To Love a Rogue
Page 41
“On the whole, I think marriage will suit you both better,” advised the governor. “Look at all the trouble it will save! You will not have the bother of later adopting your own children—as I must do with you. It makes everything easier.”
“Lass, will you have me?” Raile murmured.
“I’ll have you,” she promised. “I’ll have you in marriage, and I’ll have you in my heart—forever.”
“And I will give the bride away,” said the governor genially. “Faith, ’tis something I’ve been looking forward to!”
“That can come later,” said Lorraine dreamily from the circle of Raile’s arms. “I think Raile and I deserve a short cruise on the Likely Lass before the wedding and the crush and all those congratulations and feasts to prepare and a trousseau to be made ready. Father” —she lingered over the word—“could you not hold Venture together for me while we are gone?”
“I think I might manage that,” was the indulgent answer.
“We will be back before the last banns are cried,” promised Raile, gripping the governor’s hand.
“I will hold you to it,” said the governor. “Now, carry her away!”
Raile grinned at him. “I’ll do it!”
He swept Lorraine up in his arms and carried her out onto the veranda, meaning to swing her into the saddle. But of a sudden, just as the sun sank into the western sky, there was a vivid blinding flash and the world turned green.
“The Green Flash,” murmured Lorraine, remembering that when the Green Flash caught you in the arms of a man he would be the one love beside whom all others would pale. But I do not need the Green Flash to tell me that, she thought. For I would go with Raile no matter what the future holds!
“A pair well-matched,” murmured the governor, watching them ride off.
On board the Likely Lass that night Lorraine and Raile held their own celebration, held it in the great cabin that had known such anger and such ardor between them. MacTavish—only a little mollified when they told him of their impending wedding—took the deck watch, muttering, “Who can sleep, with a woman aboard?” The couple did not bother to eat, they rediscovered instead the delights of sharing a bunk at sea. And after that—after all the golden murmurings, the touchings that burned fiery trails across the heart, the thrill of rediscovery at each other’s firm young bodies, the soaring flights of passion, the marvelous contentment, the warmth of the afterglow—after all that, they discovered they were hungry. A cold snack and warm wine were brought by a beaming Johnny Sears.
After that they lay abed and talked, and then in the wondrous way of lovers, they found passion and enchantment again . . . and again . . . until the dawn. Then, as through the stern windows of the Likely Lass, the sun shone on their gleaming naked bodies, they fell asleep locked in warm embrace as a promise of the love they would clasp and hold—forever.
The lad she loved on Wednesday, he’s been made to rue,
The lad she loved on Thursday—at least his heart was true!
Now that it is Friday, her wild heart can rejoice,
Abrim with joy and gladness at the wisdom of her choice!
—Valerie Sherwood
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The whole sweep of the tempestuous 1600’s, when an indentured servant such as my gallant Lorraine could rise to wealth and power, has always fascinated me, and although all of the characters and situations are of my own invention (save for obvious historical characters such as Governor Berkeley and Nathanial Bacon and well-known historical events), I have striven throughout to give real backgrounds and an authentic flavor of the times—even to using archaeological findings that confirm the settlers’ way of life in colonial Virginia.
“King Philip’s War,” when marauding Indian raiders burned homes and settlements throughout New England, wrought such devastation on the Rhode Island countryside that I have been hard put to find actual houses still in existence today in which to set my story. I have therefore used typical houses and hostelries of the day, especially the unusual “stone-enders” which were so particularly Rhode Island’s own type of early colonial architecture.
For my “Light House Tavern” I have borrowed from the name of the famous White Horse Tavern in Newport—although the tavern of my story is somewhat earlier and therefore more simply constructed.
“Todd House” is based upon Eleazer Arnold’s “splendid mansion” on the Great Road in the Lower Blackstone Valley. The Mayfields’ home is based on the Palmer-Northrup House on North Kingston’s Post Road, the old section of which is thought to have escaped intact the burning during King Philip’s War.
As to the “Green Flash” to which I refer, it has a lovely lucid scientific explanation which I will not go into here. But it is also said that there are those who see it—and those who don’t. And so that strange green flash sometimes seen just as the sun goes down has been noted in several parts of the world—but only at certain spots: from a point on the coast of England and from a certain cliff in Barbados, as in my story. Being rare and uncertain, it has therefore a magic quality, which makes it the stuff of dreams. So it is natural enough for my hardheaded heroine to wonder if she will ever truly see the Green Flash.
