The Windflower

by Laura London

  Poor, poor Aunt April. She must be sick with distress.

  Like a decked sturgeon flipping uselessly from side to side, Merry turned from anger, to fear, to despair, and back again to anger. And Devon, whether from design or indifference, gave her confusion plenty of time to wind down to a numbed misery as she listened to the whirr of anonymous ship’s noises. The rattle below the floor might have been a strolling skeleton; the heavy flapping aloft, the wingbeats of a giant, primitive bird. Raucous voices rose and fell from the deck and from the corridor, and once she heard Cat talking to someone at the stair head, his voice sharp and sardonic. Was there any chance she would be left in here—for days? For weeks? Until she was weak and starving and finally submissive?

  When Devon came, she was lying on the bunk with the dying afternoon sunbeams, wondering if it was true that fear drove people out of their minds, and retracing her life to discover what she could have done differently that would have saved her from ending her days on a pirate ship.

  The man whose pitiless hands held the fragile threads of her life came into the room quietly and closed the door behind him without turning, his glance touching lightly the skylit contours of her profile. She turned her face to him without moving any other part of her body.

  “Well,” she said, “have you brought your thumbscrew? Or have you decided to boil me in walrus fat and lash me to the—to the—”

  “Yardarm,” Devon supplied, looking helpful.

  Her head disappeared under the pillow in a shimmy of glinting copper curls. “Go away!” she said in an agonized voice. “Just go away! Don’t you have to batten down the hatches or something?”

  His words, silky and beguiling, reached her through one hundred thousand goose feathers. “We only do that in a storm. Are you anticipating one?”

  “Probably.” Her warm trapped breath whispered over her lips and into her nose. “There’s going to be a hurricane, and waterspouts, and lobsters as big as horse barns off the starboard bow. You’d better secure the lanyards to the halyards and winch the grinch and bind the thingimmy-chrunkers to the nautical-blubber. I hope we get swallowed by a whale!”

  It took him an uncomfortably long time to erase his unbidden smile and cudgel into stupor the startling tenderness that crept through his expert guard. Then: “Are we getting tired, my love,” he said slowly, “of waiting?”

  A shocked head emerged from the pillow and snapped at him, “Don’t call me ‘my love’! It’s an obscenity.”

  In less than a second he was beside the bed, his hands softly massaging her shoulders. “My precious Merry. There’s no such thing as an obscenity. It’s all done by rearranging letters of the alphabet, none of which has the raw power of a bosun’s ball whistle. You know what you have to do to get out of here. Make your choice. And then watch me while I make mine.”

  Cutting like a scythe through his words were the sweet movements of his hands, drifting in a faintly suggestive rhythm that spread his hot, fluid magic in one fiery burst. So many danger bells erupted in her head that the space between her ears sounded like the carriage house of the Virginia Charitable Fire Society. She threw herself upright, breaking his grip, and twisted into a decent posture, being careful not to dislodge the skirt from her legs. The points of her shoulder blades lay as close as they could to the hard paneled wood behind her, and the fabric over her breasts felt unpleasantly tight.

  She was with him, and they were alone. Why must that circumstance always mean that her chest hurt like she’d squeezed it in a clothespress?

  “Stop it!” Her clenched fist covered her mouth. “If there’s a spark of human feeling in you, then stop it! I can’t tell you a word more about the tavern or the Guinevere than I have already, and I can’t bear to be threatened anymore. Do whatever you intend with me and have done! What will you do to hurt me? What?”

  “You break easily, Merry.” His voice, soft and detached, might have belonged to a naturalist dissecting a common tree toad for the ninety-ninth time. “Which makes me wonder how you were able to stomach Granville. If you’re not his mistress, that casts doubt on the rest of it too. Cat has pointed out that he found you in a particularly unrevealing piece of nightgear, and while that might be some new fetish of Michael’s, I have to admit you handle like a virgin. One assumes that you’re an extremely talented lady, but since innocence would help your case along, would you be willing to let Cat examine you?”

