The Maidenhead (12 page)

There was still his wife to deed with. Pride prevented him from asking his bondservant if he had seen the wench. She could not have gotten far.

He bypassed the privy and entered the barn. At his footsteps, a piglet ran squealing. In the far stall, the bay mare welcomed him with a whinny and a steaming stream of piss. Betsy placidly ignored him. In one comer, the hiding place of harvested pumpkins was exposed by the dusty sunlight filtering through the door. He stopped, listened, and thought he heard movement in the loft.

Moldy hay cushioned his footsteps as he crossed to the ladder. Scaling its wooden rungs, he cautiously stuck his head through the loft’s trapdoor. He should have known.

Her back three-quarters to him, Modesty was plowing through Holloway’s trunk. She tossed a woolen cap over her shoulder. Next a pair of knitted stockings went flying. Then an "Aha!" issued from beneath her breath. He watched her hold up something to the slivers of sunlight between the clapboards.

“I do not think you could wear Lady Clarissa’s brooch with quite the same aplomb."

She twisted around, losing her balance on her knees. One arm flung out to brace herself, and she ended up in an awkward half-reclining position. “Yew are becoming clever at spying!"

"A spy and a thief. We make a pair, do we not?"

"I did not steal the brooch!"

He climbed into the loft and, ducking his head under the low beams, crossed the straw- strewn floor to hunker down before her. He held out his palm. "Give it to me."

She made a fist. "I was going to see that it was returned to Clarissa.”

He pried loose her fingers. They were nimble, her nails short and ragged, her hand hard. "By way of Captain De Ruyter?"

Her mouth made a petulant moue. “All right. All right. I was going to buy me passage back to England. Look, yew don't want me any more than I want yew. I burn the bread, I spoil the butter, I knot the yarn. Juana can do the chores much better."

He studied the brooch, so brilliant in the loft’s dim light, then studied his wife. So tarnished. “But I don’t fancy Juana in bed with me,” he said quietly, calmly.

Her face crimsoned. In another woman he might have called it a virginal blush. Or was she merely warm because of the stuffy, hot barn? "How many men have you known?"

"Thousands.”

So she wished to play with him. He drew his thumb across the heel of her hand. She swallowed. His thumb continued on across the pad of her hand and then dipped into the center of her palm. He felt the tremor ripple down through her arm and into her hand. “To whom did you first give yourself?"

"A—a baron."

He lowered his head and kissed her palm. He heard her telltale rasp. It amused him. “Was it everything you expected?"

“And more." Her voice had a hard edge to it.

His head dipped, and with his tongue he licked the spot where his thumb had been. Her breathing sounded like the far-off rasping of a sash saw. The sound told him he was succeeding with his own game.

He raised his head. Her lips were parted, her breathing shallow, her pupils dilated. "And what did he pay you for your maidenhead?"

If those pupils had been torches, he would be in flames. "The gent paid me with his gabardine."

“His overcloak?"

"It was the blizzard of ’07.” Her eyes stared back in time. “I was twelve and homeless and freezing.”

This was followed by a careless shrug, but he knew enough about reading people to believe her. He felt somehow less for having begun this game.

Admittedly, the woman intrigued him. One never guessed where her words would land. She was as haughty as a marquise with the ingenuousness of a child and the cunning of a Medici. "A maidenhead for warmth,” he muttered, staring down at her roughened hand. "The equity of the exchange is somewhat unbal—”

“Me maidenhead for me life.”

He looked up. Her jaw was set in stony lines. Everything about her was hard. "I’ll see to it that the brooch is returned to Lady Clarissa.”

"I am sure yew will.” She yanked away her hand.

His shoulders shook in silent mirth. He stood up. "Our visitors will be drinking heavily. The rest of the day, stay here in the loft, out of their way. And out of mine.”

She peered up at him with calculated innocence. "Does that go for tonight, too?"

He felt a profound sadness for her destroyed innocence, then the feeling vanished with lightning speed. "If you are not in my bed when I am ready for you, I shall come and get you. Wherever you are. I will never again lose what is mine."

"Yew are the Devil’s dung!” she screeched as he descended the ladder.

He knew that already. That was something he had to live with the rest of his mortal life.

