Chapter 21
At sunset Merry found Cat alone on the veranda.
He was sitting on the balustrade, one leg extended, the other bent, under the curve of a Moorish arch.
Beyond him she saw the forests turning dark green, and a magenta sky, which suffused the young pirate with transparent orange-colored light that washed through his unbound hair and over the orchid resting above his ear.
From the mandolin his fingers teased the minor chords of an erotic love song, and he accompanied the rich notes in a voice that was well trained, charmingly modulated, and emotionless.
Merry stood within the ovoid of thrown light, watching the death of the wounded sun and listening to Cat sing, and when the last vibrating note faded, she could not speak because his songs always affected her in their sadness and beauty.
Nor did she tell him it had moved her, because she knew he despised compliments.
At length he swung down his legs, laid the instrument carefully against the porch, and plucked the orchid from his ear, settling it with some tenderness in her curls.
From this close Merry could breathe in the roselike odor that clung to his hair and see the faintly opiated softness in his eyes.
Annie had been right. Cat, for once, was not perfectly sober.
There had been, Merry gathered, some kind of falling out with Morgan; and no one was willing to tell her anything about it beyond warning her not to question Cat unless she wanted to get her head snapped off.
She found the orchid with her fingers and smiled. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“No.”
“No?”
He said, “Orchids remind me too much that flowers are the sex organs of the plant. I like my flowers to be more”—he touched the bloom and then, softly, her chin—“discreet.”
“You’re as bad as Cook,” she said. This morning, when she had chanced to make a remark praising the sparkling seascape, Cook had said prosaically, “I can’t see what you find to admire in the ocean.
Jeez, what is it besides diluted fish piss?
When you think of all those fish in all those centuries…
” And then encountering severely critical looks from Cat and Raven, he had added, “Oh. Sorry, Merry. Fish urine.”
“Mmm” was all the answer that Cat made to her.
He climbed back on the balustrade, extending his hand to her.
“Come here, sweeting,” he said and pulled her gently between his knees, so that she was leaning heavily into him but facing away, and his hands began a hard, slow massage of her shoulders. “How does that feel?”
“Wonderful,” she said, and in a minute he turned her over with her breasts against his thigh and her hair dripping in a dense spill down both sides of the balustrade. Baring her neck, he brought the flat of his palm down to knead her weary muscles.
“So Devon didn’t take your maidenhead this afternoon,” he said.
“How do you know? How would I know? He might have, for all I know about it. No one tells me anything.” Then, curiously, “How do you always know when I want my neck rubbed?”
“You slump.” His clever fingers were slowly pulling the tension from her muscles. “You may have noticed that I’m three sheets to the wind and the fourth shaking.”
“Yes.”
He felt the tightening of her cheek against his hip as she smiled.
“Didn’t the others warn you to stay away from me?”
“Yes,” she said again. “But I’ve never seen you intoxicated. I couldn’t resist.” For a joke she said, “Are you going to assault me?”
Fantastic coral lights shone like buried gems in the mass of her curls, and he pushed his fingers inside one of them and began to stroke her scalp. “It must have been quite an afternoon if you’ve come back wanting to be assaulted,” he observed.
“It was. Cat, have you ever seen a white oak cheese? The painted kind that unscrupulous peddlers will sell instead of real cheese? I bought one on the first occasion that I went by myself to market because the peddler who sold it to me seemed like such a kindly man. When I brought it home, Henry—that was our indentured servant—”
“The one who put the ants in your luggage?”
“Yes! What a good memory you have! Well, Henry said, ‘Missy, when you buy cheese from a man, you got to learn to look at the cheese, not the man.’ ”
“I’ll be interested to see how you intend to apply that to Devon,” he said.
“Nothing elaborate. I just thought I’d say, do you think Devon would sell me a white oak cheese?”
Six months ago Devon would have sold any woman not only white oak cheeses but wooden nutmegs and oak-leaf cigars as well.
