AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella

by Parris Afton Bonds

  He had asked of her if she were brave enough for the truth. But what was her own truth? Had she surrendered to him to broaden her options, should William accompany Adam on his return? Or, if she was to be honest, had she surrendered because she was drawn to him by a strong tidal-pull tug on her emotions?

  She should feel guilty. She did. But there was the matter of survival. She could not trust that he would return alone. And, too, had she not given him something in return for the second chance he had rendered her in their chess match? Something precious maybe to her, but not necessarily to him . . . her maidenhead.

  She felt off-center, disoriented; strangely like the momentous day she had smelled and heard the contagious, excited roar of the unwashed crowd jostling around her, that day that she had also heard the thuds of the executioner’s axe, taking from her the last of her family.

  And then from this morning’s misty memory, that last kiss, a lingering whisper near her ear, as she drifted in and out of sleep, before he took his leave . . . “Tis never when one deliberates, milady.”

  A warning? Her mind retraced the hours and minutes of the evening before. Twice ‘deliberate’ had tripped upon his tongue. Once, when informing her he took a lengthy time to make up his mind . . . the other, when quoting Marlowe, “When both deliberate the love is slight.”

  The sudden crying from her own bedchamber recalled her to the reality that was the tempest of her life now. Shaking off her apprehension, she returned to her room to swoop up the infant and work her fingers between its blanket folds. “Aye, Robbie, tis a soggy mess you have made. Sshshh, let me change you, and then tis feast you will on this holy day.”

  As would the rest of the inn’s residents, all three who could be heard below, traipsing through the kitchen’s back door. The babe cradled in one arm, she descended the stairs to find Bonnie Charlie, kneeling on one knee, as he stuffed split wood chunks into the oven. The old coot flashed nearly toothless gums in a knowing grin.

  She knew she felt different. Did she look that different?

  “Yewr bread’s arising,” he cackled, “so was yewr visitor last night.”

  She blushed as hotly as if she were still a virgin. His keen sight missed nothing. From a broken twig on the inn’s outskirts, which he scouted regularly, to assessing her varying facial expressions, which betrayed her every emotion.

  His hearing was somewhat less acute. Slammed upside his head by the flat edge of a Shawnee tomahawk, he had collapsed verily at the inn’s doorway shortly after she had taken occupancy. He had never left.

  Gantu was shoveling the shucked corncobs onto the tamped coals for roasting. His tall, powerful body was nigh as black as the coals. His head, which he shaved in the horse trough every other morning, gleamed in the fire’s light. “Heard the mon in the stable,” he said with his Caribbean English. “Though he might be one of those Powhattans bent on stealing Millie or Molly, you know? Helped the mon reshod his mount, I did.”

  “Was he . . . did he say anything? About where he might be headed . . . or if he planned on returning this way?”

  Bonnie Charlie cocked his mouth into a one-sided grin. “Reckoned, as how he wore the look of man who kept his own counsel, that was twixt yew and him. Will say he ‘peared the sort of man sure of whatever he undertook to do.” His weathered face, framed by a gray-brown bush of hair, crimped into a rascally countenance. “And I did take note that he wore the look of a man well pleasured.”

  “Did anyone milk Millie?” she asked, feeling her blush grow even hotter.

  . “Steamin’ fresh, Mistress,” Gantu said, his sentence rising in pitch at the end. “On the work table behind you, it is.”

  She sidestepped Skute to collect the milk-filled pail. The mangy mutt stirred from its position only long enough to whoof a greeting before it went back to biting its fleas. Wherever Gantu went, so went Skute, and vice versa.

  “I take baby,” Rasannock offered, entering and shutting the back door behind him. The sleekly muscled young man quickly set aside the basket of eggs he had gathered and held out his arms. Needing to make the pap, she gratefully handed over Robbie.

  Rasannock, or Two Spirits, a name his people used to described one with both masculine and feminine attributes, possessed enviable, long black hair, as coarse as a horsetail, caught at the crown of his head in a topknot. He wore leggings with a blanket draped over one shoulder and a purple sash around his waist as gracefully as any cavalier – or courtesan.

