Cousin David had always been a pale second to her mother’s energy, a follower rather than a leader. His small acts of initiative consisted of slipping Rachel the odd shilling and hesitant suggestions of expeditions to places he thought might be of interest to small girls, some of which were, and many of which weren’t. The Bodleian was all very well, Rachel was sure, but it had bored her silly, especially when Cousin David became absorbed in a manuscript and forgot about her entirely.
Impossible to imagine Cousin David as either villain or henchman.
Unless he was an unwilling henchman? Rachel paused, her hand on the drapes. It was absurd, a plot out of a serial in a magazine, but what if the old Earl of Ardmore—impossible to think of him as Grandfather—had found out about them, had intended, summarily, to put an end to his son’s other family? The thought made Rachel feel more than a little ill. They hadn’t been people to him, merely encumbrances.
If David had somehow heard of the earl’s intentions, surely that, then, would be in character. He wouldn’t have had the nerve to prevent it, just enough to shuffle them out in time, making sure the house was empty when the earl’s minions did their worst, hurrying them away to a new life lest the earl try again.
Yes, and if she believed that, there were some pigs’ glands waiting for injection.
Why not? Her life had certainly been fantastical enough recently. If she went on in that vein, there were all sorts of other plots she might pursue. Perhaps her mother was secretly the crown princess of a minor European principality and they had been burned out by angry anarchists.
Rachel smiled sourly. She had descended so far down into absurdity, she wasn’t sure how to sort out the plausible from the impossible.
What she needed was Simon, Simon stretching his long length out on the white sofa, anchoring her thoughts, cutting through her more ridiculous notions with biting wit.
Rachel’s hand twitched toward the phone, and then fell away again.
Stay at the flat as long as you need.
No, she couldn’t ring Simon. Rachel felt a flush of shame at her own selfishness. She had taken his help for granted, ascribing him all sorts of ignoble motives so that she wouldn’t have to be grateful, wouldn’t have to acknowledge the extent of her own dependence on him.
When she thought what it must have cost him to take her to Carrisford last night—and then—in the garden—
Was it weakness in her that she wished she had given Simon another answer?
What she needed, Rachel decided vigorously, was to go to Oxford and ask Cousin David right out. No nonsense about ringing; he never answered his phone anyway. But it was gone eight; there would be no trains to Oxford at this hour, and, even if there were, she could hardly knock Cousin David up at midnight. Suggs would be appalled.
A crazy laugh bubbled up in Rachel’s throat. After all this, one still wouldn’t want to shock the Merton porter.
Bourgeois, murmured Simon’s voice in her ear, but it sounded like an endearment.
Stupid to hope Simon might be up at Oxford tomorrow, too, saying farewell to his old tutor before he left for New York, brushing past her on that narrow stair as he had once before. That rainy day in April felt like a lifetime ago, a story about a different person entirely.
Rachel caught the earliest possible train out to Oxford the next morning, clanking with milk jugs and bleary-eyed travelers.
Cousin David’s door was sporting the oak, but Rachel decided there were times when tradition could be honored in the breach. She didn’t think she could bear to wait another day, or even another hour, endless speculation buzzing around her brain like a swarm without a hive.
She rapped neatly on the door, and, without waiting for an answer, let herself in.
“Rachel!” Cousin David was in his favorite chair, a book on his lap. If he was shocked at her landing in his lap before lunch, he didn’t say so. He jumped to his feet, the spectacles he wore for reading sliding down on his nose. “Did my letters reach you? I stayed in town as long as I could.”
Nothing could have been more disarming. One thing to speculate about Cousin David’s motives from a distance, quite another here in the familiarity of his old rooms, his spectacles slipping with concern.
Concern for her? Or concern that his actions of twenty-three years ago had finally come to light?
Rachel shut the door firmly behind her. “Why did you tell my father we were dead?”
