As a school of bluefish passed portside, Richard looked past them to Point Comfort. In 1667, the brilliant old Governor had, in frenzy, spent thousands of pounds to build a fort over there. The old fool. The range of any cannon would have been far too short—but for a good laugh—even had the fort been completed in time!
The Dutch came the first of June, in 1667. Their actions made it a hard and disastrous week for some of Virginia. Much of Lower Norfolk grinned a quiet toast to the Dutch.
A captured ketch from Virginia was used as a guide and a deceit for approaching the Elizabeth, a great English ship of war bearing forty-six guns. Her captain, though warned, had taken off with a wench he'd brought out from England, to a wedding party in Lower Norfolk. Friends of Richard's were drinking with the captain as the Chesapeake's great floating weapon of protection was taken. Then, fifteen ships of high-grade tobacco were burned or seized as prizes by the Dutch.
Stupidity, thought Richard. They paid for their stupidity. Anyway, the Dutch had always done right by him.
The rains had come in June, too. Until the middle of July—for forty days— rain fell to drown what remained of people's grain.
When the rains did stop, in July, and neighbors finally dared to venture out for visits, Joseph Williams was born to the wary couple. The hope that comes with new life buoyed Richard and Anne for the next month.
The hurricane was August.
Anne lay at her father's house, tended in a fever by Sarah Biggs, who also nursed new Joseph with her own son, Jabez. The wind came quickly, and Richard, working with his men, was trapped at Deep Creek. The steady, demon force blew a full twenty-four hours, all but the last few hours from the southeast direction. Deep Creek was sucked into the Southern Branch and up the Elizabeth River. As Richard lay with his men in the ditch they'd dug to drain the July rains, he traced in his mind the routes he'd taken, and he knew that the whole Chesapeake must be flowing up the rivers James and York and Piankatank….
Other than his babies dying, that had been the worst day in Richard's life.
John Biggs's house—with few others—had survived the storm, whole. The new manor of Richard Williams and his wife Anne had disappeared. The two iron pots left Anne by her mother—and presented on her wedding day by Grandmother Ware—were found protruding from the sand. Richard's new cow, Polly, was found a week later, foraging in the swamp. Ware Manor was gone, as was that of Uncle John and fifteen thousand others in Virginia.
The nightmarish year of 1667 was followed by nine years of cattle plague, drought, and more children.
"Poppa," Joseph said from the bow. "Tell me, again, about the year I was born."
Richard pointed across Hampton Roads to Point Comfort.
"That was the year the Big Hurricane washed away the foundations of Berkeley's would-be fort." He began the oft-told story.
Anne added more wood to the fire under her big iron pot. Yesterday's soap had been—as usual—a success. This morning the pot had been for laundry. Now, she was beginning a new pot of stew with the rabbits John had killed, and with the two old hens that had stopped laying. The new servants needed meat on their bones before the summer work began.
Anne's most valuable possession was her mother's pot. Glass windows had been nice—a glittering luxury—but this pot was a focal point in her life. Solid, real things stood up to adversity: this pot, her love for Richard.
How Richard had grieved for the lost house and windowpanes! She, though, had forgotten their loss in rejoicing the next spring when two of her tulips reappeared.
She hummed a happy tune as she skinned the rabbit for the fresh pot of stew. Sally Pine, one of the new girls, was tending to the oven by the hearth, heating it for the dough that had twice risen and would be sealed inside for the night—hot bread for the morning.
Anne dropped the rabbit quarters into the pot and allowed herself a few moments of quiet. She sat on the three-legged stool near the bubbling pot and settled the stool firmly in the newly packed sand. She'd taken advantage of Richard and Joseph's absence to replace the filthy floor around the hearth. One day she'd have a floor of wood planks, again. Certainly, her children would grow up to have such things. For now she was content with her "Virginia house."
More sand was needed, she noticed, to build up the floor along that northeast corner. Shade and damp kept on rotting away at the wall. The post was looking seriously weak, too. She'd speak to Richard about it.
But for what? As fine and busy a craftsman as he was with wood—more than just a cooper—it was always their house that was in need of repairs, when he could take off any time to run help someone else.
Poppa's—-and a few of the other older manor houses that survived the hurricane of '67—were about the only houses around here that had brick foundations and wooden floors; the usual way of building houses in England. Wood of any description was there for the taking. But the cost of hiring carpenters—and if you were going to be fancy, a joiner—were over three times what they were back in England, her father said. Men with the muscles to raise a wall or to secure rafters would come looking to help. Those gatherings were some of the most fun! But the cost of a carpenter…. Richard was training the boys in his skill, but they seemed to have no real knack for it. Baby Richard's favorite plaything, though, was a toy hammer his father made for him.
