Lady in the Mist (The Midwives Book #1)

Alice Eakes Laurie

Description

By virtue of her profession as a midwife, Tabitha Eckles is the keeper of many secrets: the names of fathers of illegitimate children, the level of love and harmony within many a marriage, and now the identity of a man who may have caused his wife's death. Dominick Cherrett is a man with his own secret to keep: namely, what he, a British nobleman, is doing on American soil working as a bondsman in the home of Mayor Kendall, a Southern gentleman with his eye on a higher office.By chance one morning before the dawn has broken, Tabitha and Dominick cross paths on a misty beachhead, leading them on a twisted path through kidnappings, death threats, public disgrace, and . . . love? Can Tabitha trust Dominick? What might he be hiding? And can either of them find true love in a world that seems set against them?With stirring writing that puts readers directly into the story, Lady in the Mist expertly explores themes of identity, misperception, and love's discovery.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 février 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441214874
• Langue: English

Extrait

© 2011 by Laurie Alice Eakes
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2010
Ebook corrections 5.22.2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1487-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
Published in association with Tamela Hancock Murray of the Hartline Literary Agency, LLC.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
To the ladies of the His Writers group, for your prayers, your encouragement, and your dedication to history. You all inspire me.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities:
the chastisement of our peace was upon him;
and with his stripes we are healed.
Isaiah 53:5
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30
31 32 33 34 35
36 37
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Back Ads
Back Cover
1
______
Seabourne, Virginia May 1809
“I’m sorry.” Tabitha Eckles dared not look Harlan Wilkins in the eye. If she witnessed even a flicker of grief, the floodgates of her own tears would spring open and drown her good sense in a moment when she needed all of it. “I did everything I could to save your wife.”
“I’m sure you did.” Wilkins’s tone held no emotion. He stood next to the dining room sideboard with the rigidity of a porch pillar. Candlelight played across the lower half of his face, sparkling in the crystal glass he held to his lips without drinking, without speaking further.
“The baby came too soon . . .” Tabitha needed to say something more to a husband who had just lost his young bride of only six months, as well as their son. “After the accident ”
“Did she regain consciousness?” Wilkins lashed out the words. The amber contents of his glass sloshed, sending the sharp scent of spirits wafting around him.
Tabitha jumped. “No. I mean, yes. That is ” She took a breath to steady her racing heart and give herself a moment to think of a safe answer. “She mumbled a lot of nonsense.”
At least Tabitha hoped it was nonsense, the ravings of a woman in terrible pain.
“The blow to her head must have made her crazed,” she added for good measure.
Wilkins’s posture relaxed, and he drained the liquid from his glass. “Thank you for trying. You may collect your fee from my manservant.”
“Shall I send the pastor?” As much as she wanted to, simply taking her fee for attending a lying-in and leaving Wilkins alone unsettled her as much as had the disastrous night. “I pass his house ”
“Just go.” The whiplash tone again, an order to depart with haste.
Tabitha spun on her heel and trotted from the room. The door slammed behind her. A moment later, an object thudded against the panel. The tinkle of broken glass followed.
So his wife’s death moved Harlan Wilkins after all.
Trembling, Tabitha collected her cloak from a cowering maid and her payment from a stony-faced manservant. She struggled for words of comfort over the death of their mistress, but her throat closed and her eyes burned. With no more than a brusque nod, she fled into the dawn.
Mist swirled around her, smelling of the sea and the tang of freshly turned earth, muffling the click of her heels on cobblestone and brick pavement. Trees appeared out of the gloom like stiff-spined sentries guarding her way along the route she had taken since she was sixteen and her mother had deemed her old enough to begin learning the family business of midwifery. The trees would shelter her journey if she turned left off of the village square and headed home past the houses of the townspeople.
She hesitated, then continued straight toward the sea. She needed the tang of salty mist on her lips, the peace of the beach at low tide, the extra walk home to calm her spirit, before facing Patience her friend, her companion, her maid of all work and admitting she’d failed to save a patient’s life.
To her right, the church with its bell tower looked like a castle floating in the low clouds. But castles meant knights in shining armor riding out to rescue maidens in distress. Maiden though she was, Tabitha faced her distress alone. She enjoyed no husband to await her return, unlike her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and so many generations before. In fact, no one knew for certain when the women of her family began the tradition of practicing midwifery from Lancashire, England, to the eastern shore of Virginia. But Tabitha defied the convention that unmarried women didn’t practice the art of delivering babies. She adhered to the wishes of her mother, who had died too young, followed by her grandmother, who had died too recently, and carried on the family business to support her small household. A husband would have made work unnecessary. She loved her work most of the time, and one too many young men had sailed into the mist never to return or to come back with a different bride. One man in particular had vanished mere weeks before their wedding. Now that she was four and twenty, Tabitha’s chances of finding a husband seemed unlikely.
Except in her imagination.
Walking alone through the stillness between night and day, Tabitha held loneliness at bay, imagining her fiancé returning to make her his bride, or someone else materializing from the smoky light to claim her heart and hand so, at last, every baby she held wouldn’t belong to another woman.
This dawn, more than her empty arms weighed down Tabitha’s spirit so much that she felt as arthritic as Grandmomma had been at the end. She trudged past the church and out of the village square. The sea beckoned, a constant taker and giver of life, ebbing and flowing, ever changing, yet comforting in its power.
If only the sea held enough power to wash the night’s events from her mind and heart. The drip of moisture from the trees and the distant murmur of the retreating waves reminded her of Mrs. Wilkins’s muttered ravings. Fact or nightmare?
“No, no, no,” seemed to be the predominant words, common protests of a woman in labor who thought she could bear the pain no longer. Disjointed phrases like “in the cellar” and “must ride” made little sense. No one in the swampy climate of the eastern shore dug cellars, and to Tabitha’s knowledge, the Wilkinses owned no riding stock. But another repeated word rang in her ears “pushed.”
Tabitha shivered in the damp air and drew her cloak more tightly around her. She should have gone the shorter way home. All a walk along the shore would do was give her a chill rather than clear her head. Too late now. Trees fell behind, then houses vanished in the gloom. Cobblestones gave way to soft sand and, finally, the hard-packed leavings of the ebbing tide.
“No one could have pushed her.” Tabitha paused at the edge of the high tide line, inhaling the familiar scents of fish and wet wood, seaweed and brine. “I saw no bruises except for the one on her head. I’d swear to it.”
That bruise was the sort one would receive from falling down steps. Tabitha had suffered one herself in the past. And no one save for the manservant and maid had been home at the time of Mrs. Wilkins’s fall. They could have shoved their mistress down the steps, but servants who did that wouldn’t fetch help at once; they’d run away, knowing the consequences of being found out would be as severe as whipping or worse. Mr. Wilkins had been at the inn, drinking with some friends. His behavior was reprehensible, leaving his expecting wife alone like that, but not criminal. Yet why would Mrs. Wilkins make such a claim? Even women in labor due to accidents didn’t lie during their travail. Part of Tabitha’s responsibility as a midwife was to get truth from laboring women when the occasion called for it.
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