The Windflower

by Laura London

  Softly he said, “Scented of opium and roses and wintergreen.”

  “Wintergreen?”

  “From Morgan’s nightshirt, bless his foppish heart,” he said. “I’m sorry they hurt you.”

  She forced herself to look into his eyes. “Please let me go. Please.”

  “Love, I can’t.” He brought his hand to tilt her face, his broad palm at the base of her throat; his lips were warm and dry on hers, and a few strands of her hair were caught as stinging silk in the kiss. His arm tightened her to his body, as, on her face, his thumb drifted lightly over her cheekbone, then moved to her lips and, with gentle pressure, urged them open. The blood began to pound in her throat under the exploration of his lips and fingers.

  “You kiss,” he said softly into her curls, “as though each time were your first.” He lifted his hands to her shoulders, feeling their soft graceful swell beneath his palms. She turned her face away, her lips throbbing, not wanting him to see as she slipped her tongue over them, trying to soothe the unfamiliar sensations she felt there.

  “You’ve had your revenge,” she whispered. “Now let me go.”

  “No, my dear, no. Let us see if we can make your body turn traitor. Kiss me again, and you can tell me afterward if it was worse than dying.”

  She kept her face away and pressed her hands against his chest. He turned her head and forced his mouth onto hers; the pressure of his hand and the searching of his lips were too great for her to resist, and their lips clung together, contact breaking, meeting, breaking. Her lips, burning and aching, needed to be soothed by a respite, and soothed again by the smooth touching of their like. Her hands opened and closed on his shirt front; her blood moved thin and hot, a molten flow through her veins. Intently he concentrated, feeling the warmth of her under his mouth, leaving her lips to touch on her warm forehead, and to taste the tears that shimmered on her long lashes, and then to return, plunging once more to dominate her lips. “Let us see,” he had said, “if we can make your body turn traitor.”

  But there are times when, even though sick and driven, the mind is stronger. Her will forced her hands into fists, and she pummeled his chest until with quiet laughter he caught both her wrists in the grip of one hand and brought her knuckles to his lips, biting them gently.

  She gasped. “I wish the arrow had pierced your black heart instead of innocent timber. And I wish you’d leave me alone.”

  “Oh, Lord—these challenges. It’s too late for games, sweet child. Give me your mouth.” And he took it again under his own, one hand at the back of her head, holding her still; and let the other ride her slowly. His sensitive fingers discovered the warmth of her below the rich linen fabric where the hidden skin lay, as fresh and finely textured as if it were made with the felting of a thousand cherry petals. It was an exercise in good manners to control one’s breathing while one could, and though that small discipline had been always automatic and detached for him, he noted that the silent passage of air through his lungs was less than regular. It was rare for that to happen so quickly. The postponed reckoning from that absurdly trifling encounter in the wood wagon seemed to have heightened the desire that had, in honesty, been strong from its birth.

  His palm tested the contour of her waist, as tight and narrow as a boy’s, and the climb of her delicately voluptuous hips. He spread his fingers, luxuriating in the feel of her where from blood and bone and muscle had been sculpted a softness so rich he could taste it through his finger pads.

  Merry cried out when his palm slid to softly cup the underside of her breast. It was shocking and queerly embarrassing, and very low down, below the pit of her stomach, her organs began to tighten into a hard laced ball that seemed to want to writhe and grow until somehow he would know how to bring her to ease. Never would she have suspected it would be so deliriously pleasant to have a man’s hand on that part of her body. His knowledgeable fingers moved, discovering the things that made the blood work harder through her veins. By the series of sharp little intakes of her breath, he knew when he found the right motion, but the combined pleasure and horror of it gave her the strength to beat again at his chest and protest.

  “Dainty flower,” he murmured. “You see—we don’t have to hurt each other.” He gently showed her his intention, his palm traveling in a slowly hot circle, letting the balm of it penetrate deeply into her drugged tissues.

