Chapter 37: Spring 1781

"Missy," I yelled, "where the hell are my clothes? I can't go running around out there killing Redcoats and chasing after Benedict bloody Arnold and your frigging husband, the honorable Justin sodomite H--, in jus' my birthday suit!"

"Now, don' get yo'self all riled up," she said, crawling back into the bed after using her chamber pot and adopting a deeper Southern accent. "Old Miss Martha'll be along directly with your clothes, all brushed and so forth, honey lamb, boots shined to a fare-thee-well. You jes' tend to yo' business here, dear boy, 'fore we have to go down to breakfast." She grabbed my ear and turned my face toward hers.

Lord, she was a pretty woman, soft and plump as a goose-down comforter. And she knew it and used it, a real charmer, magnolias and apple blossoms lying over iron and granite. In some ways she reminded me of Felicity Snyder up in Trenton, sure of herself and almost always happy to have a healthy man laboring between her legs at any hour of the day or night. She often wore me out without breaking a sweat. And she took pleasure in giving a man satisfaction, but even more joy in pleasing herself.

Her big farm had a elderly dock on the muddy James River and was only a few miles downstream from Richmond, Virginia's capital since 1779, a thriving mudhole of some 2,000 souls before Arnold's men rampaged through it. Her home made a fine stopping place for me, especially since Missy's lord and master, a member of one of the so-called "first families," was a miserable Tory, an advisor to Benedict Arnold and an abuser of slave boys.

Her flabby, elderly husband, she told me, was hoping to get even richer from the plunder of the British army and the confiscation of patriot properties. He owned more than a hundred slaves and well over a thousand acres of cultivated land and three times that in hills and woods. I had a small thought in the back of my head that suggested she hoped I might "see him off" in the near future, a casualty of the terrible war. Missy would have been a hellacious as well as a very rich, twice-over widow. There were a number of those in Virginia as I was to find out.

"It's likely he's got twenty or more mulatto children, ones he's sired on his Nigra women, that's working out there right now, hoein' and weedin'." She had told me that the first time we met, the last time I was under the impression that it was my idea for us to pleasure each other in her high-posted bed. "He does like that dark meat, that nasty, foul-mouthed, old man. He may a'sold that many more a'his git down the river or to one a'the neighbors. I've only been mistress here five, no, six years, his third wife you know. He don' like to keep the light-skinned boys hereabouts less he's poking 'em, 'specially them that look too much like him."

"How old is he, Miz H--?" I asked as I yanked off my boots in my initial visit to her frilly bedroom, a room which was a sight bigger than a lot of houses I had been in and massively furnished in mahogany. It had a high ceiling with fancy plaster work and six big windows with lace curtains and a Turkey carpet on the floor.

"Oh, twice my age, near seventy I suppose," she sighed, pulling her shift over her head. "An' if you don' call me 'Missy' I'm gonna take a switch to you. Captain H--, devil take him, gout an' all, he's still out there popping every dusky maidenhead around when the girls come of age; jus' like he was lord of the manor."

I stripped off my muddy britches and stood at the end of her bed while she shrugged into a lacy robe that tied at her neck and gave me a fine view of her lush body. "Now what?" I asked and she beckoned me to follow her. She led me to a high backed tub in a small dressing room, half full of warm, soapy water, and then she proceeded to scrub off most of the dirt I had accumulated over the winter and a good bit of skin as well.

She tried counting the scars and marks on my chest and back and gave up around two dozen. Some, like the dark snake on my neck, were now five years old, and a few like the still-healing bayonet wounds on my back were souvenirs of Dan Morgan's recent campaign in the Carolinas. The deepest of them still had stitches in it.

She untied the rawhide strip holding my hair back and called out, "Martha." Shortly a stocky black woman appeared with a bucket of steaming water. Her forearms were bigger around and stronger looking than mine, and I generally prided myself on my muscles. "Don' jes stan' there, pour some on his greasy head," she said and the woman dumped a gallon or so of hot water on my scalp. I yelped, and Missy cuffed my ear. After some more soaping, scrubbing and rubbing, Martha rinsed me off and handed me a towel, wordlessly, but with mischief in her eyes, as she glanced down at my dark curls and my warm member.

Missy then took me to her big, soft bed, and we enjoyed each other fully and enthusiastically until just after I heard the hall clock strike two. The next strike I heard was seven and by then I was back at work rogering Missy for all I was worth, my feet braced on the foot of her big bed and her curly head and soft shoulders touching the mattress only now and then. All, of course, in the service of the Continental Congress, General George by-damme Washington, Nathanael Greene and the rebellious American states.

