The Windflower

by Laura London

  “We’ve spent almost two weeks looking for you,” he said. “That was two weeks without a prize—without even looking for one. The decision to search for you was fairly popular, given that you didn’t leave in the steadiest company—but no one likes to have commerce interrupted. And there are some missing gold pieces, which one assumes Meadows took; but can you prove it was him and not you?”

  “Well.” She smiled too brightly. Every nerve was alive and jumping. “I guess it’s the bow cannon and a cat-o’-nine-tails for me!”

  “Is it?” he said dryly. “From what Raven told me in confidence, last night you put up a little insurance against that with Devon.”

  From brightly smiling to brightly angry. “If Raven told you that was why—”

  He interrupted. “Raven didn’t tell me anything of the sort because, innocent that he is, it’s never occurred to him that you and Devon don’t ride together. It’s part of your protection that the men think you belong in every way to Devon, and no one other than Morgan and I and possibly Sails knows any different.” Moving away from her, he lifted the empty glass of herbal tea he had given her and held it in a loose clasp. “Last night, if it wasn’t insurance with Devon, what was it?” Then, absorbing the look she was giving him, he snapped, “Listen, I don’t want to discuss this either. But there’s no one else to tell you, so I’d better. I turn, take a breath, and whenever I look back in your direction, you’re in deeper. About last night?”

  “If a dog had arrived last night and pulled me off that island by the trousers seat, I would have kissed the dog,” she said defiantly. Why, of all people, had Raven chosen to confide how he had found her with Devon to Cat? Cat, who had several times pointed out that for a woman who professed to hate Devon, she was to be found in his arms with unaccountable frequency. Cat saw things too clearly. Eventually desperation might force her to confide to Cat the humiliating and overwhelming things she felt for Devon. Today she still needed to feign indifference, even though the young blond pirate was probably seeing right through it. She slid out of bed and stood up in her bare feet, facing him. “Go on. Tell me. How has kissing Devon made this disaster worse?”

  Cat set the glass down on a tin tray without breaking his contact with her eyes. “Sweetheart, first I have to teach you the word for ladies who seem like they will when they won’t.”

  “Whatever the word is, I’ll bet it was invented by a man,” she snapped. “There’s a bad name for you if you will and a bad name for you if you won’t.”

  “Did I say it was fair? I only wish you’d pick something out and stick to it. For your sake.”

  He had opened the door and almost closed it behind him when she said quietly, “Cat, did you grow up on Ile de la Tortue?”

  He returned silently. After examining her face he said, “Someone’s given you an earful about me? Was it Meadows?”

  She had the urge to drop her eyes but refrained, with effort, and nodded.

  With an expression that coldly disguised any trace of feeling, he asked, “Curious?”

  “No. I just wanted to tell you that if it’s true—”

  “What?”

  She took a breath. “If it’s true, I’m sorry.”

  The relaxation of his facial muscles was so gradual and subtle that she couldn’t perceive it until he came a step closer to her and stroked his hand once through her sleep-ruffled curls, very gently. “You poor, extraordinary girl,” he said. “Merry, you don’t have to be sorry.…”

  By eight bells, when she heard the watch change, yesterday’s headache had come back in force. By three bells that afternoon it had become so painful she could barely think. Room light hurt, and the incessant scrape of men walking and working above hurt. The steadily rolling dip of the vessel became agonizing. Earlier she had been sure that it must be her unexamined fear about what Devon was going to do to her that had created the demon throbbing under her scalp, but as the pain went on and grew worse she began to think perhaps it was the heat, which was as bitter here as the North American winter was cold. The air around her steamed, and she had begun to sweat like a mare, and the prickle of perspiration on her temples hurt too. She wet a towel in the water can, and without thinking to wring it out she sat at the table, burying her face in wet fabric as it splattered on the table and dripped over her forearms.

  The room seemed like a furnace, and the pain in her head was like a swelling sun before she began to call weakly for Cat. Making her way to the door, whispering his name, she put her hand on the latch for balance, and surprisingly it gave. Why hadn’t they locked her in? She found the stairway and wobbled on deck, where a hurricane hit her of bouncing sunlight, and noise, and familiar faces she could hardly identify.

