The Other Daughter (31 page)

He was staring at the doorway, the flickering light of the torches casting an odd orange glow across his face.

“I had opinions on all sorts of things. I was so sure of myself.…”

Ahead of them, an elderly couple decked in orders moved, but Simon was frozen on the stair.

“Well, why didn't you?” Rachel said, hoisting her skirt so she wouldn't trip on her flounces. “Write your history, I mean.”

Simon looked at her as though he'd forgotten she was there. “Why waste time praising the achievements of great men when I could spend my time scribbling the meaningless for the sake of the unmemorable?” The sarcasm in his voice bit like cheap gin, but it wasn't directed at her. He rubbed his gloved hands against his arms, as though he were suddenly cold. “To beguile the times, look like the times.”

The great door loomed above them. Rachel looked sharply at Simon. The August night was cool, but there was sweat beading on his forehead. “Are you all right?”

With an effort, he mustered up a smile that was all teeth and no cheer. “Why wouldn't I be?”

Because he was as nervy as a horse scenting thin ice. It seemed rather an extreme reaction to crashing a party, even such a party as this.

Rachel gave up. “What happens next?”

“What happens,” said Simon, making a good show of pulling himself together, “is that I give our names to that charming personage over there, who will boom them out at the top of his lungs. And then Lord and Lady Ardmore will either shake our hands or boot us out of the party.”

Her father hadn't known her last time. But now, after the pictures … Rachel's fingers lightly touched the brooch at her neck. “What odds would you give us?”

“Aren't you the one with a crystal ball?”

A man in elaborate livery, a long staff in his hand, was leaning forward, inquiring their names. The pins and needles weren't just in Rachel's legs, they were in her hands, too, making her fingers itch and tingle.

“I've retired,” said Rachel shakily.

“Have it your own way,” said Simon. With an arrogant slouch and a pronounced Oxbridge drawl, he gave their names to the man at the door, who banged the ground with his staff, once, twice.

“Mr. Simon Montfort and Miss Vera Merton!”

There was no puff of smoke, no whiff of brimstone, no rush of angry footmen ready to throw them out on their ear.

No one paid the slightest attention.

Behind them, the staff clunked again. “Mr. Harold Conway and Her Most Serene Highness, Princess Sobiesky!”

Rachel glanced uncertainly at Simon. “We're through?”

“The first gate.” The procession twined in front of them, up a great double stair.

It was daunting and mind-boggling, the cream of London society, tottering marquesses and beribboned generals, all queuing for the privilege of wishing Rachel's brother felicitations on the anniversary of his birth. Not that it was really about Jicksy, Rachel realized that. It was about tradition and ceremony and clinging to the old ways.

At the landing, below a vast baroque painting featuring various fleshy, mythological personages, Lord and Lady Ardmore received their guests. Rachel couldn't see much of them, just the glitter of Lady Ardmore's tiara, the glint of her father's glasses, and, between them, a dark head which had to belong to her brother, Jicksy.

“If you'd like,” said Simon quietly, “we can break off now. There's no need to go through the receiving line.”

“Less chance of being discovered?” Simon seemed to have control of himself now. And it was a logical suggestion. But when else might Rachel be sure of coming face-to-face with her father? The filigree border of her brooch rasped against her chin. She lifted her head high. “I wouldn't think of being so rude.”

“When you make up your mind to something, you don't do it by halves, do you?” The look Simon gave her was half rueful, half admiring. “All right. It's your game. Lead on, Macduff.”

Rachel gave a shaky laugh. “You might have chosen a less ill-omened play.”

“Would you have preferred
Hamlet
?” It was a relief to be speaking nonsense again, something to draw her attention away from the reckoning awaiting her at the top of the stairs.

“Isn't there anything that doesn't end with the stage littered with dead bodies?
A Midsummer Night's Dream
,” Rachel picked at random.

Simon raised a brow. “How I am translated?”

Trust Simon to think of that. “Do you really need me to make an ass of you?”

Simon looked down at her, and there was something in his face that made Rachel ache. “No. I do that very well on my own, don't I?”

