The Windflower

by Laura London

  “Then you’ll release me?” she said, almost sick with hope. “Please. You’ve admitted you don’t want me.”

  “No. You’ll leave when you talk, Merry.”

  It was having to make statements to her of just that kind of stagy vulgarity that was most offensive to an intellect that knew better. Melodrama, which he’d always hated, seemed to be an integral part of the abductor role. The corners of his lips teased upward into a smile. “And you misunderstand. I said you were inconvenient—but not that I didn’t want you. I do want you. Or have you forgotten?”

  His hands found her waist in a movement that was swift and graceful, and Merry was drawn into a firm embrace before she’d had time to begin the work of relaxing the hard knot in her throat. Inside her skin was a body that was reeling, a heart bouncing painfully into ribs that seemed not to fit any longer in her chest. His clothes and hers, under normal circumstances perfectly adequate, were suddenly a shockingly thin layer, a sparse weave of threads that allowed too clearly the caress of one body by another. Exploded was the happy fiction that it had all been Morgan’s drugs, the first night with Devon in his cabin, that had made her dissolve like ice crystals in an oven. As little as she knew about intimacy, she was getting a very strong hint from that space in her body where the blood was starting to convene; it had certainly vacated her head. Everything neck up was cold and giddy, and everything neck down was hot and swimming. And everything from her waist down was boiling like spiced stew.

  She tried desperately to strain her hips away from him, and all she got for her pains was the flat of his spread hand sliding down her back, and then, resting on a part of her body she never mentioned by name, he cupped her gently back to him.

  “Don’t,” he said, and in his voice there was a smile. “That’s the best part.”

  All she could do after that was to close her eyes and pretend she wasn’t there. His hands, behind her, were moving idly, discovering as though for the first time the down-soft hollows and fertile curves. Aware of the stiffly held angle of her head, he lifted one hand, threaded under the heavy surface of her hair, and massaged the back of her neck until her cheek relaxed against his chest and her body rested from its resistance.

  “Where are we now?” he murmured. “Are we admitting we like it, or are we still pretending we don’t?”

  Clinging hopelessly to some remnant of pride, Merry said, “Why do you think it’s pretending I don’t?”

  “Well.” His hands drifted downward again and lifted her lightly into him. “There’s the faintest trace”—he moved her softly—“of a response.” Bringing up her face, he smiled at her with eyes so rich in warmth they could have melted cold lead.

  She was trying to find a good answer as he tilted her head back and laid careful kisses on her eyelids, with their delicate shadowing of blue-veined tracery. Her cheeks burned under the graze of his lips, and then he moved lower, pressing his mouth over hers and spreading the rounded fullness, probing slowly through the velvet flesh. Faint and pressureless, his fingers played in the dainty lines of her ear. The hand supporting her back rocked her back and forth with languid sensuality. Under the press of his body Merry ached in colors; the reds of the shore fires, the brilliant russets fading in the western sky, the white milk-mist from the distant stars; she tingled every hue in the prism. The world was a collection of sweet and vivid light beams, and she was one of them, and mindless, a spinning miscellany of liquid cells. When finally he lifted his head, his breathing sounded soft and even to her, while she could barely pull the air in and out of her sore lungs.

  She said, “If you’re done, just prop me there against the foremast.”

  His laughter was quiet and enticing. “Don’t you think we should go below and explore this in more detail?” When she said no in a voice that was weak but desperately convincing, he gently put her against the mast and let go. They’d made enough of a spectacle already, and though the crew would certainly expect him to express his possession by handling her when he wanted, it was not a good idea to present her too rashly as a love object. There were any number of men on the Joke who couldn’t be trusted alone with her. He read that back in his mind, grinned suddenly, and added himself to the list.

  Merry’s hair had tumbled forward, a silky spill over the rise and fall of her high breasts, a waving arcade to her exquisite features. Her eyes were deep wells of stabbing blue.

  “All we do together is fight or—or kiss,” she said. “I think I’m becoming deranged from it.”

