The Other Daughter (3 page)

The train to Calais, according to the board, was due to depart at three.

Rachel could feel the hours stretching ahead of her. Maddening that they could zap a message across wires in a matter of minutes, but human travel was little faster than it had been a century ago. She had always enjoyed the novels of H. G. Wells. Now she found herself wishing for one of his time machines, something to whisk her back to five days ago. No, earlier, before that, twenty-three years ago, when they were all three together. She could stop her father going away, stop her mother getting sick.…

And what then? History did strange things when one played with it. They would never have lived at Netherwell; her entire upbringing would be different. Useless speculation to beguile the extra hour. Rachel shivered and hugged her carpetbag closer.

She didn't need to fight for a seat on the train to Calais; at that hour, it was all but empty. Only another twelve hours—how long those twelve hours seemed—and she would be back in Netherwell, back at the cottage in which she had grown up.

And her mother … her mother would be sitting up by now, demanding to be let out of bed, to be allowed to do something, for goodness' sake. Like all healthy people, her mother made a dreadful patient.

Apples didn't fall far from the tree, Mrs. Spicer, who “did” at the vicarage, always liked to say. If Rachel was impatient, she came by it honestly. She couldn't picture her mother sitting still; she was always moving, doing, working.

Well, she had had to, hadn't she? Just as Rachel had to work now. Botanists, it seemed, weren't too plump in the pocket. Whatever legacy her father had left, it had been enough to cover the essentials of rent and food, no more.

Even now, as a nightmare, Rachel could remember those dark days after her father died, her own childish voice, bleating, “Where is Papa? Where is Papa?” Her mother's face, still and set, her eyes red-rimmed, but her mouth firm. The hurried departure from their home, taking only those things that were most precious: her mother's piano, her father's chess set, the pawns bearing the marks of small teeth, where Rachel had used them, as a baby, to ease her aching gums. The gold brooch at her mother's breast, with its intertwined
E
and
K
.

Through it all, her mother had never broken, never wavered. She had comforted Rachel's tears, packed their few belongings, saw them settled in a new home, set about finding a way to make their meager ends meet. She'd gone on.

Dawn. The sun was rising just as the train chugged into Calais, tinting the water of the Channel rose and gold. Rachel stumbled off the train, her legs stiff, her hands cold in her leather gloves. There was something about dawn, about the right sort of dawn, that made all the frights of the night seem so much nonsense. If her mother had grown worse, Jim would have let her know, surely? There would have been more than just the one telegram.

On board the Channel packet, she lifted her face to the salt sea air, relishing the slap of the wind against her face. It was an ill wind … But this wasn't an ill wind. It smelled of England and visits to the seaside.

A change in London, and then another in King's Lynn. With each stop closer to home, Rachel felt her anxiety subside. The air still had the bite of winter to it, but the sun poured down like a blessing, and Rachel felt her feelings lift at the sight of it, despite the itch of clothes worn too long. If her mother had been that ill, Jim would have sent another telegram, found some way to find her.

The local train dawdled its way along, decanting housewives with piles of shopping and chattering girls from the school. Rachel had been one of those girls once. Swinging off the train at Netherwell station, barely a pause before the train was off again, she could imagine herself that schoolgirl again, satchel in hand, a straw boater on her head. Her boots crunched on the well-worn path, rich with the scent of mulch and loam, just a hint of coal smoke in the air.

There was a shortcut through a copse of trees, a place where the leaves twined overhead, forming a natural arch. Rather than leading into the village proper, it deposited Rachel only yards from the cottage, close enough that she could see the familiar gray stone, softened with its fall of ivy, the smoke rising from the chimney.

A sense of indescribable relief flooded Rachel at the sight of that smoke. There was light in the old, leaded windows, a warm glow that made her quicken her step, the carpetbag light in her hand.

The stones in the walk were cracked and old. With the ease of long practice, Rachel wove her way around the wobbly bits. No need to knock; the door was never locked.

