Laurie Alice Eakes - [Midwives 03] Read online

  © 2013 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 2013

  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 978-1-4412-4063-7

  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.

  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.

  Published in association with Tamela Hancock Murray of the Hartline Literary Agency, LLC.

  The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.

  “The gifted Laurie Alice Eakes has done it again with a page-turner romance straight out of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. The wonderful period detail sucked me into 1840s Appalachia, while the realistic characters and tender romance kept me reading late into the night.”

  —Linda Goodnight, Carol and Rita Award–winning author

  Praise for the Midwives Series

  “Laurie Alice Eakes pens another novel that keeps the reader turning the pages with her expert knowledge of the time period and her skill with language. If you want to read a historical with romance, intrigue, and mystery all rolled into one, Lady in the Mist is a book you won’t want to miss.”

  —Golden Keyes Parsons, author of In the Shadow of the Sun King and Prisoner of Versailles

  “I loved, loved, loved this book. Laurie Alice is a master storyteller. Her book grabbed me by the heart and held on. I loved the characters and the plot, which was full of delicious romance and dark mystery. Authentic historic details brought the setting alive. I can hardly wait for her next book.”

  —Lena Nelson Dooley, author of the McKenna’s Daughters series and Love Finds You in Golden, New Mexico

  “The first book in Eakes’s new Midwives series is filled with secrets, a budding romance, and mystery with characters who have their doubts about themselves and those around them. Readers will not be able to put this gem of a novel down.”

  —RT Book Reviews, 4-star review

  “In her delightful and descriptive style, author Laurie Alice Eakes has once again crafted a story that will capture readers’ hearts from the first page. Her tales are both exciting and tender, and her characters speak to us right where they are, despite the different cultural and time settings. Heart’s Safe Passage may well be her greatest offering to date.”

  —Kathi Macias, author of Deliver Me from Evil and A Christmas Journey Home

  “I’m still thinking about the characters in Heart’s Safe Passage. Her turn of phrase and twist of a plot had me smiling long after the last page was turned. Eakes has crafted a don’t-miss story. Well done!”

  —Kathleen Y’Barbo, author of The Inconvenient Marriage of Charlotte Beck

  For my mother. To say why would take at least a chapter’s worth of words.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Endorsements

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  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

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Laurie Alice Eakes

  Back Ads

  Back Cover

  Author’s Note

  Although most of the feuds of the Appalachian Mountains started after—and because of—the Civil War, not before (when my story is set), the practice of fighting between families came over from the Old Country, where warring clans were still the norm when many of these people immigrated to America.

  This location is fictitious, but the beauty and wildness of the mountains in western Virginia are not. The reason for the beginning of this family feud happened in Kentucky. As I mention in these pages, local sheriffs and federal agents discovered that finding and arresting the perpetrators was nearly impossible. Getting lost in “hollers” or over a ridge was just too easy, and people didn’t tattle on their kinfolk. Some feuds lasted for thirty years or more. For all we know, some are still going on.

  When I was a graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic and State University in the late 1990s, a friend from the area I’ve written about told me that some roads you come across you just don’t go down without an invitation. Of course, he might have been pulling my leg.

  I lived in Appalachia for many years and still have family there, and I can imitate the dialect. For ease of reading, I have kept idiomatic expressions and spellings to a minimum. The one I employ here the most, I still use myself upon occasion—the insertion of “right” as an adjective, adverb, or whatever one needs it to be. I figure if it charmed me as a younger, single female, it would charm my heroine.

  There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death.

  Romans 8:1–2

  1

  Seabourne, Virginia

  April 1842

  Esther Cherrett removed the sketchbook from her satchel and lifted it to the highest shelf in the armoire. She didn’t need pictures of men whose form existed simply in her imagination’s portrayals, in colored chalks—not where she was going. And drawings of her family would only make her sad. Make her feel guilty.

  She didn’t need the satchel either. Its packets of herbs, rolls of bandages, and canvas apron for protecting her dresses during a lying-in would be of as little use in her new position as were the drawings. She started to hoist it up to the shelf too, but her arms shook as though the black leather bag weighed a hundred pounds instead of ten, and she let it drop.

