Chapter 3
Devon Charles Crandall sat back in his chair, raising the heel of his boot to rest it lightly against the trestle table before him.
He picked up his sand-scoured glass and with a gentle movement of his wrist sent the pale wine into a slow whirl.
After watching it a moment he raised his gaze to where his half brother sat, the great emerald winking evilly on his chest.
“Do you know,” said Devon, turning an interested gaze back to the wine, “I think it’s beginning to separate.”
“The scum coming to the top,” said the pale-haired boy next to the pirate captain. “I told you. American wine tastes like it was fresh from a pig’s…”
A raucous burst of laughter from the next table covered the end of his sentence.
Rand Morgan reached out to pluck the wineglass from the younger man’s fingers and casually tossed the contents onto the tavern’s dirt floor.
Refilling the glass from his own bottle, he handed it back and said, “Try the rum instead.”
“Oh? Is it better?”
“It’s worse.” The pirate captain smiled. “But it’s quicker.”
Devon returned the grin and lifted the glass. “To my speedy intoxification.”
The rum was worse, as it happened. Devon mentally tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing to his misspent youth, which had forged his iron palate.
The unease of the crowd had altered little since their arrival, save perhaps that the stares had become both more frequent and surreptitious.
Devon was used to being stared at. His position in life had made it inevitable, and even in those remote places where he was unknown, his looks had made him far from inconspicuous.
What he saw here was different. Here they were afraid.
What a heady, corrupting power it was, to have men fear you, and his half brother had been years on this coast, flashing his emerald and nourishing his reputation for stone-hearted savagery.
Morgan had come here to terrify, and before the night was over, he surely would.
However different Devon’s purpose, their interests were hardly incompatible.
He looked back into Morgan’s sleepy gaze.
“How do you like the natives?” asked the pirate captain, sending a slow survey around the room that made the other tavern patrons look as though they would have liked to crawl under their chairs.
Devon shrugged. “I’ve seen them before. In Cadiz, in Le Havre. The mongrel waterfront.”
The boy looked up from his ale and said in the purring, even voice that was the closest he came to good humor, “We can’t all of us be blue bloods. Listen, Dev, have you got the horn colic, or what?”
It was, all in all, the kind of remark one might expect from a boy who had lived his first twelve years in a Caribbean brothel. Devon took a pull of rum and smiled. “No more than usual, I don’t think. Why? What am I doing?”
“You’ve looked four or five times at the copper-headed wench by the puppet box.”
Amused, he said, “Four or five? Is that so many?”
“It is for you. Especially considering the size of her belly.”
“Poor Cat,” Morgan murmured. “Look at her again. She’s a beauty.”
The boy leaned his head back and shook his hair vigorously from his shoulders. “She is if you say she is. They all look alike to me.”
As Devon watched, the girl looked at him, met his gaze, and turned quickly, fearfully away, as though in shame.
She was drinking nothing, and her clasped hands lay on the table before her, the fingers fervently knit.
He was too far away to see whether they trembled.
He supposed she had heard by now of Morgan’s identity and was wondering what it might mean to her.
There was tension in the slightly averted profile, with its Venus-on-a-seashell oval frame, and soft rose-petal lips.
“If you want her, she’s yours,” said Morgan in a quiet, bored voice.
Once, long ago, there had been a man inside Devon that would have been shocked by the suggestion, though even then he would have had the poise to hide it.
The sophisticated corruptions of his young manhood in the years before he met Morgan had been many and varied, but raping women in an advanced state of pregnancy had not been among them.
Perhaps it was the rum, but he wondered what other things he had destroyed inside himself as he had slowly exorcised the part of his soul that would have flinched from Morgan’s words.
Underneath the peerless face of an angel Devon’s ice-encrusted spirit disdained the female sex.
Every woman he had ever desired had been his for the asking, and the result on the inner workings of his mind had been unsavory in the extreme.
Morgan could have told anyone interested that on the digits of a one-handed gypsy you could count Devon’s positive relationships with women.
“I don’t think so,” said the man Devon had become. “Thank you all the same. Tonight I don’t find myself feeling sufficiently creative.”
“Why the devil not, Carl?” Jason was saying in an urgent whisper.
Each passing minute had made him look, to Merry, increasingly high-strung.
He had certainly become increasingly profane.
“We’ll have to take the risk, to get the girls out of here.
Even a damned-to-hell pirate knows that a woman in Merry’s condition…
Monk’s buttocks, it doesn’t make a spit of difference whether it’s real or supposed, as long as they believe it’s real!
What can they think but that Sally’s taking Merry out to use the convenience?
The girls don’t look, do they, as if they’re able to up and ride off for the Army? ”
Carl leaned forward on his elbows, lifting the fist that he had been lightly and nervously rapping against the table. “Maybe. Maybe. But what if it misfires, eh? And it ends up drawing more attention to them?”
“More attention? What in the devil does that mean?” Jason hissed back. “You’ve seen the way that gorgeous blond son of a bitch has been looking at Merry.”
“The odds are, though,” said Sally calmly, “that given Merry’s state he won’t do more than look.”
It was through clenched teeth that Jason said, “I’ll bet with the odds every time, Sal, but not, damn it, when the stake is Merry’s rosy pink—Here, what’s this? Carl, take a gander over there.”
The rough fellow who had been sitting at the table with the man Merry had come to draw had gotten up and was walking toward Morgan’s table with an agonizingly set grin on his bulldog face and a reluctant shuffle, as though he had little faith in the steadiness of his knees.
He nodded eagerly to Morgan and boomed a few words of greeting.
Morgan stared silently back, his eyes glittering in a strange way.
With great casualness he pulled a knife from his belt and held it in front of him, examining it as one would a curiosity.
And it was a curiosity—the blade was a long brass crescent, with small hungry slashes running backward on the edge like shark’s teeth.
Shaking like spooned jelly, the ruffian spread his arms in an expansive, conciliatory gesture and began to say something in a rapid voice that collapsed into spasmodic coughing.
The crowd watched in horrified fascination as Rand Morgan slipped his wicked blade into the lamp chimney on the table.
Blue flame licked at the serrated edge, making it glow red.
“Carl, what’s he doing?” Merry was unable to keep the apprehension from her voice. “What are they going to do?”
“I don’t know,” said Carl, suddenly won over to Jason’s point of view, “but whatever it is, I don’t want you in here to watch.
” He glanced at his cousin. “We’ll do it your way, Jason.
Sally, you and Merry slip out the back door—it’ll be less obtrusive.
If there’s any talking to be done, you take care of it. ”
Sally whispered to Merry, “Lean against me and do your best to look faint. Can you do that?”
Merry mustered the beginnings of a smile. “With dazzling authenticity—I am about to faint! Carl, are you sure you and Jason can’t come with us?”
“They’re likely to kill us just for trying,” answered Jason. “Now go, and quickly.”
Merry felt Sally’s arm slide around her waist. She let her head droop to her cousin’s shoulder, and they walked toward the door.
Many in the tavern watched them go, with eyes frightened and curious, but no one in the tableau around the heating blade seemed to take notice of them.
The pirate who was guarding their intended exit drew up and stepped in their path.
“Go on back to yer chairs and sit down,” he growled, jerking his head.
“Please—my sister is feeling unwell,” answered Sally. “I want to take her outside to lie in the wagon.”
“Later.” The word was a soft growl.
“Please let us go. She is not many weeks from her time and needs rest. A shock could make the baby come early.” Sally gazed at him wide-eyed, and in a voice that carried she added, “I beg of you. I’m sure you had a mother once yourself.”