Rather ironic, considering that her own husband’s by-blow was currently sitting in the dining room of the Ritz. Or might men do as they pleased, while women were obliged to remain like Caesar’s wife, above reproach?
“That doesn’t seem quite fair.” It was an effort to keep her voice light. Rachel forced herself to loosen her grip on the stem of her glass. “To visit the sins of the mother on the child.”
“My dear! When has the world ever been fair?” Cece flicked ash into the air. “And one must admit that Simon did have the most eccentric upbringing—villas in Italy and cattle ranches in America and heaven only knows what else. Brian has such stories—most of them likely only half true. But then, there is that other half.…”
Rachel took a long swig of her cocktail. It was too sweet, cloying on her palate. “No wonder the match wouldn’t do.”
Not for Lady Olivia Standish.
One couldn’t have the prized daughter of the house throwing herself away on a man of dubious repute.
Rachel could feel anger rising up in her. She drowned it in another wave of champagne and crème de menthe.
“Of course it wouldn’t do—for Simon!” said Cece loyally. “Can you imagine being married to Olivia! Such a dear, but so deadly dull. And Aunt Violet! Fancy having her as a mother-in-law!” She shuddered dramatically. “Really, Simon should be lighting candles in gratitude. One can’t imagine what they ever found to talk about.”
Such touching concern for the masses, Simon had said of Mr. Trevannion, for someone about to marry an earl’s daughter.
Rachel’s frustration found a new target. “Perhaps it wasn’t her conversation that interested him.”
Cece gave a tinny laugh. “You are wicked. But, really—Olivia? She’s hardly the type.”
That wasn’t what she’d meant at all. But if that was what Cece wanted to believe … Rachel shrugged. “Still waters.”
Cece’s pale eyes sparkled. “My dear, it would have to be a positive swamp. Aunt Violet watches Olivia like a…”
“Hawk?” provided Rachel.
“I was thinking more like a Victorian chaperone.” Cece ground out her cigarette. “God, it’s no wonder poor Jicksy spends half his time at the bottom of a bottle of gin. Anything must be better than an evening at home with Mayfair’s answer to Lady Macbeth.”
Listening to Cece was like sifting through a pile of diamonds, a glittering confusion of sharp edges. She sounded so entirely vapid that the incisive thrust beneath her words seemed to come out of nowhere, but by the time one had registered it, the topic had already shifted.
Rachel was reminded of Mr. Trevannion’s complaint, of cleverness laid waste by idleness, a generation of leaders lost.
“I take it Lord Ardmore approves of Mr. Trevannion?”
“Oh, that was Auntie Violet’s doing.” Cece crossed one silken leg over the other. “Livvy didn’t ‘take,’ you know. No SA. Or is it BA? Either way, she hasn’t an ounce of it, poor darling. Not that you can entirely blame her when Auntie Violet chooses all her frocks.”
Cece stretched her slender arms above her head, demonstrating to the appreciative waiter that she had both chosen her own frock and had no dearth of that elusive quality known as sex appeal.
“After three Seasons, they had utterly despaired of her.”
Rachel tried not to be too pleased. “That sounds rather old-fashioned, doesn’t it?” She fished a cigarette out of her own bag. “Parading around to catch a husband.”
“Darling, Auntie Violet makes Queen Victoria seem progressive.”
Rachel had often felt that way about her own mother. She missed her now, with a sudden, unexpected longing. They had clashed, certainly, but there had always been a leavening humor to her mother’s strictures.
And, Rachel realized, her mother might have had more reason to be protective than she knew.
Her mother, more than any, knew the pitfalls that attended a fall from grace—what it was to be used and cast aside, left to a raise a child on one’s own.
Cece was still talking. “Aunt Violet fancies herself a maker of men, and since poor Uncle Edward won’t let her make anything of him…” Hunching her slender shoulders, Cece leaned forward confidingly. “That’s how Aunt Violet caught John for Olivia. She’s forever having little political evenings. They’re deadly but no one has the guts to say no.” She paused, cocking her head to one side. “Still. He’s rather a darling, isn’t he? If only one could stop him caring so.”