  Collecting the cow horn, she said, “On the hearth in the main room is a basket. You three might discover something for yourselves. It is our Christmas, you know.”

  Gantu grinned widely. “You give us presents, right?” His West Indies lilt softened his ferocious appearance, with rings piercing both his ear lobes and a single one transfixing his septum.

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “No. The Dutch Sinterklaas has left you garlic bulbs.”

  Ignoring her, he limped through the half-door ahead of the other two. His shriveled calf muscles in his left leg was his only imperfection in his superb physique.

  After he had been recaptured in an escape attempt, his owner had ordered his Achilles tendon severed Daily, she massaged his lower leg with sunflower oil in hopes of reviving the atrophied muscle, but she feared too much time had elapsed since the horrific punishment.

  She finished fitting the leather nipple over the pap-filled cow horn, then joined the three in the main room. She caught redhanded the irreligious Bonnie Charlie arranging with great care the nativity figures on the mantle.

  “Hated to see ‘em go to waste,” he grumbled. “Not that I am hornswoggled by the Christmas story.”

  “Here, give me Robbie,” she told Rasannock. “You’ve yet to look at your present.”

  A noisy feeding Robbie cradled in one arm, she sat and watched her three wise men, digging through the basket like overgrown children. She had created this. This family of misfits.

  Furred beaver cap covering his shorn head, Gantu was posing proudly, arms akimbo, his chin jutting upward. Rasannock eyed him with both approval and affection.

  She smiled. “Magnificent.”

  Fingering the razor-sharp blade of his whittling knife, Bonnie Charlie’s leathery face beamed. With the knife’s edge, he testingly scratched himself under his deerskin shirt. “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat, if this doesn’t beat everything hands down.”

  Next, Rasannock was preening around, one hand on hip, his other flicking his wrist to flourish the woolen panel of her red cape. Glee was written all over his coppery face. “I am pretty, yes?” he asked with a worshipping kind of simper directed at Gantu.

  Gantu rolled his eyes.

  “Verily,” she said. “Your people will be very jealous, when they see you in that cape.”

  Which brought her around to her announcement. It was a plan hastily conceived only that morning, but one she had reviewed and reexamined, and she felt it a sound one.

  Once Robbie was returned to his cradle and she and her three companions had prayed over the Christmas dinner, she said, quite casually, “Rasannock, be prepared tomorrow to return the babe to your village.”

  He was daintily separating the roasted partridge flesh from its bones. He paused, his plucked brows knitting in puzzlement, then flicked a sidewise glance at Gantu.

  “Tis best you stay with Robbie,” she explained, “and your people – at least, for the time being.”

  “What’s the tearin’ hurry?” Bonnie Charlie asked, wiping his greasy hand on his much-stained shirt. “Thought we weren’t leavin’ for another week.”

  How much to share? What had occurred between her and Adam was of a personal nature; yet, like the gentle flapping of a heron’s wings over the South River stirred the summer’s wintry air, her decision’s outcome would affect one and all in some way.

  Her gaze moved from Bonnie Charlie’s gnarled countenance to Gantu’s fierce one to Rasannock’s winsome one. The resolve she forced into her voice reminded her of her father’s, of th
e sorrow and anger and horror sheathed in steel words, when delivering difficult news to a terminally ill patient.

  “First, you three should know I am not Eve Wainwright.”

  Gobsmacked, all three stared at her, as if she had revealed she was the Good Queen Bess returned from the afterlife.

  “From last night’s visitor, I learned an old enemy who knows me as Lady Evangeline Bradshaw back in England is within our proximity – a day’s march north of here. “

  She cleared her throat. “He is a most powerful enemy. There is the possibility he may advance this far. For a while, I judge it wise to absent myself from here. To head in the opposite direction, south to Fort Christina and lose myself once more in a crowd.”

  A crowd. Its oppressing din and stench outside Whitehall that cold January day had only been exceeded by the three-month’s cramped and nauseating confinement aboard the ship bound for Fort Christina.

