27. Jun, 2017

Jamestown

This remarkably pristine new world settlement is full of wenches, nubile, obviously.  They've come to be wed by arrangement and, needless to say, although they none of them fall for their allotted spouses, most fall for, or are fallen for by, in the space of, oh, seconds, others who are of course unattainable from day one to them.  The nature of the men's emotional expression depends on their social status.  Thus the doctor suffers nobly, while the blacksmith does so in a brooding, heavily northern kind of way. 

A lot of air time is spent on the maid, Mercy, as simple as a mooncalf and given to rural accented ramblings of devotion, towards, in her case, her mistress, the bosom heaving Jocelyn.  She does have cleavage competition though, mainly from the, naturally, flame haired and feisty irish woman, a convict who has copped for the alcoholic tavern keeper but seems now to be making an unlikely go of it.

The natives are very pc, keeping a neutral but kindly eye on the settlers, picking them up, dusting them down and setting them right again after minor mishaps in the almost getting burnt to death department, for example.  Considering the distance, post is remarkably regular on the maiden conveying ships and almost gives away the secret nearly everybody except the governer's wife already knows, because she tells people about it all the time, from shipboard onwards, that Jocelyn killed a man back in the old country.

There's social climbing, tobacco crop and sibling rivalry and love triangles galore.  While passions are not exactly seething, they are at least on a rolling boil, or a long slow cook.  Rapprochements have been reached on various fronts and the settlers are just enjoying a bit of a hooley after honest toil, when festivities are interrupted by the arrival of slaves, looking very neat and tidy in their new chains, just minted by the blacksmith,  being led along in file, apparently as fresh as daisies after being transported in from Africa,

I wonder whether they'll have a nice new wooden hut somewhere to bunk down in, as all the Jamestown dwellings have a slightly model village look, like Wendy houses on stilts.    Things are bound to liven up again now though, as brother Henry (her original intended) has returned to interrupt the idyll that is silent Silas and the fragrant Alice's married bliss.  Oh, and the blacksmith loves Alice too.