The Windflower

by Laura London

  “You space your shots like they do in the Navy, see, by counting,” Griffith said.

  “No!” said Saunders, whose short military career had been spent fomenting mutiny. “With a verse. Here’s one: ‘If I hadn’t been born a bloody fool, I wouldn’t have joined the Navy. Fire!’ Try it. No, with rhythm. Now. Got a salt pinch in your pocket? No?” he exclaimed, affecting horror, without giving her time to answer. “Disaster! Raven, quickly teach her a hand sign for luck!”

  Raven, who was propped loosely against the bulkhead, looking like he might slither to the deck with a little encouragement, said obediently, “Hand sign. Merry, stick the middle finger of your right hand into your mouth and—”

  “I won’t. It’s dirty!” she said with spirit.

  “All the better, lovey. Wipe it on your britches first, if you must. Then—”

  “Devil take you,” snapped Cat, radiating disapproval from where he sat on a shot locker. “What she doesn’t need is to learn a lot of filthy habits.”

  “You wouldn’t catch Cat with his middle finger in his mouth,” Saunders said dreamily. He leaned across the big gun, his grin like a scythe. “Who knows where it’s been?”

  “I do,” said Raven, “and you would too if you’d noticed him last night with the fair Louisa on his lap. Eager, she was, to unwrap his pretty braids.” Seeing from the corner of his eye that Cat was starting to get up, he added hastily, laughing, “Oh, I’ve done, Cat. I’ve done. Don’t make shrimp bait of poor little me.” Hiccuping giggles, he collapsed gracefully to the floorboards.

  “Drunk,” Saunders said affectionately, “as a fish. Don’t put your finger in your mouth then, Merry. Spit in your left palm instead.”

  Staring open-eyed at Raven, Merry said, “I’m not sure, Mr. Saunders, if I really…”

  “Merry, lamb, you can’t be delicate with superstition. Spit!” Saunders with Griffith was loading the cannon. “Hey. You call that spit? I’ve seen more spray from a sneezing kitten. Now, make a right-handed fist and smack the left palm. There you go!”

  She had shot off two rounds, and dusted with gunpowder, she was trying laughingly to lift a twenty-pound cannonball in scorched fingers when she caught Cat by accident in her gaze and saw that he was staring beyond her toward the door. Alarmed by something she saw in his expression, Merry froze, and then turned.

  Devon, still and relaxed, framed like a portrait in the narrow rectangle of the open door, was holding her in his silken gaze. She might have cried out, she wasn’t sure, but her fingers splayed thoughtlessly from the shock of it and sent the cannonball humming across the deck at Devon. If he hadn’t sidestepped quickly, he would have gotten it over his toes.

  She never heard the single, curt syllable he uttered or the fluent string of dialogue he addressed to the men with her as he walked slowly across the deck. Except for a softly pulsating crackle Merry was deaf.

  Raven had told her what she must do to protect her hearing, but he had accompanied it with so many conflicting and jocularly intended orders that she hadn’t taken the right one seriously. In mime she saw Saunders dousing the match in a sand bucket, his lips energetically shaping an explanation to Devon. Griffith was dissolving in apologies. Cat was grim. Raven—Merry looked over her shoulder—was sleeping against the bulkhead, curled like a puppy. Devon, finished for the meantime with the others, turned his straight-edged attention to Merry.

  She wondered how her face must appear to him; dirty, certainly, frightened, and a bit bewildered; not reacting in the proper way to the things he was saying, which she was glad she could not hear. She was probably giving off other signs she wasn’t aware of, but still, it was amazing how soon he guessed. Catching her jaw in the firm arc of his hand, he snapped his fingers once by her ear. Merry saw him speak to her again, his face more gentle; this time she was able to gather that he was reassuring her that her hearing would return. It hardly seemed to matter. Her heart was beating in bass, and her insides had tied themselves into a bowline knot, a common bend, a rolling hitch, and Matthew Walker’s roses. This was the last grape seed, proof that the events of the last month had driven her out of her mind; she was deliriously happy to see Devon. Delirium. That was a good word for it. The paralysis of the eardrum was joined somehow with a paralysis of the brain. It was not the right reaction, not the right one at all, and in fact, it was so nearly the opposite of what her reaction ought to have been that she had to wonder if some of her brain cells were facing backward. Heartsick at the monstrous betrayal of her body, Merry generaled it back into dislike and frigidity, hoping none of the hectic, pained struggle was showing on her features.

