Someone had had the foresight to remove the page from the parish register. It hadn’t been destroyed, but it had been hidden.
Had her father—or mother—even then entertained the possibility that the marriage might be made to disappear?
Rachel glanced up at Cousin David, a furrow between her brows. The words came out with difficulty. “If my mother hadn’t made the decision to go—would he have stood by us?”
Cousin David didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He thought about it just a little too long before giving a slow nod. “Most likely, although he would have had to break up the estate to pay his father’s debts. He would have hated himself for seeing his patrimony broken into pieces. It was an impossible situation.”
“It is an even more impossible situation now.” Rachel drew in a ragged breath. “If my father were to marry Lady Ardmore again, privately, would that legitimate Olivia and Jicksy?”
“No. Your father’s existing marriage to your mother prevents him from legitimating any children by another woman born during the duration of that marriage. The law is very clear about that.” Cousin David looked at her sympathetically. “Do you wonder that your father didn’t tell you?”
Rachel folded the paper, carefully, once and then again. “If I were to assert my rights, what would happen to Carrisford?”
“It would go to a cousin, I believe. Not me,” David said hastily. “The disposition of the unentailed property would depend on your father.” As an afterthought, he added, “There would be money for Olivia and Jicksy—Lady Ardmore’s father had it tied up in trusts.”
In other words, they would be provided for. Financially, at least. “What would you do—if you were I?”
Cousin David looked helplessly up at the plaster of the ceiling. “As you say, it is an impossible situation. Perhaps I shouldn’t have helped your mother take you away. I don’t know.” He hesitated a moment, and then said slowly, “I grew up in the shadow of Carrisford. When Katherine came to me—I thought we were sparing you.”
“Sparing me a life of luxury?”
Cousin David looked troubled. “Carrisford was a cold place. It wasn’t the life your mother wanted for you. If Marcus had lived, she and your father might have made their own life for themselves, but…” He made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. I don’t know if we did right or wrong. But that’s yours now. For good or for ill.”
It was impossible to stay after that, to drink coffee and make polite conversation. They were both too lost in their own emotions, old betrayals creating a new reserve. Not forever, Rachel knew, as she kissed her cousin on the cheek, torn between love and resentment. But, for now, it was too hard to untangle her feelings, to treat Cousin David with the easy affection they had once enjoyed.
Last time, when she had stormed out of Cousin David’s rooms, there had been Simon, provoking, distracting. This time, she had only her own thoughts to accompany her as she took the stairs down to the courtyard. Her thoughts and a folded piece of paper in her bag.
Instead of going straight to the train, Rachel went to Fuller’s. Sunlight glared blindingly off the glass window with its bold legend scrolled in red. She caught sight of her own reflection as she opened the door: smart haircut, smart hat, smart suit. A world away from the rain-dampened nursery governess who had entered three months before.
Lady Rachel Standish.
She hadn’t known her name then, but she knew it now. Lady Rachel Standish could take tea in any house in London. She could call Lady Frances Heatherington-Vaughn “Aunt Fanny.” She would be invited to all the dull dances from which Miss Vera Merton was excluded.
She would have ancestors, cousins. She could go to the Peeress’s Gallery at the House of Lords, as Olivia did, and listen to her father speak.
A whole world would open up to her.
If her father didn’t deny her. If the paper were proved legitimate. How did one even go about such things? A solicitor, she supposed.
If she were prepared to sacrifice Olivia and Jicksy.
Not Lady Ardmore. She didn’t mind about Lady Ardmore. There would be a certain satisfaction in seeing her stripped of her title, twenty-three years a mistress. But her father’s children …
Jicksy was a wastrel, everyone said so. Carrisford was most likely better off without him. Everything her mother had fought to save would be safer without Jicksy.
“Thank you,” Rachel murmured to the waitress as the tea and walnut cake were set down before her.
But there was Olivia.
Rachel stuck her fork into the cake, a large piece, thick with icing, shedding nuts. And might it not be better for Olivia? She would finally be free of her mother’s influence. John Trevannion wouldn’t marry a bastard; it would be too dangerous for his political ambitions. Olivia could go to Somerville, study economics. Yes, there would be a scandal, but dons didn’t care about that sort of thing, did they? And Olivia didn’t seem to care much for society.
Possibly because she had never had to do without it.
The cake didn’t taste nearly as good as Rachel had remembered. Or maybe it was just that she wasn’t hungry.
She set the fork down and took a sip of tea instead, strong and bitter.
Her father had lied to her. Even in the midst of the emotion of their reunion, he had lied to her. Protecting—no, not Olivia and Jicksy, but Caffers.
Rachel stared down into the brick-red brew in her cup. Foolish to be hurt that her father didn’t know her better, know her well enough to understand that she would have happily relinquished any claim on the estate in exchange for his own private acknowledgment. That was all she had needed, to hear it from his own lips that they had really been a family, that he had loved them, that he had always intended to stand by them, no matter the blandishments of a dozen Violet Palmers.
I thought we were sparing you, Cousin David had said. It wasn’t the life your mother wanted for you.
What about what she might have wanted? What about growing up with a father, aunt, cousins? All that, about Carrisford being a cold place—perhaps it had been when Cousin David was there, perhaps her father hadn’t been happy as a child, but that didn’t mean they might not have lived differently.
