The Windflower

by Laura London

  To Merry it was as though a portal had opened and she had briefly glimpsed his other life. It had been a courtesan’s kiss—subtle, airy, tempting beyond reason, and spiced with urgent earthy pleasures. Given enough time, he could probably wring responses from a hearth plaque.

  Whether he received any portion of the pleasure he gave was a question that could only have been answered by a person of much wider experience than she. Comparisons were irrelevant. For Devon the act of love had been always a feast of the senses; for Cat it had been, at best, a wearisome duty. In the ensuing silence his fingers discovered and began to caress the bare inner curve of her arm.

  Merry slapped his hand away. “You’ve already made your point. Don’t become obnoxious. I know when I’ve been taught a lesson.”

  “Including, one hopes, not to be so blithe in offering your lips to all comers?” he suggested sweetly. “But what did your friend think?”

  “You know very well what she thought,” Merry said firmly. “And don’t try to pretend you don’t. You nearly burned off her hair ribbons. Now I—no, I mean, she wants to know what comes next.”

  “Well, I’m not going to show you that. You must have formed an idea.”

  “Of course I have. But goodness, what if the full truth is a shock to me? What if I emerged half-crazed from my marriage bed?”

  “That,” he said in a dry tone, “would be highly unlikely.” Then, with resignation, “Oh, all right. I don’t suppose it will harm you any.”

  There are probably not many people who are introduced to the facts of life by a lecture beginning: “Now, look—and pay attention, will you—I don’t want to go over this a dozen times. Furthermore, if you don’t like what I tell you, don’t squeak and fuss at me. I didn’t design the world.”

  It should not be thought, either, that his vocabulary for such things was the same as hers, and after several shocking experiments she said, “Cat, please, do you have to use those words?” With opiated patience he asked her what words she preferred, and when she told him—hesitantly—he grimaced and said, “What the devil kind of words are those for a grown woman to use about her body? Merry, infants give up that kind of talk with their third birthday.” There followed a brisk exchange in which both parties dispelled the tension that had arisen between them by casting aspersions on the maturity, and indeed, good taste of the other. Merry had gotten much closer to being able to give tit for tat, but Cat could still get the best of her when he really chose to. Only the suspicion that she might not find him so forthcoming with this particular line of information in some future, more sober moment kept Merry from marching, in high dudgeon, from the porch. In the end they compromised on the clinical, and though Cat was wont to give a certain acid emphasis to words he considered unnecessarily euphemistic, his explanation was thorough, detailed, and dealt with variations. After he had dealt satisfactorily with all the points raised by her challenging questions, Merry was so much enlightened that Cat, holding his erstwhile pupil in a gently sardonic gaze, was perforce to say, “There now. With what you know, you’ll be able to send your husband from your marriage bed—half-crazed.”

  Merry’s spirits were hardly elevated by an evening spent alone in her bedroom reading English Hermit; or the Unparalleled Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Phillip Quaril, an Englishman, Who Was Discovered upon an Uninhabited Island in the South Sea, Where He Had Lived About Fifty Years Without Human Assistance. The Joke had returned from a successful hunt; someone had brought a skiff-load of women from one of the other islands, and everyone, even Annie (with apologies), had gone to the beach to drink, to dance, to talk. It was by Devon’s order that Merry was not permitted to attend, as she heard thirdhand from Raven (also with apologies). The party was likely to get rough, and besides, a British man-of-war had arrived, and there were two officers aboard who were to meet with Devon on the beach, and he didn’t want them to see Merry. Something, Raven said, to do with safeguarding her reputation.…

  Merry retired quite late. She was sitting on the bed braiding her hair by the light of one candle when she heard footsteps on the greenheart floor beyond her door. Only she and one middle-aged serving maid had remained at the villa, and after hours of listening to the hollow silence of the empty halls, the steadily approaching footfalls had an eerie resonance. Worse than eerie came a moment later, when the footsteps halted outside her door and then Rand Morgan entered without knocking. Under the best of circumstances he was a frightening man. At midnight in a nearly deserted house Morgan was the living embodiment of any maiden’s worst fears. Deeply gasping, Merry dragged the bedclothes over her nightgown and exclaimed, “Oh, no!”

