Poison in the Colony, page 10
I nod quickly, not even daring to say I’m sorry again.
Da’s confidence buoys me. He is talking as if I have many years to follow his advice, as though he will have plenty of time to sue for defamation of character after Charles loses this case against me.
When we all bed down on this last night before my trial, I have hope.
Alice pats my hand. “Have fun at the tri-yul tomorrow, Ginny,” she says. Mum has told her that a trial is where people come together to talk and discuss things, and she is satisfied with that explanation despite all of the emotions flying around.
I kiss Alice’s forehead. “Thank you,” I say.
But during the night I awaken to the sound of muffled sobs, and my parents talking in tight voices. “What if they take her from us? What if there is nothing we can do to prevent them from hanging her?”
“I know, John. I have not stopped praying, not for a moment.”
“Pray for a miracle. . . .”
Then all I hear is both of them weeping.
Fear clutches me again with icy fingers. I lie awake until dawn.
* * *
. . .
Samuel breezes in without knocking, as he always does. “Come on, Ginny,” he says. “Let’s go get this over with.” He nods to my parents. “I’ll take her so you two can get to work. I’ll have her back by noon.” And before anyone can ask any questions, he whisks me out the door.
I have to trot to keep up with Samuel’s long strides. “Your parents look awful,” he says. He glances at me. “So do you.”
“Thanks,” I say.
“I’m telling you, Governor Yeardley does not like hangings or whippings. How many have we had since he took office?”
I don’t want to think about this, so I don’t answer.
We arrive at the church, where the General Assembly meeting has already begun. They are discussing how much to tax the colonists to pay themselves for the time they spend meeting.
“The trials will come a little later,” says Samuel, and he bids me sit next to him under a tree outside the church entrance. A man, dressed in the shabby clothing of an indentured servant, paces back and forth at the church entrance. He is being guarded by a man with a musket. I figure they are waiting for a trial as well.
“How is your arm?” Samuel asks.
I lift my arm, still in its splint. “Better,” I say. “But it still hurts, and it’s bent a little funny.” A group of young men walk by, on their way to the fields. “Don’t you need to get to work?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says. “My trial will be next. Samuel Collier, charged with skipping a day of labor in the tobacco fields. Twenty lashes!”
“That’s not funny,” I say. “Da says we’re still commoners and if the gentlemen and nobles want to use their power over us, they will.”
“Do you want me to leave you and go to work?” he asks.
I shake my head quickly.
“Then let me deal with the consequences,” he says.
The voices inside the church drone on. I wish they would hurry up and get to the trials. Gnats buzz around my head and I begin to feel sleepy. After all, I hardly slept last night. I lay my head back against the tree.
“You can go to sleep, Ginny,” Samuel says. “I’ll listen for when your case is called.”
Twenty-Four
I MUST HAVE fallen sound asleep, because when the commotion awakens me, I am lying on my side on the ground. I sit up quickly. The indentured servant we saw earlier is being led away, his hands tied behind his back. He is shouting,
“I didn’t steal anything!” he cries. “It was food he owed me! He’s starving me so I will die and he won’t have to pay me my freedom dues. He is a liar!”
But no one is listening to him. The council members march after him as he is led away.
“Ginny, let’s go home,” Samuel says. “The meeting is over for the day.”
“Where are they going?” I ask. I am groggy, and it feels as though I am in a dream.
“Never mind,” Samuel says.
One look at him tells me something is very wrong. “What are they doing?” I demand.
Samuel hesitates. “He works for one of the nobles on a plantation. . . .” he begins, but then stops.
My mind fills in the rest. I know how the most powerful men treat their servants as though they are not even human. To avoid paying them their freedom dues—corn, clothing, and a bit of money—at the end of their indenture, they often simply stop feeding them so that they die conveniently. This master apparently found a quicker way to be rid of his servant. “His master accused him of stealing,” I say. “So now he will be hung?”
Samuel shakes his head. “Whipped,” he says. But we both know that severe whippings can, and have, killed quite a few servants. “Let’s get you home,” Samuel says.
“I hate them!” I cry. “They treat us worse than dogs!”
I jump to my feet and run. I want out—out into the forest, where I will be safe from the power-wielding gentlemen and nobles. Samuel catches up and grabs me, but I kick him and he lets go.
A crowd is gathering around the whipping post.
“Ginny, don’t,” Samuel calls after me.
At the fort gate, two guards step out in front of me, their muskets held sideways, blocking my way. Extra security for trial day. Samuel is right behind me. “She’s with me,” he says to the guards. “I’ll take her home now.”
“Leaving the fort to avoid justice?” one of the guards asks. “Maybe you want to be next on the whipping post?”
“She has not set foot outside the gates,” Samuel snaps.
“We’ll take care of her,” the other guard says.
In an instant, they grab me, one under each arm. I cry out in pain.
“Careful of her arm!” Samuel shouts.
My feet scarcely touch the ground as they whisk me past the crowd at the whipping post. The indentured servant is being tied to it. I choke on bile that churns up from my stomach.
