Riding Shotgun

by Rita Mae Brown

  She shifted in her chair. Smudge grumbled. “I’m not a perfect person.” The cats twitched their ears but didn’t bother to open their eyes as Cig spoke in a low voice to them. “But I can’t see that I’m any worse than the next guy.” A flush of self-righteousness seized her. “Dammit, I would never have betrayed Grace.”

  She relaxed. She felt justified. She really was right. That fishhook snagged again. What did I do? Then it occurred to her that maybe she really was here to find out.

  22

  Marie’s porcine face, shiny and scrubbed, exhibited a sheen of sweat even on such a cold day. She stood in the middle of the back pastures and called to Cig, “Mistress Deyhle, you’ve a visitor.”

  Cig, a heavy veil over her face as she tended her bee boxes, couldn’t hear the servant. She stepped back, lifting her veil. The bees, more asleep than awake, stayed in their hives. “What?”

  “I’ll not be going near those bees, ma’am,” Marie, hands on hips, complained.

  “Oh God,” Cig whispered to herself. She walked toward the rotund woman, unfastening the veil from one of Tom’s floppy hats as she walked. “What is it, Marie?”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times, Mistress D, I don’t like the bees and the bees don’t like me.”

  “I can’t imagine why.” Cig folded her arms across her chest. “Now, what was it you were yelling at me?”

  “You’ve a visitor.” Marie, relishing possessing information, was in no hurry to relinquish it.

  Cig, alert to that, started walking down the lane without asking Marie who.

  Marie, huffing and puffing, fell in just behind and beside her.

  “You need exercise.”

  “I work hard enough.”

  “I know that, Marie, but consistent exercise is different from hard work. You ought not to be breathing so hard.”

  “I’m fat. Fat people breathe hard,” Marie obstinately stated.

  “Aren’t you worried about your heart?”

  “My heart?”

  “Never mind.” Cig realized no one in 1699 understood the connection between obesity and overtaxing the heart. Low-fat diets had yet to bedevil the human race. There was a certain wisdom to getting fat in winter in these times. Marie overdid it.

  “Don’t you want to know who’s calling for you, ma’am?”

  “Guess I’ll find out when I get to the house.”

  “It’s Patrick Fitzroy.” She pronounced this with solemnity. “He’s never called here before.” This was said with significance dripping off every syllable.

  “Ah—”

  Frustrated, Marie exploded. “Well, don’t you see, ma’am, he’s here to call on you. Master Tom has no business with him.”

  “What makes you think you know my brother’s business?” Cig sharply replied. Self-important tattlers rubbed her like sandpaper on a brush burn.

  “I’ve been in service long enough to know what’s about.”

  “You’re implying that my brother doesn’t like Fitzroy.”

  “If a man’s a Papist let him find solace in Maryland.”

  “Marie, for heaven’s sake,” Cig growled, “religious wars are for the Old World not the New. If he’s a Catholic he can worship in peace.”

  “That’s just it. There is no Roman Church so if—” she measured her words, “he’s any kind of Christian he needs to head to Maryland to worship.”

  “Church of England is good enough. If he has to sit through a service of interminable boredom, one service is as good or as bad as another.”

  “You haven’t changed,” Marie smugly said, folding her hands in her coat sleeves.

  “Good. Someone’s got to put you in your place.”

  “And it will be Lionel deVries putting you in yours, I should say.” The large features broadened in a wicked smile.

  “Don’t bet on it, Marie.” Cig saw Fitzroy leaning over the snake fence admiring Full Throttle. She hurried, leaving Marie to chew on the fat of their conversation.

  “Mr. Fitzroy.”

  He nodded his head, smiling. “Mistress Deyhle.”

  “What can I do for you?” she automatically said.

  “Ah—that is an offer, isn’t it?” He mischievously smiled.

  She blushed. “A modern turn of phrase—in London.”

  “That center of bustle.” He hopped over the fence in one easy motion. “May I have a bit of a chat with him?”

