Chapter 16
The battling ships had a strange beauty from four hundred yards away.
Against the night sky of transparent black the ship’s lanterns breathed sheer golden light that caught as glistening streamers on the ocean waves.
From the Joke’s stern lanterns twin haloes glowed like the eyes of a great sea monster.
The battle raged in miniature; the slowly shrinking scene seemed a microcosm of madness, with flames licking the rigging of the other ship, sooty clouds of smoke rolling upward, and the shouting and shooting and clanging echoing and faint.
It looked like an accident in an alchemist’s laboratory.
And Merry was leaving it behind as if it were a Punch and Judy show bypassed on a street corner.
Wearing denim breeches, a white shirt, and a kelly green bandanna over her hair, Merry sat in the jolly boat’s bow with her pistol trained on the kitchen assistant, whose name, she had ascertained, was Michael Meadows.
Meadows rowed, and Merry watched the battle through the oars as they rose and dipped, rose and dipped.
They had gone more than a league’s distance before Merry realized that she was looking at three sets of masts.
She exclaimed, “There’s a third ship!”
“Eh? Oh, aye. A Portuguese schooner, sailing out of the Brazils, more ’n likely.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it was coffee she was hauling.
Dumpy little rascal, ain’t she? Them sails is patched like a whaleman’s shirt.
She’s prize to that pirate bark that’s putting up Satan’s own fight against the Joke. ”
So Morgan was fighting another pirate ship!
“A pirate bark?”
“Aye.” Meadows glanced over his shoulder at the ships.
“That be Malachi Head. See his colors there, by the aft lantern? His flag’s got the bloody dagger ’pon it.
He’s the devil’s spawn, old Malachi. When he takes a ship, he sticks the men through with boarding pikes, and if’n there’s women aboard, he lets his crew take their sport with ’em and then throws the lot of ’em into the hold.
Then he bombards the ship, for target practice, see, till she goes down ablazin’.
Him and Morgan usually gives each other a wide berth, but this time the lookout spied a woman on the captured schooner, and her with a babe in her arms and two little ones clingin’ to her skirts.
So Morgan brings it up for a vote: How many want to take Malachi Head’s ship and steal his prize?
Well, quicker ’n a trout’s tongue every man jack on the Joke is finding some reason or other we oughta take the ship.
Saunders says because there might be silver aboard the Portuguese, Valentine says we oughta be replacing the skiff you sank, even Shay, that son of a bitch, suddenly remembers some old grudge he’s got against Malachi Head’s bosun.
Humpf! You know the real reason they wanna fight that Malachi Head? To save the young ’uns! I ask you!”
Dawn glimmered, a lilac fuzz on the horizon. Smiling into the trade wind’s light breath, Merry said, “I think it’s wonderful.”
“Oh, you do, eh? For my money, being a hero is fine, but suicide is something else again. I can’t see giving up yer life for a babe.
They all die anyway,” he said gloomily, coasting on his oars.
“Twenty years ago, back in Dover, my wife had three babes in three years, and not one of them lived more ’n a day or two.
And with the last one my wife dies too. Childbed fever they call it.
I call it bad doctorin’.” Meadows spit over the side. “She weren’t no more than seventeen.”
Merry was quickly and deeply affected. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Meadows shrugged, grinning slyly through charred, stumpy teeth.
“She was a shrill one anyway and never gived me a moment’s peace, though I was sorry about the little ones, and that’s a fact.
” He let one oar hang in the water and reached between his legs for the rum bottle.
He took a long swig, and as he lowered the bottle his gaze fell on the bucket Merry had placed by her feet.
“There it goes—he done it again! Put one of them arms out and wiggled it around.”
Merry glanced uncertainly at the malefactor in the bucket. “He can’t help it,” she said, on the defensive. “The bucket’s too small, and he is a squid, after all.”
“Well, I don’t hold with squids, nor octopussies neither. Ain’t natural, a critter havin’ all them arms. Fair gives a body the creeps. Dump him out.”
“I’m going to,” Merry said, “as soon as we’re far enough from the ship.”
“If that don’t beat kissin’! Think a cannonball’s gonna fall on him? Out he goes—or I don’t oar another stroke.”
It was not a threat Meadows was likely to carry out, with the eastern sky paling to slate and the rising light adding to their danger of detection and capture.
But the squid must be half-starved by now.
