The Windflower

by Laura London

  There was nothing for Merry to do but dim the lamp and sit in the corner staring morosely into the dark, listening to Devon inhaling and exhaling quietly with intense (and undeserved) peacefulness. Perhaps she should wake him up and try to make him go, but there was no guarantee she’d have any more success than she’d had already, and there was no telling what he might do if she forced the issue. Better you than me, indeed.

  On his boots Devon had brought in wet sand and water; Merry’s resentment increased as rivulets of gritty water found her and began to creep stealthily to her skin through the nightshirt. It was fortunate that the air curling through the window was warm and soft. After a long time the ocean’s roll lulled Merry gently to sleep despite her troubles. The tense column of her neck, which had so long held her head stiffly upright, went suddenly lax, and her head fell hard against the wall, painfully waking her.

  Devon was awakened as well; Merry saw his light head rise from the pillow. He kicked off the blanket and came to her, dropping to one knee by her crossed legs.

  “You hit your head?” he said.

  “No,” she said grouchily. “The wall hit my head.”

  “My, we’re in a nasty mood. Was it my idea that you sit on the floor?” His fingers felt for and found the low bump on the side of her head. “You’ve got quite a knock. I had better get—”

  “Don’t get anything! It’s just a little lump,” she said, and her tone was so sullen he had to hold back laughter.

  As he dropped his hand it touched the hem of her skirt. “You’re all wet. What happened?”

  “You forgot to use the mud mat.”

  “Did I? I’m sorry. Well. You can’t sit in a puddle.” Gently insistent, he made her stand up. “Be reasonable. You can’t keep this going all night. Let me take this wet thing off you and put you in bed.”

  Merry retreated, a white cotton streak, to the other side of the table. Thrusting a forehead that was beginning to ache into his palm, Devon let the helpless laughter overwhelm him.

  “Merry, I’ve got enough liquor in me to—God knows what, float a bugle corps or something. If you think I’m going to play chase around the table with you like an aging roué and buxom Bess the chambermaid… If I found you a hammock, would you sleep in it?”

  It was a respectable compromise, and a way to preserve pride. Inside Merry snatched gratefully at the offer, but all she showed Devon was a nod. She was a little less grateful in a moment or two, when Devon returned with the hammock and strung it across the cabin for her. Merry had never slept in a hammock. As she stared doubtfully at the swaying band of cotton mesh Devon said, “It’s simple to use. But for the first time, you had better let me help you get in.”

  “No!” snapped Merry, in no humor to be patronized. “I’ve slept in hammocks before. Will you go into the corridor, please? I’d like to change my nightshirt.”

  “Why should I? You didn’t while I was undressing. I’m going to bed. Put out the lantern if you want to be modest.”

  After a moment’s indecision she killed the lantern, then gracefully let the wet shirt fall and drew a clean one over her head and shook it down around her. She sighed with relief as the dry cloth warmed her skin, and with fading gooseflesh she tossed the old shirt over a chair.

  From the bed Devon said innocently, “I probably ought to have mentioned that I have excellent night vision.”

  It would have been nice to strangle him with the hammock and have the bunk to herself, but Merry was too tired to spend time in that happy fantasy. The sagging line of the hammock smiled expectantly at her in the dark. She felt for and tried to smooth a place to lie in the tangled webbing. When she thought she had one, she turned quickly and jumped backward onto it. The hammock jumped too and dumped Merry facedown on the floor.

  The hammock was obviously a creature to be approached with caution. She was so mad at it, swinging to the ocean beat above her, that a moment went by before she thought of Devon on the bed. She knew he wasn’t asleep, even if he was preserving a discreet silence. Very likely the man was mute from ecstasy.

  “It’s been a while since I’ve slept in a hammock,” she said from the floor.

  “You might try giving it a sugar lump.”

  “Thank you,” she said coldly. “If you have any other advice to offer—”

  “Lie on the diagonal. I’m still perfectly willing to help you.”

  If he hadn’t made the jibe about the lump of sugar, she might have softened. As it was, she’d rather break her neck than give him the satisfaction of putting her in the hammock. Raw determination got her into the hammock, on the diagonal, her arms and legs splayed for balance, and she lay like a capital X, rocking with the swell until the Joke dipped. Bucking enthusiastically, the hammock twirled a pirouette and slung Merry into Devon’s hastily prepared grip.