  It was too powerful for her, much too powerful, and she ripped herself from his arms like a cloth torn in two. She began to back away, shaking her head and choking on the nerve-storming frustration of having nothing articulate to say in self-defense. How in heaven’s name did one talk a man out of these things? Her brain, reeling with opium and too-new eroticism, seemed to be jumping up and down inside her skull like a March hare; her eyes felt like a pair of wet, enormous puddles that might at any minute choose to flow out of her head. It had been bad enough to cry in front of Cat; she would rather die of a rat’s bite than shed a single tear for Devon, though God knew she was the world’s worst imbecile to have it matter.

  Passion sharpens the features of most men; it was not so with Devon. The vivacious bones in his face had relaxed into something tender and unhurried that had not a thing to do with the driving stab of his appetite. Bright was his hair, and his eyes had a humanity that a saint would have envied, but Oh, Miss Wilding, she told herself, watch his hands. With each unsteady pop of her heartbeat she could feel herself growing weaker. “You’ve never been strong, Merry Patricia.…” This time Merry Patricia would struggle to the end. If there’s some way you can help me, Lord, then please do it. I’m nearly out of ideas.

  There was a crumple in the muscles that held up her knees, and she had to have help standing. Searching behind, her hands found a table edge, and she clung to it in the twining seconds before the ship lurched, or maybe the drug did in her damming blood, and she flew backward toward the table’s dark-grained plane. His arms were around her then, under her shoulders, cradling her head as he gently laid her on the table, her hair cascading onto the surface like spilled gold dust. Now there was no turning away from him; the tabletop was hard below her—but there was the mitigating warmth of his hands, cushioning her. Slowly he brought one hand up and, with the backs of his fingers, brushed aside the shirt, gently tearing the buttons free, letting one fair milky breast fall free and untrammeled. There was a brush of moving air against her bare skin before his hand found her. She took in a spare breath as his palm rotated lightly as a feather over the umber and coral tip of one breast, and then he nested its softness, his fingers sweeping her with their masseur’s caress. Her betraying blood rushed to meet his fingers, and her body seemed to be manufacturing unknown serums that were heating and steaming into its every cell. Her chest was becoming so full of them that she felt she could almost have smothered had he not pressed his lips down on hers in a hard exploring kiss, where they shared in a deep urgent communion each sweet liquid, each searing molecule of oxygen. It was like drinking fire; it was like being brushed by a star; it was like hurtling through air as soft and thick and fluid as heated nectar. His intoxicated lips, honeyed still from the moisture of her kiss, made a lazy journey to her breast, resting there to coax the exquisite peak with his tongue, his tender probing forcing her to gasp for air as though her lungs were starving, the rise of her breasts fitting them more snugly against the quest of his lips.

  Minutes had passed since Devon had been able to think about anything more than his need to bury himself within this charming opiated creature, with her enamel-blue eyes and velvet skin. Delighting in a desire that had not been so vivid for many years, he was slow to realize that her bare shivering legs were doing their best to shove him away. He pressed a broad palm to her thigh, and while the feel of it was enough to make his head swim, he was able, with kindness, to still the pace of her foolish struggles.

  “Remind me tomorrow,” he told her, “to teach you the best place to kick a man.”

  Her open senses burned under the sting of h
is amusement. “I intend before then to find it myself!”

  “Oh, Lord,” he said thickly, laughing, pulling off her. “A riposte. Soon we’ll probably be sounding like Kate and Petruchio.” Against the swell of her mouth his smiling lips quoted, “ ‘For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing courteous, but slow in speech, yet sweet as springtime flowers.’ ” And when she tried to pound against him with her fists, he caressed her with a whisper: “ ‘Come, come, you wasp; in faith, you are too angry.’ ”

  She knew the play. In an unexpected moment of self-discovery Merry found it a point of pride to cap his quotation. She said, “If I be waspish, best beware my sting!”

  She felt the twitch of his cheek as his mouth curved into a grin. “Not such execrable taste in literature after all. Not that I’ve ever particularly liked that play.”

