The Pursuit (27 page)

L
INCOLN
was sitting down. He was in shock. Melissa was dazed herself. Never would she have dreamed that such deep, dark secrets would be revealed here. She was almost afraid to hear more—afraid for Lincoln. His world had just been turned upside down. His father had been alive all these years? To have that knowledge kept from him must be devastating to him. And he did look that—utterly devastated.

“Why?” was all he asked eventually, but he asked it twice, “For God’s sake, why?”

Eleanor was crying in earnest now. “The accident destroyed his body and most of his mind. He’d been literally crushed. He was paralyzed from the neck down, would never walk again. He couldn’t even lift a hand to feed himself.”

“All the more reason for his
entire
family to be there for support.”

“That’s not how he saw it, Lincoln. It was his
decision. When he realized the extent of his injuries, he wanted to die, begged me to kill him. I couldn’t do it. I loved him too much, was too selfish to lose him completely. He accepted that, but in return he made me promise I’d announce his death to everyone, even have a funeral for him. And there was no time to talk him out of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“The injuries to his head took away his identity,” she explained. “He had brief periods when his mind returned, when he could talk, when his memories were intact. It was during one of those times that he insisted you be told he died. But the rest of the time—most of the time—his memories weren’t there, were simply…gone.”

“Amnesia?” Melissa asked.

“It was nothing like that.”

“Then he didna create a new identity for himself?” Melissa said.

“No, I wished so often that he could have, but when he wasn’t himself, he wasn’t cognizant of anything, really. It was like he was in a perpetual daze. He could open his eyes. He could chew his food if it was put in his mouth. But he didn’t know who I was, he didn’t know who he was. The doctor claimed he had no active thoughts when he was in that state. He didn’t talk. It was as if he didn’t know how.”

“I still don’t understand why he would want to be dead to the world,” Lincoln said.

“Not the world. He didn’t care if anyone else knew about his crippled state. It was you he
didn’t want to know, and the only way to keep it from you was to let everyone think he’d died.”

“But
why
?”

“He couldn’t bear for you to see him like that. He was a proud man. He wanted you to remember him as he’d been, not as he’d become.”

“So he denied himself to me, completely—forever?” Lincoln said, his tone anguished.

“Try to understand, Lincoln. He made that decision soon after the accident, when he was in a lot of pain. And he’d also just realized the extent of the damage to his mind, that there were going to be periods when he wasn’t himself. His reasoning was that he wouldn’t have been there for you either way. And he was mostly right. The times he was himself could be so brief, if I wasn’t in the room with him when they occurred, I would have missed them.”

Lincoln paled a bit when he realized. “That’s why you were always locked in your room? He was in there?”

“Yes. Only two other people knew he was still alive, his doctor and his valet, who was so devoted to him he remained to help me care for him.”

“But so many years…you kept him from me for more than half my life.”

“I tried many times to get him to change his mind. But over the years his condition only worsened. The times he was lucid became even briefer. So he remained firm in his decision, never faltered from it. You were never to see him like
that or even
know
he was like that. In the end he simply wasted away. If he hadn’t been such a strong man to begin with, he never would have lasted as long as he did.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this two years ago, when he really died?”

“Because the promise I made was to be forever,” Eleanor replied. “I wouldn’t have broken it now except…it was a promise I never should have made. I never agreed with it, but I had to respect his wishes.”

“Is
this
why you sent me away?” he demanded. “So I wouldn’t find out?”

“You were getting too curious about my locked door. I caught you several times lingering in the hall outside it. But that was only a minor part of the reason. It was mostly your lack of discipline, how wild you’d become. The fault was mine, because I couldn’t spend more time with you. But you were lacking a man’s guidance, which was why I thought Richard could help, at least for a few years, and why I’d already been discussing the matter with him prior to that trouble you had with the MacFearsons. That only confirmed to me that you really did need a man in your life.”

“
You
could have found more time for me,” Lincoln said.

“But that’s the decision I made,” Eleanor replied sadly. “You or your father. When he was himself, I had to be there, I was all he had.”

“You were all
I
had!”

“I know.” Eleanor began crying again. “Don’t
you think I’ve regretted it? That’s another reason I sent you to Richard. He had time for you. He wanted you. You became like a son to him. Still, I tried to get you back after a few years, even if it meant disrupting the progress you’d made there. I was selfish in that. I missed you so much. But you didn’t want to come home by then.”

