He watched her and said, “I don’t know what you’re so worried about. It’s only a little cleavage.” She glared at him and thought seriously about attacking him with the expensive brooch. Catching the look and interpreting it correctly, the boy said, “Oh, all right. Never mind. Listen. Would you eat oatmeal?”
Merry, glad at last to find something she could refuse, snapped, “I loathe oatmeal.”
“Salt fish?” he suggested doubtfully.
“I’ve never eaten it,” she said. “But I know I wouldn’t like it.”
Manifesting no surprise, Cat said, “Is that so? How about hardtack?”
Merry moved a red brocade cushion and sat down on the window bench. Tersely she said, “I’m sick. Seasick. Don’t keep talking about food to me. I don’t want anything to eat.Seasick!Do you understand?”
“Of course I do—unless there is something wrong with my eyesight. You’re greener than head lettuce. Half the problem is that you’ve hardly eaten anything since the day before yesterday. We won’t have anything fresh on board until we meet theTerriblethis afternoon, so you’d better resign yourself to oatmeal.”
Staring at him, Merry said, “The terrible? The terrible what?”
“Would you stop being so sensitive? Even for me, it’s a little unnerving to communicate with someone who’s skittishas a gingered filly.” He straightened an errant fold in the gold scarf over her shoulder with the flip of one finger. “It’s like trying to talk to a windflower. TheTerribleis another one of Morgan’s ships. I’m going to fetch you something to eat. You can stay in here and wait for Devon. He wants to talk to you.”
With an anxiety she would have preferred to hide, Merry said, “Is there any chance that he’ll—let me go?”
“I’ve already told you once. This time pay attention,” said the boy. “Will he let you go? It depends on how silver-tongued you are.”
Doom,thought Merry.Gloom. “On my good days I can sometimes put together as many as three sentences in a paragraph without more than a bare half-dozen breaks in logic.”
“Well,” he said grimly, “maybe a taste of Cook’s oatmeal will inspire you. I’m going. Put your wrists up.”
Watching him draw a length of cord from his pocket, Merry cried out, “No! Oh, no! Please don’t tie me again!”
“I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t always throwing things at people, or shooting arrows off at them. Morgan’s likely to get fed up with it and give you a taste of the back side of his hand.” He started to reach for one of her arms, but before he could touch her, he looked into her face. What he saw there made him stop and change his mind. Tactful as a nursery-maid distracting a capricious toddler, the pirate boy put one of Morgan’s silver hairbrushes into her hand and said, “Brush your hair. I’ll come right back. Don’t move. Don’t get in trouble.”
And she did not, for when he came back, she was sitting exactly as she had been, staring at the paneled bulkhead like a strange-eyed ghost in glowing green, stroking the brush unknowingly through her curls. So he gripped her by the arm and brought her to a chair at Morgan’s table and put the oatmeal in front of her, and a spoon in her hand. When she wouldn’t eat, he thought a moment, then said, “If you don’t eat it, I’lltake back the scarf.” Observing that her nose was turning pink again, he added quickly, “And if you start to cry, I’ll take back the dress.”
This was not the first time by any means that Merry had eaten oatmeal, but the oatmeal she had eaten before had been kept in Aunt April’s whistle-clean pantry, not stored for two months in the hold of a seagoing warship, by its nature damp and alive with the stench of gunpowder and unwashed bodies. Even well-run ships, and this one was the best of its kind, were infested with vermin. Seamen were used to finding in their flour evidence of the rats, maggots, and cockroaches that shared their food supply. But Merry, after a childhood of fresh cream, Aunt April’s marmalade on white toast, and vegetables fresh from the garden served in clever sauces, was not. Even her two days’ fast would not make this meal palatable. Cat had to repeat his threats, and several variants, before she would finish the bowl.
Devon entered the cabin with Morgan as she was choking down the last mouthful. With a negligent wave in Cat’s direction Morgan, his mind on business, had pitched his hat to a chair and leaned, one-handed, on his desk, flicked over a page, and entered something in the log. But it was not to his dark figure that Merry’s quickened senses homed.
