Questions for a Highlander

by Angeline Fortin

  “Then prove it!” Eve snapped back in equal tones.

  “Eve, really!” A more softhearted Kitty cut in placing a hand on her sister’s arm. “You cannot force her out of bed.”

  “If someone doesn’t,” Eve told her sister, thrusting a finger in Abby’s direction, “she’ll just lie there for the rest of her days, just daydreaming her life away!”

  Everyone’s eyebrows shot up at that but then Moira chimed in.

  “You’re right.” Moira shrugged in apology at her closest friend, adding, “She’s right, Abby. You’re just laying there dreading the moment you need to face what happened, face the fact that Richard is gone. You need to get up and start getting better and that’ll never happen if we keep treating you with kid gloves.”

  “I do want to get better,” Abby stubbornly insisted.

  “Yes, and that’s why the only time you get out of bed is when someone lifts you out to change the sheets,” Eve jumped back in.

  Moira grinned now. “Or to carry her to the loo.”

  “You two are appalling!” Kitty chided them both. “You can’t…”

  Yes, Abby thought, as she felt anger and fire burn through her veins. This is what had been wrong, why she’d lain there without will for a week. Abby wasn’t one who took coddling well at all, it just made her want to be coddled all the more. No! She needed this from her friends – this prodding, poking confrontation – to essentially humiliate her into taking action. Abby reached over and patted her champion’s hand. “No, they’re right, Kitty. I have been rather defeated, haven’t I?”

  “You’ve been quite pitiful,” Eve said bluntly. “I love you, Abby, but I must confess I’m quite tired of this will o’ the wisp you’ve become. You’ve never been one to hide away from life’s consequences, good or bad.”

  “Then I should just face the truth of it all right now,” Abby argued. “Give me a mirror.”

  Taken aback by having her own argument thrown right back in her face, Eve pressed her lips tightly together. “No. There are truths, but what you would see isn’t one of them. When the swelling is down and the bruising gone, that will be soon enough. In the meantime, work on regaining your strength. Richard MacKintosh might be gone, but life isn’t over.”

  However, her friends should have known that Abby would never be able to wait the days or weeks needed to see how badly she was injured. They say that curiosity killed the cat. Well, Abby was dying of it.

  Alone in her room that night, Abby thought about the accident, recalling the force of the horse’s hooves striking her head, her cheek. Raising a hand, she felt the thick bandages wrapped about her head. Good or bad. Eve’s words rang in her mind and again that dread wound around in her belly, bringing with it queasy dread. A part of Abby wanted to simply huddle beneath the covers and hide away from the truth, but she had never been such a coward in her life, and didn’t intend to start now.

  Flinging aside the blankets, Abby sat up and rotated herself gingerly until her feet were on the floor. Her head swam dizzily as she stood, but she gritted her teeth and took a hesitant step toward the tall, oval mirror that stood in the far corner of the room. Two steps later, Abby stumbled drunkenly and grabbed the bedpost for support, but her determination was undiminished.

  Step by step, she shuffled toward the mirror, clutching her side against the pain in her ribs. Exhausted, she sank to her knees and crawled the remaining few feet to the mirror. Sitting on the floor, Abby looked at herself in the glass. Half of her head was covered in bandages but ugly, half-healed bruises peeked out from the edges. Her friends were right about that, at least. The bruising was horrid and already Abby felt anxiety building in her, one half of her wanting to see more and the other wanting to crawl back into the bed.

  Swallowing back the lump in her throat, Abby began to unwind the coverings with trembling fingers until all that remained was a plaster against the side of her face. She peeled it away slowly, hoping that all the dread she had read on the faces of her doctor and friends was a figment of her imagination. That it was nothing but a small cut, nothing to worry herself sick over.

  As she removed it, Abby closed her eyes then cursed herself for a coward. Forcing herself to open her eyes, she felt her stomach roil even more fiercely than it had before. She closed her eyes with a sharp intake of breath. Oh, God!

