The Windflower

by Laura London

  Cat released an aging breath from his lungs. “Wilding. The famous ones?”

  “The famous ones. The fanatical ones. James and Carl Wilding…” A terse smile touched Morgan’s firm lips. “He was probably better to her than I would have been. My only consolation. I left someone with the children—”

  “I know. Merry’s Henry Cork.”

  Morgan’s brow skipped upward in mocking admiration. “How long have you known?”

  “When she was ill,” Cat said, “she told me all about Henry Cork, and the man bore a certain resemblance to old Hezekiah, the gunner’s mate that Sails used to tell stories about. Big practical joker. I found his name on a copy of your old manifest on St. Elise. Hezekiah Cork.”

  “My, my. You have been rowing with both oars, haven’t you? Hezekiah Cork. He wasn’t much, but at least I knew I could trust him not to seduce the girl the day she reached puberty. What I haven’t quite figured out yet is what she was doing on a ship bound for Britain in Michael Granville’s company, and why he would go to so much trouble to besmirch her reputation. Although I suspect Letitia’s fingers in this somewhere.”

  “Devon’s grandmother?”

  “Yes.” Morgan uncrossed his ankles. “She reposes immense confidence in Granville’s integrity. And you see, I’d been toying with the idea of bringing Merry to England if the political situation in America continued to deteriorate. I had Letitia maintain a correspondence with Merry’s aunt so that if I had to move her, it could be done through an intermediary. At that point there seemed to be nothing to be gained by terrifying the girl with the knowledge that I had an interest in her. In the end I decided she’d be safer where she was.” He studied his toes, flexing them. “It turns out, of course, that I was wrong. It was fortunate you brought her to me.”

  “ ‘All the while he by his side her bore. She was as safe as in a Sanctuary,’ ” Cat quoted sarcastically. “And you decided she’d do for Devon. Please, if you happen to pick someone out you want me to marry, just say ‘Marry her!’ and I will. Don’t drag me through all the cellars in hell by the seat of my inexpressibles first.”

  “Nonsense.” Morgan’s smile was disquieting. “I only provided proximity. They did the rest. I wouldn’t have encouraged it if I hadn’t seen in the beginning that they were in love. You’re worried about Merry; then go after her.”

  Morgan’s words had taken Cat off guard. He said quickly, “Do you mean it?”

  “Certainly. You might begin looking for her at Cathcart’s. I gave Devon a letter to deliver to him.”

  There it was. The trap, neatly closing. He might have known. Through hell by the seat of his breeches. Why had he ever expected anything else?

  “Why do you always have to be so bloody thorough?” Cat’s eyes grew colder than the icy fluids that had suddenly filled up his veins. “Was the letter about me?”

  “My dear, what else do I have in common with the saintly Cathcart? Certainly it was about you. Run along to London and find out what’s becoming of our little nestling. But first,” he said with a malicious grin, “find me something to put on my feet. I don’t intend to brave the wet cobbles of Falmouth in my stockings.”

  Sitting in Lord Cathcart’s library three days later with the history of Rome on his lap, Cat thought angrily that what Morgan deserved was to walk over live coals in his bare feet. He flipped open the expensively bound volume. It was printed on wave paper. Good God, who could read it? A gift, obviously, from one of the illiterati. Most of Cathcart’s friends were men of letters, weren’t they? He looked on the front leaf. For dear Brian. From your sincere, loving, and affectionate friend Aline. On Christmas Day 1813. Aline. Devon’s mother. That was interesting. After years of benign devotion here was Devon’s mother giving Cathcart books with love sandwiched pathetically between sincerity and affection. As an approach it was probably too subtle for Cathcart. She would have done better with Dear Brian. Aching and damp for you in my lonely bed. Pension off your mistress and I’m yours. Aline. It must be difficult for her. Rumor had it that she was a woman of unassailable virtue. Enough men, certainly, had tried to assail it, including the royal scion himself. Poor woman, and here she was, chaste as unsunn’d snow and reduced to trying to send blurred signals at her late husband’s best friend. Cat closed the book cover. Maybe he was reading too much into a simple inscription.

