Lady in the Mist (25 page)

26

______

Tabitha hesitated at the edge of the town square and drew the hood of her cloak more tightly around her face, against the rain. Across from her, Mayor Kendall’s house rose tall and elegant and welcoming, with its red brick, blue shutters, and light glowing behind the windows. The warmth of candle flames drew her. She wanted to go straight to Dominick and give him her decision, make it real before she lost her courage. Instead, she turned to her left and circumvented the square to the parsonage.

She intended to head for the garden and back door. As she passed the front, however, it opened and Phoebe Lee stood in the door frame, her hair shining in the gloom like a little candle flame. “Come in and get dry,” she called.

Tabitha did so, her feet feeling heavier with each step. This too she must do, this commitment she must make, before she talked to Dominick. “I’m wet, Mrs. Lee.”

“Phoebe,” the widow admonished her. “And that’s what a fire’s for—to dry you. Come in. I’ve just made us all tea.”

Tabitha reached the front steps. “I’d rather talk to you alone.”

“Does that mean—” Phoebe clasped her hands under her chin, and her face seemed to hold a flame behind it. “I knew the Lord brought me here for a reason.” She held the door wider. “Come into my uncle’s study. There’s a fire there, and he’s out visiting the Parks ladies.”

“Is everything all right?” Tabitha stopped on the threshold. “No one came for me.”

“No, no, nothing’s wrong. The younger one is just fretting over her husband being gone for so long. With good reason too.” Phoebe held out her hand. “Give me your cloak. I’ll take it into the kitchen to dry.”

In minutes, Phoebe had Tabitha tucked up before a fire just large enough to dry her and not overheat her. She held a cup of tea, and a plate of tiny cakes stood on the table in front of her.

“This isn’t necessary,” Tabitha protested yet again, because she was in the pastor’s house, because she wanted to forestall what she was about to say to make her future final.

“Of course it’s necessary, Miss Tabitha.” Phoebe flashed a heartwarming smile. “I think you’ve only come to call on me for one reason.”

“I could be coming to say no.” Tabitha tried to smile but felt like weeping.

“Are you?” Phoebe gave her a direct look.

Tabitha sighed. “I should be. In at least five and possibly more generations, no female in my family has passed her skill of midwifery onto anyone except her daughter. We started at sixteen, presuming we’d be married by eighteen or nineteen and able to carry on no matter where our husband took us. But I’m four and twenty, nearly five and twenty, and the likelihood of me marrying grows . . . dim.”

“I don’t know why you’d say that.” Phoebe reached across the space between their chairs and touched Tabitha’s hand. “You’re perfectly lovely and so very kind. I’m surprised a dozen men haven’t offered for you.”

“A few might have.” Tabitha stared at the swirling amber liquid of her tea. “They all seemed to vanish like the mist—” She broke off and laughed at her fancy. “So I accepted Raleigh’s proposal and then he vanished.”

“But he’s back.”

“And I’m wiser. I can’t marry a man I don’t love.”

“Let me add
wise
to your other qualities.” Phoebe’s smile was sad. “I made that mistake, let my head be turned by a handsome face and handsomer fortune, and here I am a widow at twenty-two for my folly.”

“Or his.” Tabitha smiled. “You’re still with us.”

Phoebe laughed. “You are so right. Now please do go on before I burst with sitting still and waiting.”

“Taking you on as an apprentice,” Tabitha said through a constricted throat, “is an admission that I will not have a daughter to carry on the family tradition. I’ll be the first female in generations who has passed her knowledge on to an outsider.”

“But Miss Tab—”

“Wait.” Tabitha held up her hand. “If I don’t finish quickly, I may not be able to.” She blinked against the glaze over her eyes. “I feel that I have a responsibility to share my knowledge for the sake of as many women and their babies as possible. So yes, Phoebe, I’ll teach you, in lieu of a daughter, how to be a midwife.”

Raleigh hoped the storm would give him a reprieve from his next obligation. Although the rain fell throughout the night, it dissipated by midnight. Unable to sleep, he knelt at the side of his bed and prayed.

Rather, he tried to pray—more than, “God, help me, please help,” which stuck in his throat.

He couldn’t ask God to get him out of the situation in which he found himself. He hadn’t trusted God to get him out of the Navy. He’d made the break for himself, using his ability to swim to slip overboard one night and head for shore while the ship was anchored in Halifax. He had relatives who would harbor him—he thought.

