The Counterfeit Heiress (2 page)

“The same Estella Lamar who is always climbing pyramids and exploring India?” Jeremy asked. “One can hardly open a newspaper without seeing a picture of her somewhere exotic. I am a tremendous admirer of her exploits. Capital lady.”

“She is the very one,” Cécile said. “I have not seen her in more years than I care to admit and am bent on finding her. Will you help me? She is dressed rather like you, Kallista.” Almost from the moment we had met, Cécile had refused to use my given name. She did not like it and much preferred the nickname bestowed on me by my first husband—a nickname he had never used in my presence and, hence, one I had not learned of until after his death. Cécile felt no compunction in usurping it as her own, but then, Cécile never felt compunction in usurpation when she believed it necessary to her own edification.

“Madame du Lac!” Jeremy took a step back and gasped. “Or should I say
Your Majesty
? What a wonderful thing to see Marie Antoinette with her head back where it ought to be.”

“I have always wanted to have a boat in my hair,” Cécile said. “It is irrational, I know, but I was taken with the notion as a child and thought this the perfect opportunity to play out the fantasy. Now help me find my friend.” The House of Worth had made Cécile’s costume, a fine confection of eighteenth-century fashion, replete with an enormous powdered wig fitted with a delicate model ship. Her silk satin gown, with its wide panier hoop, measured nearly six feet, and the stomacher that peeked through her overgown was covered with embroidered flowers shot through with golden thread.

We combed the ballroom first and then retreated to the garden at the suggestion of a young lady dressed as Dante’s Beatrice, who informed us she had just seen Miss Lamar headed in that direction. Cécile explained, as we made our way, that Estella, upon inheriting an enormous fortune after her parents died within days of each other, had embarked on a life of adventure and exploration. As a result, she had not seen much of her friends in the following years and had proved a terrible correspondent. She and Cécile were of an age, and as young ladies in Paris society had been inseparable. Cécile had very much missed her in the subsequent years.

Cardinal Mazarin, engaged in a lively conversation with the Lady of the Lake, paused long enough to tell us Miss Lamar had just exited the supper tent, and we soon found her speaking with our host, the duke, who was dressed as the Emperor Charles V. Estella was in a costume so similar to mine that from a distance, we might have been twins. The folds of our Grecian robes fell with the same grace, though hers skewed to pale green while mine were icy blue. Her headdress had on it a crescent moon lit by electricity. Mine, though not a showcase of our rapidly advancing age, was still lovely, its mother-of-pearl moon surrounded by sparkling diamonds.

Cécile called out to her friend as we came upon her from behind. Miss Lamar turned, a smile on her face, and gave a hearty wave in our direction. Cécile stopped dead.

“You are not Estella Lamar.” She marched toward the woman, her eyes flashing. “What is the meaning of this?”

The Duke of Devonshire, perplexed and embarrassed, did his best to placate his guests. “Madame du Lac, I assure you this is indeed Miss Estella Lamar. She took a break from her exploration of the Nile just to be at our little party.”

“I do not think much else could have induced me to leave Egypt,” Miss Lamar said. Her face did not betray her travels. It was lined, as one would expect for someone her age, but there was not so much as a hint of color from desert sun. My mother would have been most impressed.

“I have not the slightest interest in where you claim to have been or why you might want to be here,” Cécile said, “but I would very much like to know what has induced you to pose as one of the dearest friends of my youth. I knew Estella almost as well as I know myself. You look nothing like her—your eyes aren’t even the right color. Estella’s are emerald green and quite unmistakable. Furthermore, she was a good four inches shorter than I. Am I to believe that exploration causes fully grown adults to add inches to their height? Or do your golden sandals have heels of six or seven inches?”

Miss Lamar—or whoever she was—blanched. Her eyes darted nervously and her lips trembled. Cécile moved closer to her and without the slightest hesitation the other woman pushed her away, flinging her roughly to the ground, and started to run. I lunged forward, wanting to make sure my friend, who had whacked her head on the base of a decorative column, was all right.

