Chapter 9 #2
Nakedness had been the fact of life where Cat grew up, and in spite of himself he still felt that small prick of shock when he encountered shame.
“Christsake. Most women would jump for joy if they were made like that,” he said, looking at the pink smears on her white cheeks. “You can’t hide behind that shirt all day; for one thing, Morgan’s likely to want it back. Do you want a modesty bit? Come, I’ll get you a scarf.”
Cat opened the door and stepped back, bidding her to precede him with an exaggerated flowing wave of his hand.
In the bare corridor she could see sky and white canvas through the open hatch that topped a steep stair to her left, and on the right was the paneled door to Morgan’s cabin.
She stood quietly for a moment while Cat closed the door behind them and, passing her, pressed open Morgan’s door and gestured her inside.
Daylight can be a prosaic fellow. What had seemed exotically evil by fog and candle seemed only exotically lovely this morning.
Sunshine slanted gaily into the room through the sloping stern windows, and beyond the smoky glass a turquoise horizon rose and fell in a hundred broken segments.
The opium pipe was gone, the brocade pillows on the window benches lay in friendly order, the priceless icons on the rosewood-paneled walls were sweeter, flatter, and less hauntingly foreign.
And the gimbaled candlesticks had globes of clear glass.
Had they been orange yesterday, or had her concussioned brain lied about the color?
Yesterday reflected light had disguised a long glazed bookcase as a window.
Her acquaintance with Rand Morgan might be brief, but it neither surprised nor reassured her to learn that the legendary pirate was literate.
There was an open log book on the desk, along with an unrolled sea chart and a jumble of navigational tools: a brass cartographer’s square, a reflecting circle made of silver and blackened copper, a delicately crafted Lanflois graphometer, a dry compass with copper engraving, a Spanish sextant and artificial horizon.
She knew their names but not their functions.
Carl, as a boy, had owned a tin play set of them.
Before her was what appeared by the light of day to be a den of reflection, not a den of iniquity.
Cat found a gold scarf of shot silk in a lacquered chest and tossed it to her.
She reached out her arm as the fragile fabric skimmed lazily down to drape there.
Facing toward the sea, Merry changed the scarf for Morgan’s shirt quickly and had just realized that there was no way to make the scarf remain in its carefully concealing arrangement when Cat joined her, discreetly viewing her difficulties, and handed her a pin brooch.
Swallowing a sigh, Merry fastened the scarf with the pin, which would have bought her entire hometown of Fairfield.
He watched her and said, “I don’t know what you’re so worried about.
It’s only a little cleavage.” She glared at him and thought seriously about attacking him with the expensive brooch.
Catching the look and interpreting it correctly, the boy said, “Oh, all right. Never mind. Listen. Would you eat oatmeal?”
Merry, glad at last to find something she could refuse, snapped, “I loathe oatmeal.”
“Salt fish?” he suggested doubtfully.
“I’ve never eaten it,” she said. “But I know I wouldn’t like it.”
Manifesting no surprise, Cat said, “Is that so? How about hardtack?”
Merry moved a red brocade cushion and sat down on the window bench. Tersely she said, “I’m sick. Seasick. Don’t keep talking about food to me. I don’t want anything to eat. Seasick! Do you understand?”
“Of course I do—unless there is something wrong with my eyesight. You’re greener than head lettuce.
Half the problem is that you’ve hardly eaten anything since the day before yesterday.
We won’t have anything fresh on board until we meet the Terrible this afternoon, so you’d better resign yourself to oatmeal. ”
Staring at him, Merry said, “The terrible? The terrible what?”
“Would you stop being so sensitive? Even for me, it’s a little unnerving to communicate with someone who’s skittish as a gingered filly.
” He straightened an errant fold in the gold scarf over her shoulder with the flip of one finger.
“It’s like trying to talk to a windflower.
The Terrible is another one of Morgan’s ships.
I’m going to fetch you something to eat.
You can stay in here and wait for Devon. He wants to talk to you.”
With an anxiety she would have preferred to hide, Merry said, “Is there any chance that he’ll—let me go?”
“I’ve already told you once. This time pay attention,” said the boy. “Will he let you go? It depends on how silver-tongued you are.”
