Chapter 23
To Merry, standing beside Cat on a Falmouth jetty, England was a rain-drenched waterfront.
Tall row houses shimmered in a haze upon a terraced hillside; whitewash and dun stone among the choppy shag of shrubs and grasses.
From a victualer’s shop abutting the dock area came the smoky tang of frying sprat and the laughter of young apprentices as they teased each other over breakfast. Early as it was, the town was wide awake.
Wet flagstones rang under the stout wheels of lumbering carrier’s wagons and the lighter carts that drew produce to the market gardeners, the butchers, the hotels.
Undaunted by the drizzle, women were outside sweeping the slick sand from their doorsteps and taking a shovel to the offal that had gathered from yesterday’s traffic on the shining cobbles before their houses.
More than three hundred great ships bobbed like floating gulls in the vast bay, while sturdy punts streamed busily between them and the wharf on a hundred separate errands.
An oyster-catcher caught Merry’s attention, a black-and-white dart in a silver heaven.
She followed its flight until it passed over a mail packet making a slow departure under sticky sails, passing within hailing distance of where the Black Joke rode at anchor.
From where Merry stood, the Joke appeared to be one more innocuous vessel, nodding under the stern gaze of Pendennis Castle.
Passing in a skiff under the Joke’s bowsprit not half an hour ago, she had seen the bright flare of the colors of Great Britain flapping proudly over the ship, and the fresh painted name on the prow.
The Eagle, it had said. There was no clue to the casual onlooker that this was a pirate ship turned privateer with a rich load of spoils lashed in her hold awaiting division with the crown, and a dark-eyed boy wearing chains in the fo’c’sle.
It had not been a particularly pleasant voyage.
Raven had been incarcerated about a week ago, following an incident with Devon that no one would talk to her about beyond admitting that yes, it had been something to do with her, but she’d better keep her oar out of it anyway.
Late that night she had heard Morgan’s quiet voice in the passageway outside her door.
“Yes, Tom, I’m aware of that, but this way at least he can’t get into trouble. Much as he’s made a nuisance of himself lately, I don’t want to whip the child a second time. I know Raven is frightened for the girl, but I doubt Devon’s temper could support another one of Raven’s fits of weeping.”
“And Cat?” The voice belonged to Thomas Valentine.
“Cat, thank God, is not a fool. He’ll do as he’s told.”
Valentine said something in a low tone that made Morgan laugh.
“Not you also, Tom?” said the pirate captain.
“I thought you were immune! No, Devon hasn’t confided in me what he plans to do with her.
I would tend to think…” The closing door of Morgan’s cabin shut from her the trend of Morgan’s thoughts, which was probably just as well.
They were not likely to afford her much comfort.
She remembered well the only two sentences Devon had said to her in the course of the journey, and even those had not been in the strictest sense spoken to her.
She had fallen from the rigging where she had been climbing with Raven, and though it was not a long fall, she had landed awkwardly and dislocated her thumb.
It had been one of those days when one just doesn’t feel like being mature about an injury.
Light-headed with pain, she had fled, yelping, from Cat before he could undertake the excruciating process of setting the thumb.
In the end it had been Sails who caught and held her in a gently steeled grip, clucking soothingly as Cat did what he must. Surrounded as she was by anxious sympathizers, she had no idea Devon had come on deck in time to witness her treatment until it was over.
Then, with his expression sealed, he had walked forward through the suddenly silent pirate crew and looked for perhaps a minute into Merry’s face, though it had actually been to Raven that he had said, “I don’t want her up there again. Is that clear?”
Otherwise, he had said nothing to or about her.
When she met him on deck or in a passageway, his glance was indifferent and did not linger.
Watching his face in those moments, she found it hard to believe that she had ever seen tenderness there.
It might be that she had been deceived by her own willingness to find it.
If she lived for one thing now, it was the day when she could cut him as cleanly from her heart as he had swept her from his.
The broken feeling between her and Devon haunted her days and nights, along with the endless frightening questions about what he would do with her in England.
