The Windflower (50 page)

The younger man thought a moment before he said, "James Wilding—Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury. His son is a young firebrand of some renown; the only brain, they say, on Armstrong's staff. He gives British Intelligence fits. But, then, they're stupid. I recall the name coming up once in conversation with Morgan. He never told me he had a connection with them."

"The connection was with the firebrand's mother, from the days before she married Mr. Wilding. The lady was British and has evidently been dead for some time. How Morgan knew her, or when, I don't know, but he had formed enough of an attachment to have placed someone in the household staff to watch over the motherless Wilding daughter, a tar from the original crew of the
Black Joke
named Cork; a rascal, so Morgan told your grandmother, but reliable in his way."

Merry, on the couch, had grown deathly white, her eyes wilting gentians. Thin, waving strands of her hair were glinting captives on her damp brow. This was too cruel. Lord Cathcart made himself the promise that as soon as he. was done telling Devon about this particularly unpleasant business, he was going to insist that she be sent to bed. Or at least try to insist. If there was one thing Devon was
not,
it was malleable. Cathcart went on, "Your grandmother corresponded with the Wilding girl's aunt in America at Morgan's request. Morgan seems not to have ever told your grandmother in so many words he intended one day to bring Miss Wilding to England, and yet that was somehow the impression she was left with. In consequence, she got it into her head to bring the girl to visit her—

"The devil she did! In the midst of a
war?"

"I'm afraid so. She seems to have been taken with the idea of having a disposable bride awaiting you who was of such little social consequence that she might be rejected if you didn't find her to be . . ." He seemed not to be able to find a way to express it.

"Sufficiently nubile?" Devon offered in a silky tone. "Poor Miss Wilding."

"Poor Miss Wilding indeed," Cathcart agreed grimly. "Your grandmother had few choices as to how to bring the young lady to England. She penned a letter to Miss Wilding's aunt that included a half promise to arrange an advantageous marriage for the young girl and gave the letter into Michael Granville's keeping with the instructions to deliver it himself and bring the two women back with him on the neutral ship."

"And you let that happen? With Granville behind me in succession to the title?" There was icy incredulity in Devon's eyes.

"You know I would not have," Cathcart shot back angrily. "But Letitia made sure I heard nothing of it until after Granville sailed. Wires were pulled at the highest levels. Your grandmother stands as close to the Queen as ever she did; I don't need to remind you how the royal family feels on the subject of your marriage."

"No," agreed Devon, pushing himself away from the mantel and setting down his untouched brandy on the side table with a loud clack. "You don't. From your expression I take it that Granville killed the girl?"

"So I fear," Cathcart said, regret searing his voice. "There's no proof of anything, but the girl disappeared from the
Guinevere
perhaps even before she was out of port. The girl's aunt is here now—-staying with your mother—and it was the aunt's belief at first that the girl ran away to be with her father; since then we've learned that the girl did
not
arrive at her father's home, and the father claims the aunt had no authority to remove her from the country and demands that she be restored to him immediately. It's become an issue at the peace talks, because the Americans are understandably skeptical about Whitehall's claim that we don't know where she is. . . ."

Devon was no longer listening. He had turned to stare at Merry. She was looking back at him, handfuls of the blanket clenched like knots beneath her fingers. Her sleepy lips were parted, and in her wide-open eyes was an expression of utter wonderment. Slower than they to understand what had happened, Cathcart found Devon's features difficult to read, though Merry, apparently, was having no trouble. She murmured something, an inarticulate flutter in her throat; and bolted toward the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Devon caught her before she could run out of the room, slamming the door shut. She desperately tried to kick him. He deflected it expertly, but she had spent a lot of time with Cat in the last weeks learning to defend herself, and it was a small, tired triumph to see that though Devon could hold her, it was not easy for him.

"I demand to be taken to my aunt!" she panted, struggling against his grip, her wrists twisting and turning under his palms, despairing that the resolute facial expression Cat recommended she adopt in all struggles with Devon must be losing most of its effectiveness with her hair flying over her face.

