Chapter 13: Violet

In the western part of Maryland, I ran into a peculiar situation one day when I was scouting ahead, looking for good road that could lead us to a crossing of the Potomac. At a crossroads a sale was going on, not exactly an auction although some items were being bid on and sold to the highest bidder. I asked what provoked the sale and was told that a tobacco farmer's wife had died, leaving him with several small children and only one full-grown son so he had decided to give his children to relatives, sell his goods and move west with his son. There were plows, a churn, some furniture and all sort of household goods piled at the side of the road.

Since I was in no hurry and had enjoyed a good meal, I tied my horse in the shade and watched for a while, hoping that might see something I needed and could snap up cheap. I bought a good looking riding horse and a well-worn saddle for next to nothing. I knew the army would be happy to have him. I nearly made an offer on a heavy watch and chain when I noticed a young girl sitting beside the dwindling pile of goods. She was a pretty thing with straw colored hair and long legs.

I sat down beside her and told her my name. She said howdy and told me she was Violet but that most just called her Vi. Her eyes were almost that color. I asked what she was doing, and she said she was waiting to be sold. I asked if she was a servant, and she said no, a daughter. She said she was fifteen, and I believed her.

The farmer sold off his best plow and then called out, "Vi, come here." The girl stood, brushed off the back of her thin dress and walked to her father's side, looking down at her bare feet.

"This here girl's Vi," the bearded man said, patting her atop the head. "She's a good enough girl if'n you don't let the boys swarm around her. Too damn pretty for my taste. Anyways, I cain't take her, so I'll apprentice her till she's twenty-one, 'bout six years. What d'ye say?"

There was some foot shuffling in the small crowd but no offers.

"C'mon now," said the farmer, a bit louder, "she's a good worker."

"Ten shillings," said a paunchy man, scratching behind his ear and showing his teeth.

"You don' want her, Tom," the farmer said. "You got plenty a'girls." the crowd snickered a bit, but the big man said again, "Ten shillings, hard money."

"I don' want her to be no trollop," said the girl's father.

"You don't want her, that's the thing. Ten's the bid."

The girl studied her toes, and her father looked around, seemingly baffled.

"A quid," I said. "Silver." I had a good bit of money that I had collected here and there or won, probably five or six pounds.

"Ten pounds, Virginia," said the whoremonger, looking at me with narrowed eyes.

"A sovereign, a gold sovereign." I said, holding up the glittering coin, the only one I had ever held. I could not recall which dead Brit I had taken it from, but it must have been an officer.

The crowd made a small gasp, and the big man stuffed his hands in his pockets and turned his back, spitting in the dirt. I gave the girl's father the coin, and he and I had a short discussion in which I told him what I thought of him as a man. He got red in the face, packed up his remaining goods and his scrawny son and hit the road, leaving me with a forlorn girl and my new horse.

"What chu gonna do with me?" the girl asked, and I recalled the slave I had bought up in New York saying almost the same thing.

"Dunno," I said, wondering hard. "You got any friends hereabouts?"

She sniffed and shook her head.

"Can you ride?"

She nodded, and I boosted her up on my saddle. She had good, strong legs and turned her knees in and her toes out.

"Show me," I said and handed her the reins. She trotted my mare in a figure eight and brought her back in front of me. I got up on my new horse after I checked his feet, and we headed north, toward Georgetown. We galloped some, walked some, dismounted regularly, talked a bit and made good time, but the sun set before we found any tavern or barn to sleep in. I did find a meadow with some good grass, hobbled the horses, made a small fire, stuck some sausage on sticks and had a greasy meal washed down with creek water.

"What did your father mean about boys, back there?" I asked.

She smiled at me, looking as pretty as most young women do at that age. "Oh, I had a lot a'boy friends, lots a'swains mooning about."

"You did?" I asked raising an eyebrow. "You're kind of young."

"Uh huh, an' paw always thought we was doin' wrong out there."

"Were you?" I asked.

"Sometimes," she said, "one or two of the older boys showed me how to do it up in the loft and out behind a hayrick. It was fun, mostly."

"Wasn't there one you'd like to marry up with?" I asked, feeling very paternal instead of my usual predatory self.

"No, uh uh, we was just playing. Lord, I'm, well, Ma married when she was sixteen." She put a finger to her lips.

"Lots a'girls do," I said, "have a dozen kids 'fore they're thirty."

"Not me," she said. "What's in this Georgetown?"

"People," I told her. "I'm going to find you a job."

"Old Tom would'a put me to work, on my back," she said. "That what you got in mind?"

"No," I said, "What can you do?"

"Cook some, sew some, things my ma taught me, farm work mostly."

"All right," I said, "then you don't have to be a whore, do you?"

"Spoze I want to?" she said with a smile.

"Your business, but it's a hard way to make a living. I know some women that do that, hard, dirty work. They have young ones, too, y'know."

"Would be hard work if they swived you," she said. "You're near about the biggest man I ever seed." She grinned. "Hate to think what's 'tween yer legs."

I was about to go fetch my blanket roll when two men came walking out of the woods holding muskets and somebody behind me said, "Good evening, pecker-brain," and whacked me in the back of the head with something very solid like the butt of a pistol.

When I woke, the girl and both horses were gone, along with my purse and my boots. I still had my big bayonet and my cartridge box. I was lying on them, but that was about all I had except for a head ache. Since there was nothing I could do until the sun came up, I rested and waited and fumed, then found the trail heading south without much trouble.

I assumed that the man that hit me was the man I had out bid for the girl so I headed back toward the country crossroads, asking questions when I got closer. I was lucky; it did not rain, and a lot of men knew Tom when I described him. He evidently ran the only cat house on the bank of the Potomac for many miles.

By nightffall two days later, I was sitting on a flat stone and watching the ramshackle tavern built on a low bluff above the river's flood plain. It was mid-week and my friend Tom was not doing very much business. When the place got dark, I started at the far end of the outbuildings, looking for weapons and information, watching where I put my feet. The first cabin I came to housed a slave family. The man told me that "Massa Tom done brung in a gal and whup'er her some'n awful t'other day." He said she was in the third cabin up and that the other women were in the two nearer hovels.

Violet's cabin door was locked with a horseshoe through the hasp. I stepped inside as quietly as I could. "Vi," I whispered.

"No more, no more," she whimpered.

"It's me," I said, and she rose from her pallet and fell into my arms. In the moonlight I could see that her face was bruised. She was almost naked and had dark welts on her body.