The Windflower

by Laura London

  “Take him to bed, damn it.”

  “Understand this. Never.” She was screaming, without knowing it. “It disgusts every feeling!”

  “Christsakes, are we talking about the same man? When Devon walks down the streets of Bristol, half the population has neck strain from staring at him. We’ve got practically to hire eunuchs with scimitars to get him the rest of a chaste night.”

  They were faced off like weasels. The air between them hissed with their fury; with a movement of his shoulder Cat’s unbound hair flared and caught hers, and held, crackling with static.

  “Pardon me for asking you to help!” she hurled at him. “My mistake! I’m not accustomed to people whose range of emotion is limited to irritation.”

  A hush fell. As their lungs competed wrathfully for the same oxygen Cat began to slowly digest her final words. His eyes widened, as she had never seen them before, and ate light like a mirror.

  “Who were you expecting? Young Lochinvar?” he asked in a half-paralyzed amazement. The raised muscles in his shoulders began to relax, the white lines around his lips to warm. With a gentle hand he meticulously parted the wanton intercourse of their hair and put her snapping curls behind her arm. In a very different tone he continued, “My emotions aren’t limited to irritation. At times I’m annoyed as well.”

  Crazily, considering the situation, Merry felt the keen pressure of a grin on her lips and an escaping laugh. Her resentment sank like an iron slug. And the boy’s astringent blue eyes answered her in a softening that was not a smile but something as humorous and more intimate. It was the first time Merry had taken pleasure in being angry and felt neither ill nor guilty in its aftermath. Cat, she had learned, was uniquely shed of threatening complexities.

  “Look,” he said, shrugging his own hair back, “do you want to take a bath?”

  “What do you mean, a bath?” she repeated, startled.

  “Sit in a tub. Rub soap on yourself. Rinse it off. That kind of thing. You know; a bath.”

  Merry could barely remember the last time she’d been clean, not being able to do much of a job with a can of water and the worry that who knows who might walk in the door at any minute. Merry itched in places that she didn’t know the names of. Almost cheerfully she said, “Where could I take a bath?”

  “Morgan’s cabin. He’s on deck, and no one’s going to come in this late.”

  “Won’t he mind?” she asked.

  “Only if you leave damp towels in a heap on his Persian carpet,” he said, his hand on the door handle. “Well? Yes or no?”

  Shyly she came toward him, though the curve of her forehead was skeptical. “You wouldn’t—watch me, would you?”

  “Oh, for Christsake. No; I wouldn’t. The way you talk, you’d think I’d never seen a woman stripped, before you.”

  Three months ago Merry wouldn’t have called that much of a reassurance. The new Merry Wilding had spent a week on Rand Morgan’s famous pirate ship, lying her scallops off about her identity, and learning the rudiments of how to argue and how to keep her poise in bare feet and a thin nightshirt. It was the new and itchy Merry Wilding who twitched her twisted skirts into place and went with the pirate boy to Morgan’s cabin.

  She washed herself and her hair in a baroque brass hip bath behind a mother-of-pearl screen from China.

  “Are you getting into your dress or do you want a nightshirt?” Cat’s voice called around the screen.

  “Nothing would induce me to borrow another thing from Morgan,” Merry said emphatically, drying between her toes. “Especially since you said he was mad about the torn buttons, which were not my fault.”

  “This one’s mine. I never wear it.” “It” flew over the top of the screen followed by, of all things, a cranberry-colored man’s robe. She had to laugh as she put on the robe because the arms hung ten inches past her hands and the hem swept the floor. Smiling, she came around the screen dangling the long arms in front of her, and the boy stood up and began to roll the cuffs for her.

  “Are you cold?”

  “No. How come you know so much about everything?” she asked him curiously. “You couldn’t be much older than I am.”

  “How come you know so little? Why do you think we’re the same age? How old are you?”

  “Eighteen. How old are you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe eighteen. That’s what Morgan thinks, anyway.” He swept a cushion of crimson brocade from the window bench and tossed it on the floor. “Sit down. I’ll brush your hair.”

  She was so tired, and indeed so naïve, that she sank onto the cushion without a second thought. Registering her trust without comment, the young pirate sat behind her and began to put the silver brush through her hair with soft strokes.

