Chapter 9
Green waves washed over Merry, in every shade from bile to Nile.
She breathed saltwater, and foam burned the lining of her nose.
Above she saw a matte black sky and the glimmering phosphorescence in the cresting waves as they caved in upon her.
The wind was a lamprey shrieking her name through a hundred teeth and snarling her hair, and as she tried to kick and swim seaweed tangled her legs, scratchy and slimy like the long fingers of salt goblins.
Try as she might to keep herself up, there was something pushing her down, pushing her under, a pressure on her shoulders that would not cease, and she began to scream, and the sound was lost in the gulping surf as bubbling water slowly replaced air in her lungs. …
Merry burst from the dream into a still room, throbbing from the echo of her cry.
Sweat rolled in silver pellets from her pores, blankets entwined her legs thigh to ankle, but, thank heaven, she was in a bed and not drowning.
Using a corner of the bed sheet to mop the hot tears from her eyelashes, she began a rattling sigh of relief that died as she saw where she was and remembered.
Her eyes picked out like old enemies the table bound by lanyards and set neatly with three chairs; the unfaded place on the walnut paneling that had held the crossbow; the inset desk; the two sea chests bound in leather and lashed to eye-pins beneath a wall of drawers carved with Poseidon figures riding the peaks of wooden waves.
While she slept someone had dug out and discarded the arrow and the crossbow, removed the washbowl, taken away the damp cloths Devon had used to wipe her face, and then had left her discreetly and tidily alone.
Merry Patricia Wilding sat up and said, right out loud to the wrinkled bedclothes that covered her knees, “Good morning to you, parts of my body. Miss Wilding is in a real pickle. Stick with me! We’re in this together.”
It was much worse today than yesterday. Yesterday everything was muted by exhaustion, terror, pain, concussion, and finally drugs.
This morning she discovered she was unhappily recovered from the worst of that, and there was nothing to stand between her and a grim-visaged future.
Yesterday had been terrible beyond conception; today would probably be worse.
No one ever has a good time on a pirate ship; no one except the pirates.
There was time now to worry about poor Aunt April, who would be horrified by Merry’s disappearance, and time to wonder, tearful and headachy, if she would ever see Aunt April again.
Or her father, Carl, her cousins. What would they think?
That she had been abducted by some terrible and mysterious agent?
Would they search for her, frantic in their worry?
It would hardly comfort them to learn the truth.
Merry climbed from the bed, disoriented by the sea that threw the floor up toward her face, and walked to the cupboard where she had seen Devon find the washbowl.
Yes, it was there, spotless and cheerful in thick white ceramic, paired with a brass can of water.
She stuck her hand in the water; room temperature.
She splashed it into the washbowl, then onto her face, and it ran down her cheeks and trailed down her throat.
There was no towel. Pirates, probably, liked to air dry.
Below was a clean chamber pot, furred with dust; a tiny spider was sitting in a buoyant web stretched across the top.
What pirates did about their natural functions didn’t bear conjecture.
Devon, no doubt, didn’t have any. Why should he?
In every other department he seemed to have been blessed with irritating superiority. She, on the other hand…
Merry had never used a chamber pot. Never. Not in deepest winter. Not in the middle of the night. Not if she had a head cold. It had been the outside privy, or it had been nothing at all. Chamber pots were too revolting.
She was still sitting on the floor, glaring balefully at the chamber pot, when Cat came into the room, with a copper earring and one fat, neat braid down his chest to his trousers.
He carried a glass, had a cloth that was green and pretty slung on one arm, and over his shoulder was a rope.
Visions of new and more degrading tortures flooding into her mind, Merry jumped to her knees, swung the washbowl into the air and sent it flying at his head.
Her shaking aim was not true, but it came very close.
Accustomed to the lethal shrapnel of sea battles, Cat didn’t flinch under the hail of dripping splinters. Merely he fixed her with an unswerving stare as he picked a sharp white shard from his braid.
“Charming,” he said, “as the increase of a pearl-bellied anole.”
“Which are?” she snapped.
“Lizards. Was I supposed to put a white flag through the door first or—Oh. The rope. Is it the rope? It’s not for you.
It’s one of the ratlines from the mizzen.
