But Devon was already getting to his feet. “Assent with a civil leer, young’un. Do you think I’d let you kill me? It would be unspeakable to leave you alone to explain it to Morgan—”
“Not to mention packing you in a Malmsey butt and sending you home to Mother.” Taking refuge in anger, Cat said, “Try not to posture, will you? I’ve got grief enough without having to depopulate half the island. I won’t give it to you. You wouldn’t be a fair test anyway. The body isn’t a base metal vat that you can dump what have you into. Chemicals react against each other, and since you aren’t full of arsenic like she is—”
“Give me that too.”
“Wonderful! Instead of sending you home, maybe you’d like us to bury you beside the dog. What’s the matter with you? I remember a time not long ago when you were sane. Will poisoning you help her?”
“That, my friend, is what we’re going to find out.”
In the end Devon won, probably because, as Cat would reflect later, when it came to relentless expertise in getting his own way, Devon was rarely outdistanced. Cat gave him the questionable medicinal concoction, and when Devon was alive an hour later—though not in what anyone would call a healthy condition—Cat diluted the mixture by another two thirds and fed it to Merry.
Chapter 19
The unicorn hadn’t abandoned her after all, it seemed.
Merry found it in a dream of sharp colors that stretched at the edges like a projected globe from where she stood, a tiny figure clothed in pearly cotton under the sky-distant curve of an arched window. Her heart pounded gently with longing as she saw the dream creature canter across a shimmering horizon. There was a moment when it disappeared, and she was weak with fear, but it returned, circling and striking its hooves in the red dirt, and then rearing, its knotted ivory horn standing in the air as a glistening spiral. It paused and then galloped straight toward her, growing larger, its nostrils softly dilated, its mane streaming. Great hooves, unclad in iron, threw a debris of grit and pebbles behind as it raced forward until it stopped ten feet from her and stood, quivering nervously. Shyness and an inexplicable dread made her approach it slowly, though the love and joy inside her was so strong that the earth melted like April snow under her bare feet; and the unicorn seemed to quiet as it watched her come closer.
It nickered softly to her, an invitation, though its muscles were taut in repose, as if being still were an effort, as if it were not easy to restrain its power, and this was a deference not to be long accorded. With trepidation and wonder she put her fingers into its mane and buried her face there also and learned with surprise that the hair wasn’t coarse or odorous like the fibrous stuffing of Aunt April’s drawing room wing chairs back in Fairfield, but was thick and soft like heavy silk, and fresh scented as a mown pasture.
The unicorn was tall, and her arms were imbued with unnatural strength as she pulled herself upward to its back, her breasts drifting over the rippling neck muscles, her legs lifting apart to receive the broad thrust of its body as she straddled it. The creature’s life beat came to her, a caressing pulse below her cradling thighs, and then the great muscles stretched as it began to canter, and they moved together in long rocking strides. The sparkling green earth and the heavens caroled love hymns to them, and the sun dusted their united bodies with powdered light. Life fluids coursed through her surrendered body, and all parts of her had become healthy and distended with rich golden blood. Her fingers roamed under the unicorn’s mane, embracing the warm hidden curves of its muscles. Rushing air burned her throat as she pressed herself deeply into its back, and her exhaled breaths came forth in many colors and blended with its own to bathe the sky in rainbow fluid.
On it went, the exquisite paradise that filled her until she was too exhausted to hold herself on the white back any longer, and sensing it, the great animal slowed to a trot, and then to a walk, and brought her to peace under the densely bunched head of a pear tree in blossom. She let herself slide to the ground, uncurling her heavy limbs slowly, and lay on a mossy bed beneath while white-touched pink petals rained over her in perfumed silence. Through eyes that could only open halfway, she gazed at the unicorn as it stood poised above her. But then, in one splendidly beating moment, the dove-whisper of the wind murmured to watch the unicorn because she was on the edge of a great discovery.… To watch…
The wind-command faded. Merry opened her eyes to Cat, bending over her with another of those eternal damp cloths he insisted on slopping on her skin every spare second he wasn’t pouring his vile medicines down her. She observed fretfullythat his braid, usually so perfect, had hair tendrils straggling out as if he’d slept on it; the cloth being applied tenderly to her brow made her feel sticky. And he had woken her from the unicorn. Merry lifted her hand and pushed at him.
“No!” she said crossly.
She saw him drop the cloth, which made a clammy water ring on the bedclothes, and look at her face with what seemed to her like totally unwarranted amazement. Before she had a chance to comment on that, he had snatched up her hand and was pressing it to his mouth with his eyes tightly shut. And then, to her chagrin, he was bending his head over her tightly clasped hand, and droplets of something wet were running into the center dip of her palm and from there down her wrist. Where was the water coming from?
“You’re not coming down sick too, are you?” she asked him irritably.
He had turned his face away. “No. No, I’m hale. Merry…” His voice sounded strange. “Merry. You’re going to get well.”
“So you’re always telling me.I’veyet to see any evidence of it,” she said with the natural peevishness of a convalescent invalid. “Where’s Devon? Why is it so dark in here? I’m thirsty. And you made my hand wet.”
In a state of bliss that was higher than anything he’d known in his life, Cat ran to satisfy her complaints; opening the jalousies, patting her hand dry, raising her head to give her water and nourishment. He had paused at a mirror to make a brief curious study of his eyes, which had unexpectedly produced tears for the first time since his infancy. Finally, when he was certain he had this surprising new ability under control, he went to tell the others that Merry would live.
Merry had never been told that she was close to death. In consequence she couldn’t understand why her visitors were jubilant. And if anyone knew why it was three days beforeDevon came to visit her, they didn’t see fit to reveal the reason to her. It would be a long time before she learned that Devon had spent those lost days fighting the heavy throes of arsenic intoxification.
