The Windflower

by Laura London

  More than three hundred great ships bobbed like floating gulls in the vast bay, while sturdy punts streamed busily between them and the wharf on a hundred separate errands. An oyster-catcher caught Merry’s attention, a black-and-white dart in a silver heaven. She followed its flight until it passed over a mail packet making a slow departure under sticky sails, passing within hailing distance of where the Black Joke rode at anchor.

  From where Merry stood, the Joke appeared to be one more innocuous vessel, nodding under the stern gaze of Pendennis Castle. Passing in a skiff under the Joke’s bowsprit not half an hour ago, she had seen the bright flare of the colors of Great Britain flapping proudly over the ship, and the fresh painted name on the prow. The Eagle, it had said. There was no clue to the casual onlooker that this was a pirate ship turned privateer with a rich load of spoils lashed in her hold awaiting division with the crown, and a dark-eyed boy wearing chains in the fo’c’sle.

  It had not been a particularly pleasant voyage. Raven had been incarcerated about a week ago, following an incident with Devon that no one would talk to her about beyond admitting that yes, it had been something to do with her, but she’d better keep her oar out of it anyway. Late that night she had heard Morgan’s quiet voice in the passageway outside her door.

  “Yes, Tom, I’m aware of that, but this way at least he can’t get into trouble. Much as he’s made a nuisance of himself lately, I don’t want to whip the child a second time. I know Raven is frightened for the girl, but I doubt Devon’s temper could support another one of Raven’s fits of weeping.”

  “And Cat?” The voice belonged to Thomas Valentine.

  “Cat, thank God, is not a fool. He’ll do as he’s told.”

  Valentine said something in a low tone that made Morgan laugh.

  “Not you also, Tom?” said the pirate captain. “I thought you were immune! No, Devon hasn’t confided in me what he plans to do with her. I would tend to think…” The closing door of Morgan’s cabin shut from her the trend of Morgan’s thoughts, which was probably just as well. They were not likely to afford her much comfort.

  She remembered well the only two sentences Devon had said to her in the course of the journey, and even those had not been in the strictest sense spoken to her. She had fallen from the rigging where she had been climbing with Raven, and though it was not a long fall, she had landed awkwardly and dislocated her thumb. It had been one of those days when one just doesn’t feel like being mature about an injury. Light-headed with pain, she had fled, yelping, from Cat before he could undertake the excruciating process of setting the thumb. In the end it had been Sails who caught and held her in a gently steeled grip, clucking soothingly as Cat did what he must. Surrounded as she was by anxious sympathizers, she had no idea Devon had come on deck in time to witness her treatment until it was over. Then, with his expression sealed, he had walked forward through the suddenly silent pirate crew and looked for perhaps a minute into Merry’s face, though it had actually been to Raven that he had said, “I don’t want her up there again. Is that clear?”

  Otherwise, he had said nothing to or about her. When she met him on deck or in a passageway, his glance was indifferent and did not linger. Watching his face in those moments, she found it hard to believe that she had ever seen tenderness there. It might be that she had been deceived by her own willingness to find it. If she lived for one thing now, it was the day when she could cut him as cleanly from her heart as he had swept her from his.

  The broken feeling between her and Devon haunted her days and nights, along with the endless frightening questions about what he would do with her in England. And, especially in the first days at sea, there had been the barren and bestripped feeling that came from missing Annie, whom she had come to depend on for friendship and support more than she’d realized. Cook had stayed behind as well, because Annie was to have a child. They had even solemnized their common-law marriage before a priest at Sails’s urging on the day before the Joke sailed, and it was the riotous and unusual preparations Raven and Will Saunders had made for the wedding that had provided distraction during those terrible days following her estrangement from Devon.

  She’d had a birthday on the Joke. Strange things, birthdays. You wake up in the morning to find you’ve aged a year. Of course, that morning she had not thought of it at all. It had not occurred to her until midafternoon when Cat was about to write in his journal—fascinating reading, Morgan said—and had casually mentioned the day and the month. The date had hovered for a while in her mind, as though there were something familiar about it, and then she had remembered: today she could claim another year.

