“I’ve skimmed it, of course, but I haven’t delved—oh. Ah, ha. You saw that dreadful story, did you, about the pirates? Why they find it necessary to put things like that in the public press so young people can be exposed to that kind of degraded story is more than I can imagine! No wonder you don’t look well. I felt ill myself after reading it. Horrible. Put the whole thing right out of your mind.”
But bright in Merry’s mind was Morgan, black-eyed, theemerald glowing on his chest, and Cat with the long hair and cruel hands… and Devon. Had Devon taken one of the women and held her delicately, talking in a gentle, quiet voice as he had with Merry, hypnotizing her with his comforting, and then plundering her defenseless mouth with his lips? It was the kind of thing that an editor might prefer not to mention. Merry watched her aunt go to her lap desk and lock away the stationery sheet. When her aunt had turned back to her, Merry asked her, “Aunt April, why wouldn’t the newspaper say what happened to the women?”
She could have sworn her aunt blushed. “I think they said too much as it was! I can’t think that your father would want you to read things about pirates and women.”
“Why not?” Seven months ago Merry would have hardly been able to frame the question to herself, much less ask it of her aunt. It was an unbearable thing, this being desperate to know. She looked everywhere in the room but at her aunt. “What do pirates do to women?”
As it happened, Aunt April was as embarrassed as Merry. She went to peer miserably out the window, as if she was afraid someone was hiding outside listening, and swallowed with difficulty, as though she had an infected throat. “One would suppose—that is—” Another swallow. “One imagines that the pirates had their way with them.”
Before she lost her nerve, Merry asked, “Which way is that?”
“A perfectly normal question for a young lady at your stage in life,” said Aunt April with the nervous certainty of one trying to remain calm in the face of all hell breaking loose. She made a great play of arranging the new window curtains, the color running high over her cheekbones.
A wayward and rather poignant thought occurred to Merry. “Don’tyouknow either?”
“I was never married, Merry Patricia, and my mother died before she had ever an occasion to tell me.…”
It came to Merry suddenly where she had learned that meekly apologetic voice that had so amused the pirate. She felt her lips twitch upward into a grin. “But you must have gatheredsomeidea.”
“Some idea perhaps, but it’s hardly anything that I’d care to…”
A giggle sprang from Merry’s grin, and she shook an accusing finger. “If you think I’m to be put off with stalling, Aunt April, then…”
“Oh, very well. If youwillhear it. I warn you, though, it’s only the merest scrap that I chanced to overhear my mother telling my sister. I daresay this is going to sound quite peculiar but”—April stared fixedly at one of the low shrubs in front of the house—“it seems that a man—climbs on top of a woman—”
Surprise brought Merry to her feet.“On top of?”
“There! There, you see? I’ve made a poor job of it.” The window curtains crumpled under Aunt April’s fretting fingers. “You’d probably have been better off if I’d said nothing! That’s all I know. First they like to kiss, and then climb on.”
Merry sat down again and concentrated her gaze on the wall covering’s vanilla dots. When she could control the quivering of her lips, she said, “It doesn’t make sense.”
“I quite agree with you, dearest. But how many of the things that men do make sense? Take fox hunting, or prizefights, or making war, for that matter.” She added dismally, “Men have drives.”
“Do women have them too?”
“I doubt that it could be the same. Can you imagine a group of women turning outlaw, attacking ships, and forcing their will on men? Do you know what I think? A lady would do best to marry a rich man who could afford to keep a mistress and so would have less energy left for his wife.”
“Oh, Aunt!” Merry laughed, launching herself from her chair to take her aunt’s hands from the curtains and plant acheerful kiss on each one. “Then from this day forth I will take special care to encourage only my wealthy beaux.” Striking a coquettish pose, Merry fluttered her lashes at an invisible gentleman, placed, if he had been there, where he must have been tripping backward over the tea table. “Dear Major Moneybags,” she said grandly, sweeping a full court curtsy, “I shall agree to your obliging proposal on the one condition that you will keep yourself a woman and climb on her more often than you will on me!”