  “I make that Hammock-two, Merry-zero,” Devon said, though he didn’t have much breath left from laughing. “Before you’ve catapulted off every surface in the room—” He set her on the bunk. “Good night, Merry friend. I’ll take the hammock.”

  Merry woke to a morning sparkling with sharp reflected light. Devon and the hammock were gone.

  Moving stiffly, she dressed in the boy’s clothes that no longer seemed to embarrass her: coarse gray leggings, knee breeches of a darker gray with a red patch, and a red and gray striped shirt with a square missing that matched the patch. Patch over patch, and a patch over all, they said of a sailor’s wardrobe. Considering that, it was surprising how generous other men on the ship had been in offering to lend her their clothes; Raven said several times that he wished she was as eager to get into his britches as she was to get into Cat’s.

  When she went on deck, she found the Joke under full sail and Devon nowhere in sight. The land where they had been anchored was a smudge on the horizon. Angled off the stern, the sun shone unbearably white, spraying chipped light on the water and dry streamers on sails that strained voluptuously before the weight of a sumptuous wind.

  Cat was busy. He sat on the gundeck casings, his braid down his back, a diamond stud bigger than a bean on his earlobe, and Dennis the pig trotters-up against his leg, the pig’s head resting and drooling on his knee. Cat was cleaning his cutlass. A raucous group was dicing near his feet. Merry would have liked to go to him and pour out her troubles and uncertainties, but the boy pirate had never looked more unapproachable. He stared coldly through the urgent appeal in each glance she gave him. What he had done to help her yesterday and what he might do for her in the future were clearly not things he planned to discuss with her, and if he felt as angry and helpless as she did, it was not his way to share that with her.

  Pride would not let her stand in front of him, showing she was lonely. She left quickly for the galley, waving at Sails as she went. It was the one place she could be quite certain not to run into Devon.

  Besides Cat and Raven, Cook was the only person on the Black Joke under the age of twenty, and if he had any name other than “Cook,” Merry was not able to discover it, which fate was better in some ways than that of his assistant, an ill-natured middle-aged man who was universally known as “You!” and sometimes as “Hey, You!” Cook had grown up in a pirate settlement like the one Merry had seen on the Florida coast. He was grandsired, so they said, by Sails, and Cook had the same sparkling gray eyes, the same soft lips that loved to talk. His hair was brown and curling, his cheeks scattered with freckles, and his nose nicely tilted. It made a cherubic picture if you were able to discount the nude female figure tattooed on his arm (which wasn’t likely, given the rather startling posture of her legs). The nude was lovingly titled “Annie,” which happened not by coincidence to be the name of Cook’s wife, who worked as a housekeeper for Morgan on one of his island properties.

  Cook had sailed with a small vessel that carried cotton from Haiti to Europe until Sails discovered the lad in a Port-au-Prince tavern, slumped on a straw pile, deathly ill with a heavy addiction to narcotic snuff. Once he was hauled back to the Joke
, they had tried in a kind way to cure the killer habit, and when nothing worked, Morgan had said he’d shoot the boy if he touched another opiate. The boy had, and Morgan drew a pistol and shot him in the foot. This time the cure lasted, and now, two years later, Sails’s grandson was fourteen years old.

  The kitchen was squat and greasy. Fascinating clutter ran from corner to corner: tea chests and strings of garlic; tin jars of raw sassafras, sweet basil, cloves, and aniseed. There were ordinary items made strange by their enormous quantity: beef soaking in forty-gallon casks, eight gallons of mustard in a ceramic tub, oatmeal by the bushel; and a brass still to reoxygenate stale water from the storage casks that Cook called the Doomsday Machine. He said you were likely to disappear if you sat too close. Racks of boilers and pots clattered without cease from the ocean’s roll, and simmering liquids sloshed on the stove, until steam and char smoke blanketed the galley.

  Cook and his help, in faded britches, aprons, and nothing else, were chewing tobacco, sharing a rum bottle, cleaving onions on a scarred chopping board, weeping, and arguing about who was the last to use the lost whetstone. Looking up, seeing Merry, Cook said, “Hey, Merry. Hullo, sweetie.” Over his shoulder to his assistant: “Hey, You! Don’t blow your hooked nose on your apron! Use that rag. Jeez-us. Do I want to stare at your snot all day?” Spit tobacco, swig rum, toss another slice of shark meat on to fry. To Merry, “Sweetie, you hungry for breakfast? Jeez, but you look under the brine this morning.” He pinched her chin. “Give us a smile, hey? What’s the matter? Is Cat eatin’ you about something? Know what I’ll do? I’ll kill that damned pig of his if he makes you cry.”

