Chesapeake (54 page)

She did not employ an architect. And she was further hampered by the loss of the trained slaves stolen by the pirates, but through judicious purchases in Virginia she did acquire some fine masons, bricklayers and carpenters, and these she gave instructions as to how her house was to be built: ‘It’s to occupy the same site as before, but it’s never to be cluttered.’

She drew plans for every façade, every room, and when the ground was cleared and the sawn timbers were drying in the sun, she announced her basic decision: ‘We’ll build of brick.’

‘We don’t have enough for a whole house.’

‘We’ll fire them.’ And she doubled the brick crew, and the staff cutting trees for the charcoal, and in time she collected a substantial pile of reddish bricks to augment those she had been saving during the preceding decade.

But when the foundations were in and the first two courses of bricks laid, she did not like the result: ‘There’s something wrong. They don’t look the way they should.’ Deep in her mind she had a memory, from somewhere along the Rappahannock, of what a brick wall should be, and hers fell short.

Was it the color? Or the thickness of the oyster-shell mortar? Or the depth of the indentations between the courses? She could not tell, so she sailed to Patamoke and inquired of everyone she met, and finally a newcomer from Holland said he felt sure he knew what the matter was, and he sailed back to Devon and inspected the wall: ‘It’s simple. You’re not even using the English bond.’

‘What?’

He showed her how the bricks in her courses had been laid always with the long face outward, which resulted in monotony and lack of sturdiness: ‘You must follow either the English bond or the Flemish.’ And he demonstrated how, in the former, one course was composed only of bricks laid lengthwise, while the course above and below used bricks with only their ends showing. This alternation was most pleasing, and Rosalind said, ‘That’s what we want. Simple, we’ll tear out that second course and relay it end out.’

‘But the Flemish bond is even better,’ the Dutchman said, and he showed her a simple yet charming way of alternating in every row a long brick with an end one, so that the wall became not only extra sturdy but also pleasing to the eye.

‘I like that!’ she cried, but before she could give her slaves instructions, the Dutchman said, ‘What’s best is when you use light-colored local bricks for the long stretchers and blackish Holland-type bricks for the short headers.’

Two days were wasted while he searched the Choptank for some of the darker bricks, but when he located a few they produced a pattern so pleasing that Rosalind agreed she must have such a house. It took her more than two years to assemble the dark bricks she needed, but when enough had been collected she was prepared to go ahead with her house.

Construction was interrupted by an event which set cannon reverberating around the bay. The flotilla of privateers assembled by Virginia and Maryland planters had up to now accomplished little; there had been desultory forays against the pirates but no engagements of significance. Invasions of the Chesapeake had been halted, but on the high seas the pirates still burned and murdered with impunity. And then, in November of 1713, five American vessels converged on four pirate ships lurking near Martinique, and after a running fight, drove them into Marigot Bay. There a furious hand-to-hand fight ensued, with all the pirate ships being destroyed. Ninety buccaneers were hauled in chains to Williamsburg, and when they were sorted out for hanging on the docks of London, it
was found that one old man masquerading as a deck hand was actually Henri Bonfleur, now sixty-nine, toothless and steeped in cruelty.

It was Fitzhugh Steed who brought the exciting news to Devon. He was accompanied by a lieutenant who bore testimony to his courage in the fighting, and when this pair walked slowly up from the wharf to the improvised wooden shack in which Rosalind lived alone, they were taken aback by the ardor with which she greeted them. Embracing her husband joyously, she cried, ‘Is Bonfleur really in chains?’

‘We saw him selected for London,’ Fitzhugh replied, sinking into a chair.

Clenching her hands and striding about the room, oblivious of the presence of the lieutenant, she muttered, ‘God has delivered him to us.’ Then she came to her husband and said, ‘We must leave for Williamsburg at once.’

‘Why?’

‘To get Bonfleur.’

‘For what?’

‘To hang him.’ Before her husband could protest, she added, ‘He’s to be hanged from a gibbet I will erect on those ashes,’ and she pointed toward the vanished porch where Mark and Rachel had been slain.

‘That’s past now,’ Fitzhugh said from his chair.

‘It’s just beginning!’ she stormed as she moved about the room. ‘We’ll catch them all, and hang them all.’

She could not be dissuaded from her determination to see Bonfleur executed at the scene of his infamy, but Fitzhugh refused to accompany her to Virginia. ‘You’re mad. Where’s your womanly self-respect?’ She replied that she was acting as an outraged mother, ‘The mother of your children, by the way.’

At Williamsburg the English authorities in charge of the warfare against piracy were aghast at her proposal that Bonfleur be surrendered to her, but after they had watched her in court, stern as hammered iron, they had to concede that it had been her determination alone which had driven this cruel pirate from the seas. And when they listened to her recite the devastation he had visited upon Devon, they knew it would be appropriate if he were hanged there—‘But not on the island itself, for that would be interpreted as private vengeance. Publicly at Patamoke, with drums beating.’

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, with no sign of triumph. But as she stalked from the courtroom like an avenging Greek goddess, one of the judges whispered, ‘That one carries a heart of brass. Thank God she’s not stalking me.’

In the days when Bonfleur was being processed for his trip up the bay, she had free time, and it occurred to her that Williamsburg stood not far from the James River, where Tom and Evelyn Yates had their plantation, so on the spur of the moment—in the way she did most things—she
sailed to the Yates home to see her daughter Evelyn. And when she saw how this family had attained order and prosperity and three fine children, she was overcome with emotion and tears appeared upon her cheeks as they sat in the wintry sunshine.

‘What is it, Mother?’ Evelyn cried, fearing that the journey to Virginia and the excitement of the trial had impaired Rosalind’s health.

‘This is what life should be,’ her mother replied. ‘A woman and her children. Not the pursuit of pirates.’