  It landed on the blue floral rug with a thud. The latch sprang open and poked up like an accusing finger. You shouldn’t be doing this, it seemed to say in the voice of Letty O’Tool, the eldest congregant in the church. You aren’t answering to your calling.

  Esther snapped the latch back into place, then popped it open again, retrieved the sketchbook from its shelf, and shoved it amongst the instruments of the profession she had determined to leave behind in Seabourne. Leave behind with the scorn and ridicule she’d faced over the past four months.

  “I’m ready now.” She glanced around the room growing dim in the April twilight to see if she had forgotten anything
essential for a 350-mile trek across the mountains and her new life beyond the Blue Ridge. Nothing on the dressing table, inside the armoire, beneath the bed. She had squeezed all she could manage into two carpetbags and an oilskin pouch. Everything else must remain behind.

  “Except—” She dove beneath the bed and reached up between headboard and wall. Her fingers encountered stiff paper, and she yanked at it.

  A bundle of foolscap and fine stationery tied together with a black ribbon dropped into her hand. She should either take the letters or burn them before she departed, whatever necessary so her parents didn’t find the condemnatory, derisive, even threatening words from people they thought they knew well—her father’s parishioners, her mother’s patients. People her parents thought liked them and respected them, but who condemned them as well in the missives.

  “Once I’m gone, they’ll see it’s not your fault,” Esther said to the mental pictures of her parents.

  She shoved the written messages into the oilskin pouch amongst her books, then turned to the door. The time had come to tell her parents about her plans to spare them all from more heartache.

  Head high, knees wobbly, she descended the steps to the first floor—the ground floor, Papa called it in his confusing English way. At that moment, on that late April evening with the celebration of her youngest brother’s wedding behind them and the guests about to depart, it was the crowded floor. Laughter and the clink of china cups on saucers rang out from the parlor. In the music room, someone played the pianoforte, accompanied by the chime of silverware in the dining room, where the maids cleared away the supper dishes. The scent of lilacs and squeals of delight drifted through the open windows as children chased moths through Momma’s garden.

  Momma herself stood in the front hall, a shawl flung around her shoulders and her satchel in hand. She glanced at Esther, and her heart-shaped face lit with the warmth of her smile. “Are you coming with me after all?”

  “Coming with you?” Esther blinked. “There’s a lying-in?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Parker’s time has come.” Momma’s eyes glowed as they always did at the prospect of bringing a new life into the world. “I thought you would have heard their boy come to fetch me. But no matter. I can wait a few minutes if you wish to come.”

  Momma’s half smile, her downcast eyes, conveyed her longing for Esther to say yes, she would go. The cord that had held her to her mother’s profession for nearly six years tugged at Esther’s heart, urging her to go, to experience the moments she had found so precious. She took a half step forward.

  Then she saw the words from more than one missive emblazoned on her mind’s eye. Jezebel was the kindest of them. If she went, she could further harm the career of midwifery at which her mother had worked for over forty years.

  Esther retreated to the first step, her back against the balustrade. “Thank you, but I . . . can’t.” Esther’s eyes burned, and she looked away to avoid seeing Momma’s tightened lips.

  Six years ago—no, six months ago—she would have been the one waiting for Momma before dashing out the door. For most of her life, she had eagerly awaited the day she would become Tabitha Eckles Cherrett’s new apprentice midwife, carrying on a family tradition that had been passed from mother to daughter for generations, beginning in England and continuing in America.

  And now Esther must break the chain so Momma could continue her work of delivering babies and healing.

  “I came down to—to speak to you and Papa for a few minutes,” Esther added. “But if you must leave . . .”

  She would have to tell Papa and let him break the news to Momma. Surely that would be easier than seeing Momma’s heart break.

  “It can wait a bit,” Esther continued.

  “Not if you’re troubled.” Momma set down her satchel. “I’ll send the boy ahead to tell them I’m on my way. They’re only across the square, so if there’s a need for me to be there sooner, I can run over.” She turned toward the kitchen, where the Parkers’ servant would be waiting to accompany the midwife across the darkening town square. “Your father is in his office looking for a book.”

  “Her father is now in the hall to see why his two best ladies are talking about his whereabouts.” Papa emerged from behind the staircase with the languid stride not in the least diminished by his fifty-seven years. “Going out, Tabby?”