  Opening her eyes once more, Abby turned her face to the mirror so that she could see the damage. Her face was swollen and bruised but at the epicenter of the damage was an arching, scabby gash that curved from her forehead to her jaw cutting across a once graceful, high cheekbone. No thin cut at all but a wide tear punctuated by countless black stitches. The second cut went into her hair, which had been partially shaved away and was caked still with crusty bits of blood. It was horrifying!

  A glancing blow, Dr. Leven had told her, before she had raised her arms in defense. If this was a glancing blow…!

  Abby’s heart clenched in despair as she ripped her nightgown from her shoulder and tore away the bandages there. Three more similar injuries marked her shoulder and upper arm. The one on her arm showed the full curve of the horseshoe. The other injuries to her ribs and hip seemed to pulsate in perfect crescents and Abby imagined similar injuries waiting there to be revealed to her dismayed gaze.

  Abby stared into the mirror in horror. Gone was the angel she’d always been described as. She was hideous, misshapen. Suddenly she was glad Richard was gone from England. She couldn’t imagine facing him like this! He would be disgusted, as anyone would be.

  As she was.

  Abby stared into her turquoise eyes, eyes glassy with tears, seeing any future she’d ever imagined slipping away from her. No man would be able to look at her with anything more than disgust or pity. Salty tears fell down her cheeks burning against the scabs.

  Her dreams of a future with a family and children – an adoring husband – flashed before her eyes. For how could anyone find her appealing now? What would Richard think when he saw her again? It wasn’t difficult to guess. He would find her ugly and she would forever be denied the love she wanted so badly from him. How could she ever compete with the likes of the woman she had seen him with at Ascot looking like this?

  Oh, she would wed someday, Abby acknowledged with a harsh sob. As her grandparents’ heiress, she was too rich not to be married off. Her father, greedy as he was, would see to that. It would probably be some nasty old man with missing teeth, bad breath and five grown children.

  Abby had often heard the phrase ‘shattered dreams’ but had never truly understood how the shattering, in and of itself, was not merely metaphorical. Abby felt crushed, her soul fragmented into a thousand pieces.

  Finally, she knew how defeat could break a person.

  Raising a fist, Abby struck the mirror before her but her image remained unchanged. With a ragged cry of fury, Abby pushed the whole thing over and heard the sound of the breaking glass echo the cry in her heart.

  Chapter 7

  In three words

  I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life:

  it goes on.

  - Robert Frost

  Glen Sannox House

  Haddington, Scotland

  March 1887

  “Abygail! You’d best respond, lass!” Angus Merrill, Earl of Haddington commanded more forcibly to his eldest daughter as she continued to stare out the window of his study, her arms crossed tightly… stubbornly, he thought, about her.

  When she still offered no indication that she intended to answer him, the earl sighed wearily. He simply did not know how to deal with her any longer. He was too old, and frankly, had too many others available to argue with, were he in the mood. He didn’t need to add this daughter to that list. For the past five years, the lass hadn’t given him a whit of trouble. Abygail never fought with him about anything, not even when he’d made her leave her English grandparent’s home and return to Scotland years before.

  Yet, Abygail had given in without much fight, surprising her f
ather. He’d expected more from her, more of what she’d given him her entire life. Sass. God’s bones, but the lass had quite a mouth on her as a child.

  In all the years since her return, he hadn’t been faced with any of the defiance he’d come to expect from his daughter. Only once in all that time had she defied him. Now, when he truly needed her cooperation, Abygail seemed to be finding her spine once more, refuting him with a narrowed glance that she delivered with all the disdain of the English aristocracy. Abygail was half-English and so like her mother, that lovely English rose, Judith Boughton. Judith had boiled his blood with a glance but could freeze it just as quickly. Mother and daughter both were experts at reducing a man with a single glance, and masking their thoughts and feelings.

  That was why, for his third wife, Haddington had chosen a hearty Scots wife as his first wife had been. Oona was a pretty young lass of just twenty years when they wed, and though she had given him reason aplenty to regret taking her to wife, at least Oona held very little mystery. Like any good Scot, she was free with expressing her emotions. When she was mad, he knew it.

