Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [1]
She hesitated, then continued straight toward the sea. She needed the tang of salty mist on her lips, the peace of the beach at low tide, the extra walk home to calm her spirit, before facing Patience—her friend, her companion, her maid of all work—and admitting she’d failed to save a patient’s life.
To her right, the church with its bell tower looked like a castle floating in the low clouds. But castles meant knights in shining armor riding out to rescue maidens in distress. Maiden though she was, Tabitha faced her distress alone. She enjoyed no husband to await her return, unlike her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and so many generations before. In fact, no one knew for certain when the women of her family began the tradition of practicing midwifery from Lancashire, England, to the eastern shore of Virginia. But Tabitha defied the convention that unmarried women didn’t practice the art of delivering babies. She adhered to the wishes of her mother, who had died too young, followed by her grandmother, who had died too recently, and carried on the family business to support her small household. A husband would have made work unnecessary. She loved her work most of the time, and one too many young men had sailed into the mist never to return or to come back with a different bride. One man in particular had vanished mere weeks before their wedding. Now that she was four and twenty, Tabitha’s chances of finding a husband seemed unlikely.
Except in her imagination.
Walking alone through the stillness between night and day, Tabitha held loneliness at bay, imagining her fiancé returning to make her his bride, or someone else materializing from the smoky light to claim her heart and hand so, at last, every baby she held wouldn’t belong to another woman.
This dawn, more than her empty arms weighed down Tabitha’s spirit—so much that she felt as arthritic as Grandmomma had been at the end. She trudged past the church and out of the village square. The sea beckoned, a constant taker and giver of life, ebbing and flowing, ever changing, yet comforting in its power.
If only the sea held enough power to wash the night’s events from her mind and heart. The drip of moisture from the trees and the distant murmur of the retreating waves reminded her of Mrs. Wilkins’s muttered ravings. Fact or nightmare?
“No, no, no,” seemed to be the predominant words, common protests of a woman in labor who thought she could bear the pain no longer. Disjointed phrases like “in the cellar” and “must ride” made little sense. No one in the swampy climate of the eastern shore dug cellars, and to Tabitha’s knowledge, the Wilkinses owned no riding stock. But another repeated word rang in her ears—“pushed.”
Tabitha shivered in the damp air and drew her cloak more tightly around her. She should have gone the shorter way home. All a walk along the shore would do was give her a chill rather than clear her head. Too late now. Trees fell behind, then houses vanished in the gloom. Cobblestones gave way to soft sand and, finally, the hard-packed leavings of the ebbing tide.
“No one could have pushed her.” Tabitha paused at the edge of the high tide line, inhaling the familiar scents of fish and wet wood, seaweed and brine. “I saw no bruises except for the one on her head. I’d swear to it.”
That bruise was the sort one would receive from falling down steps. Tabitha had suffered one herself in the past. And no one save for the manservant and maid had been home at the time of Mrs. Wilkins’s fall. They could have shoved their mistress down the steps, but servants who did that wouldn’t fetch help at once; they’d run away, knowing the consequences of being found out would be as severe as whipping or worse. Mr. Wilkins had been at the inn, drinking with some friends. His behavior was reprehensible, leaving his expecting wife alone like that, but not criminal. Yet why would Mrs. Wilkins make such a claim? Even women in labor due to accidents didn’t lie during their travail. Part of Tabitha’s responsibility as a midwife was to get truth from laboring women when