Chapter 12
On the day Devon came back, they were teaching Merry to fire the cannon.
The Black Joke had dropped her anchor in the green ooze that floored a forbidding cove on the coast of Spanish Florida.
Gulls scavenged in the warm white sunlight, and from the Joke you could see an ocher strip of beach scattered with shabby tents made from aged sails.
Naked children ran like young animals in the breaking swell or played under the glowing browns of the sea oats that dotted the far dunes.
Women walked to and fro carrying water buckets, goats grazed on solitary patches of salt meadow grass, pirates lolled against broken casks, drinking and swapping gossip.
There were other ships here, riding under bare poles and grounding in their beef bones—they’d thrown garbage over the side till they were fair squatting on it, or so Raven had told Merry.
And at night there was a bonfire on the beach, with a great carcass dripping yellow fat turning on a spit.
Crew from the Joke not serving their trick at lookout made off like small shot for shore, swimming if they had to when the boats were full.
Merry heard the echoes of their bawdy songs drifting across the water until early morning.
Clean and sober they left, and drunk and dirty they returned, and after not so many shore leaves it was getting hard to tell who was C and S and who was D and D except for Cat, who never drank to excess, and Morgan, whose manners never altered for the better or the worse, however many intoxicants he consumed.
At four bells, Merry stood at the stern.
The shirt she wore was white and full-sleeved with blue cuffs, a front panel trimmed in blue braid, and a blue collar.
The breeze playfully lifted the long tails of her red neck scarf as she watched Cat, cross-legged at her feet, putting the final stitches in the flaring hem of her new white pantaloons.
Bright-eyed drunk and enthusiastic, Raven arrived back from shore and sought out Merry.
The peaking afternoon sun moved with surprise over the black varnished brim of a wide antique hat as he doffed it elegantly for Merry.
No one was sure where he had got it, but it had an ostrich plume on it dyed livid lilac, and that raised a lot of speculation.
The hat was transferred in short order from Raven to Merry, the feather bent round to tickle the underside of her chin.
“Stuck a feather in her hat an’ called it macaroni!” sang Raven, stepping on Cat. “Tack me, Cat, don’t you think she looks like that swell painted picture in Mme. Teo’s? You know, the picture that Morgan says is a dead poor copy of a—a—what’s his name?”
“Rubens,” Cat said. “Don’t you think Merry’s a little short of flesh for that? And as for that hat—”
“Blackbeard!” cried Raven happily. “That’s it!”
“I look like Blackbeard?” Merry asked as Raven tossed her to sit near the taffrail, eyeing her like an artist.
“Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Eye patch, that’s what you need. We’ll use Cat’s kerchief, here. C’mon, Cat, you don’t need a black kerchief, mon. Damned foppish, and black don’t suit you.”
“I think it does,” said Merry, getting her right eye covered. “Black is—Oh, no! Ouch! What do you mean, sticking that pistol down my waist? Take it back!”
Raven stood back, admiring his harried creation.
“Absolutely not, m’lady. Ain’t loaded. Jeez, know what you need?
Braids and matches. Blackbeard dipped hemp cord in saltpeter and limewater and set them to burning under his hat in a fight.
Scared the devil out of his enemies, eh? Tell you what, Merry—”
“Come within ten feet of her with saltpeter and hemp, and you go over the side, you lushy idiot,” said Cat, who had been in a particularly bad temper since morning anyway. “You’re likely to singe off her hair. Go below, would you, and sleep it off.”
Raven took direction only moderately well when he was sober.
Drunk, he was about as responsive as a toothache.
Merry found her wrist seized in his firm, joyful fingers, and she was pulled at a run to the lower gundeck.
They collected, on the way, Will Saunders, the runaway younger son of an indigo planter, a swarthy, rawboned boy genius with copious sideburns, who at the tender age of twenty-two had risen through the ranks to become Morgan’s sailing master, and who, by virtue of an exceptionally strong head, was a lot more inebriated than he looked to Merry.
Below, Merry found the lint-speckled sunlight bursting in blinding squares through the gunports.
Moist heat hung in the narrow oak gallery as in a sauna, and the black shafts of the cannons spewed the air with the reek of hot metal, brass polish, and stale gunpowder.