  When she wanted something, he knew it.

  Right now, there was something she wanted and, bugger it all, but Angus was too old and tired to fight her on something that would benefit them all in the end.

  Haddington frowned fiercely at his daughter once more, trying to will her obedience. He didn’t need to wonder why she fought him now, even when she hadn’t bothered in recent years to object to much of anything. Abygail was an incredibly lovely lass, even more so than her mother had ever been. Through the years, Angus often wondered how he could have been a part of anything so perfect. Inches under five feet in height, Abygail was the epitome of petite. His most beautiful child. Fragile, yet a fully blossomed woman. Hair so pale that it might have been white had it not shone like the sun reflecting on a loch. If her hair was the reflection of the loch then her eyes were the waters themselves, deep blue touched with green.

  Aye, a woman with a face that would have put an angel to shame once upon a time. Once upon a time, she might have been the most incomparable debutante of the Season, either in Edinburgh or London.

  That time was long gone. That’s why she fought him now. Simple vanity, he was sure.

  Vanity, be damned. Certainly, the earl pitied her openly for what the accident had done to her beauty with no attempt to hide it. After all, it was the lass’ fault for being where she shouldn’t have been. Nor did he attempt to hide the fact that her value to him dropped dramatically with her loss of looks. She might have nabbed a duke with her beauty but who wanted such a badly scarred woman? But that couldn’t stop him. He needed her now and, by God, she would cooperate.

  “Abygail!” he nearly shouted, gripping the back of his chair.

  Abby turned slowly away from the window, a beam of sunshine forming a halo of hazy light about her. Her arms were wrapped so tightly around her, it was a wonder she could breathe at all. She stared at her father through calm eyes, only the involuntary biting of her lower lip betraying her internal anxiety.

  “I will not do it.” Each word rang out like a shot in the oppressive silence of the room. A challenge.

  Haddington knew he needed to lay down the law as father and laird, but her tone so chilled him to the bone, that he was momentarily afraid he might not be able to bend her to his will. At this point, however, Angus didn’t care one whit what Abby wanted. The choice was out of his hands.

  “I wasn’t asking ye, lass. You will go.”

  Abby managed to maintain her composure until her father was gone from the room, slamming the door behind him. Only then did she collapse into a chair and bury her face into her hands in despair as tears trailed down her cheeks.

  She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t!

  He couldn’t make her.

  Oh, God! Abby moaned inwardly. He certainly could.

  What a nightmare her life had become since that day nearly five years before. She’d lost a beauty she hadn’t yet come to appreciate, yes, but she might have come to terms with that with her grandparents’ loving support. Instead, her father had commanded that she return home to Glen Sannox House after the accident. Or rather, Oona had commanded it, Abby was sure. Her stepmother held greater sway over her father than his own flesh and blood. Abby rather thought that her father gave in to Oona so easily because Oona was a larger pain in the earl’s arse than Abby had ever been.

  He had given in to her in the matter of sending Abby off to Folkestone – never knowing how deeply Abby appreciated leaving them all. Then the accident had come and her father had given in again when Oona claimed she wanted Abby home so that she could personally care for her ‘beloved’ stepdaughter. Abby had to laugh at that. It hadn’t taken but one step into the old castle to discover that Oona had wanted nothing more than to see the damage done for herself. For the past five years, she winced and sighed every time her eyes lit upon Abby’s face. Her stepmother had enjoyed every moment of it. Every verbal jab. She had loved thrusting Abby into society while her scars were still raw.

  Abby had been alone and so lonely over these past years at Glen Sannox House.

