The Windflower (64 page)

"Yes." She was sawing at the seam over his shoulder. "It's hard work being a swashbuckler. How do you ravishers always make this look so easy?"

He had brought up a hand to brush the back of his forefinger over her nipple, feeling a nerve-shiver run through him as it hardened against his skin. Sympathetically he said, "For one thing, we don't use dining utensils."

She had to gasp a little as his hand curved up and into her low-cut bodice, pressing under the warm thrust of her breast, caressing the nipple with his thumb. Feebly she murmured, "When one dines, one uses the proper utensils."

He slid her closer, freeing her breast from its aching confinement, and applied his lips and tongue to the tip. "Then I think I may come by my just deserts."

Her laughter was a sensual stroke on his brow. "I think, love, that your desserts have just begun."

When Cat returned much later to check on his patient, he found Devon asleep in a bed littered with the scattered tatters of his clothing and Merry's nose peeking out of the bedclothes, her eyes deliciously alight with amusement. And seeing the answering humor in his pale-blue gaze and questioningly upraised brow, she whispered, "Give me your hand," and slapped the knife into it. "There wasn't a bit of fight in the lad."

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

October brought the return migration of winter birds to England. Though they were often unseen, Merry could hear the shrill, undulating calls of geese as they passed overhead at night. Nutters rustled in the woods under turning leaves. The elms were a bright umber, and the Spanish chestnuts reared great golden boughs among glowing brown beeches and the russet flutter of oak leaves. Hedgerows sparkled with holly berries and the deep shimmer of luxuriant blackberries. Children sailed kites in the open fields.

Rand Morgan broke his overland journey to meet the
Black Joke,
again docked in Falmouth harbor, by spending a day with his grandmother at St. Cyr. In the late afternoon he returned to the Gentle Shepherd, bending his head to avoid the low hang of an alder branch as he came from a lane into the side yard of the coaching inn where the cider mill, the apple baskets, the vats, and the horsehair cloths were out and ready for an evening's apple cidering. He dismounted, tossed the reins to a groom, made his way upstairs to the comfortable parlor adjoining his bedchamber, and by the time he was joined by Sails, had settled into a chair, a handsomely proportioned leg in a dusty riding boot slung casually over one arm. He had a hookah at one elbow and a pitcher of beer at the other.

Lifting his glass to the sailmaker in a negligent salute, he quoted the sign exhibited in the alehouse below: " 'Drink here. The best beare.' Shall I give you a glass?"

"Aye," said the old man, smiling slightly, and took it from Morgan's hand, making himself comfortable in a woolen upholstered chair by the fire. While the captain was busy at St. Cyr, Sails had hired a gig to drive over for a look at Stonehenge, though little enough pleasure he'd been able to take in the place, because almost on arrival he'd fallen in with an elderly widower from Swindon who held sternly to the position that Avebury was by far the superior ancient monument, and went on at such length about the injustice of a fate that made Stonehenge better known, and spent such energy in detailing what he saw to be the many shortcomings of Stonehenge that Sails felt almost as though he'd been guilty of an act of ignominy by going there to begin with.

When Morgan asked Sails how he'd found Stonehenge, Sails answered rather forlornly that it wasn't the equal of Avebury. Considerably intrigued, because Sails had set out that morning in the best of spirits, Morgan soon had the story out of him, and before long Sails began to see the absurdity of the situation and was laughing and slapping his thigh over Morgan's pungent comments.

Plying his handkerchief against the moist amusement in his eyes, chuckling faintly, Sails allowed the pirate captain to refill his glass before he said, "How did ye find the duchess, your grandmama?"

Morgan inhaled a rose of blue smoke, stretching his arm along the chair back. "Brimming with sentiment. At luncheon she wept over having destroyed the letter Grandfather Morgan wrote to Jasper informing him of my upcoming birth. Do you know, she went so far as to say I would have been a— What was her word?
Magnificent,
I believe. I would have been a magnificent duke."

