The Other Daughter (29 page)

Rachel perched gingerly on the edge of the chair, her legs crossed at the ankle, her hands folded in her lap.

Lady Frances seated herself gracefully on the sofa. Her brows were plucked, her fingers manicured, and she had the strenuous thinness of one who watches her figure. Her movements were as carefully controlled as her appearance.

It all made Rachel exceedingly nervous.

“Yes, Lady Frances?” she said, feeling as though she were ten again, and being asked to account to the headmistress for the presence of a frog in the science tutor's desk.

Lady Frances regarded her rings. “I understand,” she said, “that you had a little party last night.”

“Yes. Cece and I—we planned it together.” What would Vera Merton say? “We wanted something new—something special.”

“Special. Yes, I understand it was that.” Lady Fanny looked away to the side, putting her face in sharp profile. Stripped down to bone, her face was very like Rachel's father's. “Now, let me recall—are you one of Callista's girls? Or one of Penelope's?”

There was a copy of
Debrett's Peerage
on the side table, open to the M's. Rachel was reasonably certain that Lady Fanny knew that she was neither.

“Neither.” Rachel's throat felt very dry. “I'm Katherine's daughter.”

K
and
E
, entwined forever in intricate engraving on her mother's brooch. She couldn't image Lady Frances would have known her mother; it seemed unlikely that her father would have let his sister and his mistress meet.

Lady Frances lifted her manicured brows. “I don't recall a Katherine among the Montforts.”

Rachel lifted her chin. “It is a very distant connection.” The width of a bar sinister. Glibly, she reverted to their prepared story. “My mother's health wasn't all it could be … so I have spent most of the past decade on the Continent.”

“So I have been told.” Lady Frances's voice was politely dismissive. Smoothly, swiftly, she went on the attack. “I did not realize that fortune-telling was among your talents, Miss Merton.”

Was that what this was all about? If so, she couldn't blame Rachel any more than Rachel blamed herself.

“I am so very sorry about what happened last night. I had no idea that Cece—” Under that cool, blue gaze, Rachel found herself scrambling for poise. “It was just a bit of silliness—a bit of fun. We were just playing at card reading. I'd found a pamphlet, you see—”

Rachel might not have spoken. Lady Fanny made a show of examining her perfectly groomed nails, before saying meditatively, “My Cecelia is a very sensitive girl—and a very trusting one. I should hate to see her taken advantage of.” She smiled pleasantly at Rachel. “I trust we understand each other?”

Rachel stared at her aunt. “Oh, but of course! That is—”

“I am so glad we had this little chat.” Lady Fanny rose, smoothing her smart skirt down over her knees. “I am afraid Cecelia won't be able to see you. The doctor was forced to give her a rather strong sedative.”

It wasn't a pretty image. Rachel could see Cece as she had been last night, half wild with years of suppressed grief.

Clumsily, she rose from the chair. “Please, do give her my best wishes. I hope she feels better soon.”

“She will.” There was steel beneath Lady Fanny's polished facade. “As soon as she is well enough to travel, Cecelia will be visiting friends in Switzerland.”

“I see.” Rachel felt all at sea, not sure what to say.

“The Alpine air is so very good for her.” There was no mistaking Lady Frances's meaning as she added smoothly, “Will you be staying long in London, Miss Merton?”

“No,” said Rachel. She wanted to defend herself, but she wasn't sure how. Lady Frances was right; she was a fraud. She just wasn't that sort of fraud. “I'm to join my mother—in Latin America—in a fortnight.”

“Latin America?” Her point made, Lady Frances could afford to be generous. She regarded Rachel with an air of faint amusement. “How very … exotic. I trust you will leave Cecelia your forwarding address. She will be so interested to hear of your adventures abroad.”

With that parting shot, Lady Frances turned to go, leaving Rachel standing by the sofa, her face frozen, feeling like a charlatan in her fashionable clothes.

It's not like that, Rachel wanted to say. She had never wanted money. She hadn't meant to use Cece.…

Except she had.

She hadn't thought of Cece as a person. She was a convenience, a means to an end, a faintly comical character. She had never stopped to think that Cece might have feelings of her own.

Rachel bit down hard on her lower lip, so hard that she could taste the tang of blood in her mouth.

