Chapter 18
The malaria paroxysm that came the next afternoon left Merry so severely weakened that she was alert for only a few minutes of the following twenty-four hours.
Without consulting anyone Morgan changed course for St. Elise, the small island where he owned a modest indigo plantation.
Even after she heard they had plotted a new heading, it didn’t occur to her that she wasn’t expected to recover.
They had been too careful never to shake her confidence in that by placing steeled controls on their every nuance of inflection and expression.
Cat knew as much about the disease and how to treat it as anyone; no one could have done better, and there were many who would not have been able to keep her alive beyond the first days. The most dangerous form of the lethal malaria fever had entered the dearest of his patients.
He was grateful there was no need to tell Devon, whose clever golden eyes had correctly read the signs—her constant need to sleep, her failing appetite, her progressive apathy.
Cat knew very well that when Devon had asked her again how he might find her family, it had not been to have them ease her recuperation, but because it was too cruel that she would have to die so far away from home and among strangers.
But now, even if she had told him, it was no longer possible for any of her people to reach her in time.
Morgan had been in to see her, gazing at her while she slept. Cat didn’t know which mask he had begun to dread more, Morgan’s impassivity or Devon’s cheerful efficiency. Uncapped emotion was worse. He found it unbearable to be in the same room with Raven.
Later that week they reached St. Elise, and the move into Morgan’s villa was done with such care that Merry slept throughout.
She woke in a wide airy room without a fireplace where arched windows showed the luxuriant greenery and crimson-tasseled blooms of a cashew tree.
In the day’s heat jalousie blinds dimmed the sun while they passed inside the breeze, and the immaculate cream-washed walls were restful and cool.
The floor was an uncarpeted expanse of breadnut timber that shone like a tabletop and faintly perfumed the room with its orange polish.
During the hour she was awake, she had been able to drink some thin soup, to joke with Cat about whether or not she would take her medicine, and to meet Annie, the beautiful Indian girl who was married to Cook and whom Rand Morgan employed to manage his household staff in his absence.
Often enough Merry had heard the others tease Cook about her, this heart-faced girl of twenty years whose father had worn a bone in his nose and for a Russian cutlass and a box of stale snuff had sold her outright to Cook.
Or so the story went. Deaf and mute from birth, Annie communicated with hand signs, and she sat on the bed beside Cat, smiling and helping him teach some of them to Merry until they both saw Merry was too tired to continue, and then Annie had fetched a soft hairbrush and stroked it tenderly through the dying girl’s golden curls, which ran like foam under her hands.
By the next morning Merry was in a coma.
Devon had slept only a few hours in many days, and when he had passed out in a chair, they had put him in a bed in another room, so it was Cat who saw her slip under.
Sails was with him, and Annie and Cook, and none of them was in any hurry to wake Devon up to see it.
They had had to let Raven in to tell her good-bye, and that had drained all of them so badly that even Sails had felt his gnarled hands trembling by the time Saunders had pulled Raven from the room. No one had spoken since then.
Morgan stepped into the quiet with his eyes glowing like a fox’s.
“Is this a wake, my little ones?” he asked, his smooth gaze finding and examining each of them. Crossing slowly to where the girl lay, helpless under the carved Spanish headboard of the big bed, he took her wretchedly white face between his hands.
“Oh, no, my girl,” he said softly to her, “you are not going to die. Because I have plans for you. Because you’re much smarter than your mother was. And because Cat knows better than to sit there like a dust box and let you die.”
Even for Rand Morgan the cruelty was appalling.
Sails felt a heavy rush of air in his lungs as he sucked in too sharply on a breath, and beside him he was aware that Cook was stiff as a wagon jack.
And Annie was already on her feet and running toward Cat.
She might not have been able to understand what Morgan had said, but she had seen what it did to Cat.
The sharp change in that face, which rarely altered, struck the room’s silence like a scream.
Light o’ God, to have placed that burden and that blame on a boy who was already raw with suffering and who had done everything for her short of cutting out his heart and feeding it to her, and Sails thought that Cat probably would have done that if it would have helped her. What could Morgan be thinking of?
