The Maidenhead (3 page)

If she had calculated correctly, she figured that with a commission from each arranged marriage she could buy back her marriage contract from the Virginia Company. An acre here, a couple of swine there—why, in time she could return to London to live out the rest of her life in security.

However, it was not for herself she needed to study the men but for the women for whom she had agreed to negotiate marriage contracts. She felt obligated to obtain the best terms for each of them.

She surveyed young men, middle-aged ones, tall ones and short ones. Spindly ones and squat ones. Here was a man who bore the mark of childhood smallpox upon his cheeks; there was one who limped.

But it was the expressions and gestures she studied closely. The man who punched the palm of one hand with the fist of the other—a browbeater. The one with a thin mouth—definitely a stingy soul.

The man in a simple snuff-brown suit who rubbed his palms—here was an opportunistic sort. A young man with his head ducked could be timorous ... or hiding something maybe even he didn't want to face. The downturned lines around one man's mouth indicated a cantankerous spirit.

Lechery glinted in another’s eyes. One man’s eyebrows that curved upward bespoke possible humor.

She interviewed a bumptious shipwright, an impertinent glassblower, and a cooper who wiped his nose on his sleeve.

Then a man who had a face like a cliff, the somber gaze of an ascetic, and a libertine’s sensuous mouth introduced himself as Reverend Patrick Dartmouth from the tiny upriver settlement of Henrico. His rangy frame was clothed in black broadcloth with a puritan’s white bibbed collar, and a black hat with a high crown topped his head.

At the sight of the gold buckle that adorned his hat, she had to repress a smirk. For all their piety, these Anglican parsons with their puritan streak lived with gusto. She shuddered, thinking that the exacting hand of the Anglican Church stretched across even 3,000 miles of water.

“Greetings, mistress." He removed his hat, and sandy hair fell across his forehead. "I hope thou finds Jamestown to thy liking.”

She shrugged. “Neither Jamestown nor its men.”

His full mouth curved gently. "Ahhh, then. I shall have to seek a wife elsewhere."

She regretted her harsh words. She had not thought a man of the cloth would be buying a wife. "Come to me on the morrow, good sir. I shall have a perfect wife for yew."

Plenty of men yet thronged the marketplace. The day was only half gone, and another day was left to make selections. The determined males were like rutting bucks and were beginning to press Modesty and the still-unattached women for answers.

"Modesty!"

She turned. It couldn’t be. Jack Holloway. A scraggly beard hid his handsome face. He started toward her in a shuffle and came up short. She noticed then the chains that bound his ankles—and bound him to the man-beast next to him.

Jack managed to make a jaunty bow and flash her that familiar droll smile. “Modesty, my dear, let me present you to the gentleman whose fluid eloquence convinced the rabid governor of Jamestown that I shouldn’t be broken on the wheel for the theft of his purse—Mad Dog Jones, my master."

Modesty’s gaze shifted to the long-haired savage who could have been anywhere between thirty and forty years of age. His great mane of tawny-brown hair fell well below his massive shoulders.

He was wearing clothing right off the backs of animals. After only a short time in the colony, she had learned to identify the weird wilderness clothing to which the Indians and a few settlers resorted. This man’s fringed hunting shirt of supple deer hide hung halfway down his thighs and was confined by a cincture tied behind his waist. Suspended from the cincture on his right was a flintlock pistol of large bore, a knife on his left, a bullet bag in front. At his right side was a big pouch hanging from a shoulder strap. Tied to the same strap above the pouch was a powder horn.

Her startled gaze dropped lower. He wore only knee-high leather moccasins and an Indian breechclout. His bare thighs had the girth of bronze cannons.

His imposing size, his leonine head, his fierce visage—she might not believe in God, but at that moment she believed in the devil.

Chapter Three

"A confederate of yours?" Mad Dog Jones asked his newly purchased indentured servant. The woman in question had been sharply summoned back to the palmetto shed by an irate Radcliff.

