The Other Daughter (5 page)

At the time, a confused four-year-old, she hadn't understood that flurried move. Now, Rachel thought she might. The ghost of her father would have been everywhere, in the garden, on the stair. Easier to start fresh than live with the memories.

Rachel had known, without being told, that she wasn't meant to ask about her father, that to do so would only bring that set look to her mother's face.

It must, she realized now, have been terribly hard. She remembered the affection between her parents: the way their hands touched as they passed, the looks that said more than words, the love and care they had lavished so freely on her. All gone, so quickly. And her mother had taken her and moved on. As she must move on.

Tentatively, Rachel crossed the hall on stocking feet, to her mother's door. It opened with the old familiar squeak. The bed had been hastily made, the counterpane pulled up crookedly over the pillows. Someone had aired the room, but there was still the lingering smell of the sickroom, camphor and stale sweat.

Oh, Mother.

Without thinking, Rachel went to her mother's bed, as she had all those years ago, after her father had died. She had been all right during the day, but late at night, when the unfamiliar dark of their new home closed around her, she had needed the assurance of her mother's body beside her, needed to touch her and smell her lavender scent, in the physical assurance that she was still there.

There was a lump in her throat, a lump twenty-three years old. The bed had seemed so high when Rachel was little. Wearily, Rachel curled into the hollow left by her mother's body, wrapping her arms around the pillow.

Something crinkled beneath her fingers.

Startled, Rachel sat up, dislodging the pillow and sending the paper, whatever it was, fluttering to the floor. It wasn't a letter. The paper was thin and glossy, the sort of paper one found in expensive magazines. It had been folded; on the side facing up, Rachel could see an advertisement for Turkish cigarettes.

Her mother didn't smoke. She would have been horrified at the very idea. Unless—perhaps it was something that Jim had accidentally dropped beneath her pillow? Yes, because doctors so frequently inserted bits of magazine beneath their patients. Leaning over, Rachel fished up the page, shaking it open.

Her father stared up at her in grainy black and white.

Rachel blinked, hard, but the picture was still there. She smoothed it out against the counterpane with hands that weren't entirely steady, wondering if she were seeing things. How long had it been since she had slept? Years, it seemed like, if one didn't count the odd doze on the train, her head jerking against her chest. Perhaps she was asleep now, asleep and imagining that she had reached beneath her mother's pillow, found this odd, odd picture of her father.

It all had the curious unreality of a dream: the picture, the image flattened by the glare of a flash; the discreet block letters at the upper right-hand corner of the page, which proclaimed the paper
THE TATLER
. That in itself was odd enough. The only paper her mother ever read was
The Morning Post
.
The Tatler
was for other people, people who followed society and its doings.

And the picture itself … the picture was her father and not her father. Tall like her father, yes, with the fair hair that Rachel hadn't inherited and the deep-set gray eyes that she had. There were the gold-rimmed spectacles, the slightly stooped posture.

There was even the slight shadow of a scar on his chin. She remembered running her fingers along that scar as a child, feeling the curious ridge of it.

But this man was older, older than her father had ever lived to be. As old, in fact, as he would have been if he had lived. And he was dressed as Rachel had never seen him, in evening clothes, a white scarf around his neck, a tall hat on his head, the ribbon of an order shimmering on his breast, and a fair-haired young woman on his arm.

The caption beneath the picture read,
Lady Olivia Standish, escorted by her father, the Earl of Ardmore.

The date was December 1926. Only five months ago.

 

THREE

The paper crinkled beneath Rachel's palms.

Her father … and yet not her father.

For heaven's sake, what was she thinking? Rachel pushed the paper away, rubbing her knuckles against her sore eyes. Her father had died, twenty-three years ago. And she rather thought she would know if her father had been an earl. The very thought was laughable. She might as well imagine herself the daughter of the Prince of Wales.

Ardmore … The name was vaguely familiar. It had cropped up from time to time in her history books. There had been a d'Ardmore in the train of William the Conqueror, a Lord Ardmore switching sides at Boswell Field, an Earl of Ardmore, new-minted, whispering in William of Orange's ear in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. They were powerful people, important people, people so far from Rachel's touch that they might have been on the moon.