Needs a splice. See?” He opened the door and threw the rope into the corridor.
Pushing shut the door with the heel of one hand, he joined her on the floor and put the glass into her hand.
“You look like you have a headache,” he said. “Drink this.”
“What is it?”
“Chopped up fairy wings, the heart of a narwhal taken during a lunar eclipse, spit from a consumptive.… Christ. Just drink it, will you? It’s lime juice, with honey. Great for scurvy, but it won’t do a damn thing for your head. Drink it.”
She was so thirsty that she did, and probably would have even if it had been made of fairy wings and narwhal heart.
It tasted incredibly good on her parched tongue.
When it was done, she faced squarely into Cat’s ice-blue stare and began, “I don’t know how you can expect me to have any confidence in the safety of anything you give me to drink. You drugged me—”
“That was Morgan’s idea.”
“And left me here to be ravished,” she finished.
Cat looked her up and down and absorbed with some intelligence everything from the torn shirt, which partially revealed her heaving breasts, to the feet, which were dirty and bare, to the disheveled red-gold hair.
“Were you?” he asked politely.
“No!”
Mildly he said, “Well, then, what’s your complaint?”
“No thanks to you!” she snapped, as though he hadn’t spoken.
“Did you hear me asking for thanks?” In a movement without a single break Cat took back the glass, uncurled his knees, and stood up near the table.
“I haven’t seen Devon yet this morning. They say you shot the crossbow at him.
Honestly. What a circus. You shouldn’t have been playing with that thing—you might have broken your arm. ”
“You, of course,” she said sarcastically, “would have been desolated to hear of it.”
“You’re yipping up the wrong tree if you have the idea that what I think matters,” said the boy, smoothly emphatic.
“I don’t suppose that it’ll do any good to tell you this, because you don’t seem to have the faintest sense of self-preservation, but what you ought to be worrying about is how to sweet-talk Devon.
Now, do you want to get dressed, or would you rather sit there all day with your shirt open? ”
Even by his scale of things it seemed a little unfair. Merry said, “I don’t have anything to wear because yesterday—in case you’ve forgotten—you cut off my clothes. With dispatch.”
“You’d have preferred to be stripped lingeringly? I’ll remember that for next time.”
“I’d have preferred not to be stripped at all! Do you know what? I wouldn’t apply a letter opener to an envelope the way you put your knife to me. Pardon me for my state of undress. Jack and Biddles forgot to let me pack a night bag.”
“What do you expect from the scum of the streets? I hired them as burglars, not ladies’ maids.
” He lifted the green film of fabric from his arm and sent it floating down on the bed.
“Here you are. Fresh from Paris. Count your blessings; Morgan was toying with the idea of dressing you like a boy. He said it might be interesting. I’ll be back in a few minutes, so don’t waste your time. ”
A somewhat nervous evaluation of the object on the bed revealed it to be a high-waisted satin day dress done in a shifting spectrum of mint.
In the same material was the twisted belt that pressed up under the breasts and the row of chevron puffs that decorated the hem.
The sleeves were designed to fit tight, and nothing at all had been done about filling in the space between collarbone and bust.
If necessity was the mother of invention, the prospect of nakedness was its midwife.
One could only flinch briefly at the prospect of wearing stolen clothing and then slip it on.
What good would it do to dwell on its probable capture, during some mad rummage of a wealthy woman’s trunk (pray God that it hadn’t been ripped from her body—no, it couldn’t have been without damage) while steel clanged against steel and the air was filled with black powder smoke and the cries of the dying.
In three days, Merry Patricia, you’ve sunk pretty low.
The dress had been made for a young, stylish, and highly sophisticated lady; in fact, it had once belonged to the twenty-year-old mistress of a sixty-year-old Barbados banker.
It fit Merry every place except one. When Cat came back to the cabin, he found Merry sitting rigidly postured on one of the chairs, wearing the green dress and clutching Morgan’s wrinkled shirt high under her neck.
“Now what’s the matter?” said Cat.
There was a modest silence. Then, “It’s too small.”
Walking around to her back, he found she’d made a success of all the hooks and eyes but two, and after he had fastened them, he looked down at her and said, “It didn’t look too small to me. It’s obvious that it—I forgot. You’re endowed.”