  Like the graceful turn of a dancer’s wrist that alters subtly the sense of a ballet, the pirate’s kiss changed. What had been demanding became comforting, light touching rather than brutal tracing. A different woman might have read pity there, but for one moment, for the flash of a falcon’s wingbeat, Merry’s spirit, with its undiscovered complexities, fused, frightened and resistingly, with his. They were, ever so briefly, two intuitive people swept together in a desire that chagrined the one and shamed the other. Kissing her, he mused that really he ought to be better organized about this; a woman who memorizes Shakespeare shouldn’t be taken against a table like a field whore in Spain. Merry caught the rough shadow of his thought and read there, though more innocently, his amusement, and his admiration, and his intention.

  There was no point in trying to pray, no point in trying to struggle, because by now the mind-trails to her muscles had ceased to obey her will. All that was left for her was to lie, inert under the beguiling caress of his mouth and the warm floating movements of his skilled hands over her body. Her lips were parted, the tip of her breast was hard and aching under his curving fingers, and she felt so idiotic that it seemed instead of kissing her he ought to be boxing her ears.

  The ship moved beneath them like a great groaning elephant. Lantern light sprayed through the room, transforming every color Merry saw into a shimmering scale of green or yellow. Suns with black burning centers and sharp yellow runners littered her vision. Earlier today there had been another dark sun, and a reedy voice that said, “I crave the wench,” and Merry drug-dreamed Jack in her mind and smelled his dirty whiskers and saw the greasy string of spit on his chin and knew that she was going to be sick.

  “Devon,” she said. And she had repeated it twice before he said, “Yes, love?”

  “Devon, please help me. I—I—”

  “What?”

  Need suffocated the embarrassment attendant on what was about to happen. “I’m sick,” she managed. “I really am.”

  She was the only woman who had ever lain in his arms and told him such a thing. He said in a reassuringly sensible voice, “What kind of sick?”

  “Going to be sick,” said Merry, groaning like the ship.

  Devon lifted his head and saw that it was true.

  “That’s what you get,” he observed under his breath with an expression that she couldn’t understand, “when you force yourself on a seasick woman splattered with bhang and bruises.”

  She protested as he made to move her, but he lifted her in spite of it and advised her tartly that whatever she might enjoy doing flat on her back, egesting the contents of her stomach couldn’t be one of them. And he did the civilized things that he could for her with simple decency; when he saw it was too late, he brought the washbowl and gave her the support of his arms, having an errant memory of doing the same for his cousin Steven at his… what? sixth birthday? fifth? That her young body should remind him of his smallest cousin was an uncomfortable thought; he retained it, using it to force moderation on the high pump of his pulse, which was slow in recognizing the change in circumstances.

  Her stomach didn’t seem to realize it was useless; the drug had entered through her lungs and would not be thrown off with a simple purge; and as she lay exhausted in his arms, on the bed, she felt once his lips touch the back of her neck and heard him say, with a murmur of laughter, “I hope, my love, that you realize this is an incalculable blow to my self-esteem.”

  She fell asleep with his patient fingers stroking her cheek. God, who had a much better sense of humor than she had ever before suspected, had heard her prayers with a grin.

  Chapter 9

  Green waves washed over Merry, in every shade from bile to Nile. She breathed saltwater, and foam burned the lining of her nose. Above she saw a matte black sky and the glimmering phosphorescence in the cresting waves as they caved in upon her. The wind was a lamprey shrieking her name through a hundred teeth and snarling her hair, and as she tried to kick and swim seaweed tangled her legs, scratchy and slimy like the long fingers of salt goblins. Try as she might to keep herself up, there was something pushing her down, pushing her under, a pressure on her shoulders that would not cease, and she began to scream, and the sound was lost in the gulping surf as bubbling water slowly replaced air in her lungs.…

  Merry burst from the dream into a still room, throbbing from the echo of her cry. Sweat rolled in silver pellets from her pores, blankets entwined her legs thigh to ankle, but, thank heaven, she was in a bed and not drowning. Using a corner of the bed sheet to mop the hot tears from her eyelashes, she began a rattling sigh of relief that died as she saw where she was and remembered. Her eyes picked out like old enemies the table bound by lanyards and set neatly with three chairs; the unfaded place on the walnut paneling that had held the crossbow; the inset desk; the two sea chests bound in leather and lashed to eye-pins beneath a wall of drawers carved with Poseidon figures riding the peaks of wooden waves. While she slept someone had dug out and discarded the arrow and the crossbow, removed the washbowl, taken away the damp cloths Devon had used to wipe her face, and then had left her discreetly and tidily alone.

