Chapter 13 #3
Merry was about to give up her watch when she noticed a second small boat, moving like a shadow between the waves.
As the boat approached she was able to identify its occupant as Joe Griffith, the Joke’s master gunner.
Evidently he had taken advantage of the Joke’s halt to fish.
The poor weather must have discouraged him though, for he rowed back to the ship, secured the small boat to a cleat, and agilely climbed a rope to the deck.
For more than an hour Merry returned time and again to the window.
The boat was still there. It amazed her that they hadn’t hauled it up, with a storm threatening.
Joe Griffith must have forgotten it; he had a tendency to lose interest quickly in things that weren’t connected with the ship’s cannons.
If the boat took the storm damaged, Tom Valentine would probably have Griffith punished.
Burdened with an overactive conscience, Merry went toward the door to remind Mr. Griffith about the neglected boat.
She stopped, her hand on the door handle, a new and overwhelming idea sizzling like frying shark meat in her brain.
Her chest roasting, her hands cold as granite, Merry spun the idea through her mind, as if she couldn’t believe that she’d come up with the thought by herself.
Pulling a brown wool jacket over her suddenly chilly arms, straining to keep her voice low, Merry repeated the slowly emerging plan to the stalwart table, to Devon’s desk, to a maddeningly noncommittal face she drew in the window mist. In the little fishing craft bobbing below she was going to row to the Good Shepherd.
With a kernel of a smile she decided that if that name didn’t betoken succor and divine benevolence for her plan, nothing ever would.
She wondered if Devon would remember later that the last thing he’d said to her was: You had better leave the room before your discipline collapses.
Good day. Perhaps, just perhaps it was going to be a better day for Merry Wilding than the man suspected.
And somehow, in time, she would learn to live with the knowledge that she would never see Devon again.
And Cat and Raven. No. None of that. No second thoughts.
She couldn’t afford to care. Aunt April was going to see her missing niece again. …
She waited until the bells told her that it was time for dinner before running lightly up the stairs to flatten herself against the boards and watch the rain-spattered deck.
The mess pennant flew over the fo’c’sle, and in another minute Cook came with his helper, carrying covered kids of victuals toward the crew’s quarters.
They made three trips, with rain beating the wooden covers over the hot food and rising again as silver vapor.
Cook and his man would eat with the crew, and for more than twenty crucial minutes the ship’s kitchen would be deserted.
Breathing quickly, she forced herself to count to three hundred in case Cook had forgotten something and then pulled the jacket over her hair and stepped into the open.
Around her the deck rang with water song.
Thick rain clots drummed against billowing canvas, polished boards, and gun metal.
Streams gurgled in the scuppers. The watch, in their steaming oilskins, were hardly in a mood to stop her for a chat, though Erik Shay—the fleshy giant who, long ago at the Musket and Muskrat, had let Merry and Sally leave the tavern—waved from the upper deck.
Once in the galley Merry rapidly located and stole a small paring knife, a discarded apron covered with grease, some coals, and a tinderbox.
She wrapped the tinderbox, the coals, and the knife in the apron, and buttoned her jacket and stuffed the wadded apron underneath. Running from the galley with her head down like a mole, she slammed into Tom Valentine’s chest.
“Oh, my! Oh, dear heavens!” she cried out, disengaging instantly from him, to leave a wet spot on his immaculate flannel shirt.
“Anyone would assume,” Valentine said, “that by now somebody would have taught you to curse. Don’t wring your hands at me, you little fool. I’m not going to debauch you. You look guilty. What have you been up to?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all! I was only startled to see you. I went into the galley to get a—a biscuit. Because of the storm. I was hungry, and I thought in this bad weather it might take Cat a long time to get around to bringing a tray for me.”
“It’s only a rain,” he said, “not a typhoon. Cat can bring you something to eat right away if you’re hungry. I’ll talk to him.”
“No! That is, thank you, but—I’m not as hungry as I was when I—” It was awkward to lie stupidly to Thomas Valentine; it would be disastrous to try to lie to Cat.