  “I promise I’m not crying. It’s only the onions. Thank you for offering to kill Cat’s pig for me, but I’m afraid it wouldn’t be the least use, and I like Dennis very much and would hate to see him dead. Cat hasn’t been unkind, and there’s nothing you can do, except—I believe my nose is going to run. Have you—Oh, dear,” she said as he handed her the same rag his helper had just made hearty use of.

  Raven, coming off his watch, wandered in a cloud through the galley door and almost put his foot in a bucket of hot grease.

  “Stupid bastard,” said Cook. Not caring that Raven was more than a foot taller, Cook dragged him ruthlessly backward and gave him a stinging clout that left a flour streak on the side of Raven’s green bandanna. “Watch where you’re going, hey? Want your arse basted? Idiot! Now, don’t go fussing over him, Merry. Hittin’ don’t hurt him none, big dumb ox like that. Barely feels it. Did I black his eye? Slap a hunk of shark on it.”

  “No, thank you,” Raven said hastily, smiling good-naturedly at Merry and making a quick, crude hand sign to Cook. “Hate the stuff.”

  “Do you think it smells like whale-brain fritters?” Merry eyed her prospective lunch without enthusiasm. “Cook does.”

  “Daresay it does, which is likely why I hate it.”

  Raven pulled himself up on a small table, the steel links in his belt rattling. “Since I was a kiddy I sailed on a whaler. Happiest day of my life, the day Morgan made a prize of her.”

  “Prize she weren’t,” sneered Cook’s assistant.

  “That’s true enough,” said Cook. “You never saw such a roll-along, blow-along, blubber-hunting tub. She was carrying so much sail that she had a wake on her like a dog wetting in the snow, and her hull sagged, bow and stern both. Stank so loathsome that the lads drew lots to see who’d board her, and sent the losers. Wouldn’t have stopped her to begin with if’n we hadn’t needed that extra longboat.”

  Raven’s eyes closed in joyous remembrance. “Join! they told me, or die.”

  “Jeez-us.” Cook threw a handful of onions into a copper pan. “Look at you, with that lie in your mouth; blushing like a blue dog.”

  Eyes still closed, still smiling, Raven clarified for Merry. “That is to say, not at all.” His dark pretty eyes opened, and the smile focused on Merry. “The truth is, they didn’t want me. I had to beg.”

  “Beg? I’d call it grovel,” said Cook, laughing and slapping farina onto the piece of shark meat. “You shoulda seen him, sweetie. Jumped offa that crate of a whaler, swum all the way to the Joke, and pounced on Morgan, shedding water from his duck feathers all over the cap’n. Kissed Morgan’s hand too, each inch of it from pinkie to wrist, hey, slobbering like a heifer.”

  “They weren’t either, mon. Nice neat kisses. Morgan said so himself,” said Raven to Merry. “Then he says to Saunders, ‘Will, put this child in a blanket and return him to his ship. We can’t corrupt anything so tender.’ ”

  “What about”—Merry ducked to avoid the fresh sack of meal that the kitchen assistant tossed to Cook—“Cat and Cook? They’re young too!”

  “Aye,” Cook said, catching the sack, “but we was already corrupted. There ain’t no boy ready to sail on the main chance—”

  “With pirates,” Raven supplied, sotto voce.

  “Unless,” Cook continued, ripping open the sack with a foot-long dagger, “he knows fifty terms in slang for the private parts of a woman. So we asked Raven, and the only word he knew was—Ah, sweetie, don’t cover your little ears, I won’t say it. Anyway, there was old Raven trying hard to show how bad he was, and since he didn’t know but one word, he started in to makin’ them up. Jeez, what an imagination. Had the crew laughing so hard that they let the whaler scramble off like a sand crab, so in the end we had to keep him. Boxed his ears, of course, and meant to put him out at the next stopping place. Don’t know why we never did.”

  “Because I grew on you all.” Raven grinned, picking up a mop, wielding it virtuously over a grease spot in the corner.

