The Windflower

by Laura London

  Sitting by Sails, Merry saw for the first time the Black Joke take another ship. The Joke had luffed up close upon the wind at the lookout’s call of “Sail ho” and made such a casual chase of the far vessel that Merry barely understood the import of it until a bow cannon on the lower gundeck erupted with an ear-blistering crack, which caused her to bite her tongue.

  The shot had been a warning, and as it subsided in a frothy splash off the other vessel’s stern the Black Joke ran up its frightening standard, Morgan’s Jolly Roger, the grinning skeleton caressing an hourglass. Sails had barely paused in his story about a Cree wizard who sold winds by the pouch for a pound of tobacco. Merry watched the bright dart of the other ship’s flag shimmy and drop with near comical haste as she struck her colors in surrender.

  In the hours that passed, the longboats went back and forth, leaving empty from the Joke and returning with copper-bound casks and bales wrapped in cerecloth and once a rickety crate of chickens that poked out their heads like jack-in-the-boxes and cackled disapprovingly at the pirates. The scrawny rooster wriggled through a broken slat as the longboat neared the Joke and crowed victoriously from the starboard bow. Merry watched as a pirate wearing a black and-white-striped shirt went at the bird in a flying dive and came down headfirst in the water. The other pirates in the boat guffawed mightily, and the youngest of them, whom Merry recognized as the dark-eyed boy with the soft West Indian accent who had spoken to Cat on the day he had brought her aboard the Joke, began with sweetly exaggerated solicitude to help his comrade back into the boat, but when the sodden pirate was almost aboard, the dark-eyed boy sent him sprawling back into the water with the gentle shove of a shapely booted leg. Men on the Joke began to gather by the gunwale, laughing and calling mock reproaches to the boy, and behind Merry the sailmaker chuckled and said, “That laddie, Raven. Always up to a bit of fun. Good lad. Every inch of him a man.”

  On the longboat Raven appeared to be making a longwinded apology to the wet pirate, who was treading water furiously, spouting cold seawater like an orca. The model of contrition, Raven offered his friend in the water the end of an oar, began to draw him toward the boat, and let go at the very last minute to send the man toppling backward into a curtaining fountain of sea splash. The pirates on deck were doubled over with mirth as the poor sodden fellow gave Raven a crude gesture and began swimming to the ship, followed by the longboat, oars diligently breaking water and Raven laughing and pelting him with eggs.

  No sooner had Raven set foot back on the Joke than he was collared by Thomas Valentine, cuffed backhand, and given a lecture that appeared to do him no earthly good, judging from his happily unrepentant face. In the end Valentine had mussed the boy’s hair and sent him, with a kick, to “pick oakum.”

  It was an alarming surprise for Merry when not ten minutes later Raven appeared on the bow deck with a coil of old rope and a canvas sack. With not so much as a molecule of proper inhibition, he flopped fore-down on the cold deck beside her with his chin in one square palm. As a point of pride Merry tried to match the dark gaze, sweet as an infant’s, that dripped over her like hot cocoa as the wind tickled through the waves of his long midnight hair, his big silky black jacket, and the loose legs of trousers that carried a belt of steel links. He had an uncommonly attractive face, with eyes that were almost lovely, wind-bitten skin, a straight nose, an untroubled brow, and a firm, clever mouth pleated with pronounced smile lines. The bodies of sailors, Merry was beginning to find, were uniformly superb, and on that bleak thought she looked quickly away.

  Hindered by the insensitivity of the unself-conscious, Raven had no idea what he’d done to offend her. Poor beauty, she was almost as spooked today as she had been when he’d first seen her, fetching, even with her nose running. Tragedy dwelt like a blue flame in her big eyes; the shallow pulsebeat in the golden hollow of her throat was luffing like a spanker on a vessel that was hauled too close to the wind. He had seen the look before on women about to be raped, and he found no charm in having it turned on him. More and more he had begun to understand why Cat, who had no scruples in the bedroom or out of it, still hated to see a woman taken violently. Astonishing that the captain had kept her aboard when she was bound to set everyone’s appetite to roast. But she was safe, perfectly safe. Morgan had cheerfully announced that he would see any man emasculated who laid a greedy hand on her, and Rand Morgan was a man who kept his promises.