“Lady Frances?” Her aunt paused in the doorway. Rachel took a half step forward, her hands clasped at her waist. “You will tell Cece I hope she feels more the thing?”

This time, Lady Frances's smile reached her eyes. “I shall.” Casually, too casually for it to be an afterthought, she added, “Sneller will show you out. Good-bye, Miss Merton.”

“Good-bye,” Rachel echoed.

The door clicked quietly shut behind her aunt. Rachel breathed in deeply, the blood pounding in her temples.

Words from
Hamlet
echoed through her memory.
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?
She was nothing to Lady Frances, nothing but an imposter. Blood didn't call to blood; it didn't even whisper. To Lady Frances, she was nothing but a nuisance. Worse than a nuisance, a threat to Cece's health and happiness.

A bottom-crawling feeder off the weak and wealthy.

And what was she, really? Following Sneller for the final time down the staircase, through the Moorish Hall, and down the front steps of Heatherington House, Rachel forced herself to take stock. In the name of justice, she was living in Simon's mother's flat, wearing Simon's sister's clothes, dining out on Cece's tab at the Ritz, drinking Tommy Digby's champagne—or whoever else happened to be paying.

She might not have meant it, but that was what she had become: an expensive freeloader.

What had happened to the Rachel who had always prided herself on paying her own way?

She didn't know herself anymore, and she wasn't sure she liked the self she had become.

It was time to end it.

She would do what she ought to have done from the beginning; she would go straight to the source, to her father, in the one place she was sure he could be found.

 

NINETEEN

Simon didn't pick up the phone at his flat.

He had a club, Rachel knew, but she had never bothered to ascertain which or where it was. Not that it mattered. No self-respecting club would allow her through the doors, and not because of her birth or her choice of hat. Unless it was ladies' day, she could knock until she was red in the fist and it would do no good.

Rachel tried the flat again. Nothing.

The receptionist at the
Daily Yell
was extremely irate at being interrupted in the midst of varnishing her nails. Did Miss Merton expect her to be Mr. Montfort's social secretary? Didn't she have enough to do with getting Mr. Allerton's tea, and typing Mr. O'Connell's copy, and—Oh, all right. He was meant to be covering three parties that night. The receptionist rattled off a series of names and addresses. Rachel decided to start with Colonel McEachran's house in Brook Street; it was the closest to her flat, and the names on the invitation were ones she recognized.

It took her little time to dress; she had it down to an art by now. On with the cocktail frock, slick on the lipstick, slide into the heels, grab up her bag, and dash for a taxi. Strange how quickly one's routines changed, how rapidly the exotic became mundane.

There was no one to answer when Rachel rang the bell. She was hardly surprised. A gramophone was playing, the high blare warring with the chatter of a hundred excited voices. Letting herself in, she threaded through the throng, past an overturned hatstand and a spilled drink.

Gratefully, she spotted Brian Howard. It was always easy to find Brian; he held his pack of cigarettes in one hand so as not to ruin the cut of his suit, gesturing with them as he spoke.

Rachel tapped him on the shoulder. “Brian, have you seen—”

But it wasn't Brian at all. The quirk in the brow had been drawn on by eye-black rather than nature, and the broad grin was nothing like Brian's usual supercilious smirk.

“Like it? It's the eyebrows that do it,” said Tom Driberg's voice from Brian's mouth. “If you're looking for Brian, you'll find him dressed as a German painter. Who are you meant to be?”

“Who am—” Belatedly, a memory of the receptionist's nasal voice, reeling off the details from the invitation, penetrated her brain. The Brook Street affair was an Impersonation Party, come as anyone you like. At random, Rachel said, “Oh, I've come as my last week's self. You haven't seen Simon Montfort, have you?”

“
Daily Yell
? Last I saw, he was dancing with Tallulah Bankhead.”

“The real one, or someone pretending to be Tallulah?” Rachel demanded, but Driberg didn't answer.

He was too busy greeting an acquaintance with an approximation of Brian's distinctive drawl. “M-m-my d-d-dear!”

