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 fiancé.”
“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.
Rachel backed toward the door, her heels catching on her long skirt. “Isn’t that what they say? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Her voice was Vera Merton’s, high and sophisticated. If she kept talking she might keep from crying, and, at all costs, she wasn’t going to let her father see her cry. Not for him. “You needn’t worry that I’ll trouble you again. I’ve seen all I need to see.”
She had seen the portraits and the carpets, the porcelain and the tapestries. Hundreds of years’ worth of items that were beautiful and rare, and an heiress with the money to maintain them.
She meant to sweep out, to leave with her head high and her dignity intact, or as intact as it could be, but there must have been just a little bit of that four-year-old Rachel left inside her, because she came to a stop on the threshold, her gloved hand catching against the intricately carved wooden arch.
She looked back at her father, so small at the end of the long room, and said, in the voice of that four-year-old she had been, “Did you love us at all? Even a little?”
Her father might have been one of the busts on their pedestals.
His silence was answer enough.
“Right.” The jagged edge of a Tudor rose was digging into Rachel’s palm. “That’s all, then. Good-bye.”
The stairs were worn, curving in the middle. She took them so quickly that only sheer momentum kept her from falling. Rachel stumbled int
o the corridor at something like a run, her skirts tangled against her legs.
Through the unshed tears, through the roaring in her ears, she thought she heard her own name, whispering down the corridor behind her.
TWENTY-TWO
She was soon hopelessly lost.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t care where she went. All she wanted was away. One corridor and then another, down stairs that were too narrow for public use. She had stumbled into the servants’ quarters.
How terribly appropriate, thought Rachel, with a laugh that turned into a sob. Just where she belonged. Tossed out by the back stairs.
She swiped the back of her hand clumsily against her eyes. Her father wasn’t worth crying for, none of this was. What did she need with linen-fold paneling and six swans a-swimming? And her father … Well, she didn’t need him, either. She hadn’t for a very long time. It was the idea of him she had cherished. The idea of someone who would love her, absolutely, unconditionally, as her mother had, as he had seemed to do all those years ago.
Now she knew.
That was what she had wanted, wasn’t it? To know. And now she did. There had been no mistake in his leaving them, he had meant to leave them, to trade them for all this.
She might have her revenge. She could go to the papers—Simon’s paper, some other paper—but what use would it be? A six-minute sensation and then over. And she didn’t want revenge, not really. She had never wanted revenge.
Rachel wanted her mother.
She wanted her mother with a raw longing that made her throat sting. She wanted her arms around her, her firm common sense, the smell of old lavender and fresh baking and washing soap. She didn’t belong here, at Carrisford, or in London, with the smartly sophisticated set who found Vera Merton such a gas, darling, really too too.
She didn’t belong anywhere.
Rachel shoved at the outlines of a door and found herself suddenly outdoors, in the chill of the August evening. It was full dark now, but there were lights twinkling in the gardens, and the sound of a jazz band playing on a terrace strung with Chinese lanterns.
The voices here were higher, brighter, the figures on the dance floor moving in less formal patterns than the ones in the ballroom inside. This was where the bright young people had got to, away from the stifling presence of their elders.
A footman was circling with a silver tray laden with glasses. Rachel snagged a glass of champagne and stepped forward, her long hem dragging against the dew-damp gravel of the path.
There was a fountain in the center of the terrace, Triton blowing his horn, flanked by a pair of adoring water nymphs and a quartet of very sloshed young men, ties askew, faces flushed, as they jostled and dared one another to scale the fountain.
“Bet you can’t get”—word garbled—“on Triton’s spear!”
More jostling and splashing.
“I’d like to spear—”
What idiots, thought Rachel angrily. What fools, the lot of them. This is the great and the good? It seemed such a waste, those vast edifices, all the wealth and education and culture, all come to this.
“One of them is going straight into the water,” said a familiar voice by Rachel’s shoulder.
“John!” Rachel hastily composed herself. Not John, not now. She didn’t have it in her to make polite conversation, to be the person he thought her to be.
Different from the others, he had said. He didn’t know the half of it.
“Are you cold?” John lifted the heavy white silk scarf from around his neck.
“A goose walked over my grave,” Rachel said shakily. She could only hope that her eye-black hadn’t run, or, if it had, that it was too dark for John to see it. “Shouldn’t you be doing your duty indoors?”
“I have done.” John’s cheeks were flushed with excitement and champagne. “I had the most splendid conversation with Mr. Baldwin.”
“Mmm?” Rachel plunked her empty glass on a tray, trying to think of a polite out. She had to find Simon, find a way to get back to London, pack up her things.…
But Simon was with Olivia.
“Mr. Baldwin agrees with me entirely on disarmament,” John was saying triumphantly.
“How wonderful,” said Rachel tonelessly.
Simon wouldn’t thank her for intruding, not now. The chill breeze cut through Rachel’s meager wrap, making her feel small and insignificant and miserably alone.
Oh, bother it. Rachel plucked another glass of champagne off a tray. She had never drunk to drink before, but if there was ever a time, it was now. One last hurrah, one last binge before Vera Merton packed up and disappeared forever.
