Windsong

by Valerie Sherwood

  Looking at him now, she felt proud. He would far have preferred to ride - as would Fielding - but Letitia had said she would not hear of it, she wanted their company in the coach. His lean face with its saturnine features had maintained a suitable gravity even when Fielding and Letitia had started wrangling in the coach about - of all things - her feather fan, which dangled from her violet leather-gloved wrist.

  ‘Ridiculous!’ Fielding had snorted, eyeing it in the gloom of the coach. ‘Should be fur-trimmed in weather like this! Why women insist on fanning themselves in dead of winter is beyond me!’

  ‘Nonsense!’ retorted his wife. ‘Fans are as fashionable in winter as they are in summer. I carry a fan with me against - against hot rooms!’

  ‘Hot rooms? Cold rooms, more likely, with frost webbing the windowpanes! And you have one too!’ He glared at Virginia.

  ‘Father.’ Virginia felt called upon to explain, although her mother had actually forced the fan on her. ‘If you were dancing or sitting too near a roaring fire, and were wearing the tight stays most women wear, which hardly let them breathe at all - ’

  ‘Virginia,’ said her mother sternly, mindful of their guest, whose eyes had brightened, ‘that will be enough. Ladies do not mention their undergarments in mixed company!’

  Virginia had subsided but Carolina, bounced about by the coach, had been convulsed with laughter. Her merry eye had caught Rye’s and she had seen a twinkle there but he had maintained an impassive countenance, even though she guessed he had been thinking - as she had - of the lacy undergarments which they had not only discussed at some length but which he had ripped from her back one moonlit night in Tortuga!

  Now, as the coach lurched into Williamsburg, she had the flap beside her open and was pointing out the local landmarks to Rye as they lumbered by.

  ‘And there is the mill!’ she cried - and stopped, because Virginia’s first love had been Hugh, the miller’s son at this very mill. ‘Are we going to drive by Aunt Pet’s house to see if it’s all right?’ she asked hastily.

  ‘No,’ said her mother shortly. ‘Whatever is there today will be there tomorrow. We don’t want to be so late as to miss supper.’

  ‘Good, I’m starved,’ said Virginia with a toss of her head. Not that she was, but she wanted Carolina to know that she no longer cared about Hugh!

  ‘I am happy to hear it,’ said her mother grimly. ‘I will remind you of those words at supper!’

  They were driving along Duke of Gloucester Street now, with the horses pulling hard through deepening snow and the carriage wheels moving soundlessly across a field of white. Thankful to have made it, the coachman pulled up before the white bulk of the many-dormered, green-shuttered Raleigh Tavern. The men alighted and helped the ladies down to scuttle through the snow on their tall platformlike pattens.

  They came through the Raleigh’s painted front door - before which, in better weather, slaves, goods, and even whole plantations were auctioned off - bringing with them such a swirl of snow that everyone turned to look. In the candlelit interior Carolina saw instantly that the Bramways were among those present, indeed just descending the stairs, on their way to a late supper, no doubt.

  Standing beside her stocky ginger-bearded husband, who was wincing as he made it downstairs on a cane, Amanda Bramway was not quite the brunette beauty who had once confidently expected to marry Fielding Lightfoot. But she was still a handsome woman. She eschewed the taller hairdos that were coming into popularity as a reflection of the French mode, believing that with her narrow face and large black eyes she looked better with her hair flatter on top and set into bangs with large 'spaniel’s ear’ masses of curls held out by wire to enhance and widen her narrow face. Nevertheless, she was a mirror of fashion in her own mind. Her sulphur-yellow damask gown, of so heavy a fabric that it crunched when she walked, cascaded over what was still a handsome figure - not willowy like Letitia’s but robustly female with ample curves. Her panniers were pulled back at either side by large ecru lace rosettes and revealed a deep chrome-green petticoat. Ecru lace sparkling with brilliants wandered across her deep bosom and her thick black curls were striped with bands of saffron ribands.

  ‘She looks like a bee alighting on a dandelion,’ whispered Virginia, eyeing Amanda’s saffron gown and green petticoat.

  ‘A yellow jacket,’ retorted Carolina, remembering how viciously she had once been stung by one.