In past battles body-spice had run as sweat into the golden floorboards that gave back the trapped scent, wet-baked and pungent.
Raven and Saunders were an uproar in the dour quiet that drew Joe Griffith, master gunner, from his nap in the fo’c’sle.
Beaming with healthy middle age, the tattooed crucifix that was a charm against shark death on his chunky forearms gleaming like a blurred beetle, the gunner loved the cannons from fire-spitting fore to aft as though they were his children and had wept for a day during a hurricane when Morgan had ordered a long nine- and two six-pounders thrown over to lose weight.
If Raven wanted to fire one of the little darlings, well, sure, he could.
Except, Merry learned with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, that Raven meant for her to shoot it.
A three-gun salute to the United States of America.
Was she a patriot or wasn’t she? asked Raven, having no idea that he was playing a major chord.
Merry had hardly spent her life pining to fire artillery, but there aren’t many people who’ll turn down the kind of chance to do it just once without hurting anyone. And a salute to the United States…
“You space your shots like they do in the Navy, see, by counting,” Griffith said.
“No!” said Saunders, whose short military career had been spent fomenting mutiny.
“With a verse. Here’s one: ‘If I hadn’t been born a bloody fool, I wouldn’t have joined the Navy.
Fire!’ Try it. No, with rhythm. Now. Got a salt pinch in your pocket?
No?” he exclaimed, affecting horror, without giving her time to answer.
“Disaster! Raven, quickly teach her a hand sign for luck!”
Raven, who was propped loosely against the bulkhead, looking like he might slither to the deck with a little encouragement, said obediently, “Hand sign. Merry, stick the middle finger of your right hand into your mouth and—”
“I won’t. It’s dirty!” she said with spirit.
“All the better, lovey. Wipe it on your britches first, if you must. Then—”
“Devil take you,” snapped Cat, radiating disapproval from where he sat on a shot locker. “What she doesn’t need is to learn a lot of filthy habits.”
“You wouldn’t catch Cat with his middle finger in his mouth,” Saunders said dreamily. He leaned across the big gun, his grin like a scythe. “Who knows where it’s been?”
“I do,” said Raven, “and you would too if you’d noticed him last night with the fair Louisa on his lap.
Eager, she was, to unwrap his pretty braids.
” Seeing from the corner of his eye that Cat was starting to get up, he added hastily, laughing, “Oh, I’ve done, Cat.
I’ve done. Don’t make shrimp bait of poor little me.
” Hiccuping giggles, he collapsed gracefully to the floorboards.
“Drunk,” Saunders said affectionately, “as a fish. Don’t put your finger in your mouth then, Merry. Spit in your left palm instead.”
Staring open-eyed at Raven, Merry said, “I’m not sure, Mr. Saunders, if I really…”
“Merry, lamb, you can’t be delicate with superstition. Spit!” Saunders with Griffith was loading the cannon. “Hey. You call that spit? I’ve seen more spray from a sneezing kitten. Now, make a right-handed fist and smack the left palm. There you go!”
She had shot off two rounds, and dusted with gunpowder, she was trying laughingly to lift a twenty-pound cannonball in scorched fingers when she caught Cat by accident in her gaze and saw that he was staring beyond her toward the door.
Alarmed by something she saw in his expression, Merry froze, and then turned.
Devon, still and relaxed, framed like a portrait in the narrow rectangle of the open door, was holding her in his silken gaze.
She might have cried out, she wasn’t sure, but her fingers splayed thoughtlessly from the shock of it and sent the cannonball humming across the deck at Devon.
If he hadn’t sidestepped quickly, he would have gotten it over his toes.
She never heard the single, curt syllable he uttered or the fluent string of dialogue he addressed to the men with her as he walked slowly across the deck. Except for a softly pulsating crackle Merry was deaf.
Raven had told her what she must do to protect her hearing, but he had accompanied it with so many conflicting and jocularly intended orders that she hadn’t taken the right one seriously.
In mime she saw Saunders dousing the match in a sand bucket, his lips energetically shaping an explanation to Devon.
Griffith was dissolving in apologies. Cat was grim.
Raven—Merry looked over her shoulder—was sleeping against the bulkhead, curled like a puppy.
Devon, finished for the meantime with the others, turned his straight-edged attention to Merry.