Mood Indigo

by Parris Afton Bonds

  The Frenchwoman murmured his name again, and a patient, unruffled smile creased lines at either side of his mouth. He was already weary of her avaricious hands, yet she, too, would serve his purpose.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An early-winter gale chased the brig on its voyage across the Atlantic, so the hatches were battened down most of the journey. Mercifully, Jane was too ill to recall fully the five-week nightmare: the narrow slats that slept two or three people; the paltry food, if food it could be called; the lack of ventilation; and always, the vomiting. Every indentured servant had been ill with the bloody flux and ague, and some—like the five-year-old in the cramped bunk across from hers—had died.

  For Jane, who had been served tea and crumpets in bed every morning of her life, who had Meg to light the fire each morning before she arose, the cold and aching in her bones was a new and almost unbearable hardship. Yet the captain had been humane. He provided the passengers with lemon juice against the scurvy and periodically ordered the ship scoured with vinegar.

  As the brig put into Chesapeake Bay, the indentured servants were brought on deck to wash up and restore their clothing. The captain, who was to be paid for transporting the servants according to the price each was auctioned for, desired the haggled lot to look their best. A clean list was made of the names and accomplishments of the surviving passengers. Jane noticed that sometimes a little fraud was practiced—adorning convicts with wigs to increase their respectability and crediting fictitious abilities to some of the men.

  As for her own appearance, it was much altered from that of the tall, lovely Lady Jane Lennox. She had brutally shorn her ebony, hip-length hair with a butcher’s knife from the Lennox kitchen. The cropped hair now capped her head in oil-matted locks that had been hastily and spottily hennaed by her inexpert hand.

  Her brown cotton dress, buttoned to the neck, had sweat rings beneath her armpits. Five weeks at sea had left her creamy complexion a pasty yellow, and her seasickness had sunken her cheeks. Her father would find it difficult to trace his daughter if he described her as she had once been. Despite the unappealing woman she now appeared, there was still a certain sensualness in the set of the mobile lips, a husky quality in the assumed brogue of the voice. And the shapeless dress could not conceal the high, rounded breasts that taunted the thin cotton. And, of course, there was her unconscious queenly carriage that betrayed her station in life.

  When she stepped through the hatch, the early-morning sunlight blinded her. Dazed, she held her forearm across her eyes. Around her the other servants, like flowers’ petals unfurling, slowly stretched, lifting their hands to the sun, celebrating the miracle of life. Yet overhead the wind droned in the rigging like a mournful bagpipe, and she repressed a shiver at the uncertain fate that awaited her.

  It was one of the few times the men and women had been allowed to mingle. But Jane, as before, turned a frosty, shrewish glare at any swain who had the courage to seek her out. So did Polly, a stout country maid with butternut curls and street-wise Dresden-blue eyes. The buxom young woman had indentured herself in hopes of finding a land-owning husband. Over the five weeks she had recounted to Jane all that she had learned of the New World before making the decision to indenture herself.

  Sailors in red knitted caps brought out buckets of water, and everyone fell to washing their faces and hands for the first time in weeks. Jane, however, studied the verdant coastline of Virginia. Somewhere in that vast continent was Terence. She had sailed almost three thousand miles to find him. She was that much nearer her goal.

  She turned back to the large staved buckets and knelt by the least crowded one to cleanse herself of the accumulated sweat and filth and stench. Here she could not expect French perfumed soap to wash the grit from her face, neck, hands, and arms. Afterward she rose and straightened her soiled and rumpled dress and long linen apron.

  These, along with two other gowns, a black duffel mantle and a frayed gray woolen shawl, she had pilfered from Meg’s room the evening she had stolen out of the Lennox London town house. Robert Lennox could easily afford to replace the maid’s meager clothing and metal trunk. Unfortunately the hems of Meg’s dresses were far too short for Jane’s height, and her cotton-stockinged ankles were shockingly displayed.

  “Don’t be looking too swell, dearie,” a woman’s peppery voice said behind her, “if ye get my meaning.”