  But the woman who stood beside Cat on the Falmouth jetty seemed much more than a year older than the one who had mounted the New York pier beside Aunt April. There was a certain irony, if one had the stamina left to note it, in the observation that she had finally arrived at her intended destination.

  This morning Cat had awakened her from an uneasy sleep at dawn with a light touch on the cheek.

  “Merry? I have your breakfast. Devon wants me to bring you to him on shore.”

  Since then there had been silence between them. What was there to say? Morgan was right. Cat would do as he was told.

  Ahead she could see the traveling carriage waiting on the narrow quayside street, the horses thrashing the pasty moisture from their haunches with short-cropped tails and rolling their massive shoulders against their collars as a postilion in a tall hat adjusted the far trace. She turned quickly to Cat.

  “He’s taking me away?”

  The young pirate hesitated. Then, “The carriage’s hire is paid to London. Merry—”

  Her face tilted upward to search his eyes for some sign of hope or comfort. Rain bedewed her eyelashes in tiny clear pearls and shone on the curve of her cheekbone until he covered her face with his own, just touching her brow with his lips. In that moment the clatter of hoofbeats brought a rider around the vehicle.

  “How bloody touching.” The lightly arid voice above them was Devon’s. “Is this going to be an extended farewell, or is it possible that—Thank you, Cat. You can put her bag on the seat beside her.”

  It was hard not to feel lost forever as she rode alone in the jolting carriage staring through the leaded window glass at the melancholy grandeur of the Cornish hills.

  The sweeping lonely valleys, the high jagged tumble of cleft boulders, the stark villages with their wet windblown trees and cob walls seemed bleak in the half-light, though an occasional distant shaft of sunlight falling through an open seam in the clouds would lend the rough terrain a quality that was eerily peaceful. How foreign this place was to her. Even the churches, ancient chapels under moor-stone slate roofs in shades of tawny yellow and green and russet, seemed gaunt and forbidding. She slid her hand into her valise and drew out the cloth bag that held her collection of shells, putting them one after another onto the dark drape of the cloak that covered her lap so she could touch the beguiling tropical contours. As always, she saved until last the great conch she had discovered on the St. Elise sands that day with Devon. Riding outside, he must be wretchedly wet by now. Merry tried to let that thought console her.

  It was very late when they stopped at an inn. She was so tired and travel-battered, she barely glimpsed Devon in the scattered flashes of impression she received in the short walk through the yard where wood, horses, and men were dissonantly pitched drums for the deluge from the skies. There was a chambermaid, hot food, and a feather bed with a warming pan in a private room. Before first light the chambermaid was back and the order was reversed: bed to food to cold yard to carriage, while she was still stunned with sleepiness.

  Exhaustion dulled her to the landscape, and she had missed much in the darkness. The rain had stopped, though a glance out the window might show her a ferny stand of oak rising from a coiling base of blue mist.

  By midmorning, when the carriage stopped at a pretty inn of dressed stone, Merry’s legs were stiff, her behind felt like i
t had been beaten with a grain shovel, and she was awake enough to be frightened and desperate. A meal of tea and toast, lamb chops and eggs was brought to her in a small parlor, deserted except for two middle-aged ladies in silk pelisses and their apricot poodle, who jumped from lap to lap eating potatoes from their plates.

  It had been months, and seemed years, since Merry had been among gentlewomen. They seemed like creatures from another life; and though it didn’t occur to her to ask them to help her, because the lady facing her reminded Merry of Aunt April, if only in her air of refinement, Merry couldn’t stop herself from smiling wistfully at her. She had forgotten how she herself must appear—disheveled, oddly dressed, seemingly alone. The look Merry received back was repelling in the extreme, and Merry dropped her eyes to her plate, aching with hurt, and wondering how low it was possible to sink.