  “Dear me. Is that a plea to expand our relationship or a revised way of suggesting you want to end it? What can you do, besides fight and kiss?”

  “Pick oakum,” she said wretchedly, “and cry. I can’t imagine the first would interest you, and you’ve already seen the second, so couldn’t we have a truce?”

  A gleam of humor lit Devon’s eyes. “That’s audacious of you, considering that traditional activities during a truce include, but aren’t limited to, tending the wounded, exchanging prisoners, and plotting like a demon what your moves will be when hostilities resume.”

  “If that’s true, you’ve got no reason not to want one,” she retorted, encouraged and disoriented by the relatively mellow tenor of his mood. “The wounded are all on my side; unlike you, I’ve got no prisoners to exchange; and it’s perfectly obvious that you could plot rings around me.” He was still smiling a little, but he made no response, so she added unhappily, “I know it may not matter much to you, but I have a family who must be very worried about me.”

  “Write them a letter and I’ll post it.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Merry said bitterly. “After you’d read it.”

  The accusation moved him not at all. “I’ll be the first to admit that being the kidnapper has immense advantages over being the kidnappee. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for all the mussels in Dublin.”

  “They are not my shoes. They belong to Cat, as does the shirt, and the britches. The gunpowder under my fingernails is Morgan’s. The bruises on my wrists are yours. All that’s left of me is a bit of white ash and bone meal encased in skin.”

  She turned then and made the escape her pride had withheld from her earlier and, plunging down the darkened staircase, ran flat into Cat, who was coming up. He was more than a head taller, but she was on the stair above him. Their faces were nearly level as he stood, a thin, pale-haired shadow before her. With unruffled practicality he advised her to use the handrail or she would break her neck on the steps.

  As he passed her, going up, she said brightly, through choking tears, “You must be worn to a rug, you’ve been working so hard this afternoon avoiding me.”

  He checked in mid-stride, with a reluctance she could almost taste.

  “You really don’t want anything to do with it,” she whispered. “Do you, Cat?”

  There was a short silence, and then he sat down on the stair, the new moonlight a frosty cap on his colorless hair, the hard bones of his face shaded.

  “No.” An extended pause followed before he asked, “You’ve been talking to Devon?”

  “I wouldn’t call it talking. He circles around me like a carnivore and bites when the urge takes him. There’s no more mercy in the man than there is milk in a male tiger.”

  “Panic won’t help.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I needed a slogan. Panic won’t help. That’s an apt one.”

  It was warm in the stairway. Musty air scented with dried varnish fought off breezes from the deck, and the hatch opened to a purple, star-spotted heaven. Merry could barely see his hand as Cat waved it over the empty space beside him in a silent invitation. She joined him gingerly; the step was narrow. They sat together, not touching, and he said, “What was he? Angry?”

  “I haven’t the faintest notion of the workings of the man’s mind. See a brown spider spinning on a rock; as soon know what it’s thinking. I was buried under an avalanche of finesse.”

  “If there’s an avalanche of anything, it’s me
taphors,” he said. “Do you think you can tell me what happened without crucifying the language?”

  A pause came in which Merry did a lot of fidgeting. Finally, “He kissed me.”

  Three short words, and the tone in which she said them revealed more to him than she would have liked. Long habit kept emotion from his face, though she couldn’t have seen it in the dim light anyway. None of this was as easy for the long-haired boy as it had been two weeks ago; not that it had been exactly painless then. He had already done his best for her with Devon; but Devon had experienced hypocrisy in every possible permutation, and it would likely take a deposition from God to make the man trust that Merry’s sweet surface went bone-deep. Nor had Devon any reason to be either rational or lenient with respect to anything connected with Michael Granville. The set of scarred fingers that Cat had clasped loosely around his opposite wrist were tense and icy.

  “You’ll have to accept it,” he said, the slow words following one another in chilly succession, “if you won’t tell him what he wants to know. I’ve told you already, and nothing’s changed. Damn it, Merry, you know—or you ought to know—that a man and a woman who desire each other and share a bedchamber will inevitably—”

  She leaned right over and shoved her face to within inches of his, until he could feel the warmth of her soft, shapely nose. “Will inevitably what?”