  It was a crude tactic, and he knew it, so he let her hit him once, because it seemed fair, before he seized the scraped wrists and held them, letting his fingers play hard on the damaged flesh. As he felt her attack subside he loosened his grip slightly, and loosened it further still when he saw that the lower lip she held between her teeth to keep from crying was beginning to bleed.

  “Yes, my flower, I don’t intend to be a pleasant bunkmate for you, so you’d better rethink your silence.”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything. What do you mean, bunkmate?”

  “I can’t afford to let you go traipsing back to Michael with the story of what you’ve seen and heard—the time isn’t ripe yet to flush my pheasant. I’d take the risk if you were more honest with me. As we stand, I don’t feel disposed to do you any favors. And this being the only cabin in the ship where you can sleep, this is where you will stay—unless you’d like to sleep with Morgan, which I don’t recommend. You might find his habits distressing. There’s a cubbyhole near the bilge they use sometimes for a cell, but it has four inches of water on the floor and rats. The crew, of course, would be happy to have you with them in the fo’c’sle; you’d have your choice of beds, but you wouldn’t get very much rest, and I don’t think there’s enough of you to go around.”

  Her wrists were still caught in his hands. She flexed her fingers to keep the circulation going and said, with ashen-faced fury, “I’m not going to traipse back to Granville and tell him anything. Most likely I’ll never see him again. And I’m not going to tell him anything about your connection with Morgan because I don’t know anything about it.” Her voice was beginning to simmer like boiling water. “I have no relationship with Sir Michael. No relationship! None! Do you hear me, you fiend? I’m nothing to Sir Michael, and he’s nothing to me.”

  There was a short pause before Devon said, “Isn’t fiend a thought strong?” and released her hands.

  “Why won’t you believe me?” she moaned, dropping to the bunk, laying her head down disconsolately. For a moment she dutifully reconsidered the “fiend” and then amended it: “All right, then. Barbarian.”

  “Just remember, in this exchange of personalities, that I wasn’t the one who laid wait in your bedroom brandishing archaic weaponry. Tell me what you were doing at the Musket and Muskrat and I’ll swallow your story about the ants.”

  “It’s none of your business,” she answered, with a last flare of hauteur. “What were you doing at the Muskrat? Why did Cat hire men to search Sir Michael’s room? How do you like being asked all these questions?”

  “Ask me after you’ve spent a few nights in my arms. I might be more willing to talk.”

  She dropped her head into her hands and began to cry. “I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own bed, and I never want to see another ship as long as I live. I hate the sea—I really hate it. I don’t see how the fish can stand it. I hate opium, and I hate pirates.” She felt her nose filling with tears. “I hate having adventures. You can’t make them stop when you want to. Why does this have to be me?”

  It was a nearly irresistible performance, and its effect on Devon was powerful. Gentle methods having failed, he had expected fear to work. So much for that. Either she didn’t have the imagination or the experience to understand what he could do to her, as Morgan suggested, or she had a hapless and rather touching sort of courage. She was not an easy subject to torment, and the results of his calculated efforts were not pretty. It took much of his available willpower to lean one hand against the bulkhead and say coldly, “Our route is somewhat circuitous,
but eventually we head south, where someone with your assets will bring a good price from the right buyer. I shouldn’t have to lecture an American girl on the horrors of slavery. Of course, I doubt whether you would actually have to pick cotton. I’d advise you to think seriously on the consequence of your reticence.”

  She didn’t look up, because she couldn’t, and after a few minutes knew by the matter-of-fact click of the closing door that he had left the room.

  Cat arrived after a tactfully long interval with a nasty bowl of something swimming with olives that Merry gathered he expected her to eat. He said that Devon had left on the Terrible, and no, he wasn’t sure when Devon would be back. Maybe weeks. Maybe not. And it was a good thing she’d decided to stop being so prissy about the chamber pot. For two days after that, when he came, Merry turned her face to the wall.

