The Windflower

by Laura London

  Something cold and living brushed her cheekbone, and in a torrent of hysterical sensation she recognized the taut sinews of Cat’s arm. He had not released her. Perhaps she was to be held under the water in the unflinching compassion of his arms until he was quite sure that she was totally dead. The last scattered drops of her reason evaporated, and she began to thrash wildly, her legs arching against the water, her arms knocking low fountains of seawater into the wind.

  “That,” said Cat’s voice close to her ear, “will draw sharks. And they might hear you on the beach. Feel this?” An arm, hooked under her arms, tightened. “I’m not going to let you go. Just cooperate.”

  By the time he pulled her back into the skiff, Merry was crying stormily. She was dumped without ceremony again onto the spongy dampness of the bilge.

  “I wish you’d stop wiggling,” he told her. “I don’t want to spend what’s left of the day pulling splinters out of you.”

  Peeling off his greatcoat, he joined her where she lay and wrapped it around her; although it was wet on the outside from the ocean spray, it was warm inside where it had been against his body. Somewhere in the coat he found a handkerchief and made her blow her nose on it, and then he lifted the heavy tangled wool of her hair and, dragging it between his hands, wrung from it most of the alkaline seawater. Perhaps in his profession he saw a lot of crying women; anyway, he made no reference during his ministrations to the convulsive, effortful sobs that racked her, and finally he sat back and took the tiller again.

  The sea slapped beneath the bow as the small craft sliced through the fog. The minutes flew at Merry too quickly for her to guess when one left off and the next began. They came to a place where the fog shimmered like a fine clear powder and ahead of the skiff a heaving mountain reared from the ocean. On its back rode the great triple spires of the masts; far below the skiff passed, tiny and bouncing like a waterbug, under the gargoyle figurehead with its pointed ears, opaque goiterous eyes, and red tongue, thrust out and drooling condensed moisture. Merry tried to sit up, staring, but a long thin foot, bare of covering, met her chest and pushed her quickly back to the floor.

  “Down!” he said. “Or can you swim with your hands tied? If we capsize, I’d never find you. The water’s too dark.”

  Merry heard a hallooing from the watch, and an answering shout from Cat. A rope came spinning down, and Cat made it fast and began to uncleat the halyards at the base of the mast.

  A youth of about eighteen years let himself quickly down the rope, hand over hand, staring with blossoming interest at Merry through sable eyes set in warm, sun-honeyed skin. His hair was long and very dark, pulled back under a large red bandanna knotted on one side of his head.

  “Cat, are you crazy?” he said. “Or don’t you notice she’s a woman?”

  “Little though you may credit it, I can tell the sexes apart,” snapped the boy, catching the luffing sails as they fell.

  “Morgan’s gonna wring your neck, mon. There’s not a pirate ship from Maine to Christi that’ll take a woman on board. Even Blackbeard—”

  “Plague rot it! Will you quit the Blackbeard lore? It’s most of it a bunch of cock and bull. No women on board. I could tell you some stories…” Cat glanced at the other boy’s eager face and said sourly, “But I won’t. Why don’t you do something constructive like lifting in the rudder?”

  Ignoring him, the boy with the red bandanna dropped to his knees beside Merry’s shivering form and gently lifted a wet curl from her nose. “Mon, she’s got pretty eyes—like blue glass in a church window. And her body?”

  “Is covered with gooseflesh and bleeding saltwater from every pore,” Cat said, flipping his braid irritably out of the way as he expertly coiled a rope.

  “So? She looks half-dead. What’s she been doing all morning, dancing a blanket hornpipe?”

  “No. But almost. And not with me. Look, you lazy sucker. See that nothing of an apple barrel behind you? Very good. Put it where His Lordship can get a look at it, will you, and with care, please. If it falls in the water, it’ll be your neck that gets wrung.”

  The boy gave Cat a grin with a gold tooth in it. “If you’re so worried about the barrel, you bring it. I’ll take care of Blue Eyes.”

