by Laura London
A thunderous, shuddering crash threw Merry painfully against the frame of Morgan’s door as the great hull of the Joke collided with the enemy vessel. Hell shone in vignette through the hatchway—the swarm of cursing, panting men resisting the fury of a boarding party, clanging steel blades becoming red, spitting scarlet in a spray as they flashed.
Cowering below the insanity, she could feel the cold tremors in her limbs, the sweat of fear damping her shirt, growing sticky on her face, trickling into her mouth.
Suddenly a body fell heavily from the sky, blocking the hatch in a grotesque sprawl. It was Jim Selkirk, shot from the crow’s nest, and she stared upward, horrified, into his blank eyes. The dead fingers went lax, and his pistol broke free to drop to the deck before her and skitter toward her feet. She grabbed it up in a haze of instinctive reaction.
Again the Joke rolled. The floor tipped sickeningly away, and the backwash tossed her like a toy against Morgan’s red oak door. She grabbed at the bronze latch for support as her feet slid across the dropping floor. The latch gave, and the heavy door swung open, throwing her into the room.
Inside, holding a swaying lantern candle by its black tin loop, was Cook’s assistant, the man she knew only as Hey, You! He was hunched over Morgan’s wide Belgian desk, the yellow candlelight falling in a long oval on the somberly gleaming surface and bouncing back to illuminate the man’s face in carmine shadows. Wispy hair jutted stiffly out from the base of his russet stocking cap. His greasy leather gaiters were askew, and his brown plaid shirt twisted at his stout waist, as though it had been donned in haste. He turned, saw Merry, and began to come angrily toward her. She raised a hand instinctively to protect herself. Her hand still held the half-cocked pistol, and seeing it, he magically fell back, adopting a sly, wary grin.
“What are you doing?” she asked him.
“And who might you be to be askin’ me that, eh? I may well be askin’ you the same! Last I heard, the likes of you was supposed to be under lock and key. What would Devon say if he saw you with that barker in your hand? I’ve half a mind to call him. What would you say to that?”
The threat didn’t exactly make her break out in a cold sweat. Devon had more pressing matters on his hands. And what was this man doing here? In theory the Joke was a democracy. The captain’s quarters belonged to the crew as much as they did the captain. But Rand Morgan was still Rand Morgan, and in practice before anyone entered Morgan’s cabin, they knocked, and all except Cat and Devon waited for an invitation to do that. Why would a kitchen assistant come here surreptitiously in the midst of the fray and why was he gripping a bulging canvas purse?
Not lowering the gun barrel, Merry said, “If Devon comes, will you show him that bag of money in your hand?”
“It’s my share!” He clutched it all the harder. “It’s what I got coming to me.”
Merry knew well that none of Morgan’s men helped themselves to spoils. Thomas Valentine divided the loot, in full view of the crew. Also the man before her seemed to have deserted his position in battle, and the punishment for that was fearsome—marooning on a barren island with enough water and food to last for one week. Suddenly she realized what this man’s presence here must mean. She said, “You’re planning to desert!”
“Well, ain’t you just as quick as a berry! I ain’t got time to stand here clappin’ my jaws about it wi’ ye, so let me be. We’ll go our own ways and no one the wiser. This is no affair of your’n that I can see.”
The tiniest bit of admiration mixed with the doubt in her voice as she asked, “How do you mean to get away?”
He was impatient to be off, and after a moment he appeared to decide that it would be faster to humor her with an answer than to argue. “There’s a jolly boat half-lowered to the port that was meant, I suppose, to take you out of here if we was to be gettin’ the worst of the fight. Old Tuck Simmons was to have the watchin’ of it, but he’s long since been blown into the sea. So while them bloody fools are killin’ themselves to starboard, I’m meanin’ to shamble off to the port.”
“Are we near land?” she asked.
“Near ’nough. Now, see here. I’ve got to be movin’ along, so—”
There was no time to think it over. Merry took a single slow breath and said, “I want to come with you.”
A man of a different kidney might have been flattered, but Cook’s middle-aged assistant was a realist and a well-developed coward. Every man aboard knew she’d tried to escape once before. He said sourly, “Well, you can’t. I’ve got enough trouble without having His Powerful Highness Devon hot after my carcass.” He started for the door.
