Once in a Blue Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

measure. The object of her enmity was an ugly black-backed gull. The gull, big as a goose, sat atop the paddock fence, tantalizingly near. Yet cat and bird both knew that bird could take flight long before fat cat could pounce.
    The gull squawked and Happed its wings; Peaches hissed. Laughing, Jessalyn stroked the cat's marmalade-and-cream-striped backbone. "You have him thoroughly frightened now, m' love," she cooed. Peaches began to purr beneath Jessalyn's hand, her front paws kneading the weathered wood of the windowsill.
    The evening was quiet but for the whisper of the surf and the reedy chirring of a nightjar. The sea caught the last light of a dying sun, shimmering purple like a cup of plum wine. End Cottage was only a hundred yards from the sea, but the cliffs were steeper here than they were at Crook-neck Cove, the beach narrower and usually covered by the tide.
    Peaches cast one last baleful look at the gull and then with an air of supreme indifference thumped down from the sill and waddled over to the hearth. Last year Peaches had been a skeletal stray, near death from exposure and starvation. Now she was so fat she could barely make it back and forth between the window and the fire.
    Jessalyn took the cat's place at the window. She had been restless all evening, tingly and effervescent inside, like a tub of fermenting cider.
    The wind came up again, lifting a corner of loose thatch on the stable. The air smelled heavily of the sea and of the hay that had just been gathered and ricked that week. There was a sweet smell, too, from the primroses and daffodils, splashes of bright and pale yellow, that grew along the paddock where a sorrel-colored colt cavorted around a rubbing post.
    Folk around the county called End Cottage a stud farm, although that was being generous. Once, years ago, her grandparents had bred horses to race on the great tracks near London Town. Sir Silas Letty, Jessalyn's grandfather, had been known as a bang-up sporting man who always ran his horses fairly, a man who played deep but covered his bets. In those years the Letty stables had acquired a modest reputation among the other members of the Turf, winning just enough today to support the enormous costs of racing tomorrow.
    Jessalyn's grandfather had died long before she had come to live at End Cottage, and in the years since his death the Letty luck had gone tepid and then cold. One by one the prizewinning studs and mares had been sold until only the old and the lame and the losers remained.
    Jessalyn had never attended a racing meet, never stood at the finishing post and watched her horse nose out the favorite by a whisker. All she'd had were her grandmother's stories. Stories told in the winter evenings by the fire while a wet and woolly Cornish gale blew outside. Stories told so often that she knew just how it would be: the clang of the starting bell, the jockeys flashing by in a rainbow of colored taffeta, the thunder of a hundred hooves beating at the turf... and the sweet, hot taste of winning.
    Someday, Lady Letty would say, with the light of the fire —or perhaps it was the dream—sparkling in her eyes... someday, when the right horse came along, they would go to Newmarket and Epsom Downs for the season, and they would race again. Someday, someday...
    They had high expectations of the sorrel filly in the paddock, foaled just that spring, such expectations that they had named her Letty's Hope.
    A man came out the barn carrying a halter. Jessalyn waved, but he did not wave back. He carried the halter in his right hand, and he had to put it in his teeth to open the paddock gate, for he had only the one arm. The other he had left on a battlefield in the Peninsula five years ago. Small, bandy-legged, and dark, he was as Welsh as his name, Llewellyn Davies. But Jessalyn and her grandmother called him Sarn't Major, which had been his rank in the army. The rest of the folk in the county avoided speaking to him altogether; he was not a