“The damp… the heaving of the ship… have made me a little sick. I should go lie down, I think, and sleep. If you see Cat, I wish you would tell him please not to bring food.”
Back in her cabin Merry whipped the door shut behind her and leaned onto it with pounding relief.
It was a good thing that Valentine’s life experience had convinced him that white women were imbeciles, or he would hardly have let his suspicions pass.
But what if he repeated the story of their encounter in the hearing of Saunders or Cook, who knew that she might try to escape?
Perhaps her whereabouts were of such little interest to Valentine that he would forget the whole thing immediately—or perhaps not.
She made a short, unsatisfactory attempt at prayer, and then a feverish review of her plan, which reminded her to be methodical.
So, methodically she checked to be sure the windows were closed, and with ears tuned for footsteps in the passage she pried open Devon’s locked desk.
Inside she found letters, neatly bundled; notebooks filled with coded entries in an educated masculine hand; a packet of maps, some beautifully detailed, some less so; and desk supplies: a walnut sandbox, pencils with a cast brass sharpener, a green glass ink bottle, a whalebone letter opener, a pen-knife, and a tin tray of pens.
Overcoming an instinctive repugnance for stealing, she drew the damp apron bundle from her sodden jacket and replaced it with the letters; the notebooks were too big to take, the maps too bulky.
There was no time to read the letters and discover their mysteries.
It was enough to know they belonged to Devon, and that he possessed them meant that they must be somehow useful to his country’s cause, which also meant the converse, that if her country had them, it would help the United States and hurt Britain, at least in the hazy realms of theory.
If, on the other hand, all that she was getting away with was last year’s bills to Devon from his linen draper, then Devon was going to have the last laugh when he found them missing.
Any thought that it would be preferable to have Devon laughing when he found out her theft rather than in a murderous rage Merry quakingly dismissed as fainthearted and unpatriotic.
Of course the worst would be if she were still here, on the Joke, when he learned what she was trying to do. This had better work. Or else.
Her frightened clumsy fingers spilled the water from the water can into the chamber pot and stuffed the water can with the coals and one of the better maps from Devon’s drawer.
And although the contents of the tinderbox were clean and dry, it took Merry five gut-wrenching minutes to draw a spark.
The map flared, a soft licking flame that left black curled paper ash as it went out.
It took another five minutes of unpleasant experiments before she created a fire that gave dark smoke without flame.
Thick heat singed her face as she wrapped her hands in her jacket and thrust the can between its supports near the shaped splashboard, to prevent a fiery spill that might start a real blaze.
She waited as long as she could in the storm of smoke and dead flying cinders.
When finally her eyes ran and her skin cooked, she threw open a window, flung wide the door, and stumbled, choking, into the passage.
Racing to the upper deck, croaking “Fire! Fire!” to Erik Shay, she didn’t need to be an actress; black billows from the lower passage contrasted splendidly with the cherry color of her eye whites and the white tear tracks on her cherry cheeks.
It worked better than her best hopes. If fire was feared on land, it had a hundredfold the terrors at sea.
On many ships it was a capital offense to smoke an uncovered pipe belowdecks, or in hours of darkness.
Merry stood forgotten near the gunwale as the alarm spread and men rushed across the rain-slicked decks with sand buckets and water tubs.
Dennis, the pink pig, skidding across the deck on wet trotters, bumping men and upsetting sand buckets, was the only one who saw Merry slip overboard.
In the detachment of undiluted panic she felt the turmoil on deck fade, and what she could hear best was the thunder of her breathing as she found the free-swinging rope ladder leading to the small boat and took the weight of her body on her arms. The rough jute burned her palms, and the sting of instant welts distracted her, when she ought to be remembering to brace her feet against the ship.
The next wave trench that rocked the great vessel smashed her face-first into damp timber.
Pain blinded her. She clung, swaying on the rope, while air curdled sickeningly in her lungs.
Slowly she began to move again, lowering herself in inept movements that cut shoulder blades into cringing muscles.