Chapter 22
The boisterous gaiety on the beach detonated within Merry’s senses, and shock waves arrived as tremors on the surface of her skin.
Beyond, at the quay, the Black Joke was lying to within shouting distance of the British frigate, and the shore fires made the upper reaches of the masts appear and disappear like ghostly sentinels.
On the shore a bonfire in a ditch spat smoke and cinders as juice from a spitted pork carcass sizzled down into hungry flames that leaped in blue fancies at the nourishment.
Glaring firelight threw the relaxed, inebriated faces of the revelers into deep shadows, and they seemed to be wearing fantastic tragicomic masks as they raised rum bottles and a wineskin that heaved like a living thing from the stress of rapid depletion.
Dark eyes gleamed in bearded faces; white teeth shone as they tore into hand-held chunks of roasted meat.
The ship’s orchestra labored near the fire in a welter of smoke haze and the spicy scents of liquor and roasted pig.
Merry knew the men well—the giant Turk in a turban who played something that looked like an oboe, Max Reade on the harmonica, Terence Teaswell gleefully clanging a mismatched pair of cymbals, and coaxing lilting strains from the violin, the man they called One-eyed Jack, who wore no patch over his empty eye socket.
An odd miscellany of talent, and yet they produced the sweetest ballads and the liveliest dance tunes on the Atlantic seaboard.
The voices of the revelers were now lifted in shouting song, a wild pirate song that started low and ended high, with stops and starts in between, the orchestra clashing, whining, tooting, and whistling like some illegitimate mating of a Scottish pipe band and a harem orchestra.
The women were strangers to Merry. Most, like the men, had bared their chests.
Twitching patterns from the flames shone on their wine-ripe, sweating flesh, and their gaily colored skirts swept up dry sand in time with the music.
There was hardly a soul clothed enough for Merry to look upon without a mortified flush, and yet she found a na?ve exuberance in the sea of warm, unclad bodies, as though they were spirited children who had tossed off their clothing to frolic in a summer shower.
Merry stood with Morgan among the fallen fronds at the base of a palm tree.
She was dimly aware that the tall pirate was giving her this moment to assimilate the catastrophic thing he had made known to her.
But she didn’t seem able to do that. Her love for Devon had become the most earnest and immediate force in her life.
Sensation, when it came directly from Devon, howled like a cyclone into her consciousness; but the tragedies attendant on that love arrived drop by drop, an endless caustic trickle.
Merry tried to imagine a woman made of Devon’s flesh, a sister, but she could not.
Merry tried to remember Michael Granville’s face; she could not do that either.
They were like cloud pictures to her, distant specters; and yet she knew that hidden inside the opaque folds of time there was a murdered girl with light hair and golden eyes who deserved her pity.
Morgan’s warning was delivered with a purposeful intent that could never belong to a facile lie.
And Merry had known from the day Cat carried her aboard the Joke that Devon’s hatred of Michael Granville existed on a plane beyond reason.
Grief for him and for his submerged pain burned her to the soul, and with it came a gripping fear.
As she might have seen stars blink one after another into a purple evening sky, Merry began unconsciously to identify her friends.
She heard Cook before she saw him. He was sitting on a canework mat with his freckled forehead pressed to Annie’s.
His fawn curls bobbed against Annie’s black hair as he fed her pieces torn from a fragrant hunk of pork, stopping to kiss her lingeringly between each.
The hand not employed in feeding Annie was fending off Dennis the pig, who was showing an unseemly interest in sharing their meal.
“Jeez, you disgusting porker,” Cook was saying. “It’s a bloody cannibal you are. This could be kin of yours, for all you know. Jeez!” He grabbed up the rum bottle that Dennis had overturned and started to guzzle. “Someone ought to make you into a Christian.”
Merry saw Devon on a firm grassy rise, reclining with the golden grace of a demigod, his perfectly cut shoulders against a log.
A crystal goblet from Morgan’s fine set, half-filled with wine, rested on the ground by his hip.
With a softly creased smile he was talking to two British Marine officers.
The scarlet military coats stood out like cardinals in a winter garden and drew Merry’s attention to the men who wore them.