  Devon took his hand away and said something curtly to Cat, and relief from Devon’s scrutiny and his touch was so immense that tears came, hot and pricking like straw near the base of her eyes. Cat, it appeared, was having a lot to say to Devon, and although the strict formality of their conversation gave no clue to its content, the glances she was getting from Saunders and Griffith indicated that her well-being was directly and unpleasantly involved. There was a muted pop, and a sizzle, and Merry’s hearing came back just as Devon, evidently in the middle of a sentence, was saying, “… common sense because as I recall I requested—”

  “I know what your orders were,” Cat said, “but you weren’t here, and she wasn’t eating.”

  There was a second pop, and a loud mechanical buzz overlaid her hearing for another minute and then subsided.

  “… so she left a note,” Cat was saying, “on the table telling me and hid under the bedclothes weeping while I read it.”

  “And of course,” said Devon coldly, “she needed a healthful regimen of fresh air and exercise to survive the rigors of menstruation?”

  “Take it up with Morgan,” said Cat. “First he sent Sails to her and then Raven. If I were you, I’d ask him why.”

  Devon’s beautifully shaped eyes were glinting softly. “He’s already told me”—Devon gave the smile that wasn’t a smile—“that he wanted to make a man of her. Lucky girl. Did it occur to you that if you had put your compassion in the right place and let her break, I could have let her go?”

  He had left then, or almost left. Cat’s voice halted him by the door.

  “She doesn’t break, Devon,” he said. “You’d have to kill her trying. She doesn’t break. She just collapses like wet sugar cake.”

  Merry spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding Devon.

  Sunset hung in pink fronds over the cove. Where Merry sat on the bow, the slow shadows found her, lying on her cheeks like hands shading milk in the sunlight. She had huddled beside Raven, who was groggily awake and playing solitaire with a limp deck of dog-eared cards. She helped him when he missed a play, and he thanked her, not speaking, with a desultory pat on her knee or sometimes, absently, the empty air. Across from them, beside Sails, Saunders was teasing a high, delicious melody from a tin whistle.

  More than five minutes had passed since Merry had said a word. Five minutes ago Devon had come aloft, and he was standing to the fore of the mizzen talking with Thomas Valentine. As Merry watched them a large snowy gull sank in swooping circles toward the deck and hung mewing in the face of the breeze near the mizzen. Devon looked up and smiled, his light hair falling back, his eyes shining. Drifting like a dream sequence, the beautiful bird circled again and landed on Devon’s quickly extended arm. The gull tucked its black-tipped wings, and the bright yellow bill dove into Devon’s chest pocket and found a biscuit.

  Stopping in the middle of a song, following the line of Merry’s gaze, Saunders said, “Devon’s gull. Even the dumb creatures love the man.”

  “If only,” Merry said tartly, “we were all so privileged as to be male and gifted.”

  Her tone penetrated even the haze of Raven’s hangover.

  “Milady, with the wind in the right direction you can hear the pleasure-moans of Devon’s ladies over two counties,” he said, twisting around to look at Merry. His dark, dark eyes were troubled. “I’ve never met anyone
before who didn’t want to own a piece of him. How is it you’re exempt?”

  “Oh, I’d like to own pieces of him. As long as each was disconnected from the other,” she said stiffly. “You can play on the ace of hearts. Sails, you remember, don’t you, that you were going to tell me about the time you saw the mermaid.”

  “Oh? Oh, aye! The wee mermaid. ’Twas near the Rammerees, off the Horn, ye see,” began Sails, always ready to rig his yarn tackle. And as he spoke Merry shut her eyes and missed, because of that, the hand Raven stretched comfortingly toward her, and Saunders, moving silently on the softly rocking deck, who caught Raven’s wrist in angry fingers and shoved it away from Merry with a warning shake of his head. It was all very well to have the girl for a playmate, but her heartaches would have to belong only to herself. Raven had to learn. It would be cruel to them both to let them develop the illusion that Raven could help her. And Sails, in pity, put his best into the mermaid.

