“Dysentery and foul breath,” snapped Cat, running out of patience.
“Well! Really!” Her very blue eyes filled with resentment. “I might be in the early stages.”
“Thepre-early stages,” he said. With one hand he set down the water can he had brought to her. “You’ll have to develop something more interesting than acute hypochondriato worry Devon enough to loose you on dry land. Good night.”
He was out the door and had it half-closed behind him before he heard her voice calling him softly from the black room.
“Devon said I should go free if you could tell I was a virgin. What does that mean?”
It was news to him, but he was not surprised. Devon was a master of double-edged intimidation. On the surface it was insult enough; and that faded into a fill-in-the-blank threat flavored of the black side of things nasty. It should have been enough to make her talk, except that, being who she was, the more lurid implications had winged right through her wholesome spirit. Cat stepped back into the room.
“It means that he was baiting you,” said the boy. “He doesn’t believe that you’re a virgin.”
“Couldn’t you tell him that I am?” she said in a frightened voice. Her small head was alertly held, the face shadowed, and her breath flickered in the silence like an uncovered candle.
“Try to understand,” he said, the words tight with irritation and unfamiliar pity, “it wouldn’t make any difference. The man was trying to scare you, and since it didn’t work, that’s that.”
“It didn’t work? Heavenly name! They can hear my knees knocking all the way to Paris.”
“I should have said, it didn’t work well enough.”
Not willing to let it go, Merry said, “Couldn’t you at leasttrywhat I asked? Please.”
“No,” Cat said, his voice severe, his temper thoroughly evaporated. “Devon isn’t stupid. And Morgan can see clear inside my femurs. He’d know I was lying. Besides, Devon’s bloody likely to double-check, just to give you a lesson you wouldn’t forget. He’s not a man to push. Do you understandwhat it means physically? I didn’t think so. The man’s out to buffet your guts around, Merry. Strain everything he says through a cheesecloth.” He saw her irises, thick as buckets of blue water, begin to slowly lose their focus. “Damnation. Don’t look at me like that. I can’t help you. Don’t expect me to. There are two ways you can make peace with Devon. Pleasure him, or tell him what he wants to know. You’re perfectly capable of doing either. Or both.”
She jumped to her feet so fast that her chair skittered on the uneven floorboards. “You and your smug calculations. Hasn’t it occurred to you that thetruthwouldn’t save my skin? If Devon found out what Iwasdoing at the Musket and Muskrat, he’d peel me to the gristle.”
Shocked and angry, Cat abandoned the effort to keep his tone polite. “What lunacy possessed you to make an enemy like Devon?”
“Don’t you think I know I’m in trouble?” she shouted back. “Do I look like someone who’s made a practice of consorting with pirates? What am I supposed to do now?”
“Take him to bed, damn it.”
“Understand this. Never.” She was screaming, without knowing it. “It disgusts every feeling!”
“Christsakes, are we talking about the same man? When Devon walks down the streets of Bristol, half the population has neck strain from staring at him. We’ve got practically to hire eunuchs with scimitars to get him the rest of a chaste night.”
They were faced off like weasels. The air between them hissed with their fury; with a movement of his shoulder Cat’s unbound hair flared and caught hers, and held, crackling with static.
“Pardon me for asking you to help!” she hurled at him. “My mistake! I’m not accustomed to people whose range of emotion is limited to irritation.”
A hush fell. As their lungs competed wrathfully for the same oxygen Cat began to slowly digest her final words. His eyes widened, as she had never seen them before, and ate light like a mirror.
“Who were you expecting? Young Lochinvar?” he asked in a half-paralyzed amazement. The raised muscles in his shoulders began to relax, the white lines around his lips to warm. With a gentle hand he meticulously parted the wanton intercourse of their hair and put her snapping curls behind her arm. In a very different tone he continued, “My emotions aren’t limited to irritation. At times I’m annoyed as well.”
Crazily, considering the situation, Merry felt the keen pressure of a grin on her lips and an escaping laugh. Her resentment sank like an iron slug. And the boy’s astringent blue eyes answered her in a softening that was not a smile but something as humorous and more intimate. It was the first time Merry had taken pleasure in being angry and felt neither ill nor guilty in its aftermath. Cat, she had learned, was uniquely shed of threatening complexities.
“Look,” he said, shrugging his own hair back, “do you want to take a bath?”
“What do you mean, a bath?” she repeated, startled.
“Sit in a tub. Rub soap on yourself. Rinse it off. That kind of thing. You know; a bath.”
Merry could barely remember the last time she’d been clean, not being able to do much of a job with a can of water and the worry that who knows who might walk in the door at any minute. Merry itched in places that she didn’t know the names of. Almost cheerfully she said, “Where could I take a bath?”
“Morgan’s cabin. He’s on deck, and no one’s going to come in this late.”
“Won’t he mind?” she asked.