  “Will inevitably find something stupid to argue about,” he snapped and, making a frustrated gesture, left her alone on the stairway.

  Merry, entering the cabin a few minutes later, was struck with a fog of hot air that hung pitch-black and sluggish in the small chamber. She knew now by experience that it would take a few hours to cool. A faint breeze wheezed through the high gray square of an open window and carried in the hiss of seafoam and waves slapping the hull. Outside there was also laughter, interrupted briefly by the splash of a longboat meeting water. Merry ran to the bunk and climbed up to look out the window on tiptoe, and by the small closed lantern attached to the boat’s bow, she saw that one of the eight passengers was Devon; his gleaming hair made him stand out like a fresh gold coin amid old pennies. He was laughing in evident delight at something Cat, beside him, was saying. Resting her chin on the sill, Merry watched until she could see only a slight bobbing glow from the lantern as the boat broke through the surf and onto the shore, where the nightly fires were blazing high, spraying torpedoes of sparks toward the stars.

  Pipe smoke drifted in the window from the watch, and on the still deck someone began to sing “Hosanna to the Son of David.” She hummed along while she washed in the basin, changed into Cat’s nightshirt, and used Cat’s ivory comb on her hair. Sitting on the bunk, munching an apple, she heard Morgan go by on the way to his cabin. He knocked twice as he passed, and said, “Happy dreams, nestling.”

  “Good night, Captain Morgan,” she called and struggled under the blankets, the apple cupped like a doll by her cheek. This was the time of day she devoted to trying to think of some way to escape the Joke, and motivation had increased a thousandfold since morning. Tonight the exercise of planning an escape was more intensely therapeutic than usual because with it she could erase Devon from her thoughts for whole minutes.

  The guard on deck was thick, since they were at anchor; rival pirates, evidently, didn’t trust one another, and the consequence to Merry was that she could never have slipped unnoticed from the ship. The apple rolled from her relaxing fingers, and Merry drifted into a dream-active sleep with the moist flesh of the fruit plying its sugared acids against her lips.

  She woke in the wee hours to rough footsteps and shouting on the deck above her, and the scrape of a longboat being secured. Will Saunders’s baritone soared in song, and Merry could just make out the line “He who once a good name gets may piss in bed and say he sweats.” Hastily she rolled onto her stomach and pulled a pillow over her head.

  In a few moments there was a firm tread outside, and her door came whacking open. The pillow was torn from her head and tossed on the floor.

  “God. There’s a wench in my bed,” said Devon, standing over her.

  She retreated full under the blanket and had it ripped off her too.

  “Wake up, Anne Bonney,” he said. “Your friends are aloft, waiting for you. Don’t you want to be a lady pirate? There’s Saunders and Erik Shay—hear them singing? No, now they’ve stopped. They want me to send you up to them, clad like a mermaid. Shame on them, they’re drunk as friars. Or if you don’t want to go up, shall I invite them down?”

  “No! Devon, please—”

  “Wonderful, Merry pet. Could you turn on your back and repeat that?” She felt the mattress shift slightly as he sat by her. “It’s damned appealing. Again and more throatily…”

  Merry reared to her knees in a riffle of white hollands, her hair flying over her sloping shoulders. “They’re drunk, are they? And I suppose you’re not?”

  He twisted around to smile at her. The lamp he had brought in with him sat in its niche on the small desk, and an arc of rosy light reached into his glowing hair, discovering the moisture dewed there from the sticky sea mist. His supple skin appeared golden, his teeth neat and white, and his eyes made of moonlight. Fragrances from him caressed her; the tang of driftwood smoke and mineral-rich beach sand, the fresh breath of the wind, the bouquet of sweet wine.

  “I am but ‘lightlie merrie,’ my bunkmate,” he said, “and not transmuted into Attila the Barbarian. Wait. I’d forgotten. I was that already, wasn’t I? Help me with my boots?”