With a grin in his eyes Sails studied the huge shapely body, the broad shoulders, the strong molding of the jaw. "She had the right of it, I'm thinkin'." He took a slow swallow of beer and said thoughtfully, "It's something, how you never did resent young Devon. I remember the first letter ye had from yer grandmajna about that laddie."

"Do you? Where was I? Algiers, I think."

"Aye, that you were, and in the very bed of a prime article of virtue and her sprinkling ye with rose petals. D'ye recall reading the letter aloud to me? A pathetic thing it was, all about how here was the young duke, fourteen years old and falling to ruin with a man's vices and all for want of a father. She feared he'd kill himself before he reached eighteen unless someone could take him in hand, and with what she'd heard of ye, ye were the only man to do it. Diamond cuts diamond, she said."

"Thus demonstrating a remarkable command of the language." A mocking smile curled the pirate's lip.

"And ye were so much better? It was daft, she was, or desperate, to persist until ye would finally take an interest and agree to kidnap him. 'Let's have look at my brother who's a lord,' ye said. 'And we'll teach him a whole new set of dissipations.' "

"So I did. It's amazing that she trusted me, isn't it? She would have done better to help Aline out of her depression over Jasper's death so she could be the mother Devon needed, instead of telling the poor girl at Jasper's funeral that he'd left a sideslip in the Caribbean who was a pirate."

Sails clucked and shook his head in a gently excusing way. " 'Twas the stress of the moment belike. Ah, well, it's all come right in the end, because here's Cat telling us that Aline means to have Cathcart." He set down his glass and gazed into the hearth. A note that was partly curious, partly apologetic came into his voice. "There's been a time or two, lad, when I wondered why ye never tried to make Merry fall in love with ye." He heard Morgan rise and the whisper of long muscles pulling against fabric as he stretched.

Then, "Do you imagine I'm pining over my little brother's wife?" Morgan's tone was quizzical.

"Well, now. Are ye?" Sails asked, continuing to stare placidly at the melting flames.

A pause. "They began to love as soon as they saw each other. How could I have interrupted that?" Morgan smiled carefully. "And what the devil would I have done with an eighteen-year-old girl?"

"Aye, there is that, of course," the old sailmaker admitted. "But it does seem hard that ye'U be losing all the little ones at one time. I know ye can't but feel that Cat belongs to his father, and I won't be arguing with ye, but it's my belief the boy will pine. And nov he's to go to Oxford, by all that's holy."

Raven's reaction to that announcement had become one of Morgan's more cherished recent memories. He could still hear the horror in the soft drawl when Raven said,
"Oxford*.
You mean Cat's to be for to a university? Captain, I never thought to see the day you'd do thing so coldhearted!"

Morgan came to lean against the table edge by the fire, his hands thrust relaxedly in his pockets, though his voice had the trace curtness of withheld emotion. "It won't be easy for Cat. I don't know if he'll ever adjust completely to his position, but he has Merry and Devon as well as Cathcart. And if he doesn't learn to know his father now, he may never do it, and that would be a pity, because there's no other way for him to learn to understand the gentle side of his own nature. Have no fear. I won't let hir languish."

"I know ye too well to think that" was the calm answer.

There was a companionable silence that had stretched for some few minutes before Morgan recalled the small oval locket his grandmother had given him, and he withdrew it from his pocket and flipped open the golden cover to study the miniature portrait within.

"And what might that be?" Sails asked.

"Hmm? Have a look." Morgan handed him the locket.

The locket carried the likeness of a boy of about thirteen years, with dark silky curls, wary blue eyes, and a determined chin.

Morgan said, "That unfortunate youth has recently inherited an earldom covering half of Worcester, and if the old duchess is to be believed, he's doing his best to leave it on the gaming tables. I take it he's some sort of a grandnephew to her. In any case, he was left in her guardianship and doesn't appear to have benefited much by it. He has a woman living with him that Letitia calls 'that French hussy.' " Morgan leaned back against the table with his hair flowing in magnificent black waves from his temples, and a peculiar smile came to his wide lips. "It only seems—" she had said. "Well, what's the good in having a pirate ship if you can't send wild youngsters there for a year or two and tum them into something worth inviting to dinner?"

