The Windflower

by Laura London

  The pictures from the tavern were to be the last that she would draw for Carl, who had said not so jokingly that it would be better to let a few British spies wreak havoc with the war effort than expose Merry to that much danger again. Merry was ashamed of the new secret woman inside her who questioned whether he cared for her so deeply or whether he was worried about how he’d explain things to their father if anything happened to her. Even under the blight of that cynical thought she missed him, and she wasn’t likely to see him again, or Sally and Jason either, until Sally’s wedding, which would be next June, war permitting.

  Merry had worked and reworked the sketches Carl wanted, and the results had pleased him. She had been able to draw not only the traitor but the man he had been with—the pirate John Farley, whom Rand Morgan had come to the Musket and Muskrat “only to frighten,” which, Carl had told her later, had included cutting off the little finger on each of his hands. She had drawn Morgan as well, and the boy called Cat, although not without a lingering, superstitious fear that the act might make them materialize before her. Carl had sent the sketches to the Secretary of the Navy, William Jones, for use at his discretion.

  The only face she could not draw well was that of the blond man who had hidden her from the other pirates. Each sketch she made was wrong in one way or another. No matter how hard she tried to capture them, his tantalizing features remained memorable in their effect on her, elusive in their reproduction. It was difficult to draw such a beautiful face; her hand seemed to rebel against that unnatural perfection. Or perhaps some secret avenue of her mind had closed him off and shut away the sweet pain of remembered passion. It had all become less real to her with the waning of the month; the spying, the seacoast tavern, the pirates, and Devon. Hot and sticky September filtered in, bringing moments when she even asked herself if his kiss had been another fantasy like those her imagination had made for her in the past.

  And as the days of September began to lessen and the night at the seacoast grew further away it became less real as well, gathering to itself the arabesque curlicues of legend. She would play the evening through in her mind like a playwright working on a script, and give it different endings and plot twists: She salvaged her pride with fierce resistance; she resourcefully captured the pirates single-handedly. Then there was the one ending she couldn’t acknowledge. It had come to her in a dream of scruples abandoned and fear tossed away, a dream of submission and resultant joy, her senses reeling with the warm, sweet scent of his skin, his golden hair like silk under her fingertips. There was something in the power, the energy, the intelligence of this man that made him different, the way gold is from copper, and diamonds from glass chips. Anything he chose to do, he could have done well; why had he chosen to do it with Rand Morgan? Quick riches had been Carl’s guess, for Devon wasn’t a man who seemed likely to be content with little. But there, how quickly one could fill with speculation the vacuum of the pirate’s background and identity. He was a man who would remain a mystery, and the secret would likely die with him on the blood-slicked deck of a burning ship.

  Life had waxed more complex. Merry would sit by the duck pond in a clump of ferns watching the water beetles scud between the lily pads and think about the secret people she had discovered hiding inside her, the whimpering child who had appeared at her first taste of real terror, and the woman learning desire in the arms of a pirate. Surely she must exorcise them both.

  Her home was safe and as rich in pretty domesticity as it was sterile in challenges to the soul; it was as though she were living in the clean, pink interior of a moon shell. The months passed in fluid order, filled with precious detail and suppressed longing. And Merry tried to let the pleasing minutiae of her days blot the gloss from her newly awakened senses.

  Autumn was warm, wet, and golden; the mosquitoes were intolerable. To repel them, each night until the first frost Merry slept with brown sugar burning on coals in a chafing dish near her bed and woke daily to the sharp tang of charred sugar.

  In October she husked corn with the housemaids. The project lasted a whole week because Aunt April despised as too plebeian the American custom of inviting the neighbors over to a husking bee. For days the fresh garden air was busy with the rustle of dry husks and the snap of cobs cracking and laughter as well, for Henry Cork did his best to claim the traditional kiss from any maiden who came across a red cob, and the housemaids pelted him with smut ears in lively battles.