  Sails clipped a thread with a scissors made of the jaws of a piranha. “Devon’s lady friend, boy,” he said, gently reproving.

  Raven twisted to look at the sailmaker. “Doesn’t every shellback on the Joke know it? I’ve got ears.”

  “That’s it, laddie. It’s interested in having ye keep all the parts of yer body, I am. I’m thinking yer memory is shorter than it might be.”

  “Don’t worry about my memory, old man,” Raven said. “Bless her heart, would I do her any harm? It looks to me like she’s scared enough already. Devon don’t beat her, does he? He don’t seem the type. Sweet-tempered.”

  Merry had bruises over bruises on her arms that could witness to the sweetness of Devon’s temper. If Raven’s words told her anything, it was how far down she was on the scale of Devon’s affections.

  “Keep yer oar out of it, lad,” said the sailmaker, the narrow eyes kind and practical. “She be having enough to sink her without every nose in the Western Ocean trying to sniff out a bit of scuttlebutt on her to share with his mates. Ye can do better.”

  Rolling smoothly to his hip and swinging into a sitting position, Raven wondered what in the world would be better. His experience with women was extensive for his age, but it was limited to a class of females that he could pull on his knee, and slip his hand into their bodice, and they would giggle and coo, and he’d take them to a bare pallet stuffed with a donkey’s breakfast. Then he’d be the one to giggle and coo. And there was nothing on God’s earth better than that. Still. The sun would set rosier if he could bring a smile to that sad, lovely face. That night, before sunset, he had.

  He had brought tea for her, hot in a mug, and worked on the oakum until she had asked him shyly and warily what he was doing.

  “This? Why, it’s oakum.” His fluid brown eyes filled with astonished compassion at so vast and touching an innocence. “A weak old rope shedded. It’s used to caulk the ship’s seams and such. Swells when it’s wet. Valentine sets me to it when I’m on his black list.”

  “For pushing that man into the water?” asked Merry.

  “No.” Again the astonishment. Then, grinning, “For wasting eggs.”

  Within minutes he had coaxed her into helping him. Her finished pile grew ludicrously slowly. His was mountainous beside it. But he gaily praised her effort and to Merry’s horror brought his particular friends from the crew to admire it. Mon, there had never been such oakum. The gulls would be carryin’ it away for nesting. Such a good job, she was doing, did it matter that the Joke would have chewed the old oakum and sunk to Davy Jones before Merry had made enough to fill a single knothole?

  Merry was not used to teasing, or strangers, or for that matter, men, and these, surely, deserved no more than the frigid turn of her shoulder. Their morals were low, their manners rough, their trade despicable. It was bad enough to have commerce with Cat, on whom she was dependent.

  It took them the full third of an hour filled with a splendidly vivacious assault on her defenses to drag a smile from her, and once they’d had that triumph, she knew she might as well give up.

  After the tentative bond she had made with Cat, friendship with Raven was like being force-fed beer bubbles. Life had toughened Raven’s treacle-sweet disposition, but the harsh discipline of twelve tender years at sea had neither stemmed his floodtide effervescence nor lessened a natural love for the human race, who, in his case, had done precious little to deserve it.

  Picking oakum was just the beginning. The next morning he had her up at daybreak to see a school of jellyfish, the shiny, throbbing bodies abob in bl
ue water as far as the lens of a telescope would encompass. After that Merry found herself settled near the scuttlebutt, the cask where the crew could draw water and gossip, while Raven taught her knots: a bowline knot, a common bend, a rolling hitch, a clove hitch; and the fancy ones: Matthew Walker knots and Turk’s heads.

  With Dennis trying to climb in her lap Merry learned to name each sail, in order; and what could be told about a ship from the shape of her hull and her running rigging. There were ropes to be coiled, rigging to be inspected and repaired, leads to be taken.

