All You Could Ask For

by Angeline Fortin

  “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 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.”

  * * *

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

  Alone in her room that night, she remembered the force of the horse’s hooves striking her head, her cheek. Raising a hand, she touched the thick bandages wrapped about her head.

  Good or bad. Eve’s words rang in her mind and again dread coiled in her belly, bringing with it queasy dread. A part of her wanted to simply huddle beneath the covers and hide away from the truth, however she’d never been such a coward in her life and didn’t intend to start now.

  Flinging aside the blankets, she 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, surveyed herself in the glass. Half of her head was covered in bandages, while 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, she unwound 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’d 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.

  Closing her eyes, she cursed herself for a coward. She forced herself to open them and felt her stomach roil even more fiercely than it had before. The snapped them shut with a sharp intake of breath.

  Oh, God!

  Opening them once more, Abby angled her head so 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 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 displayed the full curve of the horseshoe. The other injuries to her ribs and hip seemed to pulsate in perfect crescents and she pictured similar injuries waiting there to be revealed to her dismayed gaze.

  Horrified, she stared blindly at her reflection. 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.

  Staring into her turquoise eyes, eyes glassy with tears, any future she’d ever imagined slipped away from her. Her dreams of a future with a family and children—an adoring husband…

  How could anyone find her appealing now? No man would be able to look at her with anything more than disgust or pity. 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’d longed for. How could she ever compete with the likes of the woman she had seen him with at Ascot looking like this?

  Salty tears fell down her cheeks burning against the scabs.

  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.

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

  Raising a fist, she struck the mirror, but her reflection remained unchanged. With a ragged cry of fury, she pushed the whole thing over. The sound of the breaking glass echoed 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. Never fought him on anything, not even when he’d made her leave her English grandparent’s home and return to Scotland.

  To his surprise, she’d given in without much fight. 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 her. Only once in all that time had she defied him. Now, when he truly needed her cooperation, Abygail seemed to have found her spine once more, refuting him with a narrowed glance 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 she held very little mystery. Like any good Scot, she expressed her emotions freely. 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, Angus was too old and tired to fight her when that something 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. Abygail was an incredibly lovely lass, even more so than her mother had ever been. Through the years, he often wondered how he could have been a part of anything so perfect. 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 t
hemselves, 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.

  Vanity be damned. For he was certain that was all it was.

  While he pitied her openly for what the accident had done to her beauty, it was the lass’ fault for being where she shouldn’t have been. 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 him through calm eyes, only the involuntary biting of her lower lip betrayed 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, he was momentarily afraid he might not be able to bend her to his will. At this point, however, he 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! She moaned inwardly. He certainly could.

  What a nightmare her life had become. 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 she return home to Glen Sannox House after the accident. Or rather, Oona had commanded it, Abby was certain. 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 his wife was a larger pain in the earl’s arse than she had ever been.

  Once her stepmother had been happy to ship her ‘beloved’ stepdaughter off to boarding school, never knowing how deeply Abby appreciated leaving them all behind. It was Oona who’d insisted she return after the accident. It hadn’t taken but one step into the old castle for her to realize 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 relished 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 plentiful. It was all she 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. With Kitty back in New York, Eve studying at university, all Abby had was 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 bankrupt. It didn’t take a great genius to notice valuable portraiture and sculpture disappear from the manor. Haddington had little of value left. Gone was the fortune her father received upon marrying his first wife, Margaret Montgomery, Jack and Cullen’s mother. Gone was the far more grand dowry Abby’s mother had brought with her, and the smaller one he’d received for assuming the burden that was Oona Seton.

  What the Earl of Haddington did have left 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. Abby, as the eldest, 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 provide a financial settlement that would increase the Haddington coffers for the years to come—assuming the marriage contracts were written to their benefit.

  Though Sara and Catharine weren’t quite eighteen, Oona somehow convinced Haddington that a Season in London to find them husbands was the wisest course of action. Naturally, the younger two couldn’t possibly be presented before Abby. They would all have to go.

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

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

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

  Damn Oona, as well. Undoubtedly, her stepmother conceived the notion to torment Abby more than for the financial gain. Oona took malicious joy in each social occasion she managed to force Abby into over the years. She relished her stepdaughter’s despair and would enjoy watching Abby suffer, of that Abby was certain.

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

  Her assistance hadn’t been needed. 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.

  However, she refused to let her horror at the thought of going to London show. She feared the rejection she was certain would greet her there. It was all a nightmare, but she 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. She’d rise above it as best she could and never let them see her pain. She’d grit her teeth and participate in the Season, but she’d be damned if she would take a husband. She 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 he’d 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.

  For the first time, she was glad for it.

  Chapter 8

  We bereaved are not alone.

  We belong to the largest company in all the world—

  the company of those who have known suffering.

  ~ Helen Keller

  The War Office

  Horse Guards Avenue

  Whitehall, London, England

  May 1887

  “Our brother is out there somewhere,” Richard barked, furiously slam
ming his fist on the desk to gain the attention of the man he had come to see. “You need to order a search now!”

  “I hardly think you’re in a position to tell me what to do, Captain MacKintosh.”

  “Then perhaps I am,” Richard’s eldest brother, Francis, said mildly, though his voice was dark with restrained anger. As the Earl of Glenrothes, Francis had some pull in the House of Lords and a reputation as a stern, unforgiving foe. “Or perhaps, if my name is not enough to prompt action, shall we invoke those of the Marquis of Landsdowne and the Earl of Seaforth? The heir to them both was a part of this same mission and is out there somewhere as well.”

  Lord Palmer, an undersecretary for the War Office, a sector of the government that dealt with legitimate military dealings domestically and overseas, as well as some more clandestine operations, leaned back in his chair. Folding his hands over his paunchy stomach, he regarded the two angry men over his spectacles. “Naturally the Queen is concerned with the apprehension of one of her peers by rebels in Egypt, but given the nature of the mission, we can hardly launch a full-scale and public search for Lord Captain MacKenzie and Colonel MacKintosh despite their rank and importance.”

  “I’m afraid that such a response simply will not do,” Glenrothes shot back, gripping his younger brother’s arm to restrain Richard from leaping over the desk to strangle Palmer. “Perhaps I should request an audience with the Queen myself to impress upon her the urgency of a rescue operation.”

  Palmer’s eyes widened and he sputtered, “Dash it all, old boy, there are protocols here, you know. A chain of command.”

  “And you’re at the bottom of it.”

  Richard could see the panic in the secretary’s eyes at his brother’s terse statement. Satisfaction raced through him. He should have known Palmer was merely an underling testing the scope of his own power, but he was simply too angry and worried about his missing comrades to be able to see through the undersecretary’s brash façade. Glenrothes could. His brother had changed with the passing years as well and was no longer a young noble without influence. In the past ten years since gaining his title, Francis had built the Glenrothes earldom into one to be reckoned with.