  November brought them chillier days. The itinerant woodchopper came in his coarse boots, carrying his broad ax and his canvas bundle. When he moved on again, there was an artfully balanced stack of wood by the horse barn for their winter fires.

  Christmas! Mistletoe and red holly berries, ribbons and wax candles, chains cut from gaily colored paper and hung in swags around the drawing room, and Aunt April at the aging spinet playing “The Boar’s Head Carol” and “When Christ Was Born of Mary Free.” On Christmas morning Merry and April sat through services in the unheated church in itchy woolen mittens and heavy caps under their best bonnets and then walked home to the delectable meal April had prepared of stuffed roast goose, brussels sprouts with almonds, roast potatoes, apple Yule logs, mince pie, and a plum pudding sprigged with holly and glowing blue brandy flames. In the evening they sat by the hearth nibbling on oysters cooked with lemon on toast that her aunt called angels on horseback, and opened and exclaimed happily over their gifts: light imported cologne to Merry from April, a lilac gauze scarf to April from Merry, and to both of them a generous length of pale-green mohair for new drawing-room window curtains from Merry’s father, and a three-volume set of Mysteries of Udolpho from Sally. And that night as they walked arm in arm to their bedchambers they both agreed that no Christmas together had been happier.

  In January Merry sewed the new drawing-room curtains with her aunt and made twelve fine, large cheeses, and in late February, when a traveling showman came to the village with a moose to display, Merry snuck off in Henry Cork’s company to see it. For nine pence one purchased a ticket to see the beast and a handbill praising its excellence. The handbill read: “The properties of this fleet and tractable Animal are such as will give pleasure and satisfaction to every beholder.” Fleet the Animal proved to be, but tractable it was not. Through some mysterious expedient that Merry suspected was related to Henry Cork’s presence near its cage, the moose got loose, bit the showman, and galloped off into the woods, providing a great deal more pleasure and satisfaction to all beholders than its hapless owner had anticipated.

  Far away the war raged, and the town children ran under gray skies shooting each other with stick rifles and hiding as scalping parties behind the starkly winter-bared trees. The parson’s youngest son stole away to become a drummer for the 56th Virginia Militia, and the Richmond Enquirer was thick with advertisements like the one urging: “Gentlemen wishing uniforms embroidered in a prompt and neat manner will please apply to No. 6 Babcock Alley.”

  The campaign against British Canada had failed miserably. At the Chateauguay River a sizable chunk of the American Army got lost in a swamp and shot each other up, while the main body fled in wild retreat before a small British force when the British buglers sounded a dramatically overconfident charge. Merry heard through her father that Carl had retired to winter quarters at French Mills with Upham’s 21st Infantry, where the food and housing were abysmal and the sanitary conditions of such a nature that a gentleman could not relate them in a polite communication to his daughter.

  And from Sally came the tidings that Jason was ill but improving from a Tower musket ball in the hip, taken in a skirmish against braves from Weatherford’s Red Sticks near Fort Strother, on the southern frontier. In a flurry of concern Merry sent wool socks to Carl and one of the homemade cheeses to Jason and received back a friendly note from Carl and a very funny letter from Jason about the adventures that had befallen her cheese on its way to him, as deduced from its condition on arrival. They said little of what they must be suffering, and their co
urage awed and inspired Merry.

  March arrived. Sap ran in the maple trees, and it was time for sugaring off. The Almanack advised its readers: “Make your own sugar, and send not to the Indies for it. Feast not on the toil, pain, and misery of the wretched.” With that grim proverb in mind Merry threw herself energetically into the maple sugaring, and after a day spent hefting sap buckets she strolled happily into the hallway with the joyous fragrance of boiling maple syrup following her from the kitchens. Glancing toward the whatnot, she saw the Richmond paper. In a mood of innocent contentment she lifted it. The front-page story heading jumped out at her from the sober news sheet. In the headline was Rand Morgan and his ship, the Black Joke.

