The Other Daughter (19 page)

“Mine, too.” Rachel slid into the seat across from her, trying to look as though she lunched at the Ritz all the time. “What
was
in Tommy Digby's flask?”

“Petrol, I should think,” said Cece with a shudder. “Mixed with cr
è
me de menthe.”

Rachel nodded to Cece's glass. “Isn't that more of the same?”

“
Sans
petrol.” Cece lifted her glass, shrugged, and downed it. “Hair of the dog, you know.”

“In that case,” said Rachel, suppressing a qualm at the thought of the cost, “I'll have one of the same.”

“Make that two,” Cece told the waiter, before saying, importantly, to Rachel, “We're both in today.”

“In?”

“In
The
Tatler
.” Cece fumbled a folded magazine onto the table.

Rachel's own face stared back at her, her features bleached to fashionable blandness by the light of the flash, her hair falling in a perfect curve against her cheeks, her rouged mouth dark against her pale face.

Miss Cecelia Heatherington-Vaughn and Miss Vera Merton
, read the caption.

“God, I look a fright! They never do get the most flattering angles, do they? It's too ghastly.”

“Ghastly,” Rachel echoed.

You have the cheekbones to be a Vera
, Simon had told her, weeks ago. In that picture—she looked what she pretended to be. Not a nursery governess with work-worn hands. Not an earl's hidden by-blow. Someone rich, expensive, pampered.

What she might have been, had the world been otherwise.

“There's Aunt Violet,” Cece was saying, “kowtowing like anything to the Prince of Wales. If she curtsied any lower, she'd go through the floor, don't you think?”

Rachel came back to earth with a thump. There, on the opposite page, was the Countess of Ardmore, her father's wife. She was broad and solid, an impression aided by a frock with too many flounces and a hat in the new romantic style, as broad around as its wearer. The Prince of Wales appeared as though he were about to be engulfed by several swags of tulle and a large stuffed cockatoo.

Rachel cleared her throat. “That's Lady Olivia behind her, isn't it?”

“Yes.” Cece gratefully seized on her fresh cocktail. “Poor, dear Auntie Violet. She would so have loved to bag HRH for Livvy. They danced together once, and she all but had coronets embroidered on Olivia's underthings.”

Rachel had seen the Prince of Wales. On newsreels. “Surely, there must be a suitably Germanic princess in his future?”

Cece smiled slyly across her broad-rimmed glass. “My dear, we live in modern times! If Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could snag the Duke of York, why not a Prince of Wales for a Standish? At least,” she added practically, “that's how Auntie Violet saw it. Never mind that she still reeks of pickles.”

“Pickles?”

“Or was it tinned beans? Something of that sort. Too funny watching the airs she puts on when her father started out in one of his own factories.”

Cece's cheerful snobbery stung like hail.

“Surely birth isn't everything.” Rachel's cocktail tasted sour. She set it down. “As you say, these are modern times.”

“Someone,” said Cece languidly, “ought to tell that to Auntie Violet. Too laugh-making watching her coming over all grande dame.” She stuffed the copy of
The Tatler
back beneath the table. “Will you have a chop? I'm not sure I can face one.”

“After those bacon butties this morning, I'm not sure I ever want to eat again.”

“Wasn't the taxi man a darling? Fancy sharing his breakfast with us.” Cece scrutinized the menu, shrugged, and set it aside. “Besides, you oughtn't poke fun at family pride. The Montforts are rotten with it.”

“I'm not a Montfort, I'm a Merton.” Born of a chance moment's madness in a tea shop.

Briefly, Rachel wondered if there were real Mertons. There must be. Unless, like the de Veres, they had died out long since, another aristocratic dynasty risen and fallen to dust.

Cece waved a dismissive hand. “Simon's blood is so blue, it's a wonder he doesn't stain his shirts indigo when he cuts himself shaving. His mother's people are even worse than the Montforts. Not that it counted for much with Auntie Violet. We all thought she would have an apoplexy when—you know.”

Rachel assumed a knowing air. “When Simon's mother bolted?”

“Which time?” Cece lounged back, glass in her hand. She appeared to be enjoying herself hugely. “My dear, don't tell me you didn't know! Everyone does.”

