The Maidenhead (14 page)

He shifted his gaze to the fire. "As though he would like to touch thee.”

She let a small frown of puzzlement knit her brows. "In what way, husband?”

"Like ... like...."

"Aye?" she asked in an innocent tone. She leaned slightly forward, her lips parted.

There was only the sound of the fire crackling. Patrick's voice cracked with it as he answered, "Touch thy hair.”

Her hand drifted up to her coif. "But 'tis hidden."

He, too, leaned forward, loosed the strings tied beneath her chin in a bow, and tugged the coif from her head. Her hair tumbled loose over her left shoulder. She heard his breath suck in. His hazel eyes darkened even further.

Her throat tightened. Her stitchery lay forgotten. "Do you think he desires only to see my hair?"

“Nay.” He swallowed. “I think he yearns to run his fingers through thy locks."

"Show me how," she whispered. Her breathing came shallowly and rapidly.

He stretched out a trembling hand. Slowly, his long, slender fingers combed through her tresses, beginning at her temple and stroking downward to where they curled over her left breast—and lingered there. “Like frothy butter," he muttered.

Her breasts rose and fell with her labored breathing. It was as though his fingertips scorched her swollen nipple through the material. Her eyes locked with his. "Where else would he touch?"

He shot to his feet. "Nowhere, because thee is mine.”

She closed her eyes. She had not realized how starved she was for a man's touch. Her face upturned, she waited.

His footsteps moved past her.

Scarcely believing he could have rejected her, she opened her eyes. The cabin door was open, revealing the night’s frigid darkness.

And her coif lay abandoned at her feet.

Chapter Twelve

From their card house of a cabin, Rose watched in the early dawn's light as her husband in name only trudged in the snow’s drizzle toward his sawmill. Looking like a long-legged heron, Walter picked his way along the cattail-lined shore. His steps left quickly vanishing footprints in the thinly layered snow. She thought it a symbol of how unsubstantial his relationship with her was. Tenuous. Gossamer. Trifling even.

Three other men, shouldering iron axes and ripsaws, waved at her as they strode off in the opposite direction toward the white-shrouded forest. She worried about them. Winter’s high winds made tree-felling hazardous.

Construction was almost finished on the sawmill, but as a consequence the improvements on their wattle-and-daub house had been postponed. In inclement weather the roof was a sieve, and the wind whistled through chinks in the walls and the single window’s poorly set shutters.

Rose hugged her shawl more tightly about her bloated body and turned back to the fireplace. Water dripping from the mortar-gaping bricks hissed in the flames. She walked to the trundle bed where Isaac was curled into a ball beneath the woolen blanket. Bart was built like his father, and his feet, long for a seven-year- old, dangled over the rope bed.

She tousled Isaac’s rumpled straw-colored hair. "Gruel’s ready to eat."

"Sleep," he muttered into the crook of his arm.

"No, not sleep. Study. And you too, Bart."

Bart burrowed deeper.

She crossed in ungainly steps to the small green-and-white dome-topped chest which held a few worthless heirlooms, a boxwood comb, and a hornbook she used to teach the boys reading and ciphering.  She wished she knew more, but alas, the boys knew almost as much as she. "’Urry up, get dressed, you two lazy dunces! Mid-morning draws nigh."

One of Bart’s bare feet sought shelter beneath the blanket. She grinned and tugged it off both boys, who wore only flannel nightshirts, disdaining the nightcaps she had made them.

"Ohhh!” Isaac groaned and blindly groped for the blanket.

“Fire’s burning low. I’ll get another log. I want you two up and dressed by the time I return.”

The cold air nipped her cheeks and hands. Feeling as though she waddled like a duck, she started across the yard toward the woodshed. Her labored breathing frosted the air.

She would be glad when her time was upon her. By her calculations, she was a week past due. At this dawdling pace, her baby would be born on Christmas Day. What with the chicken nesting in the willow cradle Walter had fashioned, their cabin could almost pass for a stable with a manger.

Tiny icicles fringed the woodshed’s flat roof. The door’s wooden hinges had swollen, and drifted snow sealed the door around its bottom. She had to jerk with both hands to open it.

She didn’t like going inside the woodshed because of the myriad vermin that crawled everywhere. The English countryside had not been like this. With nostalgia, she recalled mellow sunlight and soft mist and gently rolling hills.

