Page 1 of Dirty Valentine
PROLOGUE
King George County,Virginia
May 1725
The morning mist clung to the river like the breath of ghosts, and perhaps it was.Bridget Ashworth had learned to see omens in everything now—in the way the crows gathered in threes along her fence posts, in how her milk had curdled three days running, in the silence that fell over the tavern when she passed.Fear had a smell to it, sharp and metallic, like blood on a blade, and it had been growing stronger with each passing day.
She stood at her cottage window, watching the sun struggle through the Virginia darkness, and knew with the certainty that had always lived in her bones that this would be her last sunrise.
The gift—or curse, depending on who was asked—had come to her as it had come to her grandmother and her grandmother’s grandmother, flowing through the women of her bloodline like water through a creek bed.She could ease a difficult birth, brew tonics that would break a fever, and yes, sometimes she simplyknewthings.When the Henderson baby would come early.When the drought would finally break.When Patrick McKellar’s gambling debts would catch up with him.
She’d never claimed to be a witch.Had never consorted with the devil, despite what the whispers said.She was simply a woman who listened—to the earth, to the wind, to the subtle rhythms that most people had forgotten how to hear.In England, such women had been valued.Here, in this God-fearing colony where Puritan sensibilities still ran as deep as the Rappahannock, they were feared.
And fear, Bridget had learned, was a poison that turned good people into something else entirely.
The sound of hoofbeats on the dirt road made her turn from the window.She’d been expecting them, had known they would come with the dawn.Six men on horseback, their faces set with the righteous determination of those who believed they served a higher purpose.At their head rode Magistrate Jonathan Blackwood, a man whose soul was as pinched as his thin lips, who saw the devil’s work in everything from a woman’s laughter to the way cats gathered in her garden.
Bridget smoothed her simple brown dress and checked that her dark hair was properly covered by her white cap.She would meet her accusers with dignity, even if they would show her none in return.
The pounding on her door came like thunder.
“Bridget Ashworth!”Blackwood’s voice carried the authority of a man who’d never questioned his own righteousness.“By order of the King George County Court, you are charged with the practice of witchcraft.Open this door!”
She could have run.The woods behind her cottage were thick, and she knew them better than any of these men.She could have slipped away like smoke, disappeared into the Virginia wilderness, perhaps made her way to one of the other colonies where a woman’s knowledge of herbs and healing wasn’t seen as evidence of communion with Satan.
But running would be an admission of guilt in their eyes, and more than that, it would mean abandoning the people who still came to her door in desperation—the young mothers whose babies burned with fever, the old men whose bones ached with the changing weather, the women who whispered their secrets and sorrows into her capable hands.
She opened the door.
“Magistrate Blackwood.”Her voice was steady, though her heart hammered against her ribs like a caged bird.“I have been expecting you.”
His pale eyes narrowed at that, and she saw him make a quick sign of the cross.“Have you indeed?And by what unholy means did you come by such knowledge?”
“The same means by which I know that your wife’s consumption will worsen before the winter’s end,” she said quietly.“And that your son will return safely from his voyage to the Indies, though not with the cargo you hope for.”
The color drained from Blackwood’s face, and the men behind him shifted uneasily in their saddles.Truth, Bridget had found, was often more frightening than lies.
“Seize her,” Blackwood commanded, his voice tight with something that might have been fear.
The trial, if it could be called that, was held in the courthouse that still smelled of fresh-cut timber and the sweat of nervous men.Bridget sat in the dock while witness after witness testified to her crimes—how she’d cursed the Miller boy’s leg to heal crooked after he’d trampled her herb garden, how she’d bewitched the weather to bring rain on the day of Sarah Whitman’s wedding, how she’d been seen talking to her black cat as if it were human.
The accusations grew more fantastic with each telling.She had flown through the air on moonless nights.She had turned milk to blood with a glance.She had caused livestock to sicken and crops to fail.She had, according to Widow Morrison, been seen dancing with the devil himself at the crossroads at midnight.
Bridget listened to it all with the patience of stone, speaking only when directly addressed, answering each question with simple truth that seemed to infuriate her accusers more than any denial might have.Yes, she had knowledge of herbs.Yes, she sometimes knew things before they happened.No, she had never made covenant with any dark power.No, she had never sought to harm another soul.
When they asked her to recite the Lord’s Prayer, she did so without stumbling.When they searched her for the devil’s mark, they found only the scars and calluses of a woman who worked with her hands.When they threw her into the river to see if she would float, she sank like any mortal woman, choking and gasping as they pulled her from the water.
But none of it mattered.The verdict had been decided before the trial began, written in the fearful eyes of neighbors who had once sought her help but now crossed themselves when she passed.
“Bridget Ashworth,” Magistrate Blackwood pronounced, his voice carrying across the packed courthouse like the toll of a funeral bell.“You have been found guilty of the practice of witchcraft.You are hereby sentenced to death by pressing, that the weight of stones might crush the devil from your body and send your soul to whatever judgment awaits.”
The method of execution was deliberate, chosen not just to kill but to terrorize.Pressing was reserved for those who refused to confess, who would not bend their will to the court’s demands.It was slow, inexorable, designed to break the spirit as thoroughly as it broke the body.
They brought her to the cemetery, to the section where they buried the unwanted—criminals and madmen and those who had died by their own hand.It was fitting, they said, that a witch should find her final rest among the damned.
The morning was gray and still, the air heavy with the promise of rain.They had dug a grave for her—so she would simply be pressed into the earth where she lay, the weight of stone and sin crushing her down among the roots and bones of those who had gone before.
Bridget looked up at the gray sky and felt, for just a moment, the presence of every woman who had died for the crime of being different, of being inconvenient, of knowing too much or too little or simply existing in a world that feared what it could not control.Their voices whispered to her on the wind, a chorus of the forgotten and the wronged.
