The Other Daughter (37 page)

She wished, desperately, that she had paid more attention, that she had lifted her head and looked up.

“It has haunted me since—if I had only come home when I intended—if I hadn't stayed that extra fortnight.” Her father's face was haggard, trapped in the same nightmare he had revisited year after year after year. “David sent me a telegram. I came as quickly as I could, but there was nothing there. Just the charred wreckage. And your doll—”

“We were in Norfolk.” Rachel's head came up. “David?”

“My cousin.” Her father was slumped in his seat. There was nothing of the earl about him now; just a tired, aging man with loss stamped in the lines of his face. “He was the only one who knew—about your mother. We were inseparable as children, Katherine, David, and I. I tried to see him last week, but he wasn't in college.”

No. He wouldn't be.

David knew. David knew that they weren't dead. He should know; he had bought Rachel enough ices over the years. He'd sent her presents on her birthday, listened to her childish stories, read her books.

And, yet, it appeared that he had told Rachel's father that she had perished in a fire twenty-three years ago.

Her father's voice broke through the nasty suspicions gathering in Rachel's mind. “You said—last night. You said your mother was dead.”

Rachel gathered her scattered thoughts together. “Yes, this past April. It was the Spanish influenza.”

“It seems impossible to think that all this while, she was alive, and I never knew. I never imagined…” Her father removed his glasses, rubbing them on his sleeve, his thoughts somewhere far away. “I wasn't quite in my right mind. Not after seeing—” He shook his head as though shaking off the memories.

The fire. The doll.

How could Cousin David have been so unspeakably cruel?

Rachel leaned forward, her hand almost touching her father's. “But it wasn't real, any of it.”

“No,” said her father, and, tentatively, took her hand in his. For a moment, he held it very, very tightly, before letting go. “It might have been my father's doing. I hadn't thought he knew; we thought we had been so very careful. But he might have found out.… Not that it matters now.”

If Cousin David had lied to her father, what might he have told her mother? Had her mother spent all of those years convinced that Rachel's father had abandoned them? She would have been too proud to write, too proud to beg for explanations.

There was too much to think about; she would have to mull it through later, after her father was gone.

“She never forgot you.” Rachel wasn't sure what prompted her to say it. Perhaps the desolation on her father's face. That fleeting pressure of his hand. “She would never hear of marrying.”

“No,” said her father, half to himself, “she wouldn't.” He looked up at Rachel. “Please—there is so much I missed. Will you tell me what you can? Where you lived? What your lives were?”

“There isn't much to tell,” said Rachel. “We lived in a village in Norfolk called Netherwell.…”

Haltingly, Rachel began to sketch in the details of their lives, the village fetes, the piano lessons, her mother's weekly chess match with the vicar, her adventures with Alice, the pronouncements of Mrs. Spicer.

The sun slanted across the drawing room floor before slinking back below the roofs of the buildings across the way. The sky was dusted with twilight and Rachel was still talking, stories upon stories: her mother's clever managing of Mrs. Spicer, so that Mrs. Spicer thought she was managing them; the matter of piano lessons; their battles over the question of typing lessons; Rachel's departure for Paris. So many memories, good and bad and in between.

Through them, Rachel could feel her mother taking shape again, but with a difference. There were missing pieces that made sense now. Her father's picture in the drawer. Her mother's reserve. The care she took of their reputations.

Rachel could even understand, reluctantly, why her mother might not have wanted to tell her, might have wanted her to keep her illusions. The life her mother had built for them had been harder won than Rachel knew.

What must it have cost her, night after night, knowing that the man she had loved was married to another woman? Believing that he had left her?

As Rachel's stories tailed off, her father shifted in his chair. “You were happy.”

It wasn't quite a question, but Rachel thought about it anyway.

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose we were.”

It had been quite romantic to imagine her life blighted by the absence of a father, but the truth of it was that the day to day of her life had been quite content.

“And you?” Rachel asked hesitantly.

It felt odd to be thinking about her father's happiness, when she had spent the past few months hating him so. It also felt odd to think of one's parents as people, independent of oneself, people who might be happy or unhappy.

Her father looked as though it hadn't quite occurred to him, either. “They have been good years for Carrisford. There was so much that had been left to fall into disrepair. The first few years, I did what I could to stem the damage. But, after that—”

He talked about pig breeding and haymaking and new machinery and old feuds among the tenantry, and Rachel smiled and nodded and wondered where, in the midst of it, his wife and children belonged.

They didn't, it seemed.

“You sit in the Lords?” Rachel ventured. The intimacy of their earlier discussion was gone. It was rather like sitting next to a stranger at a dinner party.

“When I must. I prefer to be at Carrisford, when I can. I don't like to trust it to an agent.” That was what Simon had told her, half a lifetime ago. Her father glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Is that the time? I should have been back an hour ago.”

Automatically, Rachel stood. There was so much more that she needed to ask, so much more that had to be said, but he was the earl again, and she found herself feeling oddly shy with him, this father she didn't know at all.

“Thank you for stopping by,” she said, her hand clasped at her waist like a schoolgirl. “It—makes rather a difference.”

Her father retrieved his hat from the table. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it does.”

They looked at each other across the dusky drawing room. “There's no going back,” said Rachel. “Is there?”

“When I lost you,” said her father, “you were only four. I am still coming to terms with … this.”

“And you have another family.” There it was, the elephant in the room.

“Yes,” said her father, but he spoke as though the thought of it brought him little pleasure.

They were at the door now. Rachel paused, with her hand on the knob.

“I know this isn't my place, but … why didn't you let Olivia go to Somerville?” Rachel's father looked at her with an air of vague puzzlement. “She told me she was awarded a scholarship.”