Devon by lamplight was a thing of beauty: the clever angles; the play in skin tone and hair of lucent pastels; the muted and unself-conscious movements of a graceful body. Devon by daylight was another proposition entirely, though not a whit less attractive: The searching sunbeams revealed a man twenty times more dangerous. The force of his character caught Merry like a plank across the chest.
Sun-detailed, he was harder, leaner, his eyes, shed of their polite fictions, were callous as those of a lynx; the fathomless volumes of charity suggested by the sweet lines of his face were simply not there. Before Merry in Apollonian splendorstood a man who was capable of vivisecting her soul, with creativity, and putting it on to fry like a Punjabi locust. When he wanted to beguile, he certainly could; he was not beyond a rare and skillful act of mercy; but his tongue had more sharp edges on it than a sheep shears, and his wit he could wield by choice as the hacksaw or the scalpel. Margaret Nelson, who had for four turbulent months been his lover, was widely quoted as having said that he could sever your head from your body, and you wouldn’t know you were dead until three weeks later, when your carriage hit a bump and you found your head sitting nose-down in your lap.
And here sat little Merry Wilding, whose most trying moments, ever, had come from Aunt April tetchy with the headache. The instant brain-burn of staring into the eyes of six feet, two inches of virile hostility made Merry drop her gaze to her oatmeal bowl and look too well at the slimy clods of cereal that were stiffening in the bottom like—no, betternotto think what it looked like. Any more vomiting and they were apt to throw her over the side.
Presented with a view of the top of her head, Devon let his glance wander from the neat line of her parted hair down the narrow arms to the giveaway movements of her baby hands. Victim and captor, close together and aware one of the other, were sharing, had they known it, the same image: the quiver of her mouth last night under his kiss, the sensation of his hands on the soft flesh of her breasts. It was a toss-up whether man or young girl was trying harder to perish the memory.
In a voice as pleasant and light as goose down Devon said, “God love us all, the wench is eating! Good morning, Cat. Have you managed to repair her internal arrangements? What’s that? Oatmeal? I hope you emptied into it the contents of every bottle of aphrodisiac in the medicine closet.”
Her chin flew up, her eyes widened, but it was clear from her face that she didn’t know the word. Her alarm was merelythe unease of someone who has just found herself the butt of a baffling and probably tasteless joke. Devon saw her gaze fly to Cat and saw the boy first reject her with his eyes and then, surprisingly, reassure her with a spare shake of the head that he had put no adulterants in her food. Merry’s chin thunked back down on her chest in relief. From the look of her the girl had no idea what an extraordinary phenomenon was Cat’s kindness to her; Morgan had this morning sardonically professed himself still reeling from the shock of it. But then, this flowerlike creature had no basis for comparison. She had never seen Cat with other women.
She was the third-string mistress of the man Devon hated, and she was no longer guarded either by nausea or by the urgency of his damned inconvenient need to take her to bed. Primed for butchery, Devon lifted his hand and darned his fingers into her heavy hair and drew her head slowly back until her gaze had no escape from his.
“Dare you eat?” he asked her, blandly tender. “One meal in Hades and you’re never allowed up. Persephone had only a few seeds of pomegranate…”
It was a successful way to intimidate someone and about thrice as effective as he would have needed. The final lump of cold oatmeal had been stuck like a sand tick to the back of Merry’s tongue, and it decided suddenly to ignore the esophagus and slip daintily into her lung. She coughed and sputtered for thirty seconds before Cat came and whacked her on the back with a slap that dislodged the oatmeal and very nearly rib cage from spine bones as well.
When Merry was able to suck in enough air to speak, she faced Devon, who had been forced to relinquish his grip on her hair.
“At least,” she said, “when the king of the underworld dragged Persephone to hell, he had marriage in mind.”
Or so Merry had heard the myth reported. All she hadasked from her response was that it be in his classical category and that it be critical. Any mention of marriage and its application to her situation vis-à-vis Devon had been an accident. Marriage. It was an off-key note to have struck. From the swiftly gathering malice on Devon’s face Merry knew the depth of her error even as she saw Cat wince.