Now it was a full month later, and Arnold was still ensconced way down in Portsmouth, building fortifications so we heard, while Von Steuben did his best to recruit more men, some for Greene as well as militia for his own shabby, little force. Governor Jefferson might have been doing his absolute best, as he insisted he was, but the largest and richest of the former British colonies was not producing its share of either war supplies or fighting men this late in the increasingly desperate Revolution.

Washington's advisors had thought that both Cornwallis and Greene would be heading for Virginia, but things had not worked out that way. They were still feinting and thrusting at each other in North Carolina like a couple of tired fighting cocks. Finally General Washington decided to send Lafayette and a small detachment south, and lately we learned that Anthony Wayne and his Pennsylvanians might also be on their way to our defense. This was probably a result of the Baron reporting his conclusion that Virginia was filled with officers on furlough who believed the war was being fought on some other planet and young men who would much rather hide in the woods or put on petticoats than fight for their freedom.

Captain Foster, my erstwhile commanding officer, and his dozen scouts, sharpshooters and spies, including me, had been as busy as horse flies since we had reached Virginia and come under Von Steuben's control. Like Greene, the big German believed in having information, lots of reliable information. I had been out recruiting friendly eyes and ears, mostly in crossroads taverns south of the capital, and Missy was one of my best and most useful informants, mainly because of her husband's position, as well as most enjoyable, because of her incredible endurance in bed and the various contortions she was willing to try.

I generally liked my sex face to face because I enjoyed watching the woman show what she felt, but Missy, among her many and varied positions, seemed to prefer being up on her knees with her head buried in a soft pillow. She also enjoyed horseback riding, polka dancing and high-stakes card games, but she just loved swiving.

So did her daughter, and as far as I knew, Missy had not found out that Charlotte B--, a slim, flirtatious beauty of nineteen, a first-rate horse woman, and the sole human product of Missy's first marriage, and I had been out riding together in a number of manners of speaking including a few that probably resulted in debarking trees and trampling young garden plants. Lotty could make her mother seem modest and sedate when she put her mind and body to it, and she seem ready to do so almost every time she saw me.

Missy tugged my ear again and kissed me, running her hand through my hair, yanking my queue and bringing me back to the present. "You said you'd be here by dark," she said, gritting her teeth and looking wolfish.

"Did my best," I lied, stroking her hip with my thumb on the inside as she liked best. She wriggled and kissed me again.

"An' you didn' even wake me when you got here. Whose arms were you in?"

"You were sound asleep, woman. Shoot, I jus' bedded down with Ham out in the stable."

"No wonder you smell so fine this morning," she said, making a face. "Very horsy."

"I thought you liked horses," I said, slipping a leg between hers and gently prying them apart.

"Oh, I do, when they're well behaved." She guided me and arched her neck in the odd characteristic of her determined behavior. She scrunched a pillow down under her heaving hips. "Ah," she said, finally happy with her position, "ah, I wish I had a Spanish bit in your bloody mouth, then wouldn't we do some fine riding."

That gave me a bit of a chill. Charlotte had said almost the same thing the night before. She had met me at the cottage near the river at sunset, and we had enjoyed a cold meal and a bottle of wine before climbing into bed. She almost demanded to be on top, mainly, I suspect, because she went barely nine stone and I was almost a hundred pounds heavier. She wiggled to get comfortable, and we started at a sedate walk, but ended shortly thereafter, as we almost always did, in a mad, disorderly gallop without any discipline at all, both flailing about, full of cries and alarms.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa there," she called out in time with our efforts, puffing out her breath steadily and trying to slow me down. When she finally forced me to a clipclop walk again, she said in a rather shaky voice. "I'd love to have a saddle and good set of reins on you, then I might get some control. You ain't broke to knee signals at all are you, and I don't suppose you'd like it if I wore spurs?"

"Um," I replied, getting a squeal and convulsive shudder from her. "I do my best, ma'm, with what little I has." I was tempted to tell her of Mrs. Snyder's extended series of cross-country riding lessons and of the times she tossed me off going over make-believe hedges, but I refrained. Charlotte left for her own bed about moonrise, and I bunked down in the stable with the head "boy," an elderly black man called Hamlet who asked no questions and, as far as I knew, told no lies but always had a jug of good whisky somewhere nearby and a young girl at his knee.

Now Missy lay panting beside me, lying on her side, satisfied at last, and touching some of the odd marks on my chest and face. "Tell me about this one again," she asked, fingering my cheekbone.

"I don' remember the lie I told you last time," I said. "Was that where the king's dancing girl scratched me?"

