Once in a Blue Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

Jessalyn didn't want to tell them all to go hang. Sometimes she wanted to do the done thing the way everyone else did it—to fit in, to belong, to be a proper young lady who would no longer be a bother of a daughter. Sometimes. At other times... other times she felt like a kite, blowing only where the wind took her. She wanted to break free, to make of herself what she would be.
    Sometimes she didn't care if she ever saw her mother again.
    The door opened with a bang, startling Jessalyn back into the present. A serving girl entered, carrying a tea tray. She closed the door behind her with a smart slap of her hip, then set the tray on a gateleg table.
    The girl straightened with a groan, rubbing the small of her back. "Me blessed life, what a day she bin. Seems like 'tes nothing but heftin' and tottin' and luggin' I bin doin' since cockcrow. 'Tes a wonder I haven't got spasms in me back, it is. 'Tes a wonder I ain't prostitute with exhaustion."
    Lady Letty rapped her cane on the floor. "Prostrate. How often must I tell you, you fool gel, that the word is prostrate."
    The girl's lace cap bobbed in harmony with her head. She had a face plump as a bun with two black currants for eyes. It might have been a pretty face except for the jagged scar that ran from the corner of her left eye nearly to her mouth. When she was twelve, her miner father in a drunken rage had swung a pick at her head, laying open her cheek. Like Peaches and the Sarn't Major, Becka Poole was another of the misfits and castoffs that Lady Letty was always taking in.
    Like me, Jessalyn thought.
    "Aye, m'lady," Becka said, with a smile so sweet it could almost make one forget about the scar. "That's just what I do say. Prostitute."
    Directing another fierce scowl at the girl, Lady Letty took a tortoiseshell snuffbox out of her pocket. She flicked the lid open with one hand in spite of fingers that were bent and gnarled with rheumatism. Raising a pinch of the pungent powder to her nose, she sniffed delicately. Lady Letty's skin was laced with tiny wrinkles like a dried apple, but age had not eroded the bones beneath. Hers was a strong face that conveyed the strength of her will and character.
    For as long as Jessalyn had known her, Lady Letty's hair had been dark gray, the color of the tin ore brought up from the Cornish mines. But Jessalyn had heard it said that once her grandmother's hair had been like a flame. Once that formidable old woman had been young with a laughing mouth and a saucy way of walking and talking. She had been a bal-maiden, a girl who worked in the mines.
    The story went that Rosalie Potter had been walking home after her shift at Wheal Ruthe when a well-set-up gentleman had come riding by. Silas Letty was of proud and ancient lineage, a son of a landed Cornish gentry family that could trace its name back to the Battle of Hastings. Silas had taken one look at that laughing mouth and all that red hair and had fallen in love. Nothing would do but that he must have his bal-maiden. But being a Letty, he had done the unexpected thing and married her, instead of simply bedding her.
    Later Silas had been elected to Parliament and gone to London, where he had done a service for the king, some secret favor that nobody was allowed to speak of, and the king had made him a baronet. Once again Silas had done the unexpected thing: He had accepted the baronetcy to please his king. But Silas had still thought it a trifling thing. Unlike other families, the Lettys did not need a title to increase their consequence.
    The tide did please Sir Silas in one way. For Rosalie Potter—onetime bal-maiden, who had been born and brought up by the scruff of her neck in a hovel next to the gritty slag heaps of Wheal Ruthe—his Rosalie became a lady.
    It was such a wonderful story, more romantic than any tale Jessalyn had ever read in the library bluebooks. Once upon a time a beautiful bal-maiden had captured the heart of a baronet, a man so far above her he might as well