The deserted city in Yucatan where Raile brings Lorraine is of course modern Tulum, which in Mayan means “fortress.” (Zama, “city of the dawn,” is a Toltec name for the site and the early Spaniards kept records on it as “Tzama.”) High on its limestone cliffs overlooking the blue Caribbean, Tulum was the first city on Mexico’s coast to be entered by the Spanish (Francisco Hernández de Cordoba and his men, March 1517, in pursuit of some thirty Indians wearing the sturdy cotton armor of the area, who had attacked them with lances and arrows upon their landing). Tulum, city of so many mysteries, still standing in silent grandeur today, guardian of the vastness of Quintana Roo, was the embarkation point for pilgrims journeying to the Isle of Cozumel to worship the goddess Ixchel. It was surely a charmed spot in the time when Raile and Lorraine chanced upon it—as it is today.
Bermuda, with its unique white limestone crossshaped houses with their flaring “welcoming-arms” steps and its seafaring ways, is accurately presented—although it is an older Bermuda of which I write, one with great cedar forests still towering above the islands, when the town of St. George had narrow twisting alleys and an almost medieval look.
Although for purposes of my story I have somewhat compressed and otherwise altered events of both King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion (Bacon’s Rebellion actually started in 1676), I would stress that the sequence of events is correct in both cases.
The town where Lorraine spent the night on her way to Yorktown was of course Middle Plantation, but for clarity I have called it what it was later named—Williamsburg. So that the reader may better place the action of Bacon’s Rebellion, one of Nathaniel Bacon’s two handsome plantations was located in “the Curies”—in other words on one of the great loops the James River made in this area. The murder of his overseer by Indian marauders took place at Bacon’s Quarter, a detached plantation some twenty miles from his home, which would now be located in downtown Richmond. Bacon’s Rebellion actually began as a kind of spontaneous uprising of the colonists and frontiersmen who objected to their wholesale slaughter by the Indians (George Washington’s grandfather. Colonel John Washington, had ordered six Susquehannock chieftains killed and the Indians had taken revenge tenfold, killing ten English settlers along the upper James for every chief they had lost—their rationale was expressed as follows: their chiefs were “persons of quality” and the settlers killed were “of inferior rank”—thus, ten-to-one reprisals! At this point the Indians demanded additional satisfaction for the injuries they had suffered. When it was rejected, they murdered three hundred more of the scattered planters and their families along the upper James.)
The Susquehannock were being pushed south by their northern cousins, the powerful Seneca, and their flight south endangered both Maryland and Virginia.
Governor Ber
keley proved to be strikingly inadequate to meet the attacks of the marauders—even had he cared to, which apparently he did not (his own commercial interests would have suffered if he had). At age sixty-four he had married the widow of Carolina’s governor, a woman half his age. Now senile and ever more manic (he raved that learning had brought heresy, thanked God that there were no free schools or printing in Virginia, and fervently hoped this condition would endure another hundred years!), he showered favors on his cronies and left the beleaguered frontier planters to fend for themselves.
Desperate, they banded together for the general defense—and found a fiery leader in handsome twenty-eight-year-old Nathaniel Bacon, a Cambridge graduate who had studied law at Gray’s Inn. Bacon had come to Virginia with a young wife and a large fortune and cast in his lot with the struggling colonists. A mesmerizing leader, Bacon offered to sally forth against the Indians if but twenty men would follow him—and soon assembled a considerable force. In a way, Bacon’s story is the story of that young America of long ago, for he was above all a man who would dare everything for what he felt was right. Governor Berkeley promptly declared him a rebel and the stage was set for fights and flights and the eventual burning of Jamestown.
As to the “venture” which pays off so handsomely, the story is based closely upon one which actually happened—and to a woman!
I should also like to point out that although today sending the captive Wampanoags and Narragansetts to Barbados to till the canefields as slaves seems barbaric, to the English colonists of that day it represented clemency. In England hanging was the price of rebellion—but the sentence was sometimes commuted to a life of slavery in the West Indies. This was especially true of those who fought Cromwell and those who rose against James II during the Monmouth Rebellion—after both, the canefields of the Indies were filled with toiling English slaves. One of my own ancestors is a case in point. He was one of the generals who brought Cromwell to power in England. Later he became disenchanted with the lord protector (who had assumed dictatorial powers) and rebelled against him, stating in effect that “he had brought the rogue to power and now he would bring him down!” He lost. He was sentenced to death but later transported as a political prisoner to Barbados, where he died. Slavery in the West Indies was considered neither a cruel nor an unusual punishment in the harsh 1600’s.
But as to that wealthy “rum and sugar world” of tropical Barbados, I have tried to bring to the reader not only the actual terrain but also the flavor and elegance of an island that in its day “looked down” upon colonial Boston as being dowdy and unfashionable. Barbados was definitely the place for such a spirited heroine as Lorraine to get herself into trouble!
—Valerie Sherwood
WARNING
Readers are warned against using any of the cosmetics, unusual foods, or remedies referred to herein without first consulting and securing the approval of a medical doctor. These items are included only to enhance the authentic seventeenth-century atmosphere, when—although many of these potions, etc., were dangerous—they were in common usage; none of them are in any way recommended for use by anyone.