The Other Daughter (23 page)

“I don't know.…” The idea of pushing herself off on someone like that was contrary to everything she had been taught. “I wouldn't want to impose.”

Simon's eyebrows soared toward his hairline. “Revenge, blackmail, impersonation … and you wouldn't want to
impose
?”

Despite herself, Rachel's lips twisted. “Old habits,” she said apologetically.

“Break them,” said Simon bluntly. “Cece's set takes delight in crashing in when they're not wanted; it's all but a religion with them.”

“Yes, but Cece is the niece of an earl.”

Simon arched a brow. “And you are the cousin of a Montfort. You're not Rachel Woodley here; you're Vera Merton.”

But only for a few more weeks. Rachel set a hand on the doorknob. “When do you need to tell them about New York?”

“Soon.”

She had always known the masquerade was meant to be a short-lived affair. She just hadn't realized quite how short.

Or how accustomed she might become to it.

Rachel pasted on a brave face. “Well, then. I'd better act quickly, hadn't I?”

*   *   *

She sent out the first of the pictures that night.

 

FIFTEEN

“Those scarves! My dear, how too divine! And those earrings—!”

If a party were to be judged by the volume of conversation, the Crystal Ball and Bottle party was a smashing success. The air was shrill with the parrot twitter of a hundred excited voices, as the same people who had seen one another at last night's Hawaiian party greeted one another again, with as much surprised delight as a stranded traveler greeting a fellow castaway.

“However did you manage—”

“That shawl! Oh, the bliss of it!”

“And then Tommy said—”

“But, really, one could never—”

“My dear, how we
roared
.”

“Vera, my sweetie-bo! Those earrings! I die for them!” Elizabeth Ponsonby enveloped Rachel in a cloud of scent and silk fringe. Elizabeth was one of Cece's dearest friends, a leader of the smart set, and permanently sloshed.

“Oh, do you like them?” Rachel extricated herself, by dint of several weeks' practice keeping her cocktail glass aloft in one hand, her cigarette in its long ebony holder in the other. “Maison Woolworth, my dear.”

“You
are
clever,” said Elizabeth admiringly. Beneath her shawl, she wore an abbreviated dress that sparkled as she moved. She pirouetted, sending the tiny crystals chiming. “What do you think of mine?”

“Darling!” Dropping Tommy Digby's arm, Lady Pansy Pakenham rushed over, splashing her gimlet over Rachel's shoes. “You haven't come as a crystal ball.
Do
tell me you haven't. It's too…”

“Too?” supplied Rachel, with an arched brow.

Tommy Digby leered in the general direction of Elizabeth's hem. “I can read someone's future in that.”

Elizabeth tossed her head, the light catching the facets of the diamante fillet binding her brow. “Don't be vile, Tommy.”

“Behave,” said Rachel, tapping him with her cigarette holder. “Or it won't be your future.”

Tommy guffawed appreciatively. “Read that in the cards, what?”

“No, just in Elizabeth's face.”

“That's good, that is.” Tommy gave Rachel a friendly elbow to the ribs. “In her face.”

He wandered off in the direction of the bar, still chuckling to himself. Rachel had no doubt it would be even funnier after another drink.

In the past few weeks, Rachel had, somehow, acquired a reputation as a wit. Or, rather, Vera Merton had. Rachel couldn't see that it had taken terribly much. All she had done was speak her mind. Within limits. But coupled with an ebony cigarette holder and a Paris frock, what Rachel considered plain common sense was transmuted by the curious alchemy of champagne and ill lighting into cutting witticisms that were repeated and embroidered upon with a titter and, “Oh,
Vera
!”

It baffled Rachel sometimes, how quickly she had become the fashion, how rapidly she had moved from Miss Merton, an unknown, to “Oh,
Vera
!”

No one seemed to think it the least bit odd that she was staying in Simon's mother's flat. “How lucky to be you!” was the general chorus, with complaints about the pickiness of parents or the pokiness of shared flats. Perhaps it was as Simon said; perhaps her instincts were too bourgeois. No one appeared to think anything of taking up residence with a relative, or even an acquaintance. It was applauded as a clever savings; more to spend on the all-important pursuit of amusement.

