The Maidenhead

by Parris Afton Bonds

  But when fellow students had gleefully tortured a Jewish mendicant, Patrick's fear of becoming a victim of their violence had kept him from intervening. So he had donned the pious vestments of the clergy to hide his eternal shame and perpetual fear.

  “The Powhattans have made an alliance with Sir Yeardley," he said, hoping to put his bride at ease.

  She gave a dainty little snort. "Mistress Pierce said that there are still wandering bands of Algonquins who don't believe in a peace treaty. A weapon might at least scare them away.”

  "A single weapon?" He had to smile. “‘The world’s mine oyster, which I with sword will open.’"

  "A minister who speaks lines penned for the theater?” she scoffed, her breath warming the back of his neck.

  “Ahhh, but Shakespeare wrote so well, did he not? A verse for every situation and every personality. Even thine own, mistress: ‘Your accent is something finer than you purchase in so removed a dwelling,’ he quoted.

  She said nothing, but he felt her stiffen. “Which brings me to question how thee, an aristocrat, came to be bagged with the other maidens of the God Sent?"

  Silence. The wind quickened and sucked down the forest-banked shore. At last she replied. "I was born bored. Mine was the ennui of a jaded princess. So for diversion I took up writing pornography.” She paused, evidently waiting for his response.

  He was shocked. He fought to control his judgmental feelings. “And for that thee was forced to flee England?”

  “Oh, not for that,” she said airily. "My writings left nothing sacred. Orgies, licentious ministers, saturnalias. It was when I wrote an archbishop into a menage à trois role that I was forced to flee.”

  Oh God, help him. He had let his carnal side gain control of his spiritual nature. Now he must make the best of his situation. He felt like a man on spring ice. He managed to say nonchalantly, “I would be most interested in reading your work."

  She was silent again. He could almost hear her ruminating. Woodpeckers, cardinals, and mockingbirds warbled while he waited for her next revelation.

  “Since you brought up the matter of work," she said, “I think you should know that I don't. Work, that is. I cannot cook, weave, spin, rend lard, dip candles, make butter, scour—”

  His mouth carved out a rueful smile. "There is no doubt but that I have bought a wife in name only."

  "After a couple of years, you may decide you have erred. You may even choose to divorce me.”

  "Mistress," he said grimly, keeping his eye on the trail ahead, "I have erred in many things. I have succumbed to the allure of lechery, the protection of falsehood, the relief of profanity. But if I have any virtue, it is this—I am steadfast. I am committed to our marriage."

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Persimmons, a fruit new to Rose, grew like ropes of onions. The countless streams, the limitless land, the abundance of game—she found it difficult to believe there had ever been starvation. But Walter Bannock swore that in the winter of 1609, the colonists had fed on corpses.

  “Land, water, wood," Walter was saying as he flicked the whip over the ox that pulled their cart. "Everything that England is lack—lacking. Its forests have vanished into pl—planks for ships. That’s why I chose Henrico as a site for my sawmill. While all of England is still saw— sawing wood by hand, I can build one driven by waterpower! What with the university being built there—"

  "The boys?" she asked. She was more concerned with how his sons would accept her. She truly hoped she could make them understand she wasn’t trying to take their mother's place.

  "They're staying with John Rolfe’s wi—wife.

  You’ll like Falling Brook. The house isn’t much. Abandoned by an iron—ironworker who returned to England. But close enough to Henrico to get supplies. Only a mile or so away.”

  “But how far is Ant Hill from Falling Brook?" Her husband’s mustache dipped at either end with his grimace. “Jones’s place is four—four miles farther, just before the falls.”

  “You don’t approve of Master Jones?"

  “I don’t know him that well. He went native. Keeps to himself. Tis your mi—mission I don’t approve of."

  Lightly, timidly, she touched Walter’s knee. "Modesty Brown meant well, husband. I can’t let her down. All that I need do is deliver her message to Master Jones.”

