The Maidenhead

by Parris Afton Bonds

  And she had to admit that the love consuming her with such an intensity was an agony. No, worse. It was a happiness that mocked her with its elusive fulfillment. If only she could make her mind a blank, her body rigid and unyielding whenever he came to take her unto him.

  Since last night, when he revealed his appalling past to her, he had not approached her, had not even come to bed. She knew he was still wrestling with the demons of his memory.

  Just as she knew he would nevertheless come to her before the week was out . . . and before her fertile period was over.

  With a forlorn sigh, she opened her eyes and espied through the river birches a ship gliding into view. She had learned from Mad Dog that great fleets of tobacco ships sailed each year down through the rivers and creeks of Virginia to the mouth of Chesapeake Bay to head out through the capes for England, returning a few months later with all kinds of manufactured goods—the latest books, gowns, silver bowls, stockings, carpenter’s tools, and farm implements.

  But this ship was familiar. It was the Maidenhead. Mad Dog was already striding down the hill to the pier. He passed through the wharf-house to wait at the end of the dock for the long- awaited vessel to put in.

  Wiping her paint-wet fingers on her apron, Modesty started down the oystershell path and emerged from the cool shade of the wharfhouse to join Mad Dog on the dock as he watched, his hands planted low on his hips. Aboard deck, sailors were scurrying to shouted commands to lower sails and anchor.

  Within minutes, Jack was striding down the gangplank. For just a moment, she had the keen sense of being back in London at the alehouse and Jack swaggering in, bedecked in fine clothes, his feathered hat tucked under one arm. His starched ruff was dazzling white against his suntanned face, his curling locks unevenly streaked with varying shades of gold by the relentless sun.

  Over a year had passed since his capture at the Bridewell Dock Grog Shop, and her infatuation for Jack had been replaced by a consuming love for Mad Dog that was like a strange and sublime fire.

  By the time she reached the caravel, the two men were deep in conversation. A third man had joined them. He was slender, and a scattering of freckles adorned what would have been a pleasant face were it not for a welted scar rippling across the right cheekbone. He wore canvas trousers and a sleeveless leather jerkin.

  Jack broke off and swept her up in his arms, oblivious to Mad Dog’s presence. “Modesty,” he rejoiced, "I thought of you a hundred times!"

  Uncomfortable under Mad Dog’s speculative gaze, she wriggled free. “Once for each time yew lifted a purse?"

  His expression one of affronted innocence, he held up his palms. “Not once, by my troth. For the first time, I have been selling myself, my word, my integrity.”

  She almost laughed, but she could see he was quite serious.

  ‘"Tis true," the scarred man put in. “Jack here saved me arse even."

  “My first mate," Jack said, introducing the man. “Elias Johnson. And what he isn’t telling you is that I won him off Radcliff in a game of cards."

  “Yew cheated,” she asserted.

  "I told you, I’m a changed man. I found out that I could not give up the role as planter representative, though verily I wanted to bolt several times. But there was a yoke of responsibility that attached itself to me like a tick each time a planter entrusted me with his crops.”

  "I am glad you did not bolt,” Mad Dog said drily, "or else I would have had to take time off from planting to hunt you down. And hunt you down I would."

  “On my honor, I behaved." He paused, then flashed her that roguish grin that Modesty knew had captured many a female heart. "Well, that’s not entirely true. I did feel compelled to relieve a certain gentleman of his gold-buckled hat band."

  This time she did laugh. "I am comforted. I would have been sorely distressed to think a sense of decency corrupted yewr great gift.”

  "As I would yours,” Mad Dog told her. He draped a possessive arm across her shoulders. "Shall we show our planters’ representative samples of your great gift?”

  She sobered. "If me forgeries don’t pass muster in England, ’tis yewr head, Jack.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and said in a bantering voice, “I’m mighty attached to it.” Laughing, almost as if in camaraderie, the four strolled along the wharf and back up the shell path toward the cabin. Even stolid-looking Juana displayed her stained-toothed grin for Jack and trotted out a keg of the potent peach brandy.