He left the barn, noting that Holloway was following his orders and rolling a heavy oaken keg down the oystershell path toward the dock, where severed slovenly seamen were already prying off the lids of two other kegs. The Jamestown cooper had charged Mad Dog enough shillings to make those kegs with their pliable willow-branch hoops.

At the cabin, De Ruyter and Schouten were feeling no pain. They were singing, in fact.

Their forearms braced on the board table, they leaned toward each other, grinning, their voices lifted in off-key lewdness.

“In the spring of the year, when the gism is too thick, there is nothing so dear, as the sassafras stick.”

Juana would not return with Arahathee and his braves for several hours, enough time for Mad Dog to fashion the shape his vengeance was to take. It was no wonder he appreciated nothing in life. Because until he took his revenge, he would be consumed with a tormenting, bottled rage. The sight of Radcliff, still alive, had uncorked it. Vengeance, blind and sterile and contemptible.

"Mad Dog!" De Ruyter called. "You are neglecting your company. Come join us."

Mad Dog filled their noggins to the brim, drew a small measure for himself, and settled down next to Schouten. The first mate’s lids were at half mast. “Your wife? Where ish she?"

He sipped the potent brew. “In the privy. With the runs.” That should blot the man's lust.

Schouten’s lids dropped, and he nodded. “It hashppens."

"Hickory dickory dock," the jolly captain launched into another ditty. "His mouth slid up my cock." He tittered and laid a stubby finger across his lips. "Sssh. The mistress mustn’t overhear.”

Mad Dog settled in to watch them and wait. As a young man, he had been left an enormous fortune of 120,000 livres a year by his maternal uncle. A wastrel those early years, he had drunk with the best but kept his head, more of an onlooker than a participant as life leaked away and night after night repeated itself.

His disgust gave way to a calm thoughtfulness. What he had in mind bordered on sheer stupidity. Yet with perfect timing and a little luck it was just possible . . . .

The afternoon’s late shadows subsided across the puncheon floor. Merrymaking could be heard coming from the ship. De Ruyter had passed out, his head lolling in the spilt brandy. Schouten was staring witlessly at nothing, when Arahathee appeared in the doorway. Schouten eyed the Indian dubiously, shook his head as if to clear it, and resumed drinking.

Arahathee, dressed in buckskin breechcloth and tunic, cradled a new musket in his arms. The hilt of a knife protruded from the high top of one moccasin. He stood tall, bronzed and majestic, as befitting a werowance.

“
Wingapoh
," Mad Dog said, calling him by the Algonquin term for good friend. He rose and indicated to Arahathee to follow him outside. The braves, numbering fifteen, fell back for their leader and Mad Dog.

On the landing below, the sailors appeared not to have taken notice of the visitors. The seamen were staging their own party, laughing, singing, shouting. Two were so drunk they were dancing like a couple and toppled from the old sea-bucket’s deck into the river.

Mad Dog led Arahathee and his warriors around to the back of the cabin and squatted beneath one of the peach trees. Its leaves had changed to a dull yellow, others littered the ground. Arahathee dropped down opposite him. His thin lips quirked and he nodded toward the ship. "Plenty of firewater."

Mad Dog grinned. “The musket you carry. Where did it come from?”

“A dozing Powhattan."

"That is not good news, my friend.” The day the
Sparrow
had put in at Jamestown, Mad Dog had staggered down its gangplank and set out walking with his knapsack along the James, vowing to continue on until he had outdistanced the sound and smell and sight of a sickened society and himself.

Arahathee, at that time yet to be a chief, had found Mad Dog nearly six weeks later. Wading through a swamp and wandering in a daze, he had been eaten up by mosquitoes and had a rash that oozed and itched miserably. His features had been hardly recognizable. He had learned that the red rash came from the oil of a poisonous ivy, unknown in England.

The Indian’s amusement had infuriated him. Perhaps his weakened attempts at driving a punch to Arahathee’s midsection had aroused the man’s admiration; certainly not his pity, for the Monacans, all the Indians, were incapable of that feeling. Pity could destroy a soul.

Arahathee had taken him back to the Monacan village and instructed a wife to coat Mad Dog's rash-blemished body with a paste. In time, he healed and was permitted to come and go among the Monacans, from whom he learned their methods of planting, the faces of the moon, and many other particulars that enabled him to survive in the wilderness.