  “Yes, but you’ll have to have one with me, too.” She climbed over and walked up to Throttle, whose ears were forward, eyes wide open with curiosity. “Throttle, this is Patrick Devlin Fitzroy. Mind your manners.”

  Fitzroy studied the animal. “The finest specimen I’ve seen in Virginia.”

  “Thank you. I hope you’ll forgive my curiosity but Marie, ever the blabbermouth, says you’re a Catholic. That makes you an exotic, I suppose?” Her eyes smiled although her lips stayed firm.

  “Aye. We all find God in our own way.”

  “If we’re lucky.”

  “I’m not a priest. Theology escapes me.” His eyes ranged over Throttle. “If my faith troubles you—”

  “It doesn’t. Not a bit. Sure seems to get other people—you know.”

  “Indeed. That’s why I’m here. Some people have their noses out of joint but it’s still better than Ireland.”

  “Why?” Cig innocently asked.

  He looked at her, puzzled. “Parliament passed an edict banning Roman Catholic bishops and clergy. A Catholic can attend mass but then as a result cannot inherit land. Nor can I buy property. I cannot bear arms or send my children to the Continent for a Catholic education. Harsh measures. Do you know so little of Ireland, ma’am?”

  “No.” She trusted him. She didn’t know why. Spontaneously she confided, “I have no memory left. I feel like a blank sheet of paper.”

  “That might be an advantage.” He half-smiled then said in his melodic voice, “I am sorry, Mistress Deyhle. I’m sure it causes you pain.”

  “It does. And please call me Pryor. Mistress Deyhle makes me feel like a schoolteacher.”

  “Thank you. You must call me Fitz.” He held out his hand, palm upward, for Full Throttle to sniff. “Do you know when this happened?”

  “Sometime within the last year, i haven’t spoken of it. People will add on their own inaccuracies to my predicament, and I didn’t want to embarrass my family.”

  “Yes.” He understood perfectly. “You must be wondering what I’m doing here in this fine pasture.”

  “I am.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone ride like you. Strange as it is, your way of going has a flash about it, a boldness. I wanted to learn how you came by this method.”

  “Grabbed mane and sat down deep.” She smiled, using a horseman’s phrase.

  “Did you learn from anyone in the colonies?”

  “No.”

  “Indians?”

  “No. I taught myself to ride,” she lied, “and that’s how it came out. Tom rides more conventionally. You’re a fine rider yourself.”

  He smiled broadly. “The horse does all the work.”

  They laughed. “Would you like to come in for a hot drink?”

  “No, no thank you. I was just—curious.” He walked back to the barn, untied his horse and mounted. Cig stood by his left foot. “Please don’t take me for a rude man, Pryor Deyhle, but I beseech you not to marry Lionel deVries.”

  Startled, she replied, “Why?”

  “He’ll toy with your affections.”

  She looked up at him, her deep brown eyes clear and honest. “But why would you care, Fitz?”

  He stammered, “You’re a bird whose wings should not be clipped. Forgive me. I have overstepped my bounds.” He turned, squeezing his well-groomed horse into a canter.

  “Patrick Devlin Fitzroy…” she called after him but he didn’t turn back.

  23

  Snowflakes twirled down but not much snow had collected on the ground. The wagon lurched and pitched over the road as the
wheels crunched in and out of deep ruts. The sun peeping over the horizon cast long pink shadows on the barren trees. Tom, reins in his hand, grouchy, was half-asleep. Wrapped in blankets, Margaret slept behind him in the bed of the wagon. Cig marveled at her sister-in-law’s ability to sleep in the midst of such discomfort.

  Her skirt wound tightly around her ankles, Cig pulled a blanket tighter around her shoulders. She knew better than to strike up a conversation with Tom. Put out as he was by her insistence that they visit Wessex, he finally succumbed to her entreaties that she didn’t remember the place. He would describe it in detail, she’d shake her head and reply, “But, Tom, what good does it do if I don’t remember? You want me to marry Lionel, don’t you?” He said yes to that. She urged, “Then I’ve got to see what I might be getting into.”