There were ladies of quality and there were ladies of the street. This woman with her too- bold manner obviously belonged to the latter category, an uncommon sort who was part of the Virginia Company's enterprise on behalf of Hymen. Of the women from the God Sent that Mad Dog had glimpsed, few would inspire sonnets of rapture. Discounting, perhaps, the fair maiden known as Clarissa.

"Modesty Brown is an . . . acquaintance,” his bondsman said. The man’s eyes, the clear blue shade of Santo Domingo’s bay waters, managed a twinkle, which was one of the reasons Mad Dog had pled for the scrawny felon’s life and then bought his indenture papers. The other was the man’s will to live. Mad Dog had seen it in the felon’s eyes like a falling star flashing through the night sky, and he thought Jack Holloway might just defy the odds of surviving in Jamestown.

Mad Dog was aware that the London Company calculated that six people out of every seven who came to the colony died within the first year of their arrival.

He knew from his own experience that before the emigrants boarded the ships at London, Southampton, or Bristol, many of them already suffered from malnutrition, jail fever, and other communicable diseases. And conditions on the ships didn’t contribute to their health.

Few adjusted well to the colony’s torpid climate. Furthermore, Jamestown’s small port was located in the midst of marshlands and swamps. The plague of mosquitoes, innumerable rats, brackish water, lack of nutritional crops, and, of course, the ever-present menace of the Indians didn’t help.

Arriving during the sickly season, June through August, was as bad as a death sentence. People came down with what the colonists called the sleeping sickness, the desire to sleep all the time. Mad Dog thought it more a disease of the mind than of the body. The colony was overpraised in England. Upon seeing it, most immigrants went into a decline of spirit. Being predominantly male, the immigrants had no family life; nearly all of them were lonely if not homesick. The will to live was not strong in such defeated men. Or women.

He studied the woman, in spirited discussion with Radcliff. Some sort of arguing was afoot. She-looked to be as rapscallion as they came, but she was no match for the cloven-hoofed Radcliff. River gossip of Radcliff’s arrival in the colony two years before had reached Mad Dog at his homestead, but he had not seen the man until today. Now all the old rage Mad Dog thought he had left behind in another country, another world, came flooding back. He battled back his emotions and refocused on the woman. "Well, your friend Mistress Brown will be most fortunate if she survives the Year of Seasoning.”

"The woman is the most skilled of artists," Holloway said.

"A pickpocket artist, most likely.” He caught Holloway eyeing him with wary regard and said, "I’ve seen it all."

"How did you get the nickname Mad Dog?”

He narrowed his gaze on the felon and decided it would better serve his purpose to tell the man the truth. "I’m quite mad.”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"I am a man of detail,” Richard Radcliff said, taking a pinch of snuff from its box and sniffing it up one nostril. “I am certain I remember your face from somewhere.”

Modesty dipped a hasty curtsy, and kept her head bowed. "I don’t think the likes of me would mingle in yewr high circle, me lord.”

“Those bizarre eyes." His gauntleted hand rested suggestively on the ruby hilt of his sheathed rapier. "Something I would not be likely to forget."

She was tempted to tell him that his own eyes looked like broken glass filled in with red dye but prudently held her tongue. “I'm just a simple farm girl, yewr lordship. From Hertfordshire."

He didn’t look convinced. "Regardless, you go through with this mutinous scheme of marriage brokering, and I shall see that you pay dearly!"

Modesty watched the London Company representative stalk away, the spurs of his buff leather boots ringing ominously. Somehow, word had gotten out about her venture.

It was obvious to Modesty that Radcliff was taking no chances that her machinations might upset his applecart. He likely feared that the London Company might withdraw his representative’s license.

She had overheard a colonist’s wife say that a company representative was the most important permanent office, since governors, normally appointed to two-year tenures, came and went.

