Chapter 19 #3
“See the fun you miss by spending half the morning closeted with Morgan in the study?” Raven said, stomping with unabashed verbiage through the embarrassing intimacy of the moment.
“It’s taking Merry forever to draw Cat’s picture because all she wants to do is look at birds.
Now she’s overset her pencils over some weightless bit of feather and bone, and God knows what it is, mon.
We keep telling her we’re only good with pigs. ”
Merry had gratefully used the time Raven made to recover. Straight-shouldered, she settled sensibly on her heels, her smudged fingers laid flat on her lap, and strove for a natural expression of welcome.
“It was a swallow,” Devon said, smiling at her. “Latin name: Hirundo poeciloma.”
Eyeing Devon with disfavor, Cook said, “God’s sake. Even the Latin. You’d think this was a bloody university.”
“Don’t worry,” Cat said, tuning his E string. “He’s a fake. He only learns the common ones. If it had been a puffin, you’d have seen him humbled.”
“But you ought to hear me with vegetation,” Devon said, grinning. “I can go on and on.” He began to laugh at Cook’s expression of alarm as he dropped easily to the blanket beside Merry. “But I won’t.” To Merry: “Will you show me your drawing, Merry mine?”
Merry was disappointed to find that his use of her name as a casual endearment had thrown her again into vivid disarray.
She had a certain fear, irrational she hoped, that she might drop her gaze to his lips or to some other unsuitable portion of his anatomy.
There must be a better way to manage. These waves of feeling were becoming more like a cruel prison every day. She handed him her sketchbook.
Devon studied her drawing of Cat, gave her an apt compliment on its quality which she took more pleasure from than she wanted to, and then he asked her in an amiable tone if she had ever done this for a living.
The question surprised a laugh out of her. “Certainly not,” she said. “Do people buy pencil sketches?”
“That might depend on the subject,” Devon said.
It was a casual remark, made without thought or any intention other than idle discussion, but it went so neatly to the heart of Merry’s one real offense against him that her laughter flattened into alarm.
Devon was fishing out a pencil that had rolled under Annie’s hem, and though no one would suspect the fate of a relationship could rest on the retrieval of an errant pencil, the act prevented Devon from seeing the apprehension in Merry’s face and beginning from that to make the right sort of guesses.
Like lost lovers that pass separately within minutes through the same door, Devon and Merry came as close as a glance to learning a crucial thing about each other.
Of course, Rand Morgan would have probably made the point that a simple solution isn’t always best when one deals with a complicated problem.
Raven, who had been looking at Merry, saw her apprehension, and although he had no way of knowing what it meant, it was logical for him to act protectively.
When Devon looked up then, it was not toward Merry but toward Raven, who was demanding in an exuberant way to see the picture too.
And so a moment that could have bred so much drama passed without solving or creating any new problems, as Raven began cheerfully to solicit critiques of the drawing on Merry’s behalf.
From Will Saunders, supporting himself on an elbow: “Beautiful. But as it’s Cat, Merry love, do you think you’ve developed enough of the sneer?”
Getting out of his studies had put Cook in a good mood.
He said, “Sneer? By crow spit and wildfire, if that ain’t an injustice to poor Cat.
Hey, with all of us knowin’ under that witchy tongue beats a heart warm as the tail fins on a dead sturgeon.
” Wiping a brown stringy curl out of his eyes, grinning at Cat, he said, “What we really need to do, see, is to take off your clothes and drape a sheet over your lap. And we’ll give the picture to Morgan on St. Valentine’s Day. ”
Raven was making a point of clearing his throat, and Cook caught the warning in it and turned to see that Morgan had joined them and was standing, with a bland smile on his face, by a flowering shrub. “Oh, bloody hell,” Cook said and turned red.
“What a delight it is to discover my name on your lips,” Morgan said in a tone that managed to convey the opposite without any visible energy. “Don’t squirm, my lad, or you’ll drop Annie’s head off your knee. She’s asleep, have you noticed?”
Heavily relieved by the turn of subject, Cook drew aside a mound of shiny jet hair to study Annie’s face, the clear brown skin lax and glowing in sleep.
“So she is! Bless her little soul. Well, Jeez. Did the same thing yesterday. Dropped right off to sleep in the middle of the day. I suppose I wake her up too many times at night,” he said with self-reproach.
That drew sputters of outright laughter from his listeners.
“On one occasion in particular,” Morgan said rather obscurely. The black gaze dipped cordially to Merry and then sprang to Devon. “Aren’t you going fishing, my dear?”
“Yes,” Devon said, starting to get up. He smiled fully at Merry. “Something distracted me. But I’m going now. Precious and fading are my idle days.”
“Well,” said Rand Morgan, “that’s true. Why don’t you take Merry?”
In the ensuing silence Merry heard Cat say tersely, “Why should he? He’s already got bait.”
Merry hardly caught the sense of Cat’s words because her every feeling arrowed to Devon.
He didn’t want her to come with him. Rejection was there, clear as water, in Devon’s face.
She had not thought to spend the day with him, she had never been fishing and never particularly desired to go, and yet, seeing that he didn’t want her with him cut her ill-protected heart like a steel spar.
Against all force of will she must have been showing her hurt, because Devon’s expression changed quickly.
