AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(13)
Gantu swigged the last of the ale in his tankard. “You are good with the machete, right?”
“Good enough to cleave a horn worm at twenty paces.”
“Oh, mon, those I hate.”
He grinned. “No more than I.” During scourges those green, close to sausage-size worms were underfoot, in the bed, and overhead.
Gantu smiled dryly and nodded at Adam’s left hand. “But not so good with the machete that you did not lose a finger to the machete’s swipe, right?”
“Aye, that happened my first year,” he conceded, “when I was thirteen. After that, I became quite good with the machete.”
What was not good was Evangeline’s absence. Oh, the devoted Gantu had rolled off a rehearsed explanation. “The baby, he be worse. Our Lady felt it best to get him to his people hot damn quick, you understand?”
Keeping her out of William Craven’s righteous eye until Adam could transact the land purchase had meant a trip back to the galleon, laying offshore, and sending Craven on a wild goose chase up the Brandywine River.
Repossession of Sutcliff Hall depended on her. And finding her depended on what information he could glean from Gantu. He refilled the man’s tankard from the inn’s nearly empty pitcher of ale. “So, when did our Lady Eve leave?”
Gantu flicked a dismissive hand, a gesture that might have resembled one of royalty in his African country. “Days ago. Saddled and bridled that obstinate mule herself. A sight to watch, I tell you. Her striking her heel into Molly’s bony flanks to urge her into a canter.”
“In a hurry, Lady Evangeline was?” he asked, passing the dice back to Gantu.
Gantu’s hard flinty eyes told Adam he had not fooled the African. “Like I said, baby be worse.”
But later that night, after Gantu had retired to the scullery and his bed, Adam opened Evangeline’s ornately carved bedroom wallpress. Empty of most of her clothing. She was not traveling, she was running. Given his almost infallible instinct, he suspected she was heading neither westward to the Lenape’s Indian homeland nor north toward the strict Puritan and Pilgrim gray of New England. That left south, to New Sweden’s Fort Christina.
She had jumped from the veritable frying pan into the fire.
*
It was a terrible burning inside, this fearful press of people within and around Fort Cristina with its nearly one-thousand residents, nearly a third of them confined by a palisade of twelve-foot-logs atop an earthenwork fortification.
Wicker basket of dried herbs in hand, Evangeline hastily shouldered her way from the crowded market stalls with their shared, thatch-covered roof roped down against Atlantic gales.
The cold was a welcome balm for her flushed cheeks. Leaning into the wind, she briskly strode the narrow street, one of the few paved, cobbled with Swedish bricks originally used as ballast for ships that transported the colonists. Overhead, the wind creaked the signboards that extended from the jettied second-story shops.
She was on the run again. How long until it was safe to return to the Virgin Queen Tavern? If ever.
More than a fortnight had passed since Adam Sutcliff’s nocturnal visit. It seemed almost like a dream . . . except for the lingering aftereffect of her body’s exquisite sensations, induced by the mere play of his fingers upon her touch-starved flesh.
All that had been safe was disappearing in time’s mists with the appearance of Adam Sutcliff at the Virgin Queen Tavern. As it now stood, her future was fraught with the unknown. His amber brown eyes haunted her at every turn.
Surely, he would soon abandon effort to purchase land from the Lenape. With the Swedish and Dutch colonies controlling the middle and northern seaboard respectively, England had had its work cut out for it if it hoped even to gain a foothold there. As it was, the English had controlled only in the southern seaboard colonies.
The barber-surgeon’s log cabin with is rammed clay floor smelled musty because of its rotten rushes in the loft, where she slept on a straw pallet. Its walls were splotched with leprous mildew stains.
In the surgery room, the main room, stout and balding John Croxton looked up from the man’s head, whose long flaxen hair he was cutting. The man’s face, tilted up, was covered by a damp linen cloth, prewarmed at the fireplace.
While barber-surgeons were medical practitioners, they were most certainly not members of the Royal College of Physicians, as had been her brother and father. Barber-surgeons had no formal learning, but John, like many barber-surgeons, had learned his trade as an apprentice during the Thirty Years Wars. And unlike many doctors, who considered it beneath their dignity, barber-surgeons, at least, performed surgery on the war wounded.
He had been, assigned to military forces united with Sweden, that great European empire and sovereign of the seas, and in Stockholm had met and married Gertrude Lindstrom.
From haircuts to hangnails, the middle-aged Englishman pulled teeth and performed a plethora of services – bloodletting with leeches, tending wounds, shaving faces, and branding slaves. While he might be illiterate, he was most certainly skilled – but he had not been skilled enough the save their only child, a five-year-old son, from a mere boil that had abscessed.
Apparently, boils were a minor complication compared to the prevalent ague in that mosquito infested mouth of the South River – or De La Warr River, as the English had named it.
The strung row of black, rotted teeth in front of the Croxtons’ window had alerted Evangeline to the opportunity of employment. Her knowledge of anatomy and medicinal compounds had at once decided John. She was fortunate that he and his sturdy wife Gertrude had quartered her in exchange for her services.