The Windflower (19 page)

"My what?" she interrupted, glaring at him.

"With your ability to deal with the servants," he finished dryly, "there would be more cause for concern."

She stood pale and still as a birch as he wrapped her in a worn coat of blue-dyed velvet trimmed with fur and even let him put a wide-brimmed straw hat on her, but Cat had to forcefully steer her aloft.

The noise and the clutter of the busy deck, the cold slap of the wind, and the brilliant vast sky exploded into Merry's numb senses as she came, blinking, onto the open deck. Hard light shimmered from the ship's brass work, white flame danced in the waves, and tilting back her head, she saw beyond the wide square sails, a bright bank of cumulus clouds, luminous and scudding high in a race with the ship. Everywhere there was motion. The
Black Joke's
great bow rocked and speared the sea. The horizon lifted and lowered as the potbellied sails strained in the heady wind.

The deck had just been scrubbed, and her feet in Cat's moccasins slipped a little on the drying planks. It was a good excuse to look down and mind her footing instead of the men above her on the crosstrees of the masts or active on the deck. There were winks, smiles that were predatory, exchanges that she was glad not to hear.

"Cat—" she said.

He cut her off. "Try to show some spirit. You're a curiosity, like the five-legged calf." Cat's voice roughened almost imperceptibly. "Sweetheart, you don't have to shake like that. I
told
you. They won't do anything."

Morgan was on the foredeck of the vessel, fresh-faced, romantically disheveled by the wind, and talking to a narrow-shouldered black man whose height topped even Morgan's by more than two inches. A sharp scar cut the man's right eyelid and sliced through his pointed brow. His lips were deep-seamed and narrow, his eyes strict and without frivolity. The taut red linen of his shirt was lively as a cardinal against the ship's timber and rigging. Cat delivered Merry there, his hand on her forearm. She had the sensation she was being carried by the scruff of the neck, like a fox cub, and her knees, as she stood there, were so disobliging as
actually
to quiver.

Morgan laughed when he saw her, and when he had finished speaking with the tall man, he turned and said, "This is Mr. Valentine, our quartermaster. Put your chin up, nestling, so he can have a look at you. Oh, dear. Will we have to teach you how to obey an order? Ah. That's better. I'm pleased to see that in spite of everything you have a functioning neck." A neat movement of Morgan's hand set the straw hat farther back on Merry's head. He turned to the quartermaster. "Well, Tom?"

Thomas Valentine's meager smile touched one side of his lips. "That damned boy . . Devon walks into a town, and women comely as sea sirens creep at him through the wainscoting. This one, of course, is ... I'm surprised he's let business keep him away this long. Some of the men aren't too happy about her. You know. Having a woman on board is—"

"What?" Morgan was grinning, but the effect was its opposite. "Bad luck? A Jonah? Kittle cargo?"

"A damned nuisance," Valentine said frankly.

"This one needn't be a nuisance to anyone but Cat." Morgan's flexible, placidly timbred voice carried across the deck to more than a dozen actively interested ears. "All anyone need manage around her is a little continence. And if any of the men complain about having a woman on board, I hope you'll send them to talk to me. I'll be fascinated to learn who sails in my crew and still has the superstitions of a lake fisherman." Every head within a twenty-yard radius turned quickly back to its task; men who for one reason or another were not standing high just now in Morgan's credit betrayed themselves with whistling that was too nonchalant and an excess of diligence at their work.

Tom Valentine's good eyebrow rose. "You won't find me making an objection if Cat wants to install one of Devon's convenients on deck. Just so he keeps her out of the way. And I hope she's not a troublemaker."

"If she makes any trouble, then with my blessing you're welcome to—" Morgan delivered one of his less benign smiles to Merry while he allowed the hesitation to develop artistically and then cut it off exactly right with "Request that she desist."

Mr. Valentine had no reason to worry. The last thing Merry wanted to do was make trouble. But Trouble, which for eighteen years had avoided Merry, had other ideas. Trouble was in a whimsical humor that morning, for Merry's next introduction on the pirate ship was to fat Dennis.

Morgan and Valentine moved off, and Merry stood nervously with Cat on the quarterdeck. Holding her hat with one hand, she tipped her head to stare up the one-hundred-and-thirty-foot length of the mast when something pink, dripping, and furred was thrust like a poker into the folds of her gown and between her knees. Too jarred to scream, she fell against Cat, who caught her hard against his hip with an arm encircling her waist.