“This is but a trifle,” Cécile said, blotting the blood on her forehead with a lace handkerchief. “You must apprehend her at once.”

Estella

i

Truth be told, Estella had never much liked going out. Not even when she was a small girl, and her nurse had taken her through the narrow streets of Paris, before Baron Haussmann had torn them up to make way for his grand boulevards, to the private gardens outside the Tuileries Palace, where the emperor invited selected children to play with his son, the Prince Imperial. Estella was far too old to play with the prince, and she had never understood the fascination some people had for gardens. She did not like the way the flowers moved in the wind, as if they were alive, nor could she abide the teeming insects flitting in and out around them. As she grew older, this lack of understanding expanded from gardens to society in general. Why an otherwise rational being would choose to spend the evening in a crowded ballroom or at a tedious dinner party mystified her. All those voices, talking at once, were impossible to understand. She despised it.

Estella’s father, one of the richest men in France, had spoiled her from the beginning, but with complete disregard for her interests and passions. He was older than her friends’ fathers by almost a generation, and had married her mother after the death of his much-loved first wife. Estella’s half siblings, all four of them, resented their stepmother, but had long since left home and started their own families, making no effort to contact Estella until their father’s will had stunned them into wanting to know her better.

One might easily imagine that a gentleman in Monsieur Lamar’s position had chosen his second wife with little regard for love. Having been made a widower once, he must be forgiven for refusing to risk his heart another time. He was, as he often said, excessively fond of the new Madame Lamar. She was a pretty little thing, petite and curvy, with a quick wit and generous nature, and it could not be denied that her husband felt a passionate attraction to her, at least until the ravages of time began to erode the youthful beauty that he had once found so appealing. He still treated her with care and respect, but Madame Lamar, so many years younger than he, craved adoration, and as her husband could not provide her with that, she insisted on having it from her daughter.

Estella needed no convincing. Her mother was a vision of loveliness and told the most exciting stories. Nurse was boring as anything, so Estella took to hiding in a nursery cupboard as often as possible. Monsieur Lamar might have found this odd had it ever been brought to his attention, but as he never ventured to the nursery and didn’t speak to the nurse when she brought Estella down for her daily quarter of an hour visit with her parents, his daughter’s peculiar habits were wholly unknown to him. Madame Lamar thought Estella’s cupboard charming, and ordered the nurse to fit it out for the child so that it might be a more comfortable hiding place. Nurse removed the lowest shelf, covered the small floor with a soft bit of carpet, and placed a child-sized stool in the corner. In the opposite corner, Estella stored a little silver box covered with engraved flowers, given to her by her mother to house treasures. When Madame Lamar inquired as to why the box remained empty more than a year after she had presented it to her daughter, Estella explained that as she was unable to capture the stories her mother told her, there was nothing precious enough to go inside. Madame Lamar could not have been more charmed and suggested that Estella start telling stories of her own to the dolls Monsieur Lamar gave to the child every month.

Until then, Estella had never taken particular notice of the dolls with their porcelain faces and elaborate dresses. Now that her mother had anointed them as
Worthwhile,
Estella looked at them from an entirely new point of view. She chose the ones she liked the best, preferring ones with eyes the same hue of emerald as her own, and allowed these favorites to sit in her cupboard with her. Her mother had erred in only one way, by suggesting Estella could invent wonderful stories. Why would Estella even try when she already knew by heart the best ones? She told her mother’s stories to the dolls, over and over. They proved a good audience.

Madame Lamar happily indulged the child until she reached an age when moving in society became necessary. When Estella resisted attending parties and dances, her mother offered no sympathy. Madame Lamar wanted to be adored in public, and if her husband was not up to the job, she believed her daughter ought to rise to the occasion. Estella had no wish to disappoint her mother, and when she realized what it was her mother required, she did her best to satisfy her, but the girl proved too awkward to be of much use. Madame Lamar longed for her to shine socially, to be a belle, to have the brightest and best men in France vying for her affections, all the while noticing that the young lady standing before them could never have been so remarkable if it were not for her extraordinary mother. Estella was to be Madame Lamar’s crowning glory.