But they hadn’t been home. While he tried to figure out a way to break into their house, he encountered one of the officers from his ship attending a party at a neighbor of Raleigh’s relatives. Bad luck. Bad timing. A lack of forethought. He’d been caught, and he thought what he was doing was worth saving his neck from being stretched from the yardarm.

But not anymore. If he couldn’t work out the identity of his contact, he was nothing less than a traitor to his country, to his family, to Tabitha. The only good that might come from it was that he might be able to implicate Dominick Cherrett and send the Englishman packing back to England or to an American prison.

Surely Dominick was involved. He’d been lurking outside the shed, Raleigh was quite certain. Outside the shed listening to Raleigh attempt to destroy him, another despicable action. Yet if Dominick were involved with stealing men and selling them to the British, what harm could Raleigh have done to him?

Of course Dominick was involved. Raleigh’s contact had known Dominick was outside. Raleigh’s contact merely used the ploy of hearing someone to catch him off guard and distract him long enough to knock him senseless.

“God, I don’t want to be a traitor, but I already am.”

And if he didn’t get out of his situation soon, he would commit the crime again.

“Help me find a way, or keep the storm here.”

But the storm rolled off across the land, leaving a gentle breeze and light swells behind. It ended up a perfect night for their mission.

Listening to the silence with his stomach dropping to the pit of his belly, Raleigh rose and pushed open his casement window. Cool, sweet air blew into his face, and the chirp of a cricket pelted his ears.

No, it wasn’t a cricket. No night insect chirped with such a regular pattern. It was the signal for him to come out.

Despite what the ship’s chaplain claimed, God had left Raleigh to his own devices, the consequences of his folly. He couldn’t blame God. Raleigh had made his choices, made his mistakes.

“I’ll find a way to make up for this,” he whispered to the night, to God, to Tabitha across the dunes.

He vaulted over the sill to land as light as a cat on the porch roof then the saturated ground. His footfalls made no sound, nor did the footfalls of his master. The man sneaked up on Raleigh and closed hard fingers around his forearm halfway between dunes and water.

“You’re going in the wrong direction.” The man’s raspy whisper cut through Raleigh like a cutlass. “Into the village.”

“The village?” Raleigh’s tone went high, like a youth whose voice was breaking. “Those might be people I know.”

“You should have thought of that before you chose life and treachery.” The man laughed.

Bile rose in Raleigh’s throat. He said nothing. He couldn’t. If he stopped his work, the British Navy would hang him. If he went to the authorities here, the Americans would hang him.

Unless he had valuable information.

He considered swinging around and snatching the mask off his companion’s face. He would learn the identity. Dissipating clouds had left behind a cleansed sky with a moon as bright as a lantern hanging low over the water. But Raleigh wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone who the traitor amongst them was. Raleigh would be dead before he hit the ground. He’d seen the man’s knife.

Dominick Cherrett had a knife . . .

Raleigh kept his head down and his feet moving. He carried a knife too. Nothing like cold steel to persuade a reluctant sailor to come with them. But he wasn’t very good at using it for more than cleaning fish. He’d never learned to throw, and the few times he’d wielded a cutlass in battle, he’d nearly died from the horror of steel meeting flesh.

“Why the village?” he asked after a few hundred yards of silence.

“There are some sailors celebrating their return home after a voyage to the East.”

“And we’re to send them back again?” Raleigh’s throat closed. “Their families—”

“They should be with their families, not out drinking and carousing.”

“True, but . . .” Raleigh sighed. “How many?”

“Four, if we can manage that many.”

“We don’t have help?”

“We’ve never had help.”

Raleigh stopped. “Didn’t you have help the other night when you hit me?”

“No, Cherrett wasn’t invited along.” A hint of anger colored the husky murmur. “He should be dead.”

“The snake?” Raleigh dared to ask.

Silence.

“That snake could have bitten Tabitha, you know.” Raleigh allowed his own anger to blossom. “She’s done nothing wrong.”

“Other than play the strumpet with Cherrett?” Now Raleigh heard amusement.

He clenched his fists. “She wouldn’t.”

“You didn’t see them embracing last night. I did.”

Embracing, not the brush of lips he’d witnessed, but an embrace.

Raleigh opened his mouth to ask where and when, but his companion raised a hand. “Silence. I hear them.”

They had reached the edge of the village, and Raleigh heard them too—tramping feet, two or three men, with two of them singing in off-key harmony. The singing was to the advantage of the captors. It masked any sound they might make.

“Go behind.”