"Merry!" Cat said. "Are you all right?" Not to her (she hoped) he added, "Damn! You stupid pig. Snuff it, will you?"

At Merry's feet there stood a grunting, sniffling pig, its ears Mapped forward like blinders, trotters clicking angrily on the deck.

"Away with ye, Dennis! If that's the way ye have with the ladies, it's as well ye are a pig," said an old sailor, who had been sewing, his back to the gunwale and nested in the ecru hills of a sail. He had found his feet easily and pushed the pig away from Merry with his bare toes. The man's chapped pink lips spread over bottle-shaped tceth that ran with char lines, and his skin was seamed like broken biscuit crust, but kindness twinkled in the pale spearpoints of his eyes. "Don't fear, lassie. No harm'll come to ye."

Cat lowered Merry to the deck and sent the old man a look that she couldn't-interpret; then, dropping to his knees, he cracked his thumb and mid-finger once. With hoggish ecstasy the pig drove its pink snout under the boy's hand, shaking its screwy tail and squealing. Cat said, "Pet him, Merry, he won't bite." Her hand was taken in a firm grip and slid around the pig's ear. "No. He can't even feel that. Under his jaw. See?"

The old sailor smiled at Merry's expression and at her attempt to befriend the pig, and he said, "There now. He's liking ye already. Old Dennis here, he was just a mite jealous, at firstly, seeing ye with Mr. Cat, here. Fair worships the lad, does Dennis."

Under happier circumstances there might be any number of pleasant jollities one could make about someone who drew the affection of a pig. A single look at Cat's face would have informed the slowest wit that none of these were a very good idea. Merry cleared her throat. "Dennis?" she said.

The older man gave her an encouraging grin. "Aye. Aye. He came aboard as a wee ruddy porker, with a yaller ribbon 'round his neck. We mean to eat him sometime, but who can do it with him being such a pet and all?''

"Oh," Merry said. "But—Dennis?"

"If there's a pig on a ship, everyone calls it Dennis," said Cat. "Don't ask me why."

"It's the porcine moniker," agreed the old man. "We sailors are a dry-witted lot, save for the nippy young ones like Mr. Cat, here. It's pleased to meet ye, 1 am, missy. Sails, ye can call me. I make 'em, I mend 'em—have done for fifty years. Come sit with me by the ridin' bitts whilst I do my work. There's protection from the weather, a bit. Wind this morning strong enough to unhair a dog, eh?"

"Yes, sir," said Merry, whose hair was starting to creep from under the hat. She perched self-consciously in the spot Sails had indicated with his gnarled hand.

"There we are," Sails said. "Shipshape and Bristol fashion. Cat, ye can be off about your work. It'll cause talk, to have ye hovering there like a snake watching its only egg."

Far above the
Black Joke
the sun was a lonely stranger, a flat circle with sharp edges that were blue and phosphorescent. A breeze rich in sea spice ruffled foam from the slate-covered ocean waves and made the ship deck lively with furling shirts and pant legs, swinging lines, fresh cheeks. Under the uproar of the great wheaten staysails Merry watched bright, busy light skitter on the sailmaker as he mended. His knuckles were swollen and red, like candied cherries. His palm was so tough that he used it as a thimble, but there was elegance in each minute turn of his fingers. He looked up at her with a smile from time to time after Cat had vanished belowdecks. Catching her glancing apprehensively around her, the sailmaker said, "Scruff-lookin' lot, ain't they? The black sheep of everybody's family; but nae so bad as they're painted, only younger sons wi' nary a penny to 'prentice them in a trade, sailors who made mutinees under ship's masters who'd made belayin' pin hash of their men, escaped slaves like Tom Valentine. Crew wi' Morgan, ye can make more than fifty times the year's pay ye would in the Navy, and if ye're already on the shark side of the law . . . Could ye cast me that pricker, next to ye foot? Aye, that's it. The wee marlinespike. There's a fine, useful lass. Now tuck yer hands in 'tween yer knees there—it's cold as blue flugin—an' I'll tell ye about an auld witch lady I know what lives in Liverpool. She can foretell a sailor's death to the hour, jest by fixing her hand on his pulse."