  The Black Joke was quite a place for a young woman whose eighteen protected years had allowed small outlet for a powerful natural curiosity. There were some questions that brought her silences and evasions, but to ask about the sea or the ships that sailed there was to have an answer instantly; to admire a skill was to have it demonstrated as more and more the pirates came to accept the novelty of her presence. She was as alien to them as they were to her. Few of them had heard a woman speak with the intriguing aristocratic accent that Morgan and Devon used. The gentility of her manners was a thing experienced only at the theater in low satires of the upper classes, and her face and figure were like those of plaster saints bought for a sixpence and given to one’s godmother on fair day.

  The ship was a tight-knit if not loving community, and one learned swiftly here to be tolerant and live without privacy. It was a democracy that elected Rand Morgan as captain unanimously and Thomas Valentine as quartermaster by a comfortable majority. Their leadership brought with it a meticulously enforced routine, the minimum of bloodshed, and fat purses. A dirty ship meant disease, bad rigging death in a storm, sloppy sailing capture and hanging, and the men on the Black Joke wanted to live and get rich. Major decisions were put to the vote of the crew, and while Tom Valentine could punish lesser offenses at his discretion, any serious crime went to a trial. It was not a bad life for men born paupers, and if their hearts of steel didn’t exactly melt to molasses at a glance from Merry, even Valentine had to admit they softened.

  The days grew slowly warmer as they rode south, and it became harder to wear the jacket that she must to preserve her modesty in the thin gown of green silk that she was rapidly coming to hate. Cat discovered her one midday slumped dizzily against a barrel and carried her below, applied wet towels to her red face, and with powerful doubts about its efficacy, brought her some of his own clothes and talked her into putting them on. It was not easy, and he might not have succeeded if she hadn’t been halfway into a case of heatstroke.

  The move into boy’s clothes, initially mortifying to Merry, was a delight to the crew. When she came on deck dressed in Cat’s loose-bottomed denim trousers and a short jacket, they greeted the change with shouts of good-natured laughter and honored the new outfit by teaching her to run aloft (climb the rigging), to shoot the sun (take a meridian altitude), and to arm the lead (prepare to take a sounding). For a lark Raven showed her how to throw a knife; they laughed when she held the knife as though it were a goat’s stomach, and laughed as well when, at her first try, the knife went end over end into the sea; all laughed, that is, except the owner of the knife, who said “Hey!” forlornly. Her pride at stake, Merry’s second try had buried the knife cleanly if inaccurately in the mast, and the pirates with great hilarity had thrown themselves to their calloused knees, pleading for their lives.

  On the poop deck Tom Valentine was heard by those standing closest to mutter something under his breath about Tom Cox’s traverse, “two turns around the longboats and a pull at the scuttlebutt,” which is a polite name for killing time. Cat, watching also, had buried his forehead into the arch of his palm and wondered how he was going to explain it all to Devon.

  Chapter 12

  On the day Devon came back, they were teaching Merry to fire the cannon. The Black Joke had dropped her anchor in the green ooze that floored a forbidding cove on the coast of Spanish Florida. Gulls scavenged in the warm white sunlight, and from the Joke you could see an ocher strip of beach scattered with shabby tents made from aged sails. Naked children ran like young animals in the breaking swell or played under the glowing browns of the sea oats that dotted the far dunes. Women walked to and fro carrying water buckets, goats grazed on solitary patches of salt meadow grass, pirates lolled against broken casks, drinking and swapping gossip.

  There were other ships here, riding under bare poles and grounding in their beef bones—they’d thrown garbage over the side till they were fair squatting on it, or so Raven had told Merry. And at night there was a bonfire on the beach, with a great carcass dripping yellow fat turning on a spit. Crew from the Joke not serving their trick at lookout made off like small shot for shore, swimming if they had to when the boats were full. Merry heard the echoes of their bawdy songs drifting across the water until early morning. Clean and sober they left, and drunk and dirty they returned, and after not so many shore leaves it was getting hard to tell who was C and S and who was D and D except for Cat, who never drank to excess, and Morgan, whose manners never altered for the better or the worse, however many intoxicants he consumed.