  The Black Joke, it seemed, had taken the American merchant ship Morning Star. Once aboard, the pirates had “made carnage of the hold, carrying off ruinous quantities of spirituous liquor, drunk as much as they could hold, and wastefully bathed themselves in the Surplus. The Captain’s psalm book was villainously used for ‘target practice,’ and the trunk of a Boston merchant was invaded and costly clothing cast upon the deck for the guffawing wretches to make peacocks of themselves in. Further, the First Mate’s spectacles were taken from him and put upon a pig. A cargo worth forty thousand dollars in gold was seized as well as a goodly amount of medicines. All the meanwhile the fifer from the Morning Star was forced to play a hornpipe until he dropped from exhaustion and was carried aboard the pirates’ ship to be conscripted into their own crew. Also aboard were three women, and of their use at the hands of the pirates this editor prefers to say nothing.”

  Merry found Aunt April in the green drawing room, peering down in a dazzled way at a sheet of superfine stationery. Another confusing bill from the mantua-maker, thought Merry. Without looking at the letter she kissed her aunt on the cheek and said, “Good evening, Aunt April.”

  April looked startled, as though she’d been woken from a catnap, and folded the paper in her hand so hastily that Merry had a fleeting impression of secrecy.

  “Merry Patricia! My, but you can come quietly into a room. You look tired, dear. I’ll ring up the tea.”

  The words were said in a flustered, rather disjointed voice that made Merry think that perhaps the bill had been high because of the blockade and her aunt was afraid she’d have to apply to Merry’s father for extra funds this quarter. Wondering why her aunt didn’t tell her about it, Merry said, “No, thank you, Aunt April. I had a cup of milk in the kitchen on the way in.”

  “Did you? Well, I’m glad. You look tired to me. All this maple sugar making—I don’t think it’s been good for you. You’ve never been very strong.”

  As long as Merry could remember, her aunt had been saying that to her. She had always accepted it before. Now she asked, “Why do you say that I’m not strong?”

  “Why, I mean merely that you’re not robust. One can see looking at you that your bones are delicate, and… Merry Patricia, what’s going on in that little head of yours? You don’t look well to me, not a bit well.”

  Merry sat down. “It’s just that—Aunt April, have you read the evening paper?”

  “I’ve skimmed it, of course, but I haven’t delved—oh. Ah, ha. You saw that dreadful story, did you, about the pirates? Why they find it necessary to put things like that in the public press so young people can be exposed to that kind of degraded story is more than I can imagine! No wonder you don’t look well. I felt ill myself after reading it. Horrible. Put the whole thing right out of your mind.”

  But bright in Merry’s mind was Morgan, black-eyed, the emerald glowing on his chest, and Cat with the long hair and cruel hands… and Devon. Had Devon taken one of the women and held her delicately, talking in a gentle, quiet voice as he had with Merry, hypnotizing her with his comforting, and then plundering her defenseless mouth with his lips? It was the kind of thing that an editor might prefer not to mention. Merry watched her aunt go to her lap desk and lock away the stationery sheet. When her aunt had turned back to her, Merry asked her, “Aunt April, why wouldn’t the newspaper say what happened to the women?”

  She could have sworn her aunt blushed. “I think they said too much as it was! I can’t think that your father would want you to read things about pirates and women.”

  “Why not?” Seven months ago Merry would have hardly been able to frame the question to herself, much less ask it of her aunt. It was an unbearable thing, this being desperate to know. She looked everywhere in the room but at her aunt. “What do pirates do to women?”

  As it happened, Aunt April was as embarrassed as Merry. She went to peer miserably out the window, as if she was afraid someone was hiding outside listening, and swallowed with difficulty, as though she had an infected throat. “One would suppose—that is—” Another swallow. “One imagines that the pirates had their way with them.”

  Before she lost her nerve, Merry asked, “Which way is that?”

  “A perfectly normal question for a young lady at your stage in life,” said Aunt April with the nervous certainty of one trying to remain calm in the face of all hell breaking loose. She made a great play of arranging the new window curtains, the color running high over her cheekbones.

  A wayward and rather poignant thought occurred to Merry. “Don’t you know either?”

