When she was alone with Paxton, she barred the door and opened the shutters to the fresh night air. Then she disrobed and went to his side. As never before, she devoted her complete self, every particle of her being, to focusing on his recovery. She used her energy in so many ways—in her hands to heal, in her throat to speak her love, in her flesh upon his.
Each hour she could see him growing stronger and each hour further debilitated her. She was like a sand glass, with time and life draining from her.
That hour between dark and dawn, a thunderous noise echoed along the corridors of the floor below. The mob had broken through the donjon door!
Even Paxton stirred at the roar of enraged voices. His lids opened. Confusion at their nakedness and the shouting outside narrowed his eyes. He made to rise and fell back weakly.
“What – ”
"You have been very ill,” she said, feeling it an effort even to speak. The moment had arrived, she knew, when she and Paxton were balanced, when even another hour would tip the scales of life’s breath in the other direction. The time had come for her ultimate seduction of her lover.
She moved up over him. Bewildered, uncertain, his gaze roamed her face for answers. Her kiss was her answer. His eyes took light, and she knew he understood.
She stroked the broad planes of his face, his chest where the hair whorled around his nipples, his groin, the base of his sex until it was turgid. Paxton's hands closed over her and drew her down under him. With the riotous mob thundering throughout the chateau, he took possession of her slowly, lovingly, while the moment crescendoed. She saw in his eyes the reflection of that wonder in her own, that recognition of souls who learn how to dance through each other. She felt she was drawing near a most exquisitely powerful energy source.
Inside her, a voice, her Divine self, whispered, "You cannot merge until the heart opens.”
She let her heart’s chambers flood with her love for Paxton. A frightening feeling of traveling through the vortex of a tunnel of darkness clamped around her. "Love is a refining, sublimating force,” her inner voice said, urging her forward.
She fought off her paralyzing fear and continued her solitary journey. She could feel the centrifugal force around her, spinning off that which did not have life. What was happening to her? An energy was seeking through her its own kind, gathering itself with a perfect pulsation until . . . it formed one law, one work, one vessel. Male activity from the gold, female from the silver, to get from the union that which perfects the mercury of both metals. Both fused into one symbol. She understood now the secret that alchemy held for the seeker of truth of knowledge: that the union of male and female form one powerful, indestructible whole!
She held the flicker to the flame and felt the flutter of the Divine. Waves of energy kept flooding over her. Around her and Paxton shimmered a radiance, that ineffable light that haloed them as they drew higher and nearer the well-spring of creation.
Between them the circuit at last closed, and a sudden joy surged through them with their transcendence. Their conjoined energy had created something entirely new.
At that penultimate moment, her finite mind crossed the threshold to another dimension, and she recognized her soul’s counterpart in Paxton!
The wind sang, the leaves clapped their hands, and the morning stars exploded their fireworks. In that instant, she realized that surrender brought not death nor the inability to survive, but always the birth of something new. By surrendering, everything changed, so that she and Paxton were a part of that grand flow.
As all moments must, this one, too, passed. The tumult in the chateau was gone, and all was quiet while the universe spun its cosmic web of pearls.
Gradually, a strange, orange glow filled the room, and Paxton rose to walk across to the window. Beyond the chateau, a fire raged. “What is it?” he asked.
“A midsummer bonfire,” she said from their bed. Later, much later, she would explain to him what her intuition told her with a certainty, that the fire was Francis de Beauvais’s immolation on the faggots of a pyre. The mob had found its witch.
He returned to the bed, and drew her into the circle of his arms. She allowed her lips to curl in a lovely, subtle smile. As she had neared the moment of dying, laying down her body with grace and embracing death from the position of mastery and not fear, she knew that she was forever after the master. Or the mistress, she amended.
She snuggled within Paxton's embrace as he began to softly kiss that delicious area behind and beneath her ear, but he ceased this delightful pastime to raise on one elbow. His big hand aligned itself with the contours of her cheek. “You are wondrous beyond all women,” he breathed.
She reached up to trace his upper lip. There was such joy in her that she found it difficult to be serious. "Would you by any chance, sire, be needing an excellent alchemist at your castle in Pembroke?”
He would not match her light mood. “Pembroke is in the past.”
She was afraid to hope. “Truly, you do not intend to fight for England?”
"I am finished with violence.” Then, with a solemn countenance, he drew her from the warmth of their coverlets to stand before him. Next, he astonished her by kneeling on one knee before her. Tears glistened in his eyes. “I am your liege man of life and limb and of earthly and eternal worship, my Lady Dominique, my love.”
T H E E N D
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Parris Afton Bonds is the mother of five sons and the author of more than thirty-five published novels. She is the co-founder of and first vice president of Romance Writers of America. Declared by ABC’s Nightline as one of three best-selling authors of romantic fiction, the award winning Parris Afton Bonds has been interviewed by such luminaries as Charlie Rose and featured in major newspapers and magazines as well as published in more than a dozen languages. She donates her time to teaching creative writing to both grade school children and female inmates. The Parris Award was established in her name by the Southwest Writers Workshop to honor a published writer who has given outstandingly of time and talent to other writers. Prestigious recipients of the Parris Award include Tony Hillerman and the Pulitzer nominee Norman Zollinger.
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T H E MAIDENHEAD
Published by Paradise Publishing
Copyright 2012 by Parris Afton, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
Cover artwork by DigitalDonna.com
This is a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination. No part of this novel may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. This e-book may not be resold or given away. The Maidenhead is a revised edition formerly published under the title of The Savage. Any resemblance to characters living or dead is purely coincidental.
