Merry’s sole consolation was that he hadn’t been able to tell her to take her swine with her. Morgan’s cabin door was too heavy to slam, but it made a satisfying loud thwack as she pulled it closed behind her.
An hour later she watched from her cabin window as Devon, looking beautiful and distinguished as an American privateer captain, got into a ship’s boat with a small crew.
The weather was worse. A thin drizzle spanked the dark, roiling sea, and the restless air was kneaded by sticky-fingered fog. Cold reached out to her from the thick window glass.
Merry was about to give up her watch when she noticed a second small boat, moving like a shadow between the waves. As the boat approached she was able to identify its occupant as Joe Griffith, theJoke’smaster gunner. Evidently he had taken advantage of theJoke’shalt to fish. The poor weather must have discouraged him though, for he rowed back to the ship, secured the small boat to a cleat, and agilely climbed a rope to the deck. For more than an hour Merry returned time and again to the window. The boat was still there. It amazed her that they hadn’t hauled it up, with a storm threatening. Joe Griffith must have forgotten it; he had a tendency to lose interest quickly in things that weren’t connected with the ship’s cannons. If the boat took the storm damaged, Tom Valentine would probably have Griffith punished. Burdened with an overactive conscience, Merry went toward the door to remind Mr. Griffith about the neglected boat. She stopped, her hand on the door handle, a new and overwhelming idea sizzling like frying shark meat in her brain.
Her chest roasting, her hands cold as granite, Merry spun the idea through her mind, as if she couldn’t believe that she’d come up with the thought by herself. Pulling a brown wool jacket over her suddenly chilly arms, straining to keep her voice low, Merry repeated the slowly emerging plan to the stalwart table, to Devon’s desk, to a maddeningly noncommittal face she drew in the window mist. In the little fishing craft bobbing below she was going to row to theGood Shepherd. With a kernel of a smile she decided that if that namedidn’t betoken succor and divine benevolence for her plan, nothing ever would. She wondered if Devon would remember later that the last thing he’d said to her was:You had better leave the room before your discipline collapses. Good day. Perhaps, just perhaps it was going to be a better day for Merry Wilding than the man suspected. And somehow, in time, she would learn to live with the knowledge that she would never see Devon again. And Cat and Raven. No. None of that. No second thoughts. She couldn’t afford to care. Aunt April was going to see her missing niece again.…
She waited until the bells told her that it was time for dinner before running lightly up the stairs to flatten herself against the boards and watch the rain-spattered deck. The mess pennant flew over the fo’c’sle, and in another minute Cook came with his helper, carrying covered kids of victuals toward the crew’s quarters. They made three trips, with rain beating the wooden covers over the hot food and rising again as silver vapor.
Cook and his man would eat with the crew, and for more than twenty crucial minutes the ship’s kitchen would be deserted. Breathing quickly, she forced herself to count to three hundred in case Cook had forgotten something and then pulled the jacket over her hair and stepped into the open. Around her the deck rang with water song. Thick rain clots drummed against billowing canvas, polished boards, and gun metal. Streams gurgled in the scuppers. The watch, in their steaming oilskins, were hardly in a mood to stop her for a chat, though Erik Shay—the fleshy giant who, long ago at the Musket and Muskrat, had let Merry and Sally leave the tavern—waved from the upper deck.
Once in the galley Merry rapidly located and stole a small paring knife, a discarded apron covered with grease, some coals, and a tinderbox.
She wrapped the tinderbox, the coals, and the knife in theapron, and buttoned her jacket and stuffed the wadded apron underneath. Running from the galley with her head down like a mole, she slammed into Tom Valentine’s chest.
“Oh, my! Oh, dear heavens!” she cried out, disengaging instantly from him, to leave a wet spot on his immaculate flannel shirt.
“Anyone would assume,” Valentine said, “that by nowsomebodywould have taught you to curse. Don’t wring your hands at me, you little fool. I’m not going to debauch you. You look guilty. What have you been up to?”