Cousin David removed the spectacles from his nose and put them carefully away in his pocket. “You’ve spoken to him.”
Rachel looked uncertainly at her cousin, not sure what to make of that. “He cried.”
“Poor Edward.” Cousin David shook his head, saddened, but not surprised. “What a comedy of errors.”
“I don’t find anything particularly comic about it,” said Rachel sharply.
“The words were ill chosen. Sit down, please.” When she hesitated, he gestured toward her usual chair. “It hurts my neck looking up at you.”
Rachel sat. She had sat here so many times, as a child, as an adolescent, as a woman about to go off into the world. It was Cousin David who had made the arrangements for her to go to Paris, as he had arranged so many other things.
“I want the truth this time.” The specter of her mother made her add, “Please.”
Cousin David didn’t ring for his scout. He poured her a cup of coffee out of his own pot, stone cold and bitter. “I never wanted to lie to Edward—or to you.”
Rachel fought a deep sense of disillusionment. If he had offered an excuse—she had been so willing to believe the best of him. “I suppose the devil made you do it?”
“No. Your mother.” Cousin David seated himself across from her, taking advantage of her confusion to say, “Your mother summoned me to Hatherleigh. That was the village where you were living then. She told me she’d made up her mind to leave and to take you with her.”
It didn’t make sense, any of it. “Why would she leave? She loved him.”
And had gone on loving him, all those years, even when she must have believed he’d left them.
“She left because she loved him.” Cousin David leaned both palms on the table, his round face earnest. “She’d had a letter from Edward—your father. The estate was on the verge of bankruptcy. His father was pressing him to marry an heiress. Violet Palmer.”
Rachel watched her cousin warily. “Yes, my father told me.”
“Did he tell you that your mother was the former estate agent’s daughter?” When Rachel looked at him in confusion, he elaborated, “She knew, more than anyone, what it would do to the estate if your father didn’t marry quickly and well.”
“I imagine it would be sold.” The carved wooden arm of the chair was digging into her side. What had that to do with anything? “You can’t think my mother cared about my father’s inheritance.”
“She did. Just not in the way you mean.” Cousin David held up his hands, saying, “It wasn’t just the house that would be sold. It was hundreds of acres of land, land that had been farmed by the same families for generations. What do you think would have happened to them? To their families?”
“I—” Rachel didn’t know what to say. “They would have to find work elsewhere, I suppose.”
“Yes, but where? How? Then there was the staff: gardeners, footmen, housemaids, laundresses … The list goes on and on. There were hundreds of people who owed their livelihood to Carrisford. Your mother knew that. She knew them.” Cousin David pressed his palms flat against the blackened oak of the table. “Your mother came to me and told me that she wouldn’t have that on her conscience. She needed to—to disappear.”
“All for a bit of land,” Rachel said skeptically.
“Not just a bit of land.”
Rachel thought of the great hall at Carrisford, of the gallery where her father had received her. “Paintings, then, and sculptures, and porcelain figurines?” she said sarcastically.
Cousin David gave her the sort of loo
k he gave undergraduates who came unprepared to tutorial. “Because of the choice your mother made, two hundred families retained their livelihood. Your mother knew them. She knew their families, their concerns. They were the ones your mother sacrificed herself to save, not a set of porcelain figurines.”
The way he said it made Rachel feel very small. Defensively, she said, “Wasn’t there anything that could have been sold?”
“Not enough. Many of the paintings are reproductions—or they were, before Violet’s money replaced them. Your grandfather had been milking the estate of its valuables for years. Your father had the misfortune of being conscientious. He wasn’t one to let Rome into Tiber melt. Nor, for that matter, was your mother.” Cousin David drew in a deep breath. “You could say that that was their tragedy, that they were both people of principle.”
He was silent, contemplating.
Rachel felt a surge of impatience. “Yes, but what happened?” It wasn’t a Greek play they were talking about, it was her parents.
