The Other Daughter (20 page)

It all came back to her sister. To Lady Olivia. Lady Olivia, whom he had instructed her to befriend.

But on Simon's terms. In his way.

Was he, after all these years, still hoping to win Lady Olivia's hand? There was something less than convincing about the notion of Simon, prickly, polished, self-assured Simon, creeping hat in hand as suitor, especially to such a one as Lady Olivia. One might take Cece's opinions with a full shaker of salt, but there was no denying that Lady Olivia lacked presence. She was like a whisper of breath in a still room, nothing more than a quiver in the air, as soft as chiffon, as insubstantial as the trail of smoke from a spent candle.

Doubt pricked Rachel. It would be convenient to think of her sister as a nonentity—but there had been those little flashes of something else. A look, a turn of phrase, a trick of inflection. Something that could catch and hold the affections of such disparate men as Simon Montfort and Mr. Trevannion.

Yes, said a cynical voice in her head. It was called being the daughter of an earl.

The legitimate daughter of an earl.

It wasn't fair to dislike Olivia merely because she was their father's daughter. No—she disliked her because she was cold and stilted, because she had looked through Rachel, because her very voice sang of snobbery. Not the honest, prattling snobbery of Cece, but a snobbery all the deeper for being so quiet; a complete lack of interest in anyone not of her world.

“I've told Stephen Tennant he must dress as a wizened old crone,” Cece was saying. She had moved on from decoration to costume. “He's simply too pretty otherwise.”

“Mmm,” said Rachel, and nodded her thanks to the waiter as he set a second cocktail in front of her. Cece, not the least bit visibly impaired, was on her third, in what appeared to be an entirely liquid lunch.

Seven years seemed a very long time to carry a torch.

“—a month Tuesday, I think. We can't possibly have it any sooner. Late July. Or early August. But it would have to be before the twelfth or no one will be left in town.…”

But was it a very long time to wait for revenge? It was so obvious Rachel couldn't believe she hadn't seen it before. Pride, Cece had said. The Montforts were rotten with it. Simon might play at self-mockery, but Rachel would wager he was as proud as the rest.

Not love, but pride, quoth she
 …

“Do you think he was truly in love with her?” Rachel asked abruptly. “Simon, I mean. With Olivia.”

Cece's plucked brows rose high on her forehead. “Simon? In love? My dear!”

Rachel forced a laugh. “I must be a romantic.”

“How too sweet,” said Cece, with withering scorn. “Next you'll be reading poetry like poor Livvy.”

“The Lady of Shalott,”
Simon had said. Rachel only vaguely remembered it from school, the Lady standing by her tower window, watching the world go by, until the curse came upon her and the web crack'd wide.
Singing in her song she died
.

All for love.

She wondered, abstractedly, what Simon's plans were. His real ones. The ones he hadn't confided to her. It would be romantic to think that she was meant to woo her half-sister on his behalf with Victorian poetry, an unlikely and unwitting Cyrano. Rachel doubted it was anything so sweet.

He wanted her in Olivia's confidence—but for what? To act as go-between? To draw her into a compromising situation?

It would not, Rachel imagined, look very good for her father if his daughter publicly broke off her engagement to run off with a gossip columnist, albeit one of unimpeachably blue blood.

If Simon wanted revenge on the Earl of Ardmore, wouldn't it just be simplest to sell Rachel's story to the papers? He didn't even need to sell it; he
was
the paper. All he had to do was plant little hints and innuendos, or, if he wanted his own hands clean, whisper hints into the ears of the right people.

Why hadn't he?

She wasn't sure to what extent her interest and Simon's were aligned. She didn't want revenge, not really. What she wanted was …

Well, she wasn't entirely sure. She wanted to know what happened all those years ago. Why her father had left them. If he had ever thought of them, missed them.

Did he love Lady Olivia as much as he had seemed, once, to love Rachel?

Did he sit across from Lady Ardmore at the breakfast table and imagine Rachel's mother into her seat?

“Do you know,” said Rachel slowly, “I feel rather sorry for Lady Olivia. She does seem to live a bit of a cloistered life, doesn't she? Someone really ought to stage a rescue operation, draw her out a bit.”