Sitting by Sails, Merry saw for the first time the
Black Joke
take another ship. The
Joke
had luffed up close upon the wind at the lookout's call of "Sail ho" and made such a casual chase of the far vessel that Merry barely understood the import of it until a bow cannon on the lower gundeck erupted with an ear-blistering crack, which caused her to bite her tongue.

The shot had been a warning, and as it subsided in a frothy splash off the other vessel's stern the
Black Joke
ran up its frightening standard, Morgan's Jolly Roger, the grinning skeleton caressing an hourglass. Sails had barely paused in his story about a Cree wizard who sold winds by the pouch for a pound of tobacco. Merry watched the bright dart of the other ship's flag shimmy and drop with near comical haste as she struck her colors in surrender.

In the hours that passed, the longboats went back and forth, leaving empty from the
Joke
and returning with copper-bound casks and bales wrapped in cerecloth and once a rickety crate of chickens that poked out their heads like jack-in-the-boxes and cackled disapprovingly at the pirates. The scrawny rooster wriggled through a broken slat as the longboat neared the
Joke
and crowed victoriously from the starboard bow. Merry watched as a pirate wearing a black and white striped shirt went at the bird in a flying dive and came down headfirst in the water. The other pirates in the boat guffawed mightily, and the youngest of them, whom Merry recognized as the dark-eyed boy with the soft West Indian accent who had spoken to Cat on the day he had brought her aboard the
Joke,
began with sweetly exaggerated solicitude to help his comrade back into the boat, but when the sodden pirate was almost aboard, the dark-eyed boy sent him sprawling back into the water with the gentle shove of a shapely booted leg. Men on the
Joke
began to gather by the gunwale, laughing and calling mock reproaches to the boy, and behind Merry the sailmaker chuckled and said, "That laddie. Raven. Always up to a bit of fun. Good lad. Every inch of him a man."

On the longboat Raven appeared to be making a long-winded apology to the wet pirate who was treading water furiously, spouting cold seawater like an orca. The model of contrition, Raven offered his friend in the water the end of an oar, began to draw him toward the boat, and let go at the very last minute to send the man toppling backward into a curtaining fountain of sea splash. The pirates on deck were doubled over with mirth as the poor sodden fellow gave Raven a crude gesture and began swimming to the ship, followed by the longboat, oars diligently breaking water and Raven laughing and pelting him with eggs.

No sooner had Raven set foot back on the
Joke
than he was collared by Thomas Valentine, cuffed backhand, and given a lecture that appeared to do him no earthly good, judging from his happily unrepentant face. In the end Valentine had mussed the boy's hair and sent him, with a kick, to "pick oakum."

It was an alarming surprise for Merry when not ten minutes later Raven appeared on the bow deck with a coil of old rope and a canvas sack. With not so much as a molecule of proper inhibition, he flopped fore-down on the cold deck beside her with his chin in one square palm. As a point of pride Merry tried to match the dark gaze, sweet as an infant's, that dripped over her like hot cocoa as the wind tickled through the waves of his long midnight hair, his big silky black jacket, and the loose legs of trousers that carried a belt of steel links. He had an uncommonly attractive face, with eyes that were almost lovely, wind-bitten skin, a straight nose, an untroubled brow, and a firm, clever mouth pleated with pronounced smile lines. The bodies of sailors, Merry was beginning to find, were uniformly superb, and on that bleak thought she looked quickly away.

Hindered by the insensitivity of the unselfconscious, Raven had no idea what he'd done to offend her. Poor beauty, she was almost as spooked today as she had been when he'd first seen her, fetching, even with her nose running. Tragedy dwelt like a blue flame in her big eyes; the shallow pulsebeat in the golden hollow of her throat was luffing like a spanker on a vessel that was hauled too close to the wind. He had seen the look before on women about to be raped, and he found no charm in having it turned on him. More and more he had begun to understand why Cat, who had no scruples in the bedroom or out of it, still hated to see a woman taken violently. Astonishing that the captain had kept her aboard when she was bound to set everyone's appetite to roast. But she was safe, perfectly safe. Morgan had cheerfully announced that he would see any man emasculated who laid a greedy hand on her, and Rand Morgan was a man who kept his promises.