Therefore, as the Company's representative, Radcliff held a position of political and commercial importance. It was said he had the power to seize all newly arriving bondservants, sources of labor for his plantation.

In addition, the colonial wife gossiped that he sold imported Company-manufactured goods at two or three times the prices set by the Company investors. Between importing human flesh and exporting tobacco, Modesty figured he must have made himself quite wealthy.

She was already discovering that there were only two social categories in this far-flung outpost: a person was either free or servant, either an exploiter or a resource. She didn’t intend to become a resource. Since she hadn’t come as a bondservant, she reckoned that as long as the Company got its money for the cost of her contract, Radcliff could do nothing to her.

Her thoughts flew to Jack. She had barely gotten to speak with him before Radcliff had interrupted. As a bondservant, Jack’s free spirit would wither, especially with a master like that savage, Mad Dog Jones. God help the poor woman that man ever took to wife. Word had it that he lived beyond the colony’s furthermost settlement, that he was a hermit, preferring seclusion.

That evening. Modesty sat on the church’s oak floor with the other women, who were in various states of undress. Some were still in their petticoats and smocks, while others were already in their night rails. She scanned the circle of expectant faces. Their number had now grown to almost twenty maidens interested in her proposition as a way to better their future.

They talked among themselves about the colonial men.

“They are none too happy," Annie said. With her hennaed hair, she was slatternly-looking, but Modesty determined her to be stout of heart in her unflagging spirit and stout of lungs with her deep-chested laugh.

Rose’s ebony curls bobbed. "Aye, I've heard grumbling aplenty. They want an answer.”

"So what do we do?" Polly asked. Despite the poor food aboard ship, she had debarked on Virginian soil with rounded arms and a buxom bosom and an easygoing nature. "I would have me own house.” Her full face dimpled with her smile. “And me own man."

Modesty held up her palms. "I’m coming to that. Yesterday I spied a Scotsman. They call him Duncan Kilbride."

The young woman with considerable charms to match her considerable girth nodded enthusiastically. "Aye, he be a shopkeeper. Do ye think ye could bargain for a looking glass?"

"Yew’re bargaining with the devil himself when yew bargain with a Scotsman, but I'll haggle a looking glass for yew."

Modesty switched her attention to Clarissa, who clasped and unclasped her aristocratic hands. Her whole person breathed seduction. "Did yew find a man to suit yew?"

Clarissa shook her head, her chin tilted haughtily. "I can’t go through with this."

"Yew’d rather marry the old fart yewr parents have arranged for yewr husband?"

She shook her head again, this time more vigorously, and her golden lovelocks tumbled about her shoulders. “No,” she said in a frayed voice. “No, never.”

Modesty thought for a minute, then said what had been on her mind. "Since marry yew must, methinks that the Reverend Dartmouth would make a right goodly husband.”

"We talked briefly this morning. The Church sent him over as a missionary last year. But he seems so"—she rolled her violet eyes—"so colorless."

"True, the parson has a puritan streak. Still, I think he’d be the most willing of the men to abide by an agreement between yew to ... uh ... forgo carnal knowledge."

Clarissa’s brows, like her lashes, darker than her hair, rose in outright skepticism. “Forever? I doubt that.”

Modesty's wide mouth expanded into a big grin. “Who said anything about forever? Dartmouth's a man of the cloth, isn’t he? Isn’t a divorce granted if the faith of one partner lapses? Should down the road he discover he has a pagan for a wife, he will grant yew a divorce quicker than this,” she said with a snap of her fingers.

All sorts of conflicting thoughts had to be going on behind those violet eyes, but at last Clarissa acceded to her suggestion. "Should he call on me tomorrow with an offer—’’

"Oh, he’ll call upon yew.” It was inconceivable to Modesty that any man wouldn’t want Clarissa. If she had to, she would put a bug in the good reverend’s ear. "Send him round to me anon."

Modesty then glanced at Rose. "Yew found someone?”

