The Windflower (12 page)

Cat took away the cup. "Don't tell me you know her?"

"Devon's little friend," said Morgan with simplicity.

"You don't say?" There was a barely perceptible note of interest in the boy's voice. "Which one of the multitude is she? You know I can't keep them apart. Except for the one in Nassau who gives the great—''

Morgan interrupted. "This one doesn't give anything. She miscarries five-pound bundles of joy and straw at your feet. You remember the night we hunted, at the Musket and Muskrat? August, I think?"

"Damn! I believe you're right!" Cat said, putting a palm to her cheek. "He let her go, didn't he? And was in the devil's own temper for three days after. How in God's peach-green grass do you think she got from there to New York and into you-know-who's bed? Unless ..." There was an exchange of glances for which Merry did not greatly care. "That changes things, doesn't it?"

"It changes things," said Morgan, "a lot. Put her in Devon's room."

"No!" The words struggled out through the inflamed fibers of Merry's mouth. "Don't do that!"

"Be quiet, my child, or I'll throttle you," Morgan said, cupping her throat with a blunt, calloused hand. As she lay still and vanquished his hand traveled down to part the blanket, and his black eyes conducted a quick dispassionate study of her wrists. "What a waste of good skin. Your friends were a little crude with the ropes, Cat. You ought to give them lessons."

"I'll retie her wrists with something less abrasive. Given time."

"No. Even you can't work miracles, and she's damaged enough as it is. She won't need ropes if we use the pipe on her." Morgan glanced at her face. "Silly chit. Don't start crying again. I'm not proposing to hit you over the head with it."

The pirate captain took something long and white from a drawer and handed it to Cat. "Put this on her when you move her. If any of the crew sees what she's got, we're likely to have a riot on our hands."

Merry heard her lips break open and spill out a futile and meaningless patter of pleas as Morgan rekindled the glass and silver instrument and carried it toward her.

In steady arms Cat lifted Merry from the bed and settled her against his chest with her cheek pressing the smooth quilt of his braid, his hand curled around her naked shoulder where the blanket had fallen. Merry's protests continued without a pause as she said everything she could think of to try to make them stop and let her go. Morgan looked at her from time to time as he worked the hookah's stem into an inlaid bowl; but he did not threaten her again, having assessed, perhaps, that she had passed beyond being able to control herself, and in a minute it would cease to matter. He brought the bowl down on her nose and mouth. She refused to inhale at first, but Morgan gave her an expertly controlled slap on the cheek and said, "Breathe it."

She breathed involuntarily from the sudden pain and got a sweet, heavy lungful that cut like rake teeth in the lining of her bronchia. Above her Cat said softly, "Give her time. Rand. You can see that she's unaccustomed."

After a moment Morgan took the bowl from her and let her breathe air and then brought it back, and she heard his voice, from far away, saying, "Don't fight it, nestling. When you stop pushing it away, I'll know you've had enough."

CHAPTER EIGHT

The room where Cat left her was Spartan and dustless. He had tucked her into a warm, sweet-smelling bed with many soft blankets and had given her some water and food she hardly knew she was eating and had advised her to, for God's sake, try to stop acting like a fool. He asked her if she thought she could get up, and when she tried and could not, he said "Good," retucked the blankets, and left the room. She had a very long time to look about her and to think pale, shifting thoughts that bunched through her mind like sand bottlenecked in an hourglass, to fall, sinking and glittering, around her. It was sweet luxury to have her wrists and ankles unbound. But if one person ever again brought a knife close to her, to remove a bond or a shred of clothing, or for any other benevolent purpose, she'd be sick on the floor. She giggled, but there was a sleeping part of her mind that knew it was the drug that made her see humor in the situation; her surroundings merited only tears. However, she was dry now, and empty and floating, and tears were something that had happened when—fifteen minutes ago, three hours ago?—whenever it was that she had felt pain.

She snuggled down into the lawn shirt she had been given. It smelled good, as though it had been rinsed in something pleasing, and she whistled to see if her dry lips could work that way. They could not.