Annie wrapped herself protectively around Cat’s neck, her loose ebony hair sliding over his arms, her cheek tucked into his shoulder.
And that in itself was a miracle. Six months ago Cat would have shoved her away, scarred as he was, and frigid, whatever anybody thought.
The only contact he had allowed was Morgan’s casual, infrequent touch, and deliberately rapid encounters with women of a certain order.
Forever etched in Sails’s memory was a color portrait of Cat the night they’d first brought him to the Joke.
Come and see the boy I’ve bought, Morgan had said, and there had been Cat, with face paint on his cheekbones and smelling of violets, sitting on Morgan’s bed, his face about as friendly as a barracuda waiting under a rotting foot bridge.
“It never does any good to ask,” the boy had observed, dissecting them, chilly-eyed under curled lashes, “but I function better when there’s only one pair of sweaty hands on me at a time.”
“You have very good diction for a twelve-year-old,” Morgan had said, blandly smiling.
“I’ve known men like you,” the boy had said. “I know what you want.”
“I’m afraid you don’t,” Morgan had said, looking consideringly at his exotic purchase.
“You still have things to learn about men like me, my child. And put your clothes on. It may take you a few days to get used to the idea, but you don’t have to wait anymore in bedrooms wearing nothing but your gooseflesh. ”
Years it had taken to turn that savagely hostile brothel product into the youth who could become a friend to little Merry, and when she passed out of this world, she would carry a part of him with her.
Surely he needed to hear it was not his fault he couldn’t save her, and not the opposite. What could Morgan be thinking of?
Devon, awakened thirty minutes later, found Cat on the southern slope near the house under the vast, horizontally spreading limbs of a fig tree.
Cat was seated in the deep shade near the trunk, his knees drawn up, and on them, in his folded arms, he had buried his face.
His braid was wrapped like a collar around his neck, and one of his thin hands clasped a large oval leaf that he must have plucked from the waxy foliage above him.
Devon knew better than to offer sympathy.
Instead he sat on the grass and waited until Cat looked up.
When the boy lifted his head, Devon saw that he had not been crying.
But it was the only time in the years of their friendship that Devon had seen Cat look like the teenager he was.
Speaking calmly, as though this were any ordinary day in their lives, Devon prodded forth the same discussion they had repeated daily since she had fallen ill: about the medicines they were giving her, the dosage, the frequency.
Even in this moment of mutual panic their minds clicked into the accustomed pattern, and when they had exhausted the paces, Devon stretched out flat and stared up at the dark branches.
“Could we get her to swallow? Is it possible?”
“Probably,” said Cat, “but by this afternoon I don’t think so.”
“What would happen if we double everything we’re giving her?”
“I’ve told you. Convulsions. Death.”
“If we increase it by a third?”
“Devon, we did that yesterday. I’m already killing her with the dosage that—” But Devon had uncoiled from the ground like a whip ricochet, dragging Cat with him, catching shirt front and braid in a crushing grip.
For once, neither was acting as each glared into the extremity of the other’s exhaustion.
In a voice he couldn’t manage to keep under perfect control, Devon said, “All right, then. Now you know. I’m as close to the brink of some childlike useless frenzy as you are. Don’t impel me to do anything I’ll have to apologize for later. That girl is not going to die.”
With helpless wrath Cat said, “Why not? Because Morgan told her not to? God and the Devil don’t listen to Rand Morgan.
Or do you think the celestial weight of our guilt is going to sift into her through the skin and keep her alive?
Do you realize you’re still calling her ‘girl’?
Does she have to be dead before you’re willing to admit that from the beginning she was a woman to you?
To me she’s more than one more warm tup. Get your goddamn hands off my shirt.”
He was released with a speed that would have terrified someone less inured to violence, and found himself staring into Devon’s cold fury.
“Don’t examine too closely the chaste purity of your feelings for her, little monk,” Devon said softly. “You might have a surprise.”
“Yes! By all means, let’s tally each other’s hypocrisies. Is that mine? Then we’ll do yours next. Why haven’t you let her go?”