It was the caring that Rachel found so attractive. Among all the whirl and confusion, the artifice and lies, there was something reassuringly solid about Mr. Trevannion, who said what he believed and believed what he said. Even when it opened him up to the mockery of exacting men about town.
Rachel held up her cigarette to be lit. “Does Mr. Trevannion know? About Simon?”
“He must do.” A tiny blaze sprung up from Cece’s gold lighter; her initials, Rachel saw, had been inset in emeralds in the center. “Unless he dislikes Simon on general principle. Simon does tend to have that effect on people.”
Rachel held her cigarette gingerly between two fingers. “A rather deliberate effect.”
Cece flicked the lid of the lighter shut. “Isn’t he a lamb?”
If lambs had fangs. “Have you known Simon long?”
“Since the cradle. His mother bolted with the first of them—the Italian—oh, ages ago. He used to spend his school hols—” With an abrupt movement, Cece craned her neck, searching for the waiter. She flapped a hand to catch his eye. “Be a pet and bring me another of the same?” Leaning toward Rachel, she said, “You haven’t said a word about your divine party! You simply must let me help you.”
The sudden change of subject caught Rachel off guard. “I hadn’t really thought much about it.”
It had been a spur-of-the-moment idea, although whether she had done it to secure her sister’s presence or to impress Mr. Trevannion, she wasn’t quite sure.
Either way, it clearly didn’t fall into Simon’s master plan, whatever that plan might be.
Simon had lied to her. No surprise there. He had practically told her he would. But why? Why pretend he barely knew Lady Olivia?
Fear of showing a weakness, of baring an old scar? Like a magician, he preferred not to show how his tricks were performed; the magician stood imperturbable, garbed in his cape, while doves capered and cooed around him.
“—red scarves over the windows,” Cece was saying. “Like a gypsy caravan.”
Perhaps magician wasn’t such a very bad analogy after all. Magicians were masters of misdirection. And so was Simon. All that, about needing material for his column … it might not be entirely untrue, but it couldn’t be his main motive.
It all came back to her sister. To Lady Olivia. Lady Olivia, whom he had instructed her to befriend.
But on Simon’s terms. In his way.
Was he, after all these years, still hoping to win Lady Olivia’s hand? There was something less than convincing about the notion of Simon, prickly, polished, self-assured Simon, creeping hat in hand as suitor, especially to such a one as Lady Olivia. One might take Cece’s opinions with a full shaker of salt, but there was no denying that Lady Olivia lacked presence. She was like a whisper of breath in a still room, nothing more than a quiver in the air, as soft as chiffon, as insubstantial as the trail of smoke from a spent candle.
Doubt pricked Rachel. It would be convenient to think of her sister as a nonentity—but there had been those little flashes of something else. A look, a turn of phrase, a trick of inflection. Something that could catch and hold the affections of such disparate men as Simon Montfort and Mr. Trevannion.
Yes, said a cynical voice in her head. It was called being the daughter of an earl.
The legitimate daughter of an earl.
It wasn’t fair to dislike Olivia merely because she was their father’s daughter. No—she disliked her because she was cold and stilted, because she had looked through Rachel, because her very
voice sang of snobbery. Not the honest, prattling snobbery of Cece, but a snobbery all the deeper for being so quiet; a complete lack of interest in anyone not of her world.
“I’ve told Stephen Tennant he must dress as a wizened old crone,” Cece was saying. She had moved on from decoration to costume. “He’s simply too pretty otherwise.”
“Mmm,” said Rachel, and nodded her thanks to the waiter as he set a second cocktail in front of her. Cece, not the least bit visibly impaired, was on her third, in what appeared to be an entirely liquid lunch.
Seven years seemed a very long time to carry a torch.
“—a month Tuesday, I think. We can’t possibly have it any sooner. Late July. Or early August. But it would have to be before the twelfth or no one will be left in town.…”
But was it a very long time to wait for revenge? It was so obvious Rachel couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it before. Pride, Cece had said. The Montforts were rotten with it. Simon might play at self-mockery, but Rachel would wager he was as proud as the rest.