“Didn’t I? But to what? More of never seeing you? More of you ignoring me?”

“Lincoln, it couldn’t be any other way. Don’t you understand? Your father had only a few minutes a day, or a week, sometimes it went as long as a month that he was himself. A few times it could last up to an hour, but mostly he had time only to say a few things, and then he’d be gone again. If I wasn’t there, in constant attendance, I would have missed most of those times. I loved him so much. My heart broke every time he was lucid and we could talk, knowing it wouldn’t last long, that he’d soon be mindless again. Yet it was all I had left of him. As it is, I did come to England to see you, knowing I wouldn’t be there when he ‘awoke’ from his mindless state. I came as often as I could. But you were rarely around to visit with, and when you were, it was obvious you didn’t want to talk to me. And I was helpless, unable to explain to you really why I’d done what I’d done, but unable to reach you without explaining. It was almost as painful to see you as it was never to see you. Can you understand? And forgive me?”

He said nothing. Several moments passed, and still he said nothing. Finally he spoke, “Forgive
you for loving my father to the exclusion of all else, certainly. Forgive you for not telling me all this when it mattered—I’m not so sure. But then I doubt I’ll be able to forgive myself either.”

L
INCOLN
had walked out. His tone had been cold, but only to mask the pain under it. Yet what he’d said…Melissa had a distinct premonition of dread. He was blaming himself now, for what, she wasn’t sure. But she’d been afraid that might happen. And none of what she’d hoped would be accomplished by this meeting had come about. They’d resolved nothing, were no closer than they had been. He’d instead found out things that would have been better left unknown.

She couldn’t even imagine how hurt he must be right now, to know his father had wanted to be dead to him. Nor could she begin to fathom what it must have been like to be Donald Ross, to live the rest of your life counted in minutes, not years, because that’s really all he’d had, minutes here and there when he was actually cognizant of who he was and who was around him.
And Eleanor, to have lived with that all these years, to want to be there for her husband so much that she gave up any semblance of a normal life of her own—and gave up her only child. How utterly horrible.

Eleanor was to be pitied. The end of Donald’s life as he’d known it was an accident, but Eleanor had had choices. Right or wrong, her choices had affected others, and she’d had to live with the consequences. Lincoln had all that to contemplate, what his mother had done and why….

“I’m sorry,” Melissa said, such an inadequate word, really, under the circumstances.

“Please, don’t apologize,” Eleanor replied, her tone weary. “I knew he’d never forgive me if he heard it all, which is why I didn’t try to tell him sooner. There was hope when I first gave him up that I’d get him back, but as the years passed, I knew I wouldn’t. He had too much resentment over it, saw it as my abandoning him.”

“You didna assure him that wasna sae?”

“Of course I did, but he didn’t believe me. He was so enraged it was almost impossible to talk to him back then. And the anger never really left him.”

“Anger is sometimes the only defense against hurt,” Melissa remarked.

“I thought of that,” Eleanor admitted. “But I couldn’t seem to get past that to reach him, the few times he allowed me to see him.”

“Perhaps because he wanted tae hurt you as much as you’d hurt him?”

Eleanor smiled sadly. “Well, that’s human nature, isn’t it?”

“Human nature that most often comes wi’ a severe kick in the face,” Melissa replied. “You canna hurt someone you love without it hurting you e’en more. Linc just got that kick in the face, I’m thinking. He’ll be needing time tae digest what you’ve told him.”

Eleanor came over, squeezed her hand gently. “I appreciate what you’re trying to say, but it’s too late for Lincoln and me. I lost my son when I sent him to my brother. Those years are gone, can never be relived. He was right. I abandoned him. The reasons don’t matter.”

“But they do.”

Eleanor shook her head. “Lincoln won’t see it that way. It was a mistake, I know that now. I think even Donald regretted it toward the end, that he’d denied himself ever seeing his son again. I should have corrected things when I could have, but I didn’t. I abided by Donald’s wishes, because I couldn’t bear for him to spend what little time he had to be himself being upset. So I never argued with him, when arguing with him was needed—at least where Lincoln was concerned.”

Melissa realized that Eleanor had given up back then—and was doing so again now. She couldn’t grasp that reasoning herself. But then, family was paramount to her, and Lincoln would be, was already in her mind, part of her family now—and so was Eleanor, for that matter.

So she didn’t spare any feelings when she told
the older woman, “It’s ne’er too late. Dinna make yet another mistake, thinking it is.”

