The Windflower

by Laura London

  “And Merry, try to walk awkwardly,” said Sally, mimicking her brother’s tone as they started toward the door, “like a woman about to give birth. Yes, that will do perfectly.” They both laughed—Merry hadn’t changed her walk at all.

  “Oh, lordy, Sal, don’t make her laugh like that or we’ll be in the soup,” Jason said.

  “Why?” asked Merry. “Aren’t women allowed to laugh in taverns?”

  “Not when they’re as fetching as you are.” Jason pinched her lightly on the cheek. “Shush now. And act cowed.”

  She looked startled and then felt like an idiot. The amazing novelty of a compliment brought the blood running high in her cheeks as she stepped over the threshold and saw her first of the smugglers’ lair.

  Earlier in the evening the floor sand had probably been swept in a fanciful pattern, and perhaps the smoke from the clay pipes of the patrons had made matching idle curlicues in the air. But now the sand had been spread into an anonymous covering by the shuffling of many feet, and the curling smoke had faded into a bone-colored haze that smarted the eyes.

  Whatever order the crude tables and chairs had begun the evening in was well broken, as were some of the hapless pieces of furniture. The air was alive with the reek of sweat, fish, and roast corn, and a roar of conversation that nearly overwhelmed the music from the fiddles and squeeze box that enlivened the near corner of the room. There were a few, not many, women scattered among the rough-clothed men in the crowd, and from the look of the river peddlers, bullwhackers, and men of the sea that were sitting, standing, and chatting, one might guess that they would have been as comfortable pulling, pushing, lifting, shouting, and breaking and entering. A plank laid over two tobacco casks formed the bar, and behind it was a stair to the sleeping room with a sign above it that read: Five Only to a Bed. No Dogs Allowed Upstairs. Organ-grinders to Sleep in the Washhouse.

  The host was a skinny, energetic Belgian immigrant with a grizzled red-and-brown beard and a bald pate. He joined them right away, clapping Carl on the arm and smiling genially at Jason. In thick accents he said, “Hey, you’re the fellows that do the puppets, right? Glad to see you! Are you going to make me a show tonight? Good. Real good! You can put the stage by the fireplace, hey?” He winked. “When folks come over to watch, they get real hot and thirsty and soak up my good wine like sponges. They have plenty to drink, they put plenty in the hat when you collect! Good for me; good for you! Ha, ha! Easier for these fellows to make it home without that heavy money in their pockets, hey?”

  Fascinated, Merry watched as her coconspirators played their parts with a brisk competence that stilled her own worries. How well they knew what they were doing, Jase and Carl in short jackets and flat-brimmed hats with frayed red and blue streamers, and Sally with her hair flattened under a triangle of paisley wool, frizzled ends lank with hair oil pulled forward to straggle over her gamin face.

  Sally pulled Merry to sit with her at a heavy gray table near the fire and gave her a cozy grin, motioning toward Jason when he returned from the wagon with the unwieldy shadow-box puppet theater. Carl followed, holding two puppets aloft in salute. The fiddles stopped scraping, and the crowd gave a cheer of comfortable appreciation. The act was a popular attraction.

  The puppets were nearly three feet in height. The first was an aristocrat with an exaggerated sneer painted on his lips and dressed in absurdly foppish clothes with glass jewelry; the other puppet was a revolutionary, outfitted in sansculotte rags, a cockade, and a wide, anarchistic grin. They were attached to long handles by very active springs and had rolling joints at the elbows and knees. Merry felt like laughing just looking at them.

  Jason talked the part of the aristocrat, in a high comical lisp, and Carl made the sansculotte the essence of hearty vulgarity. It was a routine they had developed as schoolboys, with many refinements since, and like every good puppet show, it was a delight for any crowd, children and adults. The sansculotte would bellow a republican anthem, and the aristocrat would take a swipe at him, and then the aristocrat would try to sing “God Save the King” and the sansculotte’s musical sensibilities would be violently offended. And at the end they were both yelling their respective anthems and trying to turn each other into splinters. The place was in an uproar, and when the play ended with the sansculotte shouting the aristocrat into a dead swoon, the applause was long and loud, and Carl and Jason were surrounded by backslappers.