“Mother?” She flung open the door. There was no hall. The front door led directly into the sitting room, that wonderfully familiar sitting room, with the hideous red plush furniture they had let with the house, and the fire that always smoked.

Someone was bent over the fire now, wielding the poker with a tentative hand.

But it wasn't Rachel's mother. Rachel's mother wouldn't have been so gingerly with the fire; she would have thwacked it smartly into submission. This woman was too short, too slight, her hair a strawberry blond instead of brown streaked with gray.

Rachel let her carpetbag drop. “Alice?”

Alice started, the poker catching on the edge of a coal. “Rachel!” Rachel's best friend thrust the poker back into its rest. “Thank heavens. I'd begun to think something had happened to you.”

No time to explain now. Rachel started for the stairs. “My mother. Is she—”

Rubbing her sooty hands on her skirt, Alice scurried between Rachel and the stairs. She held up a grimed hand. “Rachel. I'm so sorry.”

 

TWO

The pity on Alice's face awoke a host of nameless terrors.

“Where is she? Upstairs? In bed?”

Sick, wasted. Well, that didn't matter. Rachel was home now. She would take care of her. She knew a bit of nursing. They had all done their bit in the local infirmary during the war, emptying basins, rolling bandages. She could plump pillows, force broth down her mother's throat, hold her to life by sheer force of will if necessary.

Not that it would be necessary. Her mother had enough force of will of her own. Enough for three. Enough to beat anything, even influenza.

Alice lifted a hand to stop her, then let it fall. “Rachel … she's gone.”

“Gone,” repeated Rachel. What did gone mean, anyway? Gone to hospital? Gone to the vicarage?

A coal crackled on the hearth, the sound resounding like a shot in the quiet room.

“I'm so sorry,” Alice said again. Her blue eyes looked bruised, ringed with dark shadows.

The stillness of the cottage pressed in on Rachel like the grave. No footsteps upstairs. No crinkle of sheets. Only the crackle of the fire and the nameless darkness of grief.

“Dead. You mean she's dead.” Not at the vicarage, not in hospital, not popped out to the shops for a bit of butter.

Rachel couldn't wrap her mind around it, that the absence would be more than a temporary one, that she wouldn't hear her mother's step on the stair, her voice calling down from the landing. Her smell still lingered in the air, dried lavender and strong tea.

Alice gave a very small nod.

“When?” asked Rachel, in a voice she didn't recognize as her own.

“On Friday.”

Four days ago. Four days. When had it been? Had it been while Rachel was giving Amelie her bath? When she was grilling Albertine on the kings of England? While she was doing her hair, darning her stockings, any one of a hundred inconsequential things?

Her mother had died and she hadn't been there.

Alice shifted from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with the silence. “We did wire you. Neither of us could understand why you hadn't—”

“I know.” Rachel's chest was tight; she felt as though she couldn't breathe. “There was some confusion about the telegram. A delay.”

If only, Rachel thought savagely, she had giggled and tittered when Hector had pinched her. If the telegram had been relayed right away … If she had made the very first train …

If, if, if. A whole legion of ifs.

Alice saw the look on Rachel's face and misinterpreted it. Defensively, she said, “Jim did try to ring the Paris house, but there was trouble with the connection.”

“We weren't in Paris; we were in Normandy.”

They were always in Normandy; if Alice had bothered to read her letters, she would know that. But Alice was of the opinion that France was France; such petty distinctions as city or country eluded her.

Oh, God, she was being ghastly. It wasn't Alice's fault. There was only so much that Alice and Jim could do, and she had been away, a Channel's width away.

Alice was still speaking. “Jim did everything he could, but by the time anyone realized she was sick, the disease was so advanced—”

“I know.” Rachel's eyes felt gritty. She rubbed them with the back of her hand. Smoke from those trains, those endless trains. “He had other patients to tend to, I know.”

She had to remind herself of that, that there were others ill, other mothers, daughters, husbands, when all she wanted to do was grab Jim by the collar and demand to know why he hadn't tried harder, why he hadn't tried again and again and again, until he might have got someone with the brains enough to ring through to Brillac, who might have told her, who might have given her a chance to make it home—

Even now, she couldn't quite comprehend it, that there was nothing she could do. How could there not be any way to go back, to fix it?