Melissa went home with a heavy heart. She was afraid she was going to have to say the same thing to Lincoln, but with him it wouldn’t be so easy. His foundation had toppled. He would have to readjust his thinking completely. Where he’d placed blame before, where would it fall now? On himself, from the sound of it. But Eleanor was ultimately to blame. She could have told Lincoln the truth, when it still would have mattered. She could have pushed her way back into his life, instead of letting him close her off because he believed she didn’t want him.

He wasn’t at Kregora when she returned with her uncles. She hadn’t really thought he would be, assumed he needed some time to himself just now. His absence gave her time to tell her parents what they’d learned.

“A fever?” Lachlan said. “Faith, that’s wonderful…er, no’ that he had it, but that—”

“We know what you meant. Keep that foot out of your mouth,” Kimberly admonished him dryly.

He grinned, winked at his wife, hugged his daughter. “I knew he wasna crazy.”

“Rubbish,” Kimberly mumbled.

“And there’s no reason tae hold off the wedding sae long,” he added. “As soon as the guests can get here will be soon enough.”

“Sae
you
set the date so far ahead, Da?” Melissa scowled at him.

“Dinna be annoyed wi’ me, lass, I just wanted a wee bit more time tae get used tae him, is all.”

Her uncles had a different reaction to hearing the story. When they realized that they’d caused grief to a lad seriously ill—ill with fever as a result of their beating him, a beating that should never have occurred to begin with—and on top of that, they were probably responsible for his “running wild,” which had caused his mother to send him away…well, the fight that ensued included all nine of them that were present.

At least they took it outside, its being well in-grained in them all that they
not
come to blows in their sister’s house—if they could help it. And Lachlan didn’t lift a finger to try to break it up, just stood there with his arms crossed and watched them have at each other, flinching every so often as he witnessed a particularly grueling punch.

Kimberly wasn’t inclined to intervene either, though when the fight didn’t look as if it would be breaking up before someone got seriously hurt, she did finally order her servants to toss buckets of water on them. There were five new black eyes at the dinner table that night.

Lincoln wasn’t there for the meal, though. He still hadn’t returned. With Melissa starting to worry over how long he’d been gone, Lachlan sent out his clansmen to search for him. They didn’t find Lincoln, but they did find a rider who got lost trying to reach Kregora after dark. He had a letter for Melissa. It was from Lincoln.

She read it, sat down, and began to cry. “He’s no’ going tae marry me.”

“The devil he’s not,” Kimberly said.

“He says I deserve better’n him.”

I
T
was the deepest sort of pain, to see all your dreams come tumbling down and be the one who’d pulled out the stone to topple them. Lincoln was filled with such bile it was near choking him. He rode straight to London without stopping except to change horses, other than briefly at the first inn he came to, to jot off that note to Melissa and have it delivered.

He should have spent the night there. The morning would have given him a new perspective. But he’d been afraid that being still so close to Melissa, he’d selfishly change his mind and return to her.

It was killing him to let her go like this. And it wasn’t that she deserved better than him, as he’d told her. It was that
he
didn’t deserve
her
. He was a man who hurt the people who loved him the most. He couldn’t protect his mother from that, could only try to make it up to her,
but he could protect Melissa from such a bastard as himself.

He was remembering so much more of his youth now, all the things he’d blocked away because they pointed out the real fault, which had been his. He’d wanted so much to be accepted by the MacFearson brothers that he’d actually tried to emulate them. They’d seemed without structure, could do whatever they liked, had no one to obey, but in fact they’d merely been raised differently than he had, with more leeway. That their father would have taken a strap to them if they continued to cause trouble with him proved there had been discipline and consequences for them to face after all.

So he’d become unruly, and his mother had tried to help him back to the proper path by giving him a father figure, his Uncle Richard. But instead of accepting that he’d brought it all on himself, he’d damned her for it—and continued to focus only on that as the years passed.

How could he have forgotten how foolish he’d been before that incident at the pond? The fever? Had it pushed his memories that far away? He didn’t know. And it didn’t matter now. The damage was done, and he’d done it himself. All the letters he’d ignored, all the times his mother had tried to see him and he’d found excuses to be absent. She had tried, so often, to bridge the gap between them, and he’d just pushed her further away, until she stopped trying.