  For all their roughness Merry began to discover a certain charm to the company, which was raw and lively, like the salt winds that seeped through the rotted moldings on the windows. A fair number sent a grin and a wink her way, but they were good-humored ones mostly, and when they seemed too bold, she looked away from them, into the fire.

  It was midway through one of these retreats that she caught an intent look on her brother’s face. Carl glanced at her and hoisted his glass suggestively toward the door.

  The man had entered whom she had been brought here to observe for later sketching. He was pale, loose-skinned, and bird-faced, his chin a fallen pouch, his ears perked forward like the handles of one of Aunt April’s china pitchers. It was the face of a man distrusted on sight. He picked his way across the room to a roly-poly bulldog of a man sitting alone by a far window, and the two greeted each other with such a show of hand pumping that you’d have thought one of the pair had just been wed.

  The entering man was a traitor, the bulldog-faced man the unknown who received his secrets, and the secrets were the departure dates of American ships trying to slip through the British blockade to trade with neutral ports in Europe. Carl had friends in the Navy who thought it might be very useful to slip false information this way, as soon as they could discover to whom the information was being sold. Using Merry’s sketches, Carl said, it wouldn’t take long to find out.

  “Can you do them?” asked Carl, come to lean over her shoulder.

  “Yes. It won’t be hard. If you and Jason want to start packing the theater…”

  “You’ve had enough time already? Good girl! Will you look at Jason? What a sharper! He’s been around two times already with that darn money box of his.”

  “Well, collect him, Carl, and let’s go!” said Sally, casting a glance of sisterly exasperation at her brother. “The sooner we’re gone, the better.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that for a minute,” Carl growled back. “Start for the door. We’ll meet you.”

  Following her cousin to the door, Merry paused to smile back into the room and think, That was easy, that really was easy, and then somewhere in the middle of the smile and the middle of the pride, the tavern doors opened, front and back. Simultaneously two gigantic men stepped inside, surveying the crowd impassively before blocking the doorways like sentries. The men were twinned, with shaven heads and bristling cavalry mustaches, and fat chests woven of muscles like the coiling bands of a constrictor snake. Belts of weapons alarmingly festooned their dingy white sleeveless shirts: two pistols, primed and cocked; three wicked curved knives; and each man unsheathed a short, hideously sharp sword and slapped it across his chest, sending a thrill of fear through the watching, suddenly quiet crowd.

  Beside Merry, Sally absorbed a quick gulp of air and pushed her hand on Merry’s shoulder, snapping “Sit down! Sit!” with as little respect as she might have given a jumping puppy, and Merry sank promptly and unresentfully into the nearest chair.

  They were joined almost immediately by Carl, Jason, and the landlord, whose complexion had paled like chalk dust.

  “Good girl, Sally,” Carl said, sliding into a chair beside Merry. “We want to be as unobtrusive as… Merry, what happened to your hat?”

  “Hat?” Merry’s hand traveled involuntarily to her uncovered hair. “I… Oh. I must have left it by the fire. It was so hot that I took it off and—”

  She stopped, caught in Jason’s glare, and he said to her in a stony voice, “Well, don’t as much as turn your head from here on out without permission, do y’hear? The last thing we want
is to increase the chances that Carl and I will have to fight for your virtue, because, believe me, missy, we aren’t likely to win.”

  “That you ain’t,” said the landlord nervously. “Those devils by the door are from the Black Joke!”

  “Not Rand Morgan’s ship?” asked Carl.

  “The same.” The landlord seemed to shudder. “It’s said they never leave a place without taking a life with them. It was true last time they were here, let me tell you.”

  “Pirates?” Sally whispered, half to herself. “Oh, Jason—not pirates.”

  “Stay calm, will you? Sit still, don’t move, and try to act like you don’t see anything, just like everyone else is doing.”

  “Aye,” said the landlord. “Don’t do anything to draw attention. Let’s pray they’re not here looking for women.”