“I've been so much abroad…” Rachel hedged.

Cece's pale curls caught the light. “They tried to keep it a great secret … but, of course, who could resist? It was all anyone could talk about for
months
.”

“What was?” Rachel didn't even pretend to have a clue.

“My dear!” Cece held her glass aloft. “Why, Olivia's engagement to Simon.”

 

TWELVE

“They were engaged? As in … engaged to be married?”

“It was all terribly hush-hush.” Pleased with the effect of her announcement, Cece sank back in her chair. “I probably oughtn't have said. It was all eons ago. Practically the Dark Ages.”

“But Lady Olivia is all of … twenty-two?” As if Rachel didn't know her half-sister's age to the minute.

“Twenty-three,” said Cece, her pale eyes alight with the joy of gossip. She rested her elbows on the table. “That was part of the scandal of it. Livvy was—sixteen? Seventeen? You wouldn't have thought she had it in her, would you?”

“No.” Rachel's fingers tingled with nervous tension and cr
è
me de menthe. That odd familiarity. The tension between Simon and Mr. Trevannion. Simon's patronage, never entirely explicable as mere devotion to his newspaper column. She'd known there was more there than met the eye; she just hadn't imagined how much. “Whatever happened?”

“You mean after Auntie Violet went into hysterics and burst her corset? Uncle Edward nipped it in the bud, of course.”

It took Rachel's fogged brain a moment to make the connection. “Uncle Edward … You mean the earl.”

From far away, she could hear her mother's voice, chiding, “Edward…”

Seven years ago, Cece had said. Rachel had just begun working in France. But her father hadn't known that, had he? He had been too busy watching over his other little girl.

Rachel's throat felt as though she had swallowed a pack of pebbles. She managed to say, “He didn't approve?”

Drawing out a gold lighter, Cece lit one of her Egyptian cigarettes, waving it for emphasis. “Simon was so much older—and then there was all the scandal with his mother. She's not received—not by the sticklers. You can imagine which camp Auntie Violet falls into.” Cece blew out a long plume of smoke. “She's quite wasted on the modern age, really. She ought to have been biblical. She'd have so enjoyed a good stoning. I can just see her scrabbling to get her fingers around the first stone.”

Rather ironic, considering that her own husband's by-blow was currently sitting in the dining room of the Ritz. Or might men do as they pleased, while women were obliged to remain like Caesar's wife, above reproach?

“That doesn't seem quite fair.” It was an effort to keep her voice light. Rachel forced herself to loosen her grip on the stem of her glass. “To visit the sins of the mother on the child.”

“My dear! When has the world ever been fair?” Cece flicked ash into the air. “And one must admit that Simon did have the most eccentric upbringing—villas in Italy and cattle ranches in America and heaven only knows what else. Brian has
such
stories—most of them likely only half true. But then, there is that other half.…”

Rachel took a long swig of her cocktail. It was too sweet, cloying on her palate. “No wonder the match wouldn't do.”

Not for Lady Olivia Standish.

One couldn't have the prized daughter of the house throwing herself away on a man of dubious repute.

Rachel could feel anger rising up in her. She drowned it in another wave of champagne and cr
è
me de menthe.

“Of course it wouldn't do—for Simon!” said Cece loyally. “Can you imagine being married to Olivia! Such a dear, but so deadly dull. And Aunt Violet! Fancy having her as a mother-in-law!” She shuddered dramatically. “Really, Simon should be lighting candles in gratitude. One can't imagine what they ever found to talk about.”

Such touching concern for the masses
, Simon had said of Mr. Trevannion,
for someone about to marry an earl's daughter
.

Rachel's frustration found a new target. “Perhaps it wasn't her conversation that interested him.”

Cece gave a tinny laugh. “You
are
wicked. But, really—Olivia? She's hardly the type.”

That wasn't what she'd meant at all. But if that was what Cece wanted to believe … Rachel shrugged. “Still waters.”

Cece's pale eyes sparkled. “My dear, it would have to be a positive swamp. Aunt Violet watches Olivia like a…”

“Hawk?” provided Rachel.

