“And Cat?” The voice belonged to Thomas Valentine.
“Cat, thank God, is not a fool. He’ll do as he’s told.”
Valentine said something in a low tone that made Morgan laugh.
“Not you also, Tom?” said the pirate captain. “I thought you were immune! No, Devon hasn’t confided in me what he plans to do with her. I would tend to think…” The closing door of Morgan’s cabin shut from her the trend of Morgan’s thoughts, which was probably just as well. They were not likely to afford her much comfort.
She remembered well the only two sentences Devon had said to her in the course of the journey, and even those had not been in the strictest sense spokentoher. She had fallen from the rigging where she had been climbing with Raven, and though it was not a long fall, she had landed awkwardly and dislocated her thumb. It had been one of those days when one just doesn’t feel like being mature about an injury. Light-headed with pain, she had fled, yelping, from Cat before he could undertake the excruciating process of setting the thumb. In the end it had been Sails who caught and held her in a gently steeled grip, clucking soothingly as Cat did what he must. Surrounded as she was by anxious sympathizers, she had no idea Devon had come on deck in time to witness her treatment until it was over. Then, with his expression sealed, he had walked forward through the suddenly silent pirate crew and looked for perhaps a minute into Merry’s face, though it had actually been to Raven that he had said, “I don’t want her up there again. Is that clear?”
Otherwise, he had said nothing to or about her. When she met him on deck or in a passageway, his glance wasindifferent and did not linger. Watching his face in those moments, she found it hard to believe that she had ever seen tenderness there. It might be that she had been deceived by her own willingness to find it. If she lived for one thing now, it was the day when she could cut him as cleanly from her heart as he had swept her from his.
The broken feeling between her and Devon haunted her days and nights, along with the endless frightening questions about what he would do with her in England. And, especially in the first days at sea, there had been the barren and bestripped feeling that came from missing Annie, whom she had come to depend on for friendship and support more than she’d realized. Cook had stayed behind as well, because Annie was to have a child. They had even solemnized their common-law marriage before a priest at Sails’s urging on the day before theJokesailed, and it was the riotous and unusual preparations Raven and Will Saunders had made for the wedding that had provided distraction during those terrible days following her estrangement from Devon.
She’d had a birthday on theJoke. Strange things, birthdays. You wake up in the morning to find you’ve aged a year. Of course, that morning she had not thought of it at all. It had not occurred to her until midafternoon when Cat was about to write in his journal—fascinating reading, Morgan said—and had casually mentioned the day and the month. The date had hovered for a while in her mind, as though there were something familiar about it, and then she had remembered: today she could claim another year.
But the woman who stood beside Cat on the Falmouth jetty seemed much more than a year older than the one who had mounted the New York pier beside Aunt April. There was a certain irony, if one had the stamina left to note it, in the observation that she had finally arrived at her intended destination.
This morning Cat had awakened her from an uneasy sleep at dawn with a light touch on the cheek.
“Merry? I have your breakfast. Devon wants me to bring you to him on shore.”
Since then there had been silence between them. What was there to say? Morgan was right. Cat would do as he was told.
Ahead she could see the traveling carriage waiting on the narrow quayside street, the horses thrashing the pasty moisture from their haunches with short-cropped tails and rolling their massive shoulders against their collars as a postilion in a tall hat adjusted the far trace. She turned quickly to Cat.
“He’s taking me away?”
The young pirate hesitated. Then, “The carriage’s hire is paid to London. Merry—”
Her face tilted upward to search his eyes for some sign of hope or comfort. Rain bedewed her eyelashes in tiny clear pearls and shone on the curve of her cheekbone until he covered her face with his own, just touching her brow with his lips. In that moment the clatter of hoofbeats brought a rider around the vehicle.
“How bloody touching.” The lightly arid voice above them was Devon’s. “Is this going to be an extended farewell, or is it possible that—Thank you, Cat. You can put her bag on the seat beside her.”