He was practically sleeping in the saddle by the time he reached London. He’d stopped a few times along the way to rent a new mount, though only after his own was showing signs of wanting to trample him and would probably balk if he ever approached him again.

He went straight to bed and slept nearly twenty-four hours. He really should have done so sooner, because sleep really did put everything in a different perspective for him, showing clearly what a complete ass he was to have reacted as he did.

He was doing it again, pushing aside the people he loved the most. But not this time. He’d been blaming himself for something a child had done, and he’d let that child live inside him too long. He’d wanted to protect Melissa from the child, but the child was gone. He’d wanted to punish the child, but the child had been punished enough. If it wasn’t too late, if Melissa wasn’t fed up with him, he was going to get her back.

It was the dinner hour when he came downstairs. Only his aunt was present for it.

“Where’s Edi?” he asked casually as he joined her at the table, aware that he was taking her by surprise.

“She’s spending the weekend with her fiancé and his family, to discuss their wedding plans—and what the deuce are you doing back here? Have you settled everything with Melissa’s family, then?”

“Probably made things worse with them, actually,” he replied.

“Oh, no.”

“At least her uncles will have cause to celebrate,” he added dryly.

Because Henriette knew of their objections, she surmised correctly, if incredulously, “Don’t tell me you’ve withdrawn your suit?”

He didn’t answer that yet, asked instead, “Did you know that my father was alive all these years, that he died only two years ago?”

Henriette gasped. “Good God, Lincoln, who told you such nonsense?”

“My mother—and obviously you didn’t know. Uncle Richard probably didn’t know either, for that matter. She wouldn’t have wanted to risk the chance that he might take pity on me and tell me.”

She stared at him hard. “You aren’t joking?”

“No.”

He went on to tell Henriette the whole of it, up to and including his last and biggest blunder, that he’d ended his pursuit of Melissa.

“So it’s true then,” she said when he was done. “You really
are
crazy.”

He knew what she was referring to. He even smiled. “No, just a complete ass. It was my first gut reaction, one I should have ignored but didn’t. The thought was to protect her—from me.”

“And punish yourself.”

“That, too.”

She tsked at him. “You’re lucky that girl loves you. I’m sure she’ll understand—if you don’t take too long to rectify the situation.”

“I intend to leave for Scotland in the morning. But I’m not sure she’ll want me back. She’s already been through so much with me, butting heads with her family over me, even her parents. And she was there to hear it all. She must be thinking there will always be problems of one sort or the other that will surface because of my past.”

“Will there be?”

He shook his head firmly, said, “No, but it won’t be easy to assure her of that, particularly when I just behaved like such a bloody ass.”

“Everyone’s allowed to be an ass a few times in their lifetime.”

He snorted at that philosophy. “Not everyone hurts those they love in the process though. Were I Melissa, I’d be saying good riddance.”

“Were I her, I probably would, too.” Henriette replied with a chuckle. “Fortunately for you, your Melissa is a very special lady. But you already knew that. It’s why you loved her from the start. And you
do
still love her, don’t you, m’boy?”

“With all my heart.”

“Then put away your doubts. Love always wins out, don’t you know.”

“I believe only women carry that view, Aunt,” he replied dryly.

“Nonsense. Well, maybe…oh, never mind.
Let’s just say I have enough faith for the both of us. Now, about the rest, I’m sorry about your father. I simply had no idea—”

“No one did.”

“I’m just amazed that Eleanor never let on, not a single clue. Her letters were frequent, but always only about you. She wanted to know everything you were doing, how your schooling was coming along, what your interests were, who your friends were—absolutely everything. If my letters to her weren’t at least three pages long in reply, she’d think something was wrong. I imagine she read them to your father. He would have been starved for information about you as well.”

“Would he?”

“Now, don’t do that,” she said, because his tone had turned skeptical. “I would imagine his decision wasn’t just prideful, wasn’t just because he wanted you to have only good memories of him. That might have been part of it, but consider this—and he would have realized it as well—that for you to have any time with him at all when he was himself, you would have had to live in that sickroom with him, just as Eleanor did. Otherwise you might never have found a chance to speak with him. He wouldn’t have wanted that for you, didn’t want it for her either, but there was no help for that. And had you known, you would have curtailed your activities, would have tried to be there more often. Such a sad situation either way. But he had Eleanor. She loved him
enough to be there always. You don’t still resent that, do you?”

“No, I’m glad he had her.”

He just wished they both could have had her, as it should have been.