  Outside, a carriage stopped in clanging rhythmics of iron upon rounded stone. With unwelcome emotion writhing in his stomach Cat heard the muted sounds of Cathcart’s entrance, the indecipherable rustle of his conversation with the butler. The door opened. Lord Cathcart entered.

  They stood in the quiet and looked at each other. Father and son. The man and the only living creation of his body.

  The boy had his looks from his mother—the sturdy bones, the square hips and shoulders, the relaxed elegance of the carriage, and the odd tintless hair that had enchanted Cathcart nineteen years ago. Cathcart had met her on his Grand Tour, and though she had blossomed from the purest flower of Swedish gentility, and was only twenty, she was tainted already by disgrace, and there had been plenty of people to warn Cathcart not to marry her. But Cathcart had been young and naïve, and his insight was colored by the generosity of spirit that later made him a beloved and enlightened philanthropist; he had believed in her completely, ignoring or forgiving every sign that she might not fully return his regard, and attributing her heavy use of oral opiates to the stresses of her unquiet nature. When she deserted him after five months of marriage, it had stricken him to the marrow of his soul, and it was five years before he had recovered enough to allow Devon’s father to gently prod him into hiring a young lawyer to find out what had become of her so that they could gather the evidence for a divorcement. The lawyer was a conscientious man; it was not his fault that when he traced the woman to the Caribbean brothel where opium overuse had finally stopped her heart, no one there had thought to tell him she had left a child. Probably none of them took any interest in the parentage of the filthy and abused scraps of humanity that slept in the hen yard, the malnourished survivors of the abortionist’s sporadic competence. They became better kept and better fed as they grew older, and a source of labor or profit.

  It had been Rand Morgan, with his myriad sources, and his curiosities, and his own much less overt philanthropy, who had heard the old scandal from Devon and decided, because the frail underside of the seemingly pious had always interested him, that Cathcart’s investigations had been criminally lax and if it were ever convenient, he might look into the matter himself. And Morgan’s looking into the matter had produced Cat, and the documentation that the boy had been born in a month that placed his conception during the only period in Cathcart’s marriage when it would have been impossible for his wife to be unfaithful.

  Four years ago Lord Cathcart had been introduced to the existence of his child by Devon, who had met him in an inn fronting the Thames. “Brian, you have a son,” Devon had said gently and began the careful, compassionate explanation of Cat’s life in a narrative that avoided judgments but could do nothing to buffer the horror of the full truth.

  The horror had been crushing. Morgan had brought the boy in, and Cathcart, searching beneath the surface for a child, could see only a braid, and an earring, and the eyes, old eyes, and an existence he could barely imagine. Trying to reach through those things, he had found in Cat (dear heaven, that name—he couldn’t bring himself to use it) a hard-willed and intelligent adolescent who was bored, impatient, saw no significance in their relationship, and who, it was clear, was here only because Morgan had commanded it and it was his habit to obey Morgan. No, there was more than habit in his obedience to Morgan; there was something deeper. How intimate had their relationship become? Discipline and the need to preserve his own sanity had kept Cathcart from following that thought to its conclusion.

  Twice, at Cathcart’s insistence and with Morgan’s bland consent, there had been experiments in which Cat came to stay with him in London. Both occasion
s had been failures. What would a third failure do to them both?

  Lord Cathcart watched the boy put down the book and stand, candle-glow irradiating like a phasm from the smooth coils of his braid.

  “I’m here,” the boy said, his expression remote, his tone polite. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “No. I’m pleased.” Cathcart had learned to keep his phrases simple. In the past anything more had sounded surprisingly insincere, even when it was meant from the heart. It was harder for him than it was for the boy; because love for a son was ingrained in Cathcart while Cat had no need for a father. And on the Joke he’d had a whole shipload of potential fathers, if he’d wanted one, and all of them less alien than an English marquis. “I appreciated your letters.”