  However, what truly provoked him was the news that Patrick Devlin Fitzroy had paid a call on his sister. Tom, no fool, knew a hunting man would appeal to Pryor.

  Margaret, wisely, had said nothing.

  Well situated on the York River, almost directly across from Buckingham on the James, Wessex stood to profit handsomely by the creation of a city at the former Middle Plantation. In time the town would grow, nudging toward Wessex’s southeastern borders. Land would shoot up in value. Lionel expected either he or his heirs would profit handsomely. If Pryor would marry Lionel it meant that both families would control thousands upon thousands of acres between the York and the James rivers. In order to head overland up to the Falls or down to Williamsburg or Jamestown one would have to traverse Deyhle or deVries land. If turnpikes worked on the Continent and in England, Lionel and Tom saw no reason why they wouldn’t work here. Both were shrewd enough not to speak of this, of course.

  Cig missed the sweet hills of Nelson County, the ancient allure of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but the ease of the Tidewater topography impressed her. The sandy soils drained well except for the few swamps. The flatter land made travel easier in any century. The temperature was milder, although this winter felt cold to her. Then she remembered that there was a period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which winters grew fierce. She tried to remember where she had read or heard that.

  As Tom swayed from side to side, the reins slipped through his fingers. He, too, was asleep. Cig reached over, removing them from his gloved hands. Not that Castor and Pollux were going to run away but a light hand on the reins to a horse is what a good handshake is between people: a pledge, a reassurance.

  She remembered Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Not much of a fiction reader, she loved Twain. She reflected upon her situation, which was similar in that she, too, found herself in a different century. However, the hero in Twain’s book busily applied nineteenth-century mechanical know-how to Arthur’s problems, while she felt her knowledge was useless. She couldn’t build an internal combustion engine. Even if she knew how to make a television or a computer, there’d be no use for them. She thought she could take a stab at indoor plumbing if she could get Tom and Bobby to dig a huge cistern on the hill behind the house, then lay pipe to both the house and the barn in a two-foot-deep trench below the frost line. It wouldn’t be heated, but it would run just fine. However, the only materials available for pipes were lead or copper, both astronomically expensive. She’d bankrupt the family for convenience. She wondered if she could build a wood-burning stove. She’d need cast iron and a good foundry. That took care of that. She consoled herself with the thought that at least she knew where future profits rested: peanuts, the Falls, Williamsburg, and horses. As for tobacco, everyone in the colony understood that; Europe couldn’t get enough of the stuff.

  A sharp bump woke Tom. His eyes opened wide, he clenched his hands, no reins, then looked at his sister.

  He grunted.

  “That it for your conversational abilities?”

  “I’m still laboring under your whim.”

  “It’s not a whim. Would you want to marry without seeing your future home or your future relatives?”

  “But you have.”

  “I don’t remember, dammit. How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t remember!” She felt heat rising in her cheeks.

  “Pryor, I’ll remember for you.”

  “Oh, thank you so much.” She dripped sarcasm. “What the hell am I to you, a heifer to be sold to the highest bidder? Jesus, Tom, don’t you care what happens to me?”

  He turned to look her full in the face. “I don’t want you alone in the world. And I don’t want you poor.”

  “Well, I’ll survive.”

  “Don’t be so cocksure. Your mind is not settled.” He caught himself. “You’re coming along, though.” He breathed deeply. “There comes a time in life when a woman can be preyed upon by a man. Her judgment falters if she’s not married. Any base flatterer can turn her head.”

  “Not mine.”

  “You can’t be sure of the future. None of us can.”

  “Well—people do change. Guess we have to.” She half-agreed with him.

  “For better or for worse.” Tom reached over and took the reins so she could stuff her cold hands in her pockets. “Can you bend them?”

  “I can but my joints ache.” A little gust of wind made a snow devil whirl in the road. “Margaret and I could have made this journey. I could have made it by myself if you’d told me the way. I know why you’re coming along.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “You’re worried about Indians. You don’t really know why that man was killed in the road. You don’t know why we’ve been seeing Indians in the woods. And I bet we aren’t the only whites who’ve seen them either.”