  Jane turned to find the short, scrappy woman who slept in a hammock not far from her own. It was this woman who had lost the five-year-old. Lizzie, whose age was difficult for Jane to discern, did not shed a tear the night the little girl stopped breathing.

  “One less to suffer through this journey ’e ’ath set us on,” Lizzie had muttered briskly and closed her daughter’s lids.

  “Why shouldn’t I try to make myself presentable?” Jane asked the middle-aged woman. It only made sense to her that the fresher she looked the better chance she would have of her indenture papers being bought by someone who kept a clean, reputable house.

  Lizzie ran toil-worn fingers through her dingy, wind¬blown brown hair and nodded toward the shore. “Those that write back say that the brigs sometimes put in first to one of the coastal towns, where soul drivers come aboard.”

  “Soul drivers?”

  “They buy off the papers of a dozen or so of the servants. ’Erd the servants like sheep across the mountains to the western frontier, they do, where they peddle them as goods to Indian and ’eathen alike.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Lizzie shrugged her narrow shoulders, and Jane wondered if the woman had a husband somewhere to embrace those brittle yet strong shoulders. “Mayhap cause you gave me wee one yer share of water the night wot she took sick.”

  Jane could not forget that night. It was the first time she had ever seen someone die. “It was little enough to do,” she managed to say, feeling verbally inadequate for once.

  The woman’s nut-brown eyes squinched quizzically. “You be educated, hain’t you now.”

  Jane bit back a smile. She had read Plato in the original when she was thirteen, and the following year had translated the Mirror of the Sinful Soul, the famous work by Margaret of France.

  Until her arrival at St. James, her isolation at Wychwood had left her little escape from the tedium of needlework but books. Unless she counted the few times her father returned from London with his political cronies. From them she had absorbed a profound knowledge of politics. She now understood statesmanship and rigid protocol of court better than most men. But, like other intelligent women, she was restricted because politics was believed to be too difficult for the fair sex.

  “I can cipher to the rule of three or more and write a legible hand,” she told Liz, who accepted the statement at face value.

  Polly joined Jane and Liz at the railing to wait, along with the other three hundred-odd passengers, for the brig to reach shore. At the port city of Hampton Roads, which looked little more than a scattering of one-story wooden and brick homes, no soul sellers came aboard, and the three women breathed a little easier.

  “I ’ope I get meself a 'andsome cove,” Polly said.

  “ ’Tis a God-fearing master I ’ope to ’ave,” Lizzie muttered.

  Jane thought of the Quaker, Ethan Gordon. God-fearing, probably. But handsome, no. Not unless one considered the rusticity and savagery about him appealing. She thought that savagery was quite in keeping with the wild, forbidding forests of the New World. The vine-roped and moss-draped trees encroached on the small, insignificant port of Hampton Roads as if they would strangle that representative of civilization.

  The indentured servants were not allowed to disembark while the Cornwall discharged its cargo of salt and took on lumber hewed from the abundant forests and hogsheads of the precious weed tobacco.

  During all this, Jane stood at the railing, the salt wind playing with the frazzled ends of her chopped hair as she impatiently watched and waited. Her fingers gripped the sun-heated bulwark’s edge
, so strong was the need to set foot on land again. After the period of virtual imprisonment below deck, the fresh scent of the loblolly pines and cypresses that lined the shore, almost obscuring the view of the wharves, tantalized her more than any feast cooked by His Majesty’s royal chef. She was tired of the briny taste of food and water and the salty smell of the sea that pervaded her damp bunk, her moldy clothing, even her hair.

  Overhead the enervating Southern sun rose higher, until at last the brig weighed anchor. Up the James River the Cornwall sailed to an inlet that stretched blue fingers into the lush walls of green foliage, Virginia’s soil-rich Tidewater area. Here, at high noon, the brig, with lines slung ashore from her bows and stem, was eased gently alongside the crowded quay. With drums rolling and bosun’s pipes shrilling, the indentured servants descended the gangplank amidst the turnout of curious children, barefoot black slaves, and carriages of well-to-do planters.