  In the small rocking room she might almost have believed herself a Bedouin princess riding box-enclosed on a stately, swaying dromedary with a monotony of sand stretching like the sea to the horizon. It would have been preferable to where she was now. In her mind she began a memoir: Voyage Aboard the Pyrate Ship Black Joke During the Second American War of Independence:

  Third day of my captivity

  Wednesday, March 23, 1814

  Day commences with fresh gales, flying clouds, and cold oatmeal. The ship is noisy and never sleeps. I can make more of the sounds than I could at first. Feet run, ropes scuttle, the ship’s timbers thump as if to protest being used as a battering ram against millions of tons of water, and the wind whines in the sails. On deck they talk, shout to each other, and sing; sometimes there’s a fife playing, sometimes a violin. I’m beginning to recognize Cat’s footsteps, being as they’re especially quiet. Asked him if that was how he got his name, but he didn’t answer, only looked sardonic, so I suppose that it’s not.

  Fourth day

  Thursday, March 24, 1814

  Squally during last night, with rain and thunder. Seasick again this A.M. Cat gave me a preserve for it, with wormwood, rose petals, ginger, and lemon, which he doesn’t appear to have much faith in as a remedy, but I think I am better because of it. Have finally figured out how the ship’s bell sounds the hours. Eight bells is four o’clock, eight o’clock, midnight, and noon, and the uneven numbers—one, three, five, and seven—mark the half hours.

  Can’t see from the windows today; half the time they are fogged inside, the other half outside. Drew some blunt outlines of horses on the windowpane, but they ran. Which is a rather good pun, and I’m sorry there is no one here to share it. I think Cat’s earring is a diamond. Lots of sparkle.

  Aunt April, have you given me up for dead? I worry often about you worrying about me, about how grieved you must be. I pray that you don’t blame yourself for my disappearance, thinking it was your fault I am missing because you decided to bring me with you to England. It wasn’t your fault. How could you have known about the Black Joke?

  Fifth day

  Friday, March 25, 1814

  There is too much time to worry about what it would be like to be a slave in the Indies. Devon would probably be happy to know I am very fearful, if he has thought about me at all, which he probably has not.

  Have become obsessed with food and dream of roast goose with currant pudding, fresh strawberries, and white bread with sweet butter. The food on the Joke comes in combinations of salt beef and stale peas, salt beef and stale beans, salt beef and pickled fish, and for dinner salt beef and salt beef. The ship’s biscuit is called hardtack, which is apt. Fresh water is stored in metal-lined casks, so it reeks of tin sweat and damp wood and tastes like a foot bath for gout. Cat says I am too finicky, and I will lose weight. Maybe no one will want to buy me then.

  Sixth day

  Saturday, March 26, 1814

  Light breezes and a clear sky. Misery! This morning I realized that I’m going to begin to menstruate. What will I do? Tell Cat, I suppose, but I would rather die. There were worms in the A.M. hardtack. Cat says, “Don’t think of them as worms. Think of them as meat.” When I said “But they are worms!” he offered to pick them out for me, as though that made it any better, which shows, if nothing else, that we don’t look at things the same way. Am not afraid of him anymore. Which is extraordinary, when you think of it.

  Where is Devon? Will Michael Granville guess who was behind the theft of his papers?

  Seventh day

  Sunday, March 27, 1814

  Pleasant weather outside. Gloom within. Appetite nonexistent. Bored. Frightened. Can’t seem to pretend anymore that I am neither. Started my courses. Had to tell. Cat very matter-of-fact about it and helpful. Much better than Aunt April. The hardtack is tough as a stone. Cat says soak it in coffee.

  When Cat returned that night, the stars were twinkling through the window, haloed by mist, their image blurred by an occasional splash of spray. Merry sat at the table, her head pillowed on her folded arms. Diagonals of reedy light picked out golden pinpoints in her hair, lying over her face and shoulders like swirling crimson smoke.

