The Windflower

by Laura London

  “That was Morgan’s idea.”

  “And left me here to be ravished,” she finished.

  Cat looked her up and down and absorbed with some intelligence everything from the torn shirt, which partially revealed her heaving breasts, to the feet, which were dirty and bare, to the disheveled red-gold hair.

  “Were you?” he asked politely.

  “No!”

  Mildly he said, “Well, then, what’s your complaint?”

  “No thanks to you!” she snapped, as though he hadn’t spoken.

  “Did you hear me asking for thanks?” In a movement without a single break Cat took back the glass, uncurled his knees, and stood up near the table. “I haven’t seen Devon yet this morning. They say you shot the crossbow at him. Honestly. What a circus. You shouldn’t have been playing with that thing—you might have broken your arm.”

  “You, of course,” she said sarcastically, “would have been desolated to hear of it.”

  “You’re yipping up the wrong tree if you have the idea that what I think matters,” said the boy, smoothly emphatic. “I don’t suppose that it’ll do any good to tell you this, because you don’t seem to have the faintest sense of self-preservation, but what you ought to be worrying about is how to sweet-talk Devon. Now, do you want to get dressed, or would you rather sit there all day with your shirt open?”

  Even by his scale of things it seemed a little unfair. Merry said, “I don’t have anything to wear because yesterday—in case you’ve forgotten—you cut off my clothes. With dispatch.”

  “You’d have preferred to be stripped lingeringly? I’ll remember that for next time.”

  “I’d have preferred not to be stripped at all! Do you know what? I wouldn’t apply a letter opener to an envelope the way you put your knife to me. Pardon me for my state of undress. Jack and Biddles forgot to let me pack a night bag.”

  “What do you expect from the scum of the streets? I hired them as burglars, not ladies’ maids.” He lifted the green film of fabric from his arm and sent it floating down on the bed. “Here you are. Fresh from Paris. Count your blessings; Morgan was toying with the idea of dressing you like a boy. He said it might be interesting. I’ll be back in a few minutes, so don’t waste your time.”

  A somewhat nervous evaluation of the object on the bed revealed it to be a high-waisted satin day dress done in a shifting spectrum of mint. In the same material was the twisted belt that pressed up under the breasts and the row of chevron puffs that decorated the hem. The sleeves were designed to fit tight, and nothing at all had been done about filling in the space between collarbone and bust.

  If necessity was the mother of invention, the prospect of nakedness was its midwife. One could only flinch briefly at the prospect of wearing stolen clothing and then slip it on. What good would it do to dwell on its probable capture, during some mad rummage of a wealthy woman’s trunk (pray God that it hadn’t been ripped from her body—no, it couldn’t have been without damage) while steel clanged against steel and the air was filled with black powder smoke and the cries of the dying. In three days, Merry Patricia, you’ve sunk pretty low.

  The dress had been made for a young, stylish, and highly sophisticated lady; in fact, it had once belonged to the twenty-year-old mistress of a sixty-year-old Barbados banker. It fit Merry every place except one. When Cat came back to the cabin, he found Merry sitting rigidly postured on one of the chairs, wearing the green dress and clutching Morgan’s wrinkled shirt high under her neck.

  “Now what’s the matter?” said Cat.

  There was a modest silence. Then, “It’s too small.”

  Walking around to her back, he found she’d made a success of all the hooks and eyes but two, and after he had fastened them, he looked down at her and said, “It didn’t look too small to me. It’s obvious that it—I forgot. You’re endowed.”

  Nakedness had been the fact of life where Cat grew up, and in spite of himself he still felt that small prick of shock when he encountered shame.

  “Christsake. Most women would jump for joy if they were made like that,” he said, looking at the pink smears on her white cheeks. “You can’t hide behind that shirt all day; for one thing, Morgan’s likely to want it back. Do you want a modesty bit? Come, I’ll get you a scarf.”

  Cat opened the door and stepped back, bidding her to precede him with an exaggerated flowing wave of his hand. In the bare corridor she could see sky and white canvas through the open hatch that topped a steep stair to her left, and on the right was the paneled door to Morgan’s cabin. She stood quietly for a moment while Cat closed the door behind them and, passing her, pressed open Morgan’s door and gestured her inside.

