Free Abigail Moor by Valerie Holmes

because I was so happy with my life that I didn’t
even care!” The last few words escaped her mouth without her
thinking of what the admission meant.
    “That being the
most important point, miss. You were happy with your lot and few
can boast of that fact.” Martha sighed and crossed her arms firmly
in front of her. “Abigail, most folk around those parts – where you
were found - would have left you to meet your maker in the abbey
grounds, whether they had been rich or poor. The poor could not
have fed another mouth and the rich would not even have blinked at
you as they sped by in their fancy coaches. Your life would have
been forfeited. Folks believe it would have been your fate and they
would’ve looked the other way. It took a special kind of person to
do what Lord Hammond did. He’s different to most of his type, God
bless him. He took you despite you being a bastard. Admittedly,
he’d intended to feed you up and then let you go to the foundling
home, but by the time you thrived he was already besotted by your
charms and to the young life that had nearly been snuffed out all
too early… Like his wife, Georgiana and his own bairn.”
    “Tell me what
happened to her, Martha…please?” Abigail tried to soften her voice
slightly, hoping it would encourage Martha to tell her something,
anything of the secrets of her past.
    “She died with
her babe, a girl, only one year before you were found; neither had
stood a chance. The baby was all the wrong ways round within its
mother. Tragic… really tragic... Anyhow, he found you and did all
he could to help you survive, and when you did he made sure you got
to live a good life, denied nothing, from learning to riding to
being loved.”
    “Who am I,
though?” Abigail persisted as she tried to come to terms with what
she had just heard.
    Martha it
appeared seemed to think that she had explained enough to make
Abigail feel better. However, to Abigail it raised even more
questions and doubts. Did it mean that if her father’s real
daughter had lived she may have been left to perish? It was a
disturbing thought that made her shiver involuntarily. She felt as
though she was somehow not quite ‘real’, but a substitute daughter,
no better than a replacement for the child of his own whom he had
been denied. All the times she had looked on Frederick as a
brother, thinking he considered her as his sister and the true
daughter of Lord Hammond, had suddenly lost their credibility. Had
she been in the wrong? Was she in fact no more than an impostor –
Lord Hammond’s pampered pet? Frederick would have been nine or ten
when his mother died, then within a year he was faced with this new
baby in the household who his father favoured. Was this when the
badness in him had started to form? Was that her fault also?
    Why had her…for
the first time she hesitated before even thinking the title… her
father, not legally acknowledged her? If he had loved her so much
as he said he did, then why had he hesitated?
    “Miss Abigail
Hammond,” Martha said, and looked to the fire instead of at her.
“That’s who you are and that’s who you will always be until the day
you marry a fine man of your own.”
    “Did he ever
have papers drawn up to say that, Martha? Did he? Do I exist in
law?” Abigail asked, but knew the answer before Martha replied.
    “That’s what is
in the letter - instructions for Mr Ashton at the solicitor’s
office. He has to get things sorted out and quick like, because
Lord Hammond has to be well enough to put things he intended to do
years ago in order. He wanted to find a good match for you, but let
things slip by as time itself did. Abigail, bless him, he was
loathe to let you go. He loves you so much. Of all the things in
his life that were bad, he always kept you away from it, clean
like.”
    “Perhaps it was
not the real reason. Perhaps Frederick made my dubious heritage
common knowledge – who would want a bastard for a wife? They’d be
no better