Chapter 19 #2
But he was from the fourth generation of a family of pirates, and that affected his every attitude.
The little Annie would reveal about Cook’s early treatment of her had produced in Merry an awed respect for the Indian girl’s courage, as well as a belated thankfulness that her own advent on the Joke had been under Devon’s protection.
When Cook bought Annie, he was too young and had been too roughly reared to make even primitive concessions toward lightening her suffering and fear.
He would never have beaten her, and if he had been able to speak in her language, he might have tried to reassure her, but as things had stood, it hadn’t occurred to him that it was wrong to use force on her as long as it was done without excessive brutality; and because he had not grown up around men who bothered to conduct their intimate relations with women in privacy, he had not done that either.
Raven had been appalled and Sails gently chiding, but since the two of them, even together, had been no match for Cook, in the end it had been Cat who, after three days of listening to Annie’s weeping, had taken her away from Cook with the admonition that if he wanted his plaything back, he would have to learn to take better care of her.
So Cook had been forced to listen to Raven’s advice and to Sails’s, and if the kindnesses Cook had shown Annie in order to appease Cat had been delivered sarcastically in the beginning, in time his own basic kindliness and Annie’s charm had begun to knit them, man to woman, in an alliance that had more to it than fleshly unions.
As Cook had said rather glumly to Morgan a month later, “There’s more to love than two pelvises in a tussle. ”
It had become one of Morgan’s favorite quotations. In fact, in the weeks afterward Morgan had only to utter the words “As young Cook says…” to wring groans from his auditors.
The air outside Merry’s window was warm and genial, and as soon as she was well enough to sit up, they carried her out to rest in Morgan’s terraced garden.
The villa sprawled behind with its fretwork decorations and wooden porches.
Sunlight spilled upon the bright shingled roof and bounced like a sprite through the fountain spray and on the well-raked walks of crushed limestone.
Scarlet lilies startled the eye from shady corners, and iron frames dripped twining branches heavy with lavender blossoms. Raven put it rather well.
“Neat,” he had said to her on her first morning outside, “as the Pope’s toothpick. Do you want sun or shade?”
He had been settling her on a Chinese Chippendale bench in the early sunlight when Morgan brought her the sketchbook.
Her initial reaction was cold terror. How did he know she could draw?
But if Rand Morgan’s dark, thorough eyes had seen the color leave her cheeks, he hid it under a facile smile that was hard to interpret.
Instinct warned her not to disclose her distinctive talent, but the pleasure of having a pencil in hand after so long had by midmorning made instinct seem akin to superstition.
She received a tremendous and genuine response to the charcoal drawing she did that morning of Raven, and the charm of that made it impossible to stop.
Much later she would remember that praise was the flat plane of a quick-edged sword.
Strong and healthy some weeks after that, Merry sat under one of a lovely avenue of shaddock trees, on a blanket in the grass.
Beside her Raven was stretched out with a book propped open on his bare chest and his head on the pork belly of Dennis the pig.
Cook and Saunders lounged nearby. Annie lay curled on her side, her arching toes against Raven’s hip and her head pillowed on her husband’s thigh, her sable hair coiled between his legs.
He was lifting it and letting it fall as he frowned over the copybook in his hand, his short freckled nose wrinkled slightly in perplexed disgust.
Raven and Cook were studying, a routine that Morgan had instigated in their earliest days on the Joke, although no one was quite sure if the lessons were intended to promote their education or to test the patience of Will Saunders, who was supposed to be their teacher.
Both Cook and Raven were quick learners, but that made them no easier to instruct.
Raven’s attention span for passive activity was notably abbreviated, and Cook had a tendency to dispute everything.
If he was told that e followed i, save after c, it was woe betide Will Saunders if Cook found an exception later that Saunders had forgotten.
Just now Cook was saying, “What kind of a problem is this, Saunders?” Glaring at the book, he read aloud: ‘The stagecoach is drawn by four pairs of horses. How many horses are two horses and two horses and two horses and two horses? How many horses are four times two horses?’ He tossed down the book, spine upward on the grass.