These "Virginia houses," as people had come to call them, were less costly and more quickly raised than the older style. "Post construction," the men said, and that pretty well told the story. Upright posts and studs of locust wood were planted three or four feet in the ground, then secured and connected at their tops by a squared-timber wall plate. The roof frame rested on these wall plates, and that was about it. The outside of the frame was covered with shingles or with fouror five-foot-long rived clapboards. Richard had covered their roof with cedar shingles, and the outside walls with red oak clapboards. Softer, white pine was easily planed, and he'd used long, wide boards of that to panel the inside walls of their twenty-foot square manor house. Some bricks had been salvaged from the wreckage of their first home, and they now lined the firebox of a lath and plaster chimney. A ladder led to the loft where John and Joseph slept on a pallet of bearskins. A long table of rived and planed planks was the largest piece of furniture. Split logs on peg legs served as benches. Two walnut chests Richard made held their clothes and linens. Two polished hogsheads stored their few linens and clothes. Anne's three-legged stool stayed by the hearth within reach of the cherished pots and utensils hanging from the swinging iron crane that Grandfather Ware had given them as a present for the new manor house. He'd had to order many things from Bristol to replace his own losses from the hurricane.
Richard would despair, occasionally—when he'd been heavily into the rum—that he'd brought her from a life of comfort to a life of drudgery and infrequent pleasures. Anne would caress the masses of his curls that she loved so, and reassure him that she would chose no other life than the one she had with him and their children. She'd speak of the future they were building. Their future and the future of their children as English in a growing empire.
Anne stirred the stew and drifted to her dream.
A horse approached on the southern road from the Great Bridge. She recognized the gait of Charles Shaw's horse, Stead. Shaw still rode the old mare despite his neighbor's ribbing about Shaw's stingy nature.
There was much about the old man's personality that brought forth ribbing, but evidence of the suffering he'd undergone for his faith usually stifled people's biting humor.
Charles Shaw had arrived in Lower Norfolk from Barbados, eight years earlier. On that island he'd been among the first and, typically of him, the most vocal Quaker converts. The authorities had pierced his tongue with a hot poker so as to silence him. That hadn't quieted the man, but rather, made his constant gibbering unintelligible.
Anne heard the old nag approaching and prayed—with little hope for relief—that Charles Shaw would be merely riding by on some urgent business
elsewhere.
"Greething my chid," he said.
"Greeting, Friend Shaw," Anne replied respectfully.
"Ty huthband, ith he redurned from Thames Thown?" the old man asked.
"No, but we expect him back today, Friend Shaw. I'm sorry you missed him. The community of Friends will want to share the news he brings of my father."
Anne had known the man for six years now and, with her son John, had very little trouble understanding when Shaw spoke. It was usually what he said that was irksome.
"Thy father lies in the James Town jail, where George Wilson died for The Light," Shaw said.
Anne held the stick of wood more tightly in her hand. Her great urge was to throw it at him. How dare he stand in the place of her husband to deliver such terrible and personal news!
"How do you know this?" she calmly asked.
"The Constable arrived this morning at the County Courthouse and posted a notice on the door," he sputtered. "God be praised that your father was not called upon to suffer the loss of an ear, or the affliction of a thick tongue."
Anne suppressed a cruel laugh at the man's speech and said instead, "Have a cool drink of water, Friend Shaw, and be about your business of spreading the bad news."
She made no further efforts to understand Shaw's thick monologue. She'd wait for the details from her husband. The full truth would not be this bad, she knew. She rushed through the necessary hospitality, urging Shaw to ride on, to ride on from her sight. Even in the best of times she strained to be pleasant to the man whom nearly she alone seemed to understand. Undoubtedly, that was why the old man seemed to follow her about when they were in proximity.
"To suffer for the Light is a gift of God," Shaw said as he re-mounted the old mare.
Her father would have rebuked Anne for the insolent glare she tossed the visitor and for the words, "You Quaker fools," that she muttered as he finally rode away.
She went back to the wild onions she was washing for the stew. Richard would be home soon and she'd wait until then to worry. Her father could not live in that prison for two years. Richard would find a way to get him out. Enough pounds, certainly, could buy her father's freedom. John Biggs had readily rebuilt the fortune he'd lost in the hurricane of '67 and the next year's cattle plague. Richard had accumulated some wealth since then, too, with Anne insisting that he save everything for more servants and land instead of rebuilding her manor house with glass windows and a brick foundation.
The three servants who'd lived out their indentures were free men and woman, now. Paying George Dawes a salary was money down a rat hole, Anne kept saying. New servants were essential if they were to improve their lot much more. They could sell the new land, if need be, to free her father, but not the servants, she prayed. They'd find a way to save her father.
A saint, he was! If Sarah Hodges had married one of her own, instead of pestering her father into converting….
The relationship between Anne and her father had become less tender and intimate than it used to be. Father Biggs had another family now, two boys and two daughters, all nearly the same, matching ages as Richard's and hers. Anne and her family didn't fit into the family of the Quakeress, Sarah Biggs.