  Merry and Sally found each other’s hands under the table. There were footsteps outside, and the guardian of the hind doorway drew aside a step or two.

  Merry had heard of Rand Morgan, of course. Who had not? He was a legendary figure of her childhood, and she had grown up thinking that one day he would vanish with the pixies and the wizards and the dragons, that one day an adult would admit to her, “There’s really no such thing as…” But like tornados and wild fire, Morgan was a boogey that made the transition into her mature life without losing his fearful qualities.

  Rand Morgan. They say he wore an emerald slit from the belly of a priest when that unfortunate divine had swallowed it to prevent its theft. Ten years ago the Queen Anne had disappeared without a trace, and whispers said that Morgan had seized a fortune in bullion from her hold and then locked her captain and crew in the first mate’s cabin, setting the decks ablaze and leaving the men inside to a flaming grave. And just last October the Black Joke had seized an unarmed merchant ship and taken from it the governor of South Carolina and his five-year-old son, holding them at cost of their lives until the governor’s distraught wife had gathered a ransom of fifteen thousand dollars.

  Merry watched as Rand Morgan, the stuff of myth and nightmare, came walking through the tavern door.

  He was tall enough to have to stoop slightly as he entered, and he had black, heavy-lidded, deep-set eyes, which looked around the room seeing no one, seeing everyone, intense and sleepy at the same time. The face was impassive, as if carved in stone, with heavy cheekbones and a broad brow; it was a face made to split the sea air and crash the waves of fortune’s hurricane. His long hair was midnight black, thick and unruly on his brow, and of the same hue as his silk shirt. There was an aura about him—an air of the craftsman, one whose mastery of certain skills made him indifferent to the judgments of the uninitiated. That is what frightened Merry the most—his indifference. He didn’t look evil, only as if he did not care. If she had seen him on the street, she would have known he was not like other men. She wondered if this magnetism had been there and had forced him into a life of piracy, or if it had come to him as a mantle of the reputation he had gained.

  Morgan moved through the gaping crowd like visiting royalty, companioned by two men. The younger of the two was near to seventeen, an age that normally might have led him to be described as a “youth,” and yet there was nothing of youth in his coldly Scandinavian face, with hard, milk-blue eyes and lips that looked as though they had never known a smile. His hair was dead straight, almost white from the burn of salt and sun, and so long that it touched his hips; it was pulled across his right shoulder to lie in an ivory fall over one side of his chest. His exposed ear was pierced and held a loop of black thread. As he moved into the room Merry saw pale stripes on the chestnut-tanned skin of his naked back that she shudderingly realized had been inflicted with a whip.

  The exotic boy ranged tigerlike between the tables, oblivious to the tension around him—the indrawn breaths, the nearly exploding lungs. Finally he stopped; everyone breathed again except the unlucky patrons whose table he chose, who scurried away like lizards from fire. He gazed disgustedly at the mass of bottles, empty and full, at the table, and the unplayed hands of piquet and scattered coins which were strewn by each chair. Reaching out, he tipped the table, sending its contents clattering to the floor, followed by a single card, the jack of hearts, which flipped in the air twice and landed gently like a leaf on the floor.

  The violent little scenario caused the third man to laugh and murmur some remark which caused the spirit of a smile to pass over Morgan’s lips, so faint as to be only felt rather than seen; and the pirate’s features held fleetingly the telltale softening of affection.

  Bound by the pounding urge of fascination to see the man that Rand Morgan could care for, Merry’s gaze left the long-haired boy and the pirate captain to center on their companion.

  He was half-turned from her, his face toward Morgan, so her first impression was of a man of perhaps a little more than medium height, each inch of him hard, flowing muscles knit arousingly into a well-carried, sensuously slender frame.

  A dark jacket of supple leather hung from his wide, relaxed shoulders; below were snug, faded denims and wine-colored boots cut high to the knee, which looked expensive, despite their scarred toes. It was hardly Merry’s habit to study the male anatomy, and certainly not to admire it, and yet there was something in the shapely play of line and curve and sweetly made muscle that captured the eye, however modest.