  Letitia did not appear to see the Bramways, even though Fielding had gone over to greet them - she was busy brushing the snow from her velvet cloak. When she had finished, the Bramways had already disappeared into the Apollo Room.

  The landlord hurried over, rubbing his hands together, and Fielding looked relieved to find that the rooms they had ‘bespoke’ were waiting for them, ‘with fires already lit’. Rye was to share quarters with ‘a Mr Huddleston, a most delightful gentleman from Maryland’ but there were two private rooms waiting for the Lightfoots and their daughters. Carolina cast a distressed look at Rye. She had hoped that he too would be given a private room so she could slip out and join him, but it was the custom of the day when inns were crowded to put two or even three people into a bed (many of them slept fully clothed anyway, particularly in this inclement weather) and she knew she could do nothing about it.

  ‘Come along, girls. Fielding.’ Letitia marshalled her brood. ‘We will join you in the Apollo Room, Mr Evistock,’ she told Rye.

  ‘I doubt there’ll be room for us in the Apollo Room,’ demurred Fielding.

  But the landlord, still hovering near the entrancing Mistress Lightfoot and her beautiful daughter, heard that. A table has already been bespoke for you,’ he beamed, rubbing his fat hands together again. ‘And will be waiting when you come down.’

  ‘Which will not be long,’ announced Letitia, gathering up her violet velvet skirts and leading the march upstairs after the little serving girl who pattered up ahead of them to show them to their rooms. ‘You’ll have only time to powder your noses.’

  They barely had time to do that. But Carolina did manage to pin up her velvet panniers into great puffs at each side and to add a burst of ice-green ribands to her high-piled blonde hair - ribands that exactly matched the shining satin of her ice-green petticoat. And Virginia, who spent most of her time combing out the back of Carolina’s handsome coiffure and patting stray curls back into place, did find time - at Carolina’s insistence - to apply a bit of rouge to her pale cheeks and to touch her lips with Spanish paper.

  ‘Now,’ said Carolina, as she prepared to open the door and let her sister glide through it, ‘we will see what Mother has in mind!’

  What Letitia had in mind was not immediately apparent. That she intended to dine in the Apollo Room was patently obvious for she bore a straight course for the Apollo with Fielding and her daughters in her wake. Rye greeted them there, in a room aswirl with smoke from the long clay pipes the gentlemen affected. Strong wooden tables scarred by dice boxes had been laid for supper and more than one was still empty - although the Bramways and several friends were already seated at theirs.

  The Lightfoots and their guest were led to a table before the hearth where a roaring fire blazed.

  ‘Now do you see why I might need my fan, Fielding?’ murmured Letitia, arranging her wide velvet skirts about her. ‘That fire’ - she glanced towards the hearth - ‘May well blister your back before the night is over.’

  ‘Tis a welcome blaze,’ he said grimly, eyeing the Bramway party, who were talking and laughing across the room. Carolina guessed that he would prefer to endure the heat rather than to see his wife move any nearer to Amanda Bramway!

  Seated beside Rye, she looked up at the motto above the mantel. HILARITAS SAPIENTIAE ET BONNE VITAE PROLES. Merriment and good living there might be here at this table, she thought ironically, but prudence? That was sorely lacking!

  They dined on scalloped oysters and Welth ‘rabbit’ and blue crabs and white perch - in all, no less than nine courses. And Carolina told Rye that
the enormous ‘great tart’ as well as the Sally Lunn had been baked in the two dome-shaped red brick ovens at the back, behind the Raleigh. Everyone was very merry as they sat in the comfortable candlelit room, watching the snow come down ever more heavily outside - for Letitia’s comment had not proved true; the large flakes had turned to little ones and from the windows of the Raleigh one could not see across the street.

  Although Carolina’s eyes sparkled when some new arrivals at the table next to them gleefully discussed the ramming of the Bramway barge - adding that Duncan Bramway had turned his ankle on the way home, which accounted for his limp - Letitia did not appear to notice. Fielding Lightfoot relaxed when he saw that his wife seemed to be planning no attack upon her arch rival across the room. Even Virginia was persuaded to eat, although she kept insisting she was already ‘stuffed’. As they ate, the room filled up again, the early diners having gone, and there was the tinkle of ladies’ laughter as well as the deeper guffaws of the gentlemen as they quaffed their Madeira and brandy. And then the board was being cleared and the gentlemen settled down to toasting their ladies’ eyelashes.

