Not lowering the gun barrel, Merry said, “If Devon comes, will you show him that bag of money in your hand?”
“It’s my share!” He clutched it all the harder. “It’s what I got coming to me.”
Merry knew well that none of Morgan’s men helped themselves to spoils. Thomas Valentine divided the loot, in full view of the crew. Also the man before her seemed to have deserted his position in battle, and the punishment for that was fearsome—marooning on a barren island with enough water and food to last for one week. Suddenly she realized what this man’s presence here must mean. She said, “You’re planning to desert!”
“Well, ain’t you just as quick as a berry! I ain’t got time to stand here clappin’ my jaws about it wi’ ye, so let me be.We’ll go our own ways and no one the wiser. This is no affair of your’n that I can see.”
The tiniest bit of admiration mixed with the doubt in her voice as she asked, “How do you mean to get away?”
He was impatient to be off, and after a moment he appeared to decide that it would be faster to humor her with an answer than to argue. “There’s a jolly boat half-lowered to the port that was meant, I suppose, to take you out of here if we was to be gettin’ the worst of the fight. Old Tuck Simmons was to have the watchin’ of it, but he’s long since been blown into the sea. So while them bloody fools are killin’ themselves to starboard, I’m meanin’ to shamble off to the port.”
“Are we near land?” she asked.
“Near ’nough. Now, see here. I’ve got to be movin’ along, so—”
There was no time to think it over. Merry took a single slow breath and said, “I want to come with you.”
A man of a different kidney might have been flattered, but Cook’s middle-aged assistant was a realist and a well-developed coward. Every man aboard knew she’d tried to escape once before. He said sourly, “Well, you can’t. I’ve got enough trouble without having His Powerful Highness Devon hot after my carcass.” He started for the door.
Not for nothing had Merry Wilding spent a month of her life on the most notorious ship that furled sail on the Gulf Stream. Stationing her legs apart carefully for balance and effect, Merry put two hands on the pistol’s walnut grip and aimed the bronze barrel straight at the man’s retreating back.
“You!” she said. “Take one more step without me and—and, Saint Anne as my witness, I’ll blow your ears off.”
It was a solid improvement over her try with Devon and the crossbow. Morgan, if he could have seen her, would have been as happy as a King Charles spaniel.
Chapter 16
The battling ships had a strange beauty from four hundred yards away. Against the night sky of transparent black the ship’s lanterns breathed sheer golden light that caught as glistening streamers on the ocean waves. From theJoke’sstern lanterns twin haloes glowed like the eyes of a great sea monster. The battle raged in miniature; the slowly shrinking scene seemed a microcosm of madness, with flames licking the rigging of the other ship, sooty clouds of smoke rolling upward, and the shouting and shooting and clanging echoing and faint. It looked like an accident in an alchemist’s laboratory. And Merry was leaving it behind as if it were a Punch and Judy show bypassed on a street corner.
Wearing denim breeches, a white shirt, and a kelly green bandanna over her hair, Merry sat in the jolly boat’s bow with her pistol trained on the kitchen assistant, whose name, she had ascertained, was Michael Meadows. Meadows rowed, and Merry watched the battle through the oars as they rose and dipped, rose and dipped. They had gone more than a league’s distance before Merry realized that she was looking at three sets of masts.
She exclaimed, “There’s a third ship!”
“Eh? Oh, aye. A Portuguese schooner, sailing out of the Brazils, more ’n likely. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was coffee she was hauling. Dumpy little rascal, ain’t she? Them sails is patched like a whaleman’s shirt. She’s prize to that pirate bark that’s putting up Satan’s own fight against theJoke.”
So Morgan was fighting another pirate ship!
“A pirate bark?”
“Aye.” Meadows glanced over his shoulder at the ships. “That be Malachi Head. See his colors there, by the aft lantern? His flag’s got the bloody dagger ’pon it. He’s the devil’s spawn, old Malachi. When he takes a ship, he sticks the men through with boarding pikes, and if’n there’s women aboard, he lets his crew take their sport with ’em and then throws the lot of ’em into the hold. Then he bombards the ship, for target practice, see, till she goes down ablazin’. Him and Morgan usually gives each other a wide berth, but this time the lookout spied a woman on the captured schooner, and her with a babe in her arms and two little ones clingin’ to her skirts. So Morgan brings it up for a vote: How many want to take Malachi Head’s ship and steal his prize? Well, quicker ’n a trout’s tongue every man jack on theJokeis finding some reason or other we oughta take the ship. Saunders says because there might be silver aboard the Portuguese, Valentine says we oughta be replacing the skiff you sank, even Shay, that son of a bitch, suddenly remembers some old grudge he’s got against Malachi Head’s bosun. Humpf! You know the real reason they wanna fight that Malachi Head? To save the young ’uns! I ask you!”
Dawn glimmered, a lilac fuzz on the horizon. Smiling into the trade wind’s light breath, Merry said, “I think it’s wonderful.”
“Oh, you do, eh? For my money, being a hero is fine, but suicide is something else again. I can’t see giving up yer life for a babe. They all die anyway,” he said gloomily, coasting on his oars. “Twenty years ago, back in Dover, my wife had three babes in three years, and not one of them lived more ’n a day or two. And with the last one my wife dies too. Childbed fever they call it. I call it bad doctorin’.” Meadows spit over the side. “She weren’t no more than seventeen.”
Merry was quickly and deeply affected. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Meadows shrugged, grinning slyly through charred, stumpy teeth. “She was a shrill one anyway and never gived me a moment’s peace, though I was sorry about the little ones, and that’s a fact.” He let one oar hang in the water and reached between his legs for the rum bottle. He took a long swig, and as he lowered the bottle his gaze fell on the bucket Merry had placed by her feet. “There it goes—he done it again! Put one of them arms out and wiggled it around.”
Merry glanced uncertainly at the malefactor in the bucket. “He can’t help it,” she said, on the defensive. “The bucket’s too small, and heisa squid, after all.”
“Well, I don’t hold with squids, nor octopussies neither. Ain’t natural, a critter havin’ all them arms. Fair gives a body the creeps. Dump him out.”
“I’m going to,” Merry said, “as soon as we’re far enough from the ship.”
“If that don’t beat kissin’! Think a cannonball’s gonna fall on him? Out he goes—or I don’t oar another stroke.”
It was not a threat Meadows was likely to carry out, with the eastern sky paling to slate and the rising light adding to their danger of detection and capture. But the squid must be half-starved by now. Decency demanded that she set it free. Merry put the pistol down in her lap, picked up the bucket, and leaned over the side until the bucket’s wooden mouth was under an inch of water. Gently tipping the bucket sideways, she watched with a lump in her throat as the squid slid out and away into the glossily black ocean. It was one more link to Raven gone. Cat. Devon. The hand that she had braced against the side slipped as she drew in the heavy bucket, and her shifting weight sent the boat rocking like a tree cradle in the wind.
