The Other Daughter

by Lauren Willig

Rachel’s hand closed reflexively over her wrist, her mind muddled. There was such depth of emotion there. It made her feel small. Small and defensive.

  “If you care,” she blustered, “why don’t you do anything?”

  “If someone wants to go to the devil,” said Simon shortly, “he will. There’s nothing one can do about it.”

  “You mean like Peter Heatherington-Vaughn?”

  In the midst of all the noise and motion, there was a horrible stillness. Simon’s black and white stood out starkly against the gaily garbed throng.

  “You know nothing about it.” Simon’s words might have been chiseled from ice.

  No, she didn’t, because no one had bloody told her anything.

  Rachel fumbled to remember what John had said in the cab last night. “I know that the war did horrible things to people. I know that Peter”—she hesitated over the name, this man she had never known, but was so closely connected to her—“that Peter was one of those men. It’s not surprising that he should bear the scars of what he had seen. Which is why it’s so terribly important that we keep such things from happening again.”

  Simon fumbled at his sleeve, rooting around in the cuff for cigarette and lighter. The lighter stuck. Simon wrenched it free; Rachel could hear fabric tear. “Now you sound like Trevannion. All you need is a temperance band playing behind you and someone putting around a cup for donations.”

  “At least he has the guts to speak out for something.”

  Simon gave an unpleasant laugh. “Ignorance redeemed by vehemence? Now there’s a pretty picture.”

  “If he’s ignorant, maybe that’s because those who know won’t tell him.”

  “What do you want me to tell you? Would you like to hear about the rats that grew fat on human flesh? Or the men who would be speaking to you one minute and have a gaping hole where their heads had been the next? That was what Peter saw. That was what killed him, as surely as any shell.” His hand shook on his lighter, making the flame sway and dance. Briskly, he shut it again and shoved it up his sleeve. “What did you want, Vera?”

  The use of her assumed name felt like a blow. She had forgot, for a moment, that she was Vera.

  Rachel pressed her eyes closed before opening them. Rapidly, she said, “Lady Frances knows I’m not who we said. She told me as much this afternoon. She warned me to stay away from Cece.”

  There was a lump in her throat. Just the stale air, she was sure. Nothing more.

  “Well?” Rachel itched for action, for a plan. “What do we do?”

  Simon took a long pull on his cigarette. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” She felt as though the ground had been pulled out from beneath her.

  “My dear”—Simon flicked ash in her general direction, his voice a deliberately offensive drawl—“what you say is not exactly surprising. Your—how shall we call it?—your nom de guerre was not designed to withstand strict scrutiny. There are no Mertons on either side of my family tree. Don’t you think that half the people in this room know that?”

  There was a ringing in Rachel’s ears. She shook her head slightly. “But then, how—”

  Simon gave a sharp bark of a laugh. “We haven’t precisely been frequenting the ballrooms of the good and great. Anyone with the right dress can get into Dean Street. Brian Howard doesn’t care whether you’re Vera Merton or Eliza Doolittle so long as you genuflect before his genius. Look at Inez Holden.” Simon waved a hand toward a laughing group posing for a picture. “She was working as a receptionist at the Daily Express when Waugh picked her up. God only knows where she comes from—or how she pays her rent.”

  Rachel gaped at Simon. “They don’t think—”

  “That you’re my mistress? Possibly.” There was a bite to his voice, anger just beneath the civilized surface. “You needn’t look so appalled. I’m sure most of them don’t think of it at all.”

  So much for masquerading as a young lady of quality. Rachel had felt so smugly secure that she had pulled it off, that her father’s people, her own cousins, accepted her as one of themselves. When all this while, they had known her for a fraud.

  Rachel hardened her voice. “It doesn’t matter. They won’t be tainted with my presence much longer.” She lifted her chin, looking Simon straight in the eye. “I need an invitation to Jicksy’s coming of age.”

  Simon choked on a mouthful of smoke. “Would you also like a phoenix feather and the pearly tears of a unicorn? Those would be far easier to obtain.”

  Rachel felt like one of the mortals in old stories, who woke to find that the fairy gold for which they had sold themselves so dearly was nothing but dust.