"Aye, Walter Bannock, the sawyer from a settlement upriver. He’s balding and he stutters, but he has two children who need a mother. They’re adorable little mites."

“But what about him?” Annie asked. “What does he have to offer yew?"

Rose looked abashed. “Well, he’s been here ten years now, so he seems the solid sort. And”—her swarthy skin actually flushed—“he has agreed to take me as ... as I am, with child and all.”

How generous of him, Modesty wanted to say. Through discreet inquiry, she had learned that for each person a colonist brought to Virginia, whether it be indentured servant or freeman, the colonist received fifty acres headright. For Rose, the widower Bannock would receive one hundred acres, double his due. "Wot do yew want me to ask in exchange for yewr hand, then?"

Rose wrinkled her tiny, upturned nose. "Well... a spinning wheel. With me experience in carding, I could bring in an extra tuppence here and there."

"Oh, how jolly!" Clarissa said with a cynical twist to her rosebud lips. “More work."

“Methinks a milk cow would serve me well,” Annie said. “And the three acres.”

"Yew’ve picked yewrself a husband?” Modesty asked.

Annie screwed up her mouth in consideration. “He would have to be an elf of a man who would not be lifting his hand to me or else I shall box his ears."

"Then tomorrow I shall send yew a man I think will be to yewr liking. James Harwell."

Modesty listened and made mental notes as the priggish Elizabeth, Jane who bit her nails to the quick, and the other remaining women put forth their requests.

Aye, it looked to Modesty that she was setting out on a profitable venture. She could not remember feeling so much optimism.

By the ninth hour of the next morning, Jamestown was bursting with men at its fort’s gates. Barges and canoes slapped against each other’s sides at the wharf or were drawn upon the narrow banks to make a boardwalk of the tree-lined shores as far as the eye could see in either direction. Horses, of which Modesty had spied few, now were so numerous that they threatened to trample the tobacco planted in every plot not occupied by a building or a street.

Tobacco was a commodity as good as gold, which she duly noted. Take her commission in barter, and she would have enough to buy back her contract and more. Then she could buy a plot of land and plant a better staple—parsnips, turnips, carrots, and onions, as well as parsley, thyme, and marjoram.

Why, she could make her fortune here—honestly! In a couple of years, she could return to London a financially secure woman of means.

The sober Scotsman, Duncan Kilbride, was the first male to approach her with an offer for a bride-to-be. A brawny man of twenty-five or so and with cheeks as red as her poor satinet dress, Duncan would be man enough for Polly.

"Tis unfair advantage ye are takin’, mistress," he grumbled. "We lads are a puir lot. With no lass to—”

“My lady Polly would make yew a wonderful wife. Any man for that matter. 'Tis but a small thing, she asks, Master Kilbride. A looking glass."

His arms crossed over his chest, he tried blustering. “Now listen to me, mistress. Ye aren’t talkin' to a fool. I be a Leith man. A shopkeeper by trade. What is in this for ye?"

The skinflint. She flashed a smile, revealing her best asset, perfect teeth. “A Leith man are yew? Why, me aunt married an Edinburgh bookkeeper."

A small fib, but if it served to ease the dour man’s spirit . . . .

“Her husband, me dear uncle, always told me, ‘Lass, make people happy, and people will make yew happy.’ Now, Duncan, I know that Mistress Polly will make yew a verrry happy man.” Rolling her r’s should certainly help. “As for meself, why. I’d be content with a wee show of gratitude. Say thirty pounds of tobacco?”

“I be a shopkeeper," he growled, "not a tobacco planter."

She judged him to be one of those enterprising and intrepid Scots, so she continued to haggle. She spread her hands. “But 'twould be so little trouble to take some leaves in trade. Wot think yew?"

He rubbed his lantern-like jaw. "A shipment of rum has come in from Bermuda.”

“Three kegs, then."

“One and no more."

“Two—oh, and do not be forgetting the looking glass for the Mistress Polly."