Oh, David, her mother would have said, with that tone of fond tolerance she reserved particularly for him. But Rachel wasn’t feeling tolerant right now. She felt keyed up, on edge, reluctant to accept this new version of events. She wanted to stick her fingers in her ears, to drum her heels against the chair, to protest that this couldn’t be true, it couldn’t be her mother’s own doing, it made no sense, none at all, none, none, none.
David roused himself from his reverie. “Your mother told me that her mind was made up. She was taking the decision out of your father’s hands. And she would do it with my help or without it.”
Rachel sat very straight in her chair. “You might have told her no.”
Cousin David looked at her with resignation. “Did you ever try to say no to Katherine? When she was truly set on something?”
A little quiver of doubt pierced Rachel’s resistance. On small things, her mother was infinitely reasonable. But when it truly mattered, she was as immovable as the Alps, and just as icy. They had argued for months over that ridiculous typing course in London. Or, rather, Rachel had argued. Again and again, month after month.
And, in the end, her mother had had her own way.
“When you think of it,” said Cousin David hopefully, “it was really quite noble. She sacrificed her own happiness for the sake of your father’s tenants and staff.”
“Yes, very noble.” If it were true. Rachel looked narrowly at Cousin David. “But it wasn’t just her happiness.”
Cousin David looked at her wistfully. “Were you really that unhappy?”
Yes, she wanted to say. She wanted to hurl the word at him like a stone, to hurt him as she had been hurt. But she couldn’t. Because the truth was that she hadn’t been unhappy, not at all.
Yes, she had mourned her father, but his loss had been a gentle shadow, not an all-enveloping darkness. When she thought of her childhood, all she could see was sunshine, sparkling on the surface of the pond, turning Alice’s blond braids to gold, catching in the white net veil of her mother’s best hat, bouncing like a skipping stone down the path to the village, dancing in the dust motes above the piano keys.
There must have been rainy days, days when she sulked, days when Alice had a sore throat and couldn’t play, but they cast no shadow.
Rachel shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She felt as she had when she was eight and losing an argument with an adult. “That’s not the point.”
“It was for your mother.” Something about the way Cousin David said it made Rachel feel small and petty. “She has—she had the strongest moral sense of anyone I have ever known.”
We were inseparable as children, her father had said. Your mother, David, and I.
Moral sense, her foot. There was another possibility. Rachel seized on it with relief. Accusingly, she said, “You were in love with her.”
David didn’t bother to deny it. “Yes. From the time we were very small.”
Rachel felt on firmer ground here. She leaned forward, prepared to do battle. “Did you think she would marry you if my father were out of the way?”
“It would be easier if there were a villain, wouldn’t it?” Cousin David’s look of understanding reduced Rachel once again to the nursery. “No. I was never that foolish. Your mother loved your father too much for that. And there were … other reasons.”
“Other reasons?” Rachel said suspiciously.
“By then, your mother and I were too much like brother and sister. And I have enough self-love not to live my life in Edward’s shadow. As much,” he said gravely, “as I would have liked to be your father.”
“You did enough,” Rachel muttered. She wasn’t entirely sure what she meant by it. Old loyalties warred with new resentments.
“No.” Cousin David spoke with surprising firmness. Rachel looked up. “I was wrong in one thing. Once you came of age—you deserved to be told. You were right in that.”
He stood abruptly, his chair scraping against the well-worn wood of the floor.
“Your mother had her say. I respected her wishes during her lifetime. But you’re a woman grown now. You deserve to make your own choices.” Cousin David seemed to be speaking as much to himself as to her as he crossed the room to the shelves to the right of the window. He gave a short, sharp nod. “No more secrets.”
“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” Rachel stood, turning to watch him as he retrieved a box from the upper shelf.
It was a medieval objet d’art, a reliquary, intricately carved panels joined with strips of blackened gold. She hadn’t been allowed to play with it when she was little; the carving was too delicate for small fingers. Or so she had been told.
