Lady in the Mist - Laurie Alice Eakes [35]
“The Midsummer Festival?” Raleigh’s head shot up. “It’s still going forward?”
“Of course it is,” Fanny and Felicity chorused.
“Many a young couple gets themselves—” Momma stopped, her face stricken.
“Engaged there,” Raleigh finished.
He and Tabitha had three years ago. He’d departed six months later.
“You should take Tabitha this year.” Felicity spoke Raleigh’s thoughts aloud. “Surely she’ll have forgiven you by then.”
“I hope so.” Raleigh bent low over his work, suddenly nauseated from the odor of fish. “I understand she rarely goes to church nowadays.”
“She prayed you’d come home,” Momma confirmed. “We all did.”
“But we didn’t lose faith,” Fanny added.
“Her mother died at the same time.” Raleigh felt the need to defend Tabitha’s absence from Christian fellowship. “But maybe my return will help bring her back.”
“It’s all in God’s perfect plan,” Fanny agreed. She gave her sister a pointed look. “Including finding us husbands. Either the men will get brought home, or new ones will come.”
Raleigh set down his scaling knife. “That reminds me. Are you certain there are no new men in town? I thought I saw—” He hesitated. He didn’t want to admit he’d seen Tabitha with a man on the beach. It could ruin her reputation, which would make her an ineligible wife for him, if he wanted to rise to more than just another fisherman in the community, someone worthy of Tabitha. “Someone,” he finished lamely. “We don’t get many strangers about.”
The girls exchanged glances.
“I can’t think of anyone,” Momma said. “No one except for farmers and fishermen who find themselves here for market or even Tabitha’s care.”
“Except for Mr. Cherrett,” Felicity murmured, her eyes half closed, her knife poised in midair.
A glance at Fanny told Raleigh she too was poised as though caught in a dream. Hairs along his arms rose as they had when he saw the man kiss Tabitha.
Raleigh jabbed his knife through the next shad. “Who is Mr. Cherrett?”
“No one appropriate,” Momma snapped. “You girls shouldn’t think about him.”
“But he’s so handsome,” Felicity crooned.
“Those eyes,” Fanny added in a similar tone of adulation.
“Handsome is as handsome does,” Momma clipped out. “Only a terrible deed like gaming debts or worse would get an Englishman with his breeding trapped as a bondsman.”
“A bondsman?” Raleigh set down his knife and put his hands on his hips. “An English bondsman of good breeding? You’re certain?”
“I met a few English aristocrats in Halifax,” Momma pointed out. “I know the accent when I hear it.”
“He has a beautiful way of talking,” Felicity fairly hummed. “So clear. So crisp.”
“It’s possible it’s not his fault he’s a redemptioner.” Fanny gazed into the sun still hovering over the ocean. “Maybe his father lost the family money.”
“And maybe you girls had best get back to work,” Momma admonished. “We’ve bread to bake once this is done. You get to work too, Raleigh, if you aren’t going to sleep. Why the interest in strangers?”
Raleigh shrugged and set to work again. “As I said, I thought I saw one. What does this Cherrett fellow look like?”
The twins sighed.
“You shouldn’t have asked.” Momma cast her daughters a half-annoyed, half-amused glance. “He’s too good-looking for the peace of mind of any mother in Seabourne or mistress of a female servant. A few inches taller than you, but not as broad in the shoulders, and he wears his hair long. He’s serving mainly as Mayor Kendall’s butler, so he wears his hair powdered.”
“He’s so elegant,” Felicity proclaimed.
“Like a cavalier out of a story,” Fanny added.
The man’s hair hadn’t been powdered that morning, but Raleigh didn’t doubt for a moment that the man he’d seen kissing Tabitha was the bondsman about whom his mother spoke and over whom his sisters were moonstruck. A bondsman strolling freely on the beach before the curfew for bondservants ended.
Raleigh began to smile.
10
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“You are either very clever, my boy,” Dominick addressed his reflection in the tiny scrap of mirror that had to serve him for shaving,