by Susan Ward
Silence. Morgan eyes were black and innocent. He tossed the intricate gold box of leaves to the boy. Indy caught it with a remarkable quickness of a hand.
“Since you want my rebirth by fire, why should we make it easier on me? I have a feeling you are going to need that, more than I do, before this is through. That’s all that’s left, since we’ve been so long from the Caribbean. You are not as unaffected by all this as you imagine yourself to be. Perhaps you are the one who isn’t going to like where it takes you, lad.”
Indy’s eyes were shockingly empty. “Keep it.” He tossed the box back. “I have more experience, than you, in suffering the agonies of being forced through events I don’t wish to go through.”
~~~
Merry was sitting on her knees at the window bench, her nose pressed against the chilled glass of the stern gallery when Indy, breakfast tray in hand, entered the cabin. She looked like a tiny suffering cat, trapped in a cage, desperate to escape.
“I thought you had forgotten me,” she said irritably.
“We attracted the notice of a British frigate at dawn, and I was needed on deck.”
Merry’s eyes rounded. A British frigate? Was her luck finally to change?
“Is there going to be a battle?” she asked, unable not to sound hopeful.
The boy took a biscuit in a scarred hand and tossed it to her.
“No. We played with each until about an hour ago. I am sorry to disappoint you.”
“Why did we run?” Merry asked, unwilling to abandon all hope.
The boys shrugged. “We’re not political, Merry.”
He took the bundle from his arms and dropped it on the bench beside her.
“Those are my clothes. Put them on. Don’t ruin them. Morgan gave me permission to take you topside, for a little air, if you want to. He thinks you need a touch of color in your cheeks.”
She sprang from the bench. “Would a moment of privacy to dress be tempting my good fate?” she said.
“Only if you delay. Morgan said a quick turn on deck. Nothing more today, since there’s always a possibility we might go into battle. You had better behave yourself, Merry. Do what I tell you. If you cause any trouble, he won’t let you out again.”
“But, why is he finally allowing me out of here?”
Indy crossed the cabin, turned his back, and gave a curt order to dress.
“Why does Morgan do anything? If you want to know, you would do better to ask him.”
Not bloody likely. She wanted as little contact with Morgan as possible. The man confused her, too much, as it was.
“You can turn around now,” Merry announced once Indy’s britches and shirt were secured.
Indy swept her once with a hard stare and then cursed low.
Merry glared. “What have I done to irritate you now? Is my shirt button crooked? Why does everything I do irritate you?”
“I had thought my britches and shirt would serve better than the Wythford woman’s dresses,” Indy grumbled, noting how her breasts struggled against the fabric of his shirt. “I was wrong.” He shrugged out of his vest. “I should leave you here, loss of color or not. I should have known better than to think you wouldn’t be a nuisance. Keep that bloody thing on until you’re back in the cabin.”
Blushing, Merry shrugged into the garment. “You can be absolutely hateful at times. It is not my fault your shirt is too small. It is unfair of you to accuse me of being a nuisance because of it.”
“You can’t help but to be a nuisance, it’s an unpleasant natural part of your character and sex. You are going to be enough of a damn curiosity on deck, without your bosom popping out to heat up every man within a hundred feet of you. These are rough men, Merry. You’re not in England, damn it. Exercise some common sense for once.”
As they clambered up the ladder through the hatch, Merry fought the sudden burn of light against her eyes, her senses raw after having been in doors for so long. She struggled to focus her gaze and her senses to the dizzying rush of sound and activity around her.
Everywhere there was noise and motion, men busy rushing on deck, the brilliant vast sky now gloriously diffuse in color, and the sharp slap of icy cold wind against her cheeks. Merry’s senses jumped with a tingling excitement.
Leaning back her head, she paused at the top step, staring at hundreds of yards of sheet white canvas dancing against the masts. The men in the ratlines, their agile sailors’ bodies moving with a sureness that was oddly graceful, were no longer a muted sound. Their shouting and singing flooded her ears.
Tilting her face toward the sky, Merry allowed a smile of pure pleasure to surface.