“Auntie Violet would have fits.” Cece's pale-blue eyes glittered. She dropped her cigarette into her glass, where it fizzed out with a hiss. “And then again, Auntie Violet would have fits. It's just about that time, isn't it? Let's invite ourselves to tea.”

Once Cece had made up to her mind to something, she was every bit as autocratic as her mother. Rachel found herself swept along in Cece's wake, through the Ritz, into a taxi, to Eaton Square, where, crane her head though she might, she couldn't see much of the facade other than stone, stone, stone, and more stone, and then up the stony stairs into a hall floored with marble and humid with potted palms.

The ground floor of Ardmore House possessed none of the arabesque grandeur of the great hall of Heatherington House. There was something very boxy about the hall. Admittedly, a very large box, but a box all the same, cold with marble and heavy with oak.

“Hullo, Hutton,” said Cece, favoring the butler with her smile and her jacket, which she dropped into his outstretched hands. “Tea in the library? You needn't announce us. I know the way.”

She flashed another smile over her shoulder, dragging Rachel behind her up the slippery oak stairs. “Darling Hutton,” she murmured to Rachel. “I used to be half afraid of him as a child, but he's really just a paper tiger. All teeth and no bite.”

The walls were thick with pictures, piled one on top of the other, but they were landscapes and flower studies.

What did she expect? Rachel mocked herself. Portraits of her ancestors? A lady in Elizabethan garb who was her spitting image?

Instead, the only portrait loomed at the head of the stairs, a self-satisfied woman in the costume of a quarter century ago, blazing with diamonds and triumph, from the tiara on her head to the large hoops of glittering stones on her fingers.

“Auntie Violet,” murmured Cece. “Ghastly, isn't it?”

The Countess of Ardmore had certainly staked her claim. She had been slimmer then, but she still gave an impression of solidity. She was posed like a conquering general, feet planted firmly on the ground, chin up, her gaze seeming to dare the viewer to attempt to move her.

Had she known? It was a distinctly unsettling thought. Rachel hadn't spared much thought before for her father's wife. But now, she wondered. There was something so belligerent about that hard, blue stare.

The money came from the countess, Simon had said. Had that been the price her father had paid?

She was, Rachel realized, trying to find excuses for her father. It was a plot out of a fairy tale, the evil stepmother exiling the lost princess, sending her into the woods with a huntsman with an ax, or a poisoned apple, or whatever else it was that evil stepmothers were meant to do.

And what about the fathers in those stories? Where were they? Why had they never put their foot down?

The doors at the end of the gallery were half open. Through them, Rachel caught a glimpse of shelves heavy with books, leather bound, crimson, navy, green, brown, well worn and well read, the titles chased in gold worn almost away from the spines. The drapes were red velvet, tied with gold tassels.

There was something almost medieval about the large fireplace, with its broad stone cap. Before it, a tea tray had been set: a pot poised above a small spirit lamp, cake and sandwiches. Only one cup had been used. It sat on a small table beside a large winged chair.

Breezing gaily through the door, Cece sang out, “Livvy, darling! Prepare to be diverted!”

But it wasn't Lady Olivia sitting in the chair by the cold fire.

It was a man who rose from behind the chair. His fair hair had thinned; his gray eyes were obscured behind a pair of reading glasses. But even so, even across twenty-odd years, across the long room, there was no mistaking him.

“Uncle Edward!” Cece exclaimed. “Mummy never told me you'd come to town.”

 

THIRTEEN

“Cece, child.” Rachel's father set down the sheaf of papers he was holding and came around the chair to kiss his niece. “I didn't hear Hutton announce you.”

Rachel stood in the shadow of the door, paralyzed, from her throat down to her toes, which stayed stubbornly planted on that one spot, like one of those nightmares where one couldn't speak and couldn't move; one could only stare and stare.

