing but shadows. Except for his eyes, which seemed to glow like a cat's, wild and feral. Her heart swelled with such love it hurt to look at him, yet she could not look away.

He drew in a deep breath. "Jessalyn..."

A long shadow fell between them. "Here you are, my dear," Clarence Tiltwell said. He sauntered into the lean-to, cool and elegant in a snuff-colored riding coat and tight buff breeches. He glanced around, a frown marring his smooth high brow. "I just saw your training groom leading Blue Moon off toward the weighing house. I am disappointed in you, Jessalyn. That in spite of all my admonitions to the contrary, you are still determined to compete in this race."

"Go rain on somebody else's picnic, Tiltwell," McCady said in his most irritating drawl. "She doesn't belong to you yet." The earl hadn't abandoned his negligent pose, yet the tension in the air had suddenly grown so palpable Jessalyn could have reached out and plucked it like the strings on a harpsichord.

Humming a little ditty, Clarence peered into the empty box. "Where's your jockey? I wanted to give him a guinea for luck."

Jessalyn crushed the black and scarlet taffeta shirt to her breast as if it were a shield. "I—I can give it to him, if you like. He's waiting for me at the scales."

Clarence flashed his cousin a bright smile that revealed the gap in his teeth. "So, Caerhays. You've heard that Jessalyn and I are getting married next Friday? Are you here to wish her happy?"

McCady cocked a mocking brow. "Do you think she can be happy in hell?"

Clarence's laugh sounded brittle in the misty morning air. "Come now, coz. All's fair in love and war, isn't that what they say? What's this, Jessalyn—have you been crying?" he said, acting as if he'd only just now noticed. He brushed her cheek with the backs of his knuckles. McCady stiffened, making a sound deep in his throat like a strangled growl.

For the sake of the man she loved, Jessalyn forced herself to endure Clarence's touch. She even managed a smile. "It was only an attack of racing day nerves. My dear," she added, though the words tasted like bile in her mouth.

Clarence clicked his tongue. "Poor sweetheart. But then a woman's sensibilities ought to be of a delicate nature," he said. "Which is why, I trust, that once we are married, you will take up gentler pursuits more suited to the wife of an MP."

He patted her cheek as if she had been an obedient pet and turned to leave. He paused in the doorway and looked his cousin over, from the toes of the earl's polished top boots to the silk crown of his top hat. "Do you know what the trouble is with you, Trelawny? You don't know when to concede that you are fairly beaten."

"And the trouble with you, Tiltwell," the earl of Caerhays said in a bored, insulting voice, "is that you aren't a Trelawny and you never will be."

The color drained from Clarence's face, and his fists clenched. The two men glared at each other, bristling like a pair of alley dogs fighting over the same bone. Clarence pulled his lips back from his teeth in a rictus of a smile. "Will we see you at the wedding, coz? At least do come for the breakfast afterward. Who knows? Perhaps you'll be the one to find the bean in the bride's cake and take the plunge again."

Clarence Tiltwell left a silence in his wake. Jessalyn's hands shook as she gathered the rest of Topper's things. A hawker strolled by, selling eel pies; the smell of burned grease and hay came in with the breeze. She would not meet McCady's gaze, though she could feel him watching her. It was a tactile thing, like a breath against naked skin.

She had to walk past him to leave the lean-to. His hand fell on her arm, stopping her. "Don't marry him, Jessalyn," he said. "You see what he is like. He'll wind up doing your breathing for you."

She stared at his long, hard fingers, dark against the pale pink sleeve of her kerseymere spencer. Heat spread through her from his touch, melting her. Like holding a burning candle to thin silk. "I must go," she said on a sharply expelled breath.

His fingers tightened their grip. "Don't marry him, Jessa," he said again, and she couldn't miss the anguish in his voice.

"The—the Sarn't Major is waiting for me," she choked out through her tight throat, and fled. Because in another minute she would have told him everything. And then instead of saving him, she would have only have wound up hastening his destruction.

Blue Moon stood, legs splayed, on four stone slabs set into the ground, while a man measured the height of his withers with a rod. The big bay's head nodded as if he were dozing in the sun.