“We don’t want you to end up there simply because you ran away,” one of the guards says.
We pass the chicken coop and they drag me into the storehouse. Are they going to lock me up with the barrels of grain and baskets of dried oysters? They take me down the earthen steps into the cellar. There is a wooden partition and a door. When they open the door, I see a chamber pot, a rough blanket in a heap, and the remains of a fire on the floor.
“You’ll be safe here till morning,” one guard says, and they shove me in.
When the door closes behind me, I can see nothing. I hear a board being set across the door to lock me in. It is cold and damp, and smells of urine. I slump onto the floor. I am thirsty. And hungry.
I lean my head onto my bent knees and close my eyes. I am weary. Weary of the fear, weary of trying to do what my parents want from me and never quite being able to. I am weary of feeling as though my sisters are in danger because of me. I let out a long, shaky breath. Maybe it would be all for the best. I imagine the prickly rope of the noose being tightened around my neck. I imagine being pushed off the gallows platform, the rope snapping my neck, and all of my weariness and fear being over.
A chill creeps up my back in the damp. I feel around for the blanket and touch its roughness. I pull it across my shoulders. Immediately I feel something crawl across my face. I swat at it but I am too late. There is a pinprick of a sting, and then a growing fire.
I throw the blanket far from me, but the damage has been done. The burning pain spreads across my face, and I feel the swelling begin. It must have been a spider.
Soon I feel fever overtake me. I shiver with chills, and my stomach roils in pain. My mind feels hazy, but I recognize the symptoms of a poisonous spider bite—one of those shiny black spiders with the red hourglass on its back.
I am so very thirsty. I rock back and forth, my body consumed with pain, chills, and thirst. I begin to pray, to find comfort in the familiar words I’ve learned in church. “Our Father, who art in heaven . . .” When I am done with the prayers I know, I keep on whispering, talking to God in my own words. “I never meant to do anything wrong,” I tell Him. “I have tried to obey my parents.” I sigh, thinking of how my mother told me to kill the knowing inside me, and how I failed. “I just hope that You will let me into heaven even if I die as a criminal.” I shiver with the fever. I hug my knees and try to curl into a ball to get warm. As I sit huddled against the dirt wall, one memory comes to me as clearly as if it is happening again: Angela holding me by the shoulders, then touching my heart, and her words: “Go inside, Virginia. Find who you are.”
Angela has been here, huddled, sick, thirsty, hungry, and miserable. She has told me about how she was chained with hundreds of other slaves on the passage from Africa across the ocean. She told me how they lay in their own filth and blood and vomit, unable to move because of the chains, how so many died of sickness and despair. She also told me how, in that very dark place, deep inside her, she found the light of her own soul to be burning brightly.
Is there a light within me as well? I shut my eyes tightly, as if I am squinting to look into my soul. Go inside, Virginia. Find who you are. . . .
I groan. I see no light at all. What I see is a girl who has tried to do the right thing and has ended up in a dungeon with poisonous spiders, awaiting execution. What I see is a girl who tried to do what her parents wanted and never could.
“Dear God, is there no light in me?” I cry out. Tears press behind my eyes and I let them fall. The words float to me again, insistent, as if I have not yet really heard them: Go inside, Virginia. Find who you are.
Suddenly a thought stops my tears. I only know who I am supposed to be, which is who I have failed to be. There has never been any room for knowing who I might be, behind all the things I have been trying to be. Let us start from the begining. These words float to me, and I don’t even question where they come from.
“I am Virginia Laydon,” I say. “Daughter of—” But I stop myself. My parents are not who I am. Let me begin with just me. “I am Virginia,” I say. “I love the forest, the life I feel in the trees and plants, rocks and earth. I love my family, my sisters and Mum and Da and Samuel. I love my friends, Bermuda and Angela. I—” I hesitate to say what is in me to say next. But this is all I have, a few hours to find the light of my soul before it is consecrated to God. “I love the knowing. It has been given to me by God; it is what led me to find Angela and save her life. It is a good thing. I love it.”
There. I said it. And now there is something more for me to say that does not fit with who I am “supposed” to be. “I am Virginia, and I love my anger!” I say it loudly, feeling the freedom of claiming it. “My anger flashes up and helps me protect the people I love, like Bermuda, or my sisters.” I hesitate. “It doesn’t always make me say or do the right thing,” I say sheepishly. “But it is part of who I am.
“I am Virginia,” I continue. “I am honest. I am faithful. I work hard. I am cheerful when I can be. I am fierce when I have to be. I love all of this about myself.”
Something is lifting. My face still burns, I am still shivering with fever, and my stomach still twists with pain and nausea. The misery is not lifting from my body, but something is lifting from my spirit. I close my eyes and look inside myself. I see a faint light. It begins at my heart. “I am Virginia,” I whisper. “I am the way God made me. I love . . .”
As I say the word “love,” the light inside me brightens.