  On the bow with Tom Valentine and Sails, Merry saw Devon, standing like a young Apollo with the shameless breezes molding and displacing the clothing around his body. His golden eyes discovered her quickly, and he broke off his conversation to come toward her with his fluid, springing step, holding out a hand to her.

  “Merry!”

  Sunbeams backlit him in a dazzling aura. To her tumultuous senses his approach and his gesture were a threat. She recoiled against a mast as she said, “Don’t touch me.”

  He stopped a few feet away, his expression becoming wary. “Is there something wrong, Windflower?”

  That unthinking use of his pet name for her was unsettling. God in heaven, he had his nerve asking her in that artless fashion if something was the matter. Why didn’t he look as warm as she was? Leaning her blood-hot head against the mast, she said, “I want you to let me go.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then he said, “No.”

  “Yes!” she came back, almost screaming the word.

  The brilliant eyes hardened. “You’ve been damned troublesome, do you know that? Give me one reason why I should accommodate you.”

  “Common decency.” Merry bit off the words sharply.

  “It’s rather late, isn’t it, to bring the virtues into this? Unless you think we’ll be able to make up for lost time.”

  The swelling mound of the great canvas sail above her head slapped in the wind, attracting her unsteady fancy. When she looked back at Devon, her mind had frighteningly destroyed every memory of what they had been talking about, except that it had been hostile. For some reason it seemed fiercely important to disguise the lapse from him.

  “Could that be a reference to what happened between us yesterday?” she said, because some nearly defunct sense was telling her that the remark was somehow relevant.

  “No,” he said, cold-eyed. “However, don’t let that stop you if you think it’s something we ought to be fighting about.”

  Cat had warned her about this, but his advice had been so obliquely delivered that she couldn’t remember what it was. Something about being consistent, she thought. Cat. She needed Cat. And here was Devon, waiting for an answer.

  “I’m not going to stay here to become your mistress,” she said desperately.

  His response came quick as a slap. “That tune is getting monotonous. Do you think you could learn some new notes?”

  “Perhaps. If you’d first master the prelude.” Her head and body burned until she could taste ashes. “Am I a mechanical music toy to be wound up and run down at your pleasure?”

  “Damn. I wish just once that you’d stay wound up.” There was a fine-drawn temper in his voice; his hedonist’s mouth smiled without humor. “God forbid that you and I should do anything the simple way, Merry mine, but it would probably save time and help us right to dead center of the argument if you’d tell me what’s igniting it.”

  A pause followed. They stared at each other, she angrily, he coolly, until a tongue of wind fumbled through her shirt buttons and lapped at the moisture on her burning skin. Violent tremors seized her, rattling her muscles. Hot waves crawled over her flesh like the breath of an open oven. It must have lasted only seconds, though to Merry it seemed to go on and on. During the course of it she saw Devon come
toward her in a colorful blur of movement.

  “Merry?” The tone he used this time was new to her. She felt his hands find and hold her shoulders, trapping her before him. Panicked by the contact, she dragged herself out of his grip and wobbled back, her dry, fevered hands fluttering defensively in front of her.

  “I’m not a pet. I don’t want to be handled,” she said.

  He made no further move toward her, though anyone watching him except Merry could have seen the discipline of that was not easy for him. His eyes held a deep frown. When he spoke again, his voice was soft and deliberate.

  “Love, I know you’re not a pet. No one will touch you if you don’t want them to, but you must go below and—”

  “And what? Go below and wait to be assaulted?” Shivers coursed through her voice. “Or go below until you’re ready to whip me? Or are you going to find some way to combine the two? Oh, how well I know how ingenious you can be.”