Jessalyn sidled up to the Sarn't Major. She felt conspicuous, sure that at any moment someone would shout and fingers would point her way, declaring her an impostor. She had pinned her hair close to her head and covered it with Topper's bright scarlet skullcap, then rubbed dirt over her cheeks to disguise their feminine pallor. Beyond binding her breasts, she hadn't needed to bother with her figure. She'd always been slim-hipped and long-shanked, and her feet had fitted perfectly into the boy's lightweight leather boots.

"How do I look, Sarn't Major?" she asked, pitching her voice low.

The trainer flicked a glance in her direction. "Ye look like a proper knight, but ye're walkin' like a regular dolly-mop. Quit swivelin' and swishin' yer hips. What ye need to do is strut."

"Strut. Right." Jessalyn affected a swaggering stance, cocking one hip. She tried to spit through her teeth and nearly splattered her boots. She eyed Blue Moon, whose head was drooping to his knees. "He looks half asleep. Are you sure he wasn't given something?"

"Our boy never perks up till he's coming down the flat and lookin' at the finishin' post. Ye know that. Ye best go weigh in now, and don't get to flappin' yer jaws while yer about it."

Jessalyn put her fingers to her lips and winked at him. He answered with a ferocious scowl, and her mouth broke into a big smile.

"Christ in his cups, don't go flashin' yer ivories!" he exclaimed. "Never been a boy born what looks as pretty as ye do when ye smile."

"Why, I do believe you have just paid me a compliment, you ol' softy. I would kiss you for it were I not in disguise."

"Hunh. Good thing then."

The Sarn't Major continued to grouse and grumble as he handed her several thin, flat pieces of lead to bring her weight up to handicap. She tucked them into the special slots sewn into her saddle for that purpose, then strutted over to sit on the scale plate. She kept her mouth shut, and the man barely glanced at her as he added the weights onto the opposite plate until she was balanced out. He nodded, made a tick on a slate, and motioned for her to get down.

The Sarn't Major took the kit from her hands when she rejoined him. He saddled Blue Moon in his efficient one-handed manner, then gave her a leg up. It felt as if she were straddling a mountain as she settled onto Blue Moon's broad back.

The Sarn't Major studied her seat, then decided to shorten her stirrups a notch. She looked down at his bent head, at the bald spot in his gunmetal gray hair that was clipped close to his scarred and knobby scalp. "Does Gram know what we're doing?"

"Aye. I told 'er." He glanced up, and for a moment Jessalyn could have sworn he almost smiled. "She said 'twas better to die game than to die chicken."

A nervous laugh, rusty as old bellows, burst out of her. She squelched it by sucking on her lower lip. She could feel her heart beating through the soles of her boots. "Is there anything special I should do?"

"Aye. Don't fall off."

With that admonition ringing in her ears, Jessalyn walked Blue Moon to the starting post through a crush of carriages and spectators milling around on horseback. Most of the runners were already there, and it was their knights Jessalyn worried most about, for they all knew Topper and would have expected to see him up on Blue Moon. She pulled her skullcap so far down over her ears, she could barely see out from beneath the stiff beak.

The other jockeys circled the post, making sure their girths were tight and making last-minute adjustments to their stirrup lengths. It was perfect racing weather. The sun was a hazy yellow ball in a sky the color of birch bark. The light shifted with the breeze, from brilliant sparkle to soft mist. The horses' coats gleamed like dew-wet grass.

Jessalyn had never seen so many people on hand to view a race. They sat on the roofs of their carriages, burst from the seams of the grandstands, swarmed in a thick cluster around the betting post. The royal white pavilion looked like a miniature castle with its battlements and Gothic arches. The king wasn't there today, for he was busy preparing for his upcoming coronation. Earlier that morning Jessalyn had flirted and bribed her way into obtaining a seat for Gram in the pavilion, out of the sun and the crowd.