  At four bells, Merry stood at the stern. The shirt she wore was white and full-sleeved with blue cuffs, a front panel trimmed in blue braid, and a blue collar. The breeze playfully lifted the long tails of her red neck scarf as she watched Cat, cross-legged at her feet, putting the final stitches in the flaring hem of her new white pantaloons.

  Bright-eyed drunk and enthusiastic, Raven arrived back from shore and sought out Merry. The peaking afternoon sun moved with surprise over the black varnished brim of a wide antique hat as he doffed it elegantly for Merry. No one was sure where he had got it, but it had an ostrich plume on it dyed livid lilac, and that raised a lot of speculation. The hat was transferred in short order from Raven to Merry, the feather bent round to tickle the underside of her chin.

  “Stuck a feather in her hat an’ called it macaroni!” sang Raven, stepping on Cat. “Tack me, Cat, don’t you think she looks like that swell painted picture in Mme. Teo’s? You know, the picture that Morgan says is a dead poor copy of a—a—what’s his name?”

  “Rubens,” Cat said. “Don’t you think Merry’s a little short of flesh for that? And as for that hat—”

  “Blackbeard!” cried Raven happily. “That’s it!”

  “I look like Blackbeard?” Merry asked as Raven tossed her to sit near the taffrail, eyeing her like an artist.

  “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Eye patch, that’s what you need. We’ll use Cat’s kerchief, here. C’mon, Cat, you don’t need a black kerchief, mon. Damned foppish, and black don’t suit you.”

  “I think it does,” said Merry, getting her right eye covered. “Black is—Oh, no! Ouch! What do you mean, sticking that pistol down my waist? Take it back!”

  Raven stood back, admiring his harried creation. “Absolutely not, m’lady. Ain’t loaded. Jeez, know what you need? Braids and matches. Blackbeard dipped hemp cord in saltpeter and limewater and set them to burning under his hat in a fight. Scared the devil out of his enemies, eh? Tell you what, Merry—”

  “Come within ten feet of her with saltpeter and hemp, and you go over the side, you lushy idiot,” said Cat, who had been in a particularly bad temper since morning anyway. “You’re likely to singe off her hair. Go below, would you, and sleep it off.”

  Raven took direction only moderately well when he was sober. Drunk, he was about as responsive as a toothache. Merry found her wrist seized in his firm, joyful fingers, and she was pulled at a run to the lower gundeck. They collected, on the way, Will Saunders, the runaway younger son of an indigo planter, a swarthy, rawboned boy genius with copious sideburns, who at the tender age of twenty-two had risen through the ranks to become Morgan’s sailing master, and who, by virtue of an exceptionally strong head, was a lot more inebriated than he looked to Merry.

  Below, Merry found the lint-speckled sunlight bursting in blinding squares through the gunports. Moist heat hung in the narrow oak gallery as in a sauna, a
nd the black shafts of the cannons spewed the air with the reek of hot metal, brass polish, and stale gunpowder. In past battles body-spice had run as sweat into the golden floorboards that gave back the trapped scent, wet-baked and pungent.

  Raven and Saunders were an uproar in the dour quiet that drew Joe Griffith, master gunner, from his nap in the fo’c’sle. Beaming with healthy middle age, the tattooed crucifix that was a charm against shark death on his chunky forearms gleaming like a blurred beetle, the gunner loved the cannons from fire-spitting fore to aft as though they were his children and had wept for a day during a hurricane when Morgan had ordered a long nine- and two six-pounders thrown over to lose weight. If Raven wanted to fire one of the little darlings, well, sure, he could. Except, Merry learned with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, that Raven meant for her to shoot it. A three-gun salute to the United States of America. Was she a patriot or wasn’t she? asked Raven, having no idea that he was playing a major chord.

  Merry had hardly spent her life pining to fire artillery, but there aren’t many people who’ll turn down the kind of chance to do it just once without hurting anyone. And a salute to the United States…