“But you remember me. Now.” Rachel folded her arms across her chest. It was all a little too convenient. Rather like John’s flowers. An offering with strings attached. “To what may I attribute this sudden outpouring of paternal affection?”
Her father took a moment before answering. “When the pictures arrived,” he said quietly, “I was quite certain that it was a swindle, of the basest kind, attempting to play on my emotions as a prelude to blackmail. The pictures were very cleverly done—but they can do incredible things in darkrooms these days.” His eyes lifted to hers. “But I knew they couldn’t be real.”
Rachel’s nails bit into her palms. “Why not?”
The earl drew in a deep breath. “Because my daughter—my Rachel—was dead.”
Dead.
The word shivered through the bright, modern room, as out of place as a dirge at a nightclub.
“That’s absurd,” said Rachel flatly.
“It is,” said her father quietly, “what I was told.”
Rachel hardly knew what to say. She felt as though she had been presented with her own tombstone. There was something deeply disquieting about being told one was dead, even when one knew very well that one wasn’t.
“So you see,” he said, “when you appeared … what was I to think?” Gingerly, he set his hat down on the glass table. “Please, may we sit down?”
Wordlessly, Rachel gestured toward the white sofa. Her father waited until she had seated herself on one of the neighboring chairs before he awkwardly lowered himself onto the sofa, sitting on the very edge as though he mistrusted it.
“Even if you had been told—” It was curiously hard to say the words. “Why on earth would you believe it?”
Her father stared at the glass surface of the cocktail table. “I knew that she—that you—were dead because I saw the house. There was very little left of it. Just the charred walls. Some of the chimney. I saw”—his voice almost broke, but, with effort, he composed himself—“I saw one of your dolls. Her hair was all singed away. The porcelain had cracked and charred.…”
“Amelia.” From far away, Rachel remembered that doll, a smirking, porcelain-headed doll with a frilly frock. “I hated that doll.”
They had left Amelia behind, along with almost everything else.
But … a fire?
Her father leaned forward, saying urgently, “How did you do it? How did you escape? I had nightmares, for years, of you, in your room, in the fire—”
His face twisted, contorted. He rocked forward, his hands over his face, his shoulders shaking. A horrible choking sound emerged from between his splayed fingers.
Her father was crying, great, shuddering, terrible sobs.
Rachel didn’t know what to do. She dropped to her knees in front of him, chafing his wrists, trying to get his attention.
“Please, would you like some tea? A cocktail?” It sounded so painfully inadequate.
“I—” Her father fought for control. “All these years—I thought—”
He didn’t need to voice the words. Rachel could read the horror of it in the grooves in his cheeks.
“No,” she said, and felt her father’s fingers fleetingly brush her hair, before she pushed herself to her feet. Forcefully, she said, “There was no fire. At least, not while we were there. Please—I was never in any danger.”
Her father shook his head, looking dazed.
“I saw the house. Your doll…”
“We left her behind. Mother said I could only bring one trunk.” It was as though they were speaking separate languages. Rachel felt a slightly hysterical laugh welling up. “You see, we were told you were dead. That was why we left.”
Her father stared at her as though she were speaking in tongues. “Dead?”
“Yes,” said Rachel, “that’s rather how I felt, too. Mother had a letter. She said it was from abroad, that you had died on a collecting trip. There couldn’t be a funeral because there was no body.”
Rachel, four years old, had never questioned it, any of it. The world was full of strange shifts, of grown-up decisions for which she was offered no explanation.
“I don’t know why we had to go. But we did. All we took were our clothes—and your chess set. We kept your chess set. I have it still.”
“Dead,” her father repeated. He looked dazed, as dazed as Rachel felt. “It was my brother who had died. Katherine knew that. It was why I had to go home. I never—I cannot imagine—”
“I’ve spent my life believing that you were dead.” Speaking as evenly as she could, Rachel said, “When I learned you were alive—I thought you must have left us.”
“I did, but only for a month.” Her father looked as though someone had put him through a wringer and hung him out on a line in a high wind. “I was gone for longer than I had intended. I’d meant to be away a fortnight; it took a month. I wrote your mother, telling her—”
“Telling her what?”
Her father picked at the upholstery of the chair. “Did your mother ever tell you—anything of our situation?”
“Yes. All of it untrue. I was led to believe that you were a botanist—and an orphan.”
Her father’s lips tightened. “It would have been easier if I were. I was fortunate. I was the younger son—and a disappointment from the moment I was born. My father didn’t pay much attention to me.” His expression softened, his eyes looking at images Rachel couldn’t see. “We grew up together, your mother and I. She was the estate agent’s daughter—did she tell you that?”
Rachel shook her head.
“She was always in and out of the house. Her mother had died, so there was no one to watch over her. And I … I had been meant to go to school, but I was a sickly child, so it was simpler to keep me at home with a tutor. We were company for each other.”
His words painted a more vivid picture than he knew, of two lonely souls finding each other.
“We always knew we wanted to be married. I had thought, as a second son … but my father didn’t consider your mother a fitting match for a Standish.”