It was hard not to feel lost forever as she rode alone in the jolting carriage staring through the leaded window glass at the melancholy grandeur of the Cornish hills.
The sweeping lonely valleys, the high jagged tumble of cleft boulders, the stark villages with their wet windblown trees and cob walls seemed bleak in the half-light, though an occasional distant shaft of sunlight falling through an open seam in the clouds would lend the rough terrain a quality that was eerily peaceful. How foreign this place was to her. Eventhe churches, ancient chapels under moor-stone slate roofs in shades of tawny yellow and green and russet, seemed gaunt and forbidding. She slid her hand into her valise and drew out the cloth bag that held her collection of shells, putting them one after another onto the dark drape of the cloak that covered her lap so she could touch the beguiling tropical contours. As always, she saved until last the great conch she had discovered on the St. Elise sands that day with Devon. Riding outside, he must be wretchedly wet by now. Merry tried to let that thought console her.
It was very late when they stopped at an inn. She was so tired and travel-battered, she barely glimpsed Devon in the scattered flashes of impression she received in the short walk through the yard where wood, horses, and men were dissonantly pitched drums for the deluge from the skies. There was a chambermaid, hot food, and a feather bed with a warming pan in a private room. Before first light the chambermaid was back and the order was reversed: bed to food to cold yard to carriage, while she was still stunned with sleepiness.
Exhaustion dulled her to the landscape, and she had missed much in the darkness. The rain had stopped, though a glance out the window might show her a ferny stand of oak rising from a coiling base of blue mist.
By midmorning, when the carriage stopped at a pretty inn of dressed stone, Merry’s legs were stiff, her behind felt like it had been beaten with a grain shovel, and she was awake enough to be frightened and desperate. A meal of tea and toast, lamb chops and eggs was brought to her in a small parlor, deserted except for two middle-aged ladies in silk pelisses and their apricot poodle, who jumped from lap to lap eating potatoes from their plates.
It had been months, and seemed years, since Merry had been among gentlewomen. They seemed like creatures from another life; and though it didn’t occur to her to ask them tohelp her, because the lady facing her reminded Merry of Aunt April, if only in her air of refinement, Merry couldn’t stop herself from smiling wistfully at her. She had forgotten how she herself must appear—disheveled, oddly dressed, seemingly alone. The look Merry received back was repelling in the extreme, and Merry dropped her eyes to her plate, aching with hurt, and wondering how low it was possible to sink.
Somewhere in this unfriendly land there was, perhaps, one friend. Aunt April might be here. If theGuineverehad sailed before it was discovered that Merry had disappeared, Aunt April might have sailed on to England. In wartime surely it would not have been possible to return promptly to the United States to search for her missing niece however much that might be her wish. It was another point for the list of ironies that in a sense Devon was right about her. If there was a way to do it, she was going to escape from him and find Michael Granville. She had many reasons to be wary of that man, given the lies he had been spreading about her, even factoring out Morgan’s horrifying claim that some action of Granville’s had led to the death of Devon’s sister, but Granville was the only man who would be able to tell Merry where she could find her aunt. As a knight of the realm, Granville must be relatively easy to locate. She supposed she was obliged to Devon for giving her the idea.
After weeks of hardtack, toast with fresh-churned butter was a delight, even cold and under these uncongenial circumstances. She was eating the last bites as the ladies left the parlor to walk their little dog. Immediately after their departure Devon came in, his unbuttoned greatcoat open over the long line of his leather breeches. From the energy in his step no one would have been able to guess that he had spent the better part of the last two days in the saddle. She tried to banish her feeling of utter defeat as he looked straight into her eyes, picked up her cloak from the back of her chair, and held it open.
“Come” was all he said. She didn’t move. “Are you finished?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Well? Then, let’s go.” She stood but made no move for the door.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
She could hear the exhaustion in her own voice as she said, “You’ve set too fast a pace. A moment ago I drifted off and almost woke with my nose in a lamb chop. If you could only let me have the afternoon to rest—”