  Crowds . . . confinement. Childish fears to entertain now, at her age. She had always thought herself mature and logical . . . that life was what it was, and one made the best of it. But now, all too often, she second-guessed herself and fretted and feared unnecessarily.

  She looked first to Bonnie Charlie. “Can you carve a cradleboard for Rasannock’s back?”

  He nodded but asked, “Yew certain sure this is the best way? Gantu and me can string the English cur up like a buck and gut him for yew.”

  She fought back a smile. “No. He has troops with him. Both you and Gantu are welcome to remain here at Virgin Queen Tavern, of course. But I know you, Bonnie Charlie, feel most comfortable in the wilds of the forest.” She did not want him staying because of some errant sense of duty.

  Then to Gantu. “Among the Swedes, Gantu, with your skin coloring, you would most naturally stand out. Your manumission papers would be liable for questioning. Best you and Skute do not accompany me, either.”

  She could not afford to lose this new family of hers. Her mind scrambled for a solution. “If, within a month, it should prove dangerous to return here, to remain at the inn, we can all rendezvous at your people’s village, Rasannock.” But from there, she had no idea where next to settle.

  The three glanced at one another. “Travel would you alone to Fort Christina, Mistress?” Gantu asked in his sing-song patois.

  “I traveled alone from Fort Christina here,” she reminded them.

  An uneasy solitary journey on the bony mule Molly she had purchased with the near the last of her funds. How deep and dense the forest had seemed. The overbearing trees with their moss-draped arms shut out sunlight and shut off breath . . . much as had the crowd at Whitehall and the sloop’s crowd of passengers. Times like that her mind fogged, and she feared she was likely becoming unhinged.

  Gantu weighed her words, then grunted, “Guard the inn for you I will, until you return, mistress.”

  The old fur trapper wedged a ragged nail between his teeth to pick out food, then exchanged nods with Gantu. “Fort Christina, yew say? Been wantin’ to do justice to their alehouse’s cup. Guess, I’ll just fall in with yew on the trail.”

  If only William – or, worse, Adam, when he discovered she had reneged on her part of the bargain – did not pick up her trail.

  §§ CHAPTER FOUR §§

  Adam scooped the two dice into one palm. “Eight,” he said and cast them. Hazard was a complicated game, but the African Gantu was holding his own. They both had started with twenty-five red berries plucked – and at this Adam had to grin dryly – from the Lady Evangeline’s pagan, festooned holly and mistletoe garlands. Her wildly curling hair that defined restraint was equally as pagan, if she but knew.

  The dice clattered to a halt, showing seven and five. “Mon, you one lucky devil!” the blackamoor growled and forked over a berry from his remaining seventeen.

  “I would say we are both lucky we escaped the Caribbean work gangs.” Adam counted himself lucky that he could capitalize on this factor he had in common with Gantu, although the black giant had slaved as a blacksmith and brickmaker not on a Barbados sugar plantation but on a Jamaican tobacco plantation.

  Gantu swigged the last of the ale in his tankard. “You are good with the machete, right?”

  “Good enough to cleave a horn worm at twenty paces.”

  “Oh, mon, those I hate.”

  He grinned. “No more than I.” During scourges those green, close to sausage-size worms were underfoot, in the bed, and overhead.

  Gantu smiled dryly and nodded at Adam’s left hand. “But not so good with the machete that you did not lose a finger to the machete’s swipe, right?”

  “Aye, that happened my first year,” he conceded, “when I was thirteen. After that, I became quite good with the machete.”

  What was not good was Evangeline’s absence. Oh, the devoted Gantu had rolled off a rehearsed explanation. “The baby, he be worse. Our Lady felt it best to get him to his people hot damn quick, you understand?”

  Keeping her out of William Craven’s righteous eye until Adam could transact the land purchase had meant a trip back to the galleon, laying offshore, and sending Craven on a wild goose chase up the Brandywine River.

  Repossession of Sutcliff Hall depended on her. And finding her depended on what information he could glean from Gantu. He refilled the man’s tankard from the inn’s nearly empty pitcher of ale. “So, when did our Lady Eve leave?”