  He glanced down at her hand, and she quickly withdrew it. There she went again, always trying to please. As a child, it had been her father. She had felt sorry for him, the way her mother was always nagging him about how unambitious he was. Her mother had been born high enough to climb higher—and hadn’t.

  Then Rose had wanted to please Henry, a yeoman’s son, who had seemed to be interested in her. Her hand drifted to her rounding stomach. When out of gratitude she had given herself to Henry, he had lost interest.

  “Of course, owning a sawmill can be risky,” Walter said, reverting to his passion. "An iced-over stream could cl—close it down in winter, the easiest time to haul logs from the for—forest.”

  She listened dutifully.

  "A spring freshet might wash out the retaining dam and wreck the water—waterwheel. A summer drought could keep the machinery idle. And then there’s the ri—ripsaw blade and the up-and-down steel-edged saw to con—contend with."

  Her glance took in his missing finger. "I had not thought about how dangerous operating a sawmill could be, Walter."

  His words might twist in his mouth when he grew excited. Some might find him dull. But that was because they could not see his stalwart spirit. Hadn't he proved it by marrying her?

  Yet would he ever come to love her?

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  "Yew filthy old bawd," Modesty screeched at one woman who was trying to constrain her twisting, turning, and dodging. Jamestown’s goodwives were escorting her back across the green to the pillory.

  The Jamestown gaol had been a loathsome cell. For two weeks Modesty had been chained to an Indian woman imprisoned for prostitution for the third time. The two women had not had privacy to do what nature required, nor fresh air in the windowless gaol to relieve the stench of their own excrement. Their legs had been in one bolt and they had been bound to a post with an ox chain.

  In the past fortnight. Modesty had had plenty of time to learn Algonquin phrases from the Chesapeake Indian woman, whose name was Palantochas. Ka ka torawincs yowo—what call you this?; Pokatawer—fire; mockasins—shoes; tomahacks—axes; and Casacunnakack, peya quagh acquintan uttasantasough—In how many days will there come hither any more English ships?

  The arrival of which would mean more customers for the industrious Palantochas.

  In turn, the squat but chipper Indian maiden had learned some English phrases from Modesty, mostly ones of profanity that she had picked up along the Thames docks. "Yew arse rug! Yew bloody meat monger! Yew puck fist!”

  Even now, Modesty was making liberal use of her English swear words, because her two female captors were shoving her along faster than she could walk, what with the irons.

  Left on long enough the irons would rot the flesh. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen to her. Surely the irons would be removed by the time she was brought before the General Assembly. Already, she could see the councilmen and the burgesses arriving from the outlying areas, even though, according to Palantochas, it wasn’t yet the noon hour.

  Two soldiers in quilted coats and with baldrics worn over their shoulders to support their swords took over for the Company women. Quickly and efficiently, they installed Modesty in the pillory, her head and hands poking through its wooden slots. By now a crowd was gathering to watch.

  Then a stout woman approached the pillory with a razor's long, glinting blade. Great fear stole the breath out of Modesty. What had she ever done to these people to be so punished?

  One of the soldiers jerked loose the strings of Modesty’s coif, and out spilled her hair. Then she realized what was intended. "Yew lousy slut!” she screeched at the old dame who was shearing her like a sheep.
>
  The more she thrashed, the more nicks her scalp suffered. Her humiliation was more painful than the razor cuts. She swallowed back the acrid bile in her mouth.

  Suddenly she went still. Not because she had given up resisting the shearing, but because of the activity that had started up in the center of the green. Men were dragging in brush, faggots, and logs. They were piling them around a center stake.

  She knew then not to expect justice from the General Assembly. What she could expect was to be burned alive.

  Chapter Five

  Mad Dog stood at the back of the Council Hall, his straw hat tugged low. People eyed him askance, but they were there for the witch trial, and soon their gazes turned from him toward the front of the hall.

  The large room overflowed with spectators, who spilled out into the narrow dusty street. As Mad Dog surveyed the crowd, he recognized pioneers from settlements scattered as far west as the fall line of the James, as well as the twenty- two members of the House of Burgesses. Two men were appointed by each of the eleven boroughs’ settlements to represent them, and even though the burgesses had adjourned from their annual assembly only a little more than a fortnight before, they had returned today. Only death was accepted as a valid excuse for absence.

