The Maidenhead Read Free Page A

general of finances, the highly intelligent Radcliff was accustomed to debauchery and could not do without it. From personal experience, she knew this gossip to be well-founded.
    Licentious, he was given to all sorts of vices, gambling being one of his fancies. He was gifted at cards. Too gifted. His cardsharping had won for him priceless paintings that he had collected with discrimination, rare tapestries, and even a London townhouse.
    She recalled encountering Radcliff at the Duke of Lauderdale’s Ham House the year before. Jack had insinuated her in as a serving maid for the duke’s garden party. Jack had employees trained to steal from churches, others to attend at court on birthdays and balls, and others who specialized in thieving from both Houses of Parliament.
    At Ham House, she had seen Radcliff openly fondling the Duke of Lauderdale’s helpless link- boy. When later she had spotted Radcliff, who was gambling at piquet, palm a card—a technique Jack had taught her—she had decided that an act of God was called for.
    Playing the country bumpkin, she had instantly blurted, "Oh, sire, yew picked up two cards by mistake, didn’t yew now, Master Radcliff?"
    Exposed for a cheat, he faced the wrath of the duke and was banished from polite society as well as relieved of his privileged position in the Star Chamber.
    As for herself, she had made sure that she had avoided the fashionable areas of London for a while; and now she averted her face as she passed by the depraved Radcliff.
    She and the other brides-to-be, portmanteaus and small chests in hand, entered the palisaded fort. It enclosed forty or fifty thatched houses as well as a few two-story framed timber houses.
    After all those months at sea, the first thing Modesty noticed was odors. She sniffed freshly baked bread and ginger cookies, bayberry wax melting for candle dipping, sawdust from the new buildings under construction, and an apothecary’s herbs.
    Beneath a huge Flanders tent were vegetables or fruits, she wasn’t sure which, mounded or stacked on blankets. Strange-looking foods. But food! Fresh food! Few people milled about to examine the wildly colored foods or make their purchases. Almost everyone’s attention was centered on the women’s arrival.
    "A naked man!" gasped Polly, a carter’s plump daughter with stringy mouse-brown hair.
    Amidst the outbreak of feminine giggles, Modesty glanced in the direction the girl pointed. There were, in fact, several partially naked men. Their swarthy skin and half-shaven heads with a single plait of hair proclaimed them Indians. Some kind of hide girded their loins and shod their feet. Some were obviously drunk. Others squatted sullenly and stared at the procession.
    Rapidly, more and more male colonists gathered to watch and cheer. The currier put aside his moon knife and pincers to stand at his doorway. A man in a blood-speckled apron raised his butcher’s cleaver in a jolly salute. A pot- helmeted soldier wearing a sweltering shirt of mail waved a gauntleted hand. Two bowlers on the green deserted their game to follow the women.
    "Damn me, if they don’t think this is a public show,” Annie remarked at Modesty’s side.
    The ogling glances and whistling and cheering didn’t bother Modesty. What she saw did. Or rather, what she did not see. No soaring spires of lead and wood such as adorned St. Paul’s Cathedral, no graceful arches that braced London Bridge with its row of shops, no rounded columns that supported pleasant balconies.
    Not counting a blockhouse, a powder house, and a munitions house, she saw only numerous grog shops and stick-and-straw houses. Street after street of them, wherever tobacco wasn’t planted. Pigs and chickens ran wild across the grounds.
    She stared stupidly at her surroundings and at the men who one by one followed the stream of flustered young women along one of the narrow streets filled with pungent odors of frying fish, boiling cabbage, and melting lard.
    The procession