The Other Daughter (32 page)

“John? Speaking with Mr. Baldwin, I believe.” Olivia lifted concerned eyes toward Simon. Large, gray Standish eyes. “Are you quite certain you ought to be here? After—”

Simon made an impatient gesture. “Who do you have for this set?”

Olivia consulted her dance card. “Gerald Hamby.”

“Good. I have no compunction in cutting him out. I knew him at school,” he added as an aside, to Rachel. “Nasty little prat. I trust you can amuse yourself?”

For a moment, Rachel hesitated. Then she told herself not to be absurd. She couldn't cling to Simon forever. He had done what he had promised and more. One couldn't waltz the world away forever.

“I shall contrive not to be a wallflower,” she said brightly.

“Never that,” said Simon, and all but dragged Olivia to the dance floor, moving with a rapid gait nothing like his usual elegant slouch.

Rachel watched them for a moment, Olivia's white-gloved hand resting on Simon's arm, her head barely reaching his shoulder. If Simon wished to keep a low profile, dancing with the daughter of the house was not the way to go about it.

He didn't look like a man in love. He danced with a grim determination, his face set, looking out over Olivia's head.

For her? Nothing of the sort, Rachel told herself stoutly. A business venture, he had told her, all those weeks ago.

If Olivia jilted John, would Simon still take the job in New York?

She wasn't meant to be thinking about Simon and Olivia. Grimly, Rachel turned away from the dance floor. It was pure avoidance, that was what it was, a way to distract herself from the reality of being here, in her father's home.

Had her mother ever seen Carrisford? Rachel edged along the verge of the dance floor, past the paintings of long-nosed monarchs, weaving through eminences in knee breeches and the orders of half a dozen nations. There was so much she wanted, needed, to know.

If she could find her father, get him alone …

The receiving line had disintegrated; Lady Ardmore's tiara could be seen bobbing along, here and there, but of her father there was no sign.

Rachel hesitated below the minstrels' gallery, unsure of what to do with herself. There was no one she knew here, or, rather, no one who knew Vera Merton, or who would acknowledge her if they did. She thought she saw Lady Frances across the dance floor, but it seemed wiser not to inquire too closely.

She might, at least, take a good look around. It was the only time she was likely to see her ancestral home. Not without paying three and six, that was.

“Pardon me, miss.” One of the footmen stepped forward, his white powdered wig oddly jarring with his youthful face and sun-reddened complexion. “Are you Miss Merton?”

Rachel threw a glance over her shoulder at Simon, but he was still revolving around the dance floor, his dark head bent to Olivia, who appeared to be murmuring something rather earnestly into his ear.

She might deny it, but to what purpose? Lady Ardmore would only send someone else.

“Yes,” said Rachel defensively. “I am she.”

She rehearsed her excuses.
There must be some mistake.… Couldn't imagine … Invitation lost in the post …

“If you would be so good as to accompany me—that is—” Giving up the attempt to sound elegant, the footman said, “If you would, miss, his lordship was wondering if you might be willing to have a word.”

*   *   *

Rachel followed her guide down a passage and up a flight of stairs, over age-worn carpets, past priceless paintings. Another passage and another stair, and she began wondering if she ought to have brought breadcrumbs after all.

Her fingers were tingling again. Rachel wrapped them in her skirt and concentrated on following the footman. It was darker here. The windows were older, the panes smaller. The walls were heavily paneled.

“This is part of the original building, miss,” he said.

“Yes, I gathered that.” The doorways were lower, built for smaller people, for women in ruffs and farthingales, and courtiers in shoes that turned up at the toes. The sound of music from below was barely perceptible, just the faintest strain. “Are we almost there?”

“Just through here, miss.” With obvious relief, the footman gestured her toward another flight of stairs, a short flight this time, only four steps in all.

Rachel ducked beneath the doorway and found herself staring down a long, narrow room with a soaring ceiling, decorated with elaborate plaster roundels and rosettes. Where there would once have been torches, now electric sconces lit the room, glinting off the painted eyes of the portraits that lined the walls.