She turned a bright smile on John. “Be a darling and find me a bottle?”
John gestured obligingly to one of the ubiquitous footmen, talking all the while. “… no greater spur to war than the accumulation of arms. Dash it all, it’s common sense. If the weapons are there, someone’s bound to be tempted to use them.”
“Toys for grown-up boys?” said Rachel, holding the stem of her glass between two fingers, watching the way the crystal sparkled in the lantern light.
If Simon wouldn’t take her, maybe she could find someone else to bring her to the station. A train back to London, and then she could just disappear, melt away as though she never was.
And she wasn’t really. If Vera Merton was a sham, then Rachel Woodley was, too, just one of longer duration.
“You always have the mot juste,” said John warmly, and Rachel mutely shook her head.
La vie n’est pas juste, the cook at Brillac used to say, with a shrug of her massive shoulders, and it wasn’t, not at all. If it were—
Rachel cut off that line of thought. What use was it? What use would it be to wonder what life would be like if this had all been hers? If she were the one dancing with Simon in the ballroom, instead of lurking in the gardens, shaken and miserable, keeping to the shadows.
John went on, excited and oblivious. “That’s just it, don’t you see? And that’s why I suggested to Mr. Baldwin that we extend the vote for women. Get rid of the property qualifications, bring the age limit down to eighteen—”
Would Simon wonder what had become of her? Perhaps. In the way one wondered about the ending of a book left unfinished on the train. A curiosity, nothing more.
“… gentler sex…” said John.
Olivia was gentle. Olivia spoke in a soft, muted voice. But, then, she could afford to be gentle, couldn’t she? She had a father who acknowledged her. Pain twisted like a knife. Her father, his face a cold mask. I have a daughter.… Olivia didn’t have to battle her way through the world, earning her own bread. She had chevaliers falling over themselves for her: John, Simon …
No, that wasn’t fair, either. There was no point in being unkind about Olivia. The champagne might be the Frenchest of the French, but it still tasted sour to Rachel. She didn’t want to be that person: petty, vengeful. She might have nothing else, but she had her integrity, such as it was. What was left of it.
Gate-crasher. Fraud. And what had it been for, after all? Her father didn’t want her. Rachel pressed her lips tightly together, against a sudden, betraying rush of tears.
“… would never play with arms as though war were a game. Ah, thank you.” The footman had reappeared, face impassive, with a bottle, which he presented, bottom first, to John. John paused, a hand on the cork. “Shall we toast to a world at peace?”
“Why not?” said Rachel. She lifted her empty glass to John. “And a Trevannion in the Cabinet.”
She was only half serious, but John took her very much at her word. “It’s not a done thing, of course. I’m far too junior. But—” Out came the cork with a pop. “In a year or two…”
They had moved a little bit away from the crowd, in the lee of a Roman temple—or perhaps Greek; Rachel’s architectural background was sketchy at best—on a small rise.
“Good on you,” said Rachel. She plunked down on the ground, which wasn’t quite so dry as it looked. She
felt the wet seeping through the seat of her dress. She hoped Simon’s sister wasn’t too fond of it. “You can bring government back to what it ought to be.”
John had been pouring their champagne. He paused, the bottle on an angle. “Dash it all, I wish—” He jumped as cold liquid splashed on his hand. He shook it off. “Never mind.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” Her mother used to say that, when Rachel had sighed for this or that. Reaching up, Rachel took the bottle from him and topped up her own glass. “They can be dangerous things, wishes.”
She’d spent all those years wishing her father were still alive. She ought to have known better. Fate had a way of giving you what you wanted, but with a twist.
“It’s just—you understand a chap, don’t you?” Carefully, John spread out his jacket on the ground and sat down on top of it, next to Rachel. “Olivia—she doesn’t care. It doesn’t interest her.”
“I’m not sure I would say that.” Rachel’s brain felt fuzzy with champagne. “It’s hard to tell what Olivia is thinking.”
She didn’t want to think of Olivia, Olivia dancing with Simon, Olivia who she so dearly would have liked to hate.
Oh, let them all have each other, Rachel thought drearily, taking another swig of champagne, which tasted to her like nothing at all. It’s nothing to do with me.
John scuffed his heels against the carefully planted turf. “I thought she would be more like her mother. Oh, not like that—not as pushing—but that she’d care about things. That she’d take an interest.”
Why had she come out here with John? Because it was that or go back in the house. Go away, Rachel thought. Go away and leave me alone.
“I’m sure she has other strengths,” said Rachel vaguely.
“Oh, yes, she can balance books,” said John bitterly. “She told me. But what use is that?”
A great deal of use, Rachel could have told him. Especially when one was living quarter to quarter, payment to payment. “Well, what do you need, then?”
“Someone with—oh, I don’t know.” John leaned back on his elbows, staring gloomily out at the curves of an ornamental bridge that seemed to be missing its river. “Someone with energy, with ideals. Someone who can manage things. Someone more like—well, more like you.”