In turn, he had taught Arahathee how to read a compass, a device the chief still considered magic, and shown him the workings of a lock and key. The latter had absolutely delighted Arahathee.

Mad Dog had learned that the Indians were not simple-minded but quick of apprehension, subtle in their dealings, exquisite in their inventions, and industrious in their labor. Far more than he could say for his countrymen at Jamestown.

Now he shared his plans with Arahathee in the Algonquin tongue. "I am taking over the ship in the river."

Arahathee inclined his head and said nothing.

“The ship’s chief and his subchief buy and sell people as slaves. I am giving to you the chief and his subchief to sell or keep captive, as you wish.”

Humor at the irony of the situation glinted in Arahathee’s jet black eyes.

“Those of the men aboard ship who wish to remain in my service, may. I wish the others to be escorted ashore—safely—by your warriors and set free at the mouth of the river.” With over a hundred miles of formidable forest and river between Ant Hill and the cape, he doubted that the men would have any desire to return.

“The ship?"

"The ship is to be used to destroy my enemy, Radcliff, and his estates."

Arahathee nodded. Radcliff s alliance with the Powhattans, the Monacans’ enemies, had not found favor with Arahathee. He frowned. "Why not kill the man, burn his crops?"

"That is not my way." No, he didn’t go for the jugular. He planned to peck the man apart. A field here, a shipment of tobacco there. A piece of flesh here, an eye there.

And he knew just the man to be the instrument of his torture. The perfect pirate. Since his own wife desired the man, the sooner he implemented his plan, the better.

Chapter Eleven

"You want me to wot?"

"Paint over the name of the merchant caravel.” In the fire-lit bedroom, Mad Dog traced the bow of Modesty’s lip with a callused fingertip. "With your artist’s eye, you could do that quite splendidly."

The amber glow highlighted his cheekbones so that they looked like pottery shards. His irises were like the silver glass beads the Indians coveted. And his kisses were as heady as the colonial brandy in which she had seen the Indians in Jamestown indulge too liberally. His woodsy smell in itself was highly arousing.

She knew he toyed with her, that he amused himself by awakening her grudging desire to an unsustainable passion that left her weak with the ache of wanting. Then he would chuckle with amusement when she was reduced to asking him to take her.

"Change the
Röter Lowe
’s name? To wot?" His plan to ruin Radcliff was becoming more devious by the day. Mad Dog had the knack for taking small openings and changing them into big opportunities.

"Oh, use your imagination." His fingertip mapped her chin, moved down her neck, and rested in the hollow of her throat. “You are so good at doing that."

Heat flooded her cheeks at his veiled meaning. Exploring his wondrously built body was a never-ending pleasure for her. Mayhaps because her sight was so poor she used her hands and fingers, her lips and tongue, so skillfully.

“Tis a marvelous gift you have," he had once told her in a voice suspended somewhere between exquisite agony and tortured ecstasy. That time had been mid-morning. He had returned with a turkey he had shot and wanted her to dress and boil it—and had stayed to dally away the morning.

Strange, to be so intimate with someone and yet not address them either by name or an endearment. His name did not fit in the environs of the bedroom, and he had taunted her that her given name did not befit the less than virtuous woman he had taken for a wife. Of course, neither of them had an endearing feeling for the other.

A smile curved her lips. "
Röter Lowe
uses ten spaces. So does the name I have in mind."

His hand glided over her hip and down the length of her thigh. “And what is that?"

The lightness of his touch evoked just the opposite desire in her. She wanted to be taken in maddening, demanding lust instead of this drawn-out love play that strung her nerve endings so taut she quivered. Her breath caught, her lids fluttered, in anticipation of the moment that his hand would move inside her thighs. “Yew shall see."

He cupped her shoulders and gently pressed her onto her back and lowered his head over hers. His long hair formed a dark canopy for their faces. He rested his forehead on hers for a brief moment.  Then, where her fingers deftly wielded a paintbrush, his lips deftly feather-brushed her own. "I would see. All of you."

The kiss she expected, hungered for, was not forthcoming. Instead, to her astonishment, he shifted his massive weight. Braced on his forearms, he slid lower over her.

She felt his beard-shadowed jaw abrade her chest. His hair, tickling her skin, followed in the wake of his tongue-tipped kisses. Kisses that moved even lower.

