He moved to take her hand, and it lay small and curving in his as he touched it gently to his lips. Tiny sparks grew under her skin where his mouth had touched.
“I suppose you think that falling ill was my just deserts for running away from you?” With her free hand she made a project of wrapping one red-gold curl around her finger and gazing studiously at it. “All things considered, it was easier on your dignity than on mine for you to find me in such a mess.”
“A mess? Was that what it was?” He gave her a wide-eyed look that she realized was an imitation of her own. “My dear! And here I was thinking you were happily rusticating on a balmy island. It must have been refreshing to get away from all men after your months of patiently enduring the stag-and-drake atmosphere on theJoke.”
He waited for her brief smile to bloom and fade away before glancing down at their entwined hands. She watchedcuriously as he stroked the tip of his forefinger over the pansy surface of her nail plates. His expression was soft. Had she actually surprised some real spark from him? The promise of that settled like a moody stranger in her heart.
“Poor Windflower. Did you really think I was going to beat you?”
Cat came into the room with her breakfast in time to hear the last, and he put in grimly, “Why shouldn’t she? You ought to see yourself when you’re angry.”
Devon watched Merry slowly withdraw her hand and lay it in a slack fist on the pillow beside her cheek. “You’re right. I should,” he said as he stood up, making room for Cat to bring the tray to her.
Feeling awkward, light-headed, bashful for no good reason, Merry met Cat’s gaze and said the first cheerful thing that occurred to her. “Look at me—healthy again, though Devon won’t admit it. I want to dress.”
“You can dress if you want to,” Cat said, “but you’ll have to rest on the bed today. You’re better, not healthy.”
“Why not? Don’t worry so much.” Merry was smiling. “What do you think is wrong with me? I hope it’s the clap. Aren’t you supposed to be good at curing that?”
Devon had suddenly discovered something of great interest outside the window and was regarding it steadily, a suppressed smile pulling at his lips.
Glancing at Devon, Cat said sourly, as though in explanation, “It’s Saunders et al. They love to teach her blue language and listen to her innocently chirrup it back to them so they can laugh themselves to jelly. God knows what they’ll think of the change in her when you decide to send her home.”
This was new—someone talking about sending her home as though it were a thing that might happen soon. She thought of Aunt April as she waited a moment to see if Devon had anything to say about it, and when he didn’t, she gave Cat agrin. “This whole experience may make my fortune someday if I become an authoress. Publishing companies are always on the lookout for women whose experience has brought them into contact withpeculiarpeople.” Congratulating herself for having slipped one in under his guard, she sat up and tucked the napkin under her chin. “Furthermore, just because the pitch of my voice happens to be soprano—”
“Of the upper register, particularly when excited.”
“Soprano,”she said emphatically, ignoring Cat’s interruption and finishing her sentence. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that I chirrup. Why don’t you and Devon want to tell me what was wrong with me?”
“Come now. Don’t let your imagination tear downhill like a runaway wagon,” Cat said. “It was a fever. What else is there to know? Save your energy for your breakfast. Do you have to use the—”
“No, and don’t bring it up so casually. I’m not a heifer in a barnyard. If you don’t mind? Cat, please don’t hover.”
But hover he did. She was not left alone, even while she slept, whether she liked it or not. Sails and Raven and Dennis the pig were with her the next morning when the chill started again.
The three of them with fingers and an opposable thumb had been making silhouette portraits of each other using nail scissors and paper pages torn from an old ledger of Morgan’s. Merry was laughing at their amazement because, while they weren’t bad at it, the profiles she made were mirror accurate. Dennis was shuffling around the room with Cat’s paper profile sticking to the watery tip of his snout. Because she thought she had gotten well, she assumed, when she began to feel cool, that a northerly draft had stolen into the cabin, and wrapped herself in a wool jacket, and then, uselessly, in a blanket. In the end there was no hiding the terrible pattern she came to know in the days that followed: the disabling chillsand throbbing head, the fever without mercy that followed for as long as eight hours afterward, and then the rapid cooling and torrent of sweat that left her stuporous with exhaustion.
The attacks came at regular intervals, as though some murderous clock in her body was calling them forth. On two days out of three she was ill, and in between she was well enough to sit up, to eat, to read, to talk, and to know that she was getting progressively weaker. Malaria, Cat admitted to her finally; it was treated with quinic and poisons like arsenic and strychnine. The trick was to kill the disease before you killed the patient.
These cures, recommended and accepted as they were, the best hope the age could offer, began to take their toll, and as the days went by it became harder for anyone to make her smile. Devon, gentle as none of them had seen him, helped to beguile her in the long weak hours between her paroxysms. He taught her every card trick he knew, every hand form in shadow play, every verse of his favorite love ballad. He filled the afternoons for her with riddles and fairy stories and led her in lazy conversations about comets and fallen kingdoms and the way hot roasted corn tastes on a fair day in autumn.
In both of them was a deep delight in the simple whimsies of life. The earth, with its endless subtle beauties of color and texture, was not wasted on Merry or Devon, for they both saw the clouds as pictures, the lichen against rough bark as scripture, and sometimes heard the wind as a canticle. Two other people might have discovered these things in each other and begun to celebrate, but Devon and Merry had too many distractions to notice. She only thought, when she had the strength for reverie, that the hours sped by when she was with him. His all-encompassing aim was to remind her of the many reasons she had to cling to the world and to keep her from guessing how close she was to leaving it.
Eventually even sleep became an effort for her, a time ofdreams and discomfort and paralyzed half wakefulness. One night sand fleas from the island came to her in a nightmare, their wings shining with the moisture of her blood as they drove their venom repeatedly into her shrinking flesh. She awoke crying, rubbing her sullied face with the cotton sleeves of her nightshirt. Repugnance made her use too much force. The tiny bone buttons on her cuffs cut long raw scratches into her friction-heated skin.
She wasn’t sure what sense told her that Devon was coming across the room to her.
“Merry, let me.” He was separating the snarled ball that she was—the arms and hair and bedclothes. A damp cloth wiped neatly and thoroughly over her mouth, and then over her cheeks.
“Where else?” he asked. Gasping, she touched her forehead and closed her eyes as the cloth moved on her brow, over her eyebrows, to her hairline. After he finished, she heard the fresh splatter of water as he dipped the cloth and cleansed her again. Another woman might have been amazed at how accurately he had perceived her need and how quickly he had responded to it. Illness had eroded her interest in noting and being alarmed by his talents. She only knew she was glad that she was awake now, and that he was with her.
“Nightmare.” She whispered the word automatically. He had guessed. From Morgan’s desk the faint sheen of candle flame spread outward, dissolving in the distances and breathing like a lover on Devon. She saw him like that when she opened her eyes, and saw the nod he made to acknowledge her single word.
She was about to ask him how many bells had gone when she heard a slow warbling call well up, as though from the keep of the ship, to vibrate the humid air around her, and echo back into the cradle of the sea. A second fluttering call blended in, growing with the dying notes of the first, and thenshe heard a third tune, spasmodically moaning; a primitive and lonely monster song from the deep.
“Devon!” Her voice was trembling.
“It’s only the whales,” he said, remembering years ago, when Sails had told him the same thing. “You can hear them talk on clear, quiet nights like this. They sound melancholy in the beginning, but after you’ve listened to them for a while, their voices are as winsome as singing birds, though not as shrill.” He stroked a rosy curl from her forehead. “Can I give you anything to drink?”
