The Maidenhead (6 page)

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."

“You assert that you were in the churchyard the night before the marriage ceremonies were conducted?”

An easy smile curled Radcliff’s mouth, a mouth as thin and lipless as an iron bear trap. "I do."

Mad Dog rubbed his jaw, wrinkled his forehead. “Now I am very confused, friend, because I have a witness who will testify otherwise. Wilt the Chesapeake maid Palantochas come before the bar?"

All heads turned toward the back of the room as the young Indian woman made her way to the front. Short of stature and slightly fat-padded, she was well known in the predominantly male community. Her deer hide moccasins made a soft thud against the floor's oak planks. Her limpid eyes flashed Mad Dog a searching glance.

“Palantochas," he said, “will you tell us what you were doing the night in question?" His words were distinct and deliberate.

She bit her lip, lowered her head, and her single black braid swung forward across her shoulder.

He nodded encouragement, hoping his backwoods diplomacy was paying off. He had learned ancient and modem languages, shone at math, read Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe, and studied under William Shakespeare at Blackfriars Theatre. Yet, here he was, defending an unscrupulous wench in a cow dung of a town.

In a tremulous voice, Palantochas said, "I spent the night . . . in the company . . . of him." Her finger pointed out Radcliff.

Murmurs erupted. The room sounded like a beehive. Although many of the men had lain with the native women, few admitted it. To do so was as much as to declare oneself infected with the malady the Irish called the Country Duties.

'"Tis a damned lie!" Radcliff said.

Mad Dog spread his hands. "Do any of the burgesses wish to question my witness?” He was counting on the members’ reluctance to being possibly identified as one of the maiden’s midnight customers.

“No one would believe the word of a misbegotten creature like this against mine!" Radcliff snarled.

"I am finished with the prisoner’s defense,” Mad Dog said. “It hath been a pleasure to serve the Assembly.”

Chapter Six

"Mad Dog Jones, doth thou take this maid to be your wife?"

"Aye, I do."

What a name! Mad Dog Jones! Modesty did not know whether to laugh or to cry.

While the minister read the sacred rites, she stood shorn of hair, barefoot, and dressed only in her smock—all because Mad Dog Jones was taking no chances. He was adhering to an old legality which Modesty knew dated back to medieval times that said a man was not liable for his wife’s debts, provided he married her in nothing other than her smock. Even shoes and caps were prohibited.

"Modesty Brown, doth thou take this man to be your husband?"

How had she gotten herself into this mess?

One moment she was camouflaging a stolen snuffbox in London, and the next she was consigning herself to a living hell here in the New World.

The old minister cleared his throat. "Ummh . . . Mistress Brown . . . doth thou?"

Beneath raised brows, Mad Dog eyed her as curiously as she had the New World food called maize. She could guess what he was thinking— that she ought to be rejoicing that she wasn't going to be burning like an All Hallow’s Eve bonfire.

As for herself, she was thinking hard. She was still required to fulfill her bridal contract with the Company or spend a year in the gaol. Having just spent a fortnight there, she doubted that a human could survive for a year. It was said even the freepersons who survived the year of seasoning were full of maggots and rotting above ground.

God rot the pious citizens of Jamestown!

There was also the bargain she had made with Mad Dog. She had the distinct feeling he wasn’t the kind to give up easily what he felt was his. Nevertheless, he had another thought coming if he expected her to remain in this English colony long enough to rot.

"Mistress Brown? Did thou hearest me? Doth thou takest this man to be your husband?”

She sighed. "Aye, I suppose I do.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"I cannot take me commissions with me?” Gingerly, Modesty seated herself and her portmanteau of meager belongings in the prow of the birch bark canoe.

Mad Dog grunted. "They have been returned to their rightful owners."

"Yew had no right—”

“You truly art a scurvy wench."

“Yew are a lump of foul deformity."

"Thou art married to me now."

"A calamity it is!" She squinted suspiciously at him. "Wot be yewr real name?"

"You may call me master."

"I call no one me master."

"Egad. What happened to the willing hands and faithful heart you pledged unto me?"

"Yew got yewr fifty acres headright."

A wry smile curved his lips. "And I am out of pocket for your transportation costs. For which you shall serve me faithfully and willingly, I promise thee, wench."

“Me name’s Modesty. How did yew know that Radcliff had lain with Palantochas?”

“I didn't."

