Sex and Sedition, April 26, 2009

   A bodice gets fumbled, a bloody duel with pistols is fought over the wearer of the bodice, and a mighty flood almost washes the protagonist to the familiar watery grave. These are three dramatic events in Jack McLaughlin's entertaining yarn set in Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution.
   The story opens with a gentle knight of New England, James Leslie, pricking across the Virginia plain into Williamsburg astride a handsome gelding named Argus. Leslie is a lepidopterist, a science-minded son of the Enlightenment, and he explains that Argus gets his appellation from the "common Blue" butterfly of that name. But Leslie has not ridden all the way from Boston to study Linneaus at the College of William and Mary but to encourage Virginia to join Massachusetts in resisting England's policy of taxing the colonies without reresentation.
Several months later Kathryn Sheridan sails into Jamestown Landing intent on a visit with her distant relatives, the family of the prosperous Robert Carter. Kathryn is, in Carter's words, "a damned good-looking woman--and uncommonly well educated." She is a widow who trails a whiff of scandal behind her, and although left penniless by her dead husband she has ample sources to draw on as a spy for the Crown, and she soon buys her own blooded gelding, Starfire, and rides him every morning "with breathtaking virtuosity and abandon." In witty repartee Kathryn holds her own with aristocrats like the porcine gourmand Peyton Randolph, and when Carter quotes Samuel Johnson's mot "A man that does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything else," Kathryn responds with Juvenal's "ventris nihil novi frugalis" and Seneca's "Effugere non potes necessitates, potes vinceres." Clearly a lady of considerable parts.
   A reader of ordinary perceptions will quickly sense a plot shaping up here, with maybe a tamed shrew emerging in the denouement. Soon the geldings are swooping down the riding paths like Byron's Assyrians and bodices are being fumbled. (As Samuel Johnson might have said, but probably didn't, 'Sir, a man who would not fumble a bodice is hardly a man at all.') I should note here that the gentle Mr. Leslie had fumbled another bodice, that of the madam of the local brothel, and even though she left town without telling him of her condition he learns later that he is a father.
   Before I leave you, dear readers, to parse out the rest of this plot yourselves I want to praise the passage in "Williamsburg" that gave me the greatest pleasure. Early on in the story a working man named Richard Waller is dragged into court on a charge of preaching without a license. He is defended by Patrick Henry, whose questioning of the Pharisaical sheriff who lashed the man six times is eloquent and thrilling, and this scene is for me the high point of a narrative that always pleases. And if sometimes serious history gives way to bodice fumbling, well, remember Samuel Johnson.

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