She looked down at the ground, and he caught only a glimpse of the glistening on her lashes.
He added, “Julie is hoping you’ll have time to see her. I’ve no objection, and she will be thrilled. But,” his voice held a warning, “that’s only if you agree to the ground rule that she doesn’t have any contact with Diana that lasts longer than the time it takes to say hello and goodbye. If I find out that you’ve gone behind my back on that, I’ll cut you off from her so fast your head will spin.”
He watched her intently until she managed to nod an agreement.
“One other thing,” he added. “Your opinion of me seems to be at rock bottom. I’m sorry about that, I’m damnably sorry, because we were the best of friends. But I warn you, Laura, when you’re with Julie, keep your opinions to yourself. My daughter loves me, and she needs to respect me. I’m all she has. You are not to interfere with that. You are not to intimate to her that I’m waiting with bated breath for Diana to kill herself off or that I sleep with every woman I meet, and, for God’s sake, do not mention Francie. Julie never needs to know what a fool I was.”
She forced out through bloodless lips, “Of course not. I’d never say anything.”
“I hope I can believe that,” he said, “but, frankly, Laura, I’m astounded at just what you will say.” He moved towards the back door. “I need to get back. Good night.”
But she followed him anyway, out onto the path to the stables. He stopped several yards down the path, impatient now with her, wanting to get away, back to the safety and warmth of his home.
“Richard—”
“What?”
But, unbelievably, she hadn’t finished.
“Please,” she said. “I just need to understand.” And then she hesitated, and he watched her coolly, his body tensing for the blow he sensed coming, while she bit her lip and rummaged for the words.
“This thing between you and Francie – it wasn’t just sex, was it?” Now that she’d started, her speed picked up; the words tumbled out over each other. “Something else was going on, I always felt it, I just couldn’t see you and Francie together. Just tell me, please. I want to stop wondering. Something went wrong between you and Di, it must have, you wouldn’t have turned to Francie otherwise—”
Her voice, her eyes pleaded with him, but the truth of her words hit him a glancing blow, not enough to wound, but enough to warn. He cut her off immediately.
“That’s none of your business.”
But, damn her, she would not stop. She was crying again, great tears welling up in her eyes, but she soldiered on. She had more gall – or more courage – than any other woman he’d ever met. “I know, I know it’s not, but I have to know.”
She’d pushed too hard. He said between his teeth, “You want to know what went wrong? Fine! I adored your sister, I loved her desperately. I married her because she meant everything in the world to me. And she took all that and ground it to dust beneath her heel. You’re right about Francie, you’re absolutely right. It wasn’t just about sex. I wanted to bring Diana down, and, by God, Francie worked.”
He walked away into the dusk.
~•~
Laura could not remember ever feeling so conscience-stricken, or so helpless to make amends.
She tried all Saturday to reach Richard. First, she reached his voice mail, but, reluctant to apologize where Julie might hear, she hung up. The second time she called, she left a message inquiring about Julie’s cold. The third time, the phone rang and rang. Served her right, she thought. She had not answered his calls before.
She spent the rest of the day baking and needlepointing, waiting for him to call. Meg called once to get her flight time; Mark took the phone and offered to send up the corporate jet. She got out of that by reminding him that she could scarcely leave Max to his own devices for three days, and he knew how allergic he was to cat fur. Did he want it all over his plane?
“Just leave him there with some food. It’s only a few days.”
“Mark!”
“All right,” he said. “See you when you get here.”
She kept her hands busy. She baked the cookie dough – if Richard didn’t want it, then Julie might – and when she finished, she made up a recipe for oat bread that Peggy had taught her. Making bread was great therapy. She could pound and knead and exorcise all her demons on the hapless dough, waiting for the phone to ring.
He wouldn’t call.
And why should he? She had been crueler to him in a week’s time than she had been to anyone else in her life. She had been unable to fire a musician months after it had become obvious that he could not function up to her standards, solely because she didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but she had savagely – twice! – attacked a man who had shown her only affection and kindness.