  Margaret, awake, sat up in the back. “Tom, have other folk seen Indians?”

  “Here and there.”

  “You should have told us.” Margaret compressed her lips.

  “To what purpose? Tongues start wagging and one Indian becomes one hundred. Better to wait and see.” He changed the subject. “Since you don’t remember, Pryor, Lionel’s mother, the formidable Kate, possesses a sharp tongue, a sharp mind and no hesitation to use either. His father died years ago, when we were small, of bleeding lungs.”

  “Does she like me?”

  “As much as she likes any woman,” Margaret filled in.

  “Oh.” Cig was beginning to regret her insistence upon visiting Wessex.

  “She lost four children, you see,” Margaret said, “and I believe that compelled her to favor Lionel although she doesn’t hesitate to criticize him.”

  “He’s devoted to her, of course,” Cig flatly stated—they always were under those circumstances.

  “Yes, but he’s not unaware of her tyrannies.”

  “Oh, brother,” Cig exclaimed under her breath.

  “What?” Tom asked.

  “Just an idle expression.” She sighed.

  • • •

  Two and a half hours later they entered cleared lands, which in spring would be planted in corn, tobacco, and oats. Hickories, walnuts, and chestnuts towered in the pastures beyond. Finally Wessex hove into view. The central portion was a red-brick four-over-four home executed in the latest style, the beginnings of what would later be termed Georgian. The windows set in white wood provided a pleasing contrast to the brick. Crisp black shutters, each held back by a wrought-iron scroll, gave the house a formal facade, as did the fan window over the large double doors. Gray smoke curled from two of the four symmetrical chimneys.

  On both sides of the house in the back, perpendicular to it, ran rows, or ranges, of smaller brick houses; tiny dependencies housing servants, a foundry, salt storage, a carpentry shop, a wheelwright’s shop, and other shops that Cig couldn’t identify. Wessex, a hive of activity, astonished her. Most of the workers were English, a few were African, but what really knocked her back was the number of Indians on the property.

  Margaret, noting her surprise, said, “They’re here to do business with Lionel or to pay homage. They stay over in the dependencies or camp
by the river. They’ve a fondness for copper like our fondness for gold. Lionel trades copper kettles and flat pieces cut into foot-square sheets. The finished items he imports from England, of course, but he has a mine somewhere up the river. A few people have gone there—”

  “Escorted by soldiers,” Tom interrupted.

  “Why don’t the Indians take it away from him?” Cig asked.

  Tom smiled. “Because they don’t know how to smelt the ore and Lionel does.”

  “They also bring him copper to work,” Tom added, “from mines far north, where the Indians say there are lakes of fantastic size.”

  “The Great Lakes,” Cig said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what they’re called.”

  “I’ve never heard that.” Tom checked Castor and Pollux who were eager to reach their destination because it meant getting unhitched, rubbed down and fed in a luxurious Wessex stall.

  “The Indian names are too difficult to pronounce,” Cig replied, thinking fast. “It’s easier to say great lakes.” She stopped, staring at a young, tall Indian. “He looks like the Indian in the mists.” Then she noticed another Indian, the right side of his head also shaved, the hair on the left side twisted in a long coil about four feet, with little bits of copper and brightly colored thread woven into the hair. “But then—”

  “Powhatans.”

  “Why do they shave the right sides of their heads?”

  “Easier to draw a bow that way. The priests have the whole head shaved with a lock running down the middle. Each tribe of the Algonquins has a slightly different way of dressing its hair or cutting its clothes. The Iroquois and Sioux confederations differ in dress more than the Algonquins.”

  “Some men are covered with tattoos of fanciful design. And what strikes me as odd is how quickly they have learned our language,” Margaret said.

  “Why is that odd?”

  Margaret wrinkled her nose as a snowflake fell on it. “Not many of our people have learned their languages.”

  “Our grandfathers knew more than we do,” Tom said. “Father used to say, ‘If the Powhatans and the Appomatucks wanted to kill us they could easily have done so.’”