  More than a quarter hour later Merry still hadn’t opened her eyes.

  “And so,” he said, “before she slipped off into the water, she gave me this very pearl to keep.”

  Merry had to open her eyes to look at the pearl, and Sails dropped it, white and precious, into her palm, where it sat like a cloudy tear. “It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen one before. Please, tell me more about what the mermaid looked like,” said Merry, who had trouble believing that any story told so seriously was a simple piece of fiction.

  “As to that,” said Sails, “she was scales from the navel down, like a mackerel, and hair blacker’n Cap’n Morgan’s eyes, wi’ wee points in it like stars. Seaweed was draped o’er her graceful-like, and there was a fine net o’ gold ’cross her chest.”

  Raven looked up. “So? Last time, as I recall, her breasts were bare and pale, and there was a diamond in her navel and a ruby in her—”

  Saunders grinned. “Shush, child. Don’t you know we have a separate version for the lassies?”

  Joining them quietly and with shattering suddenness, Devon said, “And a ruby in her hair. Her nose,” he went on, imitating Sails’s brogue, “was petite, mind ye, and pointed like a wee puir fishie. Valentine tells me he knows some lazy sons of bitches who are going to be picking oakum tomorrow.”

  Within a minute Merry was alone with Devon.

  Tall and flat-hipped, he stood with his back to the gunwale, the sun a crimson globe behind him, catching delicate bronze tones in his hair. The fine-boned elegance of his features needed no blazing pastel sundown to flatter them; it was difficult to ignore the constant sensual promise of that experienced mouth and subtly arousing gaze. For once his expression was not hard for Merry to interpret. He was looking at her like a gardener mulling over what to do about the mole problem. It would have been nice to be able to match his stare with a cool one of her own; nice, but impossible. The blood rose steam-heated to her cheeks. Nausea sat in her stomach.

  Aft, on the port side, men were lowering one of the boats to leave for shore, and their voices mingled in the glowing air with water lap and the whirr of wind striking feathers as a plover flew over the ship in a swift black arrow. From the galley came food smells and the sounds of Cook shouting at his help; the friendly sounds of shipboard domesticity that somehow tonight had lost their power to reassure. And when the hovering tension became unbearable, Merry got awkwardly to her feet and started to leave.

  “Running again?” he inquired softly, with amusement.

  She had forgotten, over the interval of their separation, how cleverly he could control her. How irritating it was to have one’s most private drives analyzed, reduced to simple logic, and hung like a kissing bough over one’s head. If her emotions hadn’t been in such turmoil, she would have lost her temper. As it was, she turned with a snap and walked back to him.

  “Or,” he said, “were you going to fetch more ordnance?”

  “If you are referring to the cannonball,” Merry said, “that was an accident.”

  “Really? With the floor toward me sloping uphill? Do you know, I’m beginning to envy men whose debauchees content themselves with a slapped cheek. No one could criticize your attacks for lack of originality.”

  The tone was, overall, more friendly than she had expected. She said lamely, “Cat hadn’t told me you were back. I was startled.”

  “Startled. Were you? There was a lot of that going around. I left you very properly cowering on your bed and return to find you very improperly capering around a cannon. And here I thought all you could do was be pathetic.”

  That stung, but she was not about to let him know how much. “Pardon me. A full fortnight with nary a soul threatening to torture me and here I am, forgetting my place. Good job you’re back to put me into it again.”

  “Good Lord! And a swagger too.” A smile traced on the erotic mouth. “From Merry with an e and two r’s to Anne Bonney, scourge of the Indies.”

  Anne Bonney was a celebrated female pirate of the last century who ended her cutthroat career not, as one might think, on the business end of a gibbet, but in unsanctioned pregnancy. If there was a lesson in that for Merry, she had no wish to figure out what it was.

  “Piracy is a hateful trade,” she said, with a belligerence she would rapidly come to regret, “and if you think that wearing britches makes me into one, then I’ll take them off right now.”

