Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [101]
“I don’t want to go. I can talk Letty around if I’m late. Kendall’s gone.”
“But I don’t want you to stay.” She picked up the basket, turned her back on him, and walked away. If Dominick wouldn’t move from her gate, she could enter from the front. She hoped for his sake he would leave. He might think he could talk females around to his side with a smile and flicker of his eyelashes, but Tabitha wasn’t so certain Letty would divide her loyalty between master and fellow servant. Asking her wasn’t fair.
At the corner of the wall, Tabitha glanced back. Dominick was gone. Disappointment stabbed her, foolish female that she was. Of course he wouldn’t come after her. He’d courted her, with one goal in mind—to get her help. Once he had it, once they succeeded, he would leave. Nothing in Seabourne, in Virginia, in America, could hold back a man who wanted to redeem himself to either his earthly father in England or his heavenly Father.
She didn’t blame him. She had let him court her so she could learn if he was up to something. She had succeeded. The knowledge did her no good. He wasn’t trying to harm the local inhabitants; he was trying to help them, if he was telling the truth.
She believed him. He wouldn’t ask her to work against her countrymen. That was too risky. He knew asking for her help at all jeopardized his relationship with her, if he cared for her as anything beyond the flirt of the moment and as someone he could make an ally. In telling her, he compromised his safety. He trusted her enough not to betray him.
He trusted her, but she didn’t believe a word he said about his feelings for her. She could talk about how he wouldn’t take her to his family because his father would despise her, and when he denied it, she as good as called him a liar. Oh, he cared for her, but not enough to stand against his need to redeem himself with his family.
Just as Raleigh hadn’t cared enough to suppress his desire to roam the world. As her father hadn’t cared enough not to go out in the cold after birds’ eggs and tax his weak lungs.
“God, if You’re there, tell me what is wrong with me that no one will stay,” she cried out to the pounding surf and howling wind. She dropped to her knees and covered her face with her hands. “I just want to be loved by someone who won’t leave me.”
Pastor Downing had said God would never leave, that His love was perfect. Yet Tabitha didn’t sense it. She’d only seen Him take from her. With every death, with every disappearance, her heart broke a little more. She held herself from people more and more. She’d gotten close to Dominick for a reason, and fallen for him in the process. She loved him more than she’d ever loved Raleigh or any of the others who had courted her in her youth.
Then why did you send him away?
The question slammed into her head like a chunk of wind-borne driftwood. She gasped and covered her ears. The howl of the wind diminished, but the question ricocheted around her brainbox like a trumpet blast echoing off the mountain.
Why . . . Why . . . Why . . .
She wanted everything given to her—love, family, permanence. She hadn’t gone out to fetch the egret egg for her father. She hadn’t gone to the birthing in her mother’s place. She hadn’t loved any of the young men who had tried to court her. Now that she loved Dominick, she wasn’t even sure she had loved Raleigh. She was paid for the kindness and care she bestowed on her patients. She’d even considered running away with Dominick, which would have left Patience and Japheth behind with no one to support them.
No wonder God didn’t want her. She gave absolutely nothing.
Kneeling on the dune outside her garden wall, she understood why Dominick felt the need to redeem himself. What he’d done was regrettable, but not horrendous. And he’d been honest about his goal, about his desire to make himself unwelcome in the church as one of its servants. If someone challenged him to a duel, that man shared Dominick’s guilt.
Tabitha’s was all her own. No one