Devon's room. Devon. If this was indeed his room, there was no stamp of his personality upon it. Or perhaps there was: precision, lack of clutter; evidence of an orderly mind, the ability to minimize distractions. She had never thought to see him again, and now it seemed as though she might. It was the last extraordinary, excruciating jolt to four extraordinary, excruciating days. What, in an upbringing of painting root vegetables in watercolors and tapping sugar maples, was there to prepare her for men with hookahs and hoop earrings? Again she giggled and helplessly began to think of Devon.

She remembered his arms, gathering her for the kiss, the kiss she had not wanted and had been so unprepared for, the kiss she had forced herself to forget. ... If her father could see her now, he'd have a fit.

Suddenly she stopped giggling and began rather desperately to fight the opium-induced stupor. She didn't know the right thing to do; but then a wandering thread of her mind recalled something told to her by Betty, her aunt's maid, who liked to take brandy in the mornings. If you took too much, she said, it helped to think of something dreadful, really awful, to bring your mind into a more stable orbit. So Merry lay in the pirate's bed and thought of her mother's funeral.

The funeral had been at night, and they had arranged Merry's hair with huge black bows that reminded her of bat's wings. She vividly remembered the harsh feel of the stiff black dress she had worn, made by the hastily summoned dressmaker. And on her feet the tiny white kid slippers she had been so proud of, ruined with blacking. They had draped mirrors and pictures with black, even the one in her bedroom of the laughing-ladybird picnic; and placed scutcheons in every room, hung the front of the house with a hatchment, and tied the window shutters closed with dull black silk and left them that way all winter. Her father had given away mourning rings, mourning the price, and hers had been too big for her small finger and had flopped back and forth. She had pressed it tightly into her palm so she wouldn't lose it and displease her father. Carl had taught her painstakingly to read the ring's motto: Prepared be, to follow me. But the worst had come that night after the funeral—that tedious and confusing church service when they had tried to make her get into her bed, made neat as a thread box with black sheets.

Merry sat up suddenly, sweating and shaking, and the ship's room came into focus. She experienced a flash of eager relief, like someone waking from a nightmare. They were right when they said that funerals were to help the living.

Setting her feet carefully on the floor, she stood up, experimentally testing the strength of her numb-feeling knees—knees that collapsed as soon as they bore her full weight, sending her to the floor, flat on her face. One did not so easily snap one's fingers at opium intoxification, it seemed. She tried again to stand, this time quickly, clinging hard to the brass handles of a long desk set into the wall. She was up and swaying victoriously, slowly regaining her equilibrium.

The door, as she found when she reached it, was locked. And what good would it have done anyway to go out there? They would only easily reimprison her. And then there would be more ropes.

Still, it would be better to do something desperate than to do nothing at all. But she couldn't even think of something desperate to do, until she realized that the thing on the wall she was staring at, an ancient t-shaped instrument made of worn wood and twisted leather, was a weapon. It took a very long time for her to get it down, and a longer time yet to figure out what she would have to do to fire it so that the arrow didn't shoot backward, or flop out sideways onto the floor. The barbed point of the arrow was huge; it couldn't have been covered with a large orange, and really, the whole thing was ridiculous, but what other choice had she? It shamed her to think how she had cried, "No, no, please," to Morgan, like a child having a tooth drawn. The next man who walked through the door and tried to lay hands on her was going to wear her arrow in his breastbone.

Fortune, they say. loves a challenge. The lock turned in the door, and Devon stepped inside carrying a lamp.

"This is wonderful," he said, his gaze resting lightly on the weapon aiming straight for his heart. "You must be feeling much better."

With interest he watched her fragile hands tighten on the crossbow. His eyes picked out details—the fall of red-gold hair in a thick tumble over her shoulder, the full breasts only partially hidden by the overlarge shirt, the shapely leg she had braced before her, the beautiful flush spreading in her cheeks, the finely arched auburn brows, and the murder in the lovely deep-blue eyes. Morgan evidently had pushed her too far. For a minute Devon speculated on the pirate captain's motives while he sent his trained gaze over the girl a second time to find those things that only intuition could see: the complex emotions that trembled like tiny stars under the shadowed surface of her face.