  The ship rocked them like a great wooden cradle, and the moon smiled through the window, casting latticed shadows over them and mixing drifts of kindly moonbeams in her hair where it lay across his knee. Soon she had half fallen to sleep; her blameless cheek dropped against the inside of his leg. Like a warm hand on the shoulder, her movement woke Cat from his reverie in time to see Morgan come through the door. Cat forced moderation on the muscles that had irrationally tightened and held Morgan’s gaze as the older man crossed the room in his easy stride and let his hand fall, briefly, through Cat’s hair.

  “Pretty children,” Morgan observed. He smiled thoughtfully as Merry sat up, knuckling her eyes, looking as though she’d forgotten where she was.

  Cat handed Morgan the hairbrush and said to Merry, “Come on—you look ready for sleep now.”

  “Do you know, Cat, instead of selling her in Trinidad, why don’t we keep her?” said Morgan suddenly. “Every boy should have a pet.” He encountered a sharp look from Cat, who, except for Devon at his age, was the smartest boy Morgan had ever known. As Cat was putting an arm around Merry and bringing her to her feet to lead her from the room he said, “You’re dreaming, Captain, if you think I can afford a mistress on what you pay me.”

  Morgan’s soft laughter followed them from the room.

  Chapter 11

  Merry was not crying when Cat brought her breakfast the next morning, but he saw as he entered that she stuffed a crumpled handkerchief under her pillow. Damn Morgan and his bloody mania for rebirth by fire.

  “Morning.” He set down her breakfast. “Well?”

  She dragged herself from the bed, looking indifferently into her bowl, and said, “What a surprise. Oatmeal. Take it and throw it over the side. I’m not going to eat it.”

  “Now look,” Cat said, “don’t go back to moping.”

  “Who’s moping? Why should I mope? Wouldn’t you mope if someone were going to sell you from an auction block?”

  “I was auctioned on the block. Guess who bought me? It’s interesting to know what you’re worth in monetary terms.”

  She stared at him. “And were you expensive?”

  “Extremely. But I was worth it, being young and multifaceted. Of course, you—”

  “Are as young but I don’t have as many facets?” she said quickly, indignant on principle.

  “Merry, Devon isn’t going to sell you from an auction block.”

  Her eyes blazed as she snapped, “Do tell. How chivalrous of him. I suppose he means to strike a private deal and save the percent that would have gone to the auctioneer?” She sat down in the waves of her skirt and thrust her face into her hands. “I’d sooner stay on the Joke and be y-y-your—”

  “Oh?” His voice was calm. “Why m-m-mine and not Devon’s?”

  “Because I hate Devon!” The words, filtering through her dainty fingers, were startlingly convincing.

  It would serve no good purpose to heave her into another argument, so he only said evenly, “Does it matter if you hate him? If you’re going to play Adam and Eve with someone you don’t like, it might as well be Devon, who’s a fair hand at it.”

  “If he were Adam and I were Eve,” she said with dignity, “and if the future of humanity depended o
n us, I wouldn’t let him touch me.”

  Amused in spite of himself, Cat rested his forearms on the table so that his face and hers were at a level, his orderly braid dangling like rope.

  “Merry?”

  Merry’s fingers curled down to expose the smoky blue fret in her eyes.

  “I can tell you in a word what I’m like in bed,” he said. “Quick.”

  Her arched brows knit, and she said crossly, “Good. It can’t be too quick for me!”

  “For God’s sake, Merry. Do you always have to be so bloody melodramatic? You’re spending too much time down here immersed in self-pity.”

  “What choice do I have?” she said, outraged.

  “About the self-pity, plenty. Eat your oatmeal. I’m going to talk to Morgan.”

  And Cat asked for and rather surprisingly received Morgan’s permission to take Merry up on deck.

  The girl herself was a good deal harder to convince. Devon, it seemed, had planted a seed or two to keep her from trying to escape. Things too terrible to describe would happen if Cat took her on deck and “threw her to the crew,” she told him, her face hot with emotion. Devon had shrewdly left the details to her imagination. It took Cat the better part of an hour to clarify for her that there was a difference between being thrown to the crew and having the liberty to go aloft under Morgan’s protection. There was no question that if she was presented as a plaything, she would have been used as one. However, as she was Devon’s inviolate property, any sea dog who laid a finger on her would find himself eating barnacles off the keel. And anyway, if she thought men lost their heads over sniveling eighteen-year-olds, she was wrong. “Now, if you were twenty-seven and were really good with your—”

  “My what?” she interrupted, glaring at him.

