The Windflower

by Laura London

  “Oh, no,” he said, stretching an arm back to the bed-stand to lift the other glass. “This is.” With a wickedly teasing glint in his eyes he put the glass to his lips, and she watched with fascination and a little awe as he swallowed the remaining wine, savoring it. He gave her a smile of breathtaking charm, laid his fingers, barely touching, on her lips, and said, “Nectar of Merry.”

  Chapter 30

  However well placed Michael Granville’s faith in her ingenuity may have been, it took none at all for Merry to escape Teasel Hill well before the hour she had appointed to meet Raven. Devon had been closeted since midmorning with his long-suffering man of business, who had been waiting with breathless impatience since Devon’s homecoming to pounce on his elusive master and begin the formidable task of bringing the young duke up-to-date on the many details of his vast estates that required his attention. Aunt April and Devon’s mother had remained late in their beds, recruiting their energies after the late hours of last night’s ball. With some inner trepidation Merry asked Mr. Stanmore, Devon’s steward, if he would order the carriage prepared for her, because she had some business to attend to in London. Without even waiting to hear her carefully rehearsed amplification he had excused himself with a smile and a promise that it would be done directly. Heady stuff that, for a girl whose servants in Virginia had known her from the cradle and were more likely to kindly direct her activities than the opposite. Merry’s success with Mr. Stanmore almost emboldened her to ask for the key to the gun room because, though the weapons there were mostly of the sporting variety, Aline had mentioned once that it held also a small collection of pistols that Devon’s father had acquired on his travels. But though there was nothing pleasant about the possibility of going unarmed to a confrontation with Granville, she was afraid that a sudden desire to examine the guns might draw some notice. Someone might even mention it to Devon as soon as he emerged from his meeting, which under the circumstances would be disastrous. So, a little feebly, and not without a blush, she slid a knife from her breakfast tray into her garter, mindful of how Morgan’s men often produced weapons from unlikely parts of their raiment.

  A careful perusal of the London map in the library had led Merry to pick out an address at random that seemed in convenient circumstances to her destination, since this was not the sort of adventure it would be possible to undertake under the patronage of Devon’s solicitous if obedient servants. She was somewhat daunted when the carriage drew to a polite halt on the cobbles in front of the appointed address, which bore a wooden sign with painted letters that read Dealer in Foreign Spiritous Liquors. The groom in blue ducal livery who let down the steps for her was too well trained to look at her askance, but she could see he looked doubtful, and as she swept onto the pavement she could only be grateful that she hadn’t chosen the building next door, whose brass sign read Drain Pipe Lay Down Undertaken Here.

  She remained inside for a few minutes, pretending an interest in the port wines and unsuccessfully trying to fend off the attempts of the obsequious proprietor to make her sample his merchandise. She narrowly avoided inebriation by ordering a round dozen bottles of the port to be delivered to Teasel Hill and took her leave of the beaming proprietor. Standing a little dizzily on the flagged pavement outside, Merry told the coachman that she had chanced to meet one of her particular friends inside who would escort her on the remainder of her errands and see her home afterward. The one virtue (in Merry’s mind at least) of the shop had been its very dirty front window, as a result of which Mr. Bibbins, the coachman, could not see within; he proved that British and American family retainers weren’t so different by asking respectfully who he might tell His Grace was escorting her, should he happen to inquire. Pushed into a corner, Merry named Lord Cathcart and had the felicity of watching Mr. Bibbins’s look of mild concern relax into approval. She could only hope Mr. Bibbins wouldn’t by accident encounter that much respected peer on his way back out of the city.