Not that day, he didn’t….
No, no, there be dragons….
She concentrated on remembering Francie, Francie who had indicted Richard through her own words. Francie, whose childish plans to win his hand had ended in her own blood shed. She threw more flour and began to knead it in. Francie, whom Richard had scarcely mentioned, and then in the most neutral of tones. Francie, whose revenge on Diana had backfired so terribly.
Francie, who hadn’t mattered—
She stopped as the tears blinded her contacts.
Francie, who had died while Diana and Richard lived on.
A tear splashed down onto the flour. She lifted her dusty-white hand to her mouth and bit her fingers against the onslaught of grief and rage.
Rage that he had lived. There, she’d admitted it. He’d partnered Francie in her monstrous scheme, but he had not suffered from its failure. He had gone on with his life, he’d made a home and a family with Julie, he enjoyed all that Francie had lost. He might still be tied to his unwanted wife, but he had not been lonely.
She had to agree with Lucy that there was no reason for him to have lived like a monk; she could hardly object that he’d known other women (but she did mind, terribly). But, damn it, did he have to seem so content? So sure in the life he had chosen?
Actually, he didn’t seem that content. His voice had echoed of remembered pain, pain so sharp that he’d vowed never to risk it again. He’d learned to tamp down his emotions; she’d had the feeling, from moment to moment, that he kept a tight rein on himself. But nothing she’d seen in his eyes compared to the darkness in Diana.
She wondered what Dominic had thought of Diana’s decline.
Had he blamed Richard? She hoped so, not out of meanness – Richard had never cared what Dominic thought – but because he could shoulder the blame so much more easily than Diana. It did not require much imagination to know the scathing criticism Dominic had heaped upon Diana’s frail psyche.
She wondered when Diana had started sliding.
Lucy would know.
In all their conversations, hours spent catching up, Lucy had not wanted to talk about Diana. She had admitted her relief at Dominic’s death (“I felt like the lowest scum on earth – but honestly, all I could think was, I never have to talk to him again”), her grief for Peggy and Philip (“Every good thing in my life started with them”). She had merrily dissected Laura’s marriage and gently guided her through the inevitable talk about 9/11. But Diana she had left alone.
“Not now. Maybe when I feel better,” she’d begged off, and who could blame her? For all Diana’s downward spiral, Lucy had a greater responsibility.
Lucy knew. He threw her out… he was right to do it. She and Richard had grown up as sister and brother; they had been good friends all their lives. Laura remembered Lucy advising Richard on his delicate teenage girlfriend – give her some space, she’s stressed out about school – so surely he had confided in her when his marriage disintegrated.
But Lucy did not know the truth about Francie, or she would never have accepted the story of the crash in the Panhandle.
Laura stared hard at her fingers and thought. She thought for a long time, going abou
t her baking, playing the piano while the loaves rose, writing emails to Roger and Terry, uploading her digital recordings to the servers in Plano, petting Max on the back terrace as the shadows of the evening stretched across them. She thought of her own guilt in her twin’s death, and for a second, the pain of that thought tightened her hand on Max, until he howled in protest.
And if she suffered such guilt, what did Diana feel? Such anguish that it could only be extinguished in the seductive oblivion of wine and cocaine?
You didn’t deserve that, Di. I’m guiltier of your crimes than you ever were.
She picked up her cell phone and called Lucy.
“I’ve got to go home for a few days,” she said, and winced at her sister’s protest. “I’m coming back, really! I’ll call every day, I promise. And when I get back – how do I get in touch with Di? I’d really like to talk to her.”
I owe you that much, Richard. I owe Diana.
“Fine,” said Lucy grimly. “But I want to talk to you first. Richard called me.”
Chapter 11: Diana, Not in Love
SO WHY DID I MARRY RICHARD?
I look back across time, and I haven’t a clue. Of course, we had that dreadful scare freshman year at UVA. It wasn’t the first time I’d sweated it out, but three weeks can be a long time in a teenager’s life, and right before finals. Richard’s grades didn’t suffer, because he hadn’t left all his studying to the last minute, but mine were terrible for a first semester. And, of course, my period started right after the last exam was over.