  “With your ability to deal with the servants,” he finished dryly, “there would be more cause for concern.”

  She stood pale and still as a birch as he wrapped her in a worn coat of blue-dyed velvet trimmed with fur and even let him put a wide-brimmed straw hat on her, but Cat had to forcefully steer her aloft.

  The noise and the clutter of the busy deck, the cold slap of the wind, and the brilliant vast sky exploded into Merry’s numb senses as she came, blinking, onto the open deck. Hard light shimmered from the ship’s brass work, white flame danced in the waves, and tilting back her head, she saw beyond the wide square sails, a bright bank of cumulus clouds, luminous and scudding high in a race with the ship. Everywhere there was motion. The Black Joke’s great bow rocked and speared the sea. The horizon lifted and lowered as the potbellied sails strained in the heady wind.

  The deck had just been scrubbed, and her feet in Cat’s moccasins slipped a little on the drying planks. It was a good excuse to look down and mind her footing instead of the men above her on the crosstrees of the masts or active on the deck. There were winks, smiles that were predatory, exchanges that she was glad not to hear.

  “Cat—” she said.

  He cut her off. “Try to show some spirit. You’re a curiosity, like the five-legged calf.” Cat’s voice roughened almost imperceptibly. “Sweetheart, you don’t have to shake like that. I told you. They won’t do anything.”

  Morgan was on the foredeck of the vessel, fresh-faced, romantically disheveled by the wind, and talking to a narrow-shouldered black man whose height topped even Morgan’s by more than two inches. A sharp scar cut the man’s right eyelid and sliced through his pointed brow. His lips were deep-seamed and narrow, his eyes strict and without frivolity. The taut red linen of his shirt was lively as a cardinal against the ship’s timber and rigging. Cat delivered Merry there, his hand on her forearm. She had the sensation she was being carried by the scruff of the neck, like a fox cub, and her knees, as she stood there, were so disobliging as actually to quiver.

  Morgan laughed when he saw her, and when he had finished speaking with the tall man, he turned and said, “This is Mr. Valentine, our quartermaster. Put your chin up, nestling, so he can have a look at you. Oh, dear. Will we have to teach you how to obey an order? Ah. That’s better. I’m pleased to see that in spite of everything you have a functioning neck.” A neat movement of Morgan’s hand set the straw hat farther back on Merry’s head. He turned to the quartermaster. “Well, Tom?”

  Thomas Valentine’s meager smile touched one side of his lips. “That damned boy… Devon walks into a town, and women comely as sea sirens creep at him through the wainscoting. This one, of course, is… I’m surprised he’s let business keep him away this long. Some of the men aren’t too happy about her. You know. Having a woman on board is—”

  “What?” Morgan was grinning, but the effect was its opposite. “Bad luck? A Jonah? Kittle cargo?”

  “A damned nuisance,” Valentine said frankly.

  “This one needn’t be a nuisance to anyone but Cat.” Morgan’s flexible, placidly timbered voice carried across the deck to more than a dozen actively interested ears. “All anyone need manage around her is a little continence. And if any of the men complain about having a woman on board, I hope you’ll send them to talk to me. I’ll be fascinated to learn who sails in my crew and still has the superstitions of a lake fisherman.” Every head within a twenty-yard radius turned quickly back to its task; men who for one reason or another were not standing high just now in Morgan’s credit betrayed themselves with whistling that was too nonchalant and an excess of diligence at their work.

  Tom Valentine’s good eyebrow rose. “You won’t find me making an objection if Cat wants to install one of Devon’s convenients on deck. Just so he keeps her out of the way. And I hope she’s not a troublemaker.”

  “If she makes any trouble, then with my blessing you’re welcome to—” Morgan delivered one of his less benign smiles to Merry while he allowed the hesitation to develop artistically and then cut it off exactly right with “Request that she desist.”

  Mr. Valentine had no reason to worry. The last thing Merry wanted to do was make trouble. But Trouble, which for eighteen years had avoided Merry, had other ideas. Trouble was in a whimsical humor that morning, for Merry’s next introduction on the pirate ship was to fat Dennis.

  Morgan and Valentine moved off, and Merry stood nervously with Cat on the quarterdeck. Holding her hat with one hand, she tipped her head to stare up the one-hundred-and-thirty-foot length of the mast when something pink, dripping, and furred was thrust like a poker into the folds of her gown and between her knees. Too jarred to scream, she fell against Cat, who caught her hard against his hip with an arm encircling her waist.