She tried to focus her thoughts elsewhere, to retain at least the freedom of her mind. She visualized the task he had set her. "The figurehead would have to be recarved, also," she murmured. “To match the ship’s new name.”

“I'm good with a knife," he said, his words smothered between her breasts.

Envisioning his aptitude with the knife at splitting throats, she felt the hair at her nape stand on end.

"But I am also good at other things," he continued, as did his adroit kisses.

Her nipples hurt, they were so hard with her pent-up need. She wished he would kiss them or tweak them as he sometimes did until she groaned and shuddered in quick release.

She had a notion that she surprised not only herself but him as well at how quickly her body responded to him, over and over again. However, he neglected her pouting nipples. Keen disappointment and frustration were undoing her effort at maintaining her detachment.

When his lips reached her belly, she thought he would kiss her navel, as he had done once before. She trembled with delicious excitement. Her hands covered each of her breasts, her fingers finding her nipples. She sighed.

“It is this I wish to see," he muttered thickly and parted her thighs before she realized what he was about.

With bewilderment and embarrassment, she tried to squeeze her legs together.

Easily, he kept them spread and lowered his head to view her most intimate parts by the revealing light of the flickering coals. “Ahhh, you are like a rose.” She could feel his warm, ragged breath, his fingertip lightly tracing the intricate folds of her flesh, separating each one. “Your pink petals unfurling one after the other. . . to reveal that inner bud . . . glistening with creamy dew.”

Her fingernails dug into his iron-hard forearms, hoping to stop him, but his tongue found the engorged bud and began stroking it.

She squirmed, wiggled her hips, anchored by his large hands. Inconsistent with her hips, her hands grasped his head and held him. Her fingers raked through his lion's mane as she felt the ecstasy of release flow through her.

Later, with their backs turned to one another, she whispered, “I know now why they call you Mad Dog."

He said nothing, but she could tell he was listening.

"Backward, it spells God dam.”

His low laugh was almost savage.

It was she who was damned. She had to find a way to leave.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

His arms folded across his chest. Jack stood just inside the wharfhouse, sheltered from the wind, and watched as Modesty carefully lowered herself from the ship’s fo’c’sle to the scaffolding that dangled against the vessel’s swelling side.

The fifteen remaining members of the
Röter Lowe
’s crew went about re-rigging the less than seaworthy vessel, but more than one sailor cast a peek at Modesty’s trim ankles encased in white woolen stockings.

Squatting men were busy with needle and cord, sewing and lacing the great pieces of canvas into more serviceable sails.

A strong northern wind buffeted the scaffolding. Modesty gripped the scaffolding rope with a white-knuckled hand, while the other began painting the name of the caravel’s new home port in cobalt blue.

Jack heard footsteps on the pier’s wooden planks and turned to see Mad Dog. The wind billowed his employer’s black cloak and long hair, making him look like some huge fiend swooping down upon him. Jack waited until Mad Dog entered the wharfhouse and was within earshot, then said, "She’s extraordinary."

Mad Dog arched a devilish brow. "The ship or the girl?"

He grinned. "I’m damned either way I answer that.”

"You are damned if you fail to serve me precisely as I have instructed. You understand me, I trust?”

"All too well."

Jack was ostensibly to serve as an intermediary agent for the planters: With their power of attorney, he was to take orders from the colonial planters for goods required from London—farm implements, horses, weapons, clothes. The task should take no more than four or five months.

In exchange, he would carry their cash crops—tobacco, flax, corn—to England, where he would trade them to the representatives of London’s merchants, the factors, in exchange for the ordered goods. Of course, no cash was to change hands other than the commission Jack took.

From among the planters whose business he was to solicit, he was to gain Radcliff’s trust. In representing him, Jack would gradually build Radcliff s debt to the various London merchants until that debt destroyed Radcliff s estate. A demonic plan which its deviser calculated should take no more than three or four years.

At the end of that time, Mad Dog had promised Jack that the vessel would be his to sail the high seas, and that his indenture papers would be given back to him.

Jack eyed Mad Dog warily now. “You are taking a risk in trusting me, a notorious felon. What’s to prevent me from making off with the ship as soon as I set sail from here?"