Cousin David pressed a catch at the top, and the sides opened.
Rachel watched him narrowly. “Are you going to swear on St. Athanasius’s knucklebones? There’s really no need for that sort of thing.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him, but St. Athanasius wasn’t going to make a difference one way or the other.
“It’s Thomas à Becket,” said Cousin David. Reaching inside, he drew out not a knucklebone, but a folded piece of paper. He held it out to Rachel. “Here. Take it.”
It wasn’t parchment. It was paper, a page torn from a book, folded, and then folded again.
Automatically, Rachel’s hand closed over it. “This didn’t belong to Thomas à Becket.”
“No.” David set the reliquary back on its shelf. “Your mother gave this to me twenty-three years ago.”
Slowly, Rachel unfolded the paper. It was a sheet torn from a register, with ruled lines for names, dates, witnesses, some marked only with an X, where the signatories had made their marks rather than signing their names.
She had seen a dozen like it. She and Alice used to build forts out of the old parish registers. Or, at least, they had until Mrs. Spicer had caught them and scolded them for messing with the vicar’s things. So many births, deaths … marriages.
Cousin David hovered over her, his body casting a shadow over the document. “Your mother asked me to destroy it. But I couldn’t. I am,” he said apologetically, “too much of a historian for that.”
Rachel didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.
The ink had been cheap; it had faded with time. But two names seemed to burn out of the paper. Rachel couldn’t have said afterward what else, or who else might have been there. All she saw were those two names:
Edward Arthur Standish and Katherine Newell.
TWENTY-SIX
Whoever the rector was, he wrote a clear hand. There was no mistaking the words.
Married 2 May 1897 Katherine Newell, age 17, and Edward Arthur Standish, age 20.
The paper crinkled beneath Rachel’s fingers. “This is—”
“Marriage lines,” said Cousin David. “Your parents’ marriage lines.”
There was another name in the register. Rachel glanced up at her cousin. “You were witness.”
Cousin David ducked his head. “We were all ve
ry young,” he said apologetically.
She had never thought of her parents as being young. Parents were parents. But they had been young. So much younger than she was now. Seventeen. Impossible to think of her mother at seventeen or her father at twenty, marrying in secret, hoping everything would turn out for the best.
“Eighteen ninety-seven,” Rachel said. She looked up at Cousin David in surprise. “That was two years before I was born.”
“Did you believe—Oh, no.” The tips of Cousin David’s ears turned a delicate pink. “Your parents didn’t marry because they, er, had to. They weren’t like that. Either of them.”
Rachel remembered the picture of her parents, the one that had lived in the drawer by her mother’s bed. Not just any picture. A wedding picture.
Yesterday, when her father visited, he might have said something. But he hadn’t. Had there been a little pause when he spoke of their plans to be married, a space where he might have told her? Rachel thought there might. But, in the end, for all his professions of affection, he had kept his secrets.
In a low voice, Rachel said, “He let me go on thinking that my mother was his mistress. My father.”
“Are you surprised? Look at the date.”
Two years before her birth. And six years before her father had married Violet Palmer. “Oh,” said Rachel. And, again, “Oh.”
“Oh,” agreed Cousin David. He sat down heavily in his chair. “Poor Edward. It’s none of it his fault, you know. He truly believed he was free to marry. Your mother wanted him to be free to marry.”
“But he wasn’t.”
There was a word for that. Bigamy. It didn’t matter that her father had intended it, hadn’t known better; the existence of his first marriage made the second invalid.
Rachel stared down at the piece of paper in her hand. In one stroke, this little piece of paper could change everything. She was her father’s legitimate daughter. His heiress.
And Olivia and Jicksy were illegitimate. Bastards.
“Poor Edward,” said Cousin David again. “His will isn’t entirely his own, you know. He owes a duty to the estate. He never wanted it, but since he has it—he isn’t one to neglect his obligations.”