  “Merry!” Cat said. “Are you all right?” Not to her (she hoped) he added, “Damn! You stupid pig. Snuff it, will you?”

  At Merry’s feet there stood a grunting, sniffling pig, its ears flapped forward like blinders, trotters clicking angrily on the deck.

  “Away with ye, Dennis! If that’s the way ye have with the ladies, it’s as well ye are a pig,” said an old sailor, who had been sewing, his back to the gunwale and nested in the ecru hills of a sail. He had found his feet easily and pushed the pig away from Merry with his bare toes. The man’s chapped pink lips spread over bottle-shaped teeth that ran with char lines, and his skin was seamed like broken biscuit crust, but kindness twinkled in the pale spearpoints of his eyes. “Don’t fear, lassie. No harm’ll come to ye.”

  Cat lowered Merry to the deck and sent the old man a look that she couldn’t interpret; then, dropping to his knees, he cracked his thumb and mid-finger once. With hoggish ecstasy the pig drove its pink snout under the boy’s hand, shaking its screwy tail and squealing. Cat said, “Pet him, Merry, he won’t bite.” Her hand was taken in a firm grip and slid around the pig’s ear. “No. He can’t even feel that. Under his jaw. See?”

  The old sailor smiled at Merry’s expression and at her attempt to befriend the pig, and he said, “There now. He’s liking ye already. Old Dennis here, he was just a mite jealous, at firstly, seeing ye with Mr. Cat here. Fair worships the lad, does Dennis.”

  Under happi
er circumstances there might be any number of pleasant jollities one could make about someone who drew the affection of a pig. A single look at Cat’s face would have informed the slowest wit that none of these were a very good idea. Merry cleared her throat. “Dennis?” she said.

  The older man gave her an encouraging grin. “Aye. Aye. He came aboard as a wee ruddy porker, with a yaller ribbon ’round his neck. We mean to eat him sometime, but who can do it with him being such a pet and all?”

  “Oh,” Merry said. “But—Dennis?”

  “If there’s a pig on a ship, everyone calls it Dennis,” said Cat. “Don’t ask me why.”

  “It’s the porcine moniker,” agreed the old man. “We sailors are a dry-witted lot, save for the nippy young ones like Mr. Cat here. It’s pleased to meet ye, I am, missy. Sails, ye can call me. I make ’em, I mend ’em—have done for fifty years. Come sit with me by the ridin’ bitts whilst I do my work. There’s protection from the weather, a bit. Wind this morning strong enough to unhair a dog, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Merry, whose hair was starting to creep from under the hat. She perched self-consciously in the spot Sails had indicated with his gnarled hand.

  “There we are,” Sails said. “Shipshape and Bristol fashion. Cat, ye can be off about your work. It’ll cause talk, to have ye hovering there like a snake watching its only egg.”

  Far above the Black Joke the sun was a lonely stranger, a flat circle with sharp edges that were blue and phosphorescent. A breeze rich in sea spice ruffled foam from the slate-covered ocean waves and made the ship deck lively with furling shirts and pant legs, swinging lines, fresh cheeks. Under the uproar of the great wheaten staysails Merry watched bright, busy light skitter on the sailmaker as he mended. His knuckles were swollen and red, like candied cherries. His palm was so tough that he used it as a thimble, but there was elegance in each minute turn of his fingers. He looked up at her with a smile from time to time after Cat had vanished belowdecks. Catching her glancing apprehensively around her, the sailmaker said, “Scruff-lookin’ lot, ain’t they? The black sheep of everybody’s family; but nae so bad as they’re painted, only younger sons wi’ nary a penny to ’prentice them in a trade, sailors who made mutinees under ship’s masters who’d made belayin’ pin hash of their men, escaped slaves like Tom Valentine. Crew wi’ Morgan, ye can make more than fifty times the year’s pay ye would in the Navy, and if ye’re already on the shark side of the law… Could ye cast me that pricker, next to ye foot? Aye, that’s it. The wee marlinespike. There’s a fine, useful lass. Now tuck yer hands in ’tween yer knees there—it’s cold as blue flugin—an’ I’ll tell ye about an auld witch lady I know what lives in Liverpool. She can foretell a sailor’s death to the hour, jest by fixing her hand on his pulse.”