Catching the revulsion on Merry’s face, he added slyly, “Aye, there’s rats all right on the ships that sail at sea. Got ’em on theJoketoo, same as any other. Don’t see ’em in the day, but at night they creep out, when yer asleepin’, and stare at you with’n their teeny red eyes, and then they come creee-ping”—he stretched out the word—“up and nibble on the dead flesh o’ yer feet.”
Merry’s white cheeks turned whiter.
“Nah, Merry, don’t listen to him. Rats’ll only bother you if you take sick and are too weak to—” Seeing that this line of logic was not having a particularly salutary effect on Merry’s blanched countenance, Raven abandoned it with careless finality and, insistently cheerful, switched to, “You’ve been down here long enough breathing smoke. You ought to go aloft and—”
“She won’t go,” said Cook. The boy had been standing over his assistant, frowning at the job the older man was making of rubbing clean the floorboards with a piece of canvas. “Hey, strike a light, You! Is that clean or is there enough grease left there to lubrify a harem? You’re lazy as Ludlam’s dog that leaned against the wall to bark. Put some spark in your soap, hey?” He tossed a handful of lye into his assistant’s bucket. “That’ll do it.”
“Aye, and take the skin off me too,” grumbled hisassistant. “And turn my fingernails brown and buckled to barn shingles.”
“So, who are you—Beau Brummell? When I set you to scrubbing, it’s the only time yer hands get a good cleaning.” The boy steered his attention back to Raven. “Of course she don’t want to go up, loblolly. Scared of Devon. And you know what a foul humor Cat’s in—not thatthatdeparts none from the customary.”
Raven stared in an appalled way at Merry’s bright eyes and burning cheeks. “Poor little soul! I wish—”
“Don’t wish!” Cook snapped. “Or you’llwishyou hadn’t. She belongs to Devon, and it’s his business the use he wants to put her to, and there’s an end to it.” But the gray eyes, resting on Merry, were so much kinder than the voice. “Tell you what, though; who says she can’t stay down here long as she wants?” And over his shoulder, “Hey, You! Finished wiping the sideboard yet? Shake a leg, eh? And then go run up the chow rag to let the crew know what’s coming and bring down the biggest wooden kid from the storeroom.”
In a heavy sea, as many times as not, tall waves shook the ship, and food on its way from the galley to the after-castle was dashed to the decks and fed through the scuppers to the angry ocean. Today, with light breezes and fair skies, Cook and his assistant could carry off the meal with safe footing. They were barely out of the door before Raven tossed down his mop, lit the small bowl of his pipe, and established himself comfortably on the table, feet up and against the counter. Merry began to laugh at the pantomime of sly indolence. An incautious movement of her hand set a copper pan spinning on its peg, upending an earthenware bowl that showered Merry with sugar.
Cook heard her soft cry and the crack of shattering clay. He flew back into the galley to find Raven standing over her, looking full of alarm and trying to gently brush sugar gritfrom her heavy eyelashes. Crystals caught and sparkled in the curve of her throat and cuddled thirstily down the line of her young breasts. It was not the kind of thing Cook was likely to look away from quickly, but when he did raise his eyes, he met Raven’s polite but overstimulated brown gaze.
“Well,” he said slowly. “Heaven help us. The girl’s tried to make herself into dessert.”
Descending belowdecks, the brightness and human clatter of the afternoon muffled behind him, Devon paused, his eyes adjusting to the dimmer light. The hallway air was thick with warm wood musk. Ship’s smells. They delighted him, like the scents of rich coffee and forest humus at dawn after a thunderstorm. It was one of the amazing quirks of Morgan’s character that the man could give to his pirate vessel the atmosphere of a home.
Last week Devon had learned of Napoleon’s victories at Craonne and Reims. Again he felt anger at the well-meaning interference that had banned him from Europe, where he wanted to be, and driven him across an ocean to report on a war he opposed to high-placed men in England who had good reason to ignore his recommendations. Britain’s war with the United States was a fiasco. The majority of Britain’s great resources were being poured into the death struggle with Napoleon; this stupid secondary conflict with her former colonies wasted men and money.
As for the United States, it had been a piece of bloody-minded arrogance for the war hawks of President Madison’s administration to declare a war when they didn’t have the money to pay for it and, what’s more, had indebtment outstanding from the Revolutionary War. With customs revenues down due to the tightening blockade the national income last year had been less than ten million dollars; andyet, he wouldn’t be surprised if the United States had run up a debt of more than a hundred million dollars before the war was over. Yankee politicians were more likely to plunge their country into beggary than they were to raise taxes, accountable as they were at the next polling to a frugal electorate. It was one of the hazards of democracy. America was borrowing like a bride’s little brother, and it would be interesting to find out who was going to have the verve to pull them from the brink of bankruptcy. Devon doubted that it would be the Madisonian war hawks.
The conflict between Devon’s country and the fledgling United States was a string of petty incompetencies, and he was not a man who found it easy to tolerate incompetence, particularly in a war. It was the thing that had first drawn him to Morgan. Rand Morgan did things well and with flair.
