Chapter 14 #2
“Very well!” she flashed out. “If you need payment in blood for a small act of charity.”
He released her completely, and with a deadly smile he said, “Well, well. I believe you actually would. How noble you are. But I don’t think I could stomach a sacrificial lamb, and besides, my pretty one, even though your charms have their moments, my interest in them is low just now.
And none of it matters in the end because there’s nothing I can do to help Raven.
By all means though,” he said, going back to the door and holding it invitingly open, “go out. Look around. If you make the same suggestion to enough men, in time you might be able to find someone who wants to play.”
That last insulting reference made it especially difficult, but in spite of it she brushed past him and left the room.
Merry found Morgan in his cabin stretched out on his goliath bed eating allspice berries.
He heard her out in silence, the pleas, the frayed threads of logic she wove to show why it was she, if anyone, that ought to be punished, and not Raven.
When she was finished, he studied her for a minute, showing no expression, and answered calmly, without a trace of sympathy, “I can’t have my men flashing steel every time they get excited about something.
He’ll be wiser in the future if we blood him a little now. Don’t worry. We won’t kill him.”
In desperation she went to Valentine, her voice raised more than it should have been. He listened to her with wary annoyance and then said, “Cat! Where the blazes is he? Cat! Get over here and take her below.”
She fought Cat furiously as he strong-armed her to her cabin, and even there she lashed out wildly and struck at him with her fists.
The young pirate knew many ways to silence a hysterical victim.
None was a method he cared to use on Merry, but when she would not let him quiet her, he pushed her to the floor and stilled her frantic struggles with his body.
“Merry, listen to me. Listen to me!” In one hand he caught her flailing wrists, the other covered her mouth.
The deeply blue eyes glaring up at him were nearly delirious with anger, but to his relief they held no fear.
“Damnation, Merry. Listen. You’ve stretched this as far as you can.
Tempers are short. One more scream and you’re likely to end the morning with your back bared by Raven’s side. ”
“I don’t care!” she said, the words muffled under his strong fingers.
“So what?” he snapped. “I do. If you won’t clap a stopper on your tongue, I’ll do it for you. Open your mouth again, and I’ll drug it shut. I mean it. I’d rather humiliate you than hurt you. My choice.”
Through his fingers she said, “Why yours?”
She was breathing in short gasps, but her eyes were calmer. He loosened his hold on her mouth.
“Because,” he said, “haven’t you noticed? I’m the one on top.”
She was imprisoned in her cabin, and it was two days before she saw Raven.
Cat unlocked the door the second evening and allowed Raven to enter before him.
Standing quickly, coming toward him, she saw with unclad anxiety that the cloudless friendliness in his eyes was as bright as ever, although the firm facial skin was still gray from suffering.
His easy sailor’s grace had become stiff and awkward, and when she saw it, she ran into his arms with a cry.
“Merry! Here now, none of that,” Raven said softly, flattered and a little embarrassed. “Don’t take on so. I’m the same—sound of body, soft of brain. Ouch! Here, dear, don’t hug me, please.”
“I’m sorry!” she said, carefully and quickly redirecting her hands. “Raven, if I had known—”
“M’lady, it had nothing to do with you. I don’t mind a thrashing now ’n’ again, if it’s in a good cause.
I’d be right as a red currant by now if it hadn’t been for Sails.
Mind you, his intentions were the best, but to keep me company on the first night after, he took to reading from a sermon book.
Forty pages, he read, and the print on them smaller than flea tracks, and titled ‘The Divinity of Christ, by One Who Had Been for Thirty Years an Atheist.’ Lord, by the time it was over, you pretty well felt like putting your fist in the nose of the man who converted him. ”
Raven’s lips, smiling at her with kindness, were dry and set with pain twists.
She stood tensely before him, her hand resting against the loose weave of his cider-colored shirt.
She said, “Will Saunders calls himself your best friend. I can’t understand how he could stand by and watch them beat you. ”
“If you want the truth,” said Raven with amusement, “it didn’t exactly break his heart to see them lay stripes on my back. Madder than an empty duck with his quacker stuck shut, Will was. You should hear him quoting Pere Ardier on the subject of Caribbean males.”
“I heard,” Cat said and quoted, “ ‘While they are generally intelligent and well made—’ ”
“Thank you,” Raven said.
“ ‘—they are also unreliable, lazy, capricious, and ready at any time to commit suicide,’ ” Cat finished.
Grinning at Cat, Raven retorted, “And have you heard, mayhap, what the good father said about Swedes? ‘Quarrelsome, insolent, arrogant, and prone to wantonness.’ ”
“That,” said Cat dryly, “was quick. Why don’t you sit down and quit trying to be jolly? Look at her face. She knows you’re acting.”