  “I was never married, Merry Patricia, and my mother died before she had ever an occasion to tell me.…”

  It came to Merry suddenly where she had learned that meekly apologetic voice that had so amused the pirate. She felt her lips twitch upward into a grin. “But you must have gathered some idea.”

  “Some idea perhaps, but it’s hardly anything that I’d care to…”

  A giggle sprang from Merry’s grin, and she shook an accusing finger. “If you think I’m to be put off with stalling, Aunt April, then…”

  “Oh, very well. If you will hear it. I warn you, though, it’s only the merest scrap that I chanced to overhear my mother telling my sister. I daresay this is going to sound quite peculiar but”—April stared fixedly at one of the low shrubs in front of the house—“it seems that a man—climbs on top of a woman—”

  Surprise brought Merry to her feet. “On top of?”

  “There! There, you see? I’ve made a poor job of it.” The window curtains crumpled under Aunt April’s fretting fingers. “You’d probably have been better off if I’d said nothing! That’s all I know. First they like to kiss, and then climb on.”

  Merry sat down again and concentrated her gaze on the wall covering’s vanilla dots. When she could control the quivering of her lips, she said, “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I quite agree with you, dearest. But how many of the things that men do make sense? Take fox hunting, or prizefights, or making war, for that matter.” She added dismally, “Men have drives.”

  “Do women have them too?”

  “I doubt that it could be the same. Can you imagine a group of women turning outlaw, attacking ships, and forcing their will on men? Do you know what I think? A lady would do best to marry a rich man who could afford to keep a mistress and so would have less energy left for his wife.”

  “Oh, Aunt!” Merry laughed, launching herself from her chair to take her aunt’s hands from the curtains and plant a cheerful kiss on each one. “Then from this day forth I will take special care to encourage only my wealthy beaux.” Striking a coquettish pose, Merry fluttered her lashes at an invisible gentleman, placed, if he had been there, where he must have been tripping backward over the tea table. “Dear Major Moneybags,” she said grandly, sweeping a full court curtsy, “I shall agree to your obliging proposal on the one condition that you will keep yourself a woman and climb on her more often than you will on me!”

  Aunt April smothered a smile. “Such nonsense. We aren’t discussing this with the proper gravity, and I don’t know what people would think if they were to hear us. Really, sometimes I fear that we get a little batty, living here like this, two women alone.” A strange look came over her features. She went to her lap d
esk and thoughtfully stroked her hand in a wavy pattern across its highly polished surface. “We don’t get out enough.”

  Through the ages women had been making the same kind of statement, but Merry had never, never expected to hear it from her aunt! Aunt April, who hated to travel, who detested American social life. With disbelieving senses Merry heard her aunt ask, “Merry Patricia, would you like to come with me on a trip to New York?”

  Chapter 5

  For more than two centuries New York City had been spreading across the rocky island that had once been nibbled by glaciers and later had served as the fertile hunting grounds of clever Indian trappers, before the Dutch had come, and the British with their guns and liquor and lust for empire. The city that Merry found was tame, dirty, and crowded. Pigs wandered at will, munching on garbage and street dirt which the citizens diligently piled in the alleys to be hauled away twice a week by the Department of Scavengers. Milch cows meandered between neat gabled houses, dining on the bark of the Lombardy poplars, planted with well-meaning innocence along the narrow walkways. Within a brisk walk of the carpeted homes of the rich were the Five Points slums, where more than thirteen families might share a single privy.

  Everything here seemed remarkable to Merry: the vast markets that fed so many, the sobering bulk of the prison, the libraries, the almshouse, the botanical garden. There was not a street you could pass without seeing evidence of the city’s awesome complexity, where misery rubbed shoulders with grandeur in no more wonder than the pauper and the banker have when they pass each other on the pavement.

  Today New York was celebrating Evacuation Day, commemorating that proud memory in the First War of Independence when the British had been forced to take their scrambled leave from the city before General Washington’s triumphal entry.