Therewerereasons for Devon to be here, doing a job that was beneath his talents and not to his taste. It gave him a chance to spend time with Morgan and Cat, a boy well worth being made into somebody’s project, especially considering who he was. Not, thought Devon with a grin, that Cat was any more amenable to being made into somebody’s project than Devon ever had been. If you show promise too young, there are too many well-wishers eager to force you to realize it. Little though Cat’s well-wishers might know it, the boy couldn’t be in better hands than Rand Morgan’s. Morgan never forced potential to perform; he just gave it the opportunity to grow.
What else had brought Devon here? There was an autocratic old woman who would be pleased to have him in England; and Devon had no desire to please her. And finally, it gave him the chance to pursue his private war against Michael Granville. In the same theft that had netted Merry, Cat had brought back a set of letters that linked Granville to felony insurance fraud. In his heart Devon briefly felt the tug of a faint and familiar agony. One day Michael Granvillewould pay with utter ruin for the murder he had committed. The penalty for fraud wasn’t even close to adequate punishment for a man-monster, but it was more than Devon had dared hope for. Cleverly handled, it might be enough to bring him down. But it would be months before he could return to London and begin to use the incriminating papers, so he deferred his interest in the matter as neatly and purposefully as he had filed the papers in the locked cabin desk.
What he had not discovered on the mainland was the identity of the lamblike creature who had chastely shared his bedroom last night. Merry, sweet Merry with the haunting blue eyes; Merry, with the patrician features and the self-assurance of a birch leaf in a wind storm, who, Cat swore up, down, and sideways, was an untried girl. The Windflower, he called her. This morning Devon had left her in the blue light of dawn. Helplessly asleep, she must have thrown off her blankets; they had lain in a warm hill at the bed foot. She had been on her side, the nightshirt twisted tautly over the slope of her hip and riding high enough to expose her slim legs and soft arched feet, the toes small buds, back-curled toward the sole. He had laid the back of his hand against her palm. The skin was slightly cool, so he had drawn the blankets over her gently, without touching her again, and left.
Now, returning to the cabin in midafternoon, it was with the picture of the sleeping girl in his mind that Devon pushed open the door. He had assumed, without really having any reason to do so, that the room would be vacant.
Instead, he found Merry standing by the water can in leggings and knee breeches and naked to the waist. Her black shoes stood together by the bed, her shirt was rolled and thrown in a corner. Tiny angled chips—salt? sugar?—glittered on the flesh of her throat, and below her throat, where her loose hair curved inward, sicklelike over her ribs. Garlanded demurely by curls, dusted with crystals, her highlovely breasts were made of the most magical shades of pink. He could see that Merry was frowning down at herself in a critical way that her beauty little deserved. She held a rectangle of damp cotton that she had just used to wipe across her midriff. Her nose had a soot smear on the tip.Merry at Bath. Titian wouldn’t have painted it, but, oh, my, he should have.
Merry looked up quickly, saw Devon, and started, dropping the cloth.
“Merry, dear,” he said, picking up the cloth. “Do you need help?” His initial rush of feeling had been that rare unwanted warmth he felt sometimes with her. Desire came immediately after, so powerfully that he added, “Or—wait. I think I’m the one who’ll need help.”
Openmouthed with dismay, she crossed her arms over her chest. When she was able to tear her pained gaze away from him, she looked down at the placement of her slender forearms; as if angered by the inadequate coverage, she rearranged them, and whenthatexposed even more, she tried, in a frenzy of enflamed modesty, to hide her breasts with her cupped palms. Her motives were the highest; glancing back to Devon’s face, she was disconcerted to find that her movements had achieved the opposite of her intended effect. Devon propped his left shoulder against the doorframe, as though he needed the support, and he was only half joking.
“Merry…” he said. “Merry. My poor girl. Don’t tell me—were you trying to dampen my ardor? It’s at your most lunatic moments that I can resist you least.”
She could listen to his words, but his voice she felt. Its bright tenor entered through her skin, passed like a caress through flesh and nerves, and penetrated her spine, as luscious as a milk bath. She knew the voice. Even better, she knew the effect it had on her will.
“Go. Please,” she said, trying so hard to put convictioninto the words that they were spoken with the faulty tone of an overpumped pipe organ. “Please.”
He shut the door with one hand. Softly: “Not on your sweet life.”
She made a dash for her shirt in the corner and held it in front of her just before she was caught and gently encircled in his arms. Her fists and the shirt they clutched were trapped between her body and his. Under her rounded palms Merry could feel the fresh skin and tightly curving muscle of his chest and the steady heart rhythm mated with his languorous breathing. Inside herself Merry’s less discreet organs were slowly escalating their tempo. Little staccato gasps marred the action of her lungs, and blood slapped in hot gushes through her heart, even as his hand molded her to his long body.
One of his hands burned over her back before it moved lower, tracing a hard, flat-palmed arc over her buttocks, and then, sloping under, drew her gently up on her toes. Their hips met, the hardness and detail of him caressing her belly, and she began to ache with unexplored need. Everywhere that a part of him touched her was stirred and soothed, as though by deep sunlight in spring.
His blond head bent, and she could feel his lips seeking her face, his breath warm on her mouth and chin.
