Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [28]
She glanced up. A tempest inside her warned her to flee.
“I rather like Twelfth Night,” she said past a dry throat.
“Hmm, a midwife who reads Shakespeare.” He rested his thumb on her chin. “My dear, you intrigue me.”
“Right now, I’d better leave you. That is—” She sprang to her feet. “I have work waiting.”
He followed her to the gate. “When will I see you again?”
“A week. I’ll remove your stitches.”
“Too long. I’ve looked for you in the market and on the beach in the morning.”
“I’m only out in the morning if my work demands it.”
But if he was on the beach early, when he shouldn’t be, maybe she should join him there—keep him from, if not learn, what mischief he was up to, if any. She must give him the benefit of the doubt about his dawn activities. He could be innocent of wrongdoing. Yet if she met him by more than chance in the early morning and someone saw him, her reputation would surely suffer.
How she would enjoy discussing books again. She hadn’t done so with anyone since Grandmomma died. And this man sounded educated, intelligent . . .
“Tell Letty you can’t get that hand wet,” she admonished him, and fled.
She arrived home to the news that she was needed for a woman on the other side of the cape.
“They want me to go to a lying-in in Norfolk,” she told Patience. “We’ll leave early Monday.”
She disliked leaving her community for long periods of time, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped. She went where and when she was needed, mostly out of a sense of duty, partly out of financial necessity. She had a household to support, and the Belotes were going to pay her well for what seemed to be a routine lying-in.
On Monday morning, she woke before dawn, only to find Japheth and Patience already in the kitchen with breakfast going.
“It’s going to be hot today,” Japheth said. “Thought we should get an early start.”
“I’d like a walk before we leave.” Tabitha inhaled the aromas of coffee and frying ham. “But some breakfast would be good. Why don’t you meet me in the village, Japheth. If I’m going to ride twenty miles in a wagon, I’d like a walk along the beach first.”
“I wouldn’t do that, Miss Tabitha.” Patience flipped over the ham slices. “It ain’t safe.”
“The press-gangs aren’t going to take up a female.” She touched her fingers to her throat. Though she might see an Englishman.
Patience and Japheth argued. Tabitha ate her breakfast in silence and thus quickly. She grabbed a shawl from a hook by the door, picked up the satchel she liked to keep with her at all times, and departed with a brisk, “I’ll meet you and the wagon in the square.”
Warm, damp air swirled around her as she left her garden. She crossed the dunes and headed along the tide line. The breeze picked up and turned cooler, lifting the spring mist from the water and creating odd shadows along the brightening horizon. Waves pounded against the land, suggesting a storm out to sea.
Watchful, Tabitha headed south to where one of the numerous small waterways cut into the land to form a haven for fishing boats and well-worn paths on which to lengthen her walk to town. Halfway there, she paused at the Trowers’ inlet. Their jetty stretched into the stream. Raleigh could be coming into it with his father and their boat at any time. She couldn’t avoid him forever in a village like Seabourne. But neither did she have to make their next encounter look deliberate. With a sigh, she turned away from the sea and toward the nearest path over the dunes, through the sea grasses to where the trees began and the village lay beyond, sheltered from ocean storms.
A creak and rumble drifted to her ears over the muted roar of the sea. She paused and turned back. Wind lifted the veil of mist to display a golden pink line between dark sky and darker sea.
And against that sliver of light, as sharp as silhouette cutouts, a three-masted vessel bore down on a fishing boat.
“No,” she shouted, as though she could stop the inevitable. She ran toward the sea.
“No,” her voice echoed.
No, not an echo—another