The Windflower (18 page)

Morgan's antiscorbutics were the best in the Atlantic; scurvy was never seen on the
Black Joke.
And, for God's sake, she'd only been at sea for a week. Cat opened his mouth to enumerate the reasons why she couldn't have scurvy and then shut it again without a word. As much as she, the young pirate had noticed that their differing logic could pass cheek to cheek in the same current without stopping to tip hats.

"Why?" he said.

Silence from the head on the table. Then, "What're the symptoms?"

"Let me see," he said. "Have you got eruptions?"

"Eruptions!"

"1 hadn't finished. Are there eruptions on your arms and legs that look like fleabites?"

Her head came up, and the shiny disturbed mass of her hair fell in a soft slither down her neck as she pushed back the tight sleeves and anxiously studied the white skin on her arms. With reluctance she admitted, "No. What else do you have with scurvy?"

"Loose teeth. Do yours wiggle?"

Damned if she didn't try them. Every blasted tooth in her head. And when they were all discovered in perfect health, she had the nerve to insist that there must be
other
signs.

"Dysentery and foul breath," snapped Cat, running out of patience.

"Well! Really!" Her very blue eyes filled with resentment. "I might be in the early stages."

"The
pre-early
stages," he said. With one hand he set down the water can he had brought to her. "You'll have to develop something more interesting than acute hypochondria to worry Devon enough to loose you on dry land. Good night."

He was out the door and had it half-closed behind him before he heard her voice calling him softly from the black room.

"Devon said I should go free if you could tell I was a virgin. What does that mean?"

It was news to him, but he was not surprised. Devon was a master of double-edged intimidation. On the surface it was insult enough; and that faded into a fill-in-the-blank threat flavored of the black side of things nasty. It should have been enough to make her talk, except that, being who she was, the more lurid implications had winged right through her wholesome spirit. Cat stepped back into the room.

"It means that he was baiting you," said the boy. "He doesn't believe that you're a virgin."

"Couldn't you tell him that I am?" she said in a frightened voice. Her small head was alertly held, the face shadowed, and her breath flickered in the silence like an uncovered candle.

"Try to understand," he said, the words tight with irritation and unfamiliar pity, "it wouldn't make any difference. The man was trying to scare you, and since it didn't work, that's that."

"It didn't work? Heavenly name! They can hear my knees knocking all the way to Paris."

"1 should have said, it didn't work well enough."

Not willing to let it go, Merry said, "Couldn't you at least
try
what I asked? Please."

"No," Cat said, his voice severe, his temper thoroughly evaporated. "Devon isn't stupid. And Morgan can see clear inside my femurs. He'd know I was lying. Besides, Devon's bloody likely to double-check, just to give you a lesson you wouldn't forget. He's not a man to push. Do you understand what it means physically? [ didn't think so. The man's out to buffet your guts around, Merry. Strain everything he says through a cheesecloth." He saw her irises, thick as buckets of blue water, begin to slowly lose their focus. "Damnation. Don't look at me like that. I can't help you. Don't expect me to. There are two ways you can make peace with Devon. Pleasure him, or tell him what he wants to know. You're perfectly capable of doing either. Or both."

She jumped to her feet so fast that her chair skittered on the uneven floorboards. "You and your smug calculations. Hasn't it occurred to you that the
truth
wouldn't save my skin? If Devon found out what I was doing at the Musket and Muskrat, he'd peel me to the gristle."

Shocked and angry, Cat abandoned the effort to keep his tone polite. "What lunacy possessed you to make an enemy like Devon?"

"Don't you think I know I'm in trouble?" she shouted back. "Do I look like someone who's made a practice of consorting with pirates? What am I supposed to do now?''

"Take him to bed, damn it."

"Understand this. Never." She was screaming, without knowing it. "It disgusts every feeling!"

"Christsakes, are we talking about the same man? When Devon walks down the streets of Bristol, half the population has neck strain from staring at him. We've got practically to hire eunuchs with scimitars to get him the rest of a chaste night."