All along the walls, generations of Standishes looked down their noses at her from within their gilded frames: Elizabethan Standishes in ruff and doublet; Georgian Standishes in white wigs, posing beside their horses; military Standishes with gold-buckled red coats and swords by their sides.

At the end of the long line of Standishes stood her father.

He looked like something from another century himself, in his knee breeches and silk stockings, with the Order of the Garter on its ribbon across his breast, but for his spectacles, which were mundane and modern and didn't at all fit the general effect.

They didn't suit the earl, but they did belong to the father Rachel remembered. He had worn spectacles even then. She had snatched them off his nose, smearing her small fingerprints across the lenses.

Now that the moment was here, Rachel found her legs surprisingly steady. She walked down the narrow aisle, between the portraits of her ancestors. “Lord Ardmore.”

A strange elation buoyed her up. Her father had summoned her, he had brought her here, away from the crowd below. Surely, that must mean something.

The earl cleared his throat. “You may go, James.” Rachel had forgotten the footman was there. Any more of this, she thought giddily, and she would be like Olivia or Simon, oblivious of the help around them. “Thank you, Miss Merton. It is Miss Merton, isn't it?”

Rachel found her voice. “For the present.”

“Hmm, yes.” Her father removed his spectacles, inspected them, and then returned them to their wonted place on his nose. “If you will forgive my curiosity … may I ask where you acquired that brooch?”

Why were they playing this game? Why not get right to it? But Rachel couldn't find the words.

“My mother gave it to me.” Her fingers fumbled on the knot at the back of her neck. She held the brooch out to her father, trailing black velvet. “Would you like to see it?”

“Yes—thank you.” He cradled it in the palm of his white-gloved hand, peering at it closely, holding it away, turning it this way and that. After several minutes, he said, “It is … a very unusual piece.”

“Yes. It is.” Rachel clasped her hands at her waist, her fingers twining tightly together. “My mother was never without it. It meant—it meant the world to her.”

The earl turned it over in his hands, tracing the engraving. He pressed something, and the brooch dissolved in two. Involuntarily, Rachel started forward, but it wasn't broken. It was open, revealing a compartment she had never known was inside.

Inside were two twists of hair. One a dark blond, the other a deep brown, like Rachel's.

Edward and Katherine, forever, in perpetuity.

“I—I never knew that was there.” Rachel's voice sounded strange in the vast room.

Rapidly, the earl snapped it shut again. His fingers closed around the locket. “Thank you,” he said, and then, reluctantly, extended it to Rachel. His voice was hoarse as he said, “Do you—might you happen to know—where your mother acquired it?”

Was this a test?

“It was given to her by my father. Her name was Katherine, you see, and his was Edward.” Her eyes met her father's, willing him to understand, to respond. “I always thought that was terribly romantic, that he had it made for her.”

Her father didn't say anything. He just looked at her, and what Rachel saw in his face wasn't pleasant. Suspicion. Mistrust.

Rachel held tighter to the brooch. Rapidly, she said, “My father was a botanist. At least, that was what I was told. He wasn't terribly grand, but we were rather fond of him, my mother and I.” Her voice was shaking. She made an attempt to control it. “I was told that he had died. I was told a number of things, many of which were untrue.”

The earl's face was the color of old parchment; his face looked stripped down to the bones, all dents and hollows. “I don't know who gave this to you, or where you acquired it—”

Did he really not know? Or was it just that he didn't want to know?

“Have I changed so very much?” Rachel winced at how plaintive she sounded, how foolish. It had been twenty-three years. Of course she had changed. Fighting a sinking sense of events running away from her, Rachel said hopefully, “You haven't.”

But that wasn't true, was it? In feature he was the same, but the father she had loved had never looked so stern, so pinched.

Her father turned away, staring fiercely at the intricate paneling of the wall, where gargoyle faces stuck out their tongues at elaborate Tudor roses.