She kicked me in the knee and made a face. "You are truly a mess," she said. "Don' know why I put up with you 'cept I enjoy you. Sometimes it feels you're usin' some'in like a hoe handle, I swear."

"You do like it? I didn' know that. We'll have to do some more, I 'spose." I grabbed for her, and she ducked right out of bed.

"I got to get dressed," she said. "So do you."

"I still ain't got no clothes," I whined, turning down the quilt and exposing my tired shaft.

"Cover that thing up," she said. "They'll be along. Tell me about that groove on your cheek there and the thing on your forehead."

"Hm," I felt it and recalled hanging by my feet in that Tory farmer's smelly barn down in South Carolina or somewhere and getting whacked with his razor strop. "Man caught me with his daughter," I said, which had some of the truth in it. The strap had left bruises four inches wide that felt nearly that deep and damn near spoiled my love-life forever.

"What were you doing?" she asked, lacing up her stays. I never saw Missy without stays when she was dressed. They pulled in her thick middle and popped out her soft boobies instead of mashing them down as some women did.

"I was doing my best to satisfy a hog," I said.

"Poor girl, how mean." She yanked a wide-hipped petticoat into place.

"You don't know. She kept me busy till her paw came home and then he tried to beat me to death while she watched and applauded. If I hadn't been lucky, they'd a stretched my neck in the morning."

"How come?" she asked, frowning, serious, wriggling into a tight sacque dress, sucking in her breath and barely hooking the front.

"Tories," I said. "Down south a'here, they're burning and killing each other right and left, neighbors are, jus' for sport. No mercy, no sense, jus' cussed meanness."

"Back in January, they'd a'burned us out if Justin hadn't tole Arnold that we were loyal. He says that's what General Arnold is planning, laying waste to all the country west of here, destroying supplies meant for General Greene, taking all the horses and slaves."

"The slaves?"

"That's what he said. Cornwallis has been takin' slaves away from rebels in the Carolinas an' shipping them down to the West Indies. Arnold plans to do the same and profit from it too. I don' know what he'll do with the servants, probably jus' turn 'em out. An' he'll burn everything else, that's what my husband told me, gleefully, the mean-spirited gobshite."

"Now Missy, keep your Irish down," I said just as Martha came in with my carefully folded clothes and shining boots.

I slid out of bed and stood to thank her. Martha looked me up and down a couple of times with brief pauses at my hairy groin. "You shore is a'mess," she said, shaking her head.

"Now Martha," Missy said.

"I seen sausage meat ain't chopped up that much," the big-shouldered black woman said, smiling at me.

"Get on, now," I said, pulling up my drawers. "You should'a seen me when I was really hurt. It was ugly. Lady that sewed me up, Arabella, a red-headed black lady 'bout half your size, she wore out two needles and used up all the thread they had on my back, finally got a fiddle string to finish the job."

Martha and Missy both laughed, and I wondered if I should have told them that the story was pretty close to the truth.

Spring was coming to the Piedmont and the sandy Coastal Plain, and it is likely that no one was happier to see it than I was. It reminded me of home and of a plump girl whose name I could not recall.

We had gone through a week of cold rain coming up from the battlefield at Cowpens after Dan Morgan's crushing defeat of Colonel Tarleton and his bloodthirsty legion. Every stream we came to was up, some out of their banks, and we stayed wet the whole time, chilled night and day, living on the hard biscuits we had liberated from the captured British stores. When we reached the James, we camped on Richmond Hill, where there were still some signs of earlier fighting, while Captain Foster reported to General Von Steuben. The American army in Virginia looked to be in about the same sad shape as the dispirited force Greene had found in North Carolina the year before.

Now it was early April, the fight at Guilford Court House had chewed up the army Lord Cornwallis was pushing along, the roads were firming up and the river was full of tree limbs and running fast. The young Marquis Lafayette had finally arrived, without his troops but breathing some confidence into the whole local army, and promoting the hope that the French fleet might make the difference since they had supposedly dumped Lafayette's force in Maryland to go do battle the British navy. His men were still on their way and were expected in the next week or so. The ladies of Baltimore, we were told, were fashioning new uniforms for his troops from linen the young Frenchman had found in Maryland along with some much-needed shoes. No one knew where he found the money for either the linen or the shoes.

Captain Foster sent George Reedy and me down the James to find out what Simcoe's Rangers were up to, after several reports of what were called "outrages" which included the burning of long-stored tobacco and other farm products. He also wanted us to spy out the digging Arnold's men were doing around the port city.

George took the north side of the James, where he claimed he had already cultivated some contacts, many of them willing tavern wenches according to his colorful tales of hard-won conquests. He had brought news of the looting of some of the big plantations including Harrison's Berekley where Arnold's men had pulled all the family portraits from the walls and burned them on the front lawn. I looked at the few maps we had of the flat, well-watered land south of the river and saddled up.