  Like the burgesses, here was Mad Dog back for the second time in less than a month. However, more than three years had passed since his last visit to the colonial capital.

  Yeardley was presiding behind the desk at the front of the room when the female prisoner was brought in. Spitting like a scalded cat, she scuffled and grappled with her two gaolers. Mad Dog was shocked by her appearance. Since he had last seen her a fortnight earlier, her head had been shaven.

  She had not been comely to look upon to begin with. Of medium height and bony, she had mismatched eyes and a nose that overpowered her fawnlike face. True, the eyes were lively and inquisitive, noting everything, and her nose was of strong and pure line.

  Pure, however, was not a word one would ascribe to Mistress Modesty Brown. She was obviously woven from the seamier side of London’s fabric. Mad Dog supposed he should feel compassion. After all, she had been someone’s infant daughter. Who was he to question what life had sculpted from that infant lump of Thames clay?

  The idea that she might be a witch he found preposterous. He put no faith in what he could not see. Demons, witches, warlocks—the only power those concepts held was the power that one gave them.

  Crafty, the wench was. He had to give her that, as evidenced by the bargain she had offered him.

  Goodwife Rose Bannock, one of the recently married maids, had brought Mistress Brown’s request to him. Or rather, the goodwife’s husband had brought her by cart all the way to his place upriver from Henrico.

  With a curtsey for him at his door and a blush that brought the color of her given name to her cheeks, Goodwife Bannock had relayed by rote the wench’s message: "Plead me innocence before the General Assembly, as you did your bondservant Jack Holloway. If I go free, I will marry you. In exchange, you receive fifty acres of additional headright land, a pair of willing hands, and a faithful heart.”

  Willing? Faithful? He doubted that the woman possessed those attributes.

  Something inside him had advised it wasn’t safe to come to the General Assembly, but he had come anyway. It was like that for him, that ungovernable anger that made him reckless. I am here, his mind shouted to his faceless foes, so come on.

  "Take yewr bloody hands off me!" the wench screamed at her guards.

  The two soldiers were quite ready to oblige her. A witch, especially an uncooperative witch as she, was not to their liking.

  A disturbing creature she was. Her hands bound, she stood erect, her cleft chin outthrust. Her eyes, which seemed abnormally large due to her shorn skull, blazed. They searched the spectators and found him. He did not acknowledge the question in those cat-slanted eyes.

  The members of the House of Burgesses sat apart from the ordinary folk. They listened as Yeardley opened the hastily convened session with a grave expression. "The Honorable Radcliff has brought before the assembly charges against one Mistress Modesty Brown of witchcraft. Of sucking the milk dry from Neighbor Harwell’s cow until it died. Of cursing our colonists with the pox. Of tricking the bachelors of the Virginia colony into giving her certain possessions of theirs upon which she intended to cast spells.”

  He paused and peered down his long nose at her. "Mistress Brown, thou hast forsworn the right to counsel. How dost thou plead to the charges?"

  "Yew jackanapes, has smoking the stinking weed clouded yewr senses? I didn’t touch the milk cow. Have any townsfolk succumbed to the pox, I ask yew? Nor have—”

  The governor interrupted with a thud of his mallet. "How dost thou plead, mistress?"

  Her mouth set itself in a mutinous line.

  Clay pipes ceased to puff. Their owners leaned forward, all ears. She stared down the room’s avid faces. Her silence was doing her plight no good.

  Mad Dog heaved a sigh and shouldered his way through the press of people.

  Yeardley was saying, "Then I hereby recommend the burgesses and the council recess to deliberate the charges against Mistress Brown and, if the woman be found guilty of such charges, I recommend the administering of the commandment in the good book of Exodus, 22: 18, that states, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”

  “I stand to defend the good”—the word almost stuck in Mad Dog’s throat—“woman of the charges of witchcraft.”