The direction was unnecessary. Raleigh knew the drill. He slipped up behind the man in the rear, the silent one, whose lagging footsteps suggested he was either exhausted or inebriated. Either way, he should be easy prey. Grabbing the man’s hair with one hand, Raleigh drew the man’s head back so his throat was exposed to the knife blade.

The other two sailors kept going with their song, surely waking up the town.

The man in Raleigh’s grip choked. “No, want . . . wife . . . baby.”

Raleigh’s hand slipped. He knew this man. His baby was barely two days old. He was about to steal Donald Parks away from his beloved wife and brand-new baby.

“Take my money,” Parks pleaded. “Just let me see my wife and children.”

Raleigh’s knife clattered to the stone path. Parks spun. His hand swooped toward Raleigh’s already bruised jaw.

Other hands caught him. Steel flashed. Flesh met flesh. Parks dropped.

“I’ll tie him up,” Raleigh’s master announced. “You get one of the others or you’re a dead man.”

“Run.” Raleigh’s voice emerged barely above a whisper, but apparently the others listened. Pounding feet running for safety was the last thing Raleigh heard.

27

______

The minute Letty and Dominick stepped into the square, the nearest knot of people ceased talking and turned to stare. Their faces weren’t friendly; they registered hostility.

“Something’s happened,” Dominick murmured. He paused a dozen feet from the others who had come to buy fresh fish, milk, and eggs.

Letty kept walking. “Nancy, Kitty, what’s wrong?” Her voice rang out over the square like a town beadle.

Dominick didn’t hear the response. He didn’t need to. He guessed from the grim faces that more men had vanished the night before. He didn’t understand the hostility toward him. Never before had anyone blamed him for the disappearances. He was a servant just like them. Many of them were English too, though most were Irish like Letty. Even they never blamed him for his heritage—until now.

“Who was it?” Letty asked.

Dominick dared to sidle forward to hear the answer. The name Parks sent a jolt through his middle. The man’s wife had just borne him a new baby two days earlier.

Tabitha would be devastated.

Dominick glanced around, as though he would see her somewhere in the crowd. He didn’t. She knew he went to the market with Letty on Saturday mornings. She would avoid it for no other reason. The night before, she had sent him away before he could leave her.

If he’d been certain she was wrong, that he loved her enough to stay in America or risk taking her to his family, he would have gone after her. But her words pounded through his head when she said them, while he watched her walk away, and as he paced the six feet of open space in his attic room behind a locked door.

He loved her. He didn’t doubt that for a moment. Yet he would give her up if she stood between him and regaining his honor or gaining his father’s respect.

Well, at least his father’s acceptance back into the family. He needed that removal of the burden from his soul first. That took away his right to go after her or even ask her to help him, to touch her, or to expect her to seek him out. Still he looked for her and ached from her absence and the anguish she would feel over Parks’s disappearance.

From some of the glances shooting his way, he might end up aching from a beating by the crowd. One burly Scot gripped a hammer like a cudgel. Dominick had his knife, but he wouldn’t use it.

“You can’t blame him,” Letty cried. “I can vouch for him myself. He gets locked in his room at night.”

“Don’t the mayor trust him?” an Irishman demanded.

“He doesn’t.” Letty grinned. “He was sneaking off at night to court a lady somewhere out of this village.” She shot Dominick an apologetic look. “Mayor thought he just might not come back at night.”

“Sure it was a lady?” someone yelled. “Or some naval captain?”

“He came back smelling like roses.” Letty chuckled.

Dominick’s face burned.

“And then he got himself caught red-handed,” Letty continued. “So he gets locked up at night, and he’s too big a fella to get out his window, even if he could climb down from the attic.”

“But he’s English,” a woman protested. “He’s got every reason to steal our menfolk for their Navy.”

“If I could do that,” Dominick said, “don’t you think I’d have gotten myself away by now?”

A few people murmured. Most looked on in silence.

“I signed my indenture papers,” he said, pressing his advantage of the moment. “Just like the rest of you.”

“You don’t talk like the rest of us.”

“I don’t.” Dominick nodded. “I admit I’m from an important family. Important in England, that is.” He dug his toe into the stones beneath him and tried to smile. “So important they got rid of me.”

A handful of people chuckled.

“Why?” Letty demanded, her green eyes narrowing.

Dominick took a deep breath. He might as well tell everyone. Once he told her, they would all find out eventually anyway. “I injured someone in a duel and my father sent me packing without a penny.”

