Once in a Blue Moon by Penelope Williamson

Author:Penelope Williamson [Williamson, Penelope]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780440614128
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1993-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

15

The front door opened with a squeal of its unoiled hinges, and Jessalyn jumped at the noise. She scooped up the stack of tradesmen’s bills, shoving them beneath a pillow. She sat on the pillow, then snatched up Napoleon and the Weatherby Racing Calendar and planted them both in her lap. Settling back in an Egyptian couch with crocodile claw feet, she assumed what she hoped was a look of angelic innocence.

She heard Becka’s voice in the front hall. That would be Gram coming home. Gram, who persisted in giving away money they didn’t have. Just this afternoon she had gone to deliver a new pair of crutches to the rag-and-bone dealer’s crippled son. And she had taken to buying so many baked potatoes from the thin, ragged girl who sold them on the corner that even Becka professed herself to be heartily sick of them. But Jessalyn couldn’t ask Gram to economize on charity, and she didn’t want to worry her. So she kept the mounting bills a secret and prayed for a turn in the abysmal Letty luck.

Jessalyn heaved a gusty sigh. The movement disturbed Napoleon, who let his displeasure be known by digging his claws into her thighs. He had grown into a crotchety cat, though still runty. He did not like London and had yet to forgive her for bringing him here.

Four years ago the Sarn’t Major had come to Gram and said it was now or never if they were going to make one last run in the big races. So he had walked their string of horses to Newmarket, and she and Gram and Becka had taken the stagecoach. They had moved into her mother’s house here in London, one in a square block of contiguous town houses called the Adelphi.

Outside, the house was made of brick, delicately ornamented with pilasters in the honeysuckle design. Inside, the beautiful classical rooms had been turned into something only Cleopatra would feel at home in. Lotus bowl chandeliers and walls papered with hieroglyphics and sphinxes, sideboards with water lily carvings, and chair backs shaped like coiling serpents. In the dining room stood a table made of a single piece of white marble in the shape of a sarcophagus.

Lady Letty couldn’t enter a room without shuddering, and Becka claimed all the sphinxes and crocodiles gave her hillas. But Jessalyn secretly loved the house. She would wander the rooms, wondering about the woman who had lived here, the woman who had betrayed her husband and deserted her child to follow a Grand Passion. She would study her face in the looking glass, searching for that woman in herself. But her big mouth and fiery hair, her long lankiness were all Rosalie the bal-maiden’s. She was a child of barren moors and sea-battered cliffs. Of that mysterious, exotic woman who had liked lions and lyres, she saw nothing.

That woman, the mother of her memory, had been fair and dainty with a whispering voice and an elusive, musical laugh. That woman

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