Lady in the Mist by Laurie Alice Eakes Read Free Book Online Page B

Maybe you should leave now and give me some time to accustom myself to the new circumstances.”
    “All right, but I’ll not give up on you.” Raleigh departed with a last, longing glance back.
    She fled into the garden, with the sunshine, the scent of roses, mint, chamomile . . .
    And the lingering memory of another, elusive scent that had warned her of someone’s presence in her garden.
    She touched a forefinger to her throat, where her fichu hid the scratch. She knew two men who had reason to threaten her into silence regarding knowledge of the night. If Wilkins had something to do with his wife’s injuries, he might fear what she had said in her delirium. But surely he understood Tabitha couldn’t divulge what she heard during a lying-in, except for the identity of the father in the event of illegitimacy.
    As for the Englishman . . . At the least, a bondservant shouldn’t have been out and about after curfew. The greatest of his crimes could be that he, an Englishman, had been directly involved with the three men’s disappearance the same night.
    Yet the Englishman had been miles from the abduction scene when Tabitha met him, possibly too far away to have gotten there without a fast horse. Tabitha had noticed no horse on the beach.
    She had noticed only the man, noticed so much she recognized him in an instant when she came face-to-face with him at Mayor Kendall’s house. She knew enough to have told Kendall that his manservant, the only stranger in the village, had been prowling the beach at dawn.
    And she would have seen that manservant whipped.
    She shuddered. Even if he had threatened her, she couldn’t be the one who reported him. If he continued his nocturnal wanderings, he would bring punishment on himself. Yet if he were the culprit who had taken the young men away, he would strike again. More families would live without sons and brothers and husbands to support them. More young women would live without prospective husbands because the population of males had dropped below that of females.
    And perhaps she should make certain of his guilt before she spread damaging tales about him. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d kept her mouth shut about words she’d overheard or been told directly while tending a patient, or even traveling home. She could do so for the Englishman—for a while—rather than see him hurt. Like a doctor, she was compelled to do no harm to a living creature.
    Surely that reasoning—not a pair of long-lashed brown eyes that sparkled with gold lights in the sun—stopped her from confiding in the mayor. She would never be that foolish.
    She would never be foolish over a man again, as much as she yearned for a family of her own. Once upon a time, she’d fallen for a man with beautiful eyes. Blue eyes. Deep blue eyes she thought she could drown in.
    They seemed bluer now in his bronzed face. Yet any depth they held didn’t hold a reflection of her soul, of her heart. He claimed he’d come back to her, but she wouldn’t believe him any more than she’d believe the Englishman had been on the beach for nothing more than an early morning stroll.
    The Englishman. So attractive. So flirtatious. So nervous in her presence, stealing her attention from the man she should forgive and let herself love again.
    Raleigh should consume her thoughts. Or perhaps Mrs. Wilkins and whatever had gone wrong with the lying-in, or the condemnatory rumors Mr. Wilkins might spread about her. Not an Englishman, who looked at her as though—
    “Ah!” She jerked her hand away from the roses. Blood speckled her palm where she’d gripped the stem of a bush hard enough to drive the thorns into her skin.
    “Stupid, stupid.” She wrapped her hand in her handkerchief and scrambled to her feet. She needed to get a comfrey poultice on the punctures immediately. She couldn’t afford to injure one of her hands. Her hands were her livelihood.
    “Patience,” she called to the maid in the kitchen, “get