“Oh, Rachel, you can't imagine!” Alice's normally sweet-featured face was drawn; there were circles beneath her eyes and hollows under her cheeks. “There were so many sick in the village, and no nurses nearer than King's Lynn. All the Trotter boys were down with it, and Mrs. Spicer. Charles had chicken pox, and I was half frantic trying to keep Annabelle out of his room, what with Mrs. Spicer sick, too, and Polly under quarantine. By the time my father mentioned that your mother hadn't been to church—”

“You don't need to explain.” Stop, stop, stop, Rachel wanted to say. She didn't want to hear it. And what did it matter, any of it? The words tore out of her, unbidden. “She was my mother. I ought to have been here.”

Alice put out a hand to her, heedless of the streaks of soot. “Oh, my dear.”

Rachel felt tears stinging the backs of her eyes and hastily blinked them away. “The funeral—I'll need to see to the arrangements. The undertaker—”

Alice's eyes shifted away. “The funeral was yesterday.”

The floor tilted, the low ceiling rushing down at her. Rachel grabbed for the banister, feeling the room heave like the deck of the Channel ferry, the sitting room veiled by a gray haze. “What?”

“Rachel! I ought to have made you sit down first—and you're still in your coat! When was the last time you ate anything?”

Rachel breathed deeply, in and out. “Sometime around Calais, I think. No, there were biscuits just past London.” The sick feeling was subsiding a bit, although she still felt clammy. She forced herself to focus. “The funeral was
yesterday
?”

Alice ducked her head guiltily, although Rachel couldn't imagine why she should feel guilty. It was Rachel, Rachel who hadn't attended her own mother's funeral. “We couldn't reach you. We tried, really, we did.” She added, hesitantly, “We didn't want to leave it too long.”

And wasn't that a charming image. Rachel concentrated on her breathing. No. No—she just. No.

“It was all just as your mother would have wanted,” Alice hurried on, just as she had once rattled through recitations at school, faster and faster the more nervous she was. “Your cousin—the one from Oxford—he came up to see to the arrangements. It was a lovely ceremony, really, it was, and there were violets on the casket—your cousin said that your mother liked violets—and Mrs. Trotter had hysterics right in the middle of the twenty-third psalm.”

“Of course she did.” Despite herself, Rachel almost smiled. Mrs. Trotter's hysterics were the stuff of village legend. Rachel's mother always said—

Rachel's hands closed tight around the buttons of her coat. “It—it sounds just as it ought to have been. Thank you for seeing to everything.”

There had been no funeral for her father. He had died so very far away. And now her mother …

Rachel thought she understood, now, why custom demanded the formality of a funeral. Without the casket, without the thump of clods on the coffin, none of it seemed real.

“We waited for you to choose the stone,” Alice offered, as if that might somehow make it better.

Rachel laughed and found that she couldn't stop laughing. She put her hands to the sides of her face. “Oh, Lord. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

Alice was looking at her with concern. “Please, can't I make you a cup of tea? Something? You look ready to drop on your feet.”

“I've been traveling since last night. When I received the telegram.” She was still in her coat.

It struck her, dimly, that these were the same clothes, the same coat, the same shoes she had scrambled into in her bedroom in the Ch
â
teau de Brillac a century ago. It was warm enough in the sitting room, with the fire Alice had made, but Rachel found she was loath to remove the protective shell of her coat.

Impatient with herself, Rachel shrugged out of the coat, dumping it over the banister. “I could murder a cup of tea.”

Alice let out a deep breath of relief, turning hastily to the kitchen door. “I've got the kettle on. There isn't any milk, I'm afraid—”

“That's fine.” Rachel followed Alice into the kitchen. She felt like a guest in her own home, out of place and off-balance. “I haven't had a proper cup of tea in months.”

The kettle was already hissing gently on the hob. Alice turned her back, busying herself with the practicalities. “Did they not know how to make tea in France?”