When not flying her aeroplane over the plains of Kenya or breaking the hearts of minor rulers, Miss Merton delights her circle of acquaintances with her accomplished performances on the clavichord.
The edges of the paper crinkled beneath Rachel’s gloved fingers. The clavichord? She wasn’t even sure what a clavichord was. An instrument, presumably. Preferably a blunt one.
“Miss? Oy, miss!” Rachel was recalled to herself by the insolent call of the stallholder. “This ain’t a lending library.”
“Here.” Rachel thrust a shilling into his hand and retreated with the paper firmly wedged beneath her arm.
She didn’t feel particularly heartbreaking at the moment. Sweat dampened her hair beneath her close-fitting hat and made her frock cling to her back. No rana in his right mind would give her a second glance. And a certain very important personage? Rachel didn’t know whether to laugh or swear.
It was absurd, all of it. How was she meant to pretend to anyone that she had been to or seen any of those places? Kildapur, Kenya—even the South of France. She knew Paris, or at least the bits of it one might visit on a half day, or with three sulky charges in tow, and she knew rather small patches of Normandy and Provence. Very small patches. As for horses, she had sat on the back of a rather sullen pony as a small child, but that was the last acquaintance she had had with the breed.
One couldn’t even contemplate the clavichord.
If the porter thought anything of her choice of reading material, he didn’t comment, although the ink from the paper was leaving dark smudges on the white bits of Rachel’s dress. He sent her up in the lift with a smile and a nod, as though she had every right to be there, as though she had always been there.
And why shouldn’t he? thought Rachel wildly. Compared to scaling the Himalayas or whatever else it was that Miss Merton was meant to have done, a flat in Mayfair was shockingly commonplace.
Letting herself into the flat, Rachel dropped the paper unceremoniously onto a table, stripped off her ink-stained gloves, and made straight for the telephone.
“The clavichord?” she said, without preamble, when Simon picked up the phone.
“And good afternoon to you, too, my pet. I presume you picked up a copy of the paper?”
He sounded so damnably pleased with himself. Rachel took a deep breath and counted to ten before saying, in what she hoped were reasonable tones, “You might have consulted me.”
“Would you have preferred the virginals?” Without waiting for her to respond, Simon went on, “You’re not likely to encounter a clavichord. If you do, all you have to do is disclaim modestly. Most people are only too delighted to be spared a recital. I doubt you’ll be pressed upon to perform.”
Rachel gritted her teeth. “That is not the point.”
“Was there some other item to which you formed an objection?” asked Simon, sounding rather abstracted. There was a rustle of fabric in the background.
“Yes! To all of it. What am I meant to do when people ask me about the raj of—wherever it was?”
“Kildapur, my love. The Rana of Kildapur. You needn’t worry about him. He’s quite gaga, although he does have some quite lovely jewels. His hobby is toy railways.”
“I see,” said Rachel, in carefully controlled tones. “And my aeroplane?”
“You’ve given that up. What’s the fun of flying over England when you’ve seen elephants stampede? Use a little imagination, darling.”
Under other circumstances, Rachel might have been amused by the sheer effrontery of it. But this was her life Simon was playing with. What if someone thought to look into any of the details of that absurd story?
If she were discredited … the doors of Ardmore House would be well and truly closed to her. She could feel her father receding into the distance.
Her hand tightened around the receiver. “I wish you had used a little less.”
“The point was to make you a sensation—and, after this, you shall be.”
“Until someone decides to look into any of it,” countered Rachel.
“By cabling to Kenya? Even if they did, no one likes to be left out of the know.” Simon’s voice was briefly muffled. He must, Rachel realized, be dressing. “There’ll be half a dozen people to swear they saw the notorious Miss Merton doing high kicks on a billiard table at the Muthaiga Club—and no one will want to say them nay.”
“You sound very sure.”
“Fortune favors the bold.” More rustling from the other end, then Simon’s voice, clear again. “I’ll call for you at nine. We have an engagement at the Cave of Harmony.”
The last thing Rachel wanted was another night out and about. “I’ll be at home—practicing the clavichord.”