  The boy’s hands were not pretty, being ridged with tendons and scars, but they moved with delicacy in her hair as he stirred it to expose her pale profile. She sat still as an idol, the blue almond line of her eyelids closed as though in sleep or death. Through parted, barely moving lips, she said, “I think I’m getting scurvy.”

  Morgan’s antiscorbutics were the best in the Atlantic; scurvy was never seen on the Black Joke. And, for God’s sake, she’d only been at sea for a week. Cat opened his mouth to enumerate the reasons why she couldn’t have scurvy and then shut it again without a word. As much as she, the young pirate had noticed that their differing logic could pass cheek to cheek in the same current without stopping to tip hats.

  “Why?” he said.

  Silence from the head on the table. Then, “What’re the symptoms?”

  “Let me see,” he said. “Have you got eruptions?”

  “Eruptions!”

  “I hadn’t finished. Are there eruptions on your arms and legs that look like fleabites?”

  Her head came up, and the shiny disturbed mass of her hair fell in a soft slither down her neck as she pushed back the tight sleeves and anxiously studied the white skin on her arms. With reluctance she admitted, “No. What else do you have with scurvy?”

  “Loose teeth. Do yours wiggle?”

  Damned if she didn’t try them. Every blasted tooth in her head. And when they were all discovered in perfect health, she had the nerve to insist that there must be other signs.

  “Dysentery and foul breath,” snapped Cat, running out of patience.

  “Well! Really!” Her very blue eyes filled with resentment. “I might be in the early stages.”

  “The pre-early stages,” he said. With one hand he set down the water can he had brought to her. “You’ll have to develop something more interesting than acute hypochondria to worry Devon enough to loose you on dry land. Good night.”

  He was out the door and had it half-closed behind him before he heard her voice calling him softly from the black room.

  “Devon said I should go free if you could tell I was a virgin. What does that mean?”

  It was news to him, but he was not surprised. Devon was a master of double-edged intimidation. On the surface it was insult enough; and that faded into a fill-in-the-blank threat flavored of the black side of things nasty. It should have been enough to make her talk, except that, being who she was, the more lurid implications had winged right through her wholesome spirit. Cat stepped back into the room.

  “It means that he was baiting you,” said the boy. “He doesn’t believe that you’re a virgin.”

  “Couldn’t you tell him that I am?” she said in a frightened voice. Her small head was alertly held, the face shadowed, and her breath flickered in the silence like an uncovered candle.

  “Try to understand,” he said, the words tight with irritation and unfamiliar pity, “it wouldn’t make any difference. The man was trying to scare yo
u, and since it didn’t work, that’s that.”

  “It didn’t work? Heavenly name! They can hear my knees knocking all the way to Paris.”

  “I should have said, it didn’t work well enough.”

  Not willing to let it go, Merry said, “Couldn’t you at least try what I asked? Please.”

  “No,” Cat said, his voice severe, his temper thoroughly evaporated. “Devon isn’t stupid. And Morgan can see clear inside my femurs. He’d know I was lying. Besides, Devon’s bloody likely to double-check, just to give you a lesson you wouldn’t forget. He’s not a man to push. Do you understand what it means physically? I didn’t think so. The man’s out to buffet your guts around, Merry. Strain everything he says through a cheesecloth.” He saw her irises, thick as buckets of blue water, begin to slowly lose their focus. “Damnation. Don’t look at me like that. I can’t help you. Don’t expect me to. There are two ways you can make peace with Devon. Pleasure him, or tell him what he wants to know. You’re perfectly capable of doing either. Or both.”

  She jumped to her feet so fast that her chair skittered on the uneven floorboards. “You and your smug calculations. Hasn’t it occurred to you that the truth wouldn’t save my skin? If Devon found out what I was doing at the Musket and Muskrat, he’d peel me to the gristle.”

  Shocked and angry, Cat abandoned the effort to keep his tone polite. “What lunacy possessed you to make an enemy like Devon?”

  “Don’t you think I know I’m in trouble?” she shouted back. “Do I look like someone who’s made a practice of consorting with pirates? What am I supposed to do now?”