Chapter 10
They say it’s bad manners for a sailor to lock his sea chest and one that did was likely to find it nailed shut when he came off his watch.
Devon, it appeared, was immune to etiquette.
One by one Merry tried each lock in the cabin: the cabinets, the trunks, the windows, the door.
Everything but the chamber pot was closed off tighter than a vain man’s corset, and neat as a Dutch cupboard.
Cat, wanting no more trouble, had left her not so much as a candle, but there was daylight filtering gray-blue through three high windows, each one big enough to have admitted a pair of clinched hedgehogs.
Moving like a stubborn wraith through the slow filmy light, Merry continued her search for more than half an hour after even her singing persistence admitted it was useless.
She flopped dry-eyed on the bunk bed and decided with a quickly fading flash of humor that it was outside of enough for Devon, who was a tanned and tarred villain of a pirate, to have the audacity to think she was deficient in the department of morals.
As for Henry Cork, Merry remembered distinctly telling him last March, when he’d left a water bucket on the doorjamb and soaked the delivery boy, that someday those practical jokes were going to do someone a serious mischief.
Ne’er, at the time, had she suspected that that someone would be herself.
If she were really moral, she supposed, she would have found some way to hang herself with the bedsheets.
But as anyone will tell you who’s tried to hang themselves with bedsheets, it takes a good deal more ingenuity than it might appear to at first. She indulged in a brief, futile fantasy that Carl might somehow find she was here and come and shoot Devon.
The fantasy expired on the thought that if Carl did come, it was far more likely that Devon would shoot him.
Poor, poor Aunt April. She must be sick with distress.
Like a decked sturgeon flipping uselessly from side to side, Merry turned from anger, to fear, to despair, and back again to anger.
And Devon, whether from design or indifference, gave her confusion plenty of time to wind down to a numbed misery as she listened to the whirr of anonymous ship’s noises.
The rattle below the floor might have been a strolling skeleton; the heavy flapping aloft, the wingbeats of a giant, primitive bird.
Raucous voices rose and fell from the deck and from the corridor, and once she heard Cat talking to someone at the stair head, his voice sharp and sardonic.
Was there any chance she would be left in here—for days?
For weeks? Until she was weak and starving and finally submissive?
When Devon came, she was lying on the bunk with the dying afternoon sunbeams, wondering if it was true that fear drove people out of their minds, and retracing her life to discover what she could have done differently that would have saved her from ending her days on a pirate ship.
The man whose pitiless hands held the fragile threads of her life came into the room quietly and closed the door behind him without turning, his glance touching lightly the skylit contours of her profile. She turned her face to him without moving any other part of her body.
“Well,” she said, “have you brought your thumbscrew? Or have you decided to boil me in walrus fat and lash me to the—to the—”
“Yardarm,” Devon supplied, looking helpful.
Her head disappeared under the pillow in a shimmy of glinting copper curls. “Go away!” she said in an agonized voice. “Just go away! Don’t you have to batten down the hatches or something?”
His words, silky and beguiling, reached her through one hundred thousand goose feathers. “We only do that in a storm. Are you anticipating one?”
“Probably.” Her warm trapped breath whispered over her lips and into her nose.
“There’s going to be a hurricane, and waterspouts, and lobsters as big as horse barns off the starboard bow.
You’d better secure the lanyards to the halyards and winch the grinch and bind the thingimmy-chrunkers to the nautical-blubber. I hope we get swallowed by a whale!”
It took him an uncomfortably long time to erase his unbidden smile and cudgel into stupor the startling tenderness that crept through his expert guard. Then: “Are we getting tired, my love,” he said slowly, “of waiting?”
A shocked head emerged from the pillow and snapped at him, “Don’t call me ‘my love’! It’s an obscenity.”
In less than a second he was beside the bed, his hands softly massaging her shoulders.
“My precious Merry. There’s no such thing as an obscenity.
It’s all done by rearranging letters of the alphabet, none of which has the raw power of a bosun’s ball whistle.
You know what you have to do to get out of here.