  Fear, uncertainty, belated regret, and excitement were painted across the pale faces of the indentured servants as they were loaded into the rear ends of creaking wagons to be carted over a gently undulating forest floor to a destination seven miles distant.

  For the first time since signing her indenture papers Jane’s hopes soared. The wagons occasionally passed immense cleared fields dominated by great mansions with their collections of stables, dairies, shops, kitchens, and slave quarters spread like small self-contained towns at the foot of expansive fields of tobacco. These great homes, glistening with whitewashed brick and adorned with tall Doric pillars, reminded Jane of her family’s country estate at Wychwood—if she could ignore the slaves who worked naked in the fields, their black skin glistening with sweat and their genitals swaying with their bodies’ motions. A strange world, she thought angrily, where a lady’s delicate sensibilities were offended by romantic novels like Pamela but not at the sight of a naked man.

  Polly sat, unaffected by the spectacle before her. “Hits the masters of places like those yew be wanting to buy yewr papers, love,” she said, gesturing with her mob-capped head toward one red-brick Georgian mansion that was sheltered by rows of enormous tulip poplars.

  “And what of the mistresses?” Jane muttered, and was instantly sorry at the shadow that crossed Polly’s rounded blue eyes. She laid a hand on the girl’s rounded arm. “Yew’ll find yewr young man ’ere, yew will,” she said, mimicking the Cockney accent the best she could.

  But would she find the man she sought?

  Straggling one-room log cabins with apple orchards and fields set round with rails shimmered in the violent heat of the hot fall day. The isolated farmsteads, on the outskirts of Williamsburg, the capital of the Virginia colony, greeted the wagonloads of indentured servants. Jane tried to tell herself that life at a colonial household would not be very different from her old life—if she could force herself to play the role of the servant instead of the mistress.

  “And wot about yew?” Polly asked Lizzie. “Ye don’t want a Tidewater gent fer a husband?”

  Lizzie snorted. “The likes of me? Not likely. It’s Meg O’Reilly ’ere wot has the chance of makin’ such a contact—’er with ’er fine ways.”

  Jane started. Was her deception so poor? “Wot makes you say that now?”

  “Why, hain’t none of the Billingsgate fish market about yew, love. Ye were a grand lady’s maid, weren’t yew now?”

  “More or less.”

  “Hit’s content I’ll be to settle for one of those Virginia backwoodsmen with ’is own land,” Polly said. “Hit’s more’n me father ’ad in ’is lifetime.”

  Williamsburg was much more than Jane could have hoped for. Unlike London, with its houses cramped together on narrow streets darkened by huge signs hanging from brackets, Williamsburg was spacious and clean. Picket fences defined the half-acre lots of each brick or painted frame house. And wild flowers, bright-orange day lilies, mountain laurel, and tall hollyhocks carpeted the town’s knolls and adorned the fences. A multitude of red-bricked shops and taverns indicated that it was not the primitive settlement she had feared. Indeed, at the west end of the town a large college, William and Mary, served the students who came from as far away as Virginia’s western boundary on the Mississippi River.

  A little over a hundred years old, Williamsburg was young, compared to London’s millennium of years. And there were the pungent smells of animal manure, rooting hogs, and backyard privies that were to be found in every rural town, Old World or New.

  She could see the Union Jack unfurled high over the H-shaped capitol with its arched Renaissance windows and cupola, and she was mildly surprised by the reassurance she felt. As the caravan of indentured servants neared the spacious Palace Green, more and more of the townsfolk stopped to watch the procession.

  Saddle and draft horses and two-wheeled chairs were abruptly halted. The currier put aside his moon knife and pincers to stand at the doorway and the old wigmaker left her shears and curling pins to watch the arrival of the indentured servants. Squawking children flocked after the caravan like wild turkeys flushed from the forest. A burly man whose apron and cleaver proclaimed him a butcher raised his tool in a jolly wave at Polly, who broadly returned the greeting with a flirtatious wink.