Fondness or something like it washed into his vivid eyes and flooded, hot and pulpy, into her veins.
“Would you come with me, Merry?” Devon said slowly to her. “Who knows what the pair of us will be able to catch?”
It took a little while to talk Merry into an assent because his invitation had been reluctant and because she was certain it did her no good to indulge her need to be with him, but in the end the temptation was beyond her power to resist.
When she had run into the villa to fetch a bonnet and Devon had gone to the front entrance to wait for her, Morgan walked to Cat, who had been silent after his one comment.
Annie slept on, but Cook, Saunders, and Raven watched incredulously as Morgan caught Cat’s jaw in the bite of one wide hand. Black eyes burned into pale-blue frost.
“Keep it under control, babe,” Morgan said softly. And left them.
A shocked silence ensued as the three tried to digest and interpret the extraordinary thing that had happened. Morgan, against all precedent of custom and courtesy, had disciplined Cat in public. Reviewing the preceding minutes in their minds, not one of them could understand why it had happened.
At last Raven hazarded, “Is it—is it Merry, Cat? Surely she’s safe with Devon. He’d put his whole hand in boiling rice water before he’d hurt her.”
Not answering, Cat stared at Raven as though he couldn’t see him. He turned, walking and then running lightly, in the direction Morgan had taken. Behind him Saunders stared at the half-strung mandolin lying deserted on the gray stone wall.
“I wonder,” he said, “if we’ll ever know what that was about.”
Running slowly, Cat caught up with Morgan much farther down the slope, beside the villa vegetable plots where Morgan’s sable hair stood out against the brilliant light-green leaves of the young plantains.
Cabbages and carrots bumped from the earth in squat lateral rows, and above them were small weedless tracts of parsley, sage, thyme, and the succulent jade shoots of ginger and arrowroot.
Morgan, Cat saw, had stopped and was awaiting him beside a castor oil plant. So be it.
As Cat approached, Morgan gave him an extravagant smile and stretched an arm to the side, as though offering that space, that embrace, to Cat’s shoulders.
“Come with me, my dear,” he said. “I have an appointment in the village.”
Cat froze where he was.
“If I’d known we were going to have theatricals,” said the boy, “I would have brought my face paint.”
Morgan dropped his arm in an easy movement and let his smile take on an edge. “What are you so worried about? I’ve kept her alive this far, haven’t I?”
Livid with frustration, Cat snapped out, “You unseemly arrogant son of a whore—you’ve tried to kill her. I’ve kept her alive.”
“Allow me to rephrase,” said Morgan evenly. “I should have said, I’ve provided to keep her alive.”
“Then why the devil won’t you let me do that? She’s too weak yet. If he puts his bastard in her—”
“Babe, you’ve already told him that. He knows.”
“He’ll forget. You’ve arranged things so he’ll forget. Merry doesn’t understand what she does to him.”
Morgan’s eyes glittered with laughter and shone, lusciously cloying like black cherries. “Doesn’t she? Then you ought to have explained it to her.”
“Am I her dry nurse?”
“Aren’t you? I thought you volunteered long ago.
And I thought Devon was supposed to cure himself on her body.
Didn’t you tell him that? Or does she fluctuate in and out of a state of being rapeable?
Since none of you has the faintest idea what you want, then you are all going to get what I want you to have, which—”
“Is misery?”
“Which for you is the opportunity to discover how it feels when you can’t protect something you love.”
Cat recoiled like an animal from a flame thrust. He stood, digesting the words by slow degrees, the delicately toned eyes filled with startled distaste. “Rand…” For the first time he heard something akin to fear in his own voice. “Don’t use her to teach me pain. Anyone. But not her.”
“I can’t stop it now for your sake, child. There are many more involved than you.” The black cherry eyes had become much gentler. “You’re one of the lives in my world; but you’re not the center of it.”
It had come—the careful loving rebuff Cat had known would come one day. For years, on Morgan’s warning, Cat had been preparing himself for it, and now that it was here, Cat was surprised by his own readiness to receive it. He was well aware, in the long run, what Rand Morgan expected him to do.
“I’ve never asked,” Cat said, “to be the center of anyone’s life.
I don’t think I could stand it. This is bad enough already.
” And as Morgan cracked the tension with purling laughter Cat added, “Look, once she as good as told me that she does have some kind of secret that might make Devon harm her. Is that true? Do you know about it?”
“Of course I know about it. Do you think I’d grapple in blind space?
Yes, she has a little secret, and she’s hung on to it with extraordinary tenacity.
I was sure she would break down and tell him, or you at least, a long time ago.
Her overdeveloped sense of honor has made this more difficult than even I would have prescribed, but I have to admit I wouldn’t have her be other than she is.
” A second time Morgan raised his arm in an offered embrace, and with a sigh Cat stepped into it and received the heavy weight of Morgan’s arm across his shoulders.
They walked side by side through the plantains.
Cat watched the leaves tossing restlessly under the greedy wind-fingers that shredded the tender greens along their transverse veins.
Presently he remarked, “I suppose you have this so elaborately worked out that if I interfere, the chain of reaction would tip the continents and drown us—”
“Like all the dogs on Atlantis. Something like that. Remember it later, please.” Morgan smiled at the sky. “My hens don’t lay square eggs.”