“Was she? I wasn't told. I suppose her mother…” Her father made an apologetic gesture. “I am afraid I don't have very much to do with Olivia.”

Strange to think she had been so jealous of Olivia once, had seen the picture of her being escorted by her father and assumed that Olivia had everything Rachel had lost.

Haltingly, Rachel said, “It isn't my affair, but … her mother seems to bully her, rather. I would think, having lost one daughter … Never mind.” She opened the door, stepping aside so her father could go. “It really isn't any of my affair.”

Her father settled his hat on his head, casting his face into shadow. “It was necessary,” he said, with difficulty, “that I have an heir. I understood that. But … it was a duty. They were a duty. And when that first child was a girl…”

He stopped in the doorway, looking back over his shoulder at Rachel, his face a picture of regret.

“Olivia committed one unpardonable crime. She wasn't you.”

 

TWENTY-FIVE

Her father could be lying. But Rachel didn't think so. That sorrow had been too raw, too real to be feigned.

All these years, her father had believed her dead. Rachel couldn't quite get her mind around it. The more she learned, the less made sense, all of her easy assumptions and judgments scoured away.

She stood with her hand on the doorknob, long after her father's footsteps had retreated down the hall and the sound of the lift had faded away. Rachel leaned her forehead against the cool white panels of the door. She wanted, so very badly, to be angry, but she couldn't quite seem to manage it. All she could feel was a vast and all-encompassing bewilderment.

Why would someone have gone to such effort, such hideous and decisive effort, to keep her parents apart? There was something particularly chilling about the thought of that fire, despised Amelia lying scorched and blackened on the singed turf. Arson wasn't a business undertaken lightly.

His father, her father had said. Slowly, Rachel retreated to the sitting room, where the white sofa still bore the imprint of her father's body. Yes, she could see how Violet Palmer's money might have been a powerful inducement to her grandfather. But there it was—the sticking point. Why would David help him?

Turning on the lamps, drawing the curtains against the dusk, she couldn't wrap her mind around it; no matter how she turned it around and around, the pieces wouldn't quite fit. But then, Rachel reminded herself, all she knew of this version of events, the fire itself, came from her father. He had seemed genuinely shaken—but what did she really know of him, after all this time?

The fire could be easily enough checked. There must be records in the local papers if she could only recall the name of the village. And—with the memory of her father's stricken face—she really didn't think he was lying. Not about the fire, at any event.

But what if there had been other considerations? Her father had said he meant to come back to them. Had he really? What had been in that letter? Had Cousin David whisked them away to prevent her mother having to see the man she loved marry another woman?

A nice, altruistic motive, that, Rachel mocked herself, but it was hard to imagine Cousin David acting quite so positively, quite so aggressively.

Cousin David had always been a pale second to her mother's energy, a follower rather than a leader. His small acts of initiative consisted of slipping Rachel the odd shilling and hesitant suggestions of expeditions to places he thought might be of interest to small girls, some of which were, and many of which weren't. The Bodleian was all very well, Rachel was sure, but it had bored her silly, especially when Cousin David became absorbed in a manuscript and forgot about her entirely.

Impossible to imagine Cousin David as either villain or henchman.

Unless he was an unwilling henchman? Rachel paused, her hand on the drapes. It was absurd, a plot out of a serial in a magazine, but what if the old Earl of Ardmore—impossible to think of him as Grandfather—had found out about them, had intended, summarily, to put an end to his son's other family? The thought made Rachel feel more than a little ill. They hadn't been people to him, merely encumbrances.

If David had somehow heard of the earl's intentions, surely that, then, would be in character. He wouldn't have had the nerve to prevent it, just enough to shuffle them out in time, making sure the house was empty when the earl's minions did their worst, hurrying them away to a new life lest the earl try again.

Yes, and if she believed that, there were some pigs' glands waiting for injection.

Why not? Her life had certainly been fantastical enough recently. If she went on in that vein, there were all sorts of other plots she might pursue. Perhaps her mother was secretly the crown princess of a minor European principality and they had been burned out by angry anarchists.

Rachel smiled sourly. She had descended so far down into absurdity, she wasn't sure how to sort out the plausible from the impossible.

What she needed was Simon, Simon stretching his long length out on the white sofa, anchoring her thoughts, cutting through her more ridiculous notions with biting wit.

Rachel's hand twitched toward the phone, and then fell away again.

Stay at the flat as long as you need.

No, she couldn't ring Simon. Rachel felt a flush of shame at her own selfishness. She had taken his help for granted, ascribing him all sorts of ignoble motives so that she wouldn't have to be grateful, wouldn't have to acknowledge the extent of her own dependence on him.

When she thought what it must have cost him to take her to Carrisford last night—and then—in the garden—

Was it weakness in her that she wished she had given Simon another answer?

What she needed, Rachel decided vigorously, was to go to Oxford and ask Cousin David right out. No nonsense about ringing; he never answered his phone anyway. But it was gone eight; there would be no trains to Oxford at this hour, and, even if there were, she could hardly knock Cousin David up at midnight. Suggs would be appalled.

A crazy laugh bubbled up in Rachel's throat. After all this, one still wouldn't want to shock the Merton porter.

Bourgeois, murmured Simon's voice in her ear, but it sounded like an endearment.

Stupid to hope Simon might be up at Oxford tomorrow, too, saying farewell to his old tutor before he left for New York, brushing past her on that narrow stair as he had once before. That rainy day in April felt like a lifetime ago, a story about a different person entirely.

Rachel caught the earliest possible train out to Oxford the next morning, clanking with milk jugs and bleary-eyed travelers.

Cousin David's door was sporting the oak, but Rachel decided there were times when tradition could be honored in the breach. She didn't think she could bear to wait another day, or even another hour, endless speculation buzzing around her brain like a swarm without a hive.