They were faced off like weasels. The air between them hissed with their fury; with a movement of his shoulder Cat's unbound hair flared and caught hers, and held, crackling with static.

"Pardon me for asking you to help!" she hurled at him. "My mistake! I'm not accustomed to people whose range of emotion is limited to irritation."

A hush fell. As their lungs competed wrathfully for the same oxygen Cat began to slowly digest her final words. His eyes widened, as she had never seen them before, and ate light like a mirror.

"Who were you expecting? Young Lochinvar?" he asked in a half-paralyzed amazement. The raised muscles in his shoulders began to relax, the white lines around his lips to warm. With a gentle hand he meticulously parted the wanton intercourse of their hair and put her snapping curls behind her arm. In a very different tone he continued, "My emotions aren't limited to irritation. At times I'm annoyed as well."

Crazily, considering the situation. Merry felt the keen pressure of a grin on her lips and an escaping laugh. Her resentment sank like an iron slug. And the boy's astringent blue eyes answered her in a softening that was not a smile but something as humorous and more intimate. It was the first time Merry had taken pleasure in being angry and felt neither ill nor guilty in its aftermath. Cat, she had learned, was uniquely shed of threatening complexities.

"Look," he said, shrugging his own hair back, "do you want to take a bath?"

"What do you mean, a bath?" she repeated, startled.

"Sit in a tub. Rub soap on yourself. Rinse it off. That kind of thing. You know; a bath."

Merry could barely remember the last time she'd been clean, not being able to do much of a job with a can of water and the worry that who knows who might walk in the door at any minute. Merry itched in places that she didn't know the names of. Almost cheerfully she said, "Where could I take a bath?"

"Morgan's cabin. He's on deck, and no one's going to come in this late."

"Won't he mind?" she asked.

"Only if you leave damp towels in a heap on his Persian carpet." he said, his hand on the door handle. "Well? Yes or no?"

Shyly she came toward him, though the curve of her forehead was skeptical. "You wouldn't—watch me, would you?"

"Oh, for Christsake. No; I wouldn't. The way you talk, you'd think I'd never seen a woman stripped, before you."

Three months ago Merry wouldn't have called that much of a reassurance. The new Merry Wilding had spent a week on Rand Morgan's famous pirate ship, lying her scallops off about her identity, and learning the rudiments of how to argue and how to keep her poise in bare feet and a thin nightshirt. It was the new and itchy Merry Wilding who twitched her twisted skirts into place and went with the pirate boy to Morgan's cabin.

She washed herself and her hair in a baroque brass hip bath behind a mother-of-pearl screen from China.

"Are you getting into your dress or do you want a nightshirt?" Cat's voice called around the screen.

"Nothing would induce me to borrow another thing from Morgan," Merry said emphatically, drying between her toes. "Especially since you said he was mad about the torn buttons, which were
not
my fault."

"This one's mine. 1 never wear it." "It" flew over the top of the screen followed by, of all things, a cranberry-colored man's robe. She had to laugh as she put on the robe because the arms hung ten inches past her hands and the hem swept the floor. Smiling, she came around the screen dangling the long arms in front of her, and the boy stood up and began to roll the cuffs for her.

"Are you cold?"

"No. How come you know so much about everything?" she asked him curiously. "You couldn't be much older than I am."

"How come you know so little? Why do you think we're the same age? How old are you?"

"Eighteen. How old are you?"

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe eighteen. That's what Morgan thinks, anyway." He swept a cushion of crimson brocade from the window bench and tossed it on the floor. "Sit down. I'll brush your hair."

She was so tired, and indeed so naive, that she sank onto the cushion without a second thought. Registering her trust without comment, the young pirate sat behind her and began to put the silver brush through her hair with soft strokes.

The ship rocked them like a great wooden cradle, and the moon smiled through the window, casting latticed shadows over them and mixing drifts of kindly moonbeams in her hair where it lay across his knee. Soon she had half fallen to sleep; her blameless cheek dropped against the inside of his leg. Like a warm hand on the shoulder, her movement woke Cat from his reverie in time to see Morgan come through the door. Cat forced moderation on the muscles that had irrationally tightened and held Morgan's gaze as the older man crossed the room in his easy stride and let his hand fall, briefly, through Cat's hair.