  Having rid herself of her kindly escort, Merry set off to meet Raven. Her spirits were low enough to give the bustling, impersonal cacophony of street noise a certain poignance. The high, white sun was dissolving at the edges into a gray-blue heaven flecked with huge clouds moving quickly in the wind. The air had more than a nip in it and was filled with city scents and the clatter of traffic. Shoppers jostled one another on the pavement of broad stones; apprentices with ink on their trousers wended through a maze of spruce clerks and assistants. The smoke-blackened dome of St. Paul’s loomed like a mountain over the three- and four-story edifices below, and she gazed at it as she walked before dropping her eyes to the scenes around her, capturing passing images in vignettes: bright-cheeked schoolboys with their satchels, gazing at pastry in a baker’s window; a crossing sweep whistling a lively air as he took a broom to the street, where wheels had worn it down; and before a bookseller’s, with windows displaying many volumes laid open for inspection, a small dog hooked by his lead to a hitching post was worrying a black felt hat, blown, no doubt, from the head of some passerby.

  The changing complexion of the surrounding facades told her that she had entered the city’s high financial district, and by the time Merry reached St. Mary Abchurch, a pleasantly venerable red-brick edifice in a yard of patterned cobbles, she began to understand why Raven had made this his choice. This was an area given over to commerce, the staunch bastion of the middle class, and none of the haughty nobility who had made her acquaintance at the dowager’s ball was likely to meet her here. At the same time this was no slum, and though Merry had encountered her share of stares, it was an area where an unattended lady could walk without molestation.

  The church interior was dim and intimate. Toneless light sprinkled from oval windows in the somberly frescoed domed ceiling, glooming on the dark wood surfaces, leaving the corners in shadow. Only two persons inhabited the room: a gray-haired lady in a black bonnet hesitantly trying to coax a hymn of the forty-seventh Psalm out of the organ; and a woman swaddled in shawls who was grimly applying beeswax to the Communion table.

  Merry was taking a seat in a paneled pew near the door when Raven entered, and the shawled woman took one look at his charmingly formed but obviously disreputable countenance and dropped her tin of beeswax. Raven, stopped mid-stride under the heat of her gaze, made some exclamation under his breath that was better left unheard in a church, walked lithely backward to the alms box, and then, in an expression of startling piety, deposited a guinea within. The woman seemed to content herself with being partially mollified; she returned to her waxing, though tightening the voluminous shawls virtuously around her plump bosom and casting periodic suspicious glares at Raven.

  Sliding into the seat beside Merry, Raven said, “You’re late, m’darling. I’ve been watching for you this quarter hour in the chophouse down the block.” He tucked a shining jet-black curl back into his bandanna and cast a quick, dispassionate glance toward the Communion table. “Devilish place, ain’t it? It’s more than you can imagine, why people think they’re doing God such a service by building him a parcel of dismal houses. I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes the architects sit on hard wood benches for all eternity.”

  Merry returned him a smile, though a wan one, and he pinched her chin and said kindly, “There you go! That’s better. Where’ve you left your carriage? Let me take you back there, and you can go home and be comfortable.”

  “If you think I can be comfortable until I’ve heard everything you found out last night, you’re mistaken!” she retorted in a whisper. “Besides, I don’t have my carriage. I was set down some distance from here and I’ve sent the coachman home, so don’t think you can get rid of me so easily.”

  “You walked?” The words were spoken in the same tone he might have used if she’d announced that she’d ridden into the sacristy on a goat. He gazed from her pelisse of crimson velvet bordered in sable to the matching close hat with its wealth of short nodding plumes, to her soft kid gloves, her copious sable muff, and her velvet half boots in
the same shade as the pelisse. With something near to a groan he said, “Merry, you innocent.”

  “Innocent!”

  “Aye. And there’s no use to be looking daggers at me, lass. There’s a lot worse things a body can be than innocent. The fact is, females of your station don’t go out on their own in London unless they’ve a desire to be taken for the love light of some highborn rakehell. You might at least have brought your maid.”

  There were some, probably, who would object to lectures on propriety from a member of a notorious pirate crew, but Merry only said, “I’d like to know what I’d do with a maid on a chase after Michael Granville?”

  “Nothing. Because there ain’t going to be any chase after Michael Granville. Leastwise, not for you, lovey.”

  “You haven’t told anyone about last night!” Quiet as it was, her voice betrayed her alarm.