  Her words hung awkwardly in the unsettled air, sounding—she realized sheepishly—a little foolish. Morgan’s dark brow had ascended in amused incredulity, and he had fixed her in a humorous regard that was decidedly unflattering.

  “My poor girl, can it be that you think I might be contemplating some impropriety?” he said, managing to convey neatly by his tone that she was overrating her adolescent attractions.

  Cherry-spot blushes burned her cheekbones as she stammered a disclaimer. Taking no notice of her stumbling phrases, he said, “Put on your clothes. I’ll wait for you in the main hall.”

  He closed the door and left her before the command had fully made its imprint on her will. Abstract visions of accident and illness rose before her. Annie? Raven? Devon? Morgan had not gone four steps down the hall when she appeared at the doorway, calling in an anxious voice, “What’s happened?”

  “What a runaway imagination you have, nestling. Nothing’s happened.”

  “But then why—”

  “I,” said Rand Morgan, “do not enjoy having my orders questioned, and particularly not by vain and clumsily timorous children. I can see through your nightdress, and if you don’t change it immediately, I shall be left with no choice but to believe that situation pleases you.”

  In a thrice she was behind her door again, remembering glumly that Saunders said of Rand Morgan: “You obey his first order, or he carves his second one on your liver.”

  All her clothing was borrowed from Annie, and Merry slipped quickly into the sky-dyed gown she had worn at sunset. The fabric was a fine crepe, but the color was too bold to be fashionable by European standards. Merry had a flitting recollection of telling Annie a few days ago that it was a great shame that the designers had lately been confining women to pastels when the more intense colors were so enlivening. However, it was a not much enlivened Merry Wilding who met Rand Morgan in the main hall. His black gaze flickered over her, and then he began to walk to the door, commanding her to follow with an economical hand gesture.

  It might be pushing her luck, but as they were walking together down the porch steps Merry couldn’t help saying, “I hardly think a person should be said to have a runaway imagination because they merely inquire why they are being commanded from their beds at midnight.”

  “Ah,” said Morgan. “Did that rankle?” Subjecting her quickly combed hair to a critical survey, he added, “I take back the word vain.”

  He watched with a hidden smile as she tried surreptitiously to further order her wayward curls, and said nothing more until they came to the edge of the wooded path and she hung back uncertainly.

  “I do hate to use unnecessary force on women,” he murmured.

  Merry was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted, and on top of that Morgan was frightening her. And he had the unmitigated gall to make her feel embarrassed about it. Losing her temper and her good sense along with it, she went stomping down the path with her hands raised sarcastically in the air like a prisoner of war. Large cruel hands closed over her shoulders, and Merry was dragged very nearly by the scruff of her neck back to face Morgan’s great height. With her chin in the harsh pinch of his thumb and forefinger, he said in a level tone, “Before you were born, little chick, I had raped more women than there are teeth in your hair comb. I admire spirit and character in the young of both sexe
s, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to tolerate a lot of snubbed-nose impudence from a chit your age. Mind yourself.”

  It was surely his casual mention of his crimes against women that made Merry furious enough to ask hotly, “Or what? Will you mistreat me until you’ve driven me to opium the way you have Cat?”

  There was a flashing second afterward when she thought, Dear Lord, what have I said? He’s likely to kill me! His jet gaze ate the details of her face with an arrested curiosity, and then, to her bewilderment, he began to laugh softly.

  “Now, that’s how a lady should fight, nestling. With her tongue. Lose your temper with a man, little Merry, but not your dignity.”