"Pretty children," Morgan observed. He smiled thoughtfully as Merry sat up, knuckling her eyes, looking as though she'd forgotten where she was.

Cat handed Morgan the hairbrush and said to Merry, "Come on—you look ready for sleep now."

"Do you know, Cat, instead of selling her in Trinidad, why don't we keep her?" said Morgan suddenly. "Every boy should have a pet." He encountered a sharp look from Cat, who, except for Devon at his age, was the smartest boy Morgan had ever known. As Cat was putting an arm around Merry and bringing her to her feet to lead her from the room he said, "You're dreaming, Captain, if you think 1 can afford a mistress on what you pay me."

Morgan's soft laughter followed them from the room.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Merry was not crying when Cat brought her breakfast the next morning, but he saw as he entered that she stuffed a crumpled handkerchief under her pillow. Damn Morgan and his bloody mania tor rebirth by fire.

"Morning." He set down her breakfast. "Well?" She dragged herself from the bed, looking indifferently into her bowl, and said, "What a surprise. Oatmeal. Take it and throw it over the side. I'm not going to eat it."

"Now look," Cat said, "don't go back to moping."

"Who's moping? Why should I mope? Wouldn't you mope if someone were going to sell you from an auction block?''

"I
was
auctioned on the block. Guess who bought me? It's interesting to know what you're worth in monetary terms."

She stared at him. "And were you expensive?"

"Extremely. But 1 was worth it, being young and multifaceted. Of course, you—"

"Are as young but I don't have as many facets?" she said quickly, indignant on principle.

"Merry, Devon isn't going to sell you from an auction block."

Her eyes blazed as she snapped, "Do tell. How chivalrous of him. I suppose he means to strike a private deal and save the percent that would have gone to the auctioneer?" She sat down in the waves of her skirt and thrust her face into her hands. "I'd sooner stay on the
Joke
and be y-y-your—''

"Oh?" His voice was calm. "Why
m-m-mine
and not Devon's?"

"Because I hate Devon!" The words, filtering through her dainty fingers, were startlingly convincing.

It would serve no good purpose to heave her into another argument, so he only said evenly, "Does it matter if you hate him? If you're going to play Adam and Eve with someone you don't like, it might as well be Devon, who's a fair hand at it."

"If he were Adam and I were Eve," she said with dignity, "and if the future of humanity depended on us, 1 wouldn't let him touch me."

Amused in spite of himself, Cat rested his forearms on the table so that his face and hers were at a level, his orderly braid dangling like rope.

"Merry?"

Merry's fingers curled down to expose the smoky blue fret in her eyes.

"I can tell you in a word what I'm like in bed," he said. "Quick."

Her arched brows knit, and she said crossly, "Good. It can't be too quick for me!"

"For God's sake, Merry. Do you always have to be so bloody melodramatic? You're spending too much time down here immersed in self-pity."

"What choice do 1 have?" she said, outraged.

"About the self-pity, plenty. Eat your oatmeal. I'm going to talk to Morgan."

And Cat asked for and rather surprisingly received Morgan's permission to take Merry up on deck.

The girl herself was a good deal harder to convince. Devon, it seemed, had planted a seed or two to keep her from trying to escape. Things too terrible to describe would happen if Cat took her on deck and "threw her to the crew," she told him, her face hot with emotion. Devon had shrewdly left the details to her imagination. It took Cat the better part of an hour to clarify for her that there was a difference between being thrown to the crew and having the liberty to go aloft under Morgan's protection. There was no question that if she was presented as a plaything, she would have been used as one. However, as she was Devon's inviolate property, any sea dog who laid a finger on her would find himself eating barnacles off the keel. And anyway, if she thought men lost their heads over sniveling eighteen-year-olds, she was wrong. "Now, if you were twenty-seven and were really good with your—"