  ‘To the most dazzling lady anywhere - Mistress Carolina Lightfoot!’ Rye said recklessly, lifting his glass with a smile at Carolina. ‘I toast her’ - he was looking rather fixedly at the well-displayed tops of her white breasts, and Carolina felt her face pinken and gave him a reproving look - ‘her eyebrows,’ he said at last.

  ‘And to that other lovely lady, to whom I am married!’ cried Fielding, his good humour reflecting his relief that his lovely lady and that other lovely lady across the room had not come to blows.

  They were still drinking that toast when across the smoky room the Bramway party rose to leave. Instantly Letitia, who had been waiting for the right moment - when the room was full of important gentry and the brunette in saffron yellow would be conspicuous by standing - spoke:

  ‘Why, ’tis Amanda Bramway!’ she cried in a voice of surprise. ‘I had not thought to see you here!’

  Amanda Bramway’s dark head swung about warily and there was a sudden slackening of conversation roundabout, for Letitia’s, sharply raised voice had cut clearly across the room.

  ‘And why should you be surprised, Letitia,’ demanded Amanda Bramway, a trace of resentment colouring her voice, ‘that I should be found dining at the Raleigh?’

  ‘Oh, ’tis not your dining at the Raleigh that surprises me,’ Letitia said contemptuously. ‘In times like these, they are forced to accept anyone. What surprises me, Amanda Bramway, is that you would dare to face me! And after having bewitched our tobacco so that we have hardly had a leaf for shipment! I little wonder that your own tobacco shrivelled this summer - your curse has no doubt turned back upon you!’

  Beside her, as the first words of his wife’s barb were delivered, Fielding Lightfoot had choked on his wine. Now purple of face, he was being thumped on the back by a frightened Virginia.

  His wife ignored him. Her attention was centred entirely on her long-time adversary across the room.

  The reply was not long in coming. Amanda Bramway’s narrow face was thrust forward on her long neck, giving her the appearance of a striking cobra. The big dark clusters of ‘spaniel’s ear’ curls swayed as she cried, ‘I bewitched your tobacco? Oh, how dare you? How dare you accuse me?’

  Letitia had now risen to her feet. She stood there, a regal beauty, swaying in long-stemmed slenderness in her violet velvet gown. Behind her the firelight haloed her fair hair and cast rippling red lights along the soft folds of her gown.

  ‘I accuse you because you are the witch who did it!’ she cried in a ringing voice. ‘You came into our house at Level Green in the form of a bat!’

  Beside her Fielding found enough voice to choke out the words, ‘Sit down, Letitia!’ then went off into another paroxysm of coughing.

  Carolina gave Virginia’s foot a slight kick under the table.

  Virginia, reacting to that kick, which meant ‘Come to Mother’s aid’, stopped beating her father on the back and instead threw herself into the violent exchange between the two older women. ‘And you left our house in the form of a weasel, Amanda Bramway! I was there and I saw you too!’

  ‘And in between, Mother and Virginia both told me,’ cried Carolina, not to be left out, ‘that once you had flown in through the window as a bat you promptly turned into your real self again and it was in human form that you cast a curse upon our tobacco! They said you were standing in our dining room when you did it!’

  Rye watched this interchange among the women in fascination. He was reminded of nothing so much as a mother cat, fluffed up and spitting defiance, and her kittens rallying to the mutual defence against danger.

  ‘Oh-h-h-h!’ screeched Amanda Bramway, snapping her ivory fan in half in her anger. ‘To hear such words from a wanton!’ She would have broken free from her husband’s restraining arm to run across and rain blows upon Letitia, but Duncan - white-faced - held her fast.

  ‘And you are not a wanton only because you do not have the opportunity!’ Letitia would have come to meet Amanda but Fielding kept a grip on her, despite a spasm of coughing. ‘But a witch you certainly are - and you will mind your tongue or I will have you up at the next court session not only for witchcraft but for slander as well!’