Decency demanded that she set it free. Merry put the pistol down in her lap, picked up the bucket, and leaned over the side until the bucket’s wooden mouth was under an inch of water.
Gently tipping the bucket sideways, she watched with a lump in her throat as the squid slid out and away into the glossily black ocean.
It was one more link to Raven gone. Cat.
Devon. The hand that she had braced against the side slipped as she drew in the heavy bucket, and her shifting weight sent the boat rocking like a tree cradle in the wind.
“Hey! Watch it! You’ll tip us. And I could have had the gun off you too,” he added morosely. “Don’t you forget, if Devon should happen to catch us, it was all against my will—you had the pistol on me the whole time.”
“I’ll tell him anything you like, but he won’t find us if you’d put a little Norwegian steam into your rowing.”
“Humph.” Meadows picked up the oar, and the boat began to move forward again. “Darn female. Likes to see a man work himself to death. And only a fancy-thinking fellow like Devon would have a woman that’d insist on running away with a squid in a bucket. There’s the aristocracy for you.”
There were times when it was particularly trying to listen to one of the men on the Joke place Devon on an exaggeratedly high pedestal.
Ready to argue with Michael Meadows, ready to do anything but think about the insanely desperate thing she was doing, Merry said, “Aristocracy?” She tried, as an experiment, to sneer.
“He’s well-favored, educated, and bossy. That doesn’t make him an aristocrat.”
“Lot you know about it. He’s got bloody aristocratic ways about him, and anyway, Sails says he is, and Sails’s been with Morgan since he got his first ship.”
Sails and the mermaid. Sails and the wind-seller. Sails and the ghost ship off Nova Scotia. Wonderful stories Sails told, but not true ones. “I’m sure titled British gentlemen frequently sail with pirates?”
“Beats walkin’.” Meadows gave a short guffaw. “Course, not by much. Didn’t know, did ya, that Morgan and Devon are half brothers?”
“Yes, I did,” she said. “And that Devon is legitimate, and Morgan is not. I find it hard to believe that if Devon’s family was as influential as you are implying, they would have allowed Devon to meet Rand Morgan.”
“Well, a course they wouldn’t,” he said contemptuously. “Morgan met his fine little brother by accident.”
There was a certain look in Meadows’s eyes that warned Merry the tale was hardly likely to uplift her.
Arguing with Meadows, it seemed, might be more taxing than she had bargained for.
She had an intense and active curiosity about everything connected with Devon, but hard experience had taught her that there were things to be learned about Devon that one had better be in a well-rested state to hear.
And she was tired, frightened, and in no mood to be teased—which was clearly what Michael Meadows had in mind.
Turning her head, Merry stared at the fresh, paling horizon with a laboriously manufactured expression of indifference.
She could feel Meadows’s rheumy gaze study her.
Then he said, “You in love with the fellow?”
A long pause. Finally, with a sigh, “What fellow?”
“Devon. You in love with him or what?”
“What,” she answered emphatically.
“Yep. You love him. I can tell. Heh, heh.”
“Mr. Meadows,” she said, “if you want to think that, I’m not going to quarrel with you about it. I’m only going to say this once: I’m not in love with Devon.”
As though she hadn’t spoken, he said, “Yep. I can tell. Know what it takes to make a man like that fall in love with you?”
A miracle. “Obviously I don’t, because he’s not in love with me.”
“Heh, heh. Know how to keep a man like that?” Meadows tipped his head down until he could tap with one finger on the part of his temple exposed by his russet stocking cap. “To keep a man like that takes brains.”
As advice went, it was a little too general to be of any use.
Anyway, some of the things you don’t do if you want a man like that to fall in love with you are to run away, steal his letters, and refuse to tell him the facts he needs to acquit you of any connection with his worst enemy.
That aside, Merry hoped, and feared, that she would never have to see the man again.
Lifting with some difficulty the arm that had been bruised by Morgan’s door, Merry began to rub the aching stiffness at the back of her neck.
“That Devon,” Meadows went on. “The boy was a proper hellion in his teens, so they say. To give themselves a rest, his people sent him to look over some property in the Indies, and happens he was on a three master that Morgan took. Prettiest boy you ever saw, they say. The crew was dicing over who was to have their way with him, and Morgan, they tell, saved the lad from a fate worse than death.”
“Pray don’t continue!” Merry exclaimed, going rigid.