Chapter 12 #2
She wondered how her face must appear to him; dirty, certainly, frightened, and a bit bewildered; not reacting in the proper way to the things he was saying, which she was glad she could not hear.
She was probably giving off other signs she wasn’t aware of, but still, it was amazing how soon he guessed.
Catching her jaw in the firm arc of his hand, he snapped his fingers once by her ear.
Merry saw him speak to her again, his face more gentle; this time she was able to gather that he was reassuring her that her hearing would return.
It hardly seemed to matter. Her heart was beating in bass, and her insides had tied themselves into a bowline knot, a common bend, a rolling hitch, and Matthew Walker’s roses.
This was the last grape seed, proof that the events of the last month had driven her out of her mind; she was deliriously happy to see Devon.
Delirium. That was a good word for it. The paralysis of the eardrum was joined somehow with a paralysis of the brain.
It was not the right reaction, not the right one at all, and in fact, it was so nearly the opposite of what her reaction ought to have been that she had to wonder if some of her brain cells were facing backward.
Heartsick at the monstrous betrayal of her body, Merry generaled it back into dislike and frigidity, hoping none of the hectic, pained struggle was showing on her features.
Devon took his hand away and said something curtly to Cat, and relief from Devon’s scrutiny and his touch was so immense that tears came, hot and pricking like straw near the base of her eyes.
Cat, it appeared, was having a lot to say to Devon, and although the strict formality of their conversation gave no clue to its content, the glances she was getting from Saunders and Griffith indicated that her well-being was directly and unpleasantly involved.
There was a muted pop, and a sizzle, and Merry’s hearing came back just as Devon, evidently in the middle of a sentence, was saying, “… common sense because as I recall I requested—”
“I know what your orders were,” Cat said, “but you weren’t here, and she wasn’t eating.”
There was a second pop, and a loud mechanical buzz overlaid her hearing for another minute and then subsided.
“… so she left a note,” Cat was saying, “on the table telling me and hid under the bedclothes weeping while I read it.”
“And of course,” said Devon coldly, “she needed a healthful regimen of fresh air and exercise to survive the rigors of menstruation?”
“Take it up with Morgan,” said Cat. “First he sent Sails to her and then Raven. If I were you, I’d ask him why.”
Devon’s beautifully shaped eyes were glinting softly. “He’s already told me”—Devon gave the smile that wasn’t a smile—“that he wanted to make a man of her. Lucky girl. Did it occur to you that if you had put your compassion in the right place and let her break, I could have let her go?”
He had left then, or almost left. Cat’s voice halted him by the door.
“She doesn’t break, Devon,” he said. “You’d have to kill her trying. She doesn’t break. She just collapses like wet sugar cake.”
Merry spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding Devon.
Sunset hung in pink fronds over the cove.
Where Merry sat on the bow, the slow shadows found her, lying on her cheeks like hands shading milk in the sunlight.
She had huddled beside Raven, who was groggily awake and playing solitaire with a limp deck of dog-eared cards.
She helped him when he missed a play, and he thanked her, not speaking, with a desultory pat on her knee or sometimes, absently, the empty air.
Across from them, beside Sails, Saunders was teasing a high, delicious melody from a tin whistle.
More than five minutes had passed since Merry had said a word.
Five minutes ago Devon had come aloft, and he was standing to the fore of the mizzen talking with Thomas Valentine.
As Merry watched them a large snowy gull sank in swooping circles toward the deck and hung mewing in the face of the breeze near the mizzen.
Devon looked up and smiled, his light hair falling back, his eyes shining.
Drifting like a dream sequence, the beautiful bird circled again and landed on Devon’s quickly extended arm.
The gull tucked its black-tipped wings, and the bright yellow bill dove into Devon’s chest pocket and found a biscuit.
Stopping in the middle of a song, following the line of Merry’s gaze, Saunders said, “Devon’s gull. Even the dumb creatures love the man.”
“If only,” Merry said tartly, “we were all so privileged as to be male and gifted.”
Her tone penetrated even the haze of Raven’s hangover.
“Milady, with the wind in the right direction you can hear the pleasure-moans of Devon’s ladies over two counties,” he said, twisting around to look at Merry. His dark, dark eyes were troubled. “I’ve never met anyone before who didn’t want to own a piece of him. How is it you’re exempt?”
