Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [11]
“He held a knife to my throat and told me to keep my mouth shut about the night,” she blurted out on a single breath.
“It was this same Englishman?” Kendall nearly shouted.
The silver serving tray struck the floor with a resonant clang. Tabitha jumped, slopping hot coffee over her fingers. She gasped.
Mr. Cherrett groaned. “I am so sorry, miss. I’ll fetch you a cold wet cloth.” The kitchen door creaked.
Tabitha stared at her reddened fingers. She’d questioned the man’s guilt when looking into his eyes. But now, with Cherrett’s noisy reaction to the mayor’s raised voice, she wondered if she’d allowed herself to succumb to a pretty face and charming manner while the threat had indeed come from the Englishman.
Raleigh Trower feasted his eyes on the whitewashed cottage before him. From the neat hedge of flowers keeping the beach away from the front garden to the green door and window frames, from the smoke curling out of the chimney into the clear blue sky to the scent of baking bread, from the roar of the ocean across the dunes to the sundry birds chorusing in the trees, nothing about the Eckles home had changed in the two and a half years since he’d last laid eyes on it or its youngest lady inhabitant.
“Tabitha.” Her name burned on his lips. Her face swam before his eyes.
Swaying, he grasped the top rail of the gate. He probably should have stayed home long enough for a good night’s sleep. But the promise of seeing Tabitha again kept him going through the hardships of the past nine and twenty months, kept him alive, when dying would have been easier. Now, on sufferance from a British captain, he was nearly free to return to his life, his fishing boat, his family, his Tabitha.
“If you’ll be my Tabitha again.”
One bit of news he’d gleaned, while Momma had stuffed him with food and his sisters fluttered around him like finches in a field of grain, was that Tabitha was still unmarried and the town’s only midwife.
“The only thing we have for a healer,” Momma had added. “Her mother died right after you disappeared, and now it’s just her.”
“Is she courting anyone?” Raleigh asked.
She should have been married. She would have been married if he hadn’t betrayed her out of selfishness, out of fear.
“The men are all scared of her.” Fanny, his younger sister, giggled. “I mean, she knows everything that happens around here. Last year, when Rachel Goodwin got herself into trouble, Tabitha made her tell her who the father was before she’d deliver the baby.”
“That’s the law.” Felicity still affected the haughty tones of a plantation mistress rather than the daughter of a mildly prosperous fisherman. “She’s required to ask that when the woman is in—”
“Girls,” Momma snapped, “this isn’t proper conversation.” She turned to Raleigh. “She knows too much about what the young men get up to, now that her mother isn’t here to protect her from some of the . . . er . . . more unpleasant parts of her work, so they’re afraid she’s heard tales.”
“They wouldn’t need to fear her if they were acting as they should.” Raleigh realized he sounded smug, hypocritical. His conscience might be clear where behavior toward females went, if he discounted jilting Tabitha. Yet he lived a lie that should keep him away from any decent female.
Now he opened the gate and strode up the flagstone path to the front steps, to the door, to the knocker in the shape of a dove. The golden metal bird gleamed in the morning sunshine, and its flesh-and-blood counterpart cooed from a pine tree at the corner of the yard, as though encouraging him to seek entrance.
He let the knocker fall once, twice, three times, then a fourth for good measure. He kept his hand on it, the other one on the door frame for support, and waited. He heard nothing from inside the house.
“Bobwhite. Bobwhite,” a bird of that name chided from a cedar around the side of the house. “Bobwhite. Bobwhite.”
Quick, light footfalls sounded on the other side of the door. Raleigh straightened, lips curved into a smile, heart racing.