So we decided over Christmas that we should get married. Or did we decide? Richard came by to pick me up for an afternoon movie, and instead we ended up making love and getting engaged. I think the two were related, really. We’d been so scared that the only way we could justify sex was to say we were getting married.
But I can’t shake the feeling that Richard proposed, and I ended up married to him because I couldn’t find the courage to say no.
~•~
Of course, we’d been going together forever.
I met Richard when I was seven and he was eight. Daddy had just been acquitted of my mother’s murder in Dublin, and he had lost no time in reclaiming the three of us from foster care and leaving the emerald shores behind him for good. From the time we left Ireland, we were little American girls; he put away our Irish passports, stamped out any hint of Irish accents, and generally wiped Mama out of our lives. He even changed our name. I’d been Diana Renée Dane-Abbott in Ireland – and with the trial going on, believe you me, you did not want to have that name. Once we moved to America, I became just Diana Abbott.
Sometimes I think how strange it is that Daddy’s wife, whose name I can’t even remember (Sharon? Siobhan? something like that), changed my life. If she hadn’t run off from Daddy, undoubtedly for good reason, and taken refuge with her cousin Peggy until she had Lucy, he might not have tried to get Mama back, and so Francie and Laurie would never have existed. Mama might not have died. We might never have come to Virginia. I certainly would never have met Richard, and who knows how my life would have turned out.
But she did run away, and Mama did come back, and Mama did die, and Daddy did barely escape the noose. And then he left Ireland for good. I don’t think you “shake off the dust” of Ireland, but for all practical purposes, that’s what he did.
It always was Daddy’s goal to restore his life, rescue his reputation, and reconstitute his family, and high on his list was getting his other daughter back.
Lucy had lived with the Ashmores after her mother abandoned her – just up and left in the middle of the night, leaving Lucy in her bassinet with a note pinned to her blanket, “Take care of my baby” – and Peggy and Philip were raising her as their own daughter. Daddy tried to put an end to that – she was an Abbott, after all, and the only legitimate one of us – but Peggy refused to let her go.
Daddy tried everything, short of going to court. I guess he had seen enough of courtrooms to last him a lifetime. He tried charm and persuasion; he tried invoking their common Irish heritage; he tried an appeal to Peggy’s priest. He tried waxing lyrically about the ties of parenthood. No dice. Peggy didn’t budge. Lucy was hers.
So Dr. Ashmore stepped in with a compromise. He had a rental house out on the James – small, ramshackle, needed a lot of repairs. He had picked it up at a foreclosure auction, he told Daddy apologetically, so he’d sell it to Daddy cheap. That way, we would be living only a couple of miles away from Lucy. It wasn’t fair, he persuaded Daddy, to part Lucy from the only parents she’d ever known, plus at Ashmore Park she had a big brother and a horse and a bedroom fit for a princess, and they were more than happy to keep on paying for her upkeep and tuition and braces….
Knowing Philip and his tact, I’m sure he never came right out and made Daddy face up to the truth, which was that, even with Mama’s small estate, Daddy was going to be hard-pressed to bring up three kids, much less four. Philip felt that, with cooperation, Lucy could be part of both families. He even arranged for me, and later Francie and Laurie, to attend private school with Richard and Lucy, and I’ve always wondered about the financial aid that seemed to come out of the blue. Compared to the other students, we were definitely the charity cases. Philip talked Peggy into agreeing that, if Lucy showed any musical aptitude, Daddy would be allowed to train her (except she didn’t so he never bothered). We got her on alternate weekends – like visitation, now that I look back on it.
So, anyway, back to Richard. So we came to meet, and no cymbals clashed, no stars fell from the sky. Nothing. We were only kids. I was so curious to meet this half-sister who was eleven months to the day younger than me that I didn’t notice the Celtic knight in training who hovered protectively around “his” little sister. Actually, Francie paid more attention to him, and Laurie, just a baby, hung back and gazed adoringly at him. Richard was into model airplanes and science fiction, I was into Mick Jagger worship (to Daddy’s horror). He scarcely seemed aware that I existed, although he was very kind to Laurie. I hardly noticed him, until, during a weekend a few years later, Lucy told me that he liked me.