Now Cat was not so sure—but that didn’t mean the man was no longer dangerous.
Cat picked Merry up with a firm grip on her shoulders.
Looking straight into her bluebell eyes, he said, “I think that whatever his intentions are, by the time Devon is finished with you, you’re going to feel like someone’s put your body through a cider press. ”
She blinked twice against the dying light that was dusting her lashes with pulverized gilt. Then she said simply, “I think so too.”
When he let go her shoulders, she tried to sit up beside him, jumping and arching her body backward, and after her second failure Cat grabbed her under the arms and hauled her onto the porch rail by his side.
She sat, kicking her legs into the blue ruffled folds of her skirt.
“We could talk about your problems for a while,” she suggested baldly.
“I don’t have any problems. Morgan says I just skitter like a newt through everyone else’s.… I won’t be here later, so if we’re going to skitter, we had better do it now.”
Being ready to talk and being able to do it without crying are two separate things. Glancing sideways at his shadowed face, she wondered how she would be able to put her emotions into words without drenching him with a tear-burst. It was a subject that she could only approach indirectly.
“What… what would you think of a woman who fell in love with a man who made her his captive?” she said.
“I’d think she was trying to save her neck,” he replied. “If that woman’s a friend of yours, you ought to advise her that a love like that doesn’t have much of a future.”
“She knows that already,” Merry said, putting her hands on her knees.
“But… she’s less and less able to do anything about her feelings.
And now that it seems as though the man is going to let her go, she can’t bear the thought of leaving him.
” From an orange tree beyond the shaddocks came mockingbird song that filled the pause like tuned bells.
“Why do you think this man would be kind to my friend while she was ill and then avoid her afterward?”
The opium had irritated Cat’s eyes, and he closed them, wondering briefly how addicts could stand the attendant discomforts of frequent drug use.
As the soothing eye fluids did their work he realized that this time he would have to answer her questions.
Devon obviously had chosen not to talk about it with her, and Cat was grudgingly forced to concede the wisdom of that.
Devon had evidently decided to free her, because unless he had given her reason to so believe, she would not have thought it possible.
And he knew Devon would not change his decision unless some terrible act of Providence should intervene that—Cat stopped the thought.
Rand Morgan specialized in terrible acts of Providence, and Rand, for some fathomless reason, did not want to see Devon and Merry separated.
Protective fear for her rinsed like camphor through Cat’s veins, and as he opened his eyes he saw that her hands, clinging to her knees, were beginning to tremble.
The boy had to think a moment to recall what her original question had been.
Then he said, very carefully, “If the man has some attachment to your friend, it might be difficult for him to let her go. It would be best for both if that attachment wasn’t nourished. ”
In an oddly unmetered voice she asked, “But what if she decided of her own will to stay with him?”
Within the warm envelope of evening air Cat’s fingers had become quite cold.
That was one offer she must not make to Devon.
“And spend the rest of her life as his unprotected dependent?” Pity had roughened his soft tones.
“Running after him, nibbling his crumbs, to climb or plummet at every swing of his pitching fancy like all the others before her? She couldn’t wish that for herself—and if this man feels anything for her, he wouldn’t wish that either.
” Suddenly addressing himself no longer to the hypothetical friend, he said, “God knows, you don’t have the temperament to be a whore of Devon’s. ”
After an aching moment of silence she said, “Did he tell you that?”
“Not in those words.”
“But something like that?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“I suppose,” she said in a small halting voice, “that marriage is not in the question?”
Marriage. Cat’s mind absorbed the word with a shock.
She wouldn’t have bothered to ask if she’d known Devon’s full name.
Oh, Christ, what an innocent she was. The Windflower.
If there weren’t a thousand other obstacles, Devon’s complicated sense of honor would never permit him to solicit her hand while she was his prisoner.
Affection was only another trap. If he loved her enough to ask, that love would prevent him from doing it.
But all Cat said to her was, “As things stand, marriage is not in the question.”