“In the Navy—any navy—I would have been hanged for it,” Raven said cheerfully. “As it was, Valentine should have held me to a trial by combat, but you see, Valentine is the best swordsman on the ship, while I—”
“Would be hard put to slash your way out of a barberry hedge,” Cat said. “I’ve told you, Merry, Tom Valentine couldn’t let Raven go unpunished without looking like a weakling, and no one wants a weakling for a quartermaster.”
Not convinced, not consoled, Merry angrily said, “And this is why, I suppose, they say, ‘No man would go to sea on a ship who could contrive to get himself into jail’?” She turned away furiously, facing the window where the high rectangles showed a sky of deep slate, and a few stars made lonely, splendid pinpoints in the fading twilight. The room was hot, the surfaces sticky and pleasantly spiced with the warm raisins Cat had brought to her earlier. Their notions of justice were alien to her and seemed appallingly stupid. She could scarcely comprehend the logic that required someone to see a friend whipped to preserve some useless standard of consistency that was too harsh to begin with. And yet, what good would it do to harangue Raven about it when she’d already had the same argument through the door with Sails on two occasions, with Cook once, and with Cat every time he’d set a foot inside the threshold?
Behind her she heard Raven say, “Have you talked to Devon, then?”
Devon. The most alien and appalling of all difficult males.
In an abrupt way Cat said, “You know she hasn’t seen him in two days. Gossip around here is thicker than Scotch thistles.”
“Don’t Cat say that good?” Raven marveled. “Hardly spits at all. Mind you, I didn’t know that wehadScotch thistles thick around here, but then it’s been a few days, think again, since I’ve been inside the hold.”
The lilting tones, the tenderness in his voice were irresistible. Merry turned toward him, her hands back at her waist and resting on the bunk. She made herself smile and, working hard at keeping her tone lighthearted, said, “Cat is correct, as usual. I haven’t seen Devon. He probably waits until I’m asleep to slip in and change his underclothes. I have a strong suspicion that he means to make me walk the plank.”
Like her Raven hid distress under a smile. “Impossible. Pirates don’t do that, you know. The newspapers made it up.”
“Did they? Well. There’s another myth about pirates laid to rest,” she said.
“Yes, indeed. We never make people walk the plank. Too ghoulish. We simply”—Raven made a nimble diving motion with one hand—“throw them over the side.”
She wasn’t sure why that should make her laugh, except perhaps that Raven’s expression was so droll. Looking highly encouraged, he put out a hand to her. “Come over by me,” he said. “I can’t fetch you. Give me your hand.” When she did, he carried it to his lips.
Cat watched them a moment. Then he said, “Saunders is right. You’re too involved with her.”
There was a brief pause as Raven’s winsome gaze found Merry’s and then transferred slowly to Cat. “I may be,” Raven said, “but so, my friend, are you.”
Raven let a few days go by and then went with Will Saunders to try to buy her from Devon. And though Will never went near Merry when she was alone, because he said bluntly that he didn’t trust himself, their motives were pure.
They found Devon in the captain’s cabin, with Morgan and Valentine, drinking cici, which was corn gin from Chile made from maize chewed by toothless old women and fermented in water. There wasn’t another palate on theJokebesides those three that could keep it down.
The transfer of women by purchase was a common enough thing. Devon heard their request calmly, and without smiling asked, “Why?” It was obvious that he was going to say no, as they’d already half anticipated, but they had to answer the man’s question anyway. That was the rub. Raven wasn’t sure how it could be, but while it wouldn’t have been even slightly embarrassing to admit that their purposes were unabashedly carnal, it was ticklish beyond description to announce that they just wanted to let her go. As they spoke, facing into Devon’s golden, autocratic gaze, there was the unavoidable if unspoken implication of reproach to Devon for the way he was treating her, which was a heavy breach of pirate etiquette. Even that aside, Saunders’s explanation, tactfully phrased as it was, couldn’t help having such a ring of romanticism and sanctimony to it that Morgan hardly waited for Saunders’s finish and Devon’s refusal before laughing himself hoarse. Thomas Valentine sighed and, fixing Saunders with a blighting gaze, said tartly, “If you don’t all stop being sodamnedamusing about that wretched wench, Morgan will happily keep her around for the next twenty years.”