“Why didn’t you just marry and damn the consequences?”
“Because he would have cut off my allowance,” her father said simply. “We had nothing else on which to live. And then there was you.” Awkwardly, he said, “Whatever else, I want you to know—we loved you so. You were our own private wonder.”
Rachel’s eyes stung; her throat was too tight to speak.
We loved you so.
Her father was still speaking. “We thought that all we had to do was wait it out. When my father died, I would inherit, not much, but enough to keep us modestly. My brother Marcus was nothing like my father; he wouldn’t cut up stiff about it. But then Marcus died.”
Dimly, Rachel recalled Cousin David telling her something of the kind, about her father inheriting unexpectedly. It all seemed a million years ago, that initial interview with Cousin David, a yellowed clipping clutched in her hand.
Hurriedly, her father said, “That was why I went home, for Marcus’s funeral. My father announced to me that he had an heiress for me. The estate—it was all but bankrupt. I hadn’t realized—”
That letter. Rachel could see that letter, sitting on the kitchen table. “So you told my mother you were leaving us?”
“No!” Her father was genuinely horrified. “I needed more time. There had to be some way, something my father hadn’t considered. An asset he hadn’t yet dissipated. That was what I told your mother—that I needed more time.”
“I see.”
And Rachel had blithely been grubbing in the dirt, playing in mud puddles in the garden, while all of this had been going on around her. Life, at four, had been a sea of knees and ankles, chair legs and the undersides of tables.
She wished, desperately, that she had paid more attention, that she had lifted her head and looked up.
“It has haunted me since—if I had only come home when I intended—if I hadn’t stayed that extra fortnight.” Her father’s
face was haggard, trapped in the same nightmare he had revisited year after year after year. “David sent me a telegram. I came as quickly as I could, but there was nothing there. Just the charred wreckage. And your doll—”
“We were in Norfolk.” Rachel’s head came up. “David?”
“My cousin.” Her father was slumped in his seat. There was nothing of the earl about him now; just a tired, aging man with loss stamped in the lines of his face. “He was the only one who knew—about your mother. We were inseparable as children, Katherine, David, and I. I tried to see him last week, but he wasn’t in college.”
No. He wouldn’t be.
David knew. David knew that they weren’t dead. He should know; he had bought Rachel enough ices over the years. He’d sent her presents on her birthday, listened to her childish stories, read her books.
And, yet, it appeared that he had told Rachel’s father that she had perished in a fire twenty-three years ago.
Her father’s voice broke through the nasty suspicions gathering in Rachel’s mind. “You said—last night. You said your mother was dead.”
Rachel gathered her scattered thoughts together. “Yes, this past April. It was the Spanish influenza.”
“It seems impossible to think that all this while, she was alive, and I never knew. I never imagined…” Her father removed his glasses, rubbing them on his sleeve, his thoughts somewhere far away. “I wasn’t quite in my right mind. Not after seeing—” He shook his head as though shaking off the memories.
The fire. The doll.
How could Cousin David have been so unspeakably cruel?
Rachel leaned forward, her hand almost touching her father’s. “But it wasn’t real, any of it.”
“No,” said her father, and, tentatively, took her hand in his. For a moment, he held it very, very tightly, before letting go. “It might have been my father’s doing. I hadn’t thought he knew; we thought we had been so very careful. But he might have found out.… Not that it matters now.”
If Cousin David had lied to her father, what might he have told her mother? Had her mother spent all of those years convinced that Rachel’s father had abandoned them? She would have been too proud to write, too proud to beg for explanations.
There was too much to think about; she would have to mull it through later, after her father was gone.
“She never forgot you.” Rachel wasn’t sure what prompted her to say it. Perhaps the desolation on her father’s face. That fleeting pressure of his hand. “She would never hear of marrying.”
“No,” said her father, half to himself, “she wouldn’t.” He looked up at Rachel. “Please—there is so much I missed. Will you tell me what you can? Where you lived? What your lives were?”
“There isn’t much to tell,” said Rachel. “We lived in a village in Norfolk called Netherwell.…”
Haltingly, Rachel began to sketch in the details of their lives, the village fetes, the piano lessons, her mother’s weekly chess match with the vicar, her adventures with Alice, the pronouncements of Mrs. Spicer.
The sun slanted across the drawing room floor before slinking back below the roofs of the buildings across the way. The sky was dusted with twilight and Rachel was still talking, stories upon stories: her mother’s clever managing of Mrs. Spicer, so that Mrs. Spicer thought she was managing them; the matter of piano lessons; their battles over the question of typing lessons; Rachel’s departure for Paris. So many memories, good and bad and in between.
Through them, Rachel could feel her mother taking shape again, but with a difference. There were missing pieces that made sense now. Her father’s picture in the drawer. Her mother’s reserve. The care she took of their reputations.
Rachel could even understand, reluctantly, why her mother might not have wanted to tell her, might have wanted her to keep her illusions. The life her mother had built for them had been harder won than Rachel knew.