As if she hadn’t spoken, Simon went on. “There’s to be a treasure hunt of some sort. Bobbies’ helmets and an olive from the Ritz. Bring a warm wrap.”
As if she were an actress, on a stage of his devising. “I’ve already met my—” She caught on the word sister. “I’ve already met Lady Olivia. I don’t see the point.”
“How quickly they forget.” Now that they were away from Heatherington House, Simon’s voice was maddeningly cheerful. “The point, my sweet, is that we had a bargain. An entrée for you, copy for me.”
Rachel kicked off her uncomfortable shoes, her abused toes sinking into the soft white carpet. “Can’t you just make it up? Besides, I thought I was meant to be elusive.”
“Not that elusive.” There was a pause, the familiar snick of the lighter. “Nothing comes for free. Consider this the cost of your lodging.”
It shouldn’t have come as a shock. She’d known those were the terms of the bargain. But put that way … “That sounds like blackmail.”
“I prefer to call it rent,” said Simon. “Be ready at nine.”
Slowly, carefully, Rachel replaced the receiver. The large drawing room was light and airy, sunlight streaming through the long windows, glinting off new chrome and old silver. Her hat sat discarded on the glass table, her keys in a bowl by the door.
There was no reason for it to feel, suddenly, like a cage.
All she had to do was walk away. Rent, he called it. She could leave at any time. Abandon the rich dresses, the golden fillets. She could find a reasonably priced bedsit in Holborn. No one would miss her. Simon was only sponsoring her because she had bullied him into it.
And she would be left where she had been before. Wondering.
Rachel dropped down onto the white sofa, facing the picture of the willowy woman cradling the little boy in the white smock, with his mischievous face and deceptively fair curls.
She hated the idea of being played like a puppet, but she couldn’t walk out, not now.
These were, whether they knew it or not, her people, too. It was a strange thought. Rachel tested it, like a sore tooth. Her aunt, her cousin. Her sister. Simon had provided her the introduction—and, yes, if she were being just about it, the lodging and the means. For that, she would play his game. But only to a point.
It was time to start taking matters into her own hands. And she thought she might know how.
With new determination, Rachel crossed the room to the telephone. The operator knew the number; there was a slight delay while a maid chased down the corridors, time enough for Rachel to rehearse her opening line.
By the time a hand snatched the receiver and a voice said breathily, “Hullo?” Rachel was ready.
Rachel took a deep breath and plunged in. “Cece? Darling! It’s Vera. Vera Merton. Might I persuade you to lunch with me?”
* * *
Rachel was heavy-eyed when she left for lunch the next day.
From the Cave of Harmony, they had gate-crashed a party in Mayfair, although it hardly seemed to count as gate-crashing when most of their group appeared to have been on the guest list. Rachel had caught a brief glimpse of her sister, dancing neatly and properly with Mr. Trevannion, before Rachel’s party had whisked away again, in an impromptu chase across London, piled into car
s and taxis, everyone leaning out the windows, shrieking and laughing, before ending the night with strong black coffee and a bacon butty at the stands where the taxi men bought their breakfasts. By that time, it was dawn.
She had long since lost Simon somewhere in the scrum—hadn’t seen him, in fact, since the beginning of that chase across London—but had, in the process, progressed to first-name terms with a sporting man with very pink cheeks, an earl’s daughter named Mamie, and a very drunk young man just sacked from his job at a boys’ school, who vomited copiously out the window somewhere past Trafalgar Square, but cheered up enormously at the sight of a bacon butty.
They had all, cheerfully and unquestioningly, accepted Rachel as what she claimed to be. She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or alarmed.
There was a small brown paper parcel just outside of Rachel’s door. Moving very gingerly, she reached down to pick it up. Within was a stack of letters, all addressed to Rachel Woodley at Ivy Cottage, Netherwell.
Rachel hadn’t arranged for her mail to be forwarded. She rather thought she knew who had.
