The Windflower (36 page)

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 1 can't do it."

The saiimaker 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, momen-tarily recalled to sanity by the uncomfortably hard surface striking her shoulder blades, she said in a cranky voice, "Don't treat me like a blighted com 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."

"1 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, pressing 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 1 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."

Devon watched Merry slowly withdraw her hand and lay it in a

lack fist on the pillow beside her cheek. "You're right. I should,"

he said as he stood up, making room for Cat to bring the tray to her.

Iceling awkward, light-headed, bashful for no good reason. Merry met Cat's gaze and said the first cheerful thing that occurred to her. Look at me—healthy again, though Devon won't admit it. I want to dress."

"You can dress if you want to," Cat said, "but you'll have to rest on the bed today. You're better, not healthy."

"Why not? Don't worry so much." Merry was smiling. "What do you think is wrong with me? I hope it's the clap. Aren't you supposed to be good at curing that?"

Devon had suddenly discovered something of great interest out-sidc the window and was regarding it steadily, a suppressed smile pulling at his lips.

Glancing at Devon, Cat said sourly, as though in explanation.

It's Saunders et al. They love to teach her blue language and listen to her innocently chirrup it back to them so they can laugh themselves to jelly. God knows what they'll think of the change in her when you decide to send her home."

This was new-—someone talking about sending her home as though it were a thing that might happen soon. She thought of Aunt April as she waited a moment to see if Devon had anything to say about it, and when he didn't, she gave Cat a grin. "This whole experience may make my fortune someday if I become an authoress. Publishing companies are always on the lookout for women whose experience has brought them into contact with
peculiar
people." Congratulating herself for having slipped one in under his guard, she sat up and nicked the napkin under her chin. "Furthermore, just because the pitch of my voice happens to be soprano—"

"Of the upper register, particularly when excited."

Soprano,"
she said emphatically, ignoring Cat's interruption and finishing her sentence. "I don't think it's fair to say that I chirrup. Why don't you and Devon want to tell me what was wrong with me?"

"Come now. Don't let your imagination tear downhill like runaway wagon," Cat said. "It was a fever. What else is there | know? Save your energy for your breakfast. Do you have to the—"

"No, and don't bring it up so casually. I'm not a heifer in barnyard. If you don't mind? Cat, please don't hover."

But hover he did. She was not left alone, even while she slept, whether she liked it or not. Sails and Raven and Dennis the pig were with her the next morning when the chill started again.

The three of them with fingers and an opposable thumb had been making silhouette portraits of each other using nail scissors and paper pages torn from an old ledger of Morgan's. Merry was laughing at their amazement because, while they weren't bad at it, the profiles she made were mirror accurate. Dennis was shuffling around the room with Cat's paper profile sticking to the watery tip of his snout. Because she thought she had gotten well, she assumed, when she began to feel cool, that a northerly draft had stolen into the cabin, and wrapped herself in a wool jacket, and then, uselessly, in a blanket. In the end there was no hiding the terrible pattern she came to know in the days that followed: the disabling chills and throbbing head, the fever without mercy that followed for as long at eight hours afterward, and then the rapid cooling and torrent of sweat that left her stuporous with exhaustion.

The attacks came at regular intervals, as though some murderous clock in her body was calling them forth. On two days out of three she was ill, and in between she was well enough to sit up, to eat, to read, to talk, and to know that she was getting progressively weaker. Malaria, Cat admitted to her finally; it was treated with quinic and poisons like arsenic and strychnine. The trick was to kill the disease before you killed the patient.

These cures, recommended and accepted as they were, the best hope the age could offer, began to take their toll, and as the days went by it became harder for anyone to make her smile. Devon, gentle as none of them had seen him, helped to beguile her in the long weak hours between her paroxysms. He taught her every card trick he knew, every hand form in shadow play, every verse of his favorite love ballad. He filled the afternoons for her with riddles and fairy stories and led her in lazy conversations about comets and fallen kingdoms and the way hot roasted corn tastes on a fair day in autumn.

In both of them was a deep delight in the simple whimsies of life, The earth, with its endless subtle beauties of color and texture, was not wasted on Merry or Devon, for they both saw the clouds as pictures, the lichen against rough bark as scripture, and sometimes heard the wind as a canticle. Two other people might have discovered these things in each other and begun to celebrate, but Devon and Merry had too many distractions to notice. She only thought, when she had the strength for reverie, that the hours sped by when she was with him. His all-encompassing aim was to remind her of (he many reasons she had to cling to the world and to keep her from guessing how close she was to leaving it.

Eventually even sleep became an effort for her, a time of dreams and discomfort and paralyzed half wakefulness. One night sand fleas from the island came to her in a nightmare, their wings shining with the moisture of her blood as they drove their venom repeatedly into her shrinking flesh. She awoke crying, rubbing her sullied face with (he cotton sleeves of her nightshirt. Repugnance made her use too much force. The tiny bone buttons on her cuffs cut long raw scratches into her friction-heated skin.

She wasn't sure what sense told her that Devon was coming across the room to her.

"Merry, let me." He was separating the snarled ball that she was—the arms and hair and bedclothes. A damp cloth wiped neatly and thoroughly over her mouth, and then over her cheeks.