She would have known him anywhere, even with the spectacles, even with the gray that silvered his once fair hair. In her memories, he loomed large, tall next to her petite mother, a giant who could fling Rachel up in his arms and bring her safely to earth again; in the flesh, he seemed smaller, slighter than she remembered, his shoulders rounded from reading. Or maybe it was just the dusty grandeur of the library that made him seem small in comparison, in a way their tiny cottage never could.

But it wasn't the signs of time and change that made the words clog in her throat. It wasn't even that familiar shadow of a scar on his clean-shaven chin. It was the movement of his hand as he peeled off his spectacles, left to right, and tucked them into his pocket; a quirk of inflection; the lift of a brow. All of those tiny gestures that we see without ever seeing; the indefinable somethings that make up a character, so impossible to catch on film, so hard to translate into words, as unique and indelible as a fingerprint.

“Oh, Hutton,” said Cece with a wave of her hand. “You know how he hates climbing stairs.”

“You mean,” said Rachel's father, with amused resignation, “that you didn't give him the opportunity.”

The words washed over her, leaving only the familiar cadences in their wake, the same voice that used to read her bedtime stories and sing her silly songs. There was one, in particular, about a little warthog. How she had clamored for that warthog! And he had sung it, again and again and again, all through the long, cold nights.

Her mother had tried to sing it, later, but Rachel had turned her face away. It wasn't the same. She didn't sing it
right
.

It was dizzying, disorienting, seeing the man in front of her, overlaid with those images of long ago; that same smile, that same crinkle around the corners of the eyes, even if the crinkles were deeper, the eyes more tired than she remembered.

Papa
.

The word resonated in her ears, so strongly that she feared she had blurted it out, that it was echoing around the wood paneling and crimson drapes, the ordered rows of books and the busts on their pedestals.

For a moment, she was a child again, and her father was going on a trip, just a short trip, not to worry, he would be back before she knew he was gone, and, oh, how she didn't want him to go, Papa, Papa, Papa …

And he had lifted her in his arms and held her close, just that one last time, his nose buried in her neck, blowing to make her giggle before setting her down again, smiling at her mother over her head.

As though everything were all right, as though everything would go on being just the way it was.

“You never told us you were coming to town,” Cece was saying.

You never told us you were leaving forever.

Rachel felt like a leaf in a strong wind, shivering and trembling. Inside. In the hidden bit that was Rachel Woodley.

In the mirror, she could see Miss Vera Merton, her bobbed hair perfectly arranged, her crimson-lipped face as smooth as the priceless porcelain pieces on the mantel. There was something chilling about that image. Like looking into a lie.

It brought her forcibly back to the present. She wasn't a child anymore, braids flying, ready to run into her father's arms. She was here under false pretenses, to confront the father who had left her all those years ago.

“—just for a few days,” her father was saying, and something about a debate in the Lords.

Rachel's fingers prickled with fear and anticipation. How to make her presence known, what to say? Did she blurt it right out? Or edge around it?

For now, it was enough to stand in the shadows, to catch her breath. She had thought, after seeing all the clippings, after speaking to Simon, that she was prepared for this, prepared to see her father. She would be, she had decided, contained and cool. She would hold out a gloved hand and say coolly, “Hello, Father. Remember me?”

But nothing had prepared her for this, for the aching familiarity that crashed and washed over her, turned her into a child again, with a child's love and a child's hurt, as if it had been only days since he had gone and everything might be made right by his flinging her up into the air and catching her close again.

“Heavens, I nearly forgot! Vera, darling, do forgive?” Cece wafted a hand in her direction, all fluid charm. “Uncle Edward, may I present my friend Miss Vera Merton?”

As in a dream, Rachel moved forward, her legs surprisingly steady, her feet, in their elegant heeled shoes, soundless on the timeworn Axminster rug.

Her father turned in her direction, held out a hand. “How do you do, Miss Merton.”

“Lord Ardmore.” Rachel's voice sounded strange to her ears, husky and foreign.

She lifted her eyes to his, the same eyes as his, Standish eyes, Simon had called them. Light-lashed on her father and Olivia, dark-lashed on her, but Standish eyes all the same. Her breath was tight in her chest as she waited, waited for some sign, some small flicker of recognition, of confusion.