  Half the gentry were on their feet now, staring. Some were shouldering each other to get a better view. The nearest seemed poised to pounce upon these warring women and wrest them apart should their husbands chance to lose their hold on their respective wives (although several would be heard to remark later that they were sorely vexed that Letitia and Amanda had been restrained from bodily combat for they would dearly have loved to see those two spitting cats fight it out!).

  But Letitia’s last sally was too much for Amanda. Physically held back from lunging at the glamorous woman in violet velvet who was taunting her safely from a distance, Amanda Bramway crouched lower, trying to free herself, and her sulphur-yellow skirts seemed to spread out and stiffen. (‘It was as if a purple and white iris had attacked a dandelion,’ Virginia would report to her little sisters later. ‘And the dandelion was shaking itself out to do battle!’ ‘Who won?’ they would ask in fascination. ‘Mother won, of course,’ Virginia would tell them, adding airily, ‘Doesn’t she always?’)

  But at the moment there seemed to be some doubt as to who would ‘win’. All eyes were focused in fascination on the two women. Save for their piercing voices and Fielding Lightfoot’s incessant coughing, there was not a sound in the room. Footsteps could be heard fast approaching as word of the combat spread and servants and guests alike converged to see whatever was going on in the Apollo Room.

  ‘You - dare to insult me so?’ Amanda Bramway panted. She was struggling so desperately to free herself from her husband’s arms that some of her ecru lace came loose. (‘A slightly tattered dandelion,’ Virginia would later report.)

  ‘Witches must not have such tender feelings,’ taunted Letitia. (‘A swaying long-stemmed purple and white iris. Absolutely regal,' Virginia would tell them with admiration glowing in her voice.)

  Something in the thunderstruck glances of those around her must have communicated itself to Amanda. She realized her danger then, for witchcraft was a serious charge - indeed the unease about witches in general was pervasive throughout the Colonies. Witches had been tried before in Virginia - and would be again. Scenting this danger, Amanda abruptly changed her tune.

  ‘I am not a witch,’ she flung out haughtily. "Tis our neighbour, Estelle Randolph, who is the witch! Oh, I have forborne to bring charges because the woman is a neighbour, but she bewitched our tobacco - and no doubt yours as well.’

  Letitia had been expecting that.

  ‘The witch who changed from a bat into a woman in our dining room wore only a petticoat - nothing else - but she had your appearance,’ she declared in a ringing voice. ‘Furthermore she had a large brown mole just below her left breast.’ (Letitia had learnt that from one of her serving women who
had years ago worked for Amanda Bramway’s parents when Amanda was growing up.) She leaned forward. ‘Would you care to select three ladies of this company and disrobe in private that they might see that you do not have such a mole?’

  Amanda fell back, no longer trying to fight free of her husband’s grasp. Her face paled.

  ‘Ah, I see that you do have such a mole,’ purred Letitia. ‘And since I have never seen you naked, how could I know that if you had not appeared in only a petticoat in my dining room!’

  ‘Before leaving as a weasel!’ cried Virginia.

  All the charges were ridiculous - but nobody laughed. Women had been burned at the stake for less - and all present knew it.

  Overcome by rage and frustration, Amanda collapsed, sobbing, and her white-faced husband thrust her aside. His ginger wig had been knocked askew as he tussled with his wife, and every hair of his ginger beard seemed to be quivering as he advanced upon Fielding, shaking his large fist. His charge was somewhat marred by a wobbly gait and the fact that he was forced to lean heavily upon his cane with his other hand.

  ‘Come out from behind that table, Lightfoot!’ he barked. ‘Tis bad enough that ye married Randolph’s cast off doxy without ye must come to her aid against honest folk!’

  His wavering steps had not brought him halfway across the space that separated them before Fielding, who had got his breath back in him at last, vaulted the table. In his wild charge towards Duncan Bramway, he caught his foot on the leg of a chair that was being hastily pushed back and lunged into Duncan, managing to keep his footing only by seizing Duncan Bramway by the cravat with its thick swatch of lace around his throat. Duncan Bramway’s stockier form staggered beneath this assault and he fell back against a table. He lost his grip on his cane as Fielding plummeted into him and would have gone down, taking tablecloth and dishes with him, had not Fielding’s death-grip on his cravat and his own clawing fingers on Fielding’s coat kept him just barely on his feet.