Lady in the Mist (18 page)

He couldn’t. If he survived this night’s work without being punished in a way that would remove him from his useful position, he would have to take Tabitha into his confidence to protect himself. To protect her.

Gravel crunched under his feet, and he slowed. He’d reached the walkways along the village streets and didn’t want to draw attention to his presence. A few lights shone through windows along his way. A shadow moved behind the panes of the parsonage’s front parlor. On the other side of the square, a cat posed like a statue against the illuminated windows of Wilkins’s house.

Dominick skirted the parsonage and slipped between the church and graveyard on his way to Kendall’s back garden a hundred feet beyond. The darkness there proved complete, and Dominick slowed further, his hands in front of him to meet the gate before he crashed into it with his entire body. He’d never returned in such complete blackness and feared losing his way amidst the gravestones.

He sensed rather than saw the walls rising up on either side of him, enclosures for the gardens of an empty house on one side and the mayor’s on the other. His hand trailing the rough bricks of the wall, he followed the line.

He caught the smell of wet wool and spirits an instant before his hand struck something hard and unyielding, but wearing a coat of wool, not a coating of moss.

Another person.

He jerked his hand back, but not fast enough. Fingers coiled around his wrist and yanked him forward.

“Who is this?” Harlan Wilkins demanded.

19

______

Tabitha moved a candle so she could look into Raleigh’s eyes. They contracted from the sudden flare of light, his lashes dropped over the deep blue eyes, and he groaned a protest.

“Looking to see if you’re concussed.” She smoothed the soft brown hair away from his brow, stopping when her hand met the bandage she’d wound over the stitches. “You can rest now.” She started to turn away.

“Wait.” He caught hold of her hand. “Tabbie, what did he tell you?”

“You need to rest. We’ll discuss what happened later.”

“Now.” He sounded like a petulant child.

She spoke to him in soothing tones. “Raleigh, you have a badly bruised jaw and a banged-up head. You need to rest.”

“I’ll rest when I know what he’s been telling you about me.” He tried to smile. With one side of his face swollen and purple, it looked like a monster’s grimace. “Please.”

“All right.” She returned to the chair on which she’d been sitting while repairing the damage to his skull. “It will only take a minute. He told me nothing more than that you were unconscious in a shed.”

“Did he—did he admit to doing this to me?” Raleigh touched his jaw and winced.

“No.”

She’d presumed he had and as much as accused him of it. He hadn’t denied it. Neither had he confirmed her assumption. He’d simply been angry with her for thinking the worst. Angry with Raleigh for trying to ruin him.

But Raleigh wouldn’t do that. He might feel he was in competition with Dominick for her attention and interest, but he was neither vindictive nor mean-spirited.

At least the Raleigh she’d known as a child, as a young woman, as his fiancée, hadn’t been. No, he’d simply been irresponsible enough to abandon her because he wanted an adventure.

“Did he do this?” she asked as she had earlier. “Are you quite, quite sure?”

“I—” He rolled his eyes toward her, then closed his eyes again. “The build was much the same.”

“The build?” Tabitha leaned forward, her hands clasped on her knees. “Let me be clear on this. You’re accusing a man, a redemptioner—so the consequences are far worse than if he were an ordinary citizen—of striking you down in the dark, but you only think so because of his height and . . . what else? Shoulder breadth?”

A nice shoulder breadth, perfect for laying her head upon in apprehension and despair.

Her insides twisted. She didn’t know why she’d thought that. She had Raleigh. She could rest her head on a broader shoulder, a sturdier shoulder, in more ways than one. Raleigh was an American—home to stay, he claimed—a man with an occupation and kindness.

Yet his kindness had come into question tonight, as in the past. A kind man wouldn’t have abandoned her. A kind man wouldn’t be accusing another man on such flimsy evidence.

“Didn’t you talk to him?” she demanded, voice harsh. “You can recognize his accent in a few words.”

“Yes, he talks like some lordling.” Despite his deformed features, Raleigh’s sneer was apparent. “We had a lieutenant like that. He was the younger son of some minor peer of the realm and talked to the rest of us as though we were filth on his shoes.”

“I don’t usually talk to the filth on my shoes,” Tabitha responded. It sounded like something Dominick would say. With an effort, she managed not to smile, since she couldn’t imagine why she would want to at that moment. “Then you should have recognized Dominick’s accent.”

“Tabbie, why are you so friendly to him?” Raleigh held out his hand to her. “He’s no good, you know.”

“I don’t know.” She rose and began to pace the parlor into which they’d carried Raleigh, with its carpet rolled up and its chairs under cheap muslin coverings, preserving them for guests’ use only. “I’m afraid you’re right. He doesn’t obey the curfew, which makes him look suspicious for a bondsman. And him being English makes matters worse. But then I think maybe I only don’t know whether he’s an honest man because he is English and my basis is unfounded.”