Not for nothing had Merry Wilding spent a month of her life on the most notorious ship that furled sail on the Gulf Stream. Stationing her legs apart carefully for balance and effect, Merry put two hands on the pistol’s walnut grip and aimed the bronze barrel straight at the man’s retreating back.
“You!” she said. “Take one more step without me and—and, Saint Anne as my witness, I’ll blow your ears off.”
It was a solid improvement over her try with Devon and the crossbow. Morgan, if he could have seen her, would have been as happy as a King Charles spaniel.
Chapter 16
The battling ships had a strange beauty from four hundred yards away. Against the night sky of transparent black the ship’s lanterns breathed sheer golden light that caught as glistening streamers on the ocean waves. From the Joke’s stern lanterns twin haloes glowed like the eyes of a great sea monster. The battle raged in miniature; the slowly shrinking scene seemed a microcosm of madness, with flames licking the rigging of the other ship, sooty clouds of smoke rolling upward, and the shouting and shooting and clanging echoing and faint. It looked like an accident in an alchemist’s laboratory. And Merry was leaving it behind as if it were a Punch and Judy show bypassed on a street corner.
Wearing denim breeches, a white shirt, and a kelly green bandanna over her hair, Merry sat in the jolly boat’s bow with her pistol trained on the kitchen assistant, whose name, she had ascertained, was Michael Meadows. Meadows rowed, and Merry watched the battle through the oars as they rose and dipped, rose and dipped. They had gone more than a league’s distance before Merry realized that she was looking at three sets of masts.
She exclaimed, “There’s a third ship!”
“Eh? Oh, aye. A Portuguese schooner, sailing out of the Brazils, more ’n likely. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was coffee she was hauling. Dumpy little rascal, ain’t she? Them sails is patched like a whaleman’s shirt. She’s prize to that pirate bark that’s putting up Satan’s own fight against the Joke.”
So Morgan was fighting another pirate ship!
“A pirate bark?”
“Aye.” Meadows glanced over his shoulder at the ships. “That be Malachi Head. See his colors there, by the aft lantern? His flag’s got the bloody dagger ’pon it. He’s the devil’s spawn, old Malachi. When he takes a ship, he sticks the men through with boarding pikes, and if’n there’s women aboard, he lets his crew take their sport with ’em and then throws the lot of ’em into the hold. Then he bombards the ship, for target practice, see, till she goes down ablazin’. Him and Morgan usually gives each other a wide berth, but this time the lookout spied a woman on the captured schooner, and her with a babe in her arms and two little ones clingin’ to her skirts. So Morgan brings it up for a vote: How many want to take Malachi Head’s ship and steal his prize? Well, quicker ’n a trout’s tongue every man jack on the Joke is finding some reason or other we oughta take the ship. Saunders says because there might be silver aboard the Portuguese, Valentine says we oughta be replacing the skiff you sank, even Shay, that son of a bitch, suddenly remembers some old grudge he’s got against Malachi Head’s bosun. Humpf! You know the real reason they wanna fight that Malachi Head? To save the young ’uns! I ask you!”
Dawn glimmered, a lilac fuzz on the horizon. Smiling into the trade wind’s light breath, Merry said, “I think it’s wonderful.”
“Oh, you do, eh? For my money, being a hero is fine, but suicide is something else again. I can’t see giving up yer life for a babe. They all die anyway,” he said gloomily, coasting on his oars. “Twenty years ago, back in Dover, my wife had three babes in three years, and not one of them lived more ’n a day or two. And with the last one my wife dies too. Childbed fever they call it. I call it bad doctorin’.” Meadows spit over the side. “She weren’t no more than seventeen.”
Merry was quickly and deeply affected. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Meadows shrugged, grinning slyly through charred, stumpy teeth. “She was a shrill one anyway and never gived me a moment’s peace, though I was sorry about the little ones, and that’s a fact.” He let one oar hang in the water and reached between his legs for the rum bottle. He took a long swig, and as he lowered the bottle his gaze fell on the bucket Merry had placed by her feet. “There it goes—he done it again! Put one of them arms out and wiggled it around.”