Then he said, “How in the name of Jesus should I know? I don’t know a damn thing about horses. ”
Saunders was lying on the grass with his heels crossed and a wide-brimmed hat covering his face. From under the hat, “The question doesn’t have a damn thing to do with horses, matey, and you know it.”
“Well, Jeez.” Cook began to warm to the subject. “Bloody thing’s so easy that there must be a trick to it.”
“What’s the answer?” Saunders showed no disposition to emerge from under the hat.
“I refuse,” Cook said, brightening at the incipient argument. “Damn, it’s too easy. I’ll be blast if it ain’t an insult to my intelligence.”
Moving with reluctance, Saunders pushed off the hat and sat up.
“You’ve got tongue enough for two sets of teeth,” he said irritably.
Glancing at the book on the grass by Cook’s knees, he said, “Well, for the love of Jesus, you’ve brought out the wrong book.
Is that what you’ve been looking at for the last hour?
You went through that book in three days nine months ago, as you are more than well aware. ”
To Merry, who had halted in her drawing of Cat and begun to giggle, Saunders delivered a reproachful glance, said, “Don’t encourage him,” and vanished again under the hat.
The shaddocks were hung with cannonballs of golden fruit, and ducking through them, Devon glimpsed Merry in an innocent moment, the residue of that earlier laughter still bright, her exquisite cheeks dappled with skipping sunlight that wove through the sheltering leaves.
Her soft brushed curls haloed her smile and licked in airy tendrils against the fine-boned hollows under her ears and near the base of her jawline.
Dainty, drifting shadows beaded the shell-pink fibers of her gown.
Annie had made the dress for her from a simple pattern carefully cut of Flanders muslin that cupped Merry’s sweetly rounded breasts and showed, in faint depressions, the honey-soft line of the hips and the curved surfaces between her tucked legs.
Desire came to Devon in a light sting that brought with it the lucent memory of her flesh pliant against his fingers and the breathtaking arch of her breasts under his palm.
Cat was seated on a low stone wall stringing his mandolin and posing with not very good grace for Merry’s dexterously wielded pencil.
Spanish jasmine, growing to one side, suffused the air with its fragrance, and an inch from the toe of his high boots was a tiny hummingbird moving beelike in a vibration of gold and green feathers as its beak plunged repeatedly into the corolla of a nodding honeysuckle.
There were, Devon noted, a lot of things to distract Cat, but the long-haired boy’s fierce early years had given him an unerring sensitivity to human realities.
From Cat’s expression, focused with candid clarity on Devon’s eyes, Devon knew that Cat had seen him looking at Merry, and Devon wondered idly what his own face had shown. Probably the inbreaths of hydrogen.
Devon stepped forward as Merry glanced skyward toward the wild golden-toned twitter of a bird which darted across the stretching band of a sunbeam.
Pointing, asking what kind of bird it was, she upset her ivory pencil box, which had been unwisely balanced on the pig’s rump.
Trotters flailing, the pig scrambled to its feet, dunking Raven’s head on the blanket to receive a haphazard shower of rolling pencils.
Merry was on her knees immediately, laughing in dismayed apology, pulling pencils out of Raven’s loose waving curls, dusting graphite powder and cedar shavings from his bare skin.
Retrieving an erasing rubber from under his ear, she said, “I’m dreadfully sorry.
What a stupid thing!” Seeing that the pig had retreated in umbrage to Cat: “And poor Dennis. But does anyone happen to know what kind of a—” Suddenly Merry fell silent.
Poised as she was, half leaning over Raven with her chest a handspan from his, the boy under her could not move unless he wanted to contact that wonderful feminine body, which was not a good idea with circumstances as they were.
Tilting his neck to look up and backward, he was able to see, as he had guessed, that Devon had come, and that Merry was staring at him.
It was amazing to Raven, as it was to the others, that Devon had begun to avoid Merry, especially when one thought of the risk he had taken with his own life to save her.
For an unknown reason Devon had forbidden them to tell Merry about it.
Was it that same enigmatic motive that had made the man behave toward her like a remote if friendly acquaintance since she had reawakened from the coma?
The only certain thing about any of it was the hurt it was causing Merry.
Damn. Why couldn’t anyone seem to solve it?
Raven glanced up once at Merry and then tipped back to smile lazily into Devon’s receptive gaze.