  Daylight can be a prosaic fellow. What had seemed exotically evil by fog and candle seemed only exotically lovely this morning. Sunshine slanted gaily into the room through the sloping stern windows, and beyond the smoky glass a turquoise horizon rose and fell in a hundred broken segments. The opium pipe was gone, the brocade pillows on the window benches lay in friendly order, the priceless icons on the rosewood-paneled walls were sweeter, flatter, and less hauntingly foreign. And the gimbaled candlesticks had globes of clear glass. Had they been orange yesterday, or had her concussioned brain lied about the color?

  Yesterday reflected light had disguised a long glazed bookcase as a window. Her acquaintance with Rand Morgan might be brief, but it neither surprised nor reassured her to learn that the legendary pirate was literate. There was an open log book on the desk, along with an unrolled sea chart and a jumble of navigational tools: a brass cartographer’s square, a reflecting circle made of silver and blackened copper, a delicately crafted Lanflois graphometer, a dry compass with copper engraving, a Spanish sextant and artificial horizon. She knew their names but not their functions. Carl, as a boy, had owned a tin play set of them. Before her was what appeared by the light of day to be a den of reflection, not a den of iniquity.

  Cat found a gold scarf of shot silk in a lacquered chest and tossed it to her. She reached out her arm as the fragile fabric skimmed lazily down to drape there. Facing toward the sea, Merry changed the scarf for Morgan’s shirt quickly and had just realized that there was no way to make the scarf remain in its carefully concealing arrangement when Cat joined her, discreetly viewing her difficulties, and handed her a pin brooch.

  Swallowing a sigh, Merry fastened the scarf with the pin, which would have bought her entire hometown of Fairfield.

  He watched her and said, “I don’t know what you’re so worried about. It’s only a little cleavage.” She glared at him and thought seriously about attacking him with the expensive brooch. Catching the look and interpreting it correctly, the boy said, “Oh, all right. Never mind. Listen. Would you eat oatmeal?”

  Merry, glad at last to find something she could refuse, snapped, “I loathe oatmeal.”

  “Salt fish?” he suggested doubtfully.

  “I’ve never eaten it,” she said. “But I know I wouldn’t like it.”

  Manifesting no surprise, Cat said, “Is that so? How about hardtack?”

  Merry moved a red brocade cushion and sat down on the window bench. Tersely she said, “I’m sick. Seasick. Don’t keep talking about food to me. I don’t want anything to eat. Seasick! Do you understand?”

  “Of course I do—unless there is something wrong with my eyesight. You’re greener than head lettuce. Half the problem is that you’ve hardly eaten anything since the day before yesterday. We won’t have anything fresh on board until we meet the Terrible this afternoon, so you’d better resign yourself to oatmeal.”

  Staring at him, Merry said, “The terrible? The terrible what?”

  “Would you stop being so sensitive? Even for me, it’s a little unnerving to communicate with someone who’s skittish as a gingered filly.” He straightened an errant fold in the gold scarf over her shoulder with the flip of one finger. “It’s like trying to talk to a windflower. The Terrible is another one of Morgan’s ships. I’m going to fetch you somethin
g to eat. You can stay in here and wait for Devon. He wants to talk to you.”

  With an anxiety she would have preferred to hide, Merry said, “Is there any chance that he’ll—let me go?”

  “I’ve already told you once. This time pay attention,” said the boy. “Will he let you go? It depends on how silver-tongued you are.”

  Doom, thought Merry. Gloom. “On my good days I can sometimes put together as many as three sentences in a paragraph without more than a bare half-dozen breaks in logic.”

  “Well,” he said grimly, “maybe a taste of Cook’s oatmeal will inspire you. I’m going. Put your wrists up.”

  Watching him draw a length of cord from his pocket, Merry cried out, “No! Oh, no! Please don’t tie me again!”