Aunt April smothered a smile. “Such nonsense. We aren’t discussing this with the proper gravity, and I don’t know what people would think if they were to hear us. Really, sometimes I fear that we get a little batty, living here like this, two women alone.” A strange look came over her features. She went to her lap desk and thoughtfully stroked her hand in a wavy pattern across its highly polished surface. “We don’t get out enough.”
Through the ages women had been making the same kind of statement, but Merry had never, never expected to hear it from her aunt! Aunt April, who hated to travel, who detested American social life. With disbelieving senses Merry heard her aunt ask, “Merry Patricia, would you like to come with me on a trip to New York?”
Chapter 5
For more than two centuries New York City had been spreading across the rocky island that had once been nibbledby glaciers and later had served as the fertile hunting grounds of clever Indian trappers, before the Dutch had come, and the British with their guns and liquor and lust for empire. The city that Merry found was tame, dirty, and crowded. Pigs wandered at will, munching on garbage and street dirt which the citizens diligently piled in the alleys to be hauled away twice a week by the Department of Scavengers. Milch cows meandered between neat gabled houses, dining on the bark of the Lombardy poplars, planted with well-meaning innocence along the narrow walkways. Within a brisk walk of the carpeted homes of the rich were the Five Points slums, where more than thirteen families might share a single privy.
Everything here seemed remarkable to Merry: the vast markets that fed so many, the sobering bulk of the prison, the libraries, the almshouse, the botanical garden. There was not a street you could pass without seeing evidence of the city’s awesome complexity, where misery rubbed shoulders with grandeur in no more wonder than the pauper and the banker have when they pass each other on the pavement.
Today New York was celebrating Evacuation Day, commemorating that proud memory in the First War of Independence when the British had been forced to take their scrambled leave from the city before General Washington’s triumphal entry.
It was noon, and Merry’s gaze caught the gleam from a church tower as its great bell began to dance. The voices of other bells joined in. From the Presbyterian Church, the Trinity, the Dutch Reformed, French Episcopal, and Baptist came brilliant thunder that laced the cool air between the hard claps of cannon salute.
In front of Merry the parade was retreating down the straight stretch of Broadway. A unit of dragoons had been the last of the military that would pass them. The workers came next, under bright printed banners that snapped in the shifting breeze. Thehat makers, the pewterers—and the blacksmith trade with a wonderful float that carried a working anvil and red fire, where three men stood forging an anchor, even as six horses pulled them along.
What a day it was, what a parade! Merry glanced to her side, at Sir Michael Granville, wondering how the tall British man could remain unruffled in the face of a patriotic display that commemorated a humiliating defeat for his own nation. His expression was much as it might have been if he were watching the hunting dance of tribesmen in loin cloths and feathers—as if it were to him a colorful, primitive spectacle full of naïve and pretty drama and simple symbolism. He was too well-bred to have said anything to confirm her suspicions, but condescension has its own particular odor, detectable like a yard where goats have been, even if one walks through it with closed eyes and covered ears. She hoped that soon she would be able to look at him without feeling at all intrigued.
It was Sir Michael who had brought Aunt April to New York. Aunt April had never shown Merry the letter, but it happened that Sir Michael was a distant cousin to the Dowager Duchess of St. Cyr, one of the few of Aunt April’s correspondents who wrote back more often than once a decade. On hearing that Sir Michael had obtained permission to visit the New World in the entourage of the British prisoner-of-war exchange agent, the duchess had encouraged him to convey her respects to Aunt April. It was a compliment to the duchess’s influence that he had actually done so after his arrival in the United States. Merry could imagine the missive he had addressed to her aunt, full of polite clichés and a vaguely expressed desire that they should meet. It must have been an unlovely surprise for Sir Michael to find a letter from Aunt April in his return mail, promising to be in New York within the fortnight.