  Mad Dog tugged on a full-bodied shirt with sleeves gathered at the wrists. Then he settled onto the low stool and lit his pipe. The wreath of smoke concealed the expression in his winter-gray eyes, but she knew he was watching her and Jack. Speculating about the depth of their relationship, was he now?

  Pleasure that she could make Mad Dog jealous exhilarated her. She laughed more, talked more, and mildly flirted with her old friend as well as his first mate. After a while, she flung her quiet husband a measuring glance.

  He looked unimpressed.

  A frisson of fear traveled down her spine. She had always felt somewhat smug about her skill at distracting a dupe. Beautiful she might not be, but boring she never would be. Or so she had thought.

  Had she overestimated her asset? If it wasn’t jealousy that had flickered in Mad Dog’s eyes, what was it? She reviewed the conversation of the night before, and with a sickening feeling realized that it wasn’t love but merely proprietary interest that he had professed.

  "Well, Modesty,” Jack was saying, “are you going to show me your handicrafts?"

  Setting aside her noggin of brandy, she drew the rolled sheaths of parchment from the double chest and unfurled them on the board table. "What do yew think, Jack? Yew are the master of make believe. Will they do?"

  He quaffed the last of his brandy before putting down his own noggin to better view her work. With narrowed eyes, he scanned the documents, then said, "If you can duplicate Radcliff’s signature onto these, then, aye. We should be able to bring down the mighty man. At the most, I’d say nine months."

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  “Nine months,” Mad Dog whispered with arrogant male assurance. His breath tickled her ear and made her tingle all over. His hands held her wrist against the wharfhouse plank walls. "Nine months from tonight and you bear my child.”

  She felt as if her heart were galloping. Her senses were extraordinarily acute: the wall’s rough cedar planking abrading the back of her hands, the moldy scent of green dampness, the slap of the water against the pilings, the dance of rain pelting the cypress shingles. And now the taste of his mouth, his tongue leisurely exploring her lips, her teeth, her tongue.

  She pushed away. “Yew are so sure?" she rasped, her voice all but drowned out by a clap of summer thunder.

  They had walked Jack and Elias back to the caravel after dinner, bidding the two men good night when the rain had started. As they turned to leave, her hurried steps had thudded against the wharf boarding. Mad Dog's command to “Wait” had stopped her heart as well as her steps.

  He aligned his hands on either side of her face. His eyes were silver stars against the dense darkness of the wharfhouse. “Aye, I am sure. As I’ve never been before. Can you not feel the white-hot heat between us? Our passion is as fierce as the summer electrical storm. Tonight you will conceive my son."

  She wanted to feel his mouth possessing hers again in a kiss that dominated all her thoughts and feelings, so that she would not remember that this was not love, only lust.

  But instead he tore off her coif and buried his face in the soft cloud of new hair that drifted loose about her face. At the same time, he grasped her skirts and pushed them up around her hips.

  Her hands, released from their human manacles, fumbled feverishly at his breeches’ buttons. Hot and hard, his erection pressed against her belly. Her hands cupped his massive organ, and she went on her knees. She had never experienced this urgency, this need of him before. Mayhaps he was right. Tonight was meant for his filling her with his se
ed.

  "No," he said hoarsely as her mouth explored his length. He pressed her on down onto a bed of coiling hemp and began kissing her everywhere. He seemed out of control. Her neck, her cheek, the rising mound of one breast—they all felt the heat of his torrid kisses.

  Yet it was with gradual love play that he sheathed himself inside her folds of wet, soft velvet.

  She groaned with pleasure, and he clapped a hand over her mouth. She had forgotten the nightwatch aboard the Maidenhead, anchored only yards away.

  Then his taking of her, so fierce, so furious, altered its tempo. This was unexpected, uncharacteristic of their volcanic passion. His lips returned to lavish silken kisses over her cheeks, her temples, her chin. He stroked her damp hair back from her face. "Sash, slowly, my accomplished adventuress."

  "Why? Why this . . . this tenderness?”

  His dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. "Why, simply because I want my son conceived in tenderness."