  “I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t always throwing things at people, or shooting arrows off at them. Morgan’s likely to get fed up with it and give you a taste of the back side of his hand.” He started to reach for one of her arms, but before he could touch her, he looked into her face. What he saw there made him stop and change his mind. Tactful as a nursery-maid distracting a capricious toddler, the pirate boy put one of Morgan’s silver hairbrushes into her hand and said, “Brush your hair. I’ll come right back. Don’t move. Don’t get in trouble.”

  And she did not, for when he came back, she was sitting exactly as she had been, staring at the paneled bulkhead like a strange-eyed ghost in glowing green, stroking the brush unknowingly through her curls. So he gripped her by the arm and brought her to a chair at Morgan’s table and put the oatmeal in front of her, and a spoon in her hand. When she wouldn’t eat, he thought a moment, then said, “If you don’t eat it, I’ll take back the scarf.” Observing that her nose was turning pink again, he added quickly, “And if you start to cry, I’ll take back the dress.”

  This was not the first time by any means that Merry had eaten oatmeal, but the oatmeal she had eaten before had been kept in Aunt April’s whistle-clean pantry, not stored for two months in the hold of a seagoing warship, by its nature damp and alive with the stench of gunpowder and unwashed bodies. Even well-run ships, and this one was the best of its kind, were infested with vermin. Seamen were used to finding in their flour evidence of the rats, maggots, and cockroaches that shared their food supply. But Merry, after a childhood of fresh cream, Aunt April’s marmalade on white toast, and vegetables fresh from the garden served in clever sauces, was not. Even her two days’ fast would not make this meal palatable. Cat had to repeat his threats, and several variants, before she would finish the bowl.

  Devon entered the cabin with Morgan as she was choking down the last mouthful. With a negligent wave in Cat’s direction Morgan, his mind on business, had pitched his hat to a chair and leaned, one-handed, on his desk, flicked over a page, and entered something in the log. But it was not to his dark figure that Merry’s quickened senses homed.

  Devon by lamplight was a thing of beauty: the clever angles; the play in skin tone and hair of lucent pastels; the muted and unself-conscious movements of a graceful body. Devon by daylight was another proposition entirely, though not a whit less attractive: The searching sunbeams revealed a man twenty times more dangerous. The force of his character caught Merry like a plank across the chest.

  Sun-detailed, he was harder, leaner, his eyes, shed of their polite fictions, were callous as those of a lynx; the fathomless volumes of charity suggested by the sweet lines of his face were simply not there. Before Merry in Apollonian splendor stood a man who was capable of vivisecting her soul, with creativity, and putting it on to fry like a Punjabi locust. When he wanted to beguile, he certainly could; he was not beyond a rare and skillful act of mercy; but his tongue had more sharp edges on it than a sheep shears, and his wit he could wield by choice as the hacksaw or the scalpel. Margaret Nelson, who had for four turbulent months been his lover, was widely quoted as having said that he could sever your head from your body, and you wouldn’t know you were dead until three weeks later, when your carriage hit a bump and you found your head sitting nose-down in your lap.

  And here sat little Merry Wilding, whose most trying moments, ever, had come from Aunt April tetchy with the headache. The instant brain-burn of staring into the eyes of six feet, two inches of virile hostility made Merry drop her gaze to her oatmeal bowl and look too well at the slimy clods of cereal that were stiffening in the bottom like—no, better not to think what it looked like. Any more vomiting and they were apt to throw her over the side.

  Presented with a view of the top of her head, Devon let his glance wander from the neat line of her parted hair down the narrow arms to the giveaway movements of her baby hands. Victim and captor, close together and aware one of the other, were sharing, had they known it, the same image: the quiver of her mouth last night under his kiss, the sensation of his hands on the soft flesh of her breasts. It was a toss-up whether man or young girl was trying harder to perish the memory.

  In a voice as pleasant and light as goose down Devon said, “God love us all, the wench is eating! Good morning, Cat. Have you managed to repair her internal arrangements? What’s that? Oatmeal? I hope you emptied into it the contents of every bottle of aphrodisiac in the medicine closet.”