By far she was not the first woman who had waited for him in a bedchamber, or even—fair though she was—the most beautiful, but she surely was the only one to distinguish herself by facing him with an antique weapon, obsolete by three centuries. Someone long before him had, for a prank, bolted the thing in this small cabin. The men who sailed the
Black Joke
had grown, with time, so indifferent to its presence that no one had bothered to rip it down and burn it. Common sense could never have predicted that this weakly, flushing girl could have pried it from the wall and made it ready. Good Lord, it was designed to be bent and cocked by a chain-mailed soldier standing on the bow with feet on the stock and drawing up the cord with both arms and the back. Here clearly was a woman who bypassed common sense.

There were a hundred ways, possibly more, that he could have quickly taken the bow from her, but none that would not involve her in some way with either pain or violence, however transient. Morgan, he knew, would think he was crazy not to disarm her immediately. After all, a bolt from that bow could penetrate the bulwark of a warship. . . .

"Will it make you nervous if I set the lamp on the desk," he said, "or do you want me to stand here like Diogenes? I'll do it very slowly, and don't worry, I never throw lamps at young ladies holding crossbows. Not in cabins that lie over a powder magazine." He carefully put the lamp down and smiled at her reassuringly. "Before you tack me to the wall, do I get a last meal and twenty minutes with my confessor?"

"I'll have to think about it. That's more than
I
was offered." She hadn't forgotten his particular brand of extreme good looks, but only vaguely had she retained a memory of its effect on her. Every organ from her throat to her kneecaps started to buzz like a cricket.

"From what I've heard," he said, "it's been nasty. Why don't you surrender the military hardware and let me see what I can do to make amends?"

Who could have told him that it had been nasty? Rand Morgan? Cat? It was difficult, somehow, to imagine a conversation between them about her. Why had it taken him so long to come to her? Not that he had reason to be eager. Had he been on shore? Perhaps. He was not dressed in a sailor's garb. The pirate's clothing was American and discreetly prosperous. The bone-colored coat, the white shirt with front frill and cravat, the natural leather trousers—it was a costume that her brother might have worn, though no other man could have given it what Devon did—which was Devon's body. How amazing he was. The marvelous perfection of his features had not robbed them of intellect or made them less subtly expressive.

She hadn't been close to him before in good light. For the first time she saw that his eyes were hazel, a rare mosaic of shining sparks that appeared almost golden. They were delivering a message of sympathy tidily packed in sensual glamour.
If he's to be trusted,
she thought,
I'll
eat Aunt April's swansdown muff.
Merry destroyed the tiny voice in her brain that dissented with a savage mental kick.

"If you take one step closer," she told him, "I'm going to kill you."

The golden eyes studied her kindly. "You look tired. You sit down; I'll sit down; and we'll talk about it."

After some suspicious thought she decided that it might be a good idea to have him sitting. She wouldn't dare do so herself because the chances favored her not being able to get up afterward.
Details, Merry Patricia, apply your mind to the details.

"Where's the key to the door?" asked Merry Patricia, trying to straighten her shoulders.

"Do you want to lock us in here together? I'm game, if a little shocked."

The man was enjoying himself too much. She was forced to repeat, this time more crisply, "Where's the key?"

"Outside. I'll be happy to get it if you—"

"No! Wedge that chair under the door handle. And then sit on the desk. Slowly."

Looking amused, he obeyed her. "For the charming lady with the harpoon, anything." He poised himself, as ordered, on the edge of the desk. "Here 1 sit, ready on the second to be skewered like a bottle-fly on a hatpin. When you think of it, I'll be a pretty unappealing corpse." Easing his elbows onto the shelf behind him, Devon grinned. "Now that I'm your prisoner, what do you intend to do with me? Or, if you haven't figured that out yet, would you be open to suggestions?"