This, alas, was not to be. Estella rarely made eye contact with anyone other than her mother. She never knew what to say to men when they attempted a flirtation. Once, at a ball, she started to tell one of her mother’s stories, one Estella had repeated often to her dolls, and was crushed when the group around her burst into laughter. Cécile du Lac, a young lady her age, whom Estella’s mother had coaxed her time and time again to befriend, stepped forward and scolded the group.

“If you ingrates are incapable of realizing Mademoiselle Lamar is telling you something of great importance to her, you do not deserve her company.” With that, Cécile took Estella by the arm and marched her out of the room and into the grand hall of the house. “They are reprehensible, the lot of them. Is your mother insisting that you, too, marry? I hate the very idea of marriage, but can no longer avoid it. You must come to my wedding next month. I can promise you copious amounts of champagne.”

That had cemented their friendship, although Estella had never quite managed to admit to Cécile that marriage wasn’t the only thing she wanted to avoid. Cécile had taken her up, and for now that would suffice to satisfy her mother. When, soon after the wedding, Cécile’s husband died, Estella used her friend’s grief to persuade her mother that after witnessing such a tragedy she should be allowed to wait a little longer before entering into an engagement of her own. Her mother never need know Cécile did not miss her husband in the least, and by the time Estella would have had to start taking seriously her parents’ efforts to see her married, the issue had become moot. Typhoid took them both from her in the span of a single week.

2

I left Cécile in the very capable hands of the Duke of Devonshire, grabbed Jeremy by the arm, and shoved him in front of me so that he might clear a path through the crowd as we searched for the woman we now believed to be an ersatz Estella. We saw her go up the garden stairs and back into the house, but could not reach her before she had disappeared into the ballroom. I caught a glimpse of her as she slipped out of the room and did my best to catch her, but was unable to get close enough.

“She’s gone,” Jeremy said. I had sent him running ahead to the front of the house to inquire if she had been witnessed leaving. “The servants say she went on foot, but it’s entirely possible her carriage is waiting outside in the crush. The street is all but blocked.”

“Then we need to search every carriage,” I said. I felt a hand on my back and turned to see my husband.

“What trouble are the two of you causing?” he asked, his countenance growing serious as he listened to my story and shook his head. “The carriages are unlikely to prove of any use. Even if one of them belongs to her, it would not be able to move and she would have had no choice but to continue on foot if escape was her goal. No doubt she is already in a hansom cab headed no one knows where.”

I might have objected to Colin’s dismissal of my idea that we search the carriages were he not the most skilled and trusted agent at the Crown’s disposal. The queen quite depended on him whenever pesky matters cropped up requiring a discreet sort of investigation, and although there were few things about which Her Majesty and I agreed, Colin’s talents were one of them. “Quite,” I said. “What do you suggest?”

“Nothing,” he said. “A woman comes into a costume ball pretending to be someone she is not. What is the crime? If anything, she has admirably stuck to the spirit of the evening.”

“She is pretending to be someone invited as a guest,” I said. “That is a far cry from turning up in an ironic costume.”

“Devonshire thought it was a coup to lure the mysterious Estella Lamar to his party,” Jeremy said. “I can’t imagine he would have welcomed an imposter into his home.”

Colin frowned. “The duchess may have thought it was a coup. I can assure you it was of no significance to Devonshire. I should not be shocked to learn that the duchess planned the whole thing as a nice bit of theater for her party. Do you really think someone like Estella Lamar, who busies herself exploring the world, would have the slightest interest in a fancy dress ball?”

I sighed. “Perhaps you are right.”

“I never thought I would agree with any of your deductions, Hargreaves,” Jeremy said. “It always astonishes me when you prove useful.”

“Is that so?” Colin asked. “Then astonish me by proving your own self useful, Bainbridge. Dance with my wife. I’ve never been able to tolerate a quadrille.”

*   *   *