  Her chin flew up, her eyes widened, but it was clear from her face that she didn’t know the word. Her alarm was merely the unease of someone who has just found herself the butt of a baffling and probably tasteless joke. Devon saw her gaze fly to Cat and saw the boy first reject her with his eyes and then, surprisingly, reassure her with a spare shake of the head that he had put no adulterants in her food. Merry’s chin thunked back down on her chest in relief. From the look of her the girl had no idea what an extraordinary phenomenon was Cat’s kindness to her; Morgan had this morning sardonically professed himself still reeling from the shock of it. But then, this flowerlike creature had no basis for comparison. She had never seen Cat with other women.

  She was the third-string mistress of the man Devon hated, and she was no longer guarded either by nausea or by the urgency of his damned inconvenient need to take her to bed. Primed for butchery, Devon lifted his hand and darned his fingers into her heavy hair and drew her head slowly back until her gaze had no escape from his.

  “Dare you eat?” he asked her, blandly tender. “One meal in Hades and you’re never allowed up. Persephone had only a few seeds of pomegranate…”

  It was a successful way to intimidate someone and about thrice as effective as he would have needed. The final lump of cold oatmeal had been stuck like a sand tick to the back of Merry’s tongue, and it decided suddenly to ignore the esophagus and slip daintily into her lung. She coughed and sputtered for thirty seconds before Cat came and whacked her on the back with a slap that dislodged the oatmeal and very nearly rib cage from spine bones as well.

  When Merry was able to suck in enough air to speak, she faced Devon, who had been forced to relinquish his grip on her hair.

  “At least,” she said, “when the king of the underworld dragged Persephone to hell, he had marriage in mind.”

  Or so Merry had heard the myth reported. All she had asked from her response was that it be in his classical category and that it be critical. Any mention of marriage and its application to her situation vis-à-vis Devon had been an accident. Marriage. It was an off-key note to have struck. From the swiftly gathering malice on Devon’s face Merry knew the depth of her error even as she saw Cat wince.

  Before Devon could deliver an annihilating rebuff, Cat rescued his hapless protégée from the fruit of her naïve words.

  “Devon, try to look hurt,” said the boy. “She don’t have faith in your intentions.” Then seeing the moment could stand to cool longer, he added glumly, “I’m sorry about the crossbow—I never thought about it. She was higher than a jackdaw. Who would have thought she’d get into mischief?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Devon and smiled at Merry. He drew a slow finger down the line of her cheek. “There’s something relentlessly disarming about a woman wh
o pukes in your washbowl. Do you know, my sea nymph—and there are honestly not many women I’d say this about—that you’re more amusing defending your virtue than I wager you’d be surrendering it?”

  Across the room Morgan had turned, the dark, unkindly surface of his gaze moving like a nightwalker among the three startling blond heads. Jesus. Entertainment. Against odds to the contrary the puny, dove-eyed chit possessed a soul. So you made yourself sick, did you, on Devon? Morgan thought. That was well done of you, my babe. I didn’t pump you too fast, too full of opium for nothing. Grinning a little, he collected Devon’s cool glance and said, “Can we blame her for being ill? With you such an ill-favored fellow?”

  “His smile,” observed Cat, “has been known to raise blisters at fifty feet. Even when he’s slept in his shirt. What did you say her name was?”

  “Mary,” said Devon. “As in the Virgin.”

  “No!” Merry said, delighted to be able to correct him, though she did it through clenched teeth. “With an e and two r’s. As in merry-go-round.”

  Equally delighted, Devon gave her one of those blistering smiles and said, “Or as in making Merry?”

  The only thing left for her was a feeble sort of gulp. “I didn’t give you permission to use my name,” she said, and it sounded inappropriately grandiose even to her own ears.

  Devon said, “I’d be happy to call you Miss something, or Mrs. something, for that matter. What’s your surname?”

  She ought to have been anticipating it. If only her brain hadn’t been as furred this morning as her tongue. Not understanding what he wanted with her, she couldn’t take the risk of telling him her last name. Merry Patricia Wilding was not a famous name, but her brother was a widely known and romanticized figure, and anyone who read the newspapers would have heard of her father. You were never anonymous when your name was Wilding. Looking into Devon’s eyes, with their brilliant centers of filigreed gold, she would have been surprised had he heard her last name and not suspected a connection at once.