  Cook grinned back. “Like a wart, you grew on us.”

  “Raven,” Merry said carefully, “the whale boat—it was an honest way to earn a living.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d ever darted a bad-placed harpoon into a mother bowhead and seen her take an hour to die and her calf left to starve. Any day I’d rather rob a fat merchant ship. Insured to the gills, most of them. Ever see a whale that carried insurance? Whaling ships. Know what you get for supper? Black liquor and biscuits oiled in blubber.”

  “You young bucks,” growled Cook’s assistant disgustedly. “Always got something to bilge about. A man ought not to be complainin’ as long’s he’s got biscuit. Wait once till you’re becalmed! Oncet I was on a little sloop that got caught in the horse latitudes with no wind for more than three months. Aye, we’d’ve gived our hands for biscuit, oncet all that was left of ourn was powder ’n’ the grubs eatin’ that. Water was yellow as mare’s teeth, and stinkin’, and we didn’t get more than a cup, rationed, in a day. We ate the sawdust, and the oxhides from the main yard, and rats was going for half a crown each, if’n the selfish bastards what caught ’em didn’t keep ’em to ’emselves.”

  Catching the revulsion on Merry’s face, he added slyly, “Aye, there’s rats all right on the ships that sail at sea. Got ’em on the Joke too, same as any other. Don’t see ’em in the day, but at night they creep out, when yer asleepin’, and stare at you with’n their teeny red eyes, and then they come creee-ping”—he stretched out the word—“up and nibble on the dead flesh o’ yer feet.”

  Merry’s white cheeks turned whiter.

  “Nah, Merry, don’t listen to him. Rats’ll only bother you if you take sick and are too weak to—” Seeing that this line of logic was not having a particularly salutary effect on Merry’s blanched countenance, Raven abandoned it with careless finality and, insistently cheerful, switched to, “You’ve been down here long enough breathing smoke. You ought to go aloft and—”

  “She won’t go,” said Cook. The boy had been standing over his assistant, frowning at the job the older man was making of rubbing clean the floorboards with a piece of canvas. “Hey, strike a light, You! Is that clean or is there enough grease left there to lubrify a harem? You’re lazy as Ludlam’s dog that leaned against the wall to bark. Put some spark in your soap, hey?” He tossed a handful of lye in
to his assistant’s bucket. “That’ll do it.”

  “Aye, and take the skin off me too,” grumbled his assistant. “And turn my fingernails brown and buckled to barn shingles.”

  “So, who are you—Beau Brummell? When I set you to scrubbing, it’s the only time yer hands get a good cleaning.” The boy steered his attention back to Raven. “Of course she don’t want to go up, loblolly. Scared of Devon. And you know what a foul humor Cat’s in—not that that departs none from the customary.”

  Raven stared in an appalled way at Merry’s bright eyes and burning cheeks. “Poor little soul! I wish—”

  “Don’t wish!” Cook snapped. “Or you’ll wish you hadn’t. She belongs to Devon, and it’s his business the use he wants to put her to, and there’s an end to it.” But the gray eyes, resting on Merry, were so much kinder than the voice. “Tell you what, though; who says she can’t stay down here long as she wants?” And over his shoulder, “Hey, You! Finished wiping the sideboard yet? Shake a leg, eh? And then go run up the chow rag to let the crew know what’s coming and bring down the biggest wooden kid from the storeroom.”

  In a heavy sea, as many times as not, tall waves shook the ship, and food on its way from the galley to the after-castle was dashed to the decks and fed through the scuppers to the angry ocean. Today, with light breezes and fair skies, Cook and his assistant could carry off the meal with safe footing. They were barely out of the door before Raven tossed down his mop, lit the small bowl of his pipe, and established himself comfortably on the table, feet up and against the counter. Merry began to laugh at the pantomime of sly indolence. An incautious movement of her hand set a copper pan spinning on its peg, upending an earthenware bowl that showered Merry with sugar.

  Cook heard her soft cry and the crack of shattering clay. He flew back into the galley to find Raven standing over her, looking full of alarm and trying to gently brush sugar grit from her heavy eyelashes. Crystals caught and sparkled in the curve of her throat and cuddled thirstily down the line of her young breasts. It was not the kind of thing Cook was likely to look away from quickly, but when he did raise his eyes, he met Raven’s polite but overstimulated brown gaze.