THE MAIDENHEAD
The Virginia Company of London seeks one hundred willing maids for marriage to bachelor planters of James Cittie Colony. Maids must be young, handsome, and honestly educated.
Gingerly, Modesty nudged aside the still-wet blue snuffbox she'd painted so that she could better view the advertisement beneath it. After hours of tedious work, her eyes ached. They were her bane. Needed glasses, she did. And a pair of eyes the same color would be faerie dust. One green and one brown was an occasional cause for consternation.
Her stepfather had been ought to say, "Tis a sure sign of the devil." And her cleft chin a sign of lewdness.
Little wonder her mother died early. If the plague hadn't killed her, her husband’s sanctimonious carping would have.
Modesty leaned closer to the broadside. Her nose, which she considered too large for her face, was a thimble's length from the print. Her finger, its nail crusted with blue paint, followed the words. Posted notices for available sailor berths shared space with names of ships in port and a list of merchants’ goods that included Moorish slaves and Oriental spices.
Paint fumes blurred her vision, and she pushed away the jar of cobalt blue. She squinted at the broadside’s date. March 9, 1620. The announcement was only three days old.
She read further. James Cittie was described as a "thriving towne amidst faire meddowes and goodly tall trees.”
The broadside stated that the Virginia Company of London had elected to invest in the importation of the females for the purpose of selling them off to the enormous number of bachelors who could afford to buy a wife.
She made a sound that was half snort and half chuckle. "Young, handsome, and honestly educated," she mused.
Well, at twenty-six, she wasn’t young.
If an hourglass figure and fair features were prerequisites for being considered handsome, then she didn’t qualify in that category either.
Her nocturnal activities would certainly discredit her claim to honesty.
That left the attribute of "educated." Aha. Now that was a quality to which her stepfather could attest, bless his shriveled soul.
Thomas Fanshaw had been a harsh taskmaster. Her fingers and her shoulders had smarted enough under his razor strap when her penmanship went awry or her scribbled sum was not the correct total. Thanks to his pious and exacting nature, she could recite the books of the Bible and quote its scripture. He had been a chorister in the Canterbury cathedral, a fact that hardly determined her life path. Or just mayhap it did.
When Thomas Fanshaw had allowed the village vicar, an Anglican with a strong puritan bent, to order an awl driven through the tongue of her brother Robby for swearing, she forsook both society’s God and its religion.
She sighed. To dwell with regret on the past was foolish. The hour was late, nearly four in the morning. At this rate, she would get less than four hours sleep before she exchanged her painter’s smock for an alehouse maid’s apron.
She picked up the paintbrush, dipped it in the jar, and went back to work on her latest masterpiece: transforming Lord Pemberton’s black snuffbox, embossed with his gold seal, into a blue one festooned with a fairy ring.
With a goodly measure of pride, Modesty considered herself one of the best of London’s craftsmen in the art of camouflaging or altering watches, seals, rings, and other valuable stolen items.
* * *
Located between Fleet Street and the Thames, Modesty’s run-down neighborhood, the Bridewell Dock area, with its narrow courts and alleyways, was the haunt of all manner of thieves, strumpets, and cutthroats who disposed of their victims’ bodies in the stinking River Fleet at night. Every day Modesty saw these lowlifes pass through the Bridewell Dock Grog Shop’s battered door. Even at this time of morning, nearing the tenth hour, the alehouse—the remains of a portion of an old Saxon castle—reeked of cheap drink, stale vomit, and piss.
Few heads turned when Modesty spotted the rakishly dressed Handsome Jack Holloway stroll in. Most of the alehouse occupants, as well as Modesty, knew Jack for what he was— a skilled pickpocket and a fencer of stolen goods.
In spite of rewards offered for information of his whereabouts, Jack swaggered around in flamboyant finery. Wearing a ruffled white silk shirt, red velvet suit, silver-hilted sword, diamond rings on every finger, and a gold watch dangling from his waistcoat, he cut a dashing figure.
Through the white haze of pipe smoke, his bright blue eyes found Modesty. She set the tin cup of ale before one sour-faced patron and waited for Jack to wend his way to her through the maze of God’s neglected souls.
Jack employed a team of artists to alter stolen valuables and owned several warehouses for the storage of these goods. She sincerely liked her nocturnal employer. He might cheat, steal, and lie, but he was the gentlest of souls. Wouldn’t harm a cockroach. She was l
ucky to work for him.
Yes, between the alehouse and her artistry, she was most fortunate. She had a roof over her head and food in her belly. Security was hers.
Jack wasn’t smiling, and she suspected her news wouldn’t cheer him any. He might find her repartee entertaining, but she sensed that now was not the time for salty byplay. Bluntly, she told him, “The snuffbox isn’t finished."
"We are." His mouth, as mobile as his hands, was set in grim lines. "We’ve been fingered. I’m just one step ahead of the bailiffs.”
Fear robbed her of her breath. She had no desire to be shackled in leg irons.
Jack grabbed her shoulders and shook her lightly. "Modesty! You’re gawking like a simpleton. We’ve got to do something! Quick!”
She focused on his face, where a roguish mouth warred for dominance with a deceptive angel-innocent gaze. Was it genuine concern that showed this time in those thick-lashed eyes? "I am. I’m getting married."
"My felicitations," he said without missing a beat, which was so like Jack. He was adaptable, a mark of their profession.
Gallant even in the face of calamity, he made a leg, then began to saunter back past the noisy tables of clothed primates. When the alehouse door swung open once more to reveal two burly men, he pivoted in the opposite direction. “Hide me!" he mouthed at her.
“The taproom." She nodded toward the rear of the alehouse. If luck was with him, and it usually was, he might appropriate an empty cask for temporary living quarters.
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