And, especially in the first days at sea, there had been the barren and bestripped feeling that came from missing Annie, whom she had come to depend on for friendship and support more than she’d realized.
Cook had stayed behind as well, because Annie was to have a child.
They had even solemnized their common-law marriage before a priest at Sails’s urging on the day before the Joke sailed, and it was the riotous and unusual preparations Raven and Will Saunders had made for the wedding that had provided distraction during those terrible days following her estrangement from Devon.
She’d had a birthday on the Joke. Strange things, birthdays.
You wake up in the morning to find you’ve aged a year.
Of course, that morning she had not thought of it at all.
It had not occurred to her until midafternoon when Cat was about to write in his journal—fascinating reading, Morgan said—and had casually mentioned the day and the month.
The date had hovered for a while in her mind, as though there were something familiar about it, and then she had remembered: today she could claim another year.
But the woman who stood beside Cat on the Falmouth jetty seemed much more than a year older than the one who had mounted the New York pier beside Aunt April.
There was a certain irony, if one had the stamina left to note it, in the observation that she had finally arrived at her intended destination.
This morning Cat had awakened her from an uneasy sleep at dawn with a light touch on the cheek.
“Merry? I have your breakfast. Devon wants me to bring you to him on shore.”
Since then there had been silence between them. What was there to say? Morgan was right. Cat would do as he was told.
Ahead she could see the traveling carriage waiting on the narrow quayside street, the horses thrashing the pasty moisture from their haunches with short-cropped tails and rolling their massive shoulders against their collars as a postilion in a tall hat adjusted the far trace. She turned quickly to Cat.
“He’s taking me away?”
The young pirate hesitated. Then, “The carriage’s hire is paid to London. Merry—”
Her face tilted upward to search his eyes for some sign of hope or comfort.
Rain bedewed her eyelashes in tiny clear pearls and shone on the curve of her cheekbone until he covered her face with his own, just touching her brow with his lips.
In that moment the clatter of hoofbeats brought a rider around the vehicle.
“How bloody touching.” The lightly arid voice above them was Devon’s. “Is this going to be an extended farewell, or is it possible that—Thank you, Cat. You can put her bag on the seat beside her.”
It was hard not to feel lost forever as she rode alone in the jolting carriage staring through the leaded window glass at the melancholy grandeur of the Cornish hills.
The sweeping lonely valleys, the high jagged tumble of cleft boulders, the stark villages with their wet windblown trees and cob walls seemed bleak in the half-light, though an occasional distant shaft of sunlight falling through an open seam in the clouds would lend the rough terrain a quality that was eerily peaceful.
How foreign this place was to her. Even the churches, ancient chapels under moor-stone slate roofs in shades of tawny yellow and green and russet, seemed gaunt and forbidding.
She slid her hand into her valise and drew out the cloth bag that held her collection of shells, putting them one after another onto the dark drape of the cloak that covered her lap so she could touch the beguiling tropical contours.
As always, she saved until last the great conch she had discovered on the St. Elise sands that day with Devon.
Riding outside, he must be wretchedly wet by now.
Merry tried to let that thought console her.
It was very late when they stopped at an inn.
She was so tired and travel-battered, she barely glimpsed Devon in the scattered flashes of impression she received in the short walk through the yard where wood, horses, and men were dissonantly pitched drums for the deluge from the skies.
There was a chambermaid, hot food, and a feather bed with a warming pan in a private room.
Before first light the chambermaid was back and the order was reversed: bed to food to cold yard to carriage, while she was still stunned with sleepiness.
Exhaustion dulled her to the landscape, and she had missed much in the darkness. The rain had stopped, though a glance out the window might show her a ferny stand of oak rising from a coiling base of blue mist.
By midmorning, when the carriage stopped at a pretty inn of dressed stone, Merry’s legs were stiff, her behind felt like it had been beaten with a grain shovel, and she was awake enough to be frightened and desperate.
A meal of tea and toast, lamb chops and eggs was brought to her in a small parlor, deserted except for two middle-aged ladies in silk pelisses and their apricot poodle, who jumped from lap to lap eating potatoes from their plates.