John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

It was still early when they bade the trapper good-bye and set out in Mary's wagon for Church Creek; though the journey took five hours, the sun was scarcely past the meridian when they arrived at the little settlement.

"Yonder's an inn," McEvoy said; he indicated a neat frame structure some distance ahead.

"Aye, there we'll go, like it or not," Mary said, " 'tis Sir Harry's place." She explained that Harry Russecks flew into a dangerous temper when visitors to the town failed to appear before him and state their business. "He knows mine well enough, and ye twain need say no more than that I'm ferrying ye to Cambridge on business for the Governor."

"I say, he is a high-handed rascal!" Ebenezer cried. "What right hath he to pry into everyone's affairs?"

"Ah, well," Mary replied, "for one thing, he can carry five hundred-weight o' grain upon his back, so they say, and break a man's neck as ye'd break a barleystraw. For another, he owns the inn, the mill over yonder on the creek, and half the planters hereabouts." The mill, she went on to say, like most in the Province, had been built originally at Lord Baltimore's order and financed in part with funds from the provincial treasury; hence the government maintained an interest in its operation. Harry Russecks was aware of this fact, but St. Mary's City being so far removed from Church Creek, and the Governor's Council having so many pressing problems to engage its attention and such feeble machinery of enforcement, he did not scruple to exploit his monopoly in every way. What with charging extortionate fees for grinding, and regularly purloining a capful of grain out of each bushel, he had early become a man of means; subsequently he had built the inn and taken to making loans on acreage collateral to the tobacco-planters in the area, so that, regardless of the market, he made large profits every year. If the tobacco price was good, his loans were repaid with interest, his milling fees went up, and his tavern was filled with celebrating planters; if the market fell, he increased his landholdings with forfeited collateral, ground grain as always for his neighbors' daily bread, and sold the planters rum to drown their sorrows in. It was not surprising, then, that he was presently the wealthiest man in the area and one of the wealthiest in the Province: such was the power of his position in Church Creek that he had secured to be his wife the only truly noble lady for miles around, by what arrangements the townsfolk could only conjecture; one and all were obliged to address him by his false title even as he robbed them at the mill, to leap clear whenever he brandished the sword which he affected, even at the grindstones, as an emblem of his rank, and in general to submit without protest to his poltroonery.

"Sir Harry respects naught in the world save patents o' nobility," she concluded, "nor fears any man in the Province — save a brace o' commissioners from St. Mary's, that some folk think have been dispatched to inspect the mills and ferries."

Drawing up before the inn they saw upon its sign a curious armorial device in bold colors: on a field azure, between flanches sable with annulets or (or roundlets square-pierced to look like millstones), a fleur-de-lis gules beset from alow and aloft by hard crabs armed natural. Their examination of it was cut short by a great commotion within the place it advertised: there was a crash of crockery, a woman shrieked, "Ow! Ow" a man's voice cried, and another roared out "I'll crack thy skull, John Hanker! Arrah! Hold still, dammee, whilst I fetch ye a good one!" From the door burst a young colonial, clutching his bare head in both hands and running for his life. At his heels pumped a shaggy bull of a man, black-haired, open-shirted, squint-eyed and mottled; in his right hand he waved a sword (no gentleman's rapier, but a Henry Morgan cutlass fit to quarter oxen with) and in his left he clutched by the arm a distraught young woman — the same, they soon heard, whose shriek had announced the scene. Had his pursuer not been thus encumbered, the young man would have lost more than just his periwig; even with this handicap the wild-haired swordsman — whom Ebenezer understood to be the miller Russecks himself — came within an ace of adding homicide to the catalogue of his sins.

"Yah! Run, Hanker!" he bellowed, giving over his pursuit. "Come to Church Creek again, I grind ye to hogswill!"

" 'Twas only in sport, Father!" cried the girl. "Don't go on so!" Now that the crisis was past she seemed more embarrassed than alarmed.

" 'Sheart!" McEvoy murmured to Ebenezer. "There's a handsome lass!"

The miller turned on her. "I know thy sports! D'ye think I didn't see where he laid his drunken paw, and you smiling him farther? All dogs pant after the salt bitch! Dammee if I don't unsalt ye, and thy quean of a mother into the bargain!" With the flat of his cutlass he caught her a swat upon the rump.

"Aiee!" she protested. "Thou'rt a devil out o' Hell!"

"And thee a goose out o' Winchester!" Again he swung, and clapped her smartly along the leg. Ebenezer flushed, and McEvoy sprang to his feet as though ready to leap to the damsel's aid from his perch on the wagon seat. But though the girl protested loudly at her punishment, her complaints were anything but abject.

"Ow! I swear to Christ I'll murther ye in your sleep!"

"Not till I've done basting ye, ye shan't!"

The third blow was aimed where the first had struck, but by dint of wrenching about and biting the miller's wrist, the girl caught it on her hip and broke free as well.

"Hi! Now try and clout me, damn your eyes!" She did not run off at once, but lingered a moment to taunt him from a distance. "Look at him wave his sword, that he bought to beat helpless women with! A great ass is what he is!"

"And thee a whore!"

"And thee a cuckold! La, what a time we'll have, when Billy-Boy takes the scalp off ye!"

The miller roared and charged towards her, but the girl scampered off and led him in a circle around the wagon. When he gave up after a few moments, apparently resigned from past experience to her nimbleness, she halted as well, bright-eyed and panting. Her nostrils tightened; her chin dimpled with scorn. She spat in his direction.

"Buffoon!" With a toss of ash-blond curls she turned her back on him and marched down the street towards the mill; her father sashed his weapon with a grunt and trudged after, but in the manner of a skulking bodyguard rather than that of an assailant.

"Henrietta Russecks," Mary chuckled. "Ain't she the lively one, though?"

But the men were appalled by the scene. It was some moments before Ebenezer could find voice for his indignation, and then he railed at length against the miller's spectacular ungallantry. McEvoy expressed even greater outrage, and added for good measure a panegyric on the young lady.

"Mother o' God, what spirit, Eben! How she gave the great bully as good as she got! Nor quailed for an instant! Nor shed a tear for his bloody bastinadoes! I here swear to Heav'n I'll see her free o' that beast, if I must murther him myself!"

Ebenezer showed some surprise at his companion's vehemence, and McEvoy blushed.

"Think what ye will," he grumbled, "and be damned t'ye! She hath the face o' Helen and the soul of Agamemnon, hath that girl! Fire and fancy, what Ben Oliver was wont to call the chiefest female virtues; oh, 'tis a rare, rare thing!"

"Best not toy with Henrietta," Mary warned cordially. "Ye saw what befell young Hanker yonder, for no more'n a pat. La, the rector o' Trinity Church himself couldn't court Sir Harry's daughter without a patent out o' peerage."

McEvoy sniffed and furrowed up in thought.

They decided to go directly to the mill, where, in addition to announcing their presence to Russecks, Mary could consult the miller's wife for further news of Billy Rumbly and his bride. On the way, for McEvoy's benefit, she chattered on about Henrietta: the girl was four-and-twenty and of the same lively temper as her mother, who had been a famous beauty in her youth and could still turn the head of any young man with an eye for pulchritude seasoned by experience. It was well past time for the daughter to be wed, but so jealous was the miller of the title he had appropriated from his wife, he would permit Henrietta no husband from among the youth of the place; he held out for a suitor of noble birth. And though with every passing year the task of chaperonage grew more difficult — especially since Mrs. Russecks, so far from sharing her husband's sympathies, not only allied herself with Henrietta in the cause of love but was prepared to join her daughter in any amorous adventure they could contrive.