"All in good time, daffodil. Oh, no, don't try that again or you're going to arrive in front of her in little tiny pieces. How much do you think— Ouch!" He slid a bent finger between the small sharp teeth that had just clamped down on his forearm, trying to loosen her bite, watching sardonically as the feminine jaws opened only to close again ruthlessly on the new target of his finger. "Do you want to speak," he asked, "or gnaw?"

The finger tasted like leather reins and horse sweat. Expelling it from her mouth, she was brought up short by his long hard hand, which caught the length of her jawline and forced her face to look upward into his. "Enough, you little tiger. Tell me just how far this conspiracy has gone."

"What conspiracy?" she shouted back. "I've told you the truth from the beginning. Part of it, anyway. I was dragged from my bed by those monsters Cat hired to search Granville's cabin. I was there because of the ants. I
told
you that! I even told you"—her voice had begun to shake—"about Henry Cork."

"So you did," he said with false civility. "Coming to England, you were. To marry a duke?"

"I didn't know anything about that, and if I had, you can rest assured they would have had to pin me down like bobbin lace to yet me on that ship. All I knew was my aunt was homesick and he wanted to visit England." She broke, exasperated past bearing by the contemptuous rake of the hard gold eyes. "But there's never any use talking to you!"

"There would have been a great deal of use talking to me—if you had told the truth. In the tavern; that was your brother. That's why you kept those rosy lips sealed all this time—to protect him? That's rich. Do you understand what I might have done to you if I'd been a shade more convinced you were Granville's light-skirt? And Morgan ..." The taut grip on her jaw tightened unknowingly. "Did Morgan arrange to have you brought aboard the
Black JokeV

"I don't know. No. I don't think so," she said, "or else Cat would have had to know; he brought me aboard. And I'm almost sure he didn't know."

"What makes you so sure?"

"I don't know." She was trembling; her thoughts capered like leaves in a wind eddy. "Devon, please; that hurts." The grip moderated at once. "I'm so tired. You know it all now. Everything. At least about me, and as for the rest of it, and about Morgan knowing my mother ... I don't know. I can't believe it. I want to see my aunt. I want to go to her! I can't think anymore. Take me to my aunt."

"Not yet, Merry pet. There's something we have to do first." Devon glanced over his shoulder at Lord Cathcart. "Produce us a special license, Brian. Poor Miss Wilding is going to become a duchess."

Merry Wilding had borne up as best she could under forced confinement on a pirate ship and malaria. She had seen the man who held her fate transformed bewilderingly from pirate to duke, weaving with terrifying speed from protector to persecutor and back again. Now, at two o'clock in the morning, and for motives unabashedly hazy, that same man had the arrogance to announce offhandedly over his shoulder that he intended to make her his wife. It was one peach too many in the fruit bowl. Every last gram of her strength went into the circular upsweep of her arm, every bitter degree of temper tightened her fist as she planted a bruising punch on his chin. The force of the contact ripped through her muscles, wrenching her every tendon from wrist to shoulder, and her knuckles crackled like wren bones, but there was no question who was hurt worst. Two inches higher and she might have broken his nose. In the fireplace even the flames cowered.

At least half a minute passed before he could speak. Then, weakly at first, he began to laugh, though he had no breath to spend, and because he couldn't seem to stop the laughter, he collapsed into a chair, in a graceful descent of long-shafted limbs and tumbling blond hair. His shoulders shook like an isinglass jelly. It occurred to her suddenly that he was as tired as she was. The difference was that he had the discipline to disguise it more thoroughly.

"No, beloved," he finally managed to gasp, "we have our cliches reversed. You strike a man when his proposal is
indecent.
When a man asks you to marry him, you simper, blush behind your hand, and say, 'Sir, you do me too much honor—' "

"I wouldn't marry you—" she started, her eyes flashing.