That slow smile sent shivers rippling down the muscles at either side of Jack’s spine. “I share this with you that you may be enlightened. I am the fourth Baron De Villiers through my mother, and my father is the Lord High Admiral of the British Navy. Should I request it, he will most devotedly hunt you across the seven seas. He will explore every cove and inlet of every island until he finds you. Rest assured of that. If you cooperate, I am sure it can be arranged for you to receive the highly prized privateer papers which would permit you to legally ply your nefarious trade.”

Jack was awed by the man’s lineage, but he managed to respond with merely a shrug. “Doubtlessly your father is a figure who wields much power. So why not let him destroy Radcliff? Tis obvious he could do so as easily as he could squash a cockroach.”

Again that unnerving smile. "I reserve for myself the right to that great pleasure.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The practice of decorating a ship’s bow with allegorical sculptures symbolizing the ship’s name had seemed ludicrous to Mad Dog’s father, whose wife was a scion of an ancient Norman family. "’Tis the foppish French who are responsible for such an asinine thing,” his father had fumed. “Humph, decorating a ship. By God, next the French Navy will be decorating their seamen’s cocks!"

Mad Dog had been a mere fourteen at the time. He made a quip that played on the word seamen, bringing a stem glance of disapproval from his father, a member of an old, close-knit Essex family of minor gentry.

Now Mad Dog felt rather asinine, perched on a scaffold like some damned pigeon while trying to re-carve the figurehead. Ironic, he thought, that the warrior Ajax had been a madman. And here he was converting the figurehead of the madman into a water sprite—under the direction of the wench he called his wife. She had yet to paint the ship’s name.

November’s chilly wind buffeted the platform against the ship’s planking, and his knife slipped. A crimson slash bisected his thumb pad. "Damn!"

Modesty cried out from the ship’s bow directly above him. "Are you all right?” Her face was as white as her coif. Tendrils of hair coiled from beneath its edge and draped over her neck. Her rapidly growing hair had a lustrous health and soft curl that her former locks had lacked.

He wiped his hand on his buckskin breeches. “Aye."

He waited until the gust of wind abated, then went back to carving. The foremastmen were taking in the top sails, a swabber washed the deck, and the boatswain was coiling the tackling and arranging the marlin spikes. The fifteen sailors who had elected to remain and serve under Jack Holloway appeared steadfast enough.

“Can yew make her a little more—er, feminine?" Modesty asked.

With a grunt, he picked up his chisel. “I never claimed to be a sculptor."

"Well, she looks more like a seahorse than a sprite."

He flung her a scornful glare. “Don’t you have duties that call?"

'"Tis exactly that about which I wish to speak."

His mouth pressed flat. The wench was exasperating and would test the patience of a monk. “Why is it that I have a foreboding?"

"You recall you asked me to paint the ship’s name?"

“Aye? And what is it to be?"

She hesitated, as if she were about to request some rare boon, then blurted, "The
Maidenhead
."

His hand halted its work on the figurehead.

He glanced up at her. Her expression was at once both guarded and waggish, like a feminine Falstaff. In spite of his consternation with her, he had to chuckle. “So you have regained that prize possession. Symbolically speaking, of course.”

Her big smile transformed her pinched face into a portrait of dazzling features. Bemused, he stared up at her.

"Yew might say that. But ’tis not about the name I wish to speak,” she said, her words a little rushed, a warning to him that something was afoot. Of course, that was to be expected whenever the wench was around. "Have you given thought to the papers Jack will need? The credentials he must have if he is to convince the planters that he would represent them most honestly?"

"Is this something we have to discuss now?" Cannily, she had picked a time when he was at a disadvantage—dangling from ropes and she placed in a position of superiority above him.

“And there are the ship’s papers, also." She lowered her voice, even though they were alone at that part of the vessel. “And if you expect to falsify Radcliff s bills of lading and—”

Granted, she was right about the need for official documents. He hadn’t thought that far ahead. He was only just formulating the strategy for forcing Radcliff into financial failure. "Cease priming me and get on with it. What is it you have in mind, wench?"

“Modesty." She looked quite pleased with herself. “Why, only that I am a master forger.” He could feel his eyebrows climbing the rungs of his forehead. "You, naturally, have— er, your own credentials?"

"Well, I have none of me work with me, but I can testify that I trained under the best."