The man had a point.
Chapter 15
The sleek, heavy keel of theBlack Jokeslipped southward through the warm Gulf Stream, displacing thousands of tons of green water. Below, tiny sea creatures without numberwaged fierce microscopic battles, as indifferent to the human presence passing above as it was to them.
A brown floating wand of sargasso weed hid a herring no bigger than a child’s finger. Grazing nearby was a bluefish that caught and ate the herring just before the bluefish itself became a meal for a passing squid. Satiated and gloating, the squid hurled through the water, gaining momentum until it had enough thrust to launch its tapered length upward, bursting through the surface into sky and sunlight. The squid soared like a flying fish, thirty yards, perhaps more, before it began to lose altitude and, dropping sharply, prepared itself for the thrilling splash that would come when it fell back into the sea. But the splash never came. The squid dropped instead into the bottom of the skiff from which Raven was fishing. Thus the above-water and underwater worlds came together.
Laughing with delight, Raven picked up the squid and put it in a bucket for Merry to see.
He brought it to her in her cabin after he had gotten the key from Cat. She was too happy to see him, too pathetically lonely. In the week since she’d been confined again in her cabin, he had come to see her as often as he could, and others had also—Sails had been in, he knew, as well as Saunders, Cook, Griffith, and some others—but they had to be discreet about it and quick, because though Devon hadn’t prevented them from visiting her, he wasn’t likely to be overly enamored of the idea. The man was still sleeping elsewhere. Cat, who ought to know, said that the highborn were the same in every way as common folk, but whenever Raven gazed into Merry’s blue eyes or watched her smile, he wondered how Devon could possibly want to sleep anywhere else.
The squid was fascinating and frightening for Merry, and she envied the nonchalance with which Raven picked it up and let it wrap a sticky tentacle about his bare wrist. She wasbraving herself to do it, trying her best to ignore the sea creature’s glowering gaze as she put out her hand, when they were interrupted by Max Reade on deck shouting, “Raven? Devil take the lad, where’s he got to? If he ain’t gonna take that boat out to fish,Isure as hell am. Damme if he don’t say he’s a gonna take that skiff night fishin’, and here’s the skiff back before the hour’s out. Saunders! Where’s Mischief got hisself to? Maybe if he don’t show up in about one second here, I’m gonna take my turn with the boat!”
The squid went back into the bucket, and Raven left Merry quickly with a regretful smile and a tossed kiss. For a minute or two Merry listened to the lively argument on deck, smiled when Raven won it, and putting her arm out the window, waved at him as he set off again in the skiff. Turning back toward the cabin, Merry realized suddenly that Raven had forgotten the squid. And, typically, he had forgotten to lock the door.
She was so closely watched that Raven’s slip could do her no good, and she expected Cat to discover it when he brought her evening meal. But the ship’s carpenter had cut his hand open on a ravehook while cleaning out some old caulking on the fo’c’sle, and Cat stayed aloft to attend him. Cook came instead, straight from the kneading trough, his tattoo powdered with flour. He set her wooden bowl of spiced cabbage soup and a tin plate of apple cake on the table and had glanced critically at the door, as though he were going to ask her why it wasn’t locked, when he noticed the squid. Instantly diverted, he tried to talk Merry into surrendering the squid to him for squid soup.
She was so angry at the very suggestion that by the time he left empty-handed, he had forgotten about the unlocked door.
Merry spent the evening peering into the bucket while the squid turned desultorily in its ration of seawater, fixing her with a glassy stare and occasionally letting a tentacle slither sulkily out toward her.
Cat knocked on the door later, after she had gone to bed.
“Merry?”