“But there are bad things happening around here,” Raleigh reminded her. “Men are disappearing right off our beaches or soon after they go to sea. I was one of them.”

“And Dominick could be involved with the disappearances.” Tabitha paused at the window.

Outside, the night raged with wind and rain. A quarter mile away, the surf slammed into the beach with such force, its boom was barely distinguishable from the thunder that accompanied the lightning flashes. Inside, the parlor and house lay quiet save for an occasional murmur of voices, the clink of crockery from the kitchen, the creak of a floorboard. Shivering in the lowering temperature, Tabitha fingered the crocheted lace of the curtains. Raleigh’s grandmother had been an Acadian who’d evaded deportation to Louisiana when England took over Quebec, and she had made them herself.

England, a nation with the audacity to think it should conquer the world, wouldn’t hesitate to send a spy into the heart of a seaside village and rob the country of its young men. The men that fledgling land would need if hostilities flared into war.

“Tell me what happened tonight.” Tabitha faced Raleigh, turning her back to the wild night. “How did you encounter . . . this person who struck you down?”

“I was in the shed.” Raleigh’s words grew slurry again. “You know, we have another anchor in there. Gotta get it to the
Marianne
.”

“You were looking for the anchor at ten o’clock at night or thereabouts?” Tabitha arched her brows in disbelief. “In the dark?”

“I haven’t been sleeping well of late. Tuesday upset me. The sloop. That man fawning on you. You refusing to go to the festival with me.”

Tabitha dropped onto the nearest chair, weary in body and spirit. “Raleigh, you’re not being honest with me. Dominick said he saw you in the village. Please start from the beginning and tell me what really happened.”

“May I have some laudanum?” Raleigh responded. “I hurt all over.”

“And you don’t want to talk to me.” Tabitha remained still, torn by her desire to force the truth from Raleigh and the responsibility she had as a healer not to withhold aid from any human.

“Nothing to tell.” Raleigh’s words were barely discernible. “A man came in and said a few unpleasant things to me and struck me.”

“But you didn’t recognize his voice?”

“It sounded kind of muffled, like he didn’t want me to recognize him. Now, may I please have that laudanum?”

“All right.”

Tabitha retrieved the squat green bottle from her bag, measured two spoonfuls of laudanum into a glass, and took it to the sofa. She knelt beside him and slipped an arm beneath his shoulders, raising him just enough for him to drink with as little discomfort as possible.

“Thank you.” He curved his fingers around hers. “I love you so much, Tabbie. Please forgive me.”

“I prayed for you tonight. I haven’t prayed for anyone in two years. But I wanted you to be all right so badly, I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Does that mean you still love me?” Hope flared in his eyes, even as the drug began to make them glaze.

“I—” A door seemed to slam on her throat, cutting off her ability to say yes.

Dominick’s face flashed before her eyes, not laughing and teasing as she usually thought of him, but angry, perhaps even frightened. He claimed Raleigh had been trying to harm him.

“I need time, Raleigh.” She released her hand from his, brushed her fingertips across his brow, and rose. “I’ll stay in the house for the night in case you take a turn for the worse.” She left him before he could stop her again.

In the kitchen, his family huddled around the table. The room smelled of wood smoke, coffee, and the ever-present fish. Her mouth watered for a cup of the coffee, but her nose wrinkled at the fishy scent. She would need to go crabbing soon so she didn’t lose her taste for seafood. It was a staple of her diet there beside the ocean, and she’d never minded the odor until today.

Dominick always smelled like sandalwood, exotic and clean.

She shoved that disloyal thought aside and smiled at the Trowers. “He’ll be just fine.”

“Would you like me to walk you home then?” Mr. Trower asked, his face lighting with a smile.

“I think I should stay here rather than make you go out in this.” Tabitha pulled out a chair. “And in the event Raleigh needs me.”

“He always needs you, child.” Mrs. Trower rose and went to the hearth. “Coffee?”

“Please.” Tabitha ignored the immediate response that sprang into her head.
If he always needed me, why did he leave me?

“I want to know who came and fetched you,” Mr. Trower said. “Why won’t you tell us?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Tabitha crossed the kitchen to take her coffee from Mrs. Trower. “He probably saved Raleigh’s life. If he’d lain out there all night, he’d have likely caught a lung fever in this weather.”

“He’s likely the man who hit him,” Felicity suggested. “Did Raleigh tell you?”

“He isn’t saying either way,” Tabitha admitted. “But we shouldn’t be leaping to conclusions.”

Yet she had, and now she felt heartsick over it. Her near accusation had hurt Dominick, had told him she didn’t trust him. He might decide she was someone to avoid in the future. That possibility left her feeling hollow, frightened.