Sails was still looking at the portrait. "An orphan, is he?"

"He is," Morgan agreed.

"Shall we go have a look at him, then?"

Morgan shook his head, standing abruptly, a fathomless boredom settling into the depths of his heavy-lidded eyes. "Worcester is too far out of the way. I've got other things to do with my life than reordering other people's misreckoned adolescents."

The morning air had a snap to it, and the hills rolled with brilliant color when Morgan and Sails walked their horses through the village toward the post road. A grain mill stood on the village edge, its sails turning slowly, and within a pretty cottage garden nearby a tiny girl with a lamb stood behind a whitewashed picket fence. She stared at Morgan as he passed, in that bold, curious way children sometimes have. When he dismounted and came to her, she showed him solemnly she had new shoes, and when he asked her how old she was, she carefully displayed three dimpled fingers and told him the lamb's name was 'Tawberry. Smiling, he admired Strawberry, and her shoes, and the age of three and then touched her cheek with a gentle finger. Innocence—how does one preserve it? How does one give it back when it's lost? And then he thought of Devon and Merry, and how he had seen them in the garden at Teasel Hill, clinging to each other as though they were one person, laughing like children about some silliness only they understood.

The horses were fresh, and above the horizon Rand Morgan could see the slow rise of a bright sun. Worcester suddenly did not seem so far away.

The kiss of frost had turned the great lindens into clouds of rich sunny yellow. Translucent leaves fell in a sun-sprinkled mist over Devon and Merry beneath. He sat drawing on a sketch pad, one knee drawn up and his back against a tree. She sat on the high bronze back of the unicorn statue. Her hair was loosely flowing except for a single braided coronet plaited with violet mallow flowers. Her feet, softly shod in white slippers, swung slowly together against the unicorn's massive belly as she worked on al sketch of her own, and her white skirts waltzed and lifted in the breeze.

When she had completed her drawing, she smiled up at Devon and said gaily, "Are you finished? 1 am!"

"I finished a long time ago." He stood and came toward her, and as he did she turned her sketch pad to show him a cleverly detailed picture of himself riding the unicorn.

He stared at it with a laugh and a grimace and said, "Dear God, am I really that pretty?"

So she hit him playfully over the head with her sketchbook. "Let's see yours, then! You told me you'd inherited your skill with the pencil, and since you're the son of Jasper Crandall, who was one of the world's greatest painters of natural subjects—" She broke off with a light exclamation as he turned his drawing and she could see his work. After staring at it a moment she let out a peal of sparkling laughter because his pen had made her a stick figure with corkscrew curls, and the unicorn appeared very like a mastiff with a tusk. With laughing reproach she said, "1 fear you've been sadly deceptive, sir."

"No, I haven't. I told you I inherited my skill at drawing, and I did—from my mother. And there you see the extent of it." He removed the sketchbook from her hand and set it beside hers on the grass and then came to stand before her, smiling in a way that made her heart fill up with love that was like nectar. With softened eyes they held each other's gaze until her hands came gently to rest on his shoulders, and she bent forward to find his lips. Their touch was light, the searching breath of morning upon spring's first blossom. Her hair draped over one shoulder and moved in a sweet-scented caress all over the side of his face and his hair and upper arm.

She lifted her head, just a little, to look into his eyes and saw the wealth of love and gentleness there, and he lifted his hands to her palms, entwining their fingers.

"Each day seems to make our love stronger," he said softly.

She answered, "How lovely our years will be. I give you my life and all the moments in it."

"And I give you mine, in peace, and if it comes, in hardship," he murmured. "I give you my soul."

And the leaves were gliding in floating, downward circles around them, to wink and glisten as she laid her cheek on his hair and made him the promise, "My love, I will have it with me always, and keep it safe."