Evelyn broke into relieved laughter. ‘You fraud! Always you will be pursuing some enemy. Remember that day you drove the Claxtons away?’ She kissed her mother and added, ‘Said you were saving my life. Well, you did.’

Rosalind recalled that day and sighed. ‘I was so ugly in my hardness. But so right.’ With a broad sweep of her arm she indicated the Yates children and the growing prosperity of the land: ‘This paradise of action compared to Regis Claxton and his puny fears.’ She wiped her eyes and said, ‘But I was also right when I declared war upon Bonfleur. And now I must go home and hang him.’

She insisted that the wizened pirate be brought up the bay chained in the hold of her snow, but when that trim little craft came into the channel north of Devon she directed the Englishmen to produce him on deck so that he could review the scenes of his earlier triumphs. ‘There you landed, Bonfleur, and those jagged walls are the ones you burned. That tall oak marks the grave of my children. And ahead is Patamoke, which you also ravaged, years ago, and this marsh we’re passing is where you stole the Swedish girl. Can you even remember her?’

Bonfleur, holding his chains, glared at his tormentor. ‘I remember that winter’s night when my men wanted to kill you and I stopped them. Sad mistake.’ She sent him below, and when he was brought forth at Patamoke she stood by the gibbet in December cold, never averting her gaze from his cruel face. When he was truly hanged, his lashed feet dangling in the night, she said, ‘Now we go after the others.’

When she sailed back to Devon she found that Fitzhugh had left. He had taken all his clothes and guns to the marsh, from which he refused to return. It created a scandal, and had it not been for his exalted former position, he would probably have been publicly whipped. Father Darnley was brought over from Annapolis to reason with him, but when the priest sat in the little marsh hut, Steed told him, ‘I’ll never go back. This one’—and he indicated Nelly Turlock—‘doesn’t read books or pepper me with questions.’

When Father Darnley returned to Devon he told Rosalind, ‘We can still hope he’ll change his mind and resume his responsibilities.’

‘Not him,’ she said firmly. ‘He’s a sad weak man lacking in character. Quite unable to accept responsibilities.’

‘He fought the pirates.’

‘Only because I goaded him.’

‘Have you, perhaps, goaded him too much?’

‘No, it’s like two people on a dark road with only one lantern. One forges ahead and does the work. The other refuses to keep up.’

‘But if he can’t keep up? If he needs our help?’

‘He doesn’t care to keep up. He never cared for his home, nor his wife, nor his ships, nor anything.’ She realized the harshness of her assessment and added, ‘I am not abandoning him, Father. Long ago he abandoned himself. He’s even abandoned the church. I am now the Catholic. He’s …’ She waved her long hands expressively, signifying emptiness.

A few weeks later Father Darnley was ferried back; Fitzhugh had died. He had been hunting with his marsh children when he stopped abruptly, wiped perspiration from his eyes, and told his oldest boy, ‘I think the time has come to lie down.’ The Turlocks were prepared to bury him in the woods, but Rosalind recovered the body for interment beyond the oak. At graveside she did her best to present the image of a grieving widow, but her thoughts were harsh: You’d be entering the good years of your life, if you’d allowed me to be a partner. And as Father Darnley spoke well of the dead profligate, sanctimoniously citing a fictitious record at St. Omer’s and his reputed bravery in fighting pirates, Rosalind became preoccupied with the jagged outline of her new house: From here you can’t determine whether it’s being built or being torn down. It’s caught in a moment of time, indecipherable. But I can tell you, the family’s being built. The boys at Bohemia will see to that.

With two of her children, Mark and Rachel, dead and with the other three absent from Devon—Evelyn down the bay, Sam and Pierre still with the Jesuits at Bohemia—Rosalind’s restless energy and her need to give love had to find new channels, and one April day in 1714 as she was leaving the warehouse in Patamoke she was led by accident to that spot across from the courthouse and the slave auction where the whipping post stood close to the stocks. There, to the delight of threescore witnesses, a girl of eighteen was being lashed with strokes from the cat-o’-nine-tails. Her back was already bloodied when Rosalind reached the scene, and at the eighth stroke she had fainted, but the crowd urged the jailer to proceed in the manner the judges had decreed: ‘Well laid on.’

‘What did she do?’ Rosalind asked, looking compassionately at the bleeding figure, nude to the waist, as it hung limp from the crossbars.

‘Tom Broadnax’s serving girl.’

‘But what did she do?’ Rosalind recognized the name of a leading citizen, but this did not help in determining his servant’s crime.

‘Had a bastard child of her body.’

‘What?’ At thirty-nine Rosalind had become impatient with indirection. She demanded to know what crime this girl had committed that would justify such savage punishment.

‘It’s what they say in court.
Bastard child of her body.
’ And it was this arcane terminology that set her investigating.

She went to the courthouse, where records of proceedings and punishments, neatly written by the clerk, were kept in a large folio, but when she asked to see the book she was told that was impossible. Drawing herself up to her considerable height, she thundered at the small man tending the book, ‘Nothing’s impossible. I demand to see that book.’ And she wrested it from him, taking it to the window so she could inspect its heavily ruled pages.

What she saw regarding the case of Betsy, Thomas Broadnax’s serving girl, disgusted her: ‘It’s a novel. A French novel in four chapters.’ She was correct, for the relevant entries read:

It was a series of decisions which could have been matched in any Eastern Shore courthouse during these years, and Rosalind appreciated this; the customs may have been barbaric but they were generally approved. What made this case abhorrent was that following each of the four entries came the signatures of the justices, led by the name of the presiding judge: Thomas Broadnax. He had been displeased with his serving girl; he had brought charges against her in his own court; he had
sentenced her to a public whipping; and he had assigned to himself the infant’s unpaid services for twenty-one years.