Sweet Enchantress
Page 26
As Jack beat a retreat for the taproom, Lemuel, the slovenly alehouse keeper, sidled up to her and said, “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 derelict 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 imprisonment.
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 believed in God, of course.