Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [17]
Of all days for him to return, this one was the worst. She needed companionship, a distraction. Yet if she succumbed to the relief of seeing her fiancé again, she would regret it in moments.
He didn’t deserve a friendly welcome back into her life.
“Life aboard a British naval vessel is unpleasant at best,” she said, pressing home her point. “Of course you’d regret leaving me then. Maybe you should have stuck by your commitments to avoid getting caught by the British.”
“Once they learned my mother was from Canada, they wouldn’t let me go. They said I was English.”
“But you changed their minds and finally were able to come back?” The weakness to seek his comfort fled. Tabitha straightened her shoulders and made herself meet and hold his piercing blue eyes. “You think you can dance back into my life after deserting me practically on the eve of our wedding and expect nothing to have changed?”
“No, but I can hope for forgiveness and go on from there.”
She read the hope in his face, in the way he leaned toward her with his hands clenched at his sides.
“Will you forgive me for leaving?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
It was the only thing she possessed to offer him—the truth. She didn’t know, not this soon, not this easily. “You have had weeks, maybe months, to think about your return. This is a shock to me. Maybe you should leave now and give me some time to accustom myself to the new circumstances.”
“All right, but I’ll not give up on you.” Raleigh departed with a last, longing glance back.
She fled into the garden, with the sunshine, the scent of roses, mint, chamomile . . .
And the lingering memory of another, elusive scent that had warned her of someone’s presence in her garden.
She touched a forefinger to her throat, where her fichu hid the scratch. She knew two men who had reason to threaten her into silence regarding knowledge of the night. If Wilkins had something to do with his wife’s injuries, he might fear what she had said in her delirium. But surely he understood Tabitha couldn’t divulge what she heard during a lying-in, except for the identity of the father in the event of illegitimacy.
As for the Englishman . . . At the least, a bondservant shouldn’t have been out and about after curfew. The greatest of his crimes could be that he, an Englishman, had been directly involved with the three men’s disappearance the same night.
Yet the Englishman had been miles from the abduction scene when Tabitha met him, possibly too far away to have gotten there without a fast horse. Tabitha had noticed no horse on the beach.
She had noticed only the man, noticed so much she recognized him in an instant when she came face-to-face with him at Mayor Kendall’s house. She knew enough to have told Kendall that his manservant, the only stranger in the village, had been prowling the beach at dawn.
And she would have seen that manservant whipped.
She shuddered. Even if he had threatened her, she couldn’t be the one who reported him. If he continued his nocturnal wanderings, he would bring punishment on himself. Yet if he were the culprit who had taken the young men away, he would strike again. More families would live without sons and brothers and husbands to support them. More young women would live without prospective husbands because the population of males had dropped below that of females.
And perhaps she should make certain of his guilt before she spread damaging tales about him. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d kept her mouth shut about words she’d overheard or been told directly while tending a patient, or even traveling home. She could do so for the Englishman—for a while—rather than see him hurt. Like a doctor, she was compelled to do no harm to a living creature.
Surely that reasoning—not a pair of long-lashed brown eyes that sparkled with gold lights in the sun—stopped her from confiding in the mayor. She would never be that foolish.
She would never be foolish over a man again, as much as she yearned for a family of her own. Once upon