Merry had hardly spent her life pining to fire artillery, but there aren’t many people who’ll turn down the kind of chance to do it just once without hurting anyone. And a salute to the United States…
“You space your shots like they do in the Navy, see, by counting,” Griffith said.
“No!” said Saunders, whose short military career hadbeen spent fomenting mutiny. “With a verse. Here’s one: ‘If I hadn’t been born a bloody fool, I wouldn’t have joined the Navy. Fire!’ Try it. No, with rhythm. Now. Got a salt pinch in your pocket? No?” he exclaimed, affecting horror, without giving her time to answer. “Disaster! Raven, quickly teach her a hand sign for luck!”
Raven, who was propped loosely against the bulkhead, looking like he might slither to the deck with a little encouragement, said obediently, “Hand sign. Merry, stick the middle finger of your right hand into your mouth and—”
“I won’t. It’s dirty!” she said with spirit.
“All the better, lovey. Wipe it on your britches first, if you must. Then—”
“Devil take you,” snapped Cat, radiating disapproval from where he sat on a shot locker. “What she doesn’t need is to learn a lot of filthy habits.”
“You wouldn’t catch Cat with his middle finger in his mouth,” Saunders said dreamily. He leaned across the big gun, his grin like a scythe. “Who knows where it’s been?”
“I do,” said Raven, “and you would too if you’d noticed him last night with the fair Louisa on his lap. Eager, she was, to unwrap his pretty braids.” Seeing from the corner of his eye that Cat was starting to get up, he added hastily, laughing, “Oh, I’ve done, Cat. I’ve done. Don’t make shrimp bait of poor little me.” Hiccuping giggles, he collapsed gracefully to the floorboards.
“Drunk,” Saunders said affectionately, “as a fish. Don’t put your finger in your mouth then, Merry. Spit in your left palm instead.”
Staring open-eyed at Raven, Merry said, “I’m not sure, Mr. Saunders, if I really…”
“Merry, lamb, you can’t be delicate with superstition. Spit!” Saunders with Griffith was loading the cannon. “Hey. You call that spit? I’ve seen more spray from a sneezingkitten. Now, make a right-handed fist and smack the left palm. There you go!”
She had shot off two rounds, and dusted with gunpowder, she was trying laughingly to lift a twenty-pound cannonball in scorched fingers when she caught Cat by accident in her gaze and saw that he was staring beyond her toward the door. Alarmed by something she saw in his expression, Merry froze, and then turned.
Devon, still and relaxed, framed like a portrait in the narrow rectangle of the open door, was holding her in his silken gaze. She might have cried out, she wasn’t sure, but her fingers splayed thoughtlessly from the shock of it and sent the cannonball humming across the deck at Devon. If he hadn’t sidestepped quickly, he would have gotten it over his toes.
She never heard the single, curt syllable he uttered or the fluent string of dialogue he addressed to the men with her as he walked slowly across the deck. Except for a softly pulsating crackle Merry was deaf.
Raven had told her what she must do to protect her hearing, but he had accompanied it with so many conflicting and jocularly intended orders that she hadn’t taken the right one seriously. In mime she saw Saunders dousing the match in a sand bucket, his lips energetically shaping an explanation to Devon. Griffith was dissolving in apologies. Cat was grim. Raven—Merry looked over her shoulder—was sleeping against the bulkhead, curled like a puppy. Devon, finished for the meantime with the others, turned his straight-edged attention to Merry.
She wondered how her face must appear to him; dirty, certainly, frightened, and a bit bewildered; not reacting in the proper way to the things he was saying, which she was glad she could not hear. She was probably giving off other signs she wasn’t aware of, but still, it was amazing how soon he guessed. Catching her jaw in the firm arc of his hand, hesnapped his fingers once by her ear. Merry saw him speak to her again, his face more gentle; this time she was able to gather that he was reassuring her that her hearing would return. It hardly seemed to matter. Her heart was beating in bass, and her insides had tied themselves into a bowline knot, a common bend, a rolling hitch, and Matthew Walker’s roses. This was the last grape seed, proof that the events of the last month had driven her out of her mind; she was deliriously happy to see Devon. Delirium. That was a good word for it. The paralysis of the eardrum was joined somehow with a paralysis of the brain. It was not the right reaction, not the right one at all, and in fact, it was so nearly the opposite of what her reaction ought to have been that she had to wonder if some of her brain cells were facing backward. Heartsick at the monstrous betrayal of her body, Merry generaled it back into dislike and frigidity, hoping none of the hectic, pained struggle was showing on her features.
Devon took his hand away and said something curtly to Cat, and relief from Devon’s scrutiny and his touch was so immense that tears came, hot and pricking like straw near the base of her eyes. Cat, it appeared, was having a lot to say to Devon, and although the strict formality of their conversation gave no clue to its content, the glances she was getting from Saunders and Griffith indicated that her well-being was directly and unpleasantly involved. There was a muted pop, and a sizzle, and Merry’s hearing came back just as Devon, evidently in the middle of a sentence, was saying, “… common sense because as I recall I requested—”
“I know what your orders were,” Cat said, “but you weren’t here, and she wasn’t eating.”
There was a second pop, and a loud mechanical buzz overlaid her hearing for another minute and then subsided.
“… so she left a note,” Cat was saying, “on the table telling me and hid under the bedclothes weeping while I read it.”
“And of course,” said Devon coldly, “she needed a healthful regimen of fresh air and exercise to survive the rigors of menstruation?”
“Take it up with Morgan,” said Cat. “First he sent Sails to her and then Raven. If I were you, I’d ask him why.”
Devon’s beautifully shaped eyes were glinting softly. “He’s already told me”—Devon gave the smile that wasn’t a smile—“that he wanted to make a man of her. Lucky girl. Did it occur to you that if you had put your compassion in the right place and let her break, I could have let her go?”
He had left then, or almost left. Cat’s voice halted him by the door.
“She doesn’t break, Devon,” he said. “You’d have to kill her trying. She doesn’t break. She just collapses like wet sugar cake.”
Merry spent the rest of the afternoon avoiding Devon.
Sunset hung in pink fronds over the cove. Where Merry sat on the bow, the slow shadows found her, lying on her cheeks like hands shading milk in the sunlight. She had huddled beside Raven, who was groggily awake and playing solitaire with a limp deck of dog-eared cards. She helped him when he missed a play, and he thanked her, not speaking, with a desultory pat on her knee or sometimes, absently, the empty air. Across from them, beside Sails, Saunders was teasing a high, delicious melody from a tin whistle.
More than five minutes had passed since Merry had said a word. Five minutes ago Devon had come aloft, and he was standing to the fore of the mizzen talking with Thomas Valentine. As Merry watched them a large snowy gull sank in swooping circles toward the deck and hung mewing in the face of the breeze near the mizzen. Devon looked up and smiled, his light hair falling back, his eyes shining. Drifting like a dream sequence, the beautiful bird circled again and landed on Devon’s quickly extended arm. The gull tuckedits black-tipped wings, and the bright yellow bill dove into Devon’s chest pocket and found a biscuit.
Stopping in the middle of a song, following the line of Merry’s gaze, Saunders said, “Devon’s gull. Even the dumb creatures love the man.”