One man, sprawled comfortably upon a dark boulder, had a wide clownish mouth set between waggling jowls.
His tall crowned hat was askew, and he had unfastened his belt to give free rein to his girth.
The other man appeared to be painfully ill at ease in this piratical company; he looked as though he would rather be anywhere else in the world as he sat ramrod straight on a rock, occasionally running a thin hand nervously through his sandy hair.
Higher on the shore a mammoth silk-cotton tree dripped lianas like many ropes from its wide branches.
The boy beneath was three-quarters turned from Merry, but there was no disguising the long ivory braid or the gleam of a gold hoop on his hollowed cheek.
A young woman straddled the thigh he had braced against the tree behind her, and with her eyes closed and her brunette hair streaming over her naked shoulders, she rode him with her hips, straining into the palm that was skillfully handling her breast, tilting her head to permit his slow caress of her throat.
Some of the men had begun to notice Merry.
Erik Shay saw her and followed the direction of her shamed gaze.
Cursing under his breath, he stomped over to Cat, and as Merry watched, Shay cuffed Cat on the shoulder, speaking gruffly in a distant pantomime.
Cat swung immediately. Briefly he met the urgent appeal in her eyes and then transferred his gaze to Morgan, and the boy’s expression deepened to pure anger.
But Dennis had spotted Merry and with porcine enthusiasm began trying to scrabble up her legs and into her arms, depositing gritty hock prints on her borrowed gown.
Others began to turn, to salute Morgan with huzzahs and raised bottles, to call bleary affectionate greetings to Merry.
Many had not seen her since her illness, and she was quickly drawn into a loose circle to be teased and petted and admired.
She began automatically to respond; trying to find comfort in a fondness that she knew would never lead them to protect her from Rand Morgan or from Devon.
Annie, who had taken less to drink than the others, saw the trouble in Merry’s face and tried with friendly anxiety to find out what the matter was.
Realizing that Merry’s sign language was too limited for a clear explanation and frustrated by her inability to communicate with Merry, Annie tugged on Cook’s sleeve and signed to him that Merry was not happy.
Inebriated and amorous, the last thing that Cook wanted was to be presented with one of Merry’s insoluble problems. Annie had to pick his hands out of her bodice three times before, with an irritable groan, Cook asked Will Saunders to find Raven and see if he couldn’t bring up a smile on Merry.
Saunders, in a kindly mood, left off his drinking to fetch Raven, who was trying to bury himself in the sand with a young woman wearing four strands of pearls around her waist. Saunders dragged the protesting boy over, knocking the sand off him as he came.
When Raven saw whom he had been summoned to entertain, he enveloped her in a hug and made her the focus of his sweet besotted attentions until the young woman with the pearls removed one of the strands and tossed it over Raven’s shoulders before she ran off toward the sea, laughing, calling Raven’s name in soft invitation, flinging away her clothes as her bare feet flew over the damp sand.
With an amiable grin Raven ran after her, making the parting comment that with as much rum as that girl had in her, he had better go along and see that something didn’t happen to her.
“You mean,” Saunders called to him, “to make sure something does happen to her.” Shifting his gaze back to Merry, Will Saunders bent slightly at the knees, laid his hands flat on his long muscled thighs, and leaned forward to look into her face.
“Tell me about it, Merry lamb. What’s made you so cast down?
Has Devon been blowing hot and cold on you again? ”
“Will, Morgan told me that something—”
“Hey!” Cook said, wiping his mouth on the wad of his discarded shirt. “Devon’s right up there talking to that Captain Airmouth—”
“Eremuth. Captain Eremuth,” Saunders corrected.
“Aye, well, and isn’t that what I said? Christsake. Why don’t you play cupid, Will?”
Will Saunders caught Merry before she had time to understand what he intended, and as he hefted her over his shoulder he said laughingly, “Up with you, sweetheart. And struggle a little, because we don’t want him thinking you’re too eager for him. We’ll put you where you want to be.”
“Will! Are you taking me to Devon? Will, no! No!”
“Why, darlin’, you’re almost an actress,” Saunders said. And in a moment he murmured something to Devon, dropped her at his side, and quickly left.