Once in a Blue Moon by Penelope Williamson Read Free Book Online Page B

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