I stopped at the H-- plantation that morning since it was on the route. I was likely to get at least a good meal there if nothing more. Missy was off visiting, so Martha told me, but "Miss Charlotte was out somewhere's looking at them seedbeds." I found the tall, dark-haired young woman, wearing a straw hat and an apron, watching pairs of slaves sow the fine tobacco seeds mixed with ashes into the newly prepared soil, dirt that had never grown tobacco before.

"Well," she said with a small smile, "don' you look fine. You goin' somewhere?"

I took her hand and led her toward our cottage, with my horse's reins in the other hand and hope deep in my belly. "I'm headed down to Portsmouth," I said. "Who do you know down that way I could trust?"

"Hm," she said, swinging my arm with one hand and her beribboned hat in the other, "let's see, no women, wouldn't trust none a'them near you. I did have some beaux from a few plantations down there in the Tidewater."

"Oh, you did, and why are you still a spinster lady then?"

"Don' know, might'a set the bar too high or this war come along to spoil plans. 'Sides I ain't that old, an' there's no sense in having jus' one man anyways."

"I thought they was all jumpers down that way," I said, wishing I had known this beauty at sixteen when she was just coming into bloom. Girls in her circle were often married off by then, sometimes in arranged matchmaking that had more to do with entailed property and dower rights than with problems of consanguinity or youthful love. A healthy man of forty-five or fifty with a second or third wife of fifteen or sixteen was hardly unusual and first-cousin matches were quite common, many very productive, and the well-worn joke was that some families never had to change the engraved initial on their silverware.

When we entered the shady cottage, a platter of sliced ham, opened oysters, fresh biscuits and shiny hard-boiled eggs awaited us. The H-- farm was one of the few I had ever seen that had enough laying chickens to put eggs on the table regularly. We both smiled at Martha's perceptive guess of where I would end up. Charlotte turned and pushed me back against the door and kissed me hungrily and at length, sliding her hands up under my hunting shirt, leaving claw marks on my chest and stomach.

"Lord, girl," I said holding her away. "I'm only going down there for a week or so. Jus' to feel out things and try to recruit some folks to find out what Arnold's up to. We hear tell there's a new British general coming down from New York, want to see about that too. Might be here by now with more troops, more trouble."

I doubted that she was listening to me since she had tossed her apron aside and seemed to be engrossed in unbuttoning the bodice of her cotton dress which had about twenty tiny buttons. I poured myself a couple of inches of bourbon, added some water, swallowed a couple of oysters, broke open a biscuit and stuffed in some ham, knowing I soon was going to need my strength. Charlotte stepped out of her soft dress and twirled before me in her lacy chemise. Unlike her mother, she almost never wore stays much to Martha's displeasure. She hardly needed any. I could almost encircle her waist with my hands.

"Come on, girl," I said, grabbing her at the hip and kissing her gently, "give me some names, or at least some farms where I can start looking."

She licked a scrap of ham from my mouth and perched on the edge of the table, inviting me to step between her wide-spread legs. I did and made myself another sandwich while she pondered with her head cocked to the side and unbuckled my heavy belt.

"There's an Irish family, some kin of ours, that's been here a long time, bet they hate the British," she said. "Name's, hm, it's Mac-something, McBride maybe. They got a place jus' across from the big Shirley plantation, on this side."

I gave her a bite of my sandwich and a sip of my bourbon while she fiddled with the buttons of my foreflap. I was rising to the bait like a hungry trout. She had already set my heavy belt, blade bayonet and cartridge box aside. "Then there's Bobby, what was his name, at the Brandon place, only he wasn't no Brandon, a cousin a'theirs. Nice boy, good horseman, but he did like to paw me when he got the chance, Bobby, um, Simmons I think. Ask the Brandons but be careful there. Some a'them's jus' fiercely loyal."

She inched forward a bit and encouraged me into her. She wiggled, getting comfortable, and accepted some more ham from my fingers. She gasped and smiled as we rutted gently. I washed down my food, slid my hands up under her shift, wiping ham fat on her thighs, and locked my wrists in the small of her back while I chewed on an egg. She bent her spine on my hands, lifted her legs, crossed her ankles behind me, and we got down to it, swiving away with her bottom bouncing off the table and my knees and backbone creaking from the effort. She exhaled faster and faster. Long after I had cried out, her tongue appeared between her teeth, she arched her neck in her mother's pattern, and I kissed her throat as she keened, whooping like it was an autumn foxhunt and she had spotted the poor critter.