Make your choice. And then watch me while I make mine. ”
Cutting like a scythe through his words were the sweet movements of his hands, drifting in a faintly suggestive rhythm that spread his hot, fluid magic in one fiery burst. So many danger bells erupted in her head that the space between her ears sounded like the carriage house of the Virginia Charitable Fire Society.
She threw herself upright, breaking his grip, and twisted into a decent posture, being careful not to dislodge the skirt from her legs.
The points of her shoulder blades lay as close as they could to the hard paneled wood behind her, and the fabric over her breasts felt unpleasantly tight.
She was with him, and they were alone. Why must that circumstance always mean that her chest hurt like she’d squeezed it in a clothespress?
“Stop it!” Her clenched fist covered her mouth.
“If there’s a spark of human feeling in you, then stop it!
I can’t tell you a word more about the tavern or the Guinevere than I have already, and I can’t bear to be threatened anymore.
Do whatever you intend with me and have done! What will you do to hurt me? What?”
“You break easily, Merry.” His voice, soft and detached, might have belonged to a naturalist dissecting a common tree toad for the ninety-ninth time.
“Which makes me wonder how you were able to stomach Granville. If you’re not his mistress, that casts doubt on the rest of it too.
Cat has pointed out that he found you in a particularly unrevealing piece of nightgear, and while that might be some new fetish of Michael’s, I have to admit you handle like a virgin.
One assumes that you’re an extremely talented lady, but since innocence would help your case along, would you be willing to let Cat examine you? ”
It was a crude tactic, and he knew it, so he let her hit him once, because it seemed fair, before he seized the scraped wrists and held them, letting his fingers play hard on the damaged flesh.
As he felt her attack subside he loosened his grip slightly, and loosened it further still when he saw that the lower lip she held between her teeth to keep from crying was beginning to bleed.
“Yes, my flower, I don’t intend to be a pleasant bunkmate for you, so you’d better rethink your silence.”
“I’m not going to tell you anything. What do you mean, bunkmate?”
“I can’t afford to let you go traipsing back to Michael with the story of what you’ve seen and heard—the time isn’t ripe yet to flush my pheasant.
I’d take the risk if you were more honest with me.
As we stand, I don’t feel disposed to do you any favors.
And this being the only cabin in the ship where you can sleep, this is where you will stay—unless you’d like to sleep with Morgan, which I don’t recommend.
You might find his habits distressing. There’s a cubbyhole near the bilge they use sometimes for a cell, but it has four inches of water on the floor and rats.
The crew, of course, would be happy to have you with them in the fo’c’sle; you’d have your choice of beds, but you wouldn’t get very much rest, and I don’t think there’s enough of you to go around. ”
Her wrists were still caught in his hands.
She flexed her fingers to keep the circulation going and said, with ashen-faced fury, “I’m not going to traipse back to Granville and tell him anything.
Most likely I’ll never see him again. And I’m not going to tell him anything about your connection with Morgan because I don’t know anything about it.
” Her voice was beginning to simmer like boiling water.
“I have no relationship with Sir Michael. No relationship! None! Do you hear me, you fiend? I’m nothing to Sir Michael, and he’s nothing to me. ”
There was a short pause before Devon said, “Isn’t fiend a thought strong?” and released her hands.
“Why won’t you believe me?” she moaned, dropping to the bunk, laying her head down disconsolately. For a moment she dutifully reconsidered the “fiend” and then amended it: “All right, then. Barbarian.”
“Just remember, in this exchange of personalities, that I wasn’t the one who laid wait in your bedroom brandishing archaic weaponry. Tell me what you were doing at the Musket and Muskrat and I’ll swallow your story about the ants.”
“It’s none of your business,” she answered, with a last flare of hauteur. “What were you doing at the Muskrat? Why did Cat hire men to search Sir Michael’s room? How do you like being asked all these questions?”
“Ask me after you’ve spent a few nights in my arms. I might be more willing to talk.”
She dropped her head into her hands and began to cry.
“I want to go home. I want to sleep in my own bed, and I never want to see another ship as long as I live. I hate the sea—I really hate it. I don’t see how the fish can stand it.
I hate opium, and I hate pirates.” She felt her nose filling with tears.
“I hate having adventures. You can’t make them stop when you want to. Why does this have to be me?”