What must it have cost her, night after night, knowing that the man she had loved was married to another woman? Believing that he had left her?
As Rachel’s stories tailed off, her father shifted in his chair. “You were happy.”
It wasn’t quite a question, but Rachel thought about it anyway.
“Yes,” she said. “I suppose we were.”
It had been quite romantic to imagine her life blighted by the absence of a father, but the truth of it was that the day to day of her life had been quite content.
“And you?” Rachel asked hesitantly.
It felt odd to be thinking about her father’s happiness, when she had spent the past few months hating him so. It also felt odd to think of one’s parents as people, independent of oneself, people who might be happy or unhappy.
Her father looked as though it hadn’t quite occurred to him, either. “They have been good years for Carrisford. There was so much that had been left to fall into disrepair. The first few years, I did what I could to stem the damage. But, after that—”
He talked about pig breeding and haymaking and new machinery and old feuds among the tenantry, and Rachel smiled and nodded and wondered where, in the midst of it, his wife and children belonged.
They didn’t, it seemed.
“You sit in the Lords?” Rachel ventured. The intimacy of their earlier discussion was gone. It was rather like sitting next to a stranger at a dinner party.
“When I must. I prefer to be at Carrisford, when I can. I don’t like to trust it to an agent.” That was what Simon had told her, half a lifetime ago. Her father glanced at the clock on the mantel. “Is that the time? I should have been back an hour ago.”
Automatically, Rachel stood. There was so much more that she needed to ask, so much more that had to be said, but he was the earl again, and she found herself feeling oddly shy with him, this father she didn’t know at all.
“Thank you for stopping by,” she said, her hand clasped at her waist like a schoolgirl. “It—makes rather a difference.”
Her father retrieved his hat from the table. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it does.”
They looked at each other across the dusky drawing room. “There’s no going back,” said Rachel. “Is there?”
“When I lost you,” said her father, “you were only four. I am still coming to terms with … this.”
“And you have another family.” There it was, the elephant in the room.
“Yes,” said her father, but he spoke as though the thought of it brought him little pleasure.
They were at the door now. Rachel paused, with her hand on the knob.
“I know this isn’t my place, but … why didn’t you let Olivia go to Somerville?” Rachel’s father looked at her with an air of vague puzzlement. “She told me she was awarded a scholarship.”
“Was she? I wasn’t told. I suppose her mother…” Her father made an apologetic gesture. “I am afraid I don’t have very much to do with Olivia.”
Strange to think she had been so jealous of Olivia once, had seen the picture of her being escorted by her father and assumed that Olivia had everything Rachel had lost.
Haltingly, Rachel said, “It isn’t my affair, but … her mother seems to bully her, rather. I would think, having lost one daughter … Never mind.” She opened the door, stepping aside so her father could go. “It really isn’t any of my affair.”
Her father settled his hat on his head, casting his face into shadow. “It was necessary,” he said, with difficulty, “that I have an heir. I understood that. But … it was a duty. They were a duty. And when that first child was a girl…”
He stopped in the doorway, looking back over his shoulder at Rachel, his face a picture of regret.
“Olivia committed one unpardonable crime. She wasn’t you.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Her father could be lying. But Rachel didn’t think so. That sorrow had been too raw, too real to be feigned.
All these years, her father had believed her dead. Rachel couldn’t quite get her mind around it. The more she le
arned, the less made sense, all of her easy assumptions and judgments scoured away.
She stood with her hand on the doorknob, long after her father’s footsteps had retreated down the hall and the sound of the lift had faded away. Rachel leaned her forehead against the cool white panels of the door. She wanted, so very badly, to be angry, but she couldn’t quite seem to manage it. All she could feel was a vast and all-encompassing bewilderment.
Why would someone have gone to such effort, such hideous and decisive effort, to keep her parents apart? There was something particularly chilling about the thought of that fire, despised Amelia lying scorched and blackened on the singed turf. Arson wasn’t a business undertaken lightly.
His father, her father had said. Slowly, Rachel retreated to the sitting room, where the white sofa still bore the imprint of her father’s body. Yes, she could see how Violet Palmer’s money might have been a powerful inducement to her grandfather. But there it was—the sticking point. Why would David help him?
Turning on the lamps, drawing the curtains against the dusk, she couldn’t wrap her mind around it; no matter how she turned it around and around, the pieces wouldn’t quite fit. But then, Rachel reminded herself, all she knew of this version of events, the fire itself, came from her father. He had seemed genuinely shaken—but what did she really know of him, after all this time?
The fire could be easily enough checked. There must be records in the local papers if she could only recall the name of the village. And—with the memory of her father’s stricken face—she really didn’t think he was lying. Not about the fire, at any event.
But what if there had been other considerations? Her father had said he meant to come back to them. Had he really? What had been in that letter? Had Cousin David whisked them away to prevent her mother having to see the man she loved marry another woman?
A nice, altruistic motive, that, Rachel mocked herself, but it was hard to imagine Cousin David acting quite so positively, quite so aggressively.