Indy watched, felt instant dread, and his gaze narrowed. Every man within eye-shot was fixed on the bloody picture she made on that top step, face lifting to the Heavens. He’d be damn lucky to make it through the morning without drawing steel to protect her foolish hide.
Even Tom Craven had paused beside Morgan to give her a hard stare. Morgan was the only man not staring at Merry. Though aware of what the sudden stir around him meant, he made neither comment to put a halt to it, nor gave notice of it.
Indy grabbed her arm jerking her out of her pose.
“Ouch. Why did you hurt me?” Merry hissed, slapping at his hand.
“I told you not to attract the notice of the crew. Don’t you have sense at all?”
Her face instantly moved to his as she glared. “I wasn’t doing anything.”
He cursed again. The boy caught her hard against him with a scarred hand and pulled her with him across the deck.
Merry struggled against the grip and then stopped, glaring at him, as she slipped awkwardly behind him on the damp deck. She tried to jerk free, but fighting Indy was pointless.
She had done nothing to deserve his irritation. The men who did notice her quickly dropped their eyes as they passed. She couldn’t image why he was angry with her. The boy was scowling, his face even more fierce than usual.
In no time, Indy had worked her through the maze of rushing men, to a grinning blond youth who looked vaguely familiar to Merry. He sat, back against a mast, pulling a needle in one beefy hand through canvas, with surprising skill.
“Hello, lass, so yer alive and well with us, after all,” he boomed in a jovial voice, grinning up at Merry. “I was almost given up me prayers to ever see yer bonnie face again.”
Merry stared at him, then remembered. Shay, Indy’s partner from the beach. She would have moved onward across the deck if Indy, with not so gentle hands, hadn’t pushed her down onto the space beside Shay.
“Why the hell haven’t you finished that yet?” Indy growled.
“Plague rot ye, lad, I have got me a good hand with me needle, but not a quick one. So unless ye want the bloody thing to pull apart, leave off.”
Then to Merry, with heavy meaning, Shay explained, “It’s not that I am lazy, lass, no matter what himself thinks.”
He looked at Merry again and his smile was bright, lopsided, and absurdly shameless.
“So, yer still angry with me, lass? And meself, I have been worried day overnight fer ye, since none of us have seen even a hair of yer bonnie head, though every shellback on ship knows that yer here. I wanted to let ye go, remember? Makes me sick, in the pit of my belly, to have such bonnie eyes glaring at me. Can ye find an ounce of pity in yer blessed heart to forgive a dumb foolish Irishman?”
It was hard to remain angry with the young pirate. Merry felt the corners of her lips twitch with a smile. He had wanted to let her go and he did have an uncommonly attractive face, with lively shameless eyes that could be only be termed now as wheedling.
Her smile came, slight, but his reaction was not.
“There, ye are forgiving me, don’t try to pretend yer not,” Shay said with syrupy satisfaction.
Indy wondered at the wisdom of this and almost reached to pull Merry back up beside him. But he had duties to complete below deck and he had to leave her somewhere. Shay was the only other man under twenty o
n ship. For that reason, combined with the fact this spot was within range of Morgan’s vision if things got ugly. Indy reluctantly decided to leave Merry where she was.
“Ye can run along, lad. I will see the lass don’t come to no harm. Morgan is in a rare temper. What the hell is the matter with the mon these days?” Noting Indy’s hesitation, he slanted another look and added. “Go along with ye, lad. I will see the lassie doesn’t make no mischief.”
He gave Merry a playful wink, which brought soft giggles in spite of how she tried to check them. Indy favored them both with a severe glare.
He said to Shay, “See she doesn’t get into trouble or I will skin your hide myself.”
Merry watched as Indy crossed the deck to Morgan.
“That frigate is a bloody well-armed one, lass,” Shay said, noting the direction of her gaze while he continued his work with canvas. “If she hadn’t broken pursuit, it would have been a damn hellish mess. Not that Morgan can’t take her. The mon knows battle tactics that most captains of the fleet have never seen, much less heard of. The mon is bloody charmed and ruthless. There’s no need to worry, lass. Morgan’s order was not to battle and we didn’t.”
