The Windflower (27 page)

"Wait!" said Saunders, going quickly to the door. "There's someone coining! All they need is to find us down here fighting, and ask why."

Moving rapidly, Raven righted the chair and sat in it, and Cook sped into the seat beside him. Merry found herself put back onto the window bench by Saunders's left hand as he scooped up Dennis with the other.

"Now, listen, you," he said to her in a tense whisper. "This time we'll keep your guilty secret, but don't try leading Raven astray again here, or I'll go to Devon and tell him you've been scheming to make sail on the sly. You'll end your days on this ship locked up so tight you won't be able to make your eyelashes flutter."

Saunders had meant to frighten her. Subjecting his effect on her to a quick study, he saw that he had been too effective. She was trying to appear defiant, but her lips were drawn and beginning to lose their color. Was it the threat to her or the threat to Raven that he had made too strong? He could have as easily said the same thing more gently from the looks of it, and now there was no time to correct the damage. Later he would seek her out and explain to her with more patience why it would be foolish for her to think about escaping the
Joke,
Or had the worried eyes and the white lips been there when he had come into the cabin? Raven could have said something to her—Raven, who was too well-meaning and honest to understand that sometimes keeping your mouth shut would help everybody prosper. Trying to soften the effect of his lecture, Saunders smiled at Merry, but the soft expression was too inconsistent with the cruelty of his earlier words. She gave him a glance full of blue needles and stared at the floor as Devon pushed open the door and strolled into the room.

At the table Raven and Cook were trying against all nautical odds to build a card house with a verve and jubilation that couldn't have been bettered by a work crew on the Taj Mahal. The glances they turned on Devon were blisteringly innocent, and Raven was overplaying it so badly that it was little wonder that Devon walked over to him and smilingly lifted the jagged tear Cook had just made in Raven's shirt.

Merry tried not to cower on the window bench as Devon glanced her way, assessed her idly, and said, "Children, children . . . Have you been fighting?"

"Devil a bit," Cook said. "Raven and I had words over a hand of cards. 'Twasn't nothing. You've played cards with me; you know how ! get when I ain't winning. But you see how peaceable we are now. Building a—a—" He doubtfully regarded the tottering structures on the table.

"Card palace," beamed Raven.

"The pair of them," Saunders said, "are trying to impress little Merry with the magnificence of their erections."

Saunders thought he detected the trace of a smile at the corner of Devon's lips, though the arrogant blond man's stare was not encouraging. Will Saunders was as intimidated by Devon as any other man on the
Joke,
but he had promised Merry that he wouldn't give her away, so he tried again. "Care to try your luck too, then?"

"No, thank you," Devon said. "The competition is too—"

"Stiff?" suggested Cook with wicked glee.

"Possibly, but I was going to say—too numerous. Will, Tom wants you on deck. I'm going to board the American schooner and see if I can learn anything of interest. Good-bye. And take your"— Devon skillfully readjusted Dennis's wriggling pig body in Will Saunders's arms—"swine with you."

The speed with which Raven and Cook quitted the room behind Saunders laid a faint suggestion that they might include themselves in Devon's last category. Merry was still deciding whether she was also one of the swine who ought to get out when Devon shut the door and came to stand in front of her.

"Would you care to tell me what that was about?" he asked her. "The four of you weren't throwing around heavy furniture for no reason."

So he had heard the chair fall. "People have no privacy on a ship," she said. "I don't know why anyone wants to stay on them."

"Look at me!" he said.

It was best to convince him, if she could, that nothing of consequence had occurred. Merry tilted her chin up, willing herself to fully contact his gaze. If his tone had been demanding, his eyes held a caress. There was a fine-edged friendliness about him today that she had barely glimpsed once before, the night at the tavern when she had seen him first. The sweet novelty of it cut like tin scissors through the resistance she had spent the night building toward him, but however attractive the man was, and whatever the graces of his character, this man, this British
spy,
would never be for her.