“Him not saying either way just says he was up to no good.” Mr. Trower sighed. “Likely a meeting for a bout of fisticuffs to settle some spat with another young man.”

“And why would Raleigh be doing that?” Mrs. Trower demanded.

Mr. Trower glanced at Tabitha and winked. “Maybe over a pretty girl.”

“Nonsense.” Mrs. Trower slapped her hands onto her ample hips. “The only other young man looking Tabitha’s way is that redemptioner. And he’d be a fool to be out at night.”

“No sense in young men when it comes to a pretty girl.” Mr. Trower went to her and slipped his arm around her shoulders. “Do you remember Roger Tarr and the celebration of the end of the war?”

Mrs. Trower blushed and lost ten years off her looks as she smiled up at her spouse of twenty-six years.

Tabitha turned away. Her eyes burned. The fire blurred in the mist of tears glazing her vision. She tried to picture herself gazing up at Raleigh like that in twenty-six years, but the image wouldn’t form. If she married him, it would be for security and children, not for love and devotion.

Most women married for security and children. Most women didn’t have a skill they could practice to support themselves, and had to marry to survive. Most women, at the least, trusted the man they married, trusted him to stay, trusted him to be honest.

If Raleigh wasn’t lying to her, he was withholding a great deal of the truth. She knew Dominick was withholding a great deal of the truth. But lying? She supposed he might construct a claim that Raleigh wanted to harm him in order to win her sympathy or make her distrust Raleigh.

She wished he hadn’t been successful.

And for that reason, if nothing else, she needed to attempt to protect Dominick from the consequences of the night, if others continued to suspect he was involved.

“Mr. Trower, Mrs. Trower? Girls?” Tabitha faced the couple. “We really don’t know who struck Raleigh. I think we should keep speculation to ourselves or risk spreading possibly unfounded gossip.”

They nodded. She’d struck the right note, playing on their Christian principles about gossip to keep them quiet.

“But if it was Mr. Cherrett,” Mrs. Trower said, “he’s out after Mayor Kendall’s curfew on redemptioners.”

“Yes, and the mayor will believe you if you tell him,” Tabitha pointed out. “But should a man be whipped on suspicion alone?”

“All right,” Mr. Trower said, “we won’t say anything to Mayor Kendall.”

“Or anyone else,” Fanny added.

“And we’ll tell Raleigh not to make hints and the like if he isn’t going to just come out and say what happened,” Mrs. Trower said.

“Not that we did such a good job of instilling parental obedience into him.” Mr. Trower sighed. “If we had, he wouldn’t have run off to the sea when we told him not to.”

Tabitha stared at the couple. “You knew he was going to abandon me?”

“I had my suspicions.” Mr. Trower shuffled his feet. “It was Raleigh’s place to tell you.”

“Yes, yes, it was.”

But she would have preferred to have known he hadn’t just vanished.

Sighing to relieve the heaviness around her heart, she strode to the door into the parlor. “I’ll see if he’s sleeping. We should probably take turns sitting up with him in the event he takes a turn for the worse.”

Raleigh was still sleeping. Mr. Trower took the first watch, then his wife. When Mrs. Trower woke Tabitha, who was asleep on a settee by the kitchen hearth, daylight struggled to break through the rain, and the girls were up and preparing to perform outdoor chores beneath oiled cloth capes.

“He’s awake,” Mrs. Trower said. “Go on in and I’ll bring you some coffee.”

Tabitha smoothed as many wrinkles from her gown as she could and retied the ribbon confining her hair to a queue at the base of her neck. Felicity gave her a cloth and basin of water. After washing her face and hands, Tabitha returned to the parlor.

Raleigh looked considerably better in the feeble gray light. Color had returned to his face, diminishing the depth of the bruise’s purple.

He gave her his lopsided smile. “You stayed.”

“I always stay with a seriously injured or ill patient until I’m certain things are well in hand.”

“So I’m just a patient?” He grimaced.

“If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be alone in here with you.” She perched beside him on a chair. “How does the head feel?”

“Like someone pounded it into a wall.”

“And your jaw?”

“About the same. A few teeth are loose.”

“They should be all right if you leave them alone. Eat soft food and chew on the other side.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He feigned meekness.

Tabitha sat erect. “Will you tell me the truth this morning?”

“Tabbie—” He met her gaze. His eyes held sadness. “I can’t. I’m too ashamed of myself.”

“I see.” But she didn’t. She felt more confused than ever. “So you didn’t plan to meet Dominick last night?”

He started to shake his head, winced, and mumbled, “No. I just thought—I thought I might see him. And I won’t say anything else. He shouldn’t have been here is all I will say, and I’ll see he’s punished for stepping foot on my property, especially after dark.”