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They shivered as they got dressed, packed their belongings and hiked down the path. Dusk began to shadow the hills in darkness, but when they were within sight of the château, they could see that no lights burned in the windows. It was obvious that Sean and Emily hadn’t returned. Sheila became uneasy.
“I thought the kids would be back by now,” she said, voicing her thoughts. “I told Emily to be home before dark.”
“She might have had trouble convincing Sean,” Noah muttered. “It’s quite a hike, and the best fly fishing is in the evening.”
Sheila wasn’t convinced. “They should be home.”
“They will be. Don’t worry. I bet they’ll be here within the next half hour.”
“And if they’re not?”
“We’ll go looking for them. You do know where Emily was headed, don’t you?”
Sheila nodded and smiled in spite of her apprehension. “It’s the same place Dad used to take me.”
“Then let’s not worry until we have to. There’s something I want to talk about.” He settled upon a rope hammock in the yard and indicated with a gesture that he wanted her to lie next to him.
She slid into the rope swing, careful not to lose her balance. “‘Okay—so talk.”
“I think I should tell you about Marilyn.”
“Sean’s mother?”
Noah’s lips twisted wryly. “I don’t think of her as his mother, merely the woman who gave him birth.”
“You don’t have to explain any of this to me.” Sheila wanted to know everything about him, and yet was unwilling to know his secrets more intimately. The past was gone; what was the point in dredging up bitter memories?
“I don’t have to tell you anything, but I want to. Maybe then you’ll understand my feelings for my son . . . and my father.”
“Ben was involved.”
Noah’s entire body became rigid. “Oh, yes, he was involved all right—he couldn’t help himself. You don’t know my father, but if you did, you’d realize that he tries to dominate everyone or everything he touches.
“Your father’s ill,” Sheila reminded him gently.
Noah relaxed a little and stared at the stars beginning to peek through the violet-gray dusk. “He wasn’t ill sixteen years ago,” Noah asserted as he squinted in thought. “As a matter of fact he was in his prime.”
Noah paused, conjuring up the period in his life he had tried to forget. “Marilyn was only seventeen when we first met. She came to a fraternity dance with a friend of mine. I thought at the time she was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. Long blond hair, clear blue eyes and a smile that could melt ice. I was captivated.
“It wasn’t long before I was dating her, and Ben told me to ‘dump her.’ In the old man’s opinion, Marilyn wasn’t quite up to par, socially speaking.” Noah shook his head at his own young foolishness.
“You know that I haven’t ever gotten along with Ben?” Sheila nodded, afraid to break the silence. “Well, Ben considered Marilyn a ‘gold digger,’ after the family fortune. Maybe she was. Hell, she was just a kid, barely seventeen. Anyway, I suppose that because my father was so hell-bent against her, it made her all the more attractive to me . . . at least for a while. We dated for about four months, I guess, and then we started arguing, over stupid little things. We never got along.”
Noah absently ran his hand across his chin, rubbing the beard shadow that had begun to appear. “Anyway, just as I decided to break things off with her, she turned up pregnant. She was probably scared, but she didn’t have the guts to tell me about it. I heard the news secondhand, through a friend of mine who was dating her sister.
“At first I was angry—furious that she hadn’t come to me with the news. When I found out that she intended to have an abortion, I thought I would kill her myself. I drove around for four hours, and I had no idea where I’d been, but I had managed to calm down. By the time I went to her house, I knew that I wanted my child more than anything in the world and that I was willing to pay any price to get it.
“I tried pleading with her to keep the baby, but she didn’t even want to talk about it. I told her that I would marry her, give my name to the child, whatever she wanted, if she would reconsider.”
Noah closed his eyes, as if hiding from the truth. “She finally agreed and I thought I’d won a major victory because it was pretty evident that she was more concerned about being a cheerleader to the football squad than being a mother to my unborn child. And maybe I’d been too rough on her—she wasn’t much older than Sean is now. Just a kid. And I was just as foolish. Although we’d made one mistake, I thought we could correct it. Given time, I was sure that Marilyn would mature and learn to love the baby. I even thought she and I had a chance.”
Bitterness made his voice brittle. “But I was wrong. Dead wrong. Ben couldn’t leave it alone . . . and maybe it was better that he didn’t . . . I don’t know. Anyway, Ben was against the marriage from the first, baby or no baby, and he offered Marilyn a decent sum of money to go quietly away and give the baby up for adoption. The offer was attractive to her; she had no other means to afford college,
“I was outraged at my father’s proposal and sickened by Marilyn’s transparent interest in the money. I tried to talk her out of it and insisted that she marry me and keep the child. If she wanted to go to school, I was sure we could afford it, at least part-time. She was adamantly against any solution I provided. I didn’t understand it at the time, not until she told me what she had come up with as an alternative solution.”
Sheila was breathless as she watched the angry play of sixteen-year-old emotions contort Noah’s face in pain. “In Marilyn’s beautiful, scheming mind, she found the answer. The price was considerably higher of course, but she agreed to give the baby up for adoption to me, his father, for a discreet and large sum of money. Although Ben didn’t like the idea of being manipulated by a girl he considered socially off-limits, he seemed to almost . . . enjoy her sense of values.
“It was obvious that a marriage to Marilyn under the best circumstances would be a disaster for both the baby and myself, so I swallowed my pride and pleaded with my father to agree to her demands, in order that I could gain custody of Sean. Sixteen years ago fathers’ rights were virtually unheard of, and without Marilyn’s written consent, I could never have gotten custody of my son. I wanted the only decent thing I could retrieve from that relationship with Marilyn—my unborn son.