Last night she had heard him whisper love words to her in long unearthly dreams, and in some empty place in her spirit she had prayed that the seeds of his inclination for her might grow into something more splendid and substantial. But daybreak is a saner time, and at dawn's first narrow light Merry had tucked away her absurd fairy-tale hopes. Whatever the kindness of his gaze this morning, there was nothing in it so noble as love or even so ignoble as lust; it was as though he had simply decided to dispense with an unsatisfied ardor. He had made a barrier, not because it would protect either him or her, but because it was common sense. In his glowing eyes, in the sensual line of his lips, there was no sign it might be a struggle for him to deny the joyous enchantment of yesterday's kisses and transform the gentle, playful lover into a temperate companion. Oh, no, Devon was not trembling on the heart-thrilling verge of denouncing piracy and taking up cobbling in her noble honor. It was hopeless, and she had known it even before she learned about his British military connections. Hopeless.

Drawing his thoughtful scrutiny of her to an end, Devon said, "If I had to guess—and it seems I do—I'd guess that Cook wouldn't lay hands on Raven because Raven was trying to corrupt you, so I'll have to assume it was the other way around. What would you try to talk Raven into that Cook didn't like?"

When it came to guessing, there was no one better at it than Devon. Merry concentrated on showing nothing, and his regard remained steady and quizzical. She had no idea whether or not she was successful. His outstretched hand came to rest on her shoulder, his touch molding lightly to the curving surface. She felt the stroke of his fingers, and his warmth penetrated slowly through her nerve-chilled and unwilling flesh. It was a clear demonstration that he could touch her and still not take her in his arms and do more. When he spoke again, it was to say lightly, "Never mind. Just don't do anything foolish, Merry friend. If you aren't who you say you aren't—and I'm beginning to believe you—you have nothing to fear from me. You see, my mind is changing. I'm checking on one piece of your story, and if the item clears you—then we'll see."

"What item?" she said too rapidly.

"Don't worry," he said. "1 suspect you'll pass."

No, I won't,
she thought,
especially if it has anything to do with certain pictures I drew of you for the American government. Could you find that out? 1 don't want to be here if you do.

It cost her a fiery and humiliating blush, but she said, "About yesterday ..."

Attractive creases softly bracketed his smile. "It would take a savant with a micrometer to detect my conscience, Windflower, but you activate it better than most can."

"Why?"

"I think"—his hand left her shoulder—"it has something to do with the way you fall out of a hammock."

His words, though friendly, were dismissive; Merry got to her feet and started to walk toward the door. She stopped halfway.

"Devon?" She turned back toward him where he stood, a dusky silhouette against the window's lurid flare. "What American schooner?"

"You listen closely, don't you? There's a two-masted schooner, the
Good Shepherd,
lying off the lee bow. We've been playing cat and mouse with each other for hours now, and they've finally signaled that they're ready to talk."

"What kind of American schooner would want to talk to pirates?" she said.

"She's a privateer, probably from Massachusetts, if Morgan's information is correct."

It was not safe to ask so many questions; still, surely he couldn't wonder at her curiosity? "If that's an American privateer, why hasn't she tried to blow us out of the water? The bounty on the
Black Joke
must be—"

"In the tens of thousands." Calmly, "Yes.
The Joke
went through a metamorphosis before we came within range of the
Good Shepherd.
The black caterpillar crystallized into a white moth. The figurehead that was a gorgon has been replaced by a genie in a turban, and the signature of the bow reads
Arab,
which is by no coincidence a letter-of-marque trader with a Baltimore certificate of registry, Commission number six sixty-eight."

"Then it's a trick," she said bitterly. "What happened to the real
Arab?"

"Captured in the Rappahannock River and sent to Halifax. It's not common knowledge yet." Watching her face, he said, "Does this shock you? Your country does it too." When she would not answer him, he said, this time with amusement, "Ah, yes. I comprehend from your eloquently contemptuous eyes. You're raptly condemning the hateful trade of piracy. It's good for you to spare me a lecture. You had better leave the room before your discipline collapses. Good day."

