Page 1 of Dirty Valentine (A J.J. Graves Mystery #17)
King George County, Virginia
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 simply knew things.
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.
“Have you any last words?” Blackwood asked, though she could see in his eyes that he hoped she would maintain her silence. A confession would have been satisfying, but her continued defiance was somehow more frightening.
Bridget looked around at the assembled crowd—neighbors who had once brought their children to her for healing, men who had secretly sought her counsel, women who had whispered their fears and hopes into her compassionate ear.
Fear had transformed them all into strangers, their faces hard with borrowed righteousness.
“I forgive you,” she said simply, and saw more than one person flinch as if struck.
“All of you. You act from fear, and fear makes cowards of us all. But know this—the truth has a way of rising to the surface, no matter how deep you try to bury it. What you do here today will not be forgotten. This ground will remember.”
They stripped her of her clothes—her dignity—tossed her in the hole and then laid the wooden planks across her chest, heavy boards that pressed the breath from her lungs.
Then came the stones, one by one, each rock carefully chosen and placed with ceremonial precision.
The weight built slowly, inexorably, each new stone adding to the crushing pressure that squeezed the life from her body.
But Bridget Ashworth did not scream. Did not beg.
Did not confess to crimes she had never committed.
She looked up at the gray sky and thought of all the women who would come after, all the daughters and granddaughters who would inherit both her gifts and the burden of living in a world that feared them.
As the last stone was placed and the darkness closed over her vision, she felt the earth beneath her back accepting her sacrifice. The ground drank her blood and her breath and her bones, weaving her essence into the very soil of King George County.
Death, when it finally came, was almost a relief.
But death, Bridget discovered, was not the end.
The magistrate and his men departed, satisfied that justice had been served and the devil’s influence purged from their community. The crowd dispersed, returning to their homes and their daily concerns, eager to put the unpleasantness behind them.
They left her there, beneath the weight of stones, in ground that was already heavy with the accumulated sorrows of the unwanted dead.
But something of her remained—not a ghost, exactly, but an essence woven into the very fabric of the place.
Her blood had fed the roots of the ancient oaks.
Her bones had enriched the dark soil. Her final breath had joined the wind that whispered through the cemetery grounds.
The truth would rise, as she had promised. Justice would come, though it might take centuries to arrive.
And in some distant spring morning, when another soul lay broken on her grave, Bridget Ashworth would be there to witness it—to see if this time, finally, the weight of lies would be lifted and the stones of truth would crush those who deserved crushing.
The cemetery remembered everything.
And sometimes, on nights when the mist rose thick from the river and the moon hid behind storm clouds, visitors would swear they could hear her voice on the wind—not crying out in pain or calling for vengeance, but simply whispering the same words she had spoken on that gray morning so long ago.
The truth has a way of rising to the surface, no matter how deep you try to bury it.
This ground will remember.