Sweet Enchantress (30 page)

T H E   MAIDENHEAD

Published by Paradise Publishing

Copyright 2012 by Parris Afton, Inc.

All Rights Reserved

Cover artwork by DigitalDonna.com

This is a work of fiction and a product of the author
’s imagination.  No part of this novel may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.  This e-book may not be resold or given away.  The Maidenhead is a revised edition formerly published under the title of The Savage.  Any resemblance to characters living or dead is purely coincidental.

THE    MAIDENHEAD

The Virginia Company of London seeks one hundred willing maids for marriage to bache
lor planters of James Cittie Colony. Maids must be young, handsome, and honestly educated.

Gingerly, Modesty nudged aside the still-wet blue snuffbox she'd
painted so that she could better view the advertisement beneath it. After hours of tedious work, her eyes ached. They were her bane. Needed glasses, she did. And a pair of eyes the same color would be faerie dust. One green and one brown was an occasional cause for consternation.

Her stepfather had been ought to say, "Tis a sure sign of the devil." And her cleft chin a sign of lewdness.

Little wonder her mother died early. If the plague hadn't killed her, her husband’s sanctimonious carping would have.

Mod
esty leaned closer to the broadside. Her nose, which she considered too large for her face, was a thimble's length from the print. Her finger, its nail crusted with blue paint, followed the words. Posted notices for available sailor berths shared space with names of ships in port and a list of merchants’ goods that included Moorish slaves and Oriental spices.

Paint fumes blurred her vision, and she pushed away the jar of cobalt blue. She squinted at the broadside
’s date. March 9, 1620. The announcement was only three days old.

She read further. James Cittie was described as a "thriving towne amidst faire meddowes and goodly tall trees.”

The broadside stated that the Virginia Company of London had elected to invest in the importation of the females for the purpose of selling them off to the enormous number of bachelors who could afford to buy a wife.

She made a sound that was half snort and half chuckle. "Young, handsome, and honestly educated," she mused.

Well, at twenty-six, she wasn’t young.

If an hourglass figure and fair features were prerequisites for being considered handsome, then she didn
’t qualify in that category either.

Her nocturnal activities would certainly dis
credit her claim to honesty.

That left the attribute of "
educated." Aha. Now that was a quality to which her stepfather could attest, bless his shriveled soul.

Thomas Fanshaw had been a harsh taskmas
ter. Her fingers and her shoulders had smarted enough under his razor strap when her penmanship went awry or her scribbled sum was not the correct total. Thanks to his pious and exacting nature, she could recite the books of the Bible and quote its scripture. He had been a chorister in the Canterbury cathedral, a fact that hardly determined her life path. Or just mayhap it did.

When Thomas Fanshaw had allowed the vil
lage vicar, an Anglican with a strong puritan bent, to order an awl driven through the tongue of her brother Robby for swearing, she forsook both society’s God and its religion.

She sighed. To dwell with
regret on the past was foolish. The hour was late, nearly four in the morning. At this rate, she would get less than four hours sleep before she exchanged her painter’s smock for an alehouse maid’s apron.

She picked up the paintbrush, dipped it in the jar
, and went back to work on her latest masterpiece: transforming Lord Pemberton’s black snuffbox, embossed with his gold seal, into a blue one festooned with a fairy ring.

With a goodly measure of pride, Modesty considered herself one of the best of London
’s craftsmen in the art of camouflaging or altering watches, seals, rings, and other valuable stolen items.

* * *

Located between Fleet Street and the Thames, Modesty’s run-down neighborhood, the Bridewell Dock area, with its narrow courts and alleyways, was the haunt of all manner of thieves, strumpets, and cutthroats who disposed of their victims’ bodies in the stinking River Fleet at night. Every day Modesty saw these lowlifes pass through the Bridewell Dock Grog Shop’s battered door. Even at this time of morning, nearing the tenth hour, the alehouse—the remains of a portion of an old Saxon castle—reeked of cheap drink, stale vomit, and piss.

Few heads turned when Modesty spotted the rakishly dressed Handsome Jack Holloway stroll in. Most of the alehous
e occupants, as well as Modesty, knew Jack for what he was— a skilled pickpocket and a fencer of stolen goods.

In spite of rewards offered for information of his whereabouts, Jack swaggered around in flamboyant finery. Wearing a ruffled white silk shirt, r
ed velvet suit, silver-hilted sword, diamond rings on every finger, and a gold watch dangling from his waistcoat, he cut a dashing figure.