Merry glanced uncertainly at the malefactor in the bucket. “He can’t help it,” she said, on the defensive. “The bucket’s too small, and he is a squid, after all.”
“Well, I don’t hold with squids, nor octopussies neither. Ain’t natural, a critter havin’ all them arms. Fair gives a body the creeps. Dump him out.”
“I’m going to,” Merry said, “as soon as we’re far enough from the ship.”
“If that don’t beat kissin’! Think a cannonball’s gonna fall on him? Out he goes—or I don’t oar another stroke.”
It was not a threat Meadows was likely to carry out, with the eastern sky paling to slate and the rising light adding to their danger of detection and capture. But the squid must be half-starved by now. Decency demanded that she set it free. Merry put the pistol down in her lap, picked up the bucket, and leaned over the side until the bucket’s wooden mouth was under an inch of water. Gently tipping the bucket sideways, she watched with a lump in her throat as the squid slid out and away into the glossily black ocean. It was one more link to Raven gone. Cat. Devon. The hand that she had braced against the side slipped as she drew in the heavy bucket, and her shifting weight sent the boat rocking like a tree cradle in the wind.
“Hey! Watch it! You’ll tip us. And I could have had the gun off you too,” he added morosely. “Don’t you forget, if Devon should happen to catch us, it was all against my will—you had the pistol on me the whole time.”
“I’ll tell him anything you like, but he won’t find us if you’d put a little Norwegian steam into your rowing.”
“Humph.” Meadows picked up the oar, and the boat began to move forward again. “Darn female. Likes to see a man work himself to death. And only a fancy-thinking fellow like Devon would have a woman that’d insist on running away with a squid in a bucket. There’s the aristocracy for you.”
There were times when it was particularly trying to listen to one of the men on the Joke place Devon on an exaggeratedly high pedestal. Ready to argue with Michael Meadows, ready to do anything but think about the insanely desperate thing she was doing, Merry said, “Aristocracy?” She tried, as an experiment, to sneer. “He’s well-favored, educated, and bossy. That doesn’t make him an aristocrat.”
“Lot you know about it. He’s got bloody aristocratic ways about him, and anyway, Sails says he is, and Sails’s been with Morgan since he got his first ship.”
Sails and the mermaid. Sails and the wind-seller. Sails and the ghost ship off Nova Scotia. Wonderful stories Sails told, but not true ones. “I’m sure titled British gentlemen frequently sail with pirates?”
“Beats walkin’.” Meadows gave a short guffaw. “Course, not by much. Didn’t know, did ya, that Morgan and Devon are half brothers?”
“Yes, I did,” she said. “And that Devon is legitimate, and Morgan is not. I find it hard to believe that if Devon’s family was as influential as you are implying, they would have allowed Devon to meet Rand Morgan.”
“Well, a course they wouldn’t,” he said contemptuously. “Morgan met his fine little brother by accident.”
There was a certain look in Meadows’s eyes that warned Merry the tale was hardly likely to uplift her. Arguing with Meadows, it seemed, might be more taxing than she had bargained for. She had an intense and active curiosity about everything connected with Devon, but hard experience had taught her that there were things to be learned about Devon that one had better be in a well-rested state to hear. And she was tired, frightened, and in no mood to be teased—which was clearly what Michael Meadows had in mind. Turning her head, Merry stared at the fresh, paling horizon with a laboriously manufactured expression of indifference. She could feel Meadows’s rheumy gaze study her. Then he said, “You in love with the fellow?”
A long pause. Finally, with a sigh, “What fellow?”
“Devon. You in love with him or what?”
“What,” she answered emphatically.
“Yep. You love him. I can tell. Heh, heh.”
“Mr. Meadows,” she said, “if you want to think that, I’m not going to quarrel with you about it. I’m only going to say this once: I’m not in love with Devon.”
As though she hadn’t spoken, he said, “Yep. I can tell. Know what it takes to make a man like that fall in love with you?”
A miracle. “Obviously I don’t, because he’s not in love with me.”
“Heh, heh. Know how to keep a man like that?” Meadows tipped his head down until he could tap with one finger on the part of his temple exposed by his russet stocking cap. “To keep a man like that takes brains.”