  As blunders went, it ranked among her worst. Catching the inference on the last word, Merry tried to choke it back in; naturally it was too late. She turned hastily to spare herself the shame of having to watch him laugh.

  Before long she felt his hands, warm on her shoulders. She was pulled backward and settled kindly against the firm support of his body, the contact neither forced nor cruelly suggestive. Instead, it had almost a matter-of-fact quality to it and a reluctant affection. His fingers searching comfortably in her hair, found and exposed her ear, and she could feel his breath there.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We don’t punish maladroit ladies here by making them unbritch publicly.” His lips brushed her delicately, barely touching her skin. “You and I probably aren’t ready for anything as audacious as polite communication, but should we see if we can manage a crude facsimile?”

  Light-headed from his touch and from the effort not to show it, Merry nodded. He turned her in his hands to face him and then stepped back and released her.

  “Subjective evidence to the contrary, my sweet captive, I don’t make a habit of carrying off and maltreating very young women, be they ever so unwisely bed warmers for my enemies. You amuse me, and that’s probably going to save your life, but at best your presence is damnably inconvenient. Why don’t we get rid of one another? I’m willing to make you one final offer: For the answer to my question, only one, I’ll give you your freedom, plus a payment in gold, the sum to be your choice, within reason. And I’ll make sure that you’d never be traced as the information source.”

  The telltale blush was still staining her cheeks, brightly spread like cheap rouge. She ought to have told him to stop right there. She would have told him to stop right there if her jaw hadn’t been paralyzed with wrath.

  He said, “All I want, Merry, is the name of either of the two men who were with you that night at the Musket and Muskrat.”

  His searching gaze was thorough, and Merry, having more than a nodding acquaintance with the swift processes of his mind, worked quickly to damper the telltale indignation. There would be no saying “How dare you! Do you think that I’d sell out my brother and my cousin for your filthy money?”

  “I won’t do it,” she said with dignity and received back a long, cool stare before he shrugged and answered her good-humoredly.

  “It’s your life, angel.”

  “And now,” said Merry, her expression brittle and sparkling, “you’ll turn me over to the crew?”

  “Will I? It isn’t likely to do me much good. They seem to have already turned themselves over to you. Baubles for the fairy queen; toadstool umbrellas for the pixies
; you have your own sorcery, don’t you?”

  It was not easy to tell precisely what he meant, but it didn’t imply a great deal of trust. “I suppose,” she said, “that you’re disappointed not to find me lying dismembered on the deck.”

  “Try to see things sometimes in shades of gray, Merry. I’m interested in a little sensible compromise; the less I hurt you along the way, the better. You might try taking some of the responsibility for finding an intelligent solution.”

  “But I thought we already had one,” she responded quickly. “You were going to sell me into slavery—”

  “Did I say that?” His vivid eyes twinkled appreciatively in mock surprise.

  Furiously, “You know you did! Why are you smiling about it now? Did you mean it, or were you just trying to frighten me? It’s as Cat told me, isn’t it? That you’re out to buffet my—my emotions.” She could not bring herself to say the word guts.

  Slight as it had been, he caught, understood, and grinned at the hesitation. “Merry—” The dying sunlight graced her, pinking the white porcelain cheeks, where the skin was as finely textured as a young child’s. There were times when her eyes became so wide and susceptible that their expression, like that in a caricature, was almost silly, a structural trick of sumptuous facial bones. It was hardly the kind of thing he would have expected to find endearing, and he might not have, had it not been combined in her with a dazzling lack of awareness. Not once had he seen her use her looks as a weapon, which was amazing, because it was a remarkable one, and it was not as though she had many. He would’ve sworn she’d been raised in a mythological kingdom where there were no mirrors. “I’m no more immune to sorcery than the next man,” he said softly, gazing down into her blue eyes, fixed on him with an infant’s unwinking stare. “Hoodlum though I am, I’m not going to barter away your seductive little hide.” Nor was he ready to take the chance of setting her free until he learned something about who and what she was; and while, for that reason, he had tried to scare the truth out of her, Cat, as usual, was correct. You cannot keep a young and obviously fragile person in a state of constant terror.