  Though the Haddington estate was nearly thirty miles from Edinburgh, visitors – ready to gawk and stare – were still plentiful. It was all Abby could do to escape them, opting for long rides through the parks and woods around Haddington, and limiting herself to the company of her sisters or their young brother, Sandy. She’d had no true friends to confide in these past years. With Kitty back in New York, Eve studying at university, all Abby had were Moira’s occasional visits to keep her in good company and those had become more and more rare as her father and grandfather kept increasingly to their castle in the farthest reaches of the Highlands. Though her beloved brother, Jack, might have visited her at her grandparents’ home, he had never returned to Glen Sannox House since his own falling out with their father.

  Now this.

  The earldom was nearly bankrupt. It didn’t take a great genius to notice valuable portraiture and sculpture slowly disappearing from the manor. Haddington had little of value left. Gone was the fortune her father had gotten upon marrying his first wife, Margaret Montgomery, Jack and Cullen’s mother. Gone was the grand fortune he had gotten when wedding Abby’s mother and the smaller one he’d received for assuming the burden that was Oona Seton.

  What the Earl of Haddington did have remaining was three daughters, Abby and her younger sisters, twins Sara and Catharine. Three daughters of marriageable age, each with a large dowry and inheritance from their mother that he couldn’t touch. As the eldest, Abby would someday also inherit her maternal grandparents’ fortune. Husbands for the three Merrill daughters would remove the expense of their upkeep from his pockets (allowing more for Oona, Abby thought uncharitably), and also provide a financial settlement that would increase the Haddington coffers for the years to come – if, of course, the marriage contracts were written to their benefit.

  Though Sara and Catharine weren’t quite eighteen yet, Oona had somehow convinced Haddington that a Season in London to find them husbands was the smartest course of action for them all. Of course, the younger two could not possibly be presented before Abby. They would simply all have to go.

  Abby knew that her father had agreed for reasons of a purely fiscal nature. She was also sure that he wished he had thought of it himself years ago.

  Well, she couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it.

  Damn him, Abby thought. She would go. She had to, lest her sisters be sold off to some old roué just as her father threatened. Her compliance bought them a choice.

  Damn Oona, as well. This was all her idea, Abby knew. Her father would never have thought of this on his own.

  Before she might recall that Oona was a greedy as her father, Abby sometimes thought this Season was nothing but a malicious jest Oona had developed to torment Abby more than she already did. Abby knew well the pleasure Oona hoped to receive from forcing Abygail into Society. In fact,
she probably relished the thought of her stepdaughter’s despair. She was going to enjoy watching Abby suffer, of that Abby was certain.

  Oona was a fine actress, wrapping her cruelty up in words of worry for Abby, telling the twins how awful it would be for Abby to go out in public, and be talked about and stared at. Her sisters were vocal in their pity, echoing Oona’s words, though more ingenuously. They did truly believe that there was no worse fate than having one’s beauty stolen so cruelly. Oona seemed to take pleasure in making Abby feel ugly and insecure.

  Her assistance hadn’t been needed to make Abby feel that way. The accident had destroyed her natural self-confidence and had overcome the daring adventurer she had once been. If Oona wanted to humiliate her even more, to send her to London to be laughed at by all, there was nothing Abby could do to stop that now.

  There was no one here to know how horrified she was by the thought of going to London. No one to know how she feared the rejection that she was sure would greet her. It was all a nightmare, but Abby swore she’d never let anyone know it.

  She wouldn’t give Oona an ounce of satisfaction.

  The London ton, notorious for its spite, would find no ready target in her, either. Abby would rise above it as best she could and never let them see her pain. She would grit her teeth and participate in the Season, but she would not take a husband. Abby refused to be wed for her fortune, or for pity’s sake. Only for love would she marry, and there was no chance of that happening now.

  Stroking a finger down the curve of her scar, Abby thought about Richard. At least she wouldn’t have to face her greatest fear of all. The fear that had hung in the shadows of her mind since the day she had uncovered her disfigurement. The fear that Richard would see her and turn away in pity... or disgust. She couldn’t bear that!

  Although Richard had come home last year for a brief visit, Moira had written in her latest letter that he was a half a world away now. At least there was no chance of seeing him in London during the Season.