Frowning, Rachel leafed through the pile. A letter from her mother’s solicitors. An answer to a query about a bedsit. Notes of condolence from her mother’s former pupils. Those, Rachel set aside to read and be answered properly. And, below them, four envelopes inscribed in Cousin David’s familiar spidery hand.
“My dear…” began the first.
Rachel thrust it to the bottom of the pile. He could “my dear” her all he liked. It didn’t change the fact that he had lied, and would have gone on lying if he’d had the chance.
Would she have been happier not knowing?
Rachel shoved that thought aside as immaterial. The three following letters grew more terse and more anxious. He had rung the post office to find that she had gone. The only forwarding address was a postbox in London. He was concerned for her. He felt responsible. He trusted she wouldn’t do anything rash. There were matters she needed to know—
Rachel’s lip twisted. Now she needed to know? That made a change.
The last note had clearly been written in haste. He was going down to London to view some documents at the British Library. He would be staying at his club. If she cared to call on him … any time … He would be at the Marlborough for the next fortnight.
Rachel’s face softened. Dear Cousin David. She wondered who was taking his tutorials while he was away. He couldn’t say right out that he had come to look for her. But he would be at his club if she needed him.
For a moment, she considered it. But what would he tell her? That it had been her mother’s wish? That she should leave well enough alone?
No. Rachel drew on her gloves with unnecessary force. There was no one she could trust in this except herself.
And so it was that the fashionable Miss Vera Merton found her way to the Ritz, where Miss Cecelia Heatherington-Vaughn, the scandal of the season, was already waiting.
Cece lifted a hand in greeting as Rachel sailed into the dining room. “My dear, my head!” she said, without preamble.
She already had a cocktail in front of her, in a particularly noxious shade of green. It matched the bright hue of her dress.
“Mine, too.” Rachel slid into the seat across from her, trying to look as though she lunched at the Ritz all the time. “What was in Tommy Digby’s flask?”
“Petrol, I should think,” said Cece with a shudder. “Mixed with crème de menthe.”
Rachel nodded to Cece’s glass. “Isn’t that more of the same?”
“Sans petrol.” Cece lifted her glass, shrugged, and downed it. “Hair of the dog, you know.”
“In that case,” said Rachel, suppressing a qualm at the thought of the cost, “I’ll have one of the same.”
“Make that two,” Cece told the waiter, before saying, importantly, to Rachel, “We’re both in today.”
“In?”
“In The Tatler.” Cece fumbled a folded magazine onto the table.
Rachel’s own face stared back at her, her features bleached to fashionable blandness by the light of the flash, her hair falling in a perfect curve against her cheeks, her rouged mouth dark against her pale face.
Miss Cecelia Heatherington-Vaughn and Miss Vera Merton, read the caption.
“God, I look a fright! They never do get the most flattering angles, do they? It’s too ghastly.”
“Ghastly,” Rachel echoed.
You have the cheekbones to be a Vera, Simon had told her, weeks ago. In that picture—she looked what she pretended to be. Not a nursery governess with work-worn hands. Not an earl’s hidden by-blow. Someone rich, expensive, pampered.
What she might have been, had the world been otherwise.
“There’s Aunt Violet,” Cece was saying, “kowtowing like anything to the Prince of Wales. If she curtsied any lower, she’d go through the floor, don’t you think?”
Rachel came back to earth with a thump. There, on the opposite page, was the Countess of Ardmore, her father’s wife. She was broad and solid, an impression aided by a frock with too many flounces and a hat in the new romantic style, as broad around as its wearer. The Prince of Wales appeared as though he were about to be engulfed by several swags of tulle and a large stuffed cockatoo.
Rachel cleared her throat. “That’s Lady Olivia behind her, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Cece gratefully seized on her fresh cocktail. “Poor, dear Auntie Violet. She would so have loved to bag HRH for Livvy. They danced together once, and she all but had coronets embroidered on Olivia’s underthings.”
Rachel had seen the Prince of Wales. On newsreels. “Surely, there must be a suitably Germanic princess in his future?”