  The burgesses and council members, many of whom had half risen from their seats, jerked around to stare at him.

  Mad Dog turned to the assembled colonists. Like wild sunflowers, their faces were trained on him intently. He, who had once been insatiable for pleasure, knowledge, and glory, summoned long-forgotten skills to do what he had once done so well.

  What an oddity he must present. A wild man in long hair, looking for all the world like John the Baptist preaching in the wilderness of the New World, dressed in animal skins, his food locusts and wild honey. But Mad Dog found the deer hide easy to repair, and it dried quickly over a fire after being wrung out. “I beseech the council to allow me to represent Mistress Brown."

  "What?" Yeardley asked, his white brows climbing above his wrinkled forehead. “By whose authority?”

  "Her own."

  "Your credentials?" Radcliff drawled.

  So the man still didn’t recognize him. As befitting his position of representative for the London Company, Radcliff sat indolently at the table to the right of the governor.

  Yeardley’s cropped gray hair was bristling. “I am in charge here, Lord Radcliff, and I shall do the questioning." He looked at Mad Dog. “Now, sir, you have credentials to offer?"

  Mad Dog flexed his fingers, feeling the tendons and muscles in his forearms tense and stretch. “I hold a bachelor of arts at Oxford and was a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn." He paused, then said, “In addition, I served as a member of King's Counsel at the Star Chamber."

  The sound of collective breaths sucked between teeth whistled through the hall. The Star Chamber of Westminster Palace was notorious as a secret court. It was not responsible to Common Law, dispensed with juries, could examine witnesses and proceed on mere rumor, and could inflict torture and any penalty short of death.

  The startled look of recognition in Radcliff s face was instantly replaced with a smug expression.

  So Radcliff remembered now, did he? Their last meeting, thirteen years before, had resulted in Mad Dog’s ruin: with the annihilation of his emotions and the destruction of his mental faculties.

  "Proceed then," Yeardley said.

  With all eyes upon him, Mad Dog strode toward the female prisoner. Her eyes seemed abnormally large. He removed his straw hat and placed it gingerly upon her naked head, crisscrossed with minor cuts that doubtless had occurred while she resisted being shorn.

  Her eyes glistened, then rapidly blinked back any suspicious moisture.

  He faced the
burgesses. He fell back on those years of studying law and finding ways of evading statutes as easily as if he had never fled the bar. “As Mistress Brown pointed out, no one has come down with the pox in the previous fortnight. Neither have the bachelors who gave over their possessions to Mistress Brown given up their ghosts."

  His tone was casual, bantering, exactly right, he felt. "The primary charge against her, as I understand it, is of killing a cow by sucking it dry of its milk the night before the marriage ceremonies were conducted. I call Master James Harwell to testify."

  The round little man with pipe stem legs came forward, his flat cap in hand. He glanced nervously at his wife. The raw-boned woman gave a reassuring wink.

  “Master Harwell," Mad Dog said, "what did Mistress Brown ask as a fee for her services for you?"

  “A milk cow."

  “Did you give her a milk cow?"

  Harwell twisted his cap in his hands as if it were rosary beads. "Well . . . yes. And no."

  "Prithee, would you explain your answer to the court."

  "I gave her a cow that will produce milk."

  "Will produce?"

  "I gave her a heifer."

  “Which means?”

  "That the cow has not produced a calf yet."

  "Which means, does it not, that until a cow produces a calf, the cow can produce no milk?”

  “Aye.”

  Mad Dog turned back to the burgesses and the council members. "Which means, gentlemen, that a witch cannot suck a cow dry of its milk if it never had milk to begin with."

  Murmuring erupted again. Yeardley pounded his mallet for order. "There still remains the charge that Mistress Brown killed the cow. That she has the Evil Eye. That with one eye green and the other brown, 'tis considered a sign of the Devil."

  Mad Dog scanned the attentive faces. “Didst anyone witness Mistress Brown actually kill the cow?"

  Not a single person stirred. Then Radcliff rose from behind the table. The white ruff around his neck accentuated his falcon-red eyes. "I did."