  Through a sight field that was filling up with shimmering red stars, Merry saw a black-haired boy approach her from the direction of the mizzenmast. He was running, with compassion and worry etched well into his comely teenage features. For less than a second she knew it was Raven, and then that name was lost. He looked at Devon and then at her and came toward her. Between the heat and the pain the idea came to her that Devon had sent him to whip her, and she cowered from him, moving backward blindly on the sliding deck, her flowing hair snarling in the rough lines of the rigging. Devon held the boy back from her with a sharp command.

  “Please, mon, let me help her,” the boy said. “You can see she’s—”

  “I know. But she might hurt herself if she’s forced. Get Cat.”

  A gull screeched, and Merry retreated once more, her fists cupped over her ears. The cool caress of the wind grew stronger as she neared the gunwale, and she stood, swaying, with ocean water spotting her clothes at the ship’s edge. Strong arms caught and pulled her back to safety, but as she opened her eyes the firm grip on her waist was too tight and terrifying. Twisting a neck that had no flexibility left in it, she saw that Devon held her and tore out of his hands. Her ill-functioning mind willfully misinterpreted his action, and she clung to the heavy lines strung to the foremast, weaving precariously over the edge as the tall ship rolled. Over rushing water and timbers that creaked, she heard her own voice babbling about torture and pain. With difficulty she realized that she was saying, “You don’t have to drag me. What else do you think I expect from you but mindless barbarities? Flog me, then.… Where do you want me to go? The bow cannon, didn’t you say? Where is it? I want to be everyone’s ideal of a brave woman.”

  An older man with sharp gray eyes and the tools of a sailmaker hanging from his belt was talking to Devon, and when he finished, she heard Devon say to the man, “You’re right. But I can’t do it.”

  The sailmaker answered, “Aye, laddie. Better ’tis another in any case.” Then, “Willy, be a good boy. See what ye can do. Easy does it.”

  Insulated by the scorpion pain inside her skull, Merry couldn’t see the tanned young man approach her, and she hardly heard one word in three that he spoke to her. She leaned back tiredly against the lines, feeling the vibrant blast of the gray sea under her neck. The young man’s slowly enunciated words began to come to her.

  “Merry. Listen to me, sweeting. It’s Will Saunders. You remember—big brother Will. You want to walk to the bow cannon, don’t you? If you take my hand. No. All right. But come with me, won’t you? You don’t want us to… to have to be rough with you.”

  Eventually she felt herself begin to respond to the patient commands, and when she reached the nine-pounder in the bow and fell against it, she gasped, “How do you like your victims? Should I drape myself across it, like laundry spread to dry?”

  “No, Merry.” This time the voice belonged to Devon. “Sit by it, rest your head on the chase, and wait.”

  Merry dropped to her knees, looping her arms over the cannon, hugging it like a flood victim in rampaging waters, dropping her face against the sweating metal. Sobs began to hiccup from her aching throat. Superheated tears traced quick rivulets over her skin. After a while she remembered to look up, but her field of vision had become a mosaic of pretty, abstract shapes and colors, like a pattern on cloth, their meanings only loosely symbolic. The colors faded into a soft gray, and then she realized Cat had come and that he was talking to Devon.

  As Cat came down beside her the sleek rope of his braid slid over Merry’s hand, and she caught it and carried it foolishly to her burning cheek and saturated the pale hair with her tears. His hands were sweetly cool where they touched her with a calm and sexless assessment. Even so she whimpered, “Don’t hurt me.”

  “Never, sweetheart,” he said. “Let your head fall back against my arm. That’s it.… Merry, tell me where you’re having pain.”

  She had tried to listen to him, but each word slipped away separately from her as soon as she heard it. Sounds around her were hauntingly muted. She stared distractedly at the rolling tears that were landing in fat oily bubbles on her hand. A cold cloth, laid against her neck, her ears, her cheeks, brought her gently back.

  “Merry, where’s the pain?”

  Trying sluggishly to concentrate, she evaluated her unfriendly body. The headache was gone. It took her a long time, following false and benumbed nerve routes, to learn that the pain had spread downward.

  “C-Cat—I’ve been whipped.… I th-think I’ve been whipped.”

  Devon said something, a sharp exclamation, and over her head Merry heard Cat say, “Don’t start that, for God’s sakes. It’s the fever talking.” His voice had grown less calm than his hands. “Raven?”

