Lady in the Mist Read online

  THE

  MIDWIVES

  BOOK 1

  LADY in the MIST

  A NOVEL

  LAURIE ALICE EAKES

  © 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

  E-book edition created 2010

  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

  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 to hold her. She’d wasted too many tears alone in her room, her garden, walking along the shore, praying for God to send her someone to share her sorrows along with her joys. She would neither weep nor pray

  now.

  But as she turned and crunched her way along the hard-packed sand toward home, she couldn’t stop herself from slipping into the hope, the dream, of a beloved striding out of the mist to greet her, take her hand in his—

  Lost in her imagination, she blundered straight into a person standing on the beach. He grunted. She reeled backward. Her heel caught in the hem of her skirt. Her other foot slipped on the wet sand, and her posterior struck the ground with a splat like a landed fish.

  The person moved, looming over her. “What do we have here?” The quiet voice was real and male, deep and unmistakably English. “Are you all right?”

  He sounded friendly, even warm, and not threatening. Yet no one should be about on this stretch of beach in the wee hours of the morning. No Englishman should be about on the Atlantic coast, where young men disappeared with regularity, unless he were—

  “Press-gang.” The word burst from her like a curse, and her heart began to race. Her mouth went dry, tasting bitter. She tried to scramble to her feet. She needed to warn the village men to stay inside. But her cloak and skirts tangled around her, holding her down.

  “Let me help you.” Still speaking in an undertone, he stooped before her. She caught an exotic scent like sandalwood, saw no more than a shadowy outline and dark hair tumbling around features pale in the misty gloom.

  Listening for others moving about on the beach, Tabitha waved him off. “No, thank you. I can manage myself.” She tugged at her skirt and nearly toppled sideways.

  “You don’t look to be doing such a good job of it.” Laughter tinged his words. The hand that clasped hers was masculine, strong, and too smooth to belong to a fisherman or sailor. “Perhaps you can get to your feet if I help. Do you have feet? There does seem to be something trailing behind you. Perhaps it’s a tail. Are you a mermaid?”

  Tabitha snorted and tried to wrench her hand away. Flirtation would get the stranger nowhere with her. The instant she regained her feet, she would run back to town and warn the sheriff or mayor that the English were at it again, stealing young American men to serve aboard their ships in their endless war with France.

  If the man let her go. At that moment, he gripped her hand with a firmness suggesting he would not.

  “I’m not certain whether or not that noise you made was human.” He closed his other hand over hers. “But this lovely hand hasn’t any scales on it, which argues on the side of human. On the contrary, it’s as smooth as silk.” He rubbed the tip of a finger across her knuckles, and the skin along her arms felt as though lightning were about to strike. “What’s a human female doing out so early?”

  “Going home.” Her voice emerged hoarse, sounding unused. She swallowed to clear it. “What’s an Englishman doing in Virginia?”

  “President Madison hasn’t managed to rid these shores of all of us yet.”

  “A pity.”

  “Ah, a hostile mermaid.”

  His words pricked her conscience. She was being rather rude to someone who, although in a place where he had no business being, acted kind enough to deserve a modicum of courtesy in return.

  “I’m not hostile. I’m cautious and worn to a th-thread.” Her voice broke.

  “You must have been swimming against the tide.” Speaking with a tenderness that drew all-too-ready tears to her eyes, despite her contrary efforts, he rose, drawing her to her feet with him. “No, not a swim. Alas, a fatigued female human. That’s a cloak, I see, not a tail. Forgive the mistaken identity, But I’d expect to see a mermaid out here before I’d think to find a… lady.”

  “An understandable error.” She used the edge of her cloak to dab at her eyes. “I wouldn’t be out here if I weren’t a midwife.”

  “Indeed?” His tone spoke of disbelief. His hand lingered on hers, that errant fingertip tracing the third finger on her left hand.

  She didn’t need to see his face or have him speak the words to understand he sought a wedding ring. She snatched her hand free and tucked her ringless fingers inside the folds of her cloak. “Indeed.”

  “Then it’s the last proof you’re human, since surely mermaids are hatched in the bottom of the ocean.” He curved his hand over her forearm. “Then allow me to walk you home, Madam Midwife.”

  “I’m not going—” She glanced around her.

  A hint of sun glowed along the line between sea and sky, turning the sand to a silvery gray and the mist to tendrils of gauze. Other than the stranger, her, and the usual flotsam thrown up by the tide, the sand lay empty. If he’d had cohorts, he’d managed to distract her long enough for them to get away. By the time she found someone in authority, he would have vanished too. She couldn’t even identify him with any certainty. He stood with his back to the light, a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette with hair tumbling from his queue.

  “It’s not necessary,” she said instead. “I’m perfectly safe, especially now that daylight is nearly here.”

  “I insist.” He released her arm but headed in the direction of her house. “You were going this way.”

  “I was, but if someone sees me walking with a man…” She sighed and hastened to match her stride to his. “I depend on my reputation to make my living secure, sir.”

  He continued up the beach but slowed. “Ah, I see. If someone sees you with me, they will think perhaps you had an assignation rather than a duty.”

  “Only my good name allows me to move about freely at night without being accosted,” she affirmed.

  “Then I’ll leave you here, before we’re in sight of the village again.” He stopped, took her hand in his, and bowed as though they were attending a formal reception. “Have a care, Madam Mermaid Midwife.”

  He released her hand and retraced their footprints in the sand, his head bent, h
is hands clasped behind his back.

  Feeling as though flotsam filled her shoes, weighing them down, Tabitha trudged toward home. Images of the Englishman filled her head, tingled along her fingers, danced down her spine. She despised the way she thrilled to his flirtation, his touch. She feared his presence on her normally empty beach.

  In the past year, she knew of a dozen young men along the eastern shore who had disappeared. One had returned with the information that he’d been press-ganged aboard a British war ship and escaped when the vessel came afoul of a reef in the Caribbean. His story made all Englishmen along the coast suspect. Not satisfied with taking American sailors off of ships at sea, the British apparently decided to steal them from the land, as they did in their own country.

  So an Englishman standing on the beach in the dawn hours appeared suspect at best, outright criminal at worst. Yet he hadn’t seemed in the least alarmed when she ran straight into him. None of his words or actions spoke of a man guilty of wrongdoing.

  And he’d distracted her from thoughts of Mrs. Wilkins’s pain and death, from her husband’s coldness then burst of anger, better than had any of her hazy dreams of knights riding out of the mist. He was flesh and blood and no doubt a danger to the community she served and loved.

  She reached her garden gate and paused, her hand on the latch, reconsidering going back to town. But the man was gone and she would awaken Mayor Kendall for nothing. She would stay with her original plan and go into town later, after she slept.

  The idea of sleep suddenly the most important thought in her head, she pushed open the gate and froze. Her nostrils flared, catching a scent familiar and out of place, a sharp tang piercing through the subtle richness of newly turned earth. To her right, fabric rustled.

  She started to turn. “Who’s—”

  A hand clamped over her mouth. “This is a warning.” The voice was sibilant, muffled, as though he spoke from behind a kerchief. Something sharp pricked the skin of her throat. “Keep silent about this night if you don’t want to swim with the fishes.”