Doom, thought Merry. Gloom. “On my good days I can sometimes put together as many as three sentences in a paragraph without more than a bare half-dozen breaks in logic.”
“Well,” he said grimly, “maybe a taste of Cook’s oatmeal will inspire you. I’m going. Put your wrists up.”
Watching him draw a length of cord from his pocket, Merry cried out, “No! Oh, no! Please don’t tie me again!”
“I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t always throwing things at people, or shooting arrows off at them.
Morgan’s likely to get fed up with it and give you a taste of the back side of his hand.
” He started to reach for one of her arms, but before he could touch her, he looked into her face.
What he saw there made him stop and change his mind.
Tactful as a nursery-maid distracting a capricious toddler, the pirate boy put one of Morgan’s silver hairbrushes into her hand and said, “Brush your hair. I’ll come right back. Don’t move. Don’t get in trouble.”
And she did not, for when he came back, she was sitting exactly as she had been, staring at the paneled bulkhead like a strange-eyed ghost in glowing green, stroking the brush unknowingly through her curls.
So he gripped her by the arm and brought her to a chair at Morgan’s table and put the oatmeal in front of her, and a spoon in her hand.
When she wouldn’t eat, he thought a moment, then said, “If you don’t eat it, I’ll take back the scarf.
” Observing that her nose was turning pink again, he added quickly, “And if you start to cry, I’ll take back the dress. ”
This was not the first time by any means that Merry had eaten oatmeal, but the oatmeal she had eaten before had been kept in Aunt April’s whistle-clean pantry, not stored for two months in the hold of a seagoing warship, by its nature damp and alive with the stench of gunpowder and unwashed bodies.
Even well-run ships, and this one was the best of its kind, were infested with vermin.
Seamen were used to finding in their flour evidence of the rats, maggots, and cockroaches that shared their food supply.
But Merry, after a childhood of fresh cream, Aunt April’s marmalade on white toast, and vegetables fresh from the garden served in clever sauces, was not.
Even her two days’ fast would not make this meal palatable.
Cat had to repeat his threats, and several variants, before she would finish the bowl.
Devon entered the cabin with Morgan as she was choking down the last mouthful.
With a negligent wave in Cat’s direction Morgan, his mind on business, had pitched his hat to a chair and leaned, one-handed, on his desk, flicked over a page, and entered something in the log.
But it was not to his dark figure that Merry’s quickened senses homed.
Devon by lamplight was a thing of beauty: the clever angles; the play in skin tone and hair of lucent pastels; the muted and unself-conscious movements of a graceful body.
Devon by daylight was another proposition entirely, though not a whit less attractive: The searching sunbeams revealed a man twenty times more dangerous.
The force of his character caught Merry like a plank across the chest.
Sun-detailed, he was harder, leaner, his eyes, shed of their polite fictions, were callous as those of a lynx; the fathomless volumes of charity suggested by the sweet lines of his face were simply not there.
Before Merry in Apollonian splendor stood a man who was capable of vivisecting her soul, with creativity, and putting it on to fry like a Punjabi locust. When he wanted to beguile, he certainly could; he was not beyond a rare and skillful act of mercy; but his tongue had more sharp edges on it than a sheep shears, and his wit he could wield by choice as the hacksaw or the scalpel.
Margaret Nelson, who had for four turbulent months been his lover, was widely quoted as having said that he could sever your head from your body, and you wouldn’t know you were dead until three weeks later, when your carriage hit a bump and you found your head sitting nose-down in your lap.
And here sat little Merry Wilding, whose most trying moments, ever, had come from Aunt April tetchy with the headache.
The instant brain-burn of staring into the eyes of six feet, two inches of virile hostility made Merry drop her gaze to her oatmeal bowl and look too well at the slimy clods of cereal that were stiffening in the bottom like—no, better not to think what it looked like.
Any more vomiting and they were apt to throw her over the side.
Presented with a view of the top of her head, Devon let his glance wander from the neat line of her parted hair down the narrow arms to the giveaway movements of her baby hands.
Victim and captor, close together and aware one of the other, were sharing, had they known it, the same image: the quiver of her mouth last night under his kiss, the sensation of his hands on the soft flesh of her breasts.
It was a toss-up whether man or young girl was trying harder to perish the memory.