  “On the other island, the one Will and I searched”—the soft Caribbean vowels were slurring heavily—“they had buried two men. They had a fever—”

  Cat said urgently, “Did it begin with back pain?”

  “No. A rash.”

  Merry was lowered to the deck with dizzying speed, and Cat tore open her shirt. Groggily angered by the indignity, momentarily recalled to sanity by the uncomfortable hard surface striking her shoulder blades, she said in a cranky voice, “Don’t treat me like a blighted corn ear. I can hear you talking about me. And I don’t want fifty people looking at my rash.”

  “You don’t have a rash, Merry, peach. That’s one possibility eliminated.” Devon’s voice came from close to her. “Can you slide your arms around my neck? Including every and all circumstances, there hasn’t been a time when I’ve wanted more to take you to bed.…”

  She returned to awareness in Morgan’s cabin. Wet cloths covered her aching limbs, and the diamond cut windows dropped light on her eyelids. The sun, which had been bright when she opened her eyes, smeared to dun, and when she looked again, the room was dark and the windowpanes were thick with stars. A quiet voice—Devon’s?—was saying, “She’s much cooler now.”

  “I knew it.” Cat’s voice. “Damn. That’s what we were afraid of.”

  Why was it bad that she was cooler? Vaguely disturbed, she slipped into sleep.

  Morning’s silver light gave a misty patina to the cabin when she awoke. Devon, who needed a shave, sat on the bed close to her. He slipped an arm under her shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position. Slowly he fed her a cup of vegetable broth that was rich, flavorful, and full of shredded cabbage—where had that come from? After she had taken all of it, he set the cup down and then turned the pillow with his hand and plumped it before he laid her back down.

  “Some people,” he said calmly, “will do anything to attract attention.”

  A return to the temporary benevolence. That’s fine with me, she thought, since I’m weaker than a tin candy kettle. She retained a hazy memory of making a spectacle of herself the day before on deck. She grinned weakly and said, “Hullo.”

  “Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself?” he said with feeling.

  So she sheepishly added, “Good soup.”

  He laughed, p
ressing the side of her neck with long, graceful fingers. It seemed to her that he was searching for fever, but he showed neither surprise nor relief when he found no evidence of it.

  “How do you feel?” he said.

  “Good. But like a stewed grouse.” With a knit brow, “Am I not cured?”

  “We’ll see.” His smile was carefully arranged to cheer and to instill confidence. It was so well done that it didn’t occur to her to look under the surface. And there was another, more urgent issue that needed to be settled. Merry gathered her nerve.

  “I don’t doubt you’re disappointed that I was too ill for a whipping.”

  “Heartsick. I’ve been up all night wringing my hands over it.”

  One thing was certainly true. He had been up all night. Sleeplessness, like every other state, loved his face. Nevertheless, she could see its fine bite.

  He moved to take her hand, and it lay small and curving in his as he touched it gently to his lips. Tiny sparks grew under her skin where his mouth had touched.

  “I suppose you think that falling ill was my just deserts for running away from you?” With her free hand she made a project of wrapping one red-gold curl around her finger and gazing studiously at it. “All things considered, it was easier on your dignity than on mine for you to find me in such a mess.”

  “A mess? Was that what it was?” He gave her a wide-eyed look that she realized was an imitation of her own. “My dear! And here I was thinking you were happily rusticating on a balmy island. It must have been refreshing to get away from all men after your months of patiently enduring the stag-and-drake atmosphere on the Joke.”

  He waited for her brief smile to bloom and fade away before glancing down at their entwined hands. She watched curiously as he stroked the tip of his forefinger over the pansy surface of her nail plates. His expression was soft. Had she actually surprised some real spark from him? The promise of that settled like a moody stranger in her heart.

  “Poor Windflower. Did you really think I was going to beat you?”

  Cat came into the room with her breakfast in time to hear the last, and he put in grimly, “Why shouldn’t she? You ought to see yourself when you’re angry.”