  There had been two, delivered at odd times of the night by disreputable-looking scoundrels four months after they were dated. The first, eighteen months ago, had said, “Alive. On the Atlantic. Cat.” The second, in March, had said, “Devon gave me your letter. I don’t understand why you say you need to see me. I’ve never noticed that my presence does anything beyond distress you. If you call my relationship with Morgan ‘an infatuation’ once more, it’s unlikely that you’ll hear from me again. Cat.” The words may not have been friendly, but they were the closest Cathcart had ever come to an exchange of substance with his son.

  Cat acknowledged his father’s appreciation with a slight wary nod. Then, coming right to the point, he said, “Has Devon been here?”

  “Yes. Last night.”

  Urgently, “Was there a girl with him?”

  “Yes. Merry Wilding. He married her this morning.”

  “Jesus! He married her?”

  Recoiling inside, unfamiliar as he was with the workings of his son’s mind, Lord Cathcart misinterpreted his wonder. The surprise in Cat’s gently sardonic inflection sounded like callous incredulity, as though he could hardly imagine why Devon would marry her, when women were to be used and discarded.

  It took so much of Cat’s concentration to absorb that change in Merry’s situation that it was a moment before he realized Cathcart was watching him in rigid silence. I’ve said something wrong, Cat thought. Already. Was it the “Jesus”? He was trying to figure out whether it would make things better or worse if he apologized when Cathcart said, “You knew her on the Joke?”

  That tone. Accustomed as Cat was to thinking of himself as Merry’s… almost her foster parent, it required some abrupt mental gymnastics to recognize that this stranger whose only claim on him was that they had both spent a minute or two between the thighs of the same woman—under entirely different circumstances—this self-righteous stranger saw him as one of her captors. And of course, in a way, he had been. Before, all of this had been only irritation. Having to spend time with this gentle, balding scholar at Morgan’s insistence—irritation; having the man’s gawky, gossiping servants stare at him as though he were about to run off with the silver—irritation; being introduced to Cathcart’s noble friends with their slack-jawed fascination—well, all right, that had been a little more than irritating. But this—prior to now only Rand Morgan had been able to make Cat feel this kind of vivid hot and cold anger. The feeling he usually had with Cathcart, the feeling that he wanted to retreat and retreat, switched with shattering speed to attack.

  “Did I know her in the biblical sense, do you mean?” he snapped, his eyes wide and brighter than he knew.

  The last thing Cathcart desired was to strike his son on an open nerve. Truthfully he had never thought the boy had one. Could Merry Wilding have touched him as she had Devon?

  “No,” Cathcart said. God help me to say the right thing, he thought. “Devon assured me that she was protected from that. We don’t have to discuss it.”

  “Why not? Because you can’t stand to hear the truth about the way I live? Because you don’t want to know that I brought her on the Joke against her will, that I held her down so Morgan could feed her opium, that I left her in Devon’s bed, knowing that he might—” Cat broke off, hardly recognizing his own voice. Odd quick catches separated words and syllables. The vowels had soft slurs. His throat ached. What was this? Guilt. Guilt for every time she had needed him and he had turned away. Guilt for the rough words he had spoken to her on those first days when he could have been comforting and kind. Now she was married. And safe. And as he had done once before, when he had realized she was going to survive the nearly fatal attack of malaria, he was crying. Of all times, of all places for this to happen—he thrust his face into one callused palm with a sound somewhere between a gasp and a groan. In a moment he felt himself being drawn into the warm oval of his father’s arms. He would have cast off the hug because he usually hated being touched, but this clasp was startling in its strength and tenderness; and the darkness around him began to recede though the sobs came harder, painfully racking contractions in his esophagus. He murmured, “This is so bloody embarrassing.”

  Cathcart remembered asking Devon once if Cat ever smiled. Devon had said, “He has a sense of humor, but no, he doesn’t smile. When you know him better, it won’t matter.” Devon was right. It didn’t matter. As warm as a smile was this disarming ability the boy had to express with such candor that his tears embarrassed him. Absorbing the precious weight of his son’s body, gazing down at the neat pale hair, Cathcart saw that it was not tintless, as his mother’s had been, but held the delicate sunny ivory shades of a pear blossom.

  “Did you come to care for her a great deal?” Cathcart said thoughtfully.