Jessalyn's skullcap muffled the other jockeys' nervous chatter and the distant hum of the spectators. Fear and excitement tightened her muscles, and Blue Moon, picking up her mood, did a nervous little sidestep. Jessalyn drew in a deep breath to calm them both, filling her lungs with the smell of the turf, which was perfumed with wild thyme and juniper. The smooth green grass spread empty before her, looking like the baize on a billiard table. A white-railed fence bordered the course like a decorative strip of tatted lace. It didn't help to know that the posts were made thin and brittle, so that they would easily break beneath any jockey unfortunate enough to be dashed against them.

The last horse to come up to the post was the day's favorite, a dark chestnut with a starred forehead called Merlin. A richly dressed man with boot black hair and beady cockerel eyes rode alongside, imparting last-minute instructions to his jockey. "Give him a bellyful of the whip at the finish. Cut his bloody entrails out if you have to, lad. But bring him home a winner."

Jessalyn thought Merlin was splendid to look at: big, strong, and well muscled. But there was a sensitive, high-strung air about him. He didn't at all look the sort of horse that would respond well to the whip.

"Hullo, you there, boy."

A whip tapped Jessalyn on the shoulder. Startled, she spun around so fast in the saddle she nearly unseated herself. A jockey on a piebald gelding sat glaring at her out of spaniel-colored eyes. "That's Topper's pitch ye're sittin* on.

Jessalyn spit through her teeth. This time her efforts barely missed the shiny toe of the other fellow's boots. "What's it t' ye?" she growled.

The young man's sparrowlike mouth stretched into a tight grin as he slashed the looped end of his whip at her face.

If she hadn't shied back at the last moment, the thick rawhide would have taken out her eyes. As it was, she jerked hard on the reins and Blue Moon reared. She barely had him collected again when the starting bell clanged, catching them both flat-footed.

The race was off, and all Jessalyn saw was a cloud of dust.

It seemed to take them forever just to catch up with the pack. She hung back after that, although her nerves and muscles screamed with the temptation to forge ahead. It was so hard to let others pass her, to look at the flying tails of the leaders and not urge Blue Moon too early into his breakaway speed.

She made her eyes go soft and wide, opening them to all around her. Bleeding bands of rainbow colors flashed by. The air rushed past her ears in a gentle roar, like a winter sea. Pounding hooves thrummed in her blood. She tasted dust and grass and excitement.

An opening appeared at the rails, and she decided to take it. Blue Moon sprang forward with a powerful thrust of his hindquarters, anticipating her signal by half a second. They closed on the narrow space at the same time as the piebald gelding.

The two horses brushed, and the piebald's jockey shot her a glance. He thrust his knee upward, catching under her thigh, and flinging her out of the saddle.

She lost both stirrups and saved herself from falling only by snatching at Blue Moon's thick mane. She clung, dangling sideways, as the ground rushed past her eyes at incredible speed. It was like trying to sit on top of a greasy pole; she felt as if she were hanging on by her eyebrows. At last she managed to stab one foot back into a stirrup and haul herself upright again. It was, she thought with a shock of silent laughter, the most death-defying acrobatic feat she had ever performed.

Somehow, even with her flailing on his back, Blue Moon had still kept neck and neck with the piebald. The jockey, catching her out the corner of his eye, turned his head. Jessalyn saw his whip come up. She flung her arm around as if she were taking a wild swing with a cricket bat, and her fist caught him hard on the neck. Then all she saw were the soles of his boots.

Riderless, the piebald slowed, and Blue Moon took his place at the rails. Jessalyn cast a swift glance backward. The other jockey was rolling out of harm's way beneath the rails, bellowing curses.

They were nearing the home straight now, and the spectators began to gallop onto the course, crowding the field into the rails. Jessalyn kept her gaze straight ahead between Blue Moon's cropped ears. She held the reins lightly, giving the bay his head, her thighs and calves squeezing gently, her arms making smooth scrubbing motions in the air. Blue Moon's long, fluid stride tore at the turf, every ripple of muscle in his big body seeming to find an echo within herself.

They broke free from the pack with a quarter of a mile of flat green grass to cover and the dark chestnut favorite a furlong in front of them.

