Once in a Blue Moon Read Online Free PDF

friendly man.
    A latch lifted with a click behind her, and Jessalyn turned. Her grandmother entered the parlor with a rustle of black bombazine skirts. Although she used a cane, Lady Rosalie Letty was not bent over. A tall woman, she carried her height with pride, her back and shoulders straight and stiff as a lance.
    "Close the window, gel," Lady Letty said in accents rough with the burr of Cornwall. "The fire's smeeching."
    Jessalyn pulled the old mullioned window shut with a protest of its rusty hinges, then stooped to poke at a fire of furze and bits of driftwood, coaxing out a reluctant flame. Lady Letty lowered herself onto one end of a battered and patched settee. The settee had once been purple but was now faded by sun and age to a sickly puce. She lifted a quizzing glass to her eye, and her sharp gaze honed right in on the nail of Jessalyn's big toe that was poking through her jean house slipper. The old woman's lips pulled and twisted.
    Jessalyn noticed the scowl and ducked her head to hide a smile. "I'm that sorry about losing the boots, Gram," she said. She'd confessed earlier to Lady Letty that the sea had stolen her half boots while she'd been scavenging. She had told her grandmother nothing at all about the explosion. Or the stranger.
    Lady Letty thumped her cane on the carpet, snagging the tip in the threadbare nap. "Tis not the loss of the boots themselves, m' dear. Tis the senselessness of it. It's long before time that you stopped behaving like a wild tommy-rigg. Remember who you are—a lady born. Ladies do not walk the beach barefoot."
    "Yes, ma'am," Jessalyn said, although she doubted true ladies, even poor ones, went scavenging in the first place. She sat across from her grandmother in a moth-eaten wing chair, folding her hands primly and bringing her holey-shod feet together. She cast a glance up at Lady Letty in time to catch the love softening the old woman's fierce gray eyes, before the wide mouth pressed into a pretended scowl.
    The first time Jessalyn sat in this chair her legs had barely been long enough for her feet to touch the ground. That had been a month after her father's funeral, the day her mother had dragged her down to Cornwall and dumped her into her grandmother's care. Dropped her off like a suit of old clothes, no longer fashionable and no longer wanted.
    "So the flighty, vain little fool don't want the bother of a daughter now, and she thinks to pawn you off onto me, eh?" Lady Letty had said, peering at Jessalyn through her quizzing glass and not looking as if she had much use either for a skinny six-year-old with fiery red hair and a freckled nose and scabs on her bony knees. But then Lady Letty had laughed and said, "Good God, gel, you're the spitting image of myself at your age." And Jessalyn had thought that perhaps her grandmother thought this a good thing.
    "You'll find it ain't easy being a Letty," her grandmother had gone on. She'd flung up a gnarled hand to stop Jessalyn from speaking, although Jessalyn's tongue had been stiff in her mouth, incapable of moving. "No matter that you're her daughter, your father was a Letty. You're of Letty blood, and a Letty I shall make of you. A Letty and a lady, by God."
    Being a Letty had turned out to be easy. Being a lady was another net of fish entirely.
    It wasn't that she set out to be a hoyden. It was that she could never decide upon the correct and proper way to behave—"the done thing," as Lady Letty called it—until the situation had already come and gone. It was a deficiency in her character, which her grandmother insisted with a perverse sort of pride into turning into an accomplishment.
    "Never you mind," Lady Letty would say after Jessalyn had succeeded in making a particular fool of herself. "One must always do the done thing, of course, but there is the ordinary way of doing a thing, and there is the Letty way. Sometimes one must do the unexpected thing, the Letty thing, and tell 'em all to go hang."
    The trouble was