All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (30 page)

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 had 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.

I imagined his list of goals, and at the top:
DIANA
. With a ten-point plan to achieve me.

The idea terrified me.

Maybe, I thought, I ought to date around, hint that he should wait for Laurie to grow up….

And I might have, I really might have, except for the night he turned sixteen, six months ahead of me. He came over to take me out to a fancy dinner with his newly minted driver’s license – I remember him in his dark suit, and I had my hair up and I was wearing one of Mama’s dresses that I’d taken down from the attic. I remember Francie sidling into my bedroom while I put on mascara, hopping around, giving me her malicious little look.

“It’s smudged,” she said, and she sounded gleeful. “You look like a raccoon.”

I applied lipstick that I intended Richard to kiss off me later. “Don’t you have homework to do?”

“Field trip tomorrow, dumbo.” Then Francie leaned in and whispered, “Do you hear that?”

“What?” I stopped and listened. I vaguely heard Daddy downstairs in the music room, talking to – well, it had to be Laurie. I couldn’t make out his words. I shrugged and turned back to my dressing mirror. “What’s the deal?”

Francie was still whispering. “You know those kittens Laurie found?”

Oh, I knew those kittens, all right. I’d spent a week trying to keep out of their way. I’ve always had this deep-seated aversion to cats, a visceral reaction that I can’t explain – and, yes, I know the irony, since my sister is now Cat Courtney. Over Daddy’s vociferous objections, Laurie had dragged them home after she found them abandoned on the side of the road, and she’d been feeding the smallest one with an eyedropper with more patience than I could have ever mustered.

I picked up my blusher and dusted my bosom lightly. With any luck, that, too, Richard would kiss off in the course of the evening. “What happened?”

“The black one got loose and scratched the piano.”

Oh, boy. Now I could more clearly make out Daddy downstairs – not the words, but the deep, biting tone. Poor Laurie. She was really in for it now.

But it was not my problem. I was not getting involved. In that household, you learned early not to get between Daddy and the designated victim
du jour
. Laurie would just have to cope, and it wasn’t like it was the first time she’d been on the wrong end of a lecture.

I picked up my evening bag, said a meaningful “
Bye
” to Francie’s “Your lipstick’s smeared,” and went downstairs just as Richard rang the doorbell.

From the music room, I made out some of what Daddy was saying: “Irresponsible, Laura Rose – head in the clouds – disobedient – disgraceful – look at me when I’m talking to you—”

Richard looked so tall and handsome in his suit, and I have to admit, even now I remember how fast my heart beat when I saw him. I was so lucky, but I also
so
did not need Daddy, in that mood, to lay eyes on him. From the moment Richard and I had become an item, he had hated Richard with an unreasoning passion, calling him
that Ashmore boy
, or, when he was really pissed off,
that godless Ashmore boy
. I whispered to Richard, “Quick. He’s in one of his moods.”

Richard gave me a look that conveyed his understanding. We had spent many, many hours talking about what a strange bird Daddy was. “What’s the problem now?”

“Oh, Laurie upset him—” and I pushed open the screen door to leave.

But then we both heard it. “Words don’t appear to mean anything to you, Laura Rose. Perhaps this will persuade you—”

And we heard the first swish of the belt through the air, and a small, immediately silenced sound.

I’d never heard Richard swear before, and it shocked me. I didn’t even know he used that word. Maybe he felt free to say it now that he was sixteen. But my shock went quickly by the wayside, as he yanked the screen door wide open and brushed right by me.

He strode right into the music room, normally a room he never went into because he disliked Daddy as much as Daddy disliked him. After my initial surprise, I started in after him, and from the corner of my eye, I saw Francie, slinking down the stairs, freeze in place.

The scene in front of us appeared surreal. Daddy, in a rage, his belt wrapped around his hand, the better to swing with. Laurie, little Laurie, only ten years old, standing still, a welt on her arm, her face and eyes blank, gone away inside. And Richard – my wonderful Celtic knight, already well over six feet tall, his face hard, putting out a hand to grasp Daddy’s wrist.

“You hit her again,” he said, “I hit you. Then I call the police.”

Daddy said between clenched teeth, “Get out of here, boyo. This is not your concern.”

Richard did not back down. “If it takes a man to beat a defenseless girl, I’ll be a boy, thank you. I am not joking, Dominic. I will turn you in.”