  After giving her underlip a gentle tug he let her go, and she walked beside him on the path, although it was a good many yards before her wobbling knees recovered. Moonlight picked out scenic details with metallic brilliance: the feathery head of a palm tree, colossal stems of bamboo that nodded like reeds, and the glinting reflections as the night breeze turned over leaves on the tall mahoganies above their heads. Within the deep-blue cloak of the heavens the crescent moon lay on its back like a ghostly grin. Bats marred the lunar surface as tiny flecks; much lower came the dim, crooked flight of nightjars, and in the pastures here and there one could just make out the forms of slumbering beasts. Geckos whistled like penny trumpets, and the humid air buzzed with the song of numberless tree frogs. Rand Morgan’s thoughts drifted to another time, another climate—far crisper than these balmy tropics—and another girl, younger than this one.…

  With the sweetness of a dream the snowy clouds of English hawthorn had sobbed scent around them as they ran hand in thirteen-year-old hand down the hillside over a tender carpet of spring grass. The wind caught her thin hair ribbons and billowed her pink dimity skirt, and when he had stopped to gather her for his kiss, she had looked up at him and whispered, “Pleasth, Rand. Be gentle.” And God, how gentle it had been. He was so enchanted with her that nearly two weeks had gone by before he told her in a moment’s irritation because she’d restricted the free use of his hands that she might as well act like a baby if she was going to lisp like one. Innocent honest eyes of periwinkle blue had smiled at him as she said, “Don’t you like it, then? Oh, Rand, I’m glad. My other beaux admire it so, and I grow weary of always having to lisp!”

  Through that dying vision Morgan saw Merry Wilding walking with her delicate steps through a Caribbean night; Merry, who was slimmer than that other girl and more fragile, with a fraction of the self-confidence. But that infusion of vigorous American blood had given Merry a nimble intellect, a gallantry lacking in the frivolous and delectable creature her mother had been. With that thought Morgan felt the playful chide of that ever-present spirit: “Take care of my daughter, Rand.” I will, love. I will.…

  “Did you really cut the emerald you wear from the stomach of a priest?” came Merry’s voice, pulling Morgan back.

  “A defrocked priest, my dear,” Morgan answered. “He had stolen the jewel from a rectory in Barcelona. Being not an especially quick-witted gentleman, he pretended to swallow the stone when we took his ship. I slit the emerald from the front of his cossack.” For Merry the question had been the equivalent of putting one toe in a hip bath to test the water. She hardly knew more about Morgan now than she had on the first day on the Joke. He was not a man who encouraged familiarity, and the loosest of his crew generally exercised discretion when they gossiped about him. The awe inspired by the legend of Rand Morgan had remained fresh in her mind. Until tonight he had never appeared to take much notice of her, for which she had been devoutly grateful, while recognizing that he seemed to know a great deal about things he appeared not to notice. “Are we going to the beach? Did Devon change his mind about wanting me to be there?” she asked.

  “Yes. No.”

  “Do you mean that you’re taking me to the beach even though Devon doesn’t want me there?”

  “Yes.”

  Merry swallowed a tight lump in her throat. “Would you take it as evidence of character and not of impudence if I were to ask you why you’re doing this?”

  Morgan’s only answer was a humorless chuckle. Often when she was with him, she had to fight being overwhelmed by the sensation that she only was as high as his waist. The illusion of being dwarfed hung upon her persistently as she helplessly whispered, “Why?”

  “Because, nestling, Devon is about to pierce one of your little mysteries—”

  “W-what?”

  “—and it would be best if you were there,” Morgan said calmly. “It suits my plans better if Devon isn’t aware that I troubled to bring you, so I’m going to tell him you were hiding and watching the party wistfully from the bushes and I—”

  “What!”

  “—merely invited you to join things. You are free to dispute it, of course, but I’m sure you recognize that, given the discrepancy in our experience, I can be more convincing in a lie than you can in the truth. As always, you have the option of carrying your troubles to Raven, but I’m convinced you will have the good judgment not to, because you must be as loath as I am to have that boy’s infatuation for you lead him into any more problems than it has already.”

  Merry had stumbled to a halt. Morgan’s hand, inexorable on the small of her back, began to push her forward again. From the beach she was beginning to hear the noises of adults at play—laughter, music, loud conversation mixed with the bass of the surf.