St. Elise was a verdant saucer of land that belled upward in plump prosperity from the foaming tropical surf. Coffee and cocoa for export grew in a sheltered central valley, and here and there parcels of cleared earth held plantings of indigo that supported in plenty the nearly fifty families who made the island their home. Beyond the happy traces of civilization were magnificent unspoiled forests where butterflies flickered on blue iridescent wings and spring-fed brooks gurgled, tumbling bright pebbles beneath their warm crystal water.
Recuperation for Merry on St. Elise was a time of long afternoon naps and excellent meals from Morgan’s chef, a young German who had apprenticed in Napoleon’s kitchens at Malmaison. The villa itself was not a large one for its type, but it was beautifully made after the Spanish style and furnished with a discreet elegance that would have camouflaged to even a perceptive visitor that its owner was a pirate. Trying to find a clue from looking around here to Morgan’s personality, or to Devon’s, was more confusing than it was enlightening.
The only unpleasant surprise had been Merry’s discovery that in her heart she had begun to hope Devon’s tender care of her had been prompted by an emotion more profound than an active sense of guilt. Foolish beyond permission was the only way to describe that yearning, the more so because Devon had not tried to be alone with her since they had come to the island. If anything, it seemed he had made an effort to do the opposite. By now she must surely have learned how dangerous it was to care too much what Devon felt for her; how many times would she need to have that painful lessonrepeated? What she must do was remake her feelings into a wary friendship and not agonize over things that were not likely to be. There was some comfort in knowing if it ever became more than she was able to control, she could discuss it with Cat—comfort, but not a cure.
TheBlack Jokehad sailed, Tom Valentine in command. Rand Morgan had remained at the villa with a small number of the crew, including Raven, which meant there was a steady parade to her door of dripping buckets filled with sea creatures, of shells and starfish and snails as big as punch cups.
Quiet moments were spent with Annie, speaking in gestures and smiles. Not the least fascinating thing about Annie was that she was married to Cook, six years her junior, and if they shared a single trait, Merry was not able to discern what it was. In spite of that they appeared to love each other, which had a special interest for Merry because she had observed few such relationships in her life. It was not hard to understand how anyone, man or woman, could love Annie, with her easy dignity and intelligence; it was a little harder to imagine what Cook could offer her until Merry remembered that on theJokethe kitchens had been a retreat for her. There was an iron will and a kind of canny astringency about Annie’s tough young husband that could be sustaining.
But he was from the fourth generation of a family of pirates, and that affected his every attitude. The little Annie would reveal about Cook’s early treatment of her had produced in Merry an awed respect for the Indian girl’s courage, as well as a belated thankfulness that her own advent on theJokehad been under Devon’s protection. When Cook bought Annie, he was too young and had been too roughly reared to make even primitive concessions toward lightening her suffering and fear. He would never have beaten her, and if he had been able to speak in her language, he might have tried to reassure her, but as things had stood, it hadn’toccurred to him that it was wrong to use force on her as long as it was done without excessive brutality; and because he had not grown up around men who bothered to conduct their intimate relations with women in privacy, he had not done that either. Raven had been appalled and Sails gently chiding, but since the two of them, even together, had been no match for Cook, in the end it had been Cat who, after three days of listening to Annie’s weeping, had taken her away from Cook with the admonition that if he wanted his plaything back, he would have to learn to take better care of her. So Cook had been forced to listen to Raven’s advice and to Sails’s, and if the kindnesses Cook had shown Annie in order to appease Cat had been delivered sarcastically in the beginning, in time his own basic kindliness and Annie’s charm had begun to knit them, man to woman, in an alliance that had more to it than fleshly unions. As Cook had said rather glumly to Morgan a month later, “There’s more to love than two pelvises in a tussle.”
It had become one of Morgan’s favorite quotations. In fact, in the weeks afterward Morgan had only to utter the words “As young Cook says…” to wring groans from his auditors.
The air outside Merry’s window was warm and genial, and as soon as she was well enough to sit up, they carried her out to rest in Morgan’s terraced garden. The villa sprawled behind with its fretwork decorations and wooden porches. Sunlight spilled upon the bright shingled roof and bounced like a sprite through the fountain spray and on the well-raked walks of crushed limestone. Scarlet lilies startled the eye from shady corners, and iron frames dripped twining branches heavy with lavender blossoms. Raven put it rather well. “Neat,” he had said to her on her first morning outside, “as the Pope’s toothpick. Do you want sun or shade?”
He had been settling her on a Chinese Chippendale bench in the early sunlight when Morgan brought her the sketchbook. Her initial reaction was cold terror. How did he know she could draw? But if Rand Morgan’s dark, thorough eyes had seen the color leave her cheeks, he hid it under a facile smile that was hard to interpret. Instinct warned her not to disclose her distinctive talent, but the pleasure of having a pencil in hand after so long had by midmorning made instinct seem akin to superstition. She received a tremendous and genuine response to the charcoal drawing she did that morning of Raven, and the charm of that made it impossible to stop. Much later she would remember that praise was the flat plane of a quick-edged sword.
Strong and healthy some weeks after that, Merry sat under one of a lovely avenue of shaddock trees, on a blanket in the grass. Beside her Raven was stretched out with a book propped open on his bare chest and his head on the pork belly of Dennis the pig. Cook and Saunders lounged nearby. Annie lay curled on her side, her arching toes against Raven’s hip and her head pillowed on her husband’s thigh, her sable hair coiled between his legs. He was lifting it and letting it fall as he frowned over the copybook in his hand, his short freckled nose wrinkled slightly in perplexed disgust.