“Nothing! Nothing at all! I was only startled to see you. I went into the galley to get a—a biscuit. Because of the storm. I was hungry, and I thought in this bad weather it might take Cat a long time to get around to bringing a tray for me.”
“It’s only a rain,” he said, “not a typhoon. Cat can bring you something to eat right away if you’re hungry. I’ll talk to him.”
“No! That is, thank you, but—I’m not as hungry as I was when I—” It was awkward to lie stupidly to Thomas Valentine; it would be disastrous to try to lie to Cat. “The damp… the heaving of the ship… have made me a little sick. I should go lie down, I think, and sleep. If you see Cat, I wish you would tell him pleasenotto bring food.”
Back in her cabin Merry whipped the door shut behind her and leaned onto it with pounding relief. It was a good thing that Valentine’s life experience had convinced him that white women were imbeciles, or he would hardly have let his suspicions pass. But what if he repeated the story of their encounter in the hearing of Saunders or Cook, who knew that she might try to escape? Perhaps her whereabouts were of such little interest to Valentine that he would forget the whole thing immediately—or perhaps not.
She made a short, unsatisfactory attempt at prayer, and then a feverish review of her plan, which reminded her to bemethodical. So, methodically she checked to be sure the windows were closed, and with ears tuned for footsteps in the passage she pried open Devon’s locked desk. Inside she found letters, neatly bundled; notebooks filled with coded entries in an educated masculine hand; a packet of maps, some beautifully detailed, some less so; and desk supplies: a walnut sandbox, pencils with a cast brass sharpener, a green glass ink bottle, a whalebone letter opener, a pen-knife, and a tin tray of pens.
Overcoming an instinctive repugnance for stealing, she drew the damp apron bundle from her sodden jacket and replaced it with the letters; the notebooks were too big to take, the maps too bulky. There was no time to read the letters and discover their mysteries. It was enough to know they belonged to Devon, and that he possessed them meant that they must be somehow useful to his country’s cause, which also meant the converse, that ifhercountry had them, it would help the United States and hurt Britain, at least in the hazy realms of theory. If, on the other hand, all that she was getting away with was last year’s bills to Devon from his linen draper, then Devon was going to have the last laugh when he found them missing. Any thought that it would be preferable to have Devon laughing when he found out her theft rather than in a murderous rage Merry quakingly dismissed as fainthearted and unpatriotic. Of course the worst would be if she were still here, on theJoke,when he learned what she was trying to do. This had better work. Or else.
Her frightened clumsy fingers spilled the water from the water can into the chamber pot and stuffed the water can with the coals and one of the better maps from Devon’s drawer. And although the contents of the tinderbox were clean and dry, it took Merry five gut-wrenching minutes to draw a spark. The map flared, a soft licking flame that left black curled paper ash as it went out. It took another five minutesof unpleasant experiments before she created a fire that gave dark smoke without flame. Thick heat singed her face as she wrapped her hands in her jacket and thrust the can between its supports near the shaped splashboard, to prevent a fiery spill that might start arealblaze. She waited as long as she could in the storm of smoke and dead flying cinders. When finally her eyes ran and her skin cooked, she threw open a window, flung wide the door, and stumbled, choking, into the passage. Racing to the upper deck, croaking “Fire! Fire!” to Erik Shay, she didn’t need to be an actress; black billows from the lower passage contrasted splendidly with the cherry color of her eye whites and the white tear tracks on her cherry cheeks.
It worked better than her best hopes. If fire was feared on land, it had a hundredfold the terrors at sea. On many ships it was a capital offense to smoke an uncovered pipe belowdecks, or in hours of darkness. Merry stood forgotten near the gunwale as the alarm spread and men rushed across the rain-slicked decks with sand buckets and water tubs. Dennis, the pink pig, skidding across the deck on wet trotters, bumping men and upsetting sand buckets, was the only one who saw Merry slip overboard.