  With a graceful movement he bent to upend a chair, and his hair, as bright and glowing as a harvest moon, swung in a lively arc. He dropped into the chair facing Merry; all at once she could see his face.

  The stranger had one of those rare, wonderful faces that truly deserve to be called arresting. It was so much more than handsome; this man was beautiful, in a way uniquely masculine, as arrogant and tender as a Renaissance archangel sitting in liquid, unattainable splendor, the half deity made mortal, with eyes that held light like faceted gemstones. It was an urbane face, stamped with humor and humanity, in marked contrast with the delicately erotic mouth, and as she stared at him Merry felt the hot embers of that same confusing blend of yearning and fear that had brushed into her soul when she had dreamed of the unicorn.

  But this man was a pirate, a member of one of the most vicious and carnal orders of men that had ever plundered the earth’s good few. Lucifer, it seemed, was too smart to appear always with his horns and tail.

  Chapter 3

  Devon Charles Crandall sat back in his chair, raising the heel of his boot to rest it lightly against the trestle table before him. He picked up his sand-scoured glass and with a gentle movement of his wrist sent the pale wine into a slow whirl. After watching it a moment he raised his gaze to where his half brother sat, the great emerald winking evilly on his chest.

  “Do you know,” said Devon, turning an interested gaze back to the wine, “I think it’s beginning to separate.”

  “The scum coming to the top,” said the pale-haired boy next to the pirate captain. “I told you. American wine tastes like it was fresh from a pig’s…”

  A raucous burst of laughter from the next table covered the end of his sentence. Rand Morgan reached out to pluck the wineglass from the younger man’s fingers and casually tossed the contents onto the tavern’s dirt floor. Refilling the glass from his own bottle, he handed it back and said, “Try the rum instead.”

  “Oh? Is it better?”

  “It’s worse.” The pirate captain smiled. “But it’s quicker.”

  Devon returned the grin and lifted the glass. “To my speedy intoxification.”

  The rum was worse, as it happened. Devon mentally tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing to his misspent youth, which had forged his iron palate.

  The unease of the crowd had altered little since their arrival, save perhaps that the stares had become both more frequent and surreptitious. Devon was used to being stared at. His position in life had made it inevitable, and even in those remote places where he was unknown, his looks had made him far from inconspicuous. What he saw here was different. Here they were afraid. What a h
eady, corrupting power it was, to have men fear you, and his half brother had been years on this coast, flashing his emerald and nourishing his reputation for stone-hearted savagery. Morgan had come here to terrify, and before the night was over, he surely would. However different Devon’s purpose, their interests were hardly incompatible. He looked back into Morgan’s sleepy gaze.

  “How do you like the natives?” asked the pirate captain, sending a slow survey around the room that made the other tavern patrons look as though they would have liked to crawl under their chairs.

  Devon shrugged. “I’ve seen them before. In Cadiz, in Le Havre. The mongrel waterfront.”

  The boy looked up from his ale and said in the purring, even voice that was the closest he came to good humor, “We can’t all of us be blue bloods. Listen, Dev, have you got the horn colic, or what?”

  It was, all in all, the kind of remark one might expect from a boy who had lived his first twelve years in a Caribbean brothel. Devon took a pull of rum and smiled. “No more than usual, I don’t think. Why? What am I doing?”

  “You’ve looked four or five times at the copper-headed wench by the puppet box.”

  Amused, he said, “Four or five? Is that so many?”

  “It is for you. Especially considering the size of her belly.”

  “Poor Cat,” Morgan murmured. “Look at her again. She’s a beauty.”

  The boy leaned his head back and shook his hair vigorously from his shoulders. “She is if you say she is. They all look alike to me.”

  As Devon watched, the girl looked at him, met his gaze, and turned quickly, fearfully away, as though in shame. She was drinking nothing, and her clasped hands lay on the table before her, the fingers fervently knit. He was too far away to see whether they trembled. He supposed she had heard by now of Morgan’s identity and was wondering what it might mean to her. There was tension in the slightly averted profile, with its Venus-on-a-seashell oval frame, and soft rose-petal lips.