“I am the way God made me.” I say it again. “And I love who I am!”
The light spreads and fills me. I laugh out loud. I have found the light of my soul.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I say. No one can take this light away from me, not with threats or blows, not with a whipping or even the gallows. It is mine.
Twenty-Five
WHEN THE GUARDS come to let me out in the morning, I can barely walk. Through the night, pain and stiffness has spread into my limbs. I am still shivering, and hunger and thirst have made me weak. One eye is swollen nearly shut, and my lips are dry and cracked. I stumble and fall on the steps leading up from my dungeon. The guards help me up and I smile at them. As I do, I feel my lips crack, and blood seeps down my chin.
“What happened to her?” one guard asks.
“It’s those blasted spiders,” the other answers. “Though she looks worse than most.”
It somehow gives me satisfaction to know that my body looks as bad as it feels. It makes the contrast even greater, because my spirit is as light as sunshine. There is nothing that can scare me today. Nothing.
The guards lead me across the fort to the church. It seems my trial is about to get under way. The men of the General Court look down at their papers, glance at me, and frown. I see several of them whispering among themselves. Light glints in through the church windows, the same way it does during church services. Today, these men will judge me. But I know that only my heavenly Father is my real judge.
Charles sits on a bench, staring straight ahead. I can’t read his expression. It is tempting to bump into him as the guards lead me past him so that one touch will tell me what he is thinking. I am curious. Will he rejoice if he is responsible for the death of someone he knows full well is innocent? Or did the whipping yesterday make him reconsider?
One guard motions for me to have a seat on an empty bench. Governor Yeardley sits where Reverend Buck normally stands. He calls the guard over. “Did someone beat her?” he demands.
“No!” the guard objects. “We just put her in the storehouse cellar. It’s got spiders.”
Governor Yeardley shakes his head and clears his throat. “The proceedings of the General Court will begin,” he says.
I am calm. There is nothing that can be said against me that will be true, except that I made empty threats in anger. If these men judge me guilty, it will be based on lies.
Ensign Spence reads from a written document. It is Charles’s testimony against me. In a loud, booming voice, he reads, “The accused came into his room at night, sat on him, and tried to strangle him. She said she would use an evil spell to make him fall ill with the summer flux and die. She turned into a black cat and disappeared through the keyhole of his chamber door.”
By now I am staring at Charles with my mouth hanging open. He continues to look straight ahead, but he seems slightly worried. Maybe his fantastical story doesn’t sound quite so convincing to him now that it is being read in a court of law.
Ensign Spence addresses me. “Is it true that you sat on him and tried to strangle him?”
I clear my throat. “I did strangle him a bit,” I begin. There is mumbling among the council members. “But that didn’t happen in his chamber. It happened outside in the dirt, with a group of children watching, the day of the fight.”
“What fight?” Ensign Spence asks.
I show him my splint. “The one where he broke my arm. That was the day he was beating up my friend, so I—”
Ensign Spence interrupts me. “The night you entered his chamber, what happened then?”
“I was never in his chamber,” I say simply.
He looks down at his papers. “What about the night you turned into a black cat and went through his keyhole?”
I blink. “I have always been a girl, sir. I have never been anything else.”
There is laughter among the council members.
Ensign Spence reads his papers again. He is beginning to sound annoyed. “Did you or did you not threaten him with an evil spell to give him the summer flux?”
My throat tightens. I speak slowly. “I did not threaten him with an evil spell, sir. I know nothing of these things.”
“Yes, she did!” It is Charles, on his feet now. “She said she would cast a spell on me and make me sick and die, the same way her mother put an evil spell on my mum and then my da and made them die!”
I feel a strange thing: compassion for Charles. He thinks my mum took both his parents away from him. I want to say, She would never do that to you!
“Sit down,” Ensign Spence orders Charles.
I am ready to confess that I did threaten to make sure he got the summer flux, but that I only said it because I was so angry, and I had no way to make it happen. I suck in my breath, ready to blurt it all out. But Governor Yeardley slams down his gavel.
“This is a children’s quarrel. Send these children home and stop wasting this court’s time. The defendant is innocent and this case is over. Now, let us get on with more important business.”
Charles is ushered out of the church and I limp slowly toward the doors. “The doctor should be seen for that spider bite,” Governor Yeardley says. It is strange to have the governor address me personally.
“I will go home to my mother, sir,” I say. I think to add, She will heal me with herbs, but decide I’d better not bring up anything that might be associated with witchcraft.
As I step outside, Alice runs to me and hugs me around the waist. I look up to see Mum holding Katherine on one hip, looking devastated with worry.
“I’m fine, Mum,” I say. Then, knowing my face must still look awful, I add, “It’s just a spider bite.”
“And the trial?” she asks. I can see she is holding back an ocean of tears.
I grin and feel my lips crack further. “The trial has a happy ending. Please let’s go home and get me a drink of water, and then I will tell you about it.”
Katherine has been staring at me.
“Does my face look funny?” I ask her.
