The Forbidden Bride

by Cheryl Reavis

• ISBN13: 9780373292400
• ISBN10: 0373292406
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Harlequin

Excerpts

Gold Hill, North Carolina, 1845

The sudden downpour from the summer storm and the urgent pounding on the front door came almost simultaneously. Jane Ennis put aside her pen and took up the pewter candlestick, hastily making her way toward the front of the house.

Her intent should have been to stop the racket before her mother was disturbed, but the truth was that she was more concerned about the noise waking her father's cousin. The woman was only a few years Jane's senior, but she felt her authority acutely when he was away, and she would have little regard for whatever poor soul might have need of a doctor's skill this rainy night.

Indeed, Miss Chappell - as she insisted on being called - had little charity for anyone, not even Jane's frail mother, whose illness was supposedly the reason for the woman having left her home in London and come here in the first place. It still surprised Jane that her father had sent for this obscure relation of his to act as a nurse and companion. It surprised her even more that the woman had actually come. She clearly had no desire to be in this lonely place. Living in what was essentially a wilderness at the edge of a rough North Carolina mining village in no way compared to the delights she had perpetually encountered in London society - or so she often said.

There was no escaping Miss Chappell's relentless dissatisfaction, and in the ten long months since her arrival, Jane had grown more than a little weary of the added discord the woman's presence in the household caused. Nothing was the same anymore. Jane's brother, Sion, in a fit of temper, had suddenly broken faith with their father and gone who knew where - after which their mother stopped making any attempt to be up and about. Even Jane's younger sister, Eugenie, the decidedly cheerful member of the Ennis family, had grown subdued and nervous since Miss Chappell had come among them.

Jane glanced up the narrow stairway to the second floor as she passed, thankful to see it empty. She managed to get the door open ahead of the next barrage of pounding, and she held the flickering candle high so that she could see the man who stood on the porch more clearly.

She recognized him immediately. His name was Tregear. He was one of the Cornish miners who had come from England to work the gold mines. He had arrived on the same stage that had brought Miss Chappell, and Jane suspected that they both were now popular topics in what passed for polite dinner conversation in Gold Hill - Tregear, for his penchant for brawling in the taverns, and Miss Chappell for her total disdain of everyone and everything indigenous to the countryside.

Jane's gregarious and ever inquisitive brother had made Tregear's acquaintance almost immediately. Sion had been very impressed by the man's more noteworthy talents. Tregear was supposed to be able to blast new tunnels in the mines - without killing anyone - and to read the results of his handiwork with great accuracy. Those skills fed the mine owner's hopes of finding copper and tin among the gold veins - her father's hopes as well, because he owned a significant number of shares in that particular mine.

Jane had seen Tregear several times since his arrival, once when she and her father had been riding through Gold Hill on their way to the new county seat of Albemarle to fetch the medical supplies waiting at the Smith's store post office. Tregear had been carrying not one but two giggling women across the muddy street, two flamboyantly painted barmaids from the closest tavern, whose actual purpose Jane wasn't supposed to know anything about - but did.

At one point she had looked directly into Tregear's eyes, and he had looked boldly back - instead of showing at least some chagrin at being caught thus by a decent woman. The look had held for an uncomfortable moment, and Jane had seen there what she could only describe as something akin to pity. His brazen behavior with the two women had disturbed her a great deal that day - but not as much as the impertinence of his staring at her as if he had some reason to feel sorry for her. She simply couldn't fathom his impudence. Compared to the rest of the people here, she lacked for nothing.

Nothing.

The most relevant fact about the man, however, was that he should not be here now on her father's doorstep. All the mine owners in the area employed their own doctors, who were supposed to be handy at all times. Mining was not a desirable occupation for the men here, in spite of the steady pay. Most of them had been farmers, used to the out-of-doors, and the profitability of digging gold ore depended a great deal on keeping those who were willing to go underground healthy. She could count on one hand the number of times her father had ever been asked to attend any of them and then it had only been to give a second opinion.

"My father is not here," Jane said anyway. A sudden gust of wind from the open door blew out the candle, leaving them standing in darkness. Thunder rolled overhead, and the rain blew onto the porch. She couldn't see his face, and she stepped back, as if the flickering light from the candle had been some kind of physical barrier between them, and, now that it was gone, he might not stay below the salt where he belonged.

"It's you I've come for, miss," he said.

"Me? Why?" she asked, taken aback.

"One of the women sent me to fetch you. She asks if you will come, miss." His voice was deep and rough sounding, both in quality and in accent. But his version of the English language was not so difficult to follow as some of the other Cornish miners she'd heard. He actually said "you" instead of the Cornish "ee."

Jane didn't ask which woman. The fact that she had been summoned instead of her father narrowed down the possibilities considerably. Tregear might carry harlots from one side of a muddy street to the other - among other things - but of late it was Miss Jane Ennis who, quite innocently, had found herself tending their physical ailments. And all because she happened to be present when one of them came to Mrs. Oliver, the Methodist minister's wife, with a badly scalded hand, an injury that had been forced upon her by one of her drunken patrons.

Jane had been at the Oliver house delivering some medicine her father had made up for the reverend's gout. She had seen the injured hand, she had known perfectly well what to do - and she did it. Word of the success of the treatment had spread quickly and had led to more requests for medical help, all of them clandestine. While her father might treat the women and their illegitimate children if called upon, he did so reluctantly and with overt disapproval. Everyone knew it would be better for all concerned if he didn't learn that his older daughter drew no such lines.

Jane suspected that her real appeal, however, was that she accepted no pay for her work other than to request that some small sum be donated to the Methodist church. She was decidedly of the wrong gender, and she would never have attended a medical school, even if women had been allowed. She had no right to be paid, regardless of the fact that she knew a great deal of the healing art.

When it became apparent that Sion had neither the desire nor the stomach to follow in his sire's footsteps, it had fallen to Jane to accompany their father on his many rounds, to dress the wounds, to help hold a man or a woman or a child down for some required surgery or tooth extraction, to read her father's directions and make up the medicines. She had taken full advantage of the situation, and, in the last year, she'd made a point to learn as much as she possibly could at her father's elbow. It had become a personal challenge to know what he knew, and there was little she could not do and do well - except lie - which was a skill she would likely need at some point, because by no stretch of the imagination, had she her father's permission to treat anyone for anything, much less to go into the hovels in the middle of the night where these women plied their trade.

"She has need of you, miss," he said impatiently. "I would not have come otherwise."

Jane didn't say anything, and Tregear took her silence for refusal.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Forbidden Bride by Cheryl Reavis Copyright © 2003 by Harlequin Enterprises Limited
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.