  “Fine. And then you can be the one who explains her to Morgan. No? I thought that would change your mind. And one of the side stays is loose, if you’ve got time…”

  Frigid and terrified, and unable, it seemed, to control the tears making ceaseless icy streaks down her cheeks, Merry discovered what a singularly painful exercise it is to be carried over a man’s shoulder like a sack of meal. Establishing her there with no attention to her comfort, Cat climbed the rope ladder, and with each jarring step his hard-boned shoulder jammed into her midriff, forcing gasps of agony from her that vanished into the choking folds of her gag. Her vision spun as she looked straight down into the boiling sea, where it dashed against the side of the ship, and saw the skiff shrink as they climbed.

  Her hair was too much snarled in her face for her to see anything once they reached the deck, but she could hear the vibration of footsteps, and voices. Heedless of them, the young pirate carried her toward the stern and then ducked and took her down a flight of steps, to halt before a doorway. He knocked once, pushed it open with his foot, and brought her inside.

  She had never seen a room as exotically luxurious as this one, let alone a ship’s cabin. On three sides massive windows of wavy, diamond-shaped glass let in scattered light, but no vision beyond a gray impression of the heaving, watery horizon. A Persian carpet of the Fereghan type spread over the floor, a massive flowing field of madder red, its delicate pattern etched in densely saturated yellow and blue: two hundred and fifty Persian knots to the square inch, if anyone cared to count. Beneath the far window a beautifully carved line of bench seats were heaped with pillows in rich brocades of red and black, twisted with embroidered gold flowers. Not the smallest scratch or smear marred the high shine of the Chinese lacquered tables, Ming dynasty, or the intricate pictorial marquetry of the Belgian writing desk. The chairs were draped in ebony lambskin, catching copper glints from tiny flame tongues that licked the air behind saffron globes of Bohemian glass.

  Gleaming deeply on one wall were Russian icons, sucking room light into their amazingly brilliant colors, and underneath them a bed with a perimeter as big as a stone tool house was hidden under a blanket of Siberian crown sable.

  Cat dropped her on the bed’s blue-black fur, where she lay, rigid and weeping in her bonds. Taking a stiletto from his belt, and ignoring her horrified eyes, he brought the knife to her throat and paused before using it to rip down the fabric of her soaked nightdress, freeing it from her body; and she lay naked before him, shaking furiously.

  His cold eyes traveled over her, but with indifference, not with the prurience of one to whom such things were a mystery, and then he reached behind him, grabbed a square of cloth, and rubbed her limbs vigorously, not touching her intimately but not taking pains to avoid doing so either; and then he brought a blanket and covered her with it, tucking it efficiently around her, his long braid falling against her cheek.

  The door opened, and Rand Morgan entered, stooping as he came in. A dark olive and buttonless coat with gold facings that had some time ago belonged to one of Napoleon’s garde d’honneur casually encased the pirate captain’s wide shoulders, and the huge emerald flickered erratically from the soft inky curls on his chest. The deep black eyes looked at Cat questioningly, and then at her; the granite face was as frightening in its seeming omniscience as she had remembered it from the tavern. He spoke, the tone spiced lightly with pleasant sarcasm.

  “Dear me. Shall I come back later?”

  “Don’t be funny,” replied Cat irritably. “I’m drying her off.” He reached back into the lacquered chest bolted to the wall behind him, brought out a towel, and used it to dry Merry’s hair.

  Morgan’s imperturbable gaze followed the youth’s quick movements. “Why is she wet? And if o
ne is permitted to ask, who is she? Or were you going to wait until Christmas and surprise me?”

  The self-assured, accurate movements in her hair stilled as the boy looked up at Morgan. “I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

  Morgan’s eyes wandered, more slowly than Cat’s had done, over her form as she shivered beneath the blanket, and he said dryly, “That doesn’t seem to have been much of a deterrent. But you were about to tell me who she is, weren’t you? Don’t mind me. I’m going to smoke.”

  Morgan lowered his long-shafted limbs into a lambskin chair. Beside him was a vertical tower the length of a man’s arm with many bulb-shaped chambers made from silver and blown glass painted with floral decorations. A small brazier glowed red in the footed conical base, and into it Morgan dropped a dark-brown substance that looked like an oily rock as Cat brought a handkerchief to her pinkened nose.