  To Jane’s wonderment, the men and women were as fashionably dressed as Londoners, though even the more elegantly dressed women wore wigs that did not tower so high and the men wore simple brown perukes with sausage curls above their ears. She became aware that, in turn, she and the other indentured servants were being stared at, and she ducked her head and hunched her shoulders.

  At the market square the wagons halted before the courthouse where a large marquee tent of red-striped Flanders ticking had been erected. Here, before the servants were herded into the tent, prospective purchasers walked up and down among them, looking them over and conversing with them to discover their degrees of intelligence and docility.

  A drooping-jowled purchaser felt the muscles of each male servant and asked, “You skilled with an axe?”

  An old painted woman who wore an enormous powdered wig and, incongruously, smoked a pipe talked briskly with a few of the women servants. Not wishing to give herself away, Jane mumbled a few garbled answers about her place of birth, her last place of service, her reason for leaving. She was terribly nervous and only wanted the ordeal to be over with. More than once she wiped her damp palms down the dress where it molded her long thighs.

  At last the auction was ready to begin and the servants were ushered inside the tent. The afternoon sun had turned it into an oven. Sweat poured down between her breasts and soaked the kersey petticoat that stuck to the inside of her legs. Horseflies that seemed as big as sparrows swarmed from the nearby stables to fleck the stockinged legs of the men and buzz incessantly about the faces of Jane and the other women. No water was offered by the militiamen on duty during the long afternoon.

  “This is outrageous,” she muttered. “Englishmen treat their cattle better than this.”

  Several heads jerked around, stirred from their apathy by her outburst. Liz poked her in the ribs, and one little man who looked like a dormouse demanded. “What did ye expect? Governor Dunmore himself to welcome us?”

  Realizing she was acting out of character, Jane said no more but waited with frustrated impatience—until a drum thudded, signaling the auction’s beginning. Then a cold fear started to creep along her spine. She was going to be sold, like a cow at market, even though the selling was euphemistically called “setting over.” The drum rapped ominously as each servant was taken outside the tent and presented to the townsfolk. Words like “artisan” and “skilled” reached her. Sometimes men’s laughter.

  Barbarians! But her contempt did not crowd out her panic. It was only a matter of months, she consoled herself. She would find Terence. He could purchase her papers from whomever bought her.

  What if she didn’t immediately find where Terence was posted, a nagging voice asked. She would run away. And she would find him. From the day he had ridden
from Manor House to visit, she had known he had been meant for her. No matter that her mother had claimed his time more, Jane had somehow known her day would come to have Terence for her own.

  The captain stepped inside the tent, checked off another name, then called out the name of Meg O’Reilly—the first name on the list of females. “God ’elp ye,” Liz said as Jane rose unsteadily to her feet.

  Polly squeezed her hand. “Git yewrself a good man, love.”

  Jane straightened her hooded cloak and smoothed down her skirts. The mere actions served to still her shaking hands. What folly had she committed? Her impetuous nature, one rash act on her part, had brought her to this – selling herself as a chattel!

  Sunlight blinded her, then a sea of faces came into focus, some with gaping expressions, others smirking. Her mouth felt as dry as tinder. Here and there she saw men gesture at her and make their observations about her worth. “Plain as a pikestaff,” she overheard from one man near the front. “But look at those tits.”

  Defensively she drew the cloak over her, though she sweltered under the sun’s glare. The heavy, humid air made drawing a breath nigh impossible.

  A brown-skinned old man, his grizzled hair plaited in chest-length braids and his bony body wrapped in a woolen blanket despite the heat, watched her with a detached glimmer in his eyes, and she shivered. Surely she would not be purchased by an Indian.

  “We have here one Meg O’Reilly,” began the auctioneer, a plump, pink man in a white bag wig who stood with self-importance behind the nearby podium. “No skills other than those of a domestic, but a strong constitution at”—he looked down at the list he carried—“at twenty- two years.”

  She went rigid as the auctioneer stepped to her side and took her jaw, forcing open her mouth. “Good teeth, as you can see.”