In the detachment of undiluted panic she felt the turmoil on deck fade, and what she could hear best was the thunder of her breathing as she found the free-swinging rope ladder leading to the small boat and took the weight of her body on her arms. The rough jute burned her palms, and the sting of instant welts distracted her, when she ought to be remembering to brace her feet against the ship. The next wave trench that rocked the great vessel smashed her face-first into damp timber. Pain blinded her. She clung, swaying on the rope, while air curdled sickeningly in her lungs. Slowly she began to move again, lowering herself in inept movements that cut shoulder blades into cringing muscles.
Below, in the bottom of the boat, there were two inches of seawater, gray-green and frigid. As she set her feet in it the chill sucked through her moccasins and bit her flesh like an iron trap. Icy drizzle fell on her, and her hair whipped in wide circles as she opened the knot that held the boat to its cleat. She shoved off through the leaping sea as waves threw her boat against the massive pirate ship with a power that threatened to disintegrate her tiny craft to splinters. The boat capered and swirled with giddy violence until it and she were caught in a friendly undertow and hurled into the empty ocean and fresh breezes.
It’s one thing to watch someone row; it’s quite another to try it oneself in heavy seas, and this was a bad moment to begin wondering if the American privateers on theGood Shepherdwould becertainto help her and if there was any chance that Devon might have lied about theShepherd’sidentity.
Around her the water shone dully, a desert of wet stucco pocked with black rain blisters. The sea spit streaks of spray at her and into her eyes. She shut her lids and sliced the slapping waves with the oars. Again. Again. She was wet everywhere. The air was dense with the cold steam of rain volleys and lacy wind-borne foam. Narcotic cold began to seep into her tearing muscles, and she could row faster. Misery mingled with half-crazed exhilaration.
In the pressing gloom she didn’t know that the water in the boat rinsed the hem of her breeches. The ocean had come midway up her calves before she admitted there was more water in the boat with her than could be accounted for by rain and sea spray. Too late she understood why Joe Griffith had brought the boat back so quickly to theJoke. It hadn’t been because the weather was bad. It had been because the boat was leaking.
Twisting her head, she looked through the driving showertoward theShepherd,a toneless oblong riding distant wave heads. It was too far. TheJoke,great and gleaming behind her, was also too far. Not that it mattered. That bridge was well burnt behind her.
Her desperation mounted as she tried to find the leak and stop it with her foot. Seawater rolled in around her, a frothy jelly soured with rotting kelp and marine slag. Below, the sea beasts waited, eager-jawed, cold as clay, and hungry. Every one of her inhibitions evaporated at once. Merry snatched off her flaccid moccasin and began to bail furiously, but soon water sluiced over the sides, and the boat fell away gently beneath her, and she was kicking water while the sea gripped her legs and tried to suck her head under.
She knew, remotely, that it was ridiculous, but her hands kept bailing with the dissolving ruin of her moccasin, and her feet kept moving heavily through the water, treading to keep her afloat. Her back was toward theShepherd,and she didn’t see the longboat’s swift approach. In all her hasty thoughts it had never occurred to her that Devon, on theGood Shepherd,would see the smoke billowing from her cabin window and, because of it, return quickly to theJoke.
From the bow of the longboat Devon watched her trying to beat back the sea with her sieve of a moccasin. He was not the kind of man who did things like rolling his eyes skyward, but that gesture would have come close to capturing the flavor of his emotions. Behind him, working hard at an oar, he heard Max Reade guffaw.
“Lil gamecock, ain’t she?” Reade called forward. “Look at ’er. Pluck to the backbone, eh? Damme, she’s got bottom.”
“To hell,” said Devon, “with her bottom.” It didn’t make things substantially worse, though it hardly improved his temper that by the time they reached her, she was under the water and he had to go into the sea to save her.