  “You’re the wettest wench I ever saw,” he said disgustedly. “If you’d stop crying for a minute…”

  Merry could see Morgan’s lips quirk at the corners. From the base of the chambered tower he uncoiled a woven tube tipped with a steaming ivory mouthpiece, which he laid backhanded between his lips. Inhaling, he stretched out his legs contentedly; as he slowly exhaled, a dense and billowing smoke scattered around him. Its odor was sharp, rich, and cloying, and faintly tinged with roses. Merry was an American girl and knew tobacco in all its incarnations: smoked and chewed, growing in fields and at harvest, hanging in storage and sold in shops, and this—whatever else it was, it was not tobacco. Morgan closed his eyes, the thick lashes drooping, and smiled slowly.

  “ ‘Divine in hookahs, glorious in a pipe,’ ” he said. “Speak.”

  Cat left her, and she felt pressure near her feet as he sat on the foot of the bed. “You know those papers Devon wanted?”

  At the mention of the name Merry’s heart pounded in her chest and then slowed.

  “You had hired someone, hadn’t you, to steal them for him,” drawled Morgan. “Don’t take too long coming to the point, babe; I may fall asleep by the time you get there.”

  “Give me a chance.” He leaned over and tucked the blanket around Merry’s feet. “When they got to the Guinevere, Granville was on deck, so they thought it would be all right. They didn’t realize until they got in there that he had left a woman in his bed.”

  Morgan leaned back, took another drag, and murmured, “Slovenly bastard.”

  “I thought so,” said Cat. “You would think he’d have put her out by then, especially since the Guinevere was to sail in the morning. Idiotically they let her see them.”

  Morgan opened one eye. “Then why isn’t she dead?”

  “Fear of the hangman,” said Cat, “and minds set on ruttery. They brought her to me gagged and bound in an apple barrel. Devon, incidentally, will get his papers.”

  “I’m delighted, of course,” Morgan said and leaned back, dragging deeply on the pipe. The blue smoke swirled around his black curls, making fantastic red-tinged shapes in the light of the candles. “Cat, I really am getting tired of asking you this question. Why isn’t she dead?”

  There was a short unfriendly silence that Merry spent shaking like a fiddle string before Morgan said, “The tenderhearted boy-child hated to drown the stray kitten, so he brought it home and hid it under his bed? What do you intend to do when she starts to mew?”

  This second silence was kinder. Then Cat said, “Once you told me that trouble was the only thing that made your life interesting.”

  “Did I? How rash of me.” Morgan drew another long inhalation. When it was finished, he said, “You should take her gag off. She can barely breathe.”

  “If I do, she’ll start complaining. You know,” the boy said, “women have an excessive regard for their comfort.”

  “Nevertheless.” Morgan got up slowly and walked to the bed and sat down beside her; she could feel his rock-hard thigh next to her shoulder.

  Seawater had fused the knots of her gag into a sticky mat. Morgan’s fingers tried them, gave up, and again Merry had to endure a knife, mercifully quick.

  “Let’s have a look at you,” he said, pulling free the filthy strip of sodden gauze that had bound her mouth, “miserable, bedraggled little bird that you are.”

  She was no closer to talking now than she had been, with her skinned and swollen tongue and paralyzed jaw, and Morgan, understanding it, rubbed her chapped face lightly, teasing back the blood into her starving veins. The sudden glut of air in her throat made swallowing almost a torture.

  He watched her with black shining eyes that held neither pity nor malice, and she could tell to the second when he knew her. The pirate captain’s lazy eyelids opened, just a trifle, and a slow grin spread over the sharp line of his mouth.

  “Cat, bring me some wine.” Lifting her head on the slope of his arm, Morgan put a blue wineglass to her lips and, when she had finished, cleaned the clumsy failed drops from her chin. “Well, well. I should have recognized you, if only from the hair. But then, it was damp.”

  If it needed one thing only to make her situation worse, it would be for them to connect her and her night at the tavern with certain highly detailed portraits on placards, advertising rewards for Morgan’s capture, and Cat’s. But even if they knew about the posters, they could never trace them to her, could they?

  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 min
ute 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 8

  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.