Free The Hearth and Eagle by Anya Seton

were bistre shadows beneath the large blue eyes. But her smile as she greeted Phebe had its usual gallant sweetness.
    “Welcome, mistress, it’s kind that you come to visit me. How comely you look.”
    “To do you honor, my lady—” said Phebe, accepting the ladderback chair indicated by Arbella. “ ’Tis most good of you to receive me.”
    Arbella shook her head. “Nay, I’m much alone. My husband still at Charlestown, and my friends who returned, the Governor and Sir Richard, so much occupied. And my servants—” She shook her head again. “But you saw Molly, how she was. And the others worse. It’s hard to believe a new country or a sea voyage could so change them. And I’ve not—not yet—the strength to rule them properly. I must save my strength.”
    As she said this a light came into her eyes, and her lips lifted in a joyous and secret smile. She looked at Phebe and saw in the younger woman’s face the eager admiration which had been there from their first meeting in Yarmouth, and the need to speak overcame Arbella’s reticence.
    “I’m with child—” she said very low. “At last. Wed seven years and I had lost all hope. Our dear Lord has rewarded me for braving the new land.”
    Phebe swallowed. For an instant she could not properly answer the lady’s confidence. It pierced through the foolish barrier Phebe had built against her own realization. And through the rent, like the mounting sound of tempest waves, she heard the rushing of fear.
    And again Arbella had shamed her, by the radiance in her thin face, and thrill in the low voice.
    “I’m happy for you, milady,” Phebe said gently. She hesitated. “I think I too am with child.”
    Arbella gave a little cry and stretched out her hand until Phebe came to the bedside and took it in hers. “We have then that great bond between us—” said Arbella. Her pale cheeks flushed, and she sat up, her long braids of wheat-colored hair falling back across her thin shoulders. “Tell me—” and she asked eager questions, and as they talked together, she seemed the younger of the two women.
    Both babies would be born in the winter they decided, Arbella’s the earlier, in January, for she had reason to guess it had been conceived in England before the sailing. “And you will stay near me, Phebe—won’t you,” Arbella said—“that our babies may know each other and grow together in the new land?”
    “Indeed I hope so, milady.” Now Phebe’s eyes too were shining, Arbella’s courage and Arbella’s pride had become hers too. “But I don’t know where Mark will decide our settlement. He—he wrote me a letter, I brought it—” Phebe stopped and blushed. “I hoped—” She stared down at the letter in her hand.
    Arbella was briefly puzzled. She had been talking to this girl as she would have talked to her own sister, Lady Susan, and had forgotten that there was difference between them. Nor did the rigid class distinction seem to matter much in the wilderness. She covered Phebe’s embarrassment at once by taking the letter and calmly reading it aloud.
    “'Tis evident he takes thought of you and loves you,” she commented smiling.
    Phebe smiled back, unable to suppress the leap of hope again. If Mark continued to be disappointed in conditions as he found them—perhaps after a few months of roving and striving...
    “I too had a letter this morning from my husband—” said Arbella. “He favors a place called Shawmut—it’s across a river from Charlestown—and is starting to prepare for me. You must bear on your Mark to settle there too.”
    Phebe was silent for a moment, glad that the lady did not guess her unbecoming hope, and considering this new idea.
    “Why, is there fish at this Shawmut, your ladyship?” she asked with her sudden quiet twinkle.
    Arbella laughed. “There must be. Is he still set on fishing?”
    “More than ever. He is most apt.” But he might fish from Weymouth at home, she thought, it was scarcely