  “You could also run from me,” Morgan continued in a low tone. “If you do that, I shall catch you and do some exceedingly unpleasant things to your pretty body that don’t leave any marks, so my advice is—I beg your pardon?”

  “I said: Oh, help,” Merry whispered.

  “You,” said Rand Morgan, “have gotten yourself into a uniquely complicated situation and you will have to get yourself out of it. What I’m providing is the opportunity. Has Devon told you why he hates Granville? I see not. Very well. It’s time you know that Michael Granville murdered Devon’s sister.”

  And with those words the pirate captain pushed her firmly with him onto the beach.

  Chapter 22

  The boisterous gaiety on the beach detonated within Merry’s senses, and shock waves arrived as tremors on the surface of her skin. Beyond, at the quay, the Black Joke was lying to within shouting distance of the British frigate, and the shore fires made the upper reaches of the masts appear and disappear like ghostly sentinels. On the shore a bonfire in a ditch spat smoke and cinders as juice from a spitted pork carcass sizzled down into hungry flames that leaped in blue fancies at the nourishment. Glaring firelight threw the relaxed, inebriated faces of the revelers into deep shadows, and they seemed to be wearing fantastic tragicomic masks as they raised rum bottles and a wineskin that heaved like a living thing from the stress of rapid depletion. Dark eyes gleamed in bearded faces; white teeth shone as they tore into hand-held chunks of roasted meat. The ship’s orchestra labored near the fire in a welter of smoke haze and the spicy scents of liquor and roasted pig. Merry knew the men well—the giant Turk in a turban who played something that looked like an oboe, Max Reade on the harmonica, Terence Teaswell gleefully clanging a mismatched pair of cymbals, and coaxing lilting strains from the violin, the man they called One-eyed Jack, who wore no patch over his empty eye socket. An odd miscellany of talent, and yet they produced the sweetest ballads and the liveliest dance tunes on the Atlantic seaboard. The voices of the revelers were now lifted in shouting song, a wild pirate song that started low and ended high, with stops and starts in between, the orchestra clashing, whining, tooting, and whistling like some illegitimate mating of a Scottish pipe band and a harem orchestra.

  The women were strangers to Merry. Most, like the men, had bared their chests. Twitching patterns from the flames shone on their wine-ripe, sweating flesh, and their gaily colored skirts swept up dry sand in time with the music. There was hardly a soul clothed enough for Merry to look upon without a mortified flush, and yet she found a naïve exube
rance in the sea of warm, unclad bodies, as though they were spirited children who had tossed off their clothing to frolic in a summer shower.

  Merry stood with Morgan among the fallen fronds at the base of a palm tree. She was dimly aware that the tall pirate was giving her this moment to assimilate the catastrophic thing he had made known to her. But she didn’t seem able to do that. Her love for Devon had become the most earnest and immediate force in her life. Sensation, when it came directly from Devon, howled like a cyclone into her consciousness; but the tragedies attendant on that love arrived drop by drop, an endless caustic trickle. Merry tried to imagine a woman made of Devon’s flesh, a sister, but she could not. Merry tried to remember Michael Granville’s face; she could not do that either. They were like cloud pictures to her, distant specters; and yet she knew that hidden inside the opaque folds of time there was a murdered girl with light hair and golden eyes who deserved her pity. Morgan’s warning was delivered with a purposeful intent that could never belong to a facile lie. And Merry had known from the day Cat carried her aboard the Joke that Devon’s hatred of Michael Granville existed on a plane beyond reason. Grief for him and for his submerged pain burned her to the soul, and with it came a gripping fear.

  As she might have seen stars blink one after another into a purple evening sky, Merry began unconsciously to identify her friends.

  She heard Cook before she saw him. He was sitting on a canework mat with his freckled forehead pressed to Annie’s. His fawn curls bobbed against Annie’s black hair as he fed her pieces torn from a fragrant hunk of pork, stopping to kiss her lingeringly between each. The hand not employed in feeding Annie was fending off Dennis the pig, who was showing an unseemly interest in sharing their meal.