“Pick oakum,” she said wretchedly, “and cry. I can’t imagine the first would interest you, and you’ve already seen the second, so couldn’t we have a truce?”
A gleam of humor lit Devon’s eyes. “That’s audacious of you, considering that traditional activities during a truce include, but aren’t limited to, tending the wounded, exchanging prisoners, and plotting like a demon what your moves will be when hostilities resume.”
“If that’s true, you’ve got no reasonnotto want one,” she retorted, encouraged and disoriented by the relatively mellow tenor of his mood. “The wounded are all on my side; unlike you, I’ve got no prisoners to exchange; and it’s perfectly obvious that you could plot rings around me.” He was still smilinga little, but he made no response, so she added unhappily, “I know it may not matter much to you, but I have a family who must be very worried about me.”
“Write them a letter and I’ll post it.”
“I’m sure you would,” Merry said bitterly. “After you’d read it.”
The accusation moved him not at all. “I’ll be the first to admit that being the kidnapper has immense advantages over being the kidnappee. I wouldn’t be in your shoes for all the mussels in Dublin.”
“They arenotmy shoes. They belong to Cat, as does the shirt, and the britches. The gunpowder under my fingernails is Morgan’s. The bruises on my wrists are yours. All that’s left of me is a bit of white ash and bone meal encased in skin.”
She turned then and made the escape her pride had withheld from her earlier and, plunging down the darkened staircase, ran flat into Cat, who was coming up. He was more than a head taller, but she was on the stair above him. Their faces were nearly level as he stood, a thin, pale-haired shadow before her. With unruffled practicality he advised her to use the handrail or she would break her neck on the steps.
As he passed her, going up, she said brightly, through choking tears, “You must be worn to a rug, you’ve been working so hard this afternoon avoiding me.”
He checked in mid-stride, with a reluctance she could almost taste.
“You really don’t want anything to do with it,” she whispered. “Do you, Cat?”
There was a short silence, and then he sat down on the stair, the new moonlight a frosty cap on his colorless hair, the hard bones of his face shaded.
“No.” An extended pause followed before he asked, “You’ve been talking to Devon?”
“I wouldn’t call it talking. He circles around me like acarnivore and bites when the urge takes him. There’s no more mercy in the man than there is milk in a male tiger.”
“Panic won’t help.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I needed a slogan. Panic won’t help. That’s an apt one.”
It was warm in the stairway. Musty air scented with dried varnish fought off breezes from the deck, and the hatch opened to a purple, star-spotted heaven. Merry could barely see his hand as Cat waved it over the empty space beside him in a silent invitation. She joined him gingerly; the step was narrow. They sat together, not touching, and he said, “What was he? Angry?”
“I haven’t the faintest notion of the workings of the man’s mind. See a brown spider spinning on a rock; as soon know whatit’sthinking. I was buried under an avalanche of finesse.”
“If there’s an avalanche of anything, it’s metaphors,” he said. “Do you think you can tell me what happened without crucifying the language?”
A pause came in which Merry did a lot of fidgeting. Finally, “He kissed me.”
Three short words, and the tone in which she said them revealed more to him than she would have liked. Long habit kept emotion from his face, though she couldn’t have seen it in the dim light anyway. None of this was as easy for the long-haired boy as it had been two weeks ago; not that it had been exactly painless then. He had already done his best for her with Devon; but Devon had experienced hypocrisy in every possible permutation, and it would likely take a deposition from God to make the man trust that Merry’s sweet surface went bone-deep. Nor had Devon any reason to be either rational or lenient with respect to anything connected with Michael Granville. The set of scarred fingers that Cat had clasped loosely around his opposite wrist were tense and icy.
“You’ll have to accept it,” he said, the slow words following one another in chilly succession, “if you won’t tell him what he wants to know. I’ve told you already, and nothing’s changed. Damn it, Merry, you know—or you ought to know—that a man and a woman who desire each other and share a bedchamber will inevitably—”
She leaned right over and shoved her face to within inches of his, until he could feel the warmth of her soft, shapely nose. “Will inevitably what?”
“Will inevitably find something stupid to argue about,” he snapped and, making a frustrated gesture, left her alone on the stairway.
Merry, entering the cabin a few minutes later, was struck with a fog of hot air that hung pitch-black and sluggish in the small chamber. She knew now by experience that it would take a few hours to cool. A faint breeze wheezed through the high gray square of an open window and carried in the hiss of seafoam and waves slapping the hull. Outside there was also laughter, interrupted briefly by the splash of a longboat meeting water. Merry ran to the bunk and climbed up to look out the window on tiptoe, and by the small closed lantern attached to the boat’s bow, she saw that one of the eight passengers was Devon; his gleaming hair made him stand out like a fresh gold coin amid old pennies. He was laughing in evident delight at something Cat, beside him, was saying. Resting her chin on the sill, Merry watched until she could see only a slight bobbing glow from the lantern as the boat broke through the surf and onto the shore, where the nightly fires were blazing high, spraying torpedoes of sparks toward the stars.
Pipe smoke drifted in the window from the watch, and on the still deck someone began to sing “Hosanna to the Son of David.” She hummed along while she washed in the basin, changed into Cat’s nightshirt, and used Cat’s ivory comb onher hair. Sitting on the bunk, munching an apple, she heard Morgan go by on the way to his cabin. He knocked twice as he passed, and said, “Happy dreams, nestling.”
“Good night, Captain Morgan,” she called and struggled under the blankets, the apple cupped like a doll by her cheek. This was the time of day she devoted to trying to think of some way to escape theJoke,and motivation had increased a thousandfold since morning. Tonight the exercise of planning an escape was more intensely therapeutic than usual because with it she could erase Devon from her thoughts for whole minutes.
The guard on deck was thick, since they were at anchor; rival pirates, evidently, didn’t trust one another, and the consequence to Merry was that she could never have slipped unnoticed from the ship. The apple rolled from her relaxing fingers, and Merry drifted into a dream-active sleep with the moist flesh of the fruit plying its sugared acids against her lips.
She woke in the wee hours to rough footsteps and shouting on the deck above her, and the scrape of a longboat being secured. Will Saunders’s baritone soared in song, and Merry could just make out the line “He who once a good name gets may piss in bed and say he sweats.” Hastily she rolled onto her stomach and pulled a pillow over her head.
In a few moments there was a firm tread outside, and her door came whacking open. The pillow was torn from her head and tossed on the floor.