“Oh, I’d like to own pieces of him. As long as each was disconnected from the other,” she said stiffly. “You can play on the ace of hearts. Sails, you remember, don’t you, that you were going to tell me about the time you saw the mermaid.”
“Oh? Oh, aye! The wee mermaid. ’Twas near the Rammerees, off the Horn, ye see,” began Sails, always ready to rig his yarn tackle.
And as he spoke Merry shut her eyes and missed, because of that, the hand Raven stretched comfortingly toward her, and Saunders, moving silently on the softly rocking deck, who caught Raven’s wrist in angry fingers and shoved it away from Merry with a warning shake of his head.
It was all very well to have the girl for a playmate, but her heartaches would have to belong only to herself.
Raven had to learn. It would be cruel to them both to let them develop the illusion that Raven could help her.
And Sails, in pity, put his best into the mermaid.
More than a quarter hour later Merry still hadn’t opened her eyes.
“And so,” he said, “before she slipped off into the water, she gave me this very pearl to keep.”
Merry had to open her eyes to look at the pearl, and Sails dropped it, white and precious, into her palm, where it sat like a cloudy tear.
“It’s beautiful. I’ve never seen one before.
Please, tell me more about what the mermaid looked like,” said Merry, who had trouble believing that any story told so seriously was a simple piece of fiction.
“As to that,” said Sails, “she was scales from the navel down, like a mackerel, and hair blacker’n Cap’n Morgan’s eyes, wi’ wee points in it like stars. Seaweed was draped o’er her graceful-like, and there was a fine net o’ gold ’cross her chest.”
Raven looked up. “So? Last time, as I recall, her breasts were bare and pale, and there was a diamond in her navel and a ruby in her—”
Saunders grinned. “Shush, child. Don’t you know we have a separate version for the lassies?”
Joining them quietly and with shattering suddenness, Devon said, “And a ruby in her hair. Her nose,” he went on, imitating Sails’s brogue, “was petite, mind ye, and pointed like a wee puir fishie. Valentine tells me he knows some lazy sons of bitches who are going to be picking oakum tomorrow.”
Within a minute Merry was alone with Devon.
Tall and flat-hipped, he stood with his back to the gunwale, the sun a crimson globe behind him, catching delicate bronze tones in his hair.
The fine-boned elegance of his features needed no blazing pastel sundown to flatter them; it was difficult to ignore the constant sensual promise of that experienced mouth and subtly arousing gaze.
For once his expression was not hard for Merry to interpret.
He was looking at her like a gardener mulling over what to do about the mole problem.
It would have been nice to be able to match his stare with a cool one of her own; nice, but impossible.
The blood rose steam-heated to her cheeks. Nausea sat in her stomach.
Aft, on the port side, men were lowering one of the boats to leave for shore, and their voices mingled in the glowing air with water lap and the whirr of wind striking feathers as a plover flew over the ship in a swift black arrow.
From the galley came food smells and the sounds of Cook shouting at his help; the friendly sounds of shipboard domesticity that somehow tonight had lost their power to reassure.
And when the hovering tension became unbearable, Merry got awkwardly to her feet and started to leave.
“Running again?” he inquired softly, with amusement.
She had forgotten, over the interval of their separation, how cleverly he could control her.
How irritating it was to have one’s most private drives analyzed, reduced to simple logic, and hung like a kissing bough over one’s head.
If her emotions hadn’t been in such turmoil, she would have lost her temper.
As it was, she turned with a snap and walked back to him.
“Or,” he said, “were you going to fetch more ordnance?”
“If you are referring to the cannonball,” Merry said, “that was an accident.”
“Really? With the floor toward me sloping uphill? Do you know, I’m beginning to envy men whose debauchees content themselves with a slapped cheek. No one could criticize your attacks for lack of originality.”
The tone was, overall, more friendly than she had expected. She said lamely, “Cat hadn’t told me you were back. I was startled.”
“Startled. Were you? There was a lot of that going around. I left you very properly cowering on your bed and return to find you very improperly capering around a cannon. And here I thought all you could do was be pathetic.”
That stung, but she was not about to let him know how much. “Pardon me. A full fortnight with nary a soul threatening to torture me and here I am, forgetting my place. Good job you’re back to put me into it again.”