The smell of the race was in Blue Moon's nostrils; it thrummed through his blood. He smelled victory, and he went after it, straining, reaching, striving with every beat of his great heart. They bore down upon the winning post, and Jessalyn knew suddenly that they weren't going to make it. Blue Moon ran as if his legs bore wings, but it was not enough. She'd left it until too late.

Merlin's jockey heard them coming and craned a look back over his shoulder. His eyes grew wide to see them so close. He flailed madly at his horse's withers with his whip, as if beating at a carpet, a frenzy of flapping elbows. Merlin's ears went back, and he shied just as Blue Moon stretched out his neck, striding past the finishing post...

And winning by a nose.

It wasn't until they'd slowed to a walk that the great waves of sound hit her, though it must have been going on all along. Cheers rolled and lapped over her, buffeting her; shrill whistles pierced her ears. Blue Moon stopped flat-footed, his sweat-foamed sides heaving. Jessalyn leaned over his neck, pressing her cheek into his wet hide, her heart swelling with love for him, and pride in his stamina and courage. "You were magnificent," she crooned. He was truly rare and special, a blue moon.

Horses and men surged around them, plucking at her sleeves, slapping her on the back, shouting questions in her face. The Sarn't Major pushed his way through the crowd. "Give way, damn ye," he shouted. "Give way."

Jessalyn slid out of the saddle, and the Sarn't Major stood in front of her, blocking her from the pressing crowd. "Not 'alf bad," the crusty old trainer said. And then to Jessalyn's utter shock he bussed her on the cheek. A choking feeling clogged her throat, something between joy and exhaustion, so that she couldn't speak.

Suddenly her legs went so weak and wobbly she would have slithered to the ground like a collapsed balloon if the Sarn't Major hadn't caught her beneath the elbow. "Don't ye go turning back into a vaporish female yet," he groused at her as he fumbled with the girth buckles. "Ye've got to weigh in."

It was on her way to the scales that she saw him. Her dark angel. He stood beside a red-and-white-striped ale tent, a leather jack clutched in one fist. Their gazes clashed and held. There was no doubt that he knew her, but then hadn't he once said that he would know her anywhere?

He tipped his hat at her, but he didn't smile. He tossed what ale was left in the jack into the dirt and after, turning on his heel, pushed his way through the sharpers at the hazard tables, walking fast with his long, hitching stride.

After Jessalyn had been weighed back in, and the man had put another tick beside the Letty name on the slate, she borrowed a coat from one of the other jockeys to cover her bright scarlet and black taffeta shirt so that she could slip unnoticed through the crowd. She hurried past all the tents and booths, with their greasy smells and their flapping flags, until she was almost running by the time she reached the royal pavilion. She wished she could have seen Gram's face when she and Blue Moon had flashed past the winning post, but she would see it now.

She mounted the steps to the upper balcony two at a time. But at the top she paused to take something out of the small slash pocket in her taffeta jockey shirt. She had pawned a garnet necklace, the only piece of jewelry she had of her mother's, to buy it. She thought of it now as her good-luck charm. She had carried it with her on that wild ride and it had brought her down the home straight a winner. It had made winners of them all.

Lady Letty sat in a ribbonback chair before the balcony railing. She looked straight ahead, out over the rolling downs, a scene she must have shared a hundred times in the years gone by with her baronet.

For a moment Jessalyn stood behind her. She saw the white rails that marked the home straight, and she heard again the thunder of a thousand cheers. Tears welled in her eyes—from pride in herself and Blue Moon and from the special joy of at last having a dream come true. She laid her hand on Lady Letty's shoulder and swung around to kneel beside her chair. "We've done it, Gram. We've won the Derby."

Lady Letty sat stiff, unmoving, not speaking.

Jessalyn knelt beside her while the bell rang announcing the next race and a fight between two gentlemen broke out in the seats below her. While the sun melted the last of the mist so that the downs seemed suddenly to be bathed with a brilliant light and the breeze came up again, bringing with it the smell of horses and the turf. And the sweet, hot taste of winning.

"Oh, Gram..." she whispered. And closed the old woman's lifeless fingers around a mother-of-pearl snuffbox.