It was agonizing for Merry to watch Raven lower himself clumsily into the chair that Cat had turned backward for him. Again she said, “I can’t understand how they could do that to you.”
“Merry, it was a light sentence—” Raven began.
“Light!”
“In the Navy—any navy—I would have been hanged for it,” Raven said cheerfully. “As it was, Valentine should have held me to a trial by combat, but you see, Valentine is the best swordsman on the ship, while I—”
“Would be hard put to slash your way out of a barberry hedge,” Cat said. “I’ve told you, Merry, Tom Valentine couldn’t let Raven go unpunished without looking like a weakling, and no one wants a weakling for a quartermaster.”
Not convinced, not consoled, Merry angrily said, “And this is why, I suppose, they say, ‘No man would go to sea on a ship who could contrive to get himself into jail’?” She turned away furiously, facing the window where the high rectangles showed a sky of deep slate, and a few stars made lonely, splendid pinpoints in the fading twilight.
The room was hot, the surfaces sticky and pleasantly spiced with the warm raisins Cat had brought to her earlier.
Their notions of justice were alien to her and seemed appallingly stupid.
She could scarcely comprehend the logic that required someone to see a friend whipped to preserve some useless standard of consistency that was too harsh to begin with.
And yet, what good would it do to harangue Raven about it when she’d already had the same argument through the door with Sails on two occasions, with Cook once, and with Cat every time he’d set a foot inside the threshold?
Behind her she heard Raven say, “Have you talked to Devon, then?”
Devon. The most alien and appalling of all difficult males.
In an abrupt way Cat said, “You know she hasn’t seen him in two days. Gossip around here is thicker than Scotch thistles.”
“Don’t Cat say that good?” Raven marveled. “Hardly spits at all. Mind you, I didn’t know that we had Scotch thistles thick around here, but then it’s been a few days, think again, since I’ve been inside the hold.”
The lilting tones, the tenderness in his voice were irresistible.
Merry turned toward him, her hands back at her waist and resting on the bunk.
She made herself smile and, working hard at keeping her tone lighthearted, said, “Cat is correct, as usual. I haven’t seen Devon.
He probably waits until I’m asleep to slip in and change his underclothes.
I have a strong suspicion that he means to make me walk the plank. ”
Like her Raven hid distress under a smile. “Impossible. Pirates don’t do that, you know. The newspapers made it up.”
“Did they? Well. There’s another myth about pirates laid to rest,” she said.
“Yes, indeed. We never make people walk the plank. Too ghoulish. We simply”—Raven made a nimble diving motion with one hand—“throw them over the side.”
She wasn’t sure why that should make her laugh, except perhaps that Raven’s expression was so droll. Looking highly encouraged, he put out a hand to her. “Come over by me,” he said. “I can’t fetch you. Give me your hand.” When she did, he carried it to his lips.
Cat watched them a moment. Then he said, “Saunders is right. You’re too involved with her.”
There was a brief pause as Raven’s winsome gaze found Merry’s and then transferred slowly to Cat. “I may be,” Raven said, “but so, my friend, are you.”
Raven let a few days go by and then went with Will Saunders to try to buy her from Devon. And though Will never went near Merry when she was alone, because he said bluntly that he didn’t trust himself, their motives were pure.
They found Devon in the captain’s cabin, with Morgan and Valentine, drinking cici, which was corn gin from Chile made from maize chewed by toothless old women and fermented in water. There wasn’t another palate on the Joke besides those three that could keep it down.
The transfer of women by purchase was a common enough thing.
Devon heard their request calmly, and without smiling asked, “Why?” It was obvious that he was going to say no, as they’d already half anticipated, but they had to answer the man’s question anyway.
That was the rub. Raven wasn’t sure how it could be, but while it wouldn’t have been even slightly embarrassing to admit that their purposes were unabashedly carnal, it was ticklish beyond description to announce that they just wanted to let her go.
As they spoke, facing into Devon’s golden, autocratic gaze, there was the unavoidable if unspoken implication of reproach to Devon for the way he was treating her, which was a heavy breach of pirate etiquette.
Even that aside, Saunders’s explanation, tactfully phrased as it was, couldn’t help having such a ring of romanticism and sanctimony to it that Morgan hardly waited for Saunders’s finish and Devon’s refusal before laughing himself hoarse.
Thomas Valentine sighed and, fixing Saunders with a blighting gaze, said tartly, “If you don’t all stop being so damned amusing about that wretched wench, Morgan will happily keep her around for the next twenty years. ”
The man had a point.