Often, Anne was embarrassed for her father when Sarah interrupted men's conversations, or offered her radical opinions on important subjects. She'd been heard to speak against the new and valuable institution of permanent slave labor, and she'd bring up quotes from King James's old pamphlet condemning tobacco as a pernicious evil! Anne would amuse herself at such times by imagining her step-mother going mad and running through local settlements, as some Quaker women were said to do. In imitation of Isaiah, they said!
The sound of a gunshot echoed up Deep Creek, and Anne knew that her husband and son were back home. She threw the remaining vegetables into the rolling broth and ran out to the water barrel with a cloth to wipe the day's smoke from her face, and to wash off the rank odor of onions from her hands. She crushed first-breath-of-spring blossoms in her hands and patted her face and arms. She strolled to the wharf as the ketch drifted up. The children came running too, and a cry came from Baby Richard, lying in the crib by the door.
"The lady of the manor awaits her lord in her leisure hours," Richard said to George Dawes, as the men secured the lines fore and aft that young John had thrown to them.
"Tra-la-la," Anne sang, as though her time were spent in luxury and boredom.
Joseph ran to hug his mother's waist, telling her and John, already, about James Town. Richard walked to Anne and held her, kissed her lightly and then hard, before pulling away. He looked at her with a seriousness that confirmed Shaw's prattle. Anne spoke first.
"Ty faba lith in the Thames Thown dail," she quoted Shaw.
"The wormy little bastard!" Richard yelled.
"Your father will not stay in jail, Anne. My Uncle John was there. He wants to forgive me, and he's willing to speak to the Council for Father Biggs. There was nothing we could do. The Governor and the Council are in an unforgiving mood because of other things I'll tell you of. But Father Biggs will be well! I left more than enough with the guards to ensure his well-being and health. They're fair men, the guards, if they're well-paid."
Anne refused to yield to fear. She could see Richard's aching concern for her in his eyes, and she'd not let him.
"I know," she said. "When the wormy little man, as you called him, spat the bad news over me, I was afraid. But, not now. Father has powerful friends. As do you," she added
"Joseph, Son," Anne said, "go change your shoes and help John clear the garden space."
"No," Richard said. "Today the boys may go hunting for the rest of the daylight hours. One of the new men will do your chores for tonight."
"Edy is with her Grandmother Biggs?" Richard asked, a twinkle in his eye.
"She is," Anne said. Her eyes lidded over, and a smile crept across her face. "I think I'll have the new girls finish in the house and go clear the garden," she mused.
Richard brought in the heavy chest on his shoulder. Anne followed, watching when his neck muscles became thick ropes. He rearranged the contents until Joseph and the girls left, leaving the door ajar. Richard leaned to pick up his namesake from the crib as Anne walked up and reached around her husband's waist.
"Your father is strong," Richard said. "He'll survive whole and well, full of new tales of enlightenment to share at his Friends Meetings. We'll get him out." Richard spoke gently.
"I know," Anne said, as she ran her hands across the hard stomach. She held him tightly and moved her hands to tell him that this caress was an invitation to be returned.
Richard turned to face her. She was radiant with the same inner strength that sparkled when he'd first seen her, turning that spit in her grandmother's house. Richard placed the sleeping boy back in the crib, pushed the door firmly over the heaped sand and clasped it shut, then went to sit on the rope bed that they'd once broken in their frenzy. Anne stood before him, running her hands through the long, tangled curls of the hair that fell past his shoulders. How he longed to shave it and afford an elegant, curled wig. How she loved it.
Richard's hand moved from Anne's waist, up the laced bodice, to the open neck of her undershirt. He stroked her neck and shoulders with one hand, as he unlaced the bodice with his other. Her slim waist excited him. He was once afraid that her body would become square, like her Grandmother Ware's. When the bodice laces were unstrung and Richard's hand moved under and up the shirt to touch her breasts, Anne shuddered as she remembered doing years ago, when he first touched her, when they lay inches away from each other, buried in a corn crib. Above all, Anne loved giving Richard children. Her time was right today. She'd give him another.
Chapter Nine
Bacon's Rebellion was like the hurricane of '67. It came fast, stayed for what seemed a long time, then was gone, leaving things were all torn up.
On a hot and dusty day in late May of 1676, Edward Harper noisily appeared on the north road astride a lathe
red horse. Anne, glowing in her pregnancy, charmed Edward from his horse into their cool cabin, where she fed her guest cake and honeyed ale as servants tended to the mare and ran to fetch their master.
The news Edward brought was disturbing to Anne. The young Nathaniel Bacon had attracted followers who were urging him to further rebellion. Edward boasted that he, himself, was among those frontiersmen demanding war on the Indians, and that the number of Bacon's supporters was growing and now came from every county of the colony. Edward was in Lower Norfolk, he said, to talk with local leaders, primarily with their near neighbor to the north, Captain William Carver.
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