And what did she remember, at that? When was the last time she had looked at a picture of her father? She remembered him, largely, as a collection of disembodied attributes. As a cold cheek and the scratch of the collar of a greatcoat on a winter's day; as a warm lap and a pair of hands holding a book open as he read her a story; as the press of lips against the side of her forehead.

Rachel breathed in deeply through her nose, striving for common sense. When she thought about it logically, it wasn't wonderful that she should be imagining her father. It wasn't the first time, after all. When she was very young, she had imagined she saw her father everywhere.

And now—now, in losing her mother, she had lost her father all over again. They hadn't spoken of him, but he had always been there, with them, a shadowy presence just over her mother's shoulder, a whisper of a memory.

Through the sheen of tears, Rachel looked at the magazine page on the coverlet. The paper was creased, the picture blurred. She might, she thought wildly, have as easily imagined her father into an advertisement for men's hats—or, for that matter, Turkish cigarettes.

Still, just to make sure … There was, Rachel knew, a picture of her father in her mother's night-table drawer. It was, she had always thought, very much like her mother to keep him tucked away like that. Her mother was a great believer in keeping the personal personal.

Rachel drew out the drawer, and there it was, right on top: a faded daguerreotype in a silver frame, a tall, thinly built man, with fair hair and a pair of spectacles, not particularly handsome, not particularly remarkable, but for the love in his eyes as he gazed down at the woman next to him, Rachel's mother, eighteen and lovely, even in the high-necked, long-skirted fashion of the time.

Slowly, Rachel drew the picture from the drawer and set it down next to the page from
The Tatler
.

They might have been father and son, but for the fact that no father and son had ever resembled each other so closely, right down to the faint shadow of a scar on the chin. Her father aged before her eyes, and on his arm was another woman, his daughter.

His other daughter.

Absurd. Absolutely absurd. There had to be some explanation. Chance resemblances happened. They did.

Even down to a scar?

Even down to a scar, Rachel told herself firmly. The idea that her father might still be alive, might be, in fact, an earl—no, no, and no again. It was straight out of a twopenny novel, the sort shopgirls read on their lunch hour.

Besides, Rachel thought somberly, the Earl of Ardmore had a daughter, Lady Olivia Standish. That meant, presumably, that he had a wife. There must be—or have been—a Lady Ardmore.

People like her mother didn't have illegitimate children. In Rachel's experience, illegitimacy went with untidy houses and unwashed hair and people who dropped their aitches and didn't know who Wordsworth was. In short, the Trotters, down by the river, with their confused brood of half-clothed children.

No one was quite sure who the father of Dorcas Trotter's children was, least of all Dorcas Trotter, which, Mrs. Spicer said sagely, wasn't the least bit surprising, given that Dorcas's mother had been no better than she should be. Apples didn't fall far from the tree, especially when them apples were rotten, and no wonder.

Rachel's mother used to bring the Trotters baskets: Rachel's old clothes for the babies, soup for winter, soap and cleaning cloths and Jeyes Fluid in the summer, biscuits and oranges at Christmas.

Rachel had accompanied her mother on her errands of mercy, feeling pleasantly superior in her own neat little boater hat and tidy gloves.

Stand up, now. It's the lady from Ivy Cottage
. That was what old Mrs. Trotter would say, sharply, to Dorcas, when they knocked at the half-opened door.

They called Rachel “miss” and her mother “ma'am.” Rachel had accepted that, as of right.

The idea that she might be—that her mother might be—no. It was too absurd. Rachel's mother took tea at the vicarage every Friday; she played chess with Mr. Treadwell.

And usually beat him, too. Mr. Treadwell was a very sweet man, but he didn't have much of a head for chess.