As the summer meandered on, Vera Merton had careened from party to party. Pirate parties and circus parties and Mozart parties where everyone came attired in white wigs and period garb, hastily hired out from costumers and theatrical outfitters. There seemed to be no end to the scrabble for costume, the endless parade of masks that did nothing to mask.

Rent, Rachel told herself. Fodder for Simon's column. If she was the rage, it was largely because her activities were dwelt and embroidered upon with loving detail by the Man About Town, who added luster to her fake gems and exploits to her earlier evenings. It was all part of the bargain.

There was something dangerously seductive about the endless whirl that deprived her of the necessity of thought: the constant round of parties, the cocktails, the telephoning. The phone upon the bed-stand was no longer an oddity; it was a constant feature of her life.

Rachel, who had always risen early, now spent the hours before noon lolling in her borrowed bed, the receiver of the phone in one hand, dissecting such important matters as whether it was really quite wise to wear silver shoes with a gold dress, “Like a goldsmith's shop, darling! All her wares on display!” or if there ought to be gypsy minstrels or a jazz band hired for the Crystal Ball and Bottle party.

It was all part of the masquerade, she assured herself. People would think it odd if she didn't, and, given the flimsiness of her credentials, she couldn't risk a crack in the facade, anything that might mark her out, in the laughing term of one of Cece's friends, as “non-U.”

At least, that was what she told herself. When it came down to it, it was far easier to gossip about whether He-Evelyn would propose to She-Evelyn than to wonder whether her father was receiving an envelope … opening it … extracting the picture inside.

Since that awful day at Ardmore House, she had sent three pictures to her father, each enclosed in a sheet of blank paper, each with a brief message on the back.

The first had been the hardest.

Rachel had sat, cross-legged, on the bed, with the frame in her hands. It was real silver, that frame—pukka, her new friends would call it—but her mother would never have considered selling it. Rachel had never really noticed the frame before. Her eye had always been drawn to the picture within, her parents together, so very young. Her mother's eyes looked out at the viewer, but her father's eyes, by accident or design, were on her mother's dark head, and filled with an expression of such reverence that it had, in her romantic youth, made Rachel's heart clench.

It did now, too, but for very different reasons.

Ruthlessly, she had detached the photograph from the frame, and written, in as near a facsimile of her mother's hand as she could manage,
Pray, love, remember
.

Ophelia's line to Hamlet, after he had rejected and abandoned her. Just before she flung herself into the river.

Let him open that at the breakfast table, Rachel had thought vengefully. Let him be sitting smugly over his kipper and coffee and see
that
, hear that still, small voice from the past. Let him see that and squirm on his padded seat.

And wonder.

Four days later, Rachel sent another. Her mother was a shadowy presence behind her at the church fete, her broad-brimmed hat casting a shadow over her face, nearly obscuring the familiar brooch she wore on her breast, with its entwined
E
and
K
. Rachel was seven or eight, in braids and buttoned boots, and a too-short white frock with a wide sash at the waist. She could remember that frock, her mother fretting over there being no more material to let out.

“Growing like a weed,” she had said, surveying her daughter with fond resignation. “You'll be tall, like your father's people.”

How much had it cost her mother, to speak of her father without hurt or rancor? If she resented what he had done, leaving them, she never let it show.

It was harder than Rachel had thought to find a third picture without landmarks or identifying features, a picture old enough that her father wouldn't be able to see her childhood self in Vera Merton's painted face. Most of her childhood pictures had been taken by the vicar, who, for all his unworldliness, had a child's enthusiasm for new gadgets, some of which worked and most of which didn't. Alice was in nearly all of them, her fair head next to Rachel's dark one, their arms about each other's waists.

Rachel couldn't bring herself to take the scissors and snip them apart; as if in doing so, she would be cutting the last link that anchored her to her old life, the life where she was simply and confidently Rachel Woodley.

She found herself missing Alice with a fierce longing. Her fingers had twitched toward the phone—and then fallen away again.