Giving up, Rachel turned with a tinkle of beads, weaving her way through the dizzying crowd, searching for Simon. It was like being in the midst of a kaleidoscope, everything turned on its head, nothing quite as it seemed. Elizabeth Ponsonby's whinnying laugh issued forth from under the sleek, red head of Iris Tree; Brenda Dean Paul, dancing past, turned out not to be Brenda at all, but a very sulky Olivia Plunkett-Greene, already several sheets to the wind and spoiling for a fight. The air was thick with perfume and spilled cocktails, adding to the general miasma of confusion.

“Simon!” He was there, dancing with Tallulah Bankhead, the real Tallulah, dressed like a French tennis star in jersey and beret, but still, unmistakably, Tallulah.

As for Simon, in defiance of the invitation, he hadn't bothered to come as anyone else. Instead, he wore the black-and-white garb of the harlequin, his face painted white, his mask dangling from one hand.

Rachel gestured at him over Tallulah's beret. Simon leaned forward to whisper something in the actress's ear, and she gave him a playful push, followed by a long kiss on the lips.

Queen Marie of Romania, Stephen Tennant under white face paint and pearls, applauded languidly.

Rachel narrowed her eyes.

Unconcerned, Simon sauntered toward her, dodging George Sitwell in a false nose and one of Cece's friends in a bathing costume and very little else.

“You're meant to be in costume,” he said.

“I am,” said Rachel impatiently. “I'm impersonating Miss Vera Merton. Lady Frances is sending Cece to Switzerland.”

In a leisurely fashion, Simon inspected the back of his mask. Now that Rachel was closer, she could see why he wasn't wearing it. The string had broken.

He shrugged. “It won't be the first time.”

Rachel stared at him. “She had a breakdown. They had to give her a sedative.”

Simon tossed the useless mask aside. “I know. I was there. It wasn't pleasant. It never is.”

Rachel could see, beneath his makeup, the faint trace of hollows beneath Simon's eyes, but there was no other sign of feeling in his face.

“Did you know—you knew that she had had these incidents before? You knew and yet you let me go through with that—that performance?”

“It was a Crystal Ball and Bottle party,” said Simon sarcastically. “It was not unforeseeable that someone would contrive to tell fortunes.”

Rachel wanted to shake him. “You might have told me about Peter.”

“Did you imagine that yours was the only family tragedy in Britain?” he said tightly. “Ah, thank you.” Simon accepted a cup off the tray of a passing waiter and drained it without bothering to examine the contents.

Rachel waved the waiter aside. “That's not fair. I'm not a mind reader. I'm not even a card reader. You might—you
ought
—to have told me.” How could he stand so still, look so supercilious? Rachel's voice broke. “If you cared at all—But, then, you don't, do you? It's all just a game, all of it, and all of us your pawns, there to make good copy. What does it matter if Cece has a breakdown? It's nothing to you—not so long as it makes for a paragraph in the
Daily Yell
.
Society Girl's Breakdown, the exclusive on page five
.”

She turned to go, but Simon's hand clamped down, hard, over her wrist.

In a clipped, toneless voice, he said, “From the time I was seven years old, I spent holidays with Peter. My mother had bolted; my father didn't want anything of my mother's get. Peter's home was my home, his sister was my sister.” There was something in his eyes, something dark and dangerous. Rachel could feel his fingers digging into her wrist before he suddenly, abruptly, let go. He took a step back, his eyes dark in his white face. “Tell me again that I don't care.”

Rachel's hand closed reflexively over her wrist, her mind muddled. There was such depth of emotion there. It made her feel small. Small and defensive.

“If you care,” she blustered, “why don't you do anything?”

“If someone wants to go to the devil,” said Simon shortly, “he will. There's nothing one can do about it.”

“You mean like Peter Heatherington-Vaughn?”

In the midst of all the noise and motion, there was a horrible stillness. Simon's black and white stood out starkly against the gaily garbed throng.

“You know nothing about it.” Simon's words might have been chiseled from ice.

No, she didn't, because no one had bloody told her anything.

Rachel fumbled to remember what John had said in the cab last night. “I know that the war did horrible things to people. I know that Peter”—she hesitated over the name, this man she had never known, but was so closely connected to her—“that Peter was one of those men. It's not surprising that he should bear the scars of what he had seen. Which is why it's so terribly important that we keep such things from happening again.”