No, thought Rachel. They were positively mired, steeped, in respectability. It was a chance resemblance, nothing more. That, in all likelihood, was why her mother had kept the clipping. She must have been struck by it, too. Rachel had never known her mother to read
The Tatler
, but perhaps Alice had brought it. And with flu-dimmed eyes, her mother had seen the picture and imagined her husband alive again.

Her husband, Edward Woodley, botanist. Just repeating her father's name was reassuring. Edward Woodley. Not Edward Standish, Earl of Ardmore. The fact that they were both Edwards meant nothing. England was peopled with Edwards. One might as well suspect the late King Edward or the Prince of Wales of being her father.

All the same, Rachel tucked the
Tatler
page into her purse before she left for Oxford the next morning. As a curiosity, she told herself.

Cousin David was the one person who had known them before Netherwell. He'd held Rachel as she'd been baptized, had guided her straggling baby steps across the garden in that half-remembered home of her infancy, and, once she was old enough to crave penny candy from the village shop, slipped her shillings beneath the seals of his letters, just as, he said, his godfather used to do for him when he was a boy at school.

Perhaps the Earl of Ardmore was a distant relation. Cousin David would know. He was a historian, after all.

And it was easier, Rachel thought wryly, as she stepped out of the train at Oxford station, to fret over fairy tales than to think of any of the many troublesome realities awaiting her, such as how she was to make her living.

Rachel pulled her coat more closely around her. Spring was clinging stubbornly to the memory of winter; there was frost in the air and the sky was dark as slate, threatening rain. The stones of Oxford, which glowed golden in summer, were a flat, unrelieved gray in the gloom.

Undergraduates might come and go, but the porter's lodge at Merton looked just the same, with its litter of bicycles, the baskets piled high with books and bunched-up gowns and what looked like someone's lost top hat.

The porter's face was forbidding beneath his bowler hat, but it lightened as soon as he recognized Rachel. “I hardly knew you, miss, you look so grown up! I thought you were one of them women students.”

The way he pronounced it made it sound just a step away from scarlet woman. Suggs was a purist when it came to his university.

Rachel held out a hand. “How do you do, Suggs?”

When she was a little girl in a sailor hat and her best dress, Suggs used to conjure boiled candies from his bowler hat. They were always lightly fuzzed with lint, but Rachel had eaten them all, every one. It wouldn't do, her mother had said, to hurt Suggs's feelings.

Rachel could picture her mother standing there, in her good wool coat, her gloves pristine, her hair coiled beneath her hat, holding tight to Rachel's hand as she urged her to say thank you to Mr. Suggs.

“I've seen better days,” said Suggs darkly. “But there you are. And you're a sight to cheer a dark day, miss. It's nice to see a woman what looks like a woman.”

With that, he cast an ominous look down the street, where a lady scholar, gown flapping over her frock, was bicycling toward the High Street.

“I'm just back from France,” said Rachel briskly, avoiding both the compliment and the complaint. “It is nice to be back.”

Suggs nodded knowingly. “You'll be wanting to see your cousin.”

“Is he in?” Rachel didn't know what she would do if he wasn't. Build a willow cabin at his gate?

Suggs inclined his bald head. “For you, miss, he's always in.”

“Please give my regards to Mrs. Suggs,” said Rachel politely, and went up the familiar stair, to Cousin David's rooms on the second floor.

The oak was, mercifully, unsported. Rachel knocked, for form's sake, on the inner door, before letting herself in. They had only visited two, perhaps three times a year, but she had had the run of these rooms for as long as she could remember.

The familiarity of it all enfolded her like a comfortable old coat, the old-book smell of Cousin David's rooms, mingled with tobacco, last night's Stilton, and just a hint of Jeyes Fluid. There was the chair where she had kicked her heels as a small girl, and the window with its cracked and bubbled old glass. She used to look for patterns in the bits of lead that held together the fragments of old glass, finding letters and shapes.

Cousin David was in his favorite chair by the bookcases, a long-necked lamp behind him, a hassock at his feet piled high with books. The books might have changed over the years, but the chair and hassock hadn't.

At Rachel's entrance, he jumped to his feet. “Rachel!”