  “Boots? Are you taking them off?” she gasped in a voice anything but throaty.

  “Of course I am. I don’t usually sleep knee-down in leather.”

  One boot hit the floor, and she jerked with alarm at the thud.

  “Now, Devon—” she began nervously, watching him work on the other boot. “Devon, I—I… Devon, please leave me alone. Go away. Go to bed. I want to go back to sleep.”

  “You’re welcome to sleep, and I am going to bed. Dear child, this is my bed, gracefully occupied though it may be.”

  “You can’t really mean to sleep in here,” she said desperately.

  “You can’t really be so naïve as to think I won’t.”

  Merry, forgetting that her new motto was panic won’t help, said, “No! Devon, no!”

  “Don’t tell me,” Devon said, starting to shuck his jacket, “that we’ve already degenerated to incoherent protests? I’ve been looking forward to a moving and articulate appeal to my submerged sense of decency. Please, if you won’t be throaty, be eloquent. You haven’t soured on a truce, have you? Think. It will be biblical; we shall beat our swords to plowshares, and the lion will lie down with the lamb.”

  “Not if the lamb has any say in the matter!”

  “They don’t, as a rule,” he said. “One shears them seasonally, bleating or not.”

  The pirate’s shirt was soft-textured and clean. His expression was tidy and his words hardly slurred. It didn’t seem fair when she, unblamably asleep, should be handicapped once waked by a soggily semialert brain, eyes that itched under raw lids, and a tongue as flaccid as dry wool. If he wanted bleating, he was going to get it.

  “I shall scream!” she said.

  “As you like. Mind you, I feel compelled to mention that there are any number of otherwise civil individuals on board who are working their way into pleasantly intoxicated sleep. If you’re noisy, someone’s likely to come in here and stick a sock in your mouth.”

  Over the past few days Merry had had enough opportunity to observe men under the influence of alcohol to decide that it was probably true. His shirt, opening over tough, lovely muscle, made Merry’s throat contract involuntarily in a gulp. Grabbing the two sides of his collar, she drew it fiercely together and snapped, “There’s not enough shame in you to wash a flea’s foot! Do you mean to sit there before me and bare yourself?”

  He swallowed a laugh, though his eyes brimmed with humor as they devoured her in fascination. “Ah, darling. Now I r
emember. No wonder I’m shocking you. Your husband slept in a nightshirt.”

  Caught off guard, Merry drew a blank, and it showed in her face.

  “That freckled paragon, Jeremiah Jones,” he said in a gently encouraging tone. “Your husband. Sleeps in a nightshirt. Recall telling me that?”

  There was something unnerving about a man who could grin and “forget” a threat he’d made two weeks earlier; and then turn around and throw in your face an insignificant scrap of conversation eight months old. It wouldn’t have surprised her if she’d been deliberately maneuvered into her present indignity of holding his shirt closed. She saw herself in five minutes trying to hold up his britches and shuddered. How he would love that! Before she had figured what to do, he said affably, “I don’t want to throw you out of the bunk, you know; just share it. If that’s worrying you.”

  “Don’t work so hard to be funny,” said Merry, who’d learned the phrase from Cat. She let go his shirt with a sharp gesture and put her bare feet on the cool floorboards and stood with her back to him. “If you’re getting into this bed, then I’m getting out of it.”

  “You’re safer than you think” came Devon’s voice behind her. “Cat swept me off to the mainland and smothered me in drink and female hospitality. He didn’t say so, but I gather the charitable zeal was on your behalf.”

  For so brief a statement it had a remarkable number of half messages. Miserably the one that penetrated to Merry most clearly was the image of Devon with a woman. She was disturbed and more than a little embarrassed by the discomfort it caused her.

  “I won’t hurt you, Merry,” he said, his tone kind, warmly sensual, full of humor; the spider in a ladybug’s shell. “Come to bed with me.”

  “No. I’m going to sleep on the floor.”

  After a short hesitation he said a very cheerful “Better you than me,” and in an irritatingly short time the even pace of his breathing revealed that he’d fallen asleep.