  With that, he began a concentrated control of his movements in and out of her. She could feel his total focus on her body. The result was an ever-expanding awareness of the two of them moving in a cooperative unison that brought a much more explosive ecstasy.

  The prolonged pleasure was unsustainable. Her fingers curled, her legs stiffened, she arched into him. His mouth absorbed her outcry. Afterwards, she could not look at him but kept her eyes closed.

  He kissed away the inexplicable tears that seeped from beneath her closed lids. '"Tis all right," he said, holding her against his length and stroking her reassuringly, as a man would a wild mare he is trying to induce into captivity.

  It was more than all right. It was like dying and going to heaven. But she wasn’t going to tell him that if he didn’t know. Instead she said, "If I am indeed carrying yewr child now, then I have a right to know yewr real name."

  He grunted, tried to move away, but she held fast to him. "A son shouldn’t have a father named Mad Dog,” she said, running her fingers over his beard-stubbled jaw.

  "Inigo.”

  "Wot?”

  "You heard me,” he growled. "Inigo. Inigo Jones.”

  Her peel of full-throated laughter was irrepressible.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Before proceeding to London, the Maidenhead put in at Jamestown. Disembarking for the Publick Times were the burgesses and their families from upriver Henrico, as well as the governor’s new chaplain and his wife. Watching them leave the ship, Jack felt the knots ease from his shoulders. His masquerade had not been detected. He wondered how well he would fare as he mingled with the crowds.

  Jack knew from his business encounters with the colonists that every July Jamestown’s population of three hundred doubled almost overnight for the convening of the General Assembly and the courts, as well as for the Publick Times.

  Since it was the social, cultural, and political center of the Virginia Colony, all sorts of people descended on the capital to seek pleasure as well as to settle their legal concerns and to conduct business. Rich Tidewater aristocrats who had townhouses in Jamestown rubbed elbows with the small freeholders in the Piedmont, the rolling country beyond the fall line of the rivers. Merchants and dockhands from the cape wharves mingled with settlers searching for pitch, tar, and turpentine in the Dismal Swamp. German ironworkers jostled with frontiersmen from deep in Indian territory, and the members of the Council of State mixed with planters who had lawsuits to plead in the General Court and with yeomen who had petitions to lay before the assembly.

  Jack's passengers had boasted that the shops would be stocked with the latest goods imported from London as well as with the products of local craftsmen and that the town would hum with activity for the entire week. There would be horse races, fairs, and formal balls. Auctions would be held at various taverns and on Market Square.

  Though he was relieved to see his charges melt into the crowds, he knew he would see them all again that evening at the opening ball at the State House. But Jack’s real uneasiness came from being under Mad Dog’s watchful eye. Just in case the perceptive planter might suspect something amiss, Jack felt compelled to put in an obligatory appearance for the sake of the man’s mercantile interest.

  His own mercantile interest lay elsewhere.

  The caravel’s rich cargo could find lucrative markets in the Far East with exotic names like Java, Macao, and Malaysia. Aye, the spice trade would be profitable—and would keep the Maidenhead far from the vengeful tentacles of the English high admiral who was Mad Dog’s uncle.

  In less than three days, Jack could vanish with the Maidenhead on the vast, trackless sea.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  “These crude provincials dance as well as the best London society," the outgoing governor told Wyatt, the new one. The two men stood just inside the State House doorway.

  Sitting nearby, Rose overheard the statement and had to smile. The "provincials" included ladies, knights, and younger sons of aristocrats who, prevented from inheriting by the law of entail came as adventurers to this promised land. Even a baron—Jack Morley, her rescuer.

  She was one of those adventurers, wasn’t she? Coming to the New World and leaving all that was familiar had taken a courage she hadn’t know she had. At home, she had always been the biddable, submissive daughter. Here, in this wild Eden, she could sense herself gradually changing, growing stronger in spirit. No longer did she cry out inside, Love me. Please someone love me.

  She curled between her fingers the downy, flaxen hair of her sleeping infant, whom she cradled in one arm. Strange, she could not remember the face of her son's father.

