Lady in the Mist by Laurie Alice Eakes Page B

We couldn’t possibly win.”
    “We’ll see about that.” A muscle in Father’s jaw bulged. “I’d better get going. We’ll go crabbing later today.”
    “I’d like that.”
    So many boyhood memories lay in crabbing with his father, learning about the different sorts of sea creatures and birds. More memories of Tabitha filled his head. He’d shown her how to fish, to crab, to handle a sail and tiller. He’d shown her living sea creatures, for her own father—a schoolmaster with weak lungs—possessed little energy to teach his daughter about the true sea, the one outside of books and a few withered specimens he’d collected in his younger days.
    Raleigh’s heart squeezed with sorrow for the girl of ten or so years he’d met as she wandered alone on the beach, while her father drowsed in the garden between lessons most of the time, and her mother and grandmother tended patients. She thought they’d notice how useful she could be too, if she brought home a basket of clams, but she was trying to dig at high tide and came close to drowning in waves taller than she.
    Raleigh smiled. “I’ll take a couple of baskets of these fish to Momma and the girls to preserve.”
    “You do that.” Father nodded. “Never too early to start preparing for winter.”
    He departed for town with the cart, and Raleigh, a basket of shad in each hand, rounded the house to the kitchen garden.
    The sight of his mother and sisters ready for him with knives and a barrel of salt gave him an idea he realized he should have thought of at once. Momma and the girls knew everything that went on in Seabourne.
    “You had faith in my ability to still seine,” he greeted the three ladies awaiting him on the back porch. “And rightly so.”
    “What is it?” Fanny asked.
    “Shad.”
    She wrinkled her pert nose. “Ew. All those tiny bones.”
    “It’s good eating.” Momma grabbed the back fin of a fish. “Let’s get to work, girls. What was that gunfire we heard, Raleigh?”
    “A quarrelsome British frigate.” Raleigh made his tone light. “But we pretended not to understand their accents, and they let us go.”
    “I’d say it was my prayers.” Momma began to scale. “Can’t have you getting taken up again when you’re finally home, just because we were born in Acadia. Now go change out of those clothes in the barn. I’ve left fresh ones and water in there for you. And get yourself some breakfast. It’s waiting on the hearth. Then get some sleep.”
    “I’d rather stay and help you all.” Raleigh began to clean another shad. “I’ve missed you all so much, and sleeping just takes me away.”
    “But you look tired,” Felicity pointed out. “I don’t think you sleep more than four hours in a day.”
    “The training of the British Navy.” Raleigh grimaced. “And it’s a bit too quiet here after two years on a ship.”
    “I couldn’t do it.” Slowly, with obvious reluctance, Fanny began to strip heads, tails, and fins from the fish. “The noise. The smell. Nothing but water around you.” She shuddered.
    “But all those men.” Felicity chopped off a fish head with unnecessary force. “There aren’t any for us females here on land with the British Navy stealing them from us.”
    “We don’t know the British are responsible,” Raleigh pointed out.
    “No, there’s just a British ship around every time someone vanishes.” Felicity smacked the shad into a barrel. “I’m two and twenty and don’t even have an escort for the Midsummer Festival.”
    “The Midsummer Festival?” Raleigh’s head shot up. “It’s still going forward?”
    “Of course it is,” Fanny and Felicity chorused.
    “Many a young couple gets themselves—” Momma stopped, her face stricken.
    “Engaged there,” Raleigh finished.
    He and Tabitha had three years ago. He’d departed six months later.
    “You should take Tabitha this year.” Felicity spoke Raleigh’s thoughts aloud. “Surely she’ll have forgiven you by