The Maidenhead Read Free

smile, a soothing hand, and soft words. A few months in a pastoral exile, then back to glorious London it would be. By that time and with a little luck, the furor over her would have been long forgotten.
    At last, late in the afternoon, the sea-weary vessel rounded a peninsula and a turf fort came into view. By squinting, she could make out the steeple of a church rising reassuringly among the backdrop of trees. Civilization!
    Immediately, the maids began primping. With wry amusement, Modesty watched them tuck in errant curls, pinch their pallid cheeks to elicit a becoming flush, and smooth down wrinkled but clean skirts.
    Like the other maids, she had been provided with two changes of clothing by the Virginia Company of London when she signed a contract agreeing to marry a colonist. Once the colonist purchased the marriage contract, which paid the Virginia Company’s representative for the cost of a maid’s clothing, food, and transportation, then a wedding service would be performed.
    Modesty thought the bridal convoy the most woebegone of women as she had learned much about them during the long voyage. She looked at Rose whose small body now showed she was with child. If she didn’t wed before the child's birth, Church law prescribed that she be publicly whipped. That the father went unpunished, Modesty considered justification for her disgust with the Church.
    Then there was Annie who had been in Ludgate Prison, supposedly for murdering her husband. Another female was feebleminded, taken straight from Bedlam Hospital. Most of the young women were like herself, hard women who had known hard lives. Mayhap, Modesty thought, they were perfect for this outpost of the English empire, after all.
    She had learned from the crew that Jamestown’s prime attractions were that it was far enough inland to be safe from attack by the Spanish and its deep-water shoreline serviced the largest of sea-going vessels. Unfortunately, the colonial capital had been established in a swampy area, and the wells were contaminated with salt at high tide.
    The number of dugouts, barges, shallops, scows, and ships of sail anchored before the waterfront town was both reassuring and a cause for concern. Virginia was notorious in England for her thirst for liquor, and the barks and brigs were said to be moving taverns. Modesty had been told that women were scarcer even than liquor and fetched a higher price.
    Ships' crews and their captains, indentured servants wearing pothook iron collars welded around their necks, traders, soldiers with pikestaffs, and other ordinary-looking men congregated on the wharf or before the warehouses outside the triangular fort's timbered gates.
    The broadside that Modesty had read the night she’d worked on the snuffbox had reported a population of almost 1,300 people spread over the Virginia Colony. To the east of the fort was a community of cottages, which had outgrown the fort’s fifteen-foot-high palisades. Some of these new homes were two- storied timbered houses, and the governor’s residence was said to be there.
    She saw few females, which may have explained why the men stopped to stare as she and the other women were welcomed ashore by one of the Lord Commissioners of Trade and Plantations.
    Dressed in a silver-buttoned coat with skirts that flared to the thighs, he had eyes like red coals. They seemed to inventory each maid as a personal investment, a commodity.
    Modesty knew she had met this man before. Those eyes, the way they instantly filed away a person’s shortcomings reminded her of a specific incident. But what?
    When he removed his feathered hat with its cocked brim to fan himself against the heat, she saw the crest of prematurely white hair and recognized Richard Radcliff. In her opinion even the most ill-informed Londoner knew that Radcliff had been a formidable member of the Star Chamber, an infamous branch of the judiciary answerable only to the king. A dissolute heir of the former comptroller