  Somewhere in this unfriendly land there was, perhaps, one friend. Aunt April might be here. If the Guinevere had sailed before it was discovered that Merry had disappeared, Aunt April might have sailed on to England. In wartime surely it would not have been possible to return promptly to the United States to search for her missing niece however much that might be her wish. It was another point for the list of ironies that in a sense Devon was right about her. If there was a way to do it, she was going to escape from him and find Michael Granville. She had many reasons to be wary of that man, given the lies he had been spreading about her, even factoring out Morgan’s horrifying claim that some action of Granville’s had led to the death of Devon’s sister, but Granville was the only man who would be able to tell Merry where she could find her aunt. As a knight of the realm, Granville must be relatively easy to locate. She supposed she was obliged to Devon for giving her the idea.

  After weeks of hardtack, toast with fresh-churned butter was a delight, even cold and under these uncongenial circumstances. She was eating the last bites as the ladies left the parlor to walk their little dog. Immediately after their departure Devon came in, his unbuttoned greatcoat open over the long line of his leather breeches. From the energy in his step no one would have been able to guess that he had spent the better part of the last two days in the saddle. She tried to banish her feeling of utter defeat as he looked straight into her eyes, picked up her cloak from the back of her chair, and held it open.

  “Come” was all he said. She didn’t move. “Are you finished?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Well? Then, let’s go.” She stood but made no move for the door.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  She could hear the exhaustion in her own voice as she said, “You’ve set too fast a pace. A moment ago I drifted off and almost woke with my nose in a lamb chop. If you could only let me have the afternoon to rest—”

  “No.”

  “Then only an hour.”

  “An hour,” he said, “is not going to do you any good. If we stop for an hour, that’s an extra hour we’ll have to travel after nightfall. The sooner this is over, the better for you.”

  Infusing her soggy backbone with some stiffness, she resettled her spine into a more noble posture. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to know where we’re going.”

  He took a step forward and settled the cloak around her shoulders, and she conquered an impulse to step away.

  “I’ll let you know”—he fastened her cloak—“when I’m in the mood.”

  “That’s much too good of you,” she answered with sarcasm that tried hard to be withering. “Would it spoil some international tactical arrangement and plunge the empire into chaos if I could have five minutes to comb my hair?”

  “Comb it in the coach” was his laconic answer as he took her arm, propelling her toward the door. She pulled out of his grip.

  “Hang it, Devon, I want five minutes to use the convenience.” She felt her cheeks turn crimson.

  “Well, for God’s sake, why didn’t you say so? I don’t know your code,” he said.

  At his worst the man had an inherent decency that even he couldn’t escape. When it turned out the outdoor privy was unusable after flooding from the recent heavy rains, Devon rented her a bedchamber and told her with a sudden almost reluctant kindness that if she really thought an hour’s rest would help her, she could have it, but no longer. Her face must be looking more weary than she realized.

  The bedchamber was clean and old-fashioned, smelling faintly of the home-brewed ale used to gloss the fine oak wainscot. It more than made up for its deficiency of not being on the ground floor by possessing a window that faced toward the back of the inn, with a wide tiled porch directly beneath supported by stout poles that appeared to have been designed with shinnying down them in mind. And she might have gotten away too if the landlord had been as conscientious about keeping his roof in repair as he was about preserving the finishing on his wainscoting. And if it hadn’t been his practice to keep his geese flocked in a pen directly beneath.