Merry's sole consolation was that he hadn't been able to tell her to take her swine with her. Morgan's cabin door was too heavy to slam, but it made a satisfying loud thwack as she pulled it closed behind her.

An hour later she watched from her cabin window as Devon, looking beautiful and distinguished as an American privateer captain, got into a ship's boat with a small crew.

The weather was worse. A thin drizzle spanked the dark, roiling sea, and the restless air was kneaded by sticky-fingered fog. Cold reached out to her from the thick window glass.

Merry was about to give up her watch when she noticed a second small boat, moving like a shadow between the waves. As the boat approached she was able to identify its occupant as Joe Griffith, the
Joke's
master gunner. Evidently he had taken advantage of the
Joke's
halt to fish. The poor weather must have discouraged him though, for he rowed back to the ship, secured the small boat to a cleat, and agilely climbed a rope to the deck. For more than an hour Merry returned time and again to the window. The boat was still there. It amazed her that they hadn't hauled it up, with a storm threatening. Joe Griffith must have forgotten it; he had a tendency to lose interest quickly in things that weren't connected with the ship's cannons. If the boat took the storm damaged, Tom Valentine would probably have Griffith punished. Burdened with an overactive conscience, Merry went toward the door to remind Mr. Griffith about the neglected boat. She stopped, her hand on the door handle, a new and overwhelming idea sizzling like frying shark meat in her brain.

Her chest roasting, her hands cold as granite, Merry spun the idea through her mind, as if she couldn't believe that she'd come up with the thought by herself. Pulling a brown wool jacket over her suddenly chilly arms, straining to keep her voice low, Merry repeated the slowly emerging plan to the stalwart table, to Devon's desk, to a maddeningly noncommittal face she drew in the window mist. In the little fishing craft bobbing below she was going to row to the
Good Shepherd.
With a kernel of a smile she decided that if that name didn't betoken succor and divine benevolence for her plan, nothing ever would. She wondered if Devon would remember later that the last thing he'd said to her was:
You had better leave the room before your discipline collapses. Good day.
Perhaps, just perhaps it was going to be a better day for Merry Wilding than the man suspected. And somehow, in time, she would learn to live with the knowledge that she would never see Devon again. And Cat and Raven. No. None of that. No second thoughts. She couldn't afford to care. Aunt April was going to see her missing niece again. . . .

She waited until the bells told her that it was time for dinner before running lightly up the stairs to flatten herself against the boards and watch the rain-spattered deck. The mess pennant flew over the fo'c'sle, and in another minute Cook came with his helper, carrying covered kids of victuals toward the crew's quarters. They made three trips, with rain beating the wooden covers over the hot food and rising again as silver vapor.

Cook and his man would eat with the crew, and for more than twenty crucial minutes the ship's kitchen would be deserted. Breathing quickly, she forced herself to count to three hundred in case Cook had forgotten something and then pulled the jacket over her hair and stepped into the open. Around her the deck rang with water song. Thick rain clots drummed against billowing canvas, polished boards, and gun metal. Streams gurgled in the scuppers. The watch, in their steaming oilskins, were hardly in a mood to stop her for a chat, though Erik Shay—the fleshy giant who, long ago at the Musket and Muskrat, had let Merry and Sally leave the tavern— waved from the upper deck.

Once in the galley Merry rapidly located and stole a small paring knife, a discarded apron covered with grease, some coals, and a tinderbox.

She wrapped the tinderbox, the coals, and the knife in the apron, and buttoned her jacket and stuffed the wadded apron underneath. Running from the galley with her head down like a mole, she slammed into Tom Valentine's chest.

"Oh, my! Oh, dear heavens!" she cried out, disengaging instantly from him, to leave a wet spot on his immaculate flannel shirt.