Through the white haze of pipe smoke, his bright blue eyes found Modesty. She set the tin cup of ale before one sour
-faced patron and waited for Jack to wend his way to her through the maze of God’s neglected souls.

Jack employed a team of artists to alter stolen valuables and owned several warehouses for the storage of these goods. She sincerely liked her nocturnal emp
loyer. He might cheat, steal, and lie, but he was the gentlest of souls. Wouldn’t harm a cockroach. She was lucky to work for him.

Yes, between the alehouse and her artistry, she was most fortunate. She had a roof over her head and food in her belly. Secur
ity was hers.

Jack wasn
’t smiling, and she suspected her news wouldn’t cheer him any. He might find her repartee entertaining, but she sensed that now was not the time for salty byplay. Bluntly, she told him, “The snuffbox isn’t finished."

"We are." His mo
uth, as mobile as his hands, was set in grim lines. "We’ve been fingered. I’m just one step ahead of the bailiffs.”

Fear robbed her of her breath. She had no desire to be shackled in leg irons.

Jack grabbed her shoulders and shook her lightly. "Modesty! You’re gawking like a simpleton. We’ve got to do something! Quick!”

She focused on his face, where a roguish mouth warred for dominance with a deceptive angel-innocent gaze. Was it genuine concern that showed this time in those thick-lashed eyes? "I am. I
’m getting married."

"My felicitations," he said without missing a beat, which was so like Jack. He was adaptable, a mark of their profession.

Gallant even in the face of calamity, he made a leg, then began to saunter back past the noisy tables of clothed primates. When the alehouse door swung open once more to reveal two burly men, he pivoted in the opposite direction. “Hide me!" he mouthed at her.

“
The taproom." She nodded toward the rear of the alehouse. If luck was with him, and it usually was, he might appropriate an empty cask for temporary living quarters.

As Jack beat a retreat for the taproom, Lemuel, the slovenly alehouse keeper, sidled up to her and s
aid, “High Sheriff’s officials from the looks of them."

"No doubt here to monitor yewr ale." The publican was an adept at watering down the ale with lime.

But one of the Crown’s two ruffians was pointing her out to his partner. Casually, she removed her stained apron and tossed it on a counter slick with sludge and littered with flat-sided bottles. "I’m on me way to the Virginia Colony, Lemuel."

He stared at the two, now weaving through the alehouse's patrons toward her. "I
’d say ye be on 'oor way to Newgate."

“
No time for fond faretheewells then.” She sprinted to the taproom, saw that the only available cask was occupied, and sped on toward the back door, which opened onto an alley that was home to rats, vagabonds, and odorous garbage. Negotiating the narrow way speedily could be tricky. Slime, rotten food, and raw sewage threatened to impede her flying feet.

In back of her, she heard shouts for her to halt.

Incarceration in Newgate Prison, where the vice, drunkenness, immorality and filth far exceeded her present circumstances and where prisoners died off like flies from jail fever—well, the images spurred her even faster.

She picked up her skirts, hopped over a der
elict drunk, and dodged a chamber pot being emptied from a second-story window. The alley abutted the Fleet Ditch, a tributary of the Thames. Twenty thousand boats, from heavy barges and scuttling river ferries to the towering fortresses of the East Indian Company, blocked her view—and her escape.

With nothing to lose, she jumped into a skiff
moored in the ditch. The skiff lurched dangerously. From the skiff, she bounded onto a barge. Then she gathered every ounce of her might to vault to the opposite bank—a span that not even a chimney sweep would attempt. And she made it!

“
Ta da!" she called to her two pursuers, waved a grimy hand, and hurried on toward Guildhall.

Opposite the Quarter Moon Groggery and a row of shops, Guildhall was thronged with the unemployed who were often subject to impris
onment.

After a few questions, she found the room
designated as the Board of Trade and Plantations. "I am here to apply for the position of bride, as advertised by the Virginia Company of London," she breathlessly told the magistrate, who stared at her over his bulbous nose.

Her hair had come loose from
her pins during her mad dash, and tangled wisps straggled from beneath her dingy white cap to her shoulders. Her red, cheap satinet skirts were splashed with muck. She and the satinet had both seen better days.

“
You meet the qualifications?" he inquired, his brows arched in skepticism.

“
As God is me witness, yewr lordship.”

She might not be young, handsome, or honest but she was shrewd
—and desperate. So the opportunity to marry a planter who lived at the edge of the world was God-sent.

Not that she believe
d in God, of course.