Not love, but pride, quoth she …
“Do you think he was truly in love with her?” Rachel asked abruptly. “Simon, I mean. With Olivia.”
Cece’s plucked brows rose high on her forehead. “Simon? In love? My dear!”
Rachel forced a laugh. “I must be a romantic.”
“How too sweet,” said Cece, with withering scorn. “Next you’ll be reading poetry like poor Livvy.”
“The Lady of Shalott,” Simon had said. Rachel only vaguely remembered it from school, the Lady standing by her tower window, watching the world go by, until the curse came upon her and the web crack’d wide. Singing in her song she died.
All for love.
She wondered, abstractedly, what Simon’s plans were. His real ones. The ones he hadn’t confided to her. It would be romantic to think that she was meant to woo her half-sister on his behalf with Victorian poetry, an unlikely and unwitting Cyrano. Rachel doubted it was anything so sweet.
He wanted her in Olivia’s confidence—but for what? To act as go-between? To draw her into a compromising situation?
It would not, Rachel imagined, look very good for her father if his daughter publicly broke off her engagement to run off with a gossip columnist, albeit one of unimpeachably blue blood.
If Simon wanted revenge on the Earl of Ardmore, wouldn’t it just be simplest to sell Rachel’s story to the papers? He didn’t even need to sell it; he was the paper. All he had to do was plant little hints and innuendos, or, if he wanted his own hands clean, whisper hints into the ears of the right people.
Why hadn’t he?
She wasn’t sure to what extent her interest and Simon’s were aligned. She didn’t want revenge, not really. What she wanted was …
Well, she wasn’t entirely sure. She wanted to know what happened all those years ago. Why her father had left them. If he had ever thought of them, missed them.
Did he love Lady Olivia as much as he had seemed, once, to love Rachel?
Did he sit across from Lady Ardmore at the breakfast table and imagine Rachel’s mother into her seat?
“Do you know,” said Rachel slowly, “I feel rather sorry for Lady Olivia. She does seem to live a bit of a cloistered life, doesn’t she? Someone really ought to stage a rescue operation, draw her out a bit.”
“Auntie Violet would have fits.” Cece’s pale-blue eyes glittered. She dropped her cigarette into her glass, where it fizzed out with a hiss. “And then again, Auntie Violet would have fits. It’s just about that time, isn’t it? Let’s invite ourselves to tea.”
Once Cece had made up to her mind to something, she was every bit as autocratic as her mother. Rachel found herself swept along in Cece’s wake, through the Ritz, into a taxi, to Eaton Square, where, crane her head though she might, she couldn’t see much of the facade other than stone, stone, stone, and more stone, and then up the stony stairs into a hall floored with marble and humid with potted palms.
The ground floor of Ardmore House possessed none of the arabesque grandeur of the great hall of Heatherington House. There was something very boxy about the hall. Admittedly, a very large box, but a box all the same, cold with marble and heavy with oak.
“Hullo, Hutton,” said Cece, favoring the butler with her smile and her jacket, which she dropped into his outstretched hands. “Tea in the library? You needn’t announce us. I know the way.”
She flashed another smile over her shoulder, dragging Rachel behind her up the slippery oak stairs. “Darling Hutton,” she murmured to Rachel. “I used to be half afraid of him as a child, but he’s really just a paper tiger. All teeth and no bite.”
The walls were thick with pictures, piled one on top of the other, but they were landscapes and flower studies.
What did she expect? Rachel mocked herself. Portraits of her ancestors? A lady in Elizabethan garb who was her spitting image?
Instead, the only portrait loomed at the head of the stairs, a self-satisfied woman in the costume of a quarter century ago, blazing with diamonds and triumph, from the tiara on her head to the large hoops of glittering stones on her fingers.
“Auntie Violet,” murmured Cece. “Ghastly, isn’t it?”