In the end, Rachel had chosen a picture taken two years after her father had died—two years after he had left them, she corrected herself. Cousin David had snapped her on the pier at the seaside, grinning unrepentantly at the camera, proudly displaying the gap where one of her upper teeth had been.

No Shakespeare this time. Instead, Rachel wrote,
Do you know where your daughter is?

It was only after she had sent it off that she became aware that it might be construed more than one way.

And where was her father's other daughter?

Rachel glanced unobtrusively toward the entrance, where gypsies mingled with witches, swamis, and the inevitable harlequins, the costume of least resistance. It was past midnight, and there was still no sign of Lady Olivia and Mr. Trevannion.

What if they had decided not to attend?

It had been maddening sending those letters off into the world, never knowing whether her father had received them. She knew he was still at Ardmore House; the Court Circular had been her friend in this. He had lingered in London, speaking at the Lords, escorting his wife to flower shows and garden parties, debutante dances and private concerts, events well above Rachel's touch, even as Vera Merton. There were Londons within London, a protected circle to which Rachel had no hope of entr
é
e.

The earl's pictures in
The Tatler
told nothing; the flash could make even the healthy look ill, the resolute look alarmed.

Cece was no use; she was persona non grata with Lady Ardmore, and knew little of what went on inside the household. When Rachel had mentioned, delicately, that it seemed her uncle was lingering in London, Cece had only shrugged, and said that it must be Jicksy's twenty-first, heaven only knew they had done everything but hire elephants, and had she told Vera that she had acquired the most smashing dress—the cleverest little woman, my dear—and wasn't it just like Aunt Violet to be too mean to put them up at Caffers before the dance but was making them stay with the Grandisons, too deadly, darling; nothing but hunting talk, endless hunting talk, and with whom was Vera staying?

Rachel had hastily changed the subject. At the moment, she wasn't staying with anyone at all. She assumed that she could crash the dance—with so many invited, surely one more would occasion no comment—but finding someone to house her was a trickier task.

Rather ridiculous to hope she might wrangle an invitation to Caffers when she couldn't even get herself back through the door of Ardmore House.

Blast it all, where was Olivia? Rachel's fingers fumbled on the clasp of her bag as she drew out a fresh cigarette to place in her holder, masking her anxiety in the familiar ritual of clicking the flame of her lighter.

“I hope that frown doesn't mean that you've read something nasty in the cards.”

Rachel looked up to find Mr. Trevannion standing just beside her, his hair wind-tousled, a half smile on his lips.

“Mr. Trevannion!” The lighter gave a cough and a sputter, and the small flame died. “I thought you didn't believe in such things.”

“Not in the general way, no. But I hope I am open to conviction.” Mr. Trevannion extracted his own lighter from his pocket, clicked the top open. Unlike Simon's, it wasn't a minor work of art; it was the cheap sort that could be picked up at any tobacconist's. “May I?”

“Thanks, awfully.” Rachel put the cigarette holder between her lips, leaning in to the flame. “And that was a very politic answer, Mr. Trevannion.”

“But true,” he said. He slipped the lighter back into his pocket, where it jangled against a handful of coins. “And hadn't you better call me John? One doesn't stand on ceremony at events such as this.”

Rachel gestured with her cigarette holder, which might not be proper gypsy attire, but was nonetheless de rigueur for her other masquerade. Costumes layered upon costumes. “And yet you're so terribly formal.”

There was no costume for Mr. Trevannion. Her sister's fianc
é
was impeccably turned out in tails, a white silk scarf around his neck, a high-crowned black hat in his hands.

John turned his high-crowned hat over in his hands, as though unsure what to do with it. “I've just come from the Massinghams'. They had rather more in the way of imperial orders and somewhat fewer gypsies.”

“One imagines they would.” Rachel glanced casually over her shoulder. “Did Lady Olivia accompany you?”

“Properly speaking, I accompanied Lady Olivia,” said John, with that wry little half smile that brought out the dimple in his cheek. “Although there don't seem to be such firm rules about such things these days.”