  “No. I wouldn’t squeak beef without letting you know first, but y’know, sweetheart, I’m giving you notice now that I’m going to Devon with the whole of it. For one thing, I put some enquires to Morgan last night about Granville, and the fellow’s a dangerous agent. Granville makes it his business to own a fleet of merchant ships that he sets to sail heavily insured; then he turns over their course to pirate raiders who steal the cargo, and Granville collects twice, from the insurance and from the contraband. Some of the fleet captains are in Granville’s pay and play willingly, but when they have an honest crew, if there’s a chance they’re suspicious, Granville has the lot of them put to death. Sails says Devon’s little sister was killed in a munitions blast whilst she was traveling aboard a frigate that tried to fight back, poor lass, so don’t you see, Merry, Granville’s just the sort of cur that would make an end to you if he had the least reason. And besides that, since I traced that jackal to his lair last night, I’ve been followed myself, though I don’t know who the devil by. Some curst rum touch, by the looks of him and—Oh, damn.”

  Following the direction of his eyes with some surprise, Merry saw that the shawled woman was making her way down the aisle, swiping her dustrag at the pews and giving Raven a baleful stare. Promptly Raven shed his intensity and beheld Merry with limpid eyes.

  “You have the right of it, ma’am. Abchurch is a corrupt of the word upchurch, being that this church is set upon high ground, you know,” he said in a gently instructive tone. “As for your idea that the steeple is of an inferior quality, I can only say that, for myself, I find it very pretty. And I can’t imagine what makes you doubt the authenticity of the altarpiece. I, myself, don’t think Grinling Gibbons has ever done finer work.”

  In an immediate change of front, the beshawled woman gave Raven a glance of warm approval and, frowning at Merry, shuffled off muttering under her breath about impertinent hussies who were no better than they should be.

  Her lips quivering with nervous laughter, Merry turned back toward Raven. “Oh, you—you devil. How dare you make that horrid woman think I don’t like her church!”

  He grinned. “It was a little in Morgan’s style, wasn’t it? I do it a bit from time to time to amuse Will, though I suppose I’ll get the captain’s boot in my seat if he catches me at it. The nonsense I talked about the church comes out of a pocket guide, which was the worst two shillings I ever spent in my life, because all it does is to describe a lot of places that no one in his right mind would want to see, like museums and government offices and lunatic asylums.”

  Observing that the woman was making her way up the opposite aisle, he broke off to say, in the voice of an earnest student of architecture, “You’ve noted, perhaps, that the cupola is supported by groined pendentives?” but rather spoiled this impressive utterance as soon as the shawls had passed out of earshot by adding, “Whatever the devil that means. Come on, then, I’m taking you home.”

  “In a pig’s ear!” she returned inelegantly. “Either you tell me where you found Michael Granville, or I’ve a coach to catch at five o’clock on Finsbury Square.”

  “Now, see here—”

  “I won’t see here! All Devon needs to hear is that Granville made a threat to me to drive him to do—some desperate thing. He’s not himself on the subject of Michael Granville. For all I know, if Devon discovered Granville had made threats on my life, Devon would gun him down like a dog. I won’t let that happen, Raven. Do you think I’ll stand by and see my husband hanged for killing a man like Granville? And I don’t intend to let my brother die!”

  “Damnation!” he said in a low tone. “Do you have to be so hot in the spur?”

  “When it comes to protecting the people I love,” she said fiercely, “yes.”

  The determined set of her small chin was beginning to give Raven a sinking feeling. “What you’ve got no business doing, lovey, is protecting two grown men.” Then, on a sudden note of inspiration: “I’ll tell you what. What d’you say we take things to Morgan? You can depend on him for a cool-headed judgment.”

  “When pear trees bear peaches, I’ll go to Morgan!” she said bitterly. “If he found my brother, Morgan would probably turn him over to the Army and, if they hanged him, say that it was character-building. And don’t suggest we tell Will or Cat either. Telling them would be the same as telling Morgan because that’s just what they’d do.”