  “But…”

  “It’s not a studio party in Chelsea, my sweet. The guest list was determined months ago.”

  Rachel stared at him, feeling as though she’d never seen him before. “But—you promised. You said you could get me an invitation to Caffers.”

  “I said Olivia could get you an invitation to Caffers.” The silk of his costume hugged his form as he turned away. “I made your introductions for you. If you botched it, it’s down to you.”

  “Oh, no.” Rachel followed doggedly behind him, through the nightmare throng of well-known faces distorted by wigs and makeup, one man’s face on another man’s body, everyone familiar and foreign all at once. “That’s not what you said when we started.”

  Simon’s voice was clipped. “I said you needed an invitation to Jicksy’s twenty-first. I never promised to provide one.”

  Rachel felt as though the world were crumbling around her. She was abandoned, alone, in this room full of people, none of whom would notice if Miss Vera Merton were to disappear permanently from view. “And you never meant to, did you? That wasn’t what this was about. Not for you.”

  Make friends with Olivia, get close to Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, Olivia. Simon couldn’t have given a damn about Rachel’s personal vendetta; he’d seen his chance and seized it. The veneer of sympathy, of interest, had been just that, a veneer.

  He’d warned her not to trust him, hadn’t he? One foot on sea and one on shore, to one thing constant never.

  “Be logical, Vera.” The very name was a barb. Simon looked at her sideways, through a haze of drifting smoke. “You can’t really mean to confront your father in front of all five hundred of his guests.”

  “Why not?” All her frustration found its way into Rachel’s voice. “It would certainly make copy for your column. That was what you wanted.”

  “Was it? I forget.” He took a long drag on his cigarette. “You could probably find a party into which to insert yourself, convince them you’ve been invited.”

  “But not you.” When she’d imagined going to Caffers to confront her father, she had assumed that Simon would be with her. She’d assumed rather too much. Rachel turned away, hoping Simon couldn’t see her face. “Never mind. I won’t ask you to soil your lily-white hands.”

  She felt his hand on her shoulder, a fleeting touch, quickly gone. “It’s not that. It’s—”

  “You don’t owe me any explanations.” He’d made that much plain. “Don’t bother yourself. I’ll find someone else to take me.”

  Simon threw up his hands. “Oh, the hell with it. Why not? One last hurrah. For both of us. Nothing like burning one’s last bridge.” He dropped the butt of his cigarette and crushed it beneath the sole of his shoe. “I’ve taken the job in New York.”

  Rachel’s emotions zigzagged crazily through relief, fear, and a strange, unaccountable sense of loss. “Should I congratulate you?”

  Simon was watching her closely. “Or commiserate. Take your pick.”

  Rachel squared her shoulders. “You will still take me to Caffers?”

  “For my sins.” Gently, Simon’s fingers touched her chin, tilting her face toward his. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  Rachel had never been less sure what she wanted. But she nodded anyway. Because there was nothing else she could think to do.

  With false b
ravado, Rachel said, “What’s the worst that can happen? We both knew this charade couldn’t go on forever. Why not go out in style?”

  Simon smiled crookedly. “If you must go to the devil … far be it from me to stop you.”

  TWENTY

  Rachel first saw Carrisford Court by sunset.

  The setting sun turned the stones to gold and set the mullioned windows glittering with iridescent fire. In the shadow of the walls, swans swam lazily on a moat limned with gold, framed gently by the fronds of weeping willows.

  “A fairy-tale castle come to life.” Simon opened the door of the car, his long frame, elegant in evening attire, blocking the view. “I quote from the guide book, of course.”

  Rachel lifted her long skirt out of the way, stepping carefully out onto the turf. “If I remember my fairy tales, most of them were fairly gruesome.”

  It had been three hours from London. Rachel’s legs were wobbly with disuse. Simon caught her before she stumbled, bracing her with a hand beneath her elbow, where her long kid leather glove ended.

  “Nervous?”

  “Numb,” said Rachel succinctly. Her legs, at least. The rest of her tingled with nervous anticipation. “My leg has been asleep since Slough.”

