The Artist's Healer - Regina Scott

Chapter One

Grace-by-the-Sea, Dorset, England, July 1804

She wasn’t made to lie abed all day.

Abigail Archer stared at the ceiling in her bedchamber. It wasn’t a grand ceiling like those in Castle How on the headland above her shop or Lord Peverell’s Lodge on the opposite headland across Grace Cove. The cream-colored plaster bore no coffering, no elaborate beams, no mosaic pattern or allegorical painting of mythical beings.

She could paint one. Perhaps Poseidon rising from the depths, waves crashing around him. But no, she didn’t need the reminder of the autocratic fellows in her life.

The biggest autocrat at the moment wouldn’t allow her to paint in any regard.

She carefully shrugged her right shoulder. Immediately, pain shot down her arm, causing her fingers to tighten. No, no painting. Not yet. But she would not be deterred.

Her mother bustled into the room. On the best of days, theirs was an uneasy truce. Now the carefully coiffed white curls around her mother’s face, her neat and cheerful cream on spring green printed cotton gown gathered at her neck, and her purposefulness only served to remind Abigail of all she could not be at the moment.

“Let me fix your hair,” her mother said, going to the walnut bureau on the opposite wall to fetch the tortoiseshell brush. “And help you change into something prettier. Miss Pierce the elder sent over a lovely bed jacket—green quilted satin. Can you imagine?”

“That was very kind of her,” Abigail said as her mother came around the bed, brush in hand. “But I can’t move my arm enough to don it, and I doubt this bandage would fit inside even if I could.”

Her mother frowned at the swath of linen wrapped around Abigail’s upper arm. “That is a problem.”

It certainly was.

And it wasn’t something she’d ever prepared for. Bullet wounds were unheard of in the village of Grace-by-the-Sea. She ought to know; she’d lived here for all her six and twenty years. She’d made cherished friends like Jesslyn Chance and now Eva Howland. She’d learned to read and write, learned to sail, learned to paint. She’d built her own business, provided for herself and her widowed mother. Now all that was threatened because she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Her mother had nearly collapsed when two of Abigail’s fellow shopkeepers, Mr. Carroll across the street and Mr. Lawrence, the jeweler, had half carried her down from the headland two nights ago.

“But what happened?” she kept repeating as Abigail curled up on her bed, holding her arm while the men went for the physician. “Why are you bleeding?”

“I was shot,” Abigail managed, pausing to clench her teeth against the pain. “I was helping the magistrate up at the castle. He suspects the French have been using it to pass messages.”

“Messages?” Even in Abigail’s fog of shock, she could see her mother’s face scrunching up. “But the French are still massing across the Channel. They haven’t invaded.”

Yet.

“There may be some in the area,” Abigail said.

“How?” her mother protested. “Why?”

She would not lose patience. She tried so hard. Abigail drew in a breath, mustered the last of her energy to explain. “Mr. Howland hoped to catch one of them, so he and the militia surrounded the castle, hiding among the trees. Jesslyn and I were inside with Eva and Mrs. Tully, keeping an eye on things, when one of the Frenchmen slipped through their net and into the castle. I ran out to alert the magistrate, and a militiaman fired his musket, thinking me the enemy. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I shall faint.”

She’d woken in her nightgown, with her mother hovering over her. The bullet had carved a deep trough across her upper arm, and that physician had insisted she must rest to heal. After all that, they had caught only one of the French agents thought to be haunting their village.

“It’s fine, Mother,” she said now. “I don’t need to dress. It isn’t as if I have anywhere to go.”

Her mother bit her lip a moment, then set about running the brush through Abigail’s hair. Ginger-colored tendrils whipped past her eyes as if fleeing the vigorous strokes. She knew how they felt.

“Well, it’s always wise to look your best,” her mother said, avoiding her gaze. “You never know who might call.”

A knock at the door to their flat attested to the fact.

“Oh!” her mother fumed. “I wasn’t ready.” She hurried to grab a handful of hairpins from the bureau and dropped them and the brush in Abigail’s