  “Someone had to. At first she was so helpless—” Cat heard Cathcart chuckle, not as Morgan would have done. This sound was sympathetic, gently interested.

  “She’s not helpless anymore. Last night she landed a wallop on the underside of Devon’s jaw that almost knocked him out of his waistcoat,” Cathcart said, watching his son lift his head, the pale lashes webbed with blue glittering tears.

  “Did she? Poor midget, his jaw’s the only part of him she can reach, unless he leans over,” Cat said shakily, blinking. “He’s been acting like an ass lately. I hope she knocked some sense into him.”

  “I think she did,” Cathcart smiled. “He seemed more reasonable afterward.” He felt the slight gather of tension in his son’s well-muscled shoulders, and he stepped back, gently releasing the boy, not with regret but with grateful wonder that he had had this brief first chance to hold his unchildlike child. “Can you stay? We should give them a few days alone, and then, if you like, we could visit them.”

  Cat nodded. As he took the comfortable chair Cathcart offered and settled into its velvet upholstery, it occurred to him that there was one thing Cathcart offered the people around him that Morgan never gave to anyone. Peace.

  Chapter 27

  Dawn frosted the loft with sun-shot colors that spangled the fragrant rolling surfaces with prisms and sipped night broth from the magenta shadows. Awakening to a gush of hot, voluptuous sensations, Merry felt Devon’s warmth beside her, his palm a deep pressure on her breast, kneading, flexing, shaping the full mound that was softly burning under his touch. He had uncovered her to the muted sunlight and to his gaze, and her first memory was of her own flowery wantonness under his hands last night. She whimpered, curling away from him, and sat up with her back to him, the bruised hay snapping under her. Her arms crossed over the blood-hot flesh on her breasts, her hair falling like a crepe lisse curtain between her parted knees.

  “What is it, Windflower?” His voice, behind her, was a gentle whisper.

  There were any number of things, including the unfamiliar delicacy of her body, holding yet the sweet flavors of his lovemaking; and her diffuse uncertainties about the strength of his love; and her fears about the wisdom of this hurried marriage and… and… She felt his hands spreading the curls on her neck, uncovering the highest point of her spine. His open mouth slowly brushed her there; his tongue followed in a rough caress, a liquid, tingling circle that sent stinging pricks of pleasure in an aching trail to the base of he
r spine. She moaned, a deep sigh, and she felt his breath halt and come more quickly on her skin as he heard it.

  “I love your pleasure sounds, Merry. I love your voice. I love to hear you, husky with wanting me,” he whispered.

  His fingers were moving on her back, sending cascades of shivers through her, a reminder of the quivering heights he had carried her to.… One of his hands smoothed over the yearning swell of her hip, while the other courted the vulnerable flesh on her nape, moving under her hair to cup and caress her throat before lazily stroking her mouth with his fingers.

  “Open your lips, little one,” he murmured into her foaming curls. “Let me… yes…” His thumb dragged across the rise of her lower lip, curving gently inward to the warm and moist interior, his fingers supporting her chin. Then the hand left her face, wandering downward through the lush garden of her hair until his fingers were just below her breast, lifting its softly swelling weight in his curling palm, his thumb pressing upward on her nipple, dewing the hardening, aching flesh with glossy moisture, the wetness easing and deepening the dizzying contact.

  “Yes… oh, yes, love,” he whispered, “oh, yes,” as she arched herself against his hand. A slow delicious sweep of movement brought his other hand to her belly, massaging her taut resisting flesh to pliancy. She felt the teasing rise and fall of his breathing on her cheek, the prickling, shifting pressure of his lips tasting the side of her neck, the damp fire of his tongue-stroke on the tip of her ear.

  “Come back, my love. Turn back to me.” His need for her flamed in the beguiling voice. “You’ve drawn my image with your clever fingers. Now let me print it on your heart.” His breath, a soft exhalation, stirred the curls that hung as a nodding bouquet over her earlobe, sending vivid shock runners to the peaks of her breasts. Cupping the pink crest of her shoulders in his palms, he pressed her backward into the nest of the quilt.