“I didn't mean—”

“I know.” They were only three couples from the top now. Simon said rapidly, “I don't know if I've done right or wrong in bringing you here, but whatever happens—Oh, bother it.”

Whatever happens. They were two couples from the top now, Lady Ardmore's tiara bobbing above a man's turbaned head as he bowed over her hand. “It was my own choice. All of it. I was the one who twisted your arm, remember?”

The man in the turban and his wife, gorgeously gowned in a silk sari, moved off, leaving only one couple between Rachel and her father.

“Yes, but—” Simon's voice seemed to come from very far away.

Rachel could see her father now. His lips were smiling as he greeted his guests, but the expression failed to convey much in the way of joy. His face looked thinner than when she had last seen him; there were lines beside his eyes. He looked, she thought, like a man convalescing from fever, whittled to a husk, still caught somewhere between sleep and waking.

The people in front of Rachel were moving on, moving away. Her father turned toward them, the set smile of welcome on his lips.

And then his eyes, so distant, so vague, fell on Rachel's brooch and came, for the first time, fully open.

 

TWENTY-ONE

Rachel's chest was tight; she scarcely dared to breathe. There was no one else there; no one else mattered.

Simon's hand was firm on her arm. “Go on,” he murmured.

Rachel went on. She didn't trip on her dress or fall up the stairs. Afterward, she would wonder at that. At the moment, her entire being was focused on her father.

Why couldn't she hate him? Rachel's ears were ringing, the world a dizzying kaleidoscope as her feet tripped blindly forward. She so wanted to hate him. It had been easy to revile him in the abstract, to plot and scheme and ascribe all sorts of dastardly motives, to call him venal and selfish and cruel.

But when she saw him, all of that fell away, as though it had never been, and all she wanted to do was lock her arms around his neck and bury her face in his shoulder, as she had done, so contentedly, so many years ago.

A discreet personage in black leaned forward to murmur something in Lady Ardmore's ear. Their names, Rachel realized.

Lady Ardmore's eyes narrowed on Simon. “Mr. Montfort,” she said, tight-lipped. “I hadn't expected to see you at Carrisford.”

“In the face of such beauty, how could I stay away?” drawled Simon, deliberately outrageous. He bent down low over her hand, giving Rachel time to pull herself together, to put the mask of Vera Merton once more in place.

Feeling raw, exposed, Rachel murmured a conventional word of greeting to Lady Ardmore, who summed her up and dismissed her, all in one unblinking stare.

Jicksy, frankly bored, lounged between his parents. His
Tatler
photos had flattered him. He showed to better advantage in riding kit. In the heat of the hall, his face was florid, his collar tight on a too-thick neck.

Rachel must, she assumed, have spoken to him, too, but she had no recollection later of having done so. He didn't interest her. Her attention was all for her father.

“Lord Ardmore,” said Rachel's lips. What she really meant was
Papa
. “Felicitations on this happy occasion.”

Do you know me? Do you know me now? Do you remember?

So foolish to hope, but she couldn't help it, not now, with the familiar voice in her ears, all the memories flooding back. In her mind's eye, the gray was gone, and the formal costume; he was two feet taller, and the world came alive whenever he came home.

Her father's eyes moved from the brooch to her face, back and forth between the two, a thin line between his brows.

Hesitantly, he said, “Miss…”

“Merton,” Rachel supplied. Would it have been better to have said Woodley? Or was that not a name her father would know?

His eyes flickered between her brooch and her face, like a mathematician struggling to reconcile a recondite equation. “Might I ask—”

“Yes?” Rachel's fingers were digging into Simon's arm, but she hardly noticed.

“Ardmore!” Lady Ardmore deliberately recalled her husband's attention. “You do remember Princess Sobiesky?”

“Yes, most certainly.” Lord Ardmore blinked, and the moment was lost. “Good evening, Miss … Merton.”