  Gantu flicked a dismissive hand, a gesture that might have resembled one of royalty in his African country. “Days ago. Saddled and bridled that obstinate mule herself. A sight to watch, I tell you. Her striking her heel into Molly’s bony flanks to urge her into a canter.”

  “In a hurry, Lady Evangeline was?” he asked, passing the dice back to Gantu.

  Gantu’s hard flinty eyes told Adam he had not fooled the African. “Like I said, baby be worse.”

  But later that night, after Gantu had retired to the scullery and his bed, Adam opened Evangeline’s ornately carved bedroom wallpress. Empty of most of her clothing. She was not traveling, she was running. Given his almost infallible instinct, he suspected she was heading neither westward to the Lenape’s Indian homeland nor north toward the strict Puritan and Pilgrim gray of New England. That left south, to New Sweden’s Fort Christina.

  She had jumped from the veritable frying pan into the fire.

  * * *

  It was a terrible burning inside, this fearful press of people within and around Fort Cristina with its nearly one-thousand residents, nearly a third of them confined by a palisade of twelve-foot-logs atop an earthenwork fortification.

  Wicker basket of dried herbs in hand, Evangeline hastily shouldered her way from the crowded market stalls with their shared, thatch-covered roof roped down against Atlantic gales.

  The cold was a welcome balm for her flushed cheeks. Leaning into the wind, she briskly strode the narrow street, one of the few paved, cobbled with Swedish bricks originally used as ballast for ships that transported the colonists. Overhead, the wind creaked the signboards that extended from the jettied second-story shops.

  She was on the run again. How long until it was safe to return to the Virgin Queen Tavern? If ever.

  More than a fortnight had passed since Adam Sutcliff’s nocturnal visit. It seemed almost like a dream . . . except for the lingering aftereffect of her body’s exquisite sensations, induced by the mere play of his fingers upon her touch-starved flesh.

  All that had been safe was disappearing in time’s mists with the appearance of Adam Sutcliff at the Virgin Queen Tavern. As it now stood, her future was fraught with the unknown. His amber brown eyes haunted her at every turn.

  Surely, he would soon abandon effort to purchase land from the Lenape. With the Swedish and Dutch colonies controlling the middle and northern seaboard respectively, England had had its work cut out for it if it hoped even to gain a foothold there. As it was, the English had controlled only in the southern seaboard colonies.

  The barber-surgeon’s log cabin with is rammed cla
y floor smelled musty because of its rotten rushes in the loft, where she slept on a straw pallet. Its walls were splotched with leprous mildew stains.

  In the surgery room, the main room, stout and balding John Croxton looked up from the man’s head, whose long flaxen hair he was cutting. The man’s face, tilted up, was covered by a damp linen cloth, prewarmed at the fireplace.

  While barber-surgeons were medical practitioners, they were most certainly not members of the Royal College of Physicians, as had been her brother and father. Barber-surgeons had no formal learning, but John, like many barber-surgeons, had learned his trade as an apprentice during the Thirty Years Wars. And unlike many doctors, who considered it beneath their dignity, barber-surgeons, at least, performed surgery on the war wounded.

  He had been, assigned to military forces united with Sweden, that great European empire and sovereign of the seas, and in Stockholm had met and married Gertrude Lindstrom.

  From haircuts to hangnails, the middle-aged Englishman pulled teeth and performed a plethora of services – bloodletting with leeches, tending wounds, shaving faces, and branding slaves. While he might be illiterate, he was most certainly skilled – but he had not been skilled enough the save their only child, a five-year-old son, from a mere boil that had abscessed.

  Apparently, boils were a minor complication compared to the prevalent ague in that mosquito infested mouth of the South River – or De La Warr River, as the English had named it.

  The strung row of black, rotted teeth in front of the Croxtons’ window had alerted Evangeline to the opportunity of employment. Her knowledge of anatomy and medicinal compounds had at once decided John. She was fortunate that he and his sturdy wife Gertrude had quartered her in exchange for her services.

  .

  Evangeline understood what was uppermost in Gertrude’s mind when the middle-aged woman forsook the kitchen to greet her with alacrity in the surgery. “Allt väl?” plump and peach-colored Gertrude asked.