  Instead, another face, Jack’s, occasionally intruded on her thoughts. A gallant man, a gentleman, a handsome man. Not that looks were important to her. Dear Walter was certainly not handsome by any means.

  It would have been wonderful had Walter loved her with the passion that Reverend Dartmouth loved Clarissa. It was so obvious in the minister’s adoring eyes.

  On the opposite side of the elongated room, sitting on a long bench with several other women, Clarissa tapped her foot impatiently to the lively music played by a backwoods fiddler and by old Clem on his flute. But the minister’s puritan calling forbade him from asking his wife to dance. A shame, Rose thought.

  A shame too that Walter was preoccupied in seeking out the German ironworkers to help him finish the remaining sections of his sawmill. Rose would have loved to dance—reels, jigs, hornpipes, contra dances—any and all of them.

  Then again, how fortunate she was that she had a good husband, a man willing to work hard for her and the boys.

  She sighed and turned her attention to her baby, who was trying to nuzzle her milk- engorged breast. She shifted him against her shoulder and began patting his back. "Go back to sleep, little one," she murmured along with the music. “Go back to—"

  "He’s so precious!" Annie cooed beside her. "Oh, let me hold him, Rose.”

  Feeling motherly pride, Rose passed her baby to the big-boned young woman, who was now large with child herself. Coming to her feet, Rose smoothed out her crumpled apron. “'E’s a handful. Bart and Isaac are tame compared to Jack.”

  "Where are the rascals?” Annie asked, then rubbed the baby's tiny nose with her own.

  "Outside with their pa."

  Annie raised her head and grinned. "Sampling the beer as me Jamie is no doubt doing."

  But Rose wasn't listening. Her gaze locked on Jack Morley, who had just entered the room. He was dressed in a black velvet doublet and thigh-high leather boots fastened to his Venetian breeches by points. A short Spanish cape was draped from one shoulder so that the scarlet lining showed.

  Her hands outstretched, she crossed toward him. "Jack! Jack Morley! I 'adn't thought ever to see 'oo again!"

  Uneasiness flashed across his face and quickly disappeared. “Rose? I wasn’t certain it was you." He gestured at her slim, corseted waistline. "You look so . . . slender.”

  Her laughter was light, airy. Like she felt at that moment. "I
imagine I looked a bit bloated back then.” She nodded toward the baby. ‘"Tis 'oor doing, if you remember that—”

  She stopped and flushed, realizing what she had said. Later, she knew Annie would be all questions. "I mean, about 'elping bring the babe into the world and all."

  He leaned over to view the object in question.

  "Why, he has become a handsome lad! When first I saw the wee one, he was as ugly as a monkey.”

  Annie and she laughed, but her laughter ebbed when she saw that now the Earl of Monteagle was embarrassed. She knew why. They both were recalling that very intimate moment when he helped deliver her baby.

  She lowered her voice. She knew Annie was eavesdropping over the music. '"Is name is Jack, you know."

  He straightened, shook his head. “No. I did not." He seemed at a loss for words. Even anxious.

  "I would like to introduce 'oo to me 'usband. If 'oo don't mind, 'e’s outside—”

  He glanced around the room nervously. "Would you care to dance, Rose?"

  His request took her by surprise. Polly was dancing with her Duncan. John Rolfe and his wife, Joane, also shared the floor, as well as several other couples. "Well, I—I—”

  "Go ahead," Annie said with a puckish grin. “I can manage little Jack just fine."

  The dance was a round. She barely recognized these new colonial steps, but Jack’s hands, lightly lifting her fingers at the appointed intervals, helped guide her through the set. At one close, lingering pass, he inclined his head and murmured, “You smell sweet. Of milk."

  She thought he was belittling her. A hasty peek up into his sun-burnished face told her he meant no harm. Rather, she thought she detected a bemused expression. She felt herself blushing. This man knew her better than her husband. Incredible. “Little Jack has a mighty appetite for me milk," she mumbled.

  At that moment, she spotted her husband standing in the doorway with Isaac and Bart. “Oh, my menfolk are here. I can introduce ’oo now. My husband Walter is the tall one there.”