  From that position she was not to be moved. She was plainly terrified, but she was no less stubborn for all that. When Raven threatened to carry her by force to Morgan, all she would do was give an angry laugh and invite him to try it. And while he was admitting to himself that the citizens of this civilized metropolis were hardly likely to allow him to waltz through the streets bearing off a struggling woman of her obvious beauty and youth, Merry told him that if he didn’t take her to the place he had followed Granville to, she would approach a constable and tell him Raven had tried to steal her purse, which would keep him in gaol until she arrived for her five o’clock appointment at Finsbury Square. Raven could see she meant it. Which was why half an hour later he found himself in a hackney carriage with Merry on the way to the dockside address where he had seen Granville disappear.

  Raven was furiously angry with her—an emotion rare for him—and scared half-witless that she was going to get hurt and it would be his fault. It seemed that with all that emotion on his side he ought to have won the battle of wills. After he’d given the driver the correct address, he realized what he should have done was deliver her to a disreputable inn (how would she have known Granville wasn’t there?), locked her in a room, and gone to fetch Morgan. He knew Morgan, or even Cat, would have said even now it was his duty to knock her unconscious and carry her to one of them. But looking down at the proud blue eyes and harmless little nose, he couldn’t find in himself the resolution to harm her. Once, when she turned her head to catch her first glimpse of the Thames, he did raise his hand, but it faltered. In his mind he felt the impact of the blow and heard her soft cry of pain and saw her body crumple; and he knew no fist of his could cause that to happen. Raven lowered his hand and with a heavy sigh began to load his pistol.

  Merry’s face and figure would have made her conspicuous even if she hadn’t been dressed at the height of fashion. When an attempt to talk her into stopping at the inn where he was lodged to change into men’s clothing failed, he had to direct the hack to a corner he considered to be dangerously close to their destination to avoid too long a tramp with her along the waterfront.

  The door where he had seen Granville disappear and then, much later, reappear was located in a courtyard of muddy pink brick inside a quadrant of tall warehouses with granite portals. Yawning black entrances emitted the scent of molasses in quantity enough to grab Merry’s throat as she slid stealthily behind a row of cerecloth bales beside Raven. A handful of burly watermen were rattling barrels aboard a tilted carrier’s dray under the shouted direction of a warehouseman in a bent top hat.

  She didn’t need Raven’s whispered admonition, “Have a care! They might be in Granville’s hire,” to make her dive obediently to his side and sit qu
ietly trembling. Spilled sugar carpeted the yard so thickly in places that she saw men sink to the ankle in it, and the wind pranced off the river in damp gusts to throw the dirty grit in glittering patterns against the buildings. Beyond, the Thames was green, smelly, and busily absorbing greasy reflections. A mass of sails in different sizes made the river as crowded as the streets.

  She felt Raven’s tension beside her and was sorry for it, though there wasn’t anything she could do about it. Her entreaties in the hackney carriage that he leave her (with the pistol) to take care of matters on her own had made up in nobility what they lacked in sincerity, and she was ashamed of the ignoble relief she had experienced at his shocked refusal. The remainder of the trip he had spent alternately glancing out the window trying without success to decide whether they were being followed and endeavoring with austere gentleness to convince her that the only existence her brother had in England was in Granville’s evil mind, and if Granville in fact did have her brother, and if he did know anything to Granville’s detriment, the lad would be long dead. It never occurred to her to guess that Raven was doing his best to talk himself into hitting her over the head, but if anyone had told her this, she wouldn’t have been surprised. She could see he was mad as fire. All she could say in her own defense was that she had a feeling, as real and keen as any truth, that her brother was alive and hidden nearby, and she was the best person to preserve his life, and not any of the men who cared much for her and nothing for him.

  Or perhaps she was losing her mind. She was almost convinced of it in another moment. The men loading the dray had begun a good-naturedly bantering exchange of insulting jests about each other’s mothers. As she stole a glance around the must-scented edge of her bale her eyes for some reason swept toward a far group of barrels, and while she watched, Henry Cork rose to the shoulders from one with a barrel lid on his head.