As advice went, it was a little too general to be of any use. Anyway, some of the things you don’t do if you want a man like that to fall in love with you are to run away, steal his letters, and refuse to tell him the facts he needs to acquit you of any connection with his worst enemy. That aside, Merry hoped, and feared, that she would never have to see the man again. Lifting with some difficulty the arm that had been bruised by Morgan’s door, Merry began to rub the aching stiffness at the back of her neck.
“That Devon,” Meadows went on. “The boy was a proper hellion in his teens, so they say. To give themselves a rest, his people sent him to look over some property in the Indies, and happens he was on a three master that Morgan took. Prettiest boy you ever saw, they say. The crew was dicing over who was to have their way with him, and Morgan, they tell, saved the lad from a fate worse than death.”
“Pray don’t continue!” Merry exclaimed, going rigid.
Highly encouraged, Meadows went on gleefully, “O’ course, depending on who’s telling the story, Morgan was after keeping Devon for himself. Hey!” Meadows protested, finding that he was gazing down the barrel of Merry’s sea service pistol. Hastily, “Take your finger off that trigger there, missy. I was funnin’. Here, now, if you shoot me, you’ll be rowin’ the measure of the way yerself.”
“I’d rather row than listen to any more disgusting nonsense. How far are we from where you intend to land us?”
“Oh, that be quite a distance yet, quite a distance. We can’t stop too close, or they’ll find us sure as supper. Not, mind you, that supper tonight is so sure. Heh, heh.” Meadows watched her lower the gun discouragedly. “What’s the matter now? Wishin’ you hadn’t run off so hasty-like?” He chuckled. “Morgan catches me, and it’s a quick swing from the yardarm, but you—ho! Devon threatened to beat you if you tried to pull up anchor on him again, didn’t he? Everyone heard him say it too, so he’d have to go through with it or lose face. Never been whipped, have you? Ask your friend Raven about it. Ask Cat. Brung up in a bawdy house, he was, on Ile de la Tortue. He come to Morgan with so many stripes on his back that Morgan should’ve got a discount on the price.” Meadows observed warily that the gun barrel had righted itself again. “Watch it, there! That thing’s cocked!”
“I know it is,” Merry said grimly, “and you’re making me very nervous. When I grow nervous, my fingers twitch uncontrollably.”
This time he could see she meant it.
Staring at the loaded pistol, he asked uneasily, “What could I do to make you less nervous?”
“Row,” she said. And this time Meadows put his back into it. Neither spoke, and the only sounds were the rhythmically splashing oars and the sucking lap of the ocean as it moved beneath them. The battle sounds had faded to silence. The first searching tendrils of sun warmth fell softly on Merry’s cheeks, the breeze made a gentle massage on her weary shoulders, and the sea whispered a rich melody to the new day. Shifting the bucket to her lap, Merry tucked the pistol between her knees, crossed her arms on the bucket, and rested her cheek on her forearm. She meant only to close her eyes for a moment. In that moment she fell deeply asleep.
Merry woke with a sick knot in her stomach and powerful light stinging her scratchy eyelids. Her muscles burned as though someone had stitched nettles in them, and her face, nestled against the bucket’s rough unfinished surface, felt as though it had been rubbed down with sand. The stench of rum, pine, and sour sweat howled into her dry throat. Fabric covered her head. Overwhelmed by the feeling that she was about to suffocate, Merry grabbed wildly at it and emerged into blank white sunshine.
“Threw one of me shirts over you,” she heard Meadows say. Blinking against the heavy light, she couldn’t see him at first. “Shoulda been one of yourn,” he said, “but as you didn’t see fit to bring nothing wi’ you ’cept a no-good nothing of a squid—Here, have some of this.”
A horn cup was pressed into her hands. The water inside was hot and metallic to the taste. Merry drank three cupfuls of it before saying, “Thank you. I’ve had enough.” Shading her eyes and squinting, she was able to stand the light.
Meadows had raised the sail and lay comfortably stretched by the tiller. He had rolled his sleeves down to protect his arms from the sun and replaced the stocking cap with a dark, broad-brimmed hat that moths had long ago gotten the best of.