"I know," he said, gasping softly. "If I were the last man Europe, For all the flax in Flanders. If I paid you."

"If my life depended on it!" she snapped.

"Be reasonable." Below eyes dewed winsomely by the side issue of his laughter, Devon was laying careful fingers on his jaw. "There's only so much mortal danger I can arrange on your behalf." He turned, smiling, at Lord Cathcart, who had been sitting in his chair as though someone had riveted him there. "Don't feel you have to stay to protect me. I'll try not to incite her to violence a second time."

Cathcart bore the look of a man hovering unsteadily between outrage and the strong desire to laugh in spite of himself. "A more | well-deserved punch I have yet to see laid. I can't in conscience walk from the room and let you bully a distraught girl into an enforced marriage for reasons of expediency."

"If there's one word that
doesn't
apply to this entire venture," Devon said with real feeling, "that word is
expediency.
You wouldn't use words like
expediency
to me if you'd been responsible for an eighteen-year-old girl left to wander at will on a Caribbean privateer. Please go, Brian. We're beyond chaperonage."

Merry saw that something in Devon's tone must have convinced the older man, for he rose, though reluctantly. Halting before Merry, he studied her eyes calmly and touched her cheek lightly with his forefinger. "If you shout for me, I'll come," he said and went from the room, closing the door behind him without force.

Into the ensuing silence Merry found herself saying, "He's
much
too nice to be a friend of yours."

"I suppose he is," Devon said equitably. "You know—or don't you?—that after the months you've spent on the
Black Joke
that marriage is the only thing that can keep you from social ruin."

The distant couch was looking very good to Merry, but her legs were saying, Don't even try. She sank where she stood, her knees on one of the lion-dogs that leered from the blue Chinese carpet beneath her. "Social ruin means nothing to me. I grew up in a farming village in Virginia where my aunt and I were as ostracized as was Christianly possible. I walked in the country, sketched, practiced on the pianoforte, and did embroidery on linen. Aunt April kept a list in the back of our everyday book, and I'll have you know that in my lifetime I've made two small shawls in white work; a raised work panel of David and Bathsheba; a set of eight needlepoint chair covers in flame stitch; four full-sized bed covers—one in candlewick embroidery, one in looped wool, two in crewel; three cross-stitch hand screens with birds;
and
six pincushions in red furnishing silk embroidered with clear and gold beads—of honeysuckle among ripe corn."

"God in heaven! And I took you away from all that?"

Resolutely ignoring the interruption, staring at the wandering hair strands that had crept forward over her shoulders, she said, "I promise you, Devon, I'll adapt perfectly to an isolated spinsterhood."

"I'm not so certain," he said. "My dear, with a rearing like yours it surprises me that you didn't bend to Mother Earth and kiss the feet of the first pirate who offered to abduct you."

She brought her fingers up to her temples, as if trying to hold together her afflicted headworks. Desperately she said, sotto voce, "I'll kiss any portion—within reason—of the first person of
any
persuasion who hands me to a nightgown and a real bed." Through coma-edged nausea she saw Devon stand, walk toward her, and lower his body cross-legged to the carpet before her. His palm gently lifted her drooping chin; his head had to tilt a little to gather her attention.

"Merry Wilding, I'm going to give you everything in this world you'll ever want," he said in a very soft tone. "Along with maybe a thing or two you don't want. And first, love, that means my name."

And in the end she had said yes. Well, perhaps not yes precisely. What she had really said was (irritably), "Oh, do what you want. You will anyway. When have you ever shown the faintest consideration for my opinion?" It was not a blush and simper behind her hand, but, then, this was not an ordinary marriage. And even as things .stood between them, there was a part of her that wanted as much as he did to marry quickly before one or the other of them had time to change his mind.

They were wed in the pink-washed country villa of Lord Cathcart's older brother, an Anglican bishop, strong-boned and gentle with narrow pale eyes. Devon allowed Merry to sit down for the ceremony, which was a mistake, because she fell asleep immediately.