  After that dreadful fight at the Impersonation Party, they had treated each other with gingerly politeness, like someone avoiding a sore tooth. Rachel missed their comfortable sniping.

  “You might have said something.”

  “So you could rub it for me? Thank you, but no.” Rachel picked her way carefully over the turf. Up in front of them, cars were circling beneath the portico. They had left the car some way from the house, in a field.

  “You prefer to take your chances with the pins and needles?”

  “I know, it’s all the result of an inhibited bourgeois upbringing,” said Rachel raggedly. Now that she was here, she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to go through with it. Confronting her father on his own ground had seemed like a grand idea—until she had seen that ground. “I’m sure Dr. Radlett can sort that for you with an infusion of pigs’ glands.”

  “Rabbits, I should think,” said Simon, “in that context.”

  Rachel gave a choked laugh. “An animal for every occasion?”

  But she was grateful for him in that moment, grateful for the irreverent sense of humor and the warm hand so unobtrusively beneath her elbow.

  Ahead of them, car after car disgorged its jeweled cargo: elderly gentlemen bristling with orders, ladies with tiaras still dusty from the vault, in evening capes that smelled mildly of mold. There wasn’t a face that Rachel recognized.

  The fairy-tale castle, the resplendent guests all made Rachel feel particularly out of place. She had thought she had been in society these past two months, but seeing the ranks of polished cars, the impassive chauffeurs, the elderly ladies with their fox stoles and old-fashioned diamonds, it became clear to Rachel just how far from it she had been, dancing on the fringes in her borrowed finery.

  There had been only one long evening dress in Simon’s sister’s wardrobe. It was sea-foam green, and fitted. At least, it had been fitted to Simon’s sister. It didn’t fit Rachel at all, and a quick alteration had made it wearable, but not becoming.

  She might, she supposed, have taken it to a dressmaker, but now, with her tenure in society winding to a close, she was reluctant to dip into her own closely held funds. Rachel wasn’t a Paris couturier, but necessity had taught her how to sew a seam, competently if not elegantly. Real life was crowding back around her. The enchanted bubble had burst. Cece was in Switzerland; Simon was leaving for New York. And Rachel, like Cinderella, would see her finery turned to ashes at the stroke of midnight.

  Or, if not to ashes, then to a typewriting machine, a stenographic pad, and a bedsit in Holborn.

  But first, she needed to see her father. One last time.

  Rachel’s fingers closed around the brooch she had fastened to a ribbon around her neck. E and K, entwined in perpetuity.

  Until they weren’t.

  “Pardon?” Simon had said something, had been saying something, but the words had buzzed around her ears without penetrating her consciousness.

  “Are you feeling stirrings of ancestral consciousness?” inquired Simon. The words were facetious, but there was an edginess about him that Rachel knew was echoed in the tenseness of her own shoulders.

  Rachel looked up at the manor house looming before her. Her father might live here, but she never could. It was the sort of house one saw in newsreels and magazines, the stately home of X, Y, or Z, for shopgirls to sigh over and Communists to deplore.

  “I feel as though I ought to be paying two shillings for the guided tour,” she said bitterly.

  “As I recall, it’s three and six. And it’s well worth the ticket price. Caffers is a beautiful artifact.”

  Rachel glanced sharply at him. “Yet people live here still.”

  “Live is a relative term. Your father works here. It’s a pursuit for him, not a home. Lady Ardmore performs here on Saturdays to Mondays. She uses it as a stage set. Jicksy is jailed here in between excesses. It’s a prison for him. And Olivia…”

  “Yes?” Rachel’s gloved fingers were slippery on the sea-green flounces of her borrowed dress.

  “Olivia truly loves Caffers.” Simon spoke in the same detached, dispassionate voice. “If there were no such thing as entail, she might have done a brilliant job of running it someday. As it is, she’ll have to content herself with murmuring bland nothings to Trevannion’s constituency.”

  In front of them, the swans sailed blithely on the gold-spangled moat, trailing weeds like emerald ribbons. “Could you have done better for her?”

  “It depends,” said Simon, “on whether you prefer the devil or the deep blue sea.”