Cece smiled slyly across her broad-rimmed glass. “My dear, we live in modern times! If Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could snag the Duke of York, why not a Prince of Wales for a Standish? At least,” she added practically, “that’s how Auntie Violet saw it. Never mind that she still reeks of pickles.”
“Pickles?”
“Or was it tinned beans? Something of that sort. Too funny watching the airs she puts on when her father started out in one of his own factories.”
Cece’s cheerful snobbery stung like hail.
“Surely birth isn’t everything.” Rachel’s cocktail tasted sour. She set it down. “As you say, these are modern times.”
“Someone,” said Cece languidly, “ought to tell that to Auntie Violet. Too laugh-making watching her coming over all grande dame.” She stuffed the copy of The Tatler back beneath the table. “Will you have a chop? I’m not sure I can face one.”
“After those bacon butties this morning, I’m not sure I ever want to eat again.”
“Wasn’t the taxi man a darling? Fancy sharing his breakfast with us.” Cece scrutinized the menu, shrugged, and set it aside. “Besides, you oughtn’t poke fun at family pride. The Montforts are rotten with it.”
“I’m not a Montfort, I’m a Merton.” Born of a chance moment’s madness in a tea shop.
Briefly, Rachel wondered if there were real Mertons. There must be. Unless, like the de Veres, they had died out long since, another aristocratic dynasty risen and fallen to dust.
Cece waved a dismissive hand. “Simon’s blood is so blue, it’s a wonder he doesn’t stain his shirts indigo when he cuts himself shaving. His mother’s people are even worse than the Montforts. Not that it counted for much with Auntie Violet. We all thought she would have an apoplexy when—you know.”
Rachel assumed a knowing air. “When Simon’s mother bolted?”
“Which time?” Cece lounged back, glass in her hand. She appeared to be enjoying herself hugely. “My dear, don’t tell me you didn’t know! Everyone does.”
“I’ve been so much abroad…” Rachel hedged.
Cece’s pale curls caught the light. “They tried to keep it a great secret … but, of course, who could resist? It was all anyone could talk about for months.”
“What was?” Rachel didn’t even pretend to have
a clue.
“My dear!” Cece held her glass aloft. “Why, Olivia’s engagement to Simon.”
TWELVE
“They were engaged? As in … engaged to be married?”
“It was all terribly hush-hush.” Pleased with the effect of her announcement, Cece sank back in her chair. “I probably oughtn’t have said. It was all eons ago. Practically the Dark Ages.”
“But Lady Olivia is all of … twenty-two?” As if Rachel didn’t know her half-sister’s age to the minute.
“Twenty-three,” said Cece, her pale eyes alight with the joy of gossip. She rested her elbows on the table. “That was part of the scandal of it. Livvy was—sixteen? Seventeen? You wouldn’t have thought she had it in her, would you?”
“No.” Rachel’s fingers tingled with nervous tension and crème de menthe. That odd familiarity. The tension between Simon and Mr. Trevannion. Simon’s patronage, never entirely explicable as mere devotion to his newspaper column. She’d known there was more there than met the eye; she just hadn’t imagined how much. “Whatever happened?”
“You mean after Auntie Violet went into hysterics and burst her corset? Uncle Edward nipped it in the bud, of course.”
It took Rachel’s fogged brain a moment to make the connection. “Uncle Edward … You mean the earl.”
From far away, she could hear her mother’s voice, chiding, “Edward…”
Seven years ago, Cece had said. Rachel had just begun working in France. But her father hadn’t known that, had he? He had been too busy watching over his other little girl.
Rachel’s throat felt as though she had swallowed a pack of pebbles. She managed to say, “He didn’t approve?”
Drawing out a gold lighter, Cece lit one of her Egyptian cigarettes, waving it for emphasis. “Simon was so much older—and then there was all the scandal with his mother. She’s not received—not by the sticklers. You can imagine which camp Auntie Violet falls into.” Cece blew out a long plume of smoke. “She’s quite wasted on the modern age, really. She ought to have been biblical. She’d have so enjoyed a good stoning. I can just see her scrabbling to get her fingers around the first stone.”
The Other Daughter Page 14