“He thinks you’re beautiful,” she whispered. “I saw him drawing your face for his pictures.”
“What kind of picture?” I asked in alarm. In creative writing class, Richard had been working on a sci-fi fantasy story involving an underground kingdom populated by mutants repelled by the society above. (I’m not making this up.)
“Duchess Julia.” The heroine, with long flowing locks, etc. The inspiration of the hero of these stories, who just happened to be a Celtic knight.
Even at ten, I knew that meant something. Over the next few weeks, I kept a covert eye on this boy with his secret crush on me. If he had been the usual run-of-the-mill boy, I probably would have gone out of my way to snub him. But gradually it dawned on me that Richard Ashmore was no ordinary boy and maybe I ought to give him the time of day. First, all the girls in my class thought he was the cutest thing alive. Second, he was smart. Richard knew a lot about a lot of things, and he read all the time to learn more. Third – well, third, Francie had been batting her eyes at him since the day we first met him, and maybe I liked knowing that Francie could have all the crushes in the world on him, but he liked me.
So I smiled at him one day. I asked how his sci-fi story was going. I said how wonderful it must be to learn to fly. I let him walk me to my door when we got off the bus one day, which meant that, afterwards, he had a long walk back to Ashmore Park.
Francie seethed.
My classmates gazed at me with envy.
Daddy made me practice double time to punish me for straying from my art.
And my Celtic knight, mind stuffed with Irish romanticism by his mother, decided that the future was settled, all tied up with a bow.
~•~
Let’s see, a few highlights of my life as Richard Ashmore’s girlfriend:
His mother never approved of me. Why, I wasn’t sure, until it dawned on me that she ha
d someone else picked out for her son. I didn’t catch on until the day I heard Richard thanking Laurie for making his favorite cookies. Then I started to notice how Peggy had Laurie over there every weekend, teaching her to cook and sew and – oh, she wasn’t even subtle about it after a time – run Ashmore Park. She mostly ignored me, except to tell me that my skirts were too short or my jeans too tight or I really needed to wear a bra. She never once took me under her wing and tried to teach me anything. No wonder I’m a terrible cook.
It never occurred to me to be jealous of Laurie.
I knew something Peggy didn’t want to know.
I knew Richard was so crazy in love with me, he’d never give Laurie the time of day.
Another memory. Our first kiss. I was thirteen, and he was fourteen, and we were at a carefully chaperoned mixer at school. But the chaperones couldn’t be everywhere, and we found a dark stairwell, and that’s when I found out that Richard Ashmore was not only the best-looking guy in school, he was a great kisser. He wasn’t one of those god-awful sloppy kissers, and he didn’t make a meal of it, and he had this thing with the upper lip…. Now that I’ve kissed a great many men, I can honestly say that he ranks up there in the top two or three.
The first time he told me he loved me. I don’t even remember how old we were or where we were, although for some strange reason I remember that he was wearing a blue shirt that brought out the color of his eyes. I can still hear his exact words: “Don’t say anything, Di, I just want you to know. I think I’m in love with you.” And he followed it up with a deep, intimate kiss, so I guess we must have been in that transition time between early adolescent kissing and his sixteenth birthday – fifteen or so.
A good thing he told me not to say anything, because the other thing I remember is a quick, panicky feeling of being trapped. For the first time, I realized that he was serious about me, and, by that time, I knew what Richard Ashmore wanted, Richard Ashmore pursued with a single-minded determination. I’d seen it when he had gone out for track, constantly trying to top his personal best. I’d seen it in his studies; he was determined to be first in his class, and he achieved it early and never let it go. I’d seen it when he set out to tame a hunter Philip had bought; Richard had that horse broken in no time.
All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) Page 23