  “That’s no answer at all.”

  “If you want answers, go to Trevannion. He has plenty and to spare.”

  “All right,” said Rachel, goaded. “Perhaps I will. He’s sure to be here tonight, isn’t he? I imagine he’ll be kind enough to spare me a dance.”

  Simon looked down at her, a sardonic expression on his face. “Kindness? Is that what you call it?”

  “Would you prefer basic courtesy? You shouldn’t snipe about him so, you know. Just because—”

  “Because what?”

  Because you’re too much of a coward to reclaim the woman you love, she had been going to say. Something in Simon’s expression made her rapidly improvise, “Because he has the courage of his convictions.”

  Belatedly, she remembered John’s complaint at the Crystal Ball and Bottle party, about the article Simon had published under his own name. But it was too late to take it back.

  “I had convictions once. Or thought I had.” Simon stared up at the twin flambeaux on either side of the door, hissing and spitting in the waning light, flanked footmen in matching livery, white-wigged, decked out in knee breeches and silk stockings, a relic of an earlier age. “I was going to write the definitive history of the Norman conquest, did you know that?”

  He was staring at the doorway, the flickering light of the torches casting an odd orange glow across his face.

  “I had opinions on all sorts of things. I was so sure of myself.…”

  Ahead of them, an elderly couple decked in orders moved, but Simon was frozen on the stair.

  “Well, why didn’t you?” Rachel said, hoisting her skirt so she wouldn’t trip on her flounces. “Write your history, I mean.”

  Simon looked at her as though he’d forgotten she was there. “Why waste time praising the achievements of great men when I could spend my time scribbling the meaningless for the sake of the unmemorable?” The sarcasm in his voice bit like cheap gin, but it wasn’t directed at her. He rubbed his gloved hands against his arms, as though he were suddenly cold. “To beguile the times, look like the times.”

  The great door loomed above them. Rachel looked sharply at Simon. The August night was cool, but there was sweat beading o
n his forehead. “Are you all right?”

  With an effort, he mustered up a smile that was all teeth and no cheer. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  Because he was as nervy as a horse scenting thin ice. It seemed rather an extreme reaction to crashing a party, even such a party as this.

  Rachel gave up. “What happens next?”

  “What happens,” said Simon, making a good show of pulling himself together, “is that I give our names to that charming personage over there, who will boom them out at the top of his lungs. And then Lord and Lady Ardmore will either shake our hands or boot us out of the party.”

  Her father hadn’t known her last time. But now, after the pictures … Rachel’s fingers lightly touched the brooch at her neck. “What odds would you give us?”

  “Aren’t you the one with a crystal ball?”

  A man in elaborate livery, a long staff in his hand, was leaning forward, inquiring their names. The pins and needles weren’t just in Rachel’s legs, they were in her hands, too, making her fingers itch and tingle.

  “I’ve retired,” said Rachel shakily.

  “Have it your own way,” said Simon. With an arrogant slouch and a pronounced Oxbridge drawl, he gave their names to the man at the door, who banged the ground with his staff, once, twice.

  “Mr. Simon Montfort and Miss Vera Merton!”

  There was no puff of smoke, no whiff of brimstone, no rush of angry footmen ready to throw them out on their ear.

  No one paid the slightest attention.

  Behind them, the staff clunked again. “Mr. Harold Conway and Her Most Serene Highness, Princess Sobiesky!”

  Rachel glanced uncertainly at Simon. “We’re through?”

  “The first gate.” The procession twined in front of them, up a great double stair.

  It was daunting and mind-boggling, the cream of London society, tottering marquesses and beribboned generals, all queuing for the privilege of wishing Rachel’s brother felicitations on the anniversary of his birth. Not that it was really about Jicksy, Rachel realized that. It was about tradition and ceremony and clinging to the old ways.

  At the landing, below a vast baroque painting featuring various fleshy, mythological personages, Lord and Lady Ardmore received their guests. Rachel couldn’t see much of them, just the glitter of Lady Ardmore’s tiara, the glint of her father’s glasses, and, between them, a dark head which had to belong to her brother, Jicksy.