“I was thinking more like a Victorian chaperone.” Cece ground out her cigarette. “God, it's no wonder poor Jicksy spends half his time at the bottom of a bottle of gin.
Anything
must be better than an evening at home with Mayfair's answer to Lady Macbeth.”

Listening to Cece was like sifting through a pile of diamonds, a glittering confusion of sharp edges. She sounded so entirely vapid that the incisive thrust beneath her words seemed to come out of nowhere, but by the time one had registered it, the topic had already shifted.

Rachel was reminded of Mr. Trevannion's complaint, of cleverness laid waste by idleness, a generation of leaders lost.

“I take it Lord Ardmore approves of Mr. Trevannion?”

“Oh, that was Auntie Violet's doing.” Cece crossed one silken leg over the other. “Livvy didn't ‘take,' you know. No SA. Or is it BA? Either way, she hasn't an ounce of it, poor darling. Not that you can entirely blame her when Auntie Violet chooses all her frocks.”

Cece stretched her slender arms above her head, demonstrating to the appreciative waiter that she had both chosen her own frock and had no dearth of that elusive quality known as sex appeal.

“After three Seasons, they had utterly despaired of her.”

Rachel tried not to be too pleased. “That sounds rather old-fashioned, doesn't it?” She fished a cigarette out of her own bag. “Parading around to catch a husband.”

“Darling, Auntie Violet makes Queen Victoria seem progressive.”

Rachel had often felt that way about her own mother. She missed her now, with a sudden, unexpected longing. They had clashed, certainly, but there had always been a leavening humor to her mother's strictures.

And, Rachel realized, her mother might have had more reason to be protective than she knew.

Her mother, more than any, knew the pitfalls that attended a fall from grace—what it was to be used and cast aside, left to a raise a child on one's own.

Cece was still talking. “Aunt Violet fancies herself a maker of men, and since poor Uncle Edward won't let her make anything of him…” Hunching her slender shoulders, Cece leaned forward confidingly. “That's how Aunt Violet caught John for Olivia. She's forever having
little political evenings
. They're deadly but no one has the guts to say no.” She paused, cocking her head to one side. “Still. He's rather a darling, isn't he? If only one could stop him
caring
so.”

It was the caring that Rachel found so attractive. Among all the whirl and confusion, the artifice and lies, there was something reassuringly solid about Mr. Trevannion, who said what he believed and believed what he said. Even when it opened him up to the mockery of exacting men about town.

Rachel held up her cigarette to be lit. “Does Mr. Trevannion know? About Simon?”

“He must do.” A tiny blaze sprung up from Cece's gold lighter; her initials, Rachel saw, had been inset in emeralds in the center. “Unless he dislikes Simon on general principle. Simon does tend to have that effect on people.”

Rachel held her cigarette gingerly between two fingers. “A rather deliberate effect.”

Cece flicked the lid of the lighter shut. “Isn't he a lamb?”

If lambs had fangs. “Have you known Simon long?”

“Since the cradle. His mother bolted with the first of them—the Italian—oh, ages ago. He used to spend his school hols—” With an abrupt movement, Cece craned her neck, searching for the waiter. She flapped a hand to catch his eye. “Be a pet and bring me another of the same?” Leaning toward Rachel, she said, “You haven't said a word about your divine party! You simply must let me help you.”

The sudden change of subject caught Rachel off guard. “I hadn't really thought much about it.”

It had been a spur-of-the-moment idea, although whether she had done it to secure her sister's presence or to impress Mr. Trevannion, she wasn't quite sure.

Either way, it clearly didn't fall into Simon's master plan, whatever that plan might be.

Simon had lied to her. No surprise there. He had practically told her he would. But why? Why pretend he barely knew Lady Olivia?

Fear of showing a weakness, of baring an old scar? Like a magician, he preferred not to show how his tricks were performed; the magician stood imperturbable, garbed in his cape, while doves capered and cooed around him.

“—red scarves over the windows,” Cece was saying. “Like a gypsy caravan.”

Perhaps magician wasn't such a very bad analogy after all. Magicians were masters of misdirection. And so was Simon. All that, about needing material for his column … it might not be entirely untrue, but it couldn't be his main motive.