When he spoke, it was in a carefully controlled voice, every syllable enunciated, every word pronounced evenly. “Would I be mistaken in thinking that you are responsible for the arrival of … certain pictures?”

He made them sound as though they were something of which to be ashamed. Not a little girl and her mother at a church fete, but something dirty, something unclean.

“No,” said Rachel, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. “You would not be mistaken. I sent them. I wanted to remind you—that you had a daughter.”

Her father's words cut through her like a knife. “I have a daughter. She is currently downstairs, dancing with her fianc
é
.”

“I—” Rachel fought for composure. “I cannot blame you for being suspicious. But, surely, in the face of all the evidence…”

She was trying so very hard to remain logical, but every word tore at her like thorns; she felt as though she were crawling through a bramble thicket, losing a little more of herself with every desperate movement.

Her father's face was as set and still as the portraits on the wall. “Miss Merton, I do not know where you acquired these … items, but if you have come here tonight with the intent to blackmail me—”

“Blackmail!” Rachel's head came up sharply. “You can't think—”

But he did think. She could see it in his face, in the utter disdain that managed to convey itself despite his very stillness.

“What do you want, Miss Merton?” Her father's voice was clipped, remote.

He looked at her as though she were something foul.

I want my father back, Rachel thought wildly But he didn't exist anymore, had never existed. He had been an illusion, compounded of memory and—what? Boredom? Had he dallied with them for a while, playing at domesticity, until he found something better?

“I was right at the start.” Her mother's brooch clutched in her hand, Rachel took a shaky step back. “I ought to have left well enough alone. I ought to have had the sense—the sense to realize that people who disappear generally don't want to be found.”

He hadn't so much disappeared as made them disappear. But that was immaterial.

“I ought not to have come.” Now, when she thought of him, she would always remember this, she would remember him pinched and sour, pretending not to know her. Rachel flung the words like a sword. “I was much happier when I thought you were dead.”

Her father stood there, among the shades of his ancestors, the gargoyles and the roses, writing her out of his history as effectively as he knew how.

“How do I know you are who you claim to be?” he demanded.

“You can't even say my name, can you?” Rachel couldn't hide the hurt in her voice. She tried to make up for it with a show of bravado. “Or have you forgotten it?”

That, at least, got some reaction. Her father's nostrils flared. “Forgive me, Miss … whatever your name is. Your methods do not inspire one to trust you.”

“Trust?” Rachel stared at her father in disbelief. It didn't matter what she said now. Her father was lost to her. This man, this man in front of her, was nothing. “You kissed me good-bye. You lifted me in your arms and told me you loved me and that you would be back soon. Trust you? I waited for you. I waited for you to come home, and you never did.”

Once started, she couldn't seem to stop speaking, her voice rising higher and higher with every word. “I used to imagine that you weren't dead at all, that you'd been kidnapped by pirates, or dropped in an oubliette, or were employed by His Majesty's government on a secret mission. And one day you would come home to us and everything would be as it was. There was no body—so it was easy to imagine it was all a mistake.”

“No body,” her father echoed. For the first time, he looked directly at her, as though he were really seeing her. “Where is—your mother?”

“You needn't look over my shoulder for her. She's dead.” The words came out, bald and ugly. Rachel had the satisfaction of seeing the earl flinch. “She died in April. Influenza.”

“April,” the earl repeated.

“I suppose it must be a relief, to know that she's finally out of the way. One less loose end.”

Her father didn't seem to hear. He was half turned away, his face in shadow, his shoulders hunched. He seemed to have folded in on himself.

Hoarsely, he said, “If you need money…”

“I don't want your money. I don't need your money. I am perfectly capable of getting my own living. I have done for years. That wasn't why I came. I had a crazy idea that it—that it might mean something to see you again.” Rachel's eyes stung. Blinking the tears away, she said fiercely, “I loved you once, you see. More fool me.”

Slowly, her father straightened. The Order of the Garter was bright on his breast.