No. No, no, no. Rachel balked, stubbornly lingering where she was, but there was Simon's hand on the small of her back, and the press of the crowd driving them forward, inexorably, down the other side of the stairs and through an archway, into a hall where tapestries gave the wood-paneled walls a suitably antiquated air, lacking only a few suits of armor. Rachel followed, blindly, resisting the urge to fall back, to crane her neck to look back over her shoulder.

Might I ask
 …

What?

“We're through,” said Simon, his voice seeming to come from very far away.

“Yes,” Rachel echoed, but her thoughts were still back up the other side of the stair, on the balcony where her father and his wife held court. She forced her attention back to the present. “I thought Lady Ardmore was going to throw you out on your ear.”

“She didn't want to make a scene. Not in front of Princess Sobiesky.” Simon fumbled for his cigarette case, clicking it open and closed, his long fingers restless. “Are you all right?”

Her hands were damp, her pulse racing. She felt unsettled, unsatisfied. “What do we do next?”

“Dance?” said Simon, gesturing toward the broad floor that had been cleared for that purpose.

They were in a vast hall with a mellow beauty that came of long use; it felt as though it had grown rather than been made. No decorator had chosen those pennants that hung from the beamed ceiling or selected the painting of Charles I on horseback that gazed benignly from above the chimneypiece.

The musicians had set up not on a manufactured stage, but in a genuine minstrels' gallery, suspended above them. In the vast space, cleared for dancing, couples looped and twirled to the vibrant strains of a Viennese waltz.

Rachel shook her head. “You can't be serious.”

“Why not? There's nothing else to do until your father finishes receiving.” For all his bold words, Simon seemed edgy, shifting from one foot to the other, his eyes darting around the hall.

It seemed frivolous, somehow. She wasn't here to enjoy the party. And what if her father emerged from his perch? “I don't know.…”

“If nothing else,” Simon said persuasively, “it provides a useful camouflage.”

The violinists lifted their bows. There was an eddy of activity around the dance floor as people searched for their parties, encountered acquaintances, tried to find their partners for the next dance.

“Come.” Simon held out a hand to her, elegant and saturnine in his dark evening clothes, moonstones glimmering on his wrists. “Dance your demons away.”

Rachel tried to tame her nerves, to speak as Vera Merton might. “Is that the proper protocol for dealing with demons?”

“I don't know.” Simon's dark gaze was disarmingly direct. “But I'm willing to try it if you are.”

Why not? Rachel thought defiantly. It would be something to beguile the time.

To beguile the times, look like the times.
… Simon's words echoed through her mind. But that was the danger, wasn't it? Getting pulled into the charade, living the charade, believing the charade.

It was just a dance.

Rachel put her gloved hand into Simon's and let him draw her forward onto the dance floor, into the firm frame of his arms as the first strains of the waltz ebbed around them. Around and around they went, moving in perfect time, in the strange limbo of the dance floor, faces a blur around them, nothing real except Simon's dark shoulders, the curve of his chin, the sandalwood and musk scent of his aftershave.

A familiar voice broke in. “Simon! Miss Merton. I hadn't thought—”

It was Olivia, her cheeks flushed from dancing, a diamond diadem in her blond curls, much smaller than her mother's and a great deal less regal.

Simon swung them to a stop, Rachel's skirts swirling dramatically around her legs. All around them, other couples were bowing, parting. The song had ended, and she had never known.

“Miss Merton! Mr. Montfort!”

Olivia looked almost pretty, her fair hair waved, her cheeks pink, at home at Carrisford as she had never been in London.

Oh, be fair, Rachel told herself. There was no almost about it. Olivia would never be a stunner, but she had her own quiet charm.

Yes, like Little Bo Beep, all pink and white and ruffled.

A momentary hesitation crossed Olivia's face. “I hadn't expected to see you.”

“We crashed,” Simon said baldly.

“Hush.” Rachel poked him in the ribs. “Don't say that so loudly.”

Simon tugged at his tie. “What's the worst that could happen?”

“We might be asked to leave.” And she wasn't ready to go. Not yet.

“What, with the daughter of the house here to vouch for us?” Simon bared his teeth in a smile. Before Rachel could respond, he turned to Olivia. “Where is your
prieux chevalier
?”