Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [2]
She’d gotten no truth from Mrs. Wilkins. Now, poised on the edge of the beach, she wondered if perhaps she should tell the sheriff or mayor of what Mrs. Wilkins had claimed in her ravings. Tabitha should have told the husband. But no, a man who had just lost his wife didn’t need to know she’d died in terror as well as pain. She would tell the mayor later that morning. He could talk to his friend.
Decision made, she resumed walking parallel to the sea. Though less than fifty feet away, the ocean’s roar sounded farther off, muffled, nearly still. No lights bobbed on the surf, not an oarlock creaked to indicate a fisherman passing.
Shoulders slumped and head bowed with the weight of losing a patient, she considered giving in to the temptation of weeping without inhibitions.
“Childbirth is dangerous for women,” Momma had told her from the beginning. “We can only do our best and leave the rest to the Lord.”
Momma and Grandmomma’s best had been to save more than they lost. In the two years she’d been working on her own, Tabitha had followed in their footsteps until tonight, when her efforts to ease suffering had been in vain. She had failed.
If just one of her dreams had come true, she would have given up midwifery right then. If loss was inevitable, she didn’t want to continue. She wanted to live like other young women—with a husband, children, a proper place in the community. But God ignored her pleas, and she’d given up asking for anything to change.
That didn’t mean she’d given up wanting things to change. Crying had made her want a shoulder on which to rest her head, arms to hold her. She’d wasted too many tears alone in her room, her garden, walking along the shore, praying for God to send her someone to share her sorrows along with her joys. She would neither weep nor pray
now.
But as she turned and crunched her way along the hard-packed sand toward home, she couldn’t stop herself from slipping into the hope, the dream, of a beloved striding out of the mist to greet her, take her hand in his—
Lost in her imagination, she blundered straight into a person standing on the beach. He grunted. She reeled backward. Her heel caught in the hem of her skirt. Her other foot slipped on the wet sand, and her posterior struck the ground with a splat like a landed fish.
The person moved, looming over her. “What do we have here?” The quiet voice was real and male, deep and unmistakably English. “Are you all right?”
He sounded friendly, even warm, and not threatening. Yet no one should be about on this stretch of beach in the wee hours of the morning. No Englishman should be about on the Atlantic coast, where young men disappeared with regularity, unless he were—
“Press-gang.” The word burst from her like a curse, and her heart began to race. Her mouth went dry, tasting bitter. She tried to scramble to her feet. She needed to warn the village men to stay inside. But her cloak and skirts tangled around her, holding her down.
“Let me help you.” Still speaking in an undertone, he stooped before her. She caught an exotic scent like sandalwood, saw no more than a shadowy outline and dark hair tumbling around features pale in the misty gloom.
Listening for others moving about on the beach, Tabitha waved him off. “No, thank you. I can manage myself.” She tugged at her skirt and nearly toppled sideways.
“You don’t look to be doing such a good job of it.” Laughter tinged his words. The hand that clasped hers was masculine, strong, and too smooth to belong to a fisherman or sailor. “Perhaps you can get to your feet if I help. Do you have feet? There does seem to be something trailing behind you. Perhaps it’s a tail. Are you a mermaid?”
Tabitha snorted and tried to wrench her hand away. Flirtation would get the stranger nowhere with her. The instant she regained her feet, she would run back to town and warn the sheriff or mayor that the English were at it again, stealing young American men to serve aboard their ships in their endless war with France.
If the man let her go. At that moment, he gripped her