Chapter 7 #3
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 minute 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.”