The Countess of Ardmore had certainly staked her claim. She had been slimmer then, but she still gave an impression of solidity. She was posed like a conquering general, feet planted firmly on the ground, chin up, her gaze seeming to dare the viewer to attempt to move her.
Had she known? It was a distinctly unsettling thought. Rachel hadn’t spared much thought before for her father’s wife. But now, she wondered. There was something so belligerent about that hard, blue stare.
The money came from the countess, Simon had said. Had that been the price her father had paid?
She was, Rachel realized, trying to find excuses for her father. It was a plot out of a fairy tale, the evil stepmother exiling the lost princess, sending her into the woods with a huntsman with an ax, or a poisoned apple, or whatever else it was that evil stepmothers were meant to do.
And what about the fathers in those stories? Where were they? Why had they never put their foot down?
The doors at the end of the gallery were half open. Through them, Rachel caught a glimpse of shelves heavy with books, leather bound, crimson, navy, green, brown, well worn and well read, the titles chased in gold worn almost away from the spines. The drapes were red velvet, tied with gold tassels.
There was something almost medieval about the large fireplace, with its broad stone cap. Before it, a tea tray had been set: a pot poised above a small spirit lamp, cake and sandwiches. Only one cup had been used. It sat on a small table beside a large winged chair.
Breezing gaily through the door, Cece sang out, “Livvy, darling! Prepare to be diverted!”
But it wasn’t Lady Olivia sitting in the chair by the cold fire.
It was a man who rose from behind the chair. His fair hair had thinned; his gray eyes were obscured behind a pair of reading glasses. But even so, even across twenty-odd years, across the long room, there was no mistaking him.
“Uncle Edward!” Cece exclaimed. “Mummy never told me you’d come to town.”
THIRTEEN
“Cece, child.” Rachel’s father set down the sheaf of papers he was holding and came around the chair to kiss his niece. “I didn’t hear Hutton announce you.”
Rachel stood in the shadow of the door, paralyzed, from her throat down to her toes, which stayed stubbornly planted on that one spot, like one of those nightmares where one couldn’t speak and couldn’t move; one could only stare and stare.
She would have known him anywhere, even with the spectacles, even with the gray that silvered his once fair hair. In her memories, he loomed large, tall next to her petite mother, a giant who could fling Rachel up in his arms and bring her safely to earth again; in the flesh, he seemed smaller, slighter than she remembered, his shoulders rounded from reading. Or maybe it was just the dusty grandeur of the library that made him
seem small in comparison, in a way their tiny cottage never could.
But it wasn’t the signs of time and change that made the words clog in her throat. It wasn’t even that familiar shadow of a scar on his clean-shaven chin. It was the movement of his hand as he peeled off his spectacles, left to right, and tucked them into his pocket; a quirk of inflection; the lift of a brow. All of those tiny gestures that we see without ever seeing; the indefinable somethings that make up a character, so impossible to catch on film, so hard to translate into words, as unique and indelible as a fingerprint.
“Oh, Hutton,” said Cece with a wave of her hand. “You know how he hates climbing stairs.”
“You mean,” said Rachel’s father, with amused resignation, “that you didn’t give him the opportunity.”
The words washed over her, leaving only the familiar cadences in their wake, the same voice that used to read her bedtime stories and sing her silly songs. There was one, in particular, about a little warthog. How she had clamored for that warthog! And he had sung it, again and again and again, all through the long, cold nights.
Her mother had tried to sing it, later, but Rachel had turned her face away. It wasn’t the same. She didn’t sing it right.
It was dizzying, disorienting, seeing the man in front of her, overlaid with those images of long ago; that same smile, that same crinkle around the corners of the eyes, even if the crinkles were deeper, the eyes more tired than she remembered.
Papa.
The word resonated in her ears, so strongly that she feared she had blurted it out, that it was echoing around the wood paneling and crimson drapes, the ordered rows of books and the busts on their pedestals.
For a moment, she was a child again, and her father was going on a trip, just a short trip, not to worry, he would be back before she knew he was gone, and, oh, how she didn’t want him to go, Papa, Papa, Papa …