Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [12]
The door opened. A woman twice Tabitha’s age, a full head shorter and half again as wide, stood in the opening. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t recall her name. “May I help you?” she asked.
“I’m—” He swallowed. “I’m here to see Tabitha. Miss Eckles, I mean.”
She narrowed her eyes as though she too recognized him. “Is this an emergency?”
Oh, yes, he needed to know right away if Tabitha had forgiven him. Or at the least, if she could.
“Not an emergency.” He had to be honest about some things after all. “I—I’m an old friend. Raleigh Trower.”
“Are you?” The woman’s round face tightened, her green eyes grew cold. “I can’t be sure she’ll be wanting to see you.”
Raleigh looked down his nose at the woman. “That’s for her to decide, isn’t it?”
“It is, and she isn’t here.” The woman started to close the door. “You’ll have to come back later.”
“Please.” Raleigh stuck his foot over the threshold and smiled. Suddenly the woman’s name came to him and he added, “It’s Patience, isn’t it? Patience Neff?”
“Well, fancy that.” Patience stuck her own nose in the air. “You couldn’t recall you was engaged to Miss Tabitha, but you remember my name.”
“Oh, I remembered.” Raleigh closed his eyes, recalling every detail of Tabitha’s lovely face. “I made a mistake.”
“And now you come back to pick up where you left off?” Patience set work-reddened hands on her hips. “Well, young man, she’s had her heart broke once too often and I don’t want to see it happen again.”
“I know about her family.”
The mother and grandmother who had never been quite as welcoming of the engagement as he would have wished, for Tabitha’s sake.
“That’s why I thought she might be kind enough to see me,” he continued. “She might like to know I’m not dead.”
“And I can tell her, or she’ll learn in the village.” Patience sighed and pulled the door wide. “All right, come in and wait. The parlor’s clean and I was just making some coffee.” She waved him forward.
He entered the tidy parlor, with its open windows allowing the sea air and sunshine inside, and a braided woolen rug on the floor. He wanted to pace while waiting for Tabitha. He wanted to stride in circles around the house, waiting for her to arrive across the beach or from town, as he had waited many times in the past. With Patience’s bright eyes on him, he chose a chair facing the parlor door, perching on its edge so he could spring to his feet the instant the front door opened or she came down the hall from the back of the house.
He expected Patience to leave him alone to stew in private. A maidservant would have. But Patience was much more to the Eckles family and had been since the grandmother, Mrs. Nottingham, had bought the woman’s indenture mere months before Raleigh left. Now that Tabitha was alone in the world, Raleigh expected Patience had taken on an even more protective role.
“Is she truly well?” he decided to ask.
“As well as a woman of four and twenty and still unwed can be.” Patience pierced him with her eyes the green of the sea before a storm. “You’re talking like an Englishman. Did you go back to your sainted mother’s people?”
“Not by choice.” He made himself focus on the old lady. “I was on a merchantman bound for China. A British frigate hauled me aboard and asked me a lot of questions.”
Lantern light had hung in his face so he couldn’t see the officers except for the occasional glint of a blade. They’d struck his head when hauling him out of his boat and onto their deck. He’d been dizzy, cloudy of brain, sick in body.
“I made the mistake of telling them my mother is from Halifax. That made me English enough in their eyes to justify tossing me into the stinking coffin they call a man-of-war, and made me—” His fists clenched on his thighs. “I’ve tried everything to get away, to get back to Tabitha.”
“Before or after you were pressed?”
Raleigh swallowed and dug his knuckles into his thigh muscles. He couldn’t meet Patience’s eyes. “After.”
“And now you’ve managed to—what?—desert, and you want to renew your relationship with Tabitha?”
“You’re rather forward for a redemptioner,