She left the shed door open for the weak wintery light. Her gaze searched the musty- smelling premises carefully for lurking bugs. Satisfied, she stooped, collected two split logs, and with a low grunt of effort rose to go.

Sounds other than her own halted her. She turned and peered out the doorway. Two Indian savages were running across the yard toward the cabin. Tomahawks in hand, they kept their bodies lowered in a half-bent posture and moved stealthily.

There was really no time to think. Rose only knew that she had to draw their attention away from the boys, to do something without bringing the boys to the cabin door. She threw the logs down, and their thudding noise spun the savages in her direction.

The Indians sprinted toward her with their tomahawks raised for the kill.

She froze, as stiff as the icicles overhead. Then, frantic with fright, she got out the word, "Friends!" She thought she shouted, but her words came out no louder than a chick’s peep.

At least the two Indians did not bury their tomahawks in her skull. After an argumentative exchange of words she could not understand, the shorter of the two grabbed her upper arm and shoved her forward, ahead of him.

She stumbled, caught her balance against the trunk of a nearly denuded oak. Her arms encircled it, as if it were the leg of some giant from whom she was pleading protection.

The other warrior, who wore a wreath of weasel skins on his naked pate, gestured toward her swollen middle.

She did not mistake his gesture, that of gutting with the knife. "No!" she gasped.

The first Indian shook his head and moved his hand up and down, as if signaling patience.

Once again, she was pushed forward. The two were herding her away from the cabin, across the stubble of winter cornfields and toward the forest. Briers caught at her apron and tore at her skirts. She was shivering, both from fright and from the cold. Her captors were draped in layers of animal skins and seemed not to notice the cold.

On through the forest they traveled. The Indians laughed when she could not keep up with them and prodded her with the hafts of their weapons. Once, when she fell, the weasel- crowned Indian made as if to lay open her stomach then and there.

Crying, she scrambled away and pulled herself upright with the help of a densely vine-clad sycamore. She was panting heavily. The Indians watched her, as if gauging her endurance.

Time. That was what she needed. If she could stay alive until the boys missed her and went for their father, she might be rescued. Might be. She banished the last thought from her mind and with a resolute nod indicated that she was capable of moving on.

The journey resumed. She had the sense they were moving parallel to the river, though she could neither see nor hear it. If that were so, then they were moving into Powhattan territory.

The tribes of the Powhattan confederacy were known to be friendlier to the colonists since Master Rolfe had taken the werowance’s daughter for his wife several years earlier. Rose’s hope grew.

Occasionally a gloomy sun peeked between the sky's gray layers of clouds. Its paltry light was filtered even more by the dense lattice of branches.

Toward midday, when she thought she could not take another step, her two captors halted. From leather pouches they produced jerky and berries that looked to her like English capers and squatted to partake of the meager fare.

Nothing was offered to her. She took the opportunity to sit. She explained away the pains that were shooting up her stomach as stitches in her side that came from unaccustomed physical exertion. She concentrated, instead, on how to stay alive.

What fate awaited her once the savages reached their destination? Should she try to escape before that? Only if an excellent opportunity offered, she decided. Time was still her best ally.

Too soon the repast was finished, and her captors were prodding her forward again. She was being swallowed up by the wilderness. Brambles scratched her face. On her cheeks, tears of frustration and fear froze in their tracks. Paradoxically, her flesh was feverish. Her eyes felt as if they were burning.

Just when she was ready to whirl and yell at her captors to go ahead and kill her, they emerged into a clearing that fronted the sluggish James. Eerie vapor rose from the water.

At the shoreline, the short Indian delved into the brush and tugged forth a canoe. He nudged her into it. The two pushed it through the shallow water until they were knee-deep themselves. Then, with Rose ensconced in the middle, they climbed in and began paddling through the cold mist. Snowflakes melted upon hitting the water but clung momentarily to her lashes.

Her captors were making for the opposite shore. Spiraling tree tops began to take shape. When the water became choppy, she realized the canoe had entered the confluence with another lesser river, most likely, she judged, the Appomatucks.

The longer they traveled, the more distance they covered, and the more frightened she became. No one would ever find her. Worse, the pains in her abdomen were coming more frequently. There was no denying the fact: She was about to have her child . . . if she was not killed first.