It was clear Shay all but idolized the man.
“Morgan,” Merry said, settling her chin in palms with elbows on knees. “I am so weary of that insufferable man. The last thing I want to do is talk about him. Next you’ll be telling me he can fly.”
“He might at that. If yer weary of the mon, lass, why do ye stare at him? Here I thought ye were glad to see me, and I would be getting a share of yer bonnie eyes on me.”
Feeling an unwanted blush, she rapidly shifted her gaze. She had been staring at Morgan.
“I despise the man,” she stated stiffly.
Shay gave her a wink. “That’s good, lass. I like ye. He ain’t the mon fer you. More bother than any mon’s worth. He’s bloody ruthless with the lasses. When he walks the streets, the women flock about him, like he were the last sweet meat on the dinner tray. Want him fer dessert, they do. Common or noble, ain’t no difference what they are, every blasted one of ‘em. Now tell me, isn’t my fion figure just as striking?”
He waited for a reply with a silly expression on his face and didn’t get one.
Shay studied her face, and then said, “Ah, so that be the way of it. I heard some of the crew all a’whispers in their hammocks that ye slept on the bench, but the scuttlebutt at times is a crazy thing. I couldn’t believe me ears. Do you know, yer the first lass I ever run across that didn’t have an itch for the mon?”
Blushing furiously, Merry stated in a voice of absolute resolve, “I assure you the only thing I want from that man is my return to Falmouth.”
Her gaze shifted back to Morgan then. All at once he turned, fresh faced and romantically tousled by the wind. Reaction surged upward so quickly, Merry couldn’t stop it.
She had shared a cabin with the man for a week. She had watched him in ever mood and turn. She had thought she was over that shock that came when looking at him.
But Morgan by sunlight was another prospect all together. Sun-detailed, the chiseled lines of his face were more flawlessly perfect, more handsome. Less soulless and dangerous. Those black eyes captured light, seeming to hold it, turning it into a shimmering mosaic of rich tones, which had only been hinted at by candle glow. Seeing him now, next to other men, made him all the more inhumanly perfect.
She hated her reaction. Yet, she couldn’t stop it. It caught Merry like a cannon ball against her stomach.
Shay sat for awhile, stitching and studying Merry. She claimed she didn’t want Morgan, but he’d known that look in a woman’s eyes, more clever than her at hiding it. Then there was Morgan who, if rumor had the right of it—and he sensed it did— let the girl sleep on the bench, when her beauty alone would have brought her ruin with any man who could make their member work.
He couldn’t begin to fathom it, but any way he looked at it, the situation was better for the lass, if it were left to sit as it was.
Shay invested a full hour of quickly invented, outrageous sea tales to drag her gaze from the captain. Pulling her attention back, canvas done, he decided to distract her by teaching her knots. He was pleased when the effort turned her face to smiles as she clumsily worked the rope. Once Morgan had disappeared below decks, Merry gave the rope her full attention, though it didn’t seem to help.
“Blast it, lass, that’s the damn silliest rolling hitch I have ever seen. Now pay attention.”
Effortlessly he twisted and turned his rope into the knot.
Merry tried again. Hopeless. He tried teaching her several more types. They were just as bad. But, the lass was all smiles. Both of them forgetting Indy’s warning, the knots turned into a trek to the canons and showing her how to load one.
Merry was covered in gunpowder and laughing uproariously by the time they were chased off by Morgan’s gruff gunner barking furiously at them, after the boy had asked if she could fire one. Shay had stopped to pelt him with a wash of powder before they fled the flustered man.
A lesson with a knife followed that had him rolling with mirth on the deck, as she inexpertly attempted to bury it in the wood of a mast. The knife whizzed past the target, just missing the sailing master’s leg. Shay only boomed about how well she sank it into the railing.
For Merry the afternoon was splendid. Being with Shay was like floating in the bubbles of a champagne bottle, impossible to resist and providing an escape from her currently ghastly state of affairs. However outrageous her conduct was, it only pleased and urged the boy onward.