Letty frowned at him. Most of the other women’s faces softened. A few of the men nodded, either in understanding of his father’s actions or in sympathy. He couldn’t tell. He noticed more the lowering of that Scot’s hammer and lessening of hostility.

He slipped his arm through Letty’s and bent to whisper in her ear, “What gives with the unfriendliness toward me? It’s never happened before.”

“Someone’s been talking out of turn.” Letty still scowled. “Dueling indeed. Over a female, I’m sure.”

“No, not a female.” He scanned the crowd again, seeking another face besides Tabitha’s, the face belonging to the man he suspected of pointing a finger at him as the one responsible for the disappearances. “My behavior has been reprehensible, but never where females are concerned.”

If his suspicions were correct, then perhaps Kendall wasn’t guilty. On the other hand, he liked his English butler, so perhaps locking Dominick in his room was a way of protecting him from incidents like this one. Or to direct suspicion away from his household. Kendall, after all, was not home. That didn’t mean he was in Norfolk, as he claimed he would be.

Dominick didn’t see Raleigh Trower, but he did see Tabitha. A basket over her arm, she strolled into the square with her long-legged gait and paused beside a cart bearing butter and cheese. Even from across the intervening space, Dominick saw her face whiten and guessed she must have just learned the news. He took a step in her direction. He needed to go to her, offer her comfort.

Letty grasped his arm. “I need to do my shopping before all the best cream is gone.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Dominick followed Letty in the opposite direction without protest. It was the best course for now. Tabitha needed to come to him.

But she’d walked away from him, with too good a reason to give him the right to go after her. And she hadn’t come the night before, though he’d seen her in town.

His eyes stung in the brightness of the morning sun. Even without her help, he needed to complete his mission and be gone. The longer he was around Tabitha, the more both of them would suffer.

Unless she abandoned him as easily as others had abandoned her.

How he would manage on his own, he didn’t know. He must find another ally, but not through courtship. That had proved dangerous.

Basket of cream and butter over his arm, he strolled with Letty back toward Mayor Kendall’s house. A few people apologized for their suspicions. Dominick shrugged it off as understandable.

“I’m English and a stranger to you all. But I don’t approve of what my country is doing any more than you all do. We’ve been at war most of my life, and I’ve seen friends die. Why would I want to see more go?” He couldn’t resist one more glance to where he’d seen Tabitha earlier. “And Parks should have been able to see his baby.”

His words must have rung with the sincerity he intended, for the mood around him changed, grew sympathetic rather than antagonistic.

But Tabitha was gone.

Beside him, Letty was muttering and grumbling. “Who would start saying such things about you? Have you made enemies here, lad?”

“Just one that I know of.” Dominick took one last look around the square for Trower or Tabitha. Neither was in sight. “Raleigh Trower thinks I’ve stolen his lady.”

“You have.” Letty opened Kendall’s gate. “Not that it’ll do her any good.”

“She’s free to choose whom she likes.” Dominick stalked past her. “If she prefers me, it’s because Trower left her at the church.”

“And you know how to use those bold eyes of yours.” Letty snatched the basket from him. “Now, get out of my kitchen. Even if you don’t have anything to do with Mayor Kendall gone, I still have to cook for all of us.”

“I suppose I could polish silver.” Dominick removed his coat and shuddered at the thought of all that emery grit sticking to him, but an idea struck him. “Aren’t there candlesticks in the parlor and Kendall’s study needing to be polished?”

“Just the parlor. The ones in the study are glass and I wash those myself.”

“All right. I’ll attend to the ones in the parlor.”

And seek an opportunity to slip into the study.

Except the opportunity didn’t come. Either Deborah or Dinah seemed to flit past him the entire time he scrubbed and rubbed the brass candelabra in the parlor. The brass gleamed like pure gold when he was done with it. He hadn’t gotten any closer to getting into Kendall’s study, short of snatching the feather duster from Dinah and offering to apply it himself. Since she would find this peculiar, he refrained and returned to the kitchen.

The aroma of a buttery pastry and fresh coffee met his nose. His mouth watered. “Letty, my dearest lady—”

She swatted him with a flowery apron. “Don’t try your sweet talk on me. I’m old enough to be your mother. If you want coffee and a tart, just say so.”

“So.” He grinned.

She plopped a miniature dried apple pie into his hand. Suddenly hungry, he took a healthy bite—

And choked as Tabitha strolled through the back gate.

“Greedy.” Letty smacked him on the back.