There was also the possibility that she and her baby might be kept as slaves. She had heard too many descriptions of the hideous atrocities inflicted on slaves. With that thought in mind, she was prepared to leap from the canoe. She could not swim, but a swift death by drowning was better than prolonged torture.

At that moment of decision, a monster of the deep rose from its sleep to thrust its head through the mist and block the canoe’s way.

"
Ahee!
" cried out the weasel-skin-clad Indian. So startled were the canoe’s occupants that their abrupt movements toppled it, and they were flung into the freezing water.

Rose floundered, sank, and struggled to the surface again. Her clothing weighted her. Her body, tortured by the cramps of childbirth, rendered her helpless. She cried out once, then felt the river sucking her downward to its burial bed.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The woman had to weigh twenty stone if not more. Her flailing arms threatened to beat Jack senseless. But then he had to have been already senseless to dive into the frigid water. The fleeting sight of the white woman wedged between the two Indians had shocked him, so that when the canoe capsized he had dived from his ship into the water without thinking.

The thrashing woman put his own life at peril. Scenarios played out before his eyes in quick succession: the
Maidenhead
sailing the high seas, he on the quarterdeck directing his crew of buccaneers; the glittering towns of the West Indies prostrate before his privateering warfare. Glory, gold, and gentlewomen awaited him.

The aristocratic face of the Lady Clarissa flashed in the back of his mind, but what he actually saw was a panic-stricken face, scratched and reddened and with hair straggling like seaweed across it.

Her cries of “’Elp! ’Elp!" told him this was no aristocrat but a coarse commoner.

"Stop struggling!" he shouted.

He was wasting his breath. Alternately she battered him with her open hands and clung to him as if she were determined to drag him under the surface with her.

The two braves were already swimming off in steady strokes and soon disappeared in the frosty mist. Good sense told Jack he should swim off, too. He was tiring quickly.

Foolishly, he grappled with the woman instead. She lashed out at him, striking him against his temple with the heel of her hand.

He had no choice. His fist clipped her jaw with enough impact to knock her unconscious.

His arm locked beneath her chin, he swam toward the canoe. It had righted itself and bobbed on the water between him and the shoreline. The water was numbing cold. He wasn't sure if he had the strength to reach the canoe, much less cling to it in hopes of keeping the two of them afloat.

Let her go! Let her go!

Like a dunce, he ignored the inner warning, that instinct for survival that so many times had saved his hide. His lungs felt as if they were caving in, collapsing on him like a pair of bellows. His ears rang with his pounding pulse.

Somewhere out of the mist, he heard his crew’s searching shouts of “’Ello? ’Ello?”

Timing was his once again! An eddy swirled the canoe’s bow out toward him. He lunged, grabbed hold, and held on with no strength but that of the will to hold on. It seemed forever .  . . and finally he felt his boots drag bottom. He staggered onto the tree-lined shore and dropped his burden. He fell face forward. The sand grated against his cheekbone.

At first, all he could hear was his breath rasping in and out of his throat and lungs in great gasps of indrawn and expelled air.

Then he heard the woman. She was groaning and throwing up water.

He rolled to his side and looked back over his shoulder. “For the love of God, woman, will you shut the bloody—"

His words choked in his throat. The woman lay on the sand behind him like a great beached white whale. He crawled toward her. "What the—” Again, his words were robbed by what he saw. The way her wet dress clung to her distended stomach. She was with child!

With a tortured moan, the woman gripped her belly and rolled into a fetal position.

“My God, if you’re aren’t having a baby!”

“'Elp me.” Her words were like the rusk of a boat being dragged upon sand.

He recognized her now from her and her husband’s visit to Ant Hill when she had delivered Modesty's marriage proposal. Apparently she didn’t recognize him. Time and Modesty’s alterations had changed his looks more than he had realized.

"What—I don’t know what to do.” Her blanched lips formed a gargoyle’s grimacing grin.

"Neither do I.”

He broke out in a sweat. He scanned the water for his ship, but fog enshrouded everything. No help there. How far back upstream was Bermuda’s Hundred? He had spent a couple of days with the various planters there, introducing himself and taking orders for English goods after leaving Henrico.

The young woman’s teeth were chattering. He removed his doublet, wrung it out, and laid it over her. It wasn’t much help, but it was better than nothing.