Free The Maidenhead by Parris Afton Bonds Page A

feather-tipped lance. His immobile face contained much dignity despite its smears of paint. One half of his head was shaven; a feather was tucked into the dark brown braid that fell from the other side.
    Mad Dog said something in the Algonquin dialect. She picked up the word pokatawer , fire. Apparently he was inviting the Indian to join them, because he crossed the clearing to squat before the fire.
    "Arahathee,” Mad Dog patiently explained to her, "is the chief, the werowance, of the Monacans. The tribe lives above the falls at Rasauweak. The Monacans are actively hostile to the Powhattans and unfriendly to most English."
    That was reassuring. “ Mawchick chammay ," she said, using Palantochas’s phrase for best of friends.
    The Indian only nodded, but the condescension disappeared from his stony gaze.
    Mad Dog darted an oblique glance at her before resuming conversation with the Indian.
    While they talked, Modesty ate. The shad was surprisingly tasty. When it looked as if the two were going to talk through the night, she curled up beside the fire. She had not realized it, but her face and hands were sunburned during the river journey, so that she was chilled. Later she was partly roasted by the blaze and partly frozen, but too fatigued to move.
    Sometime during the night she awoke. She thought she was alone, and terror rattled through her. Then she saw Mad Dog asleep on the fire’s far side. The Indian was nowhere to be seen. Relieved, she went back to sleep, only to awake to find Mad Dog hunched down over her. She gasped. "What do yew want?”
    His brows furrowed with disgust. "I believe I can control my raving desires for the while, mistress. Tis time to leave.”
    By the time they shoved off in the canoe, the morning fog had lifted. Later in the morning he pointed out a sleepy waterfront village. "Henrico.”
    Farther on, they passed a cluster of homes and a two-story waterwheel that he identified as Falling Brook.
    "How much more traveling in this infernal country afore we reach yewr place? And where is yewr bondsman? Jack Holloway?”
    "Earning his keep, as thou shall be anon."
    "I am yewr wife, I remind yew. Not some indentured servant."
    Amused contempt glittered in his eyes. "Aye, my wife for life, God help me.”
    "Oh, so yew believe in God, do yew now?"
    The canoe had slid into a gentle current that momentarily carried it near the bank, and the dips of his paddles ceased. He rested, his arms braced against the paddles, though occasionally he pulled the boat along by hauling on cattails and overhanging oak branches, draped with moss. His hands were the most massive she had ever seen. “You do not?" he asked.
    “I believe in meself. I believe a person gets wot she takes from life.”
    For a moment there was only the silence of the great forest. Then he said, "You get what you give.” His eyes were empty. “And in the end, you give what you take."
    He resumed paddling. His eyes had a faraway gaze. His manner was so remote that she decided silence was in her best interest, after all.
    But not quite just yet. She felt that her suffering belonged to her alone, and she wasn’t about to let a lawyer full of words get the last one. "Yew may have taken yewrself a wife, but it 'pears to me that I am the one doing all the giving. To have to work like an indentured servant the rest of me life in a rathole of a frontier settle—”
    "—with willing hands and faithful heart," he reminded her with a black look that this time did silence her.
    At length, when the western sun was balancing on the tips of spiraling pines and the parasol spread of ancient oaks, she sighted a long pier with a wharfhouse at its tip. A path of crushed oystershell led up through ragged grass to a clearing plowed with crops. On a hill were clustered several houses of various sizes.
    Mad Dog banked the canoe and, collecting his flintlock, strode on up the path.
    She grabbed her portmanteau and hurried to catch up with him. So tall was he that