"But I heard her tell the burgesses—”

"How thy tongue doth wag."

She waved away a haze of gnats and said indifferently, "Yew are an unkempt churl.”

"You were the one who bargained for marriage."

For the first time since they had set out in the canoe from Jamestown, he looked at her. Before, he had kept a hawklike gaze swinging in a steady arc from one side of the bank and its dark, impenetrable forest to the other. "Why me? Why didst thou bargain marriage with me, wench?”

“Modesty. Who else would be mad enough to marry me than a man called Mad Dog?”

Indeed, she thought ruefully, who would be mad enough to marry a woman accused of witchcraft, a fugitive felon? "Besides, Jack— yewr bondservant—told me how yewr fine words saved him from being broken on the wheel."

"You have heard of the saw 'jumping from the frying pan into the fire’?”

She figured she may have well done just that. The man’s feral gaze seemed to pierce into the secret recesses of her mind. "For the cost of me transportation, yew could have almost bought a headright of fifty acres or bought an indentured servant—or yew could have taken yewrself a wife of yewr own choosing. Why me?"

"Do not flatter thyself.” His searching glance swung to the somber glades of forest and back to settle on her. "In the bargain I sought satisfaction, small though it was, of an old score."

She was already humiliated, and his words wounded her. "Yew took me because no other woman would have yew. Look at yewrself."

The wintery gleam in his gray eyes halted any further words she had been about to utter. Still, with an inward shudder, she inventoried her new husband.

Like the Indians, he wore moccasins that folded up below his knees. This time, however, deer hide trousers encased his thighs. The trouser leggings were tucked into the moccasins, and a leather jerkin was belted at the waist.

His thick dark brown hair, streaked by tropical sunlight and the seasoning of years, flowed like a lion’s mane to fall heavy upon his shoulders. His skin was the color of burnt crumpets, his broad mouth as unpredictable as a river. At one moment she thought it scorned her, at another it took her by surprise with its deep, wry twist of a smile.

Indeed, there were many twists and unexpected bends to the man. Grudging admiration crept into her voice. "Yew played those web-toed burgesses like a fiddle. Plucking a string here and there, then yew leaned back, watching them."

His smile was just a quiver away from being a grimace. "Aye. I am a turkey buzzard. An avaricious creature, by my troth. I wait until a prey is helpless, then I strike. Dost not put thy trust in me. I use people, as thou dost, wench."

“Modesty." She should have been affronted by his poor opinion of her, but she was more intrigued by the incongruity of his character. A London barrister living like an animal at the edge of the world. A wild animal with the voice of a god.

He had a tall and powerful frame that held a leashed strength. His shoulders were strong and broad, and his arm muscles flexed from the unceasing thrust of paddle against water.

Her view, looking upriver from the canoe, was like gazing on an eternity of rushing water. The more she gazed, the more she realized the river’s awful power.

In the New World, according to Mistress Pierce, other than a few Indian paths, the only roads were rivers, which, Modesty suspected, was why farms were granted in long strips along a river. Occasionally she sighted a farm amidst the trackless forest, but it had been several hours since she had last seen sign of human habitation.

At a place of vine-hung coolness, the wild man beached the canoe. She glanced at him inquiringly.

“We’ll spend the night here. We got a late start, and Ant Hill is too far upstream to make in the time we have left.”

Cautiously, she stepped from the wobbly canoe. She was sure there must be a trick to keeping the canoe upright in the water. She followed him ashore. "Ant Hill—yewr place?”

“Aye.” In a clearing, he collected twigs and dead leaves for tinder, then opened his leather possibles bag.

“I hope the name isn't an apt description of yewr place." She slapped at a whining mosquito that had lit on her temple, where once rebellious curls had strayed from her cap. The shame of having her head shaved and then having to stand practically naked before the minister crackled like a flame inside her brain.

"Let’s just say that Ant Hill is a far sight better than the Jamestown gaol.” Hunkering down, he struck a glancing blow with the steel on the chunk of flint. At the glow of a spark, he began blowing, and nursed it into a small flame.

"Let’s hope that yew aren’t as barbaric as the good people of Jamestown.”

From the canoe, he took out a fishnet of some sort of bark fiber and lines equipped with hooks that looked like fish bone. “I have the distinct notion that you have no idea of the concept of the word ‘good.’ ’’

She huddled before the fire, where the smoke warded off the pesky mosquitoes. "It has been me experience that goodness and virtue are seldom rewarded."