He’d raved in pleasure when she’d asked to climb the rigging, clutching her hand in his burly grasp. Before she knew it, she was climbing aloft, hurrying to keep pace on the ratlines with the much surer moving boy. She had done this before, with Uncle Andrew on their journey to America, and as remembered the experience was thrilling.
High above the ship, with an endless horizon of water and sky, the wind rushed her senses. She held the ropes, leaning back, feet braced, hair caught by the current of air and streaming in a dancing dark cloud behind her. As miserable as her current situation was, this was a treasure.
Shay looked down at Merry, smiling in satisfaction. “Damn me, if yer not one of the best I have seen on these ropes. Do ye want to go higher, lass? Let’s see if we can’t touch Heaven.”
Merry’s laughter filled the air as she scrambled to continue upward with him.
Indy, coming through the hatchway, found the majority of the crew gathered beneath a mast, the ship in near chaos, not a lick of work being done with a British warship within reach of them. Following the direction of their gazes, he looked upward and saw Merry. Recalling the battle he had had with Morgan to let her from cabin, he wondered how the devil he would ever explain this.
By the time Morgan returned to deck, Indy was in the ratlines, as well. His laughing, jeering crew was almost folded over on the deck in their unrestrained humor. It was clear the boy was fighting to get them down. Shay took direction only moderately well, in the best of circumstances. With Merry’s glowing humor egging him on, Shay was unmanageable.
The Irishman was making comical wipes with his leg to keep Indy away from his companion. Indy’s face was a thing of thunder, as he rapidly spoke with an animated swing of arm. Merry was doing ridiculous evasive maneuvers on the ropes, rather skillfully, and was laughing like a madwoman. The scene held all the absurdity of a low farce in a London theater.
Morgan’s black eyes took in the scene in a single glance. Only Tom Craven wasn’t laughing, though there was a telling softness to the edges of his thin lips.
As amusing as it all was, Morgan was irritated with the interruption. Since they were still playing cat-watching mouse with a British warship, it was time to return Merry to the cabin where he should have kept her in the first place.
“Varian, don’t you think you should keep the girl locked below in your cabin?” Tom Craven said the instant Morgan was upon h
im.
“You can’t expect her to exist on only doses of alone and doses of me. I think she shows astonishing agility for a girl of nineteen. Who would have thought she could out run Indy on the ropes.”
Morgan arched a brow at Tom Craven. Tom’s was a reasonable suggestion given the current disruption on ship. His response, therefore, sounded unreasonable even to him.
“Agility be damned. The girl is a madwoman. I have not made comment any time you’ve kept one of your conveniences aboard ship and let them have the run of the deck. This one, of course, is beautiful, but the others had the good sense not to climb the rigging. Why the devil do you keep the girl? She’s not in your style at all, Varian, and she’s a bloody nuisance.”
“The others had not so much more sense, Tom. Most probably less agility.”
“Where will you be with your amusement if she kills herself? I don’t relish the idea of having her hide splattered on the deck, regardless of what you decide to do with her.”
“As I recall, you wanted me to dispose of her. Wasn’t that the content of our discussion last night? Wouldn’t her being splattered on my deck tend to settle our disagreement for us? A betraying softening, Tom? What should I make of that?”
That sent a slight flush across Tom’s face. Morgan assessed it and then turned his eyes back to Merry.
He was about to send men up after them, when it became unnecessary. Indy, who had the never failing sureness of a cat, fell from the ratlines into the water. He had made an uncharacteristically foolish move with an arm as he reached for Merry’s squirming leg.
Humor gone, Morgan’s face was thunderous. He found himself giving the order to come about so that the boy could be retrieved from the water.
He was still on the quarterdeck when Indy was dropped, a shivering, splattering wet mess on the deck. Two of Morgan’s stouter crewmen held him back from tearing Shay apart. Merry, laughing in unbridled glee, dropped to her knees beside the boy’s struggling, snarling figure.