Introduction

“Featuring a charming hero with a mysterious past and mission, Lady in the Mist brims with tension, intrigue, and romance.”--Julie Klassen, bestselling author of The Silent Governess and The Girl in the Gatehouse 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? With stirring writing that puts readers directly into the story, Lady in the Mist expertly explores themes of identity, misperception, and love's discovery.

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Excerpt

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 hardpacked
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, broadshouldered
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, his 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.”
... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1: In Chapter 1, Tabitha daydreams of something she desperately wants but thinks she will never have. What are your dreams? How would faith in God helped Tabitha have hope of seeing her dreams fulfilled?

2: Dominick is an indentured servant, a form of short-term slavery. Is only his body enslaved, or are his heart and soul under bondage, too?

3: In Chapter 3, Raleigh returns to Tabitha after having abandoned her years before, and wants to renew a relationship with her. Would you have reacted as Tabitha does, or in an entirely different manner? If differently, how would you treat someone who hurt you deeply?

4: Tabitha bears heart wounds that keep her separated from God. What heart wounds have separated you from the Lord’s love and Grace?

5: Being a midwife sets Tabitha apart from other women and makes her feared by some men. Would you have the courage to be a near outcast for the sake of your vocation?

6: In chapters 1 and 8 we find Dominick on the beach when he isn’t supposed to be. Although he has a mission to complete, does the ends, the good of many, justify the means of him violating his master’s orders? Does any duty justify breaking the law?

7: Tabitha holds a secret that will ruin her ability to continue practicing midwifery if she keeps quiet, and break people’s trust in her integrity if she gives it away to save herself. How would you react in similar circumstances?

8: In Chapter 22, Danger strikes Tabitha and Dominick. Who do you think the intended victim was and why?

9: In Chapter 26, Tabitha makes two important choices. What are their significance to her future? If you knew you could lose everything you want with the choices you make, how would you have decided to act? As Tabitha does, or would you go in another direction?

10: Throughout the story, Raleigh claims to be a Christian, yet his actions rarely reflect this claim. Are any of his actions, especially aboard the ship, what we expect of Christian behavior, or does he never make up for his previous mistakes?

11: How do the suspense and mystery elements of the story demonstrate the themes of love, forgiveness, and sacrifice for the redemption of others?

12: Who do you think makes the most important changes in the story—Tabitha, Dominick, or Raleigh? What is the significance of the changes they make?

13: Isaiah 53:5 is the bible verse chosen for this book. How do you think it applies to the themes in the story?

14: Who is your favorite character and why?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Laurie Alice Eakes' web site

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