Her temporary husband sat on his haunches at the bank to spread his net in the shoal water. "Oh? What is?"

In the day’s dying light, she watched an egret search the opposite shoreline for crayfish. “Quickness of wit for one thing. ’Tis far better to be wise than good, and better still to be shrewd.”

He jerked in the net with its catch of fish. "Ahhh,” he said in a bitter tone, “‘An excellent wife, who can find? For her worth is far above jewels.’"

"Proverbs." She rested her chin in her hand, grinned, and said, “‘A joyful heart makes a cheerful face.’ ’’

He looked askance at her. "So you can read.”

He proceeded to clean, then plank the fish over the flame.

"Aye. Books and people. Now yew—well, yew’re the kind of man who takes pleasure in the precise application of logic. No imagination to yewrself."

Over the fire's blazing streamers, he flashed her a disgruntled look. "And you think you are imaginative?"

"Aye.” She shrugged. ‘"Tis like being a fairy. Yew can make anything happen."

"I trust you are not confused between a fairy and a fury. Or perhaps it is I who am confused. I would swear I have taken the latter for a wife.”

She ignored him. "What kind of fish are yew cooking?"

"Shad. Do you ever stop talking?”

"Fairies are good talkers.”

"If you've ever read Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene
, then you know a lock put on the tongue is an excellent way to achieve silence."

"Never read anything but the Bible and a broadside about Jamestown." But his reference to silence made her realize that with nightfall the forest was alive with sounds of screeches, hoots, howls, and chatters. By now, a muggy fog shrouded the river.

Then she heard the trill of a clear liquid note, and the rough-hewn man across from her answered it with a warbled whistle.

She tensed. "What was that?"

He didn’t reply but passed her a portion of the planked shad on a palmetto leaf. Behind her, the brush rustled. She whirled, almost dropping her food. A tall, dusky-skinned Indian stepped from the tangled copses. He carried a feather-tipped lance. His immobile face contained much dignity despite its smears of paint. One half of his head was shaven; a feather was tucked into the dark brown braid that fell from the other side.

Mad Dog said something in the Algonquin dialect. She picked up the word
pokatawer
, fire. Apparently he was inviting the Indian to join them, because he crossed the clearing to squat before the fire.

"Arahathee,” Mad Dog patiently explained to her, "is the chief, the
werowance,
of the Monacans. The tribe lives above the falls at Rasauweak. The Monacans are actively hostile to the Powhattans and unfriendly to most English."

That was reassuring. “
Mawchick chammay
," she said, using Palantochas’s phrase for best of friends.

The Indian only nodded, but the condescension disappeared from his stony gaze.

Mad Dog darted an oblique glance at her before resuming conversation with the Indian.

While they talked, Modesty ate. The shad was surprisingly tasty. When it looked as if the two were going to talk through the night, she curled up beside the fire. She had not realized it, but her face and hands were sunburned during the river journey, so that she was chilled. Later she was partly roasted by the blaze and partly frozen, but too fatigued to move.

Sometime during the night she awoke. She thought she was alone, and terror rattled through her. Then she saw Mad Dog asleep on the fire’s far side. The Indian was nowhere to be seen. Relieved, she went back to sleep, only to awake to find Mad Dog hunched down over her. She gasped. "What do yew want?”

His brows furrowed with disgust. "I believe I can control my raving desires for the while, mistress. Tis time to leave.”

By the time they shoved off in the canoe, the morning fog had lifted. Later in the morning he pointed out a sleepy waterfront village. "Henrico.”

Farther on, they passed a cluster of homes and a two-story waterwheel that he identified as Falling Brook.

"How much more traveling in this infernal country afore we reach yewr place? And where is yewr bondsman? Jack Holloway?”

"Earning his keep, as thou shall be anon."

"I am yewr wife, I remind yew. Not some indentured servant."

Amused contempt glittered in his eyes. "Aye, my wife for life, God help me.”

"Oh, so yew believe in God, do yew now?"

The canoe had slid into a gentle current that momentarily carried it near the bank, and the dips of his paddles ceased. He rested, his arms braced against the paddles, though occasionally he pulled the boat along by hauling on cattails and overhanging oak branches, draped with moss. His hands were the most massive she had ever seen. “You do not?" he asked.

“I believe in meself. I believe a person gets wot she takes from life.”