  Merry Patricia Wilding sat up and said, right out loud to the wrinkled bedclothes that covered her knees, “Good morning to you, parts of my body. Miss Wilding is in a real pickle. Stick with me! We’re in this together.”

  It was much worse today than yesterday. Yesterday everything was muted by exhaustion, terror, pain, concussion, and finally drugs. This morning she discovered she was unhappily recovered from the worst of that, and there was nothing to stand between her and a grim-visaged future. Yesterday had been terrible beyond conception; today would probably be worse. No one ever has a good time on a pirate ship; no one except the pirates.

  There was time now to worry about poor Aunt April, who would be horrified by Merry’s disappearance, and time to wonder, tearful and headachy, if she would ever see Aunt April again. Or her father, Carl, her cousins. What would they think? That she had been abducted by some terrible and mysterious agent? Would they search for her, frantic in their worry? It would hardly comfort them to learn the truth.

  Merry climbed from the bed, disoriented by the sea that threw the floor up toward her face, and walked to the cupboard where she had seen Devon find the washbowl. Yes, it was there, spotless and cheerful in thick white ceramic, paired with a brass can of water. She stuck her hand in the water; room temperature. She splashed it into the washbowl, then onto her face, and it ran down her cheeks and trailed down her throat. There was no towel. Pirates, probably, liked to air dry.

  Below was a clean chamber pot, furred with dust; a tiny spider was sitting in a buoyant web stretched across the top. What pirates did about their natural functions didn’t bear conjecture. Devon, no doubt, didn’t have any. Why should he? In every other department he seemed to have been blessed with irritating superiority. She, on the other hand…

  Merry had never used a chamber pot. Never. Not in deepest winter. Not in the middle of the night. Not if she had a head cold. It had been the outside privy, or it had been nothing at all. Chamber pots were too revolting.

  She was still sitting on the floor,
glaring balefully at the chamber pot, when Cat came into the room, with a copper earring and one fat, neat braid down his chest to his trousers. He carried a glass, had a cloth that was green and pretty slung on one arm, and over his shoulder was a rope. Visions of new and more degrading tortures flooding into her mind, Merry jumped to her knees, swung the washbowl into the air and sent it flying at his head. Her shaking aim was not true, but it came very close.

  Accustomed to the lethal shrapnel of sea battles, Cat didn’t flinch under the hail of dripping splinters. Merely he fixed her with an unswerving stare as he picked a sharp white shard from his braid.

  “Charming,” he said, “as the increase of a pearl-bellied anole.”

  “Which are?” she snapped.

  “Lizards. Was I supposed to put a white flag through the door first or—Oh. The rope. Is it the rope? It’s not for you. It’s one of the ratlines from the mizzen. Needs a splice. See?” He opened the door and threw the rope into the corridor. Pushing shut the door with the heel of one hand, he joined her on the floor and put the glass into her hand.

  “You look like you have a headache,” he said. “Drink this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Chopped up fairy wings, the heart of a narwhal taken during a lunar eclipse, spit from a consumptive.… Christ. Just drink it, will you? It’s lime juice, with honey. Great for scurvy, but it won’t do a damn thing for your head. Drink it.”

  She was so thirsty that she did, and probably would have even if it had been made of fairy wings and narwhal heart. It tasted incredibly good on her parched tongue. When it was done, she faced squarely into Cat’s ice-blue stare and began, “I don’t know how you can expect me to have any confidence in the safety of anything you give me to drink. You drugged me—”