  Momma turned to him like a compass to the North Star, her mouth relaxing into a smile again, her eyes more shining blue than gray. “Yes, Mrs. Parker’s time has come.”

  “That’s wonderful news.” Papa laid his hand on her cheek and kissed her on her widow’s peak.

  Esther clutched the newel post and fought a surge of pain in her middle strong enough to give her nausea. Since she’d turned sixteen, she had sought for a man who would make her look at him as Momma did Papa, and the other way around. She had conjured his image in her mind and set her dreams in colored chalks in her sketchbook. She observed her brothers courting, marrying, and the eldest two producing children. At the same time she watched the men on the eastern shore of Virginia shy away from her, call her Queen Esther behind her back, and end up marrying other females who didn’t have an English marquess for an uncle, a mother who knew all the town’s secrets, and a profession of her own.

  Now the eligible young men simply ran from her as though fearing for their virtue.

  “Are you going with her, Esther?” Papa turned to her, eyes wide.

  “No, I—” Esther made the mistake of looking into his face, the eyes she dared not call beautiful since the same dark brown orbs with their gold flecks and ridiculously long lashes peered back at her from every mirrored surface, as did her own delicate version of his aristocratic features.

  She flicked her gaze right and down, concentrated on a drift of lilac petals fallen from a vase and onto the polished floorboards. “I still can’t. I—” She took a long, shuddering breath and gripped the newel post with both hands, curling her fingers into the carved leaf design like marlinespikes holding a sail line in place—holding herself in place before she raised her eyes to her parents’ faces. “I’m leaving Seabourne.”

  Momma caught her breath and pressed her hand to her lips.

  Papa’s eyes widened further, and his chin hardened. “By whose leave, young lady?”

  “Mine. That is—” A lifetime of obedience crowded down upon her shoulders. “I have to go. I have . . . no future here now.”

  “Of course you do.” Momma spoke hastily. Perhaps too hastily. “Your sweet spirit will overcome the talk.”

  “When some new scandal comes along?” Esther cast her parents a smile that barely moved her lips up at the corners. “Perhaps in another thirty years or so?”

  “Sarcasm is not attractive in a young lady,” Papa said. Then he sighed. “But I wish it didn’t hold at least a drop of truth.” He closed the distance between them and rested his hand over hers on the newel post. “You aren’t going to brazen this out, my dear? Have I raised a craven for a daughter?”

  “I think so.” Esther blinked back tears and would not meet his gaze. “I’m running away, I am well aware. And I see no other choice.”

  “You could have discussed it with us.” Momma joined them at the foot of the steps. “If you want to go, we can send you back west with the Dochertys.”

  “I thought about that.” Esther glanced toward the parlor and the remaining guests who had come for the wedding. “But they know.”

  “They’ll never tell anyone,” Momma said.

  Esther nodded. “I agree. But they know, and perhaps they have their doubts about me. About whether or not I’m telling the truth.” She removed her hand from beneath Papa’s and backed up a step. “I just wanted to tell you of my plans so you wouldn’t worry.”

  “As if we won’t.” Papa reached out his hand to her.

  Esther’s fingers twitched to take it and go down to him and Momma, let them hold her as they had when she was small, as they had four months earlier, as they had every tim
e she hurt and needed comfort. The idea of living without their loving arms around her whenever she needed reassurance, which seemed like every day now, felt like a hole ripping open inside her.

  She backed up another step, out of arm’s reach. “I need to go where no one knows anything more about me than they need to.”

  “But you can’t, child,” Momma protested. “How will you live? You might not be safe on your own.”

  Esther bit down on her tongue to stop herself from reminding them that she hadn’t been safe living at home.

  “I won’t be on my own,” she said instead. “The families I’ll be working for are coming to fetch me.”

  “Indeed.” Papa’s supercilious eyebrows arched toward a hairline now more silver than the deep brown shot with copper and bronze that Esther had inherited. “And when is this, and who are these families?”

  Esther crossed her arms over her chest. “S-soon, and no one you ever heard of. They live on the other side of the commonwealth. I didn’t want to leave without letting you know first.”

  “I suppose we are honored,” Papa murmured.

  Momma laid her hand on his arm. “Sarcasm, love.”