  It was a sorry spectacle of an escape attempt; in fact it ranked as her worst. The flustered geese trumpeted their fury at her and ran about her in circles loosing feathers while she sat winded in the ooze under the new gash in the porch roof, with splinters of lathing and bits of plaster falling on her head and a broken window pot of geraniums between her legs. The gander spread his ruffled wings ominously and stood before her like Gabriel reprimanding a sinner. Through a forest of arching scrawny necks Merry saw the people come running; the ostlers, the stableboys, the hired postilion, the kitchen maids, the two ladies with their yipping poodle, the landlord and landlady, and finally Devon, who dragged her out of the mud and feathers and across the fence. But this was a different Devon from the cold-eyed stranger who had put her in his coach this morning. This was a smiling, urbane Devon who dripped tact like warm molasses, apologizing to the landlord even as he slipped him a note for the damages. When it became clear that the landlord’s curiosity as well as his temper was aroused about what purpose a young woman might have in hopping around on his porch roof, Devon’s smile increased in power and became at once rueful and convincing. The hand he laid on her shoulder seemed a kindly gesture; only Merry felt the threat in the pressure of his strong fingers. Her jaw clenched with humiliated rage as she listened to Devon tell the titillated mob that she was the runaway youngest daughter of a Frensham barrister (the tone of voice managing to convey neatly that she had been much indulged) and then continue to describe himself as her older cousin, who had barely rescued her from a disastrous elopement with a penniless foot soldier (a gambler and unprincipled wastrel if only she could be brought to see it!).

  “Why, of all the unctuous, deceitful—How dare you!” Merry cried, unbearably mortified by the severely critical expressions directed toward her. Too tired to quite know or care what she was saying, Merry turned pleadingly to the landlady, who had at least shown more concern for Merry’s possible injuries than for the broken porch. “It’s not true! I beg you to believe me. This man is a pirate. He’s kidnapped me and held me for months on his pirate ship and refuses to release me in spite of my pleading.”

  She might as well have saved her breath. Truth is so often no more impressive than its herald—and she made a thoroughly unimpressive herald. It was with despair but not surprise that she saw compassionate condescension alight convincingly on Devon’s features.

  “Oh, Nan,” he said to her, laughing. “How could you? Very well, then. As you say, I’m a pirate, and I’ve kidnapped you.”

  “But you have! He has! He’s telling the truth!”

  It was no use. None at all. The landlady began to tut-tut, the kitchen maids to giggle, and the ladies with the poodle to talk about the want of conduct prevalent among young females of this generation. The landlord clapped Devon heartily on the back and proclaimed him the scourge of the Seven Seas, adding with a sly wink that he supposed the shot was to be paid for in pieces of eight! There was a good deal more of that kind of badinage, which Devon allowed to continue until, apparently, he felt that he was well revenged.
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  A mile from the inn he stopped the carriage beside an arched stone bridge above a brook where cows rustled, half-concealed in the rushes. She shrank from him but had no strength to fight when he entered the carriage with a length of rope and bound her wrists.

  “I’ll say this for you,” he conceded grimly. “You try.”

  Evening came, a smoky mauve lip on a black horizon. They had stopped often to change horses. Twice he had brought food to the carriage, and she’d had to eat it with her hands tied. She’d had to ask him to make a third stop with choked-back pride. This time the “convenience” was a beech copse where wasps zigzagged among tiny hawkweed flowers, and convenient it was not, because he refused to untie her wrists. If his acute golden eyes noticed the trail on her cheek left by tears hastily knuckled dry with bound hands when she came back to the carriage, he gave no sign of it. Mentally retracting everything she’d thought earlier about his basic decency, she was so wretched, she almost had the relief of being able to convince herself she hated him.

  She slept, or it seemed so. A gray veil settled over her vision; a soft roar muffled all other sound; her mind carried meandering dream images. Awareness came occasionally in swiftly vanishing stabs. Some fragment of her stuporous brain registered the choked turnpikes, the change in sounds and odors, the brilliant flash of bright-lit shop windows glancing off her eyelashes. She slid into wakefulness in a still carriage, her body crumpled over her valise. Her spine felt like a stiff iron pipe, her eyes burned from lack of rest, and her throat was sandy. Devon, gathering her upright, was shrouded in rotating star points. Blinking rapidly against the altering intensity of light and the fresher air as he drew her outside, she pulled out of the steadying arms, her pattens clicking against a pavement.