He gasped from the pain of his knife sheath biting into one of his scars, and inhaled another crumb.

“It appears,” Tabitha said, giving him a smart blow on his lower back, “that I arrived just in time.”

“I’m all right,” Dominick said.

And he was. Her nearness, her scent of violets and roses rising over the pastry, the warmth of her hand on his back, with only the thin linen of his shirt between her fingers and his flesh, felt like balm on a wound.

At that moment, it was her hand on a wound, an old wound, a scar. When she ran her fingers down and back up again, pausing and repeating the motion, he knew she’d felt the marks, the ridges down his back, even through his shirt.

“Perhaps some air would do you good,” she said in her honey voice. Her hand still on his back, she nudged him forward.

“Keep the girls out of the garden, will you please, Letty, my love?” He spoke the words in a light accent and pleaded with his eyes.

She gave him a sharp nod and returned to the oven set into the hearth.

Feeling a bit weak-kneed, Dominick stumbled over the threshold and had nearly reached the bench beneath the cedar tree before Tabitha stopped him, a hand on his shoulder and her person planted on the path ahead of him. “Who did that to your back?”

Dominick offered her a twisted smile. “That father who you’re so concerned will dislike me for bringing you home.”

“Your father?” She looked like she had after he’d killed the snake—a bit green. “But Dominick, it must have been a—a—whip.”

“A carriage whip, to be precise. When I came home after the duel . . .”

It all flashed before him, his father’s face so full of loathing. The staring servants. The way the falling rain turned his blood pink on the cobblestones of the stable yard.

He made it two steps further and collapsed onto the bench. He wouldn’t be sick in front of Tabitha, but it took willpower.

Tabitha sat beside him and took one of his hands in hers. She said nothing. She simply caressed his fingers one by one and in between.

He started to relax. “He’d already found out. He met me in the stable yard. He already had the whip in his hand.” Dominick shivered despite the warmth of the sunshine. “It was January and raining, but he ordered me to strip to the waist, right there in front of the grooms and coachman and I don’t know who else. When I refused, he ordered two of the grooms to do it for me.” His body burned with remembered shame, and he stared at the brilliant red of a strawberry bush a dozen yards away. Red like blood. “My eldest brother made him stop, or he might have killed me. I’d made him angry before, but that was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Always before, he just shouted and let my schoolmasters do the caning. And in front of the servants . . .” He shook his head. His hair cascaded out of its queue and over his face.

Tabitha brushed it back, her fingers as light as petals. “Why was he so angry?”

“I’d shamed the family.” He conjured up a grin. “You know how it is with us English—family, country, God, in that order. I thought I was putting God first, and in doing so, I shamed the family. So I had to be eliminated.”

“What did he do after beating you?” Her fingers rested on the pulse beneath his ear. He felt it leap to her gentle caress and wanted nothing more than to bury his face in her hair and hold her close.

“He ordered me thrown off his land as I was.” Dominick tilted his head to press her hand between his cheek and shoulder. “I remember landing on the road outside the gate, but nothing more until I woke up at the home of a physician in Lyme Regis. My brothers had carried me there. I stayed for a month until I had enough strength to travel. I got as far as Plymouth with the little money I had, and had some vague notion of heading to the West Indies. I’d forgotten my uncle was attached to the vice admiralty office there. He and my father heartily dislike one another, so he was happy to help me. And here I am.” He straightened and looked her in the eye. “But why are you here?”

“To offer you my help.”

“Tabitha.” The pain of memory, of shame, slipped away. “Why? Because of Parks?” That idea dampened his joy a bit. He wanted her to have come because of him.

“No.” She rose and paced to the strawberry bushes and back again, a ripe berry between her fingers. “I was on my way here when I heard the news. I had to pay a visit to Mrs. Parks first. Duty.” She offered him the berry.

He took it, bit off half, then returned it to her.

She held the leaves then sank to her knees before him. “I never should have walked away from you. But I’ve done that all my life. I didn’t do what was right, and then those I love left me. If I’d done the right things, I don’t know that the same bad things wouldn’t have happened, but sometimes I think it’s likely they wouldn’t have. And now God has noticed me and given me this chance. If I love you, then I know no other way to show it than to help you gain your freedom, even if that means losing you in the end.”

Her voice shook. Tears clouded her eyes, and the blazing sunlight showed the bruises of fatigue beneath her eyes and the faint lines at the corners of her mouth and lids. In that moment, she looked drawn and older than her four and twenty years.