Or would they have? Rachel had always taken for granted that if her father had lived, their lives would have gone on as they had before. But they wouldn’t have. Her mother wouldn’t have cooked dinner; her father wouldn’t have sung her to sleep at night. There would have been servants and nannies, those white-aproned nannies she had seen wheeling their charges in the park. Her father would have had a myriad of other obligations—and her mother, too.
Two hundred families, Cousin David had said. Her mother wouldn’t have shirked her obligations as countess. And then there were all those other obligations, the ones Rachel only dimly understood: committees, charity balls, dress fittings. Society, in other words. Would she have been left behind at Carrisford, while her parents went to London?
When her mother taught piano, it was only a few hours a day, in their own sitting room. She had been there for Rachel always, day in and day out.
And Rachel … Rachel had been free to splash in the pond, to roll a hoop down the lane, to climb trees and skip stones. There had been no nanny to reprimand her, no photographers to snap pictures of her. When she went to France, no one stood with flashbulbs at the pier, ready to make an article out of her departure, or describe, in detail, her dress and hat.
It was strange to think that, instead of being deprived, she might actually have been given a gift, a gift of time. And a measure of freedom.
She might have gone to France as Lady Rachel Standish, but she would have been chaperoned and supervised. Unless, like Olivia, she wasn’t allowed to go at all.
No, her mother was no Lady Ardmore.
Except that she was. Or would have been, had she chosen to be. It wouldn’t have changed her out of recognition, but it would have changed her. It would have changed them all.
There was no way of kno
wing. Now.
Last night, she had told her father that the fire was a lie, as much a lie as his being a botanist. But, thought Rachel, poking at her uneaten cake, it wasn’t entirely, was it? Her father had believed it all this time. Stories took on their own truth. No matter how many times she sat across a tea table from her father, there would always be part of him that believed, deep down, that his Rachel had died in that fire, just as she couldn’t quite reconcile the man she had met, the man who spoke so impersonally of crops and dry rot, with the father who had died all those years ago, in a faraway speck on the globe.
Too much time had elapsed. Those people might as well be dead. Fondly remembered, well loved, but truly gone.
Rachel tossed coins on the table, drew her gloves on, leaving her uneaten cake and half-drunk tea.
Unpardonable extravagance. Her mother hadn’t approved of waste. Simon’s training had rubbed off. She was, she realized, neither here nor there, caught between two worlds.
But did she need to be? Sunlight dazzled her eyes after the dimness of the shop. Rachel put up a hand, supplementing the inadequate brim of her too-smart hat. She could feel her spirits lifting, a dizzying wave of euphoria. Who said those were her only options?
You’re yourself, Simon had said. Isn’t that enough?
Rachel’s pace picked up from a walk to something that was nearly a run. When her mother had been presented with impossible choices, she had made her own way through them. Not, perhaps, a way that Rachel would have chosen, but she hadn’t let circumstances hedge her in. She’d been bold, struck out on her own.
And, in doing so, she might just have given Rachel an unexpected gift.
She didn’t want to be Lady Rachel Standish, not really. Maybe if she’d been raised to it—but she hadn’t. She’d been raised to independence.
The station platform was near empty; midday wasn’t a popular time to travel. She’d bought a return ticket that morning, Oxford to London. Rachel chucked it in the bin, going quickly to the empty ticket counter.
“One to Southampton, please,” she told the man at the counter.
The Aquitania, Simon had said. There was no difficulty in finding the ship, the smokestacks painted Cunard red, already belching smoke, the smell of burning coal warring with the salt tang of the sea, the sweat of the men heaving parcels and packages aboard, the varied perfumes of the travelers and guests, the sulfurous smell of flashbulbs popping.
Finding Simon was another matter. He wasn’t part of the throng leaning against the rail. Rachel wove her way through the excitedly chattering groups, family members and well-wishers bringing bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolates, weeping children being peeled from parental legs by white-capped nannies, women in fur coats with small dogs cradled in their arms, journalists darting everywhere, looking for a celebrity to snap. Rachel passed unnoticed among them.
She found Simon, at last, on the leeward side, leaning against the rail, a cigarette in one hand.
He looked terribly alone, standing there, away from the madding crowd, the ocean spreading along beyond him.
Now that she was here, Rachel wasn’t quite sure what to say. She resisted the craven urge to slip away. “Simon?”
Simon’s head came up with a jolt. He turned, so quickly that he bumped his elbow on the rail, letting out a grunt of pain.
“Hullo,” said Rachel inadequately.
A series of emotions flashed across Simon’s face, buried, quickly, beneath his old urbane mask. Meticulously, he ground his cigarette beneath his heel. “Have you come to wave your hankie?”
“I left my hankie at home, I’m afraid.”
All around them, there was bustle and movement, but Rachel felt as though they were encased in their own private bubble. The silence grew and grew, and with it, Rachel’s doubts. Had Simon changed his mind? Had that moment in the garden been nothing but a reaction to being back at Carrisford again, hastily said and just as hastily regretted?
“Why did you take me up, all those months ago?” She hadn’t meant to say it; the words just came out. “Why didn’t you just drop me at the station and send me on my way?”
“Your cousin…” he began slowly.
“Don’t fob me off with that,” said Rachel sharply.
“No.” A glimmer of a smile crossed Simon’s lips. He buried his hands in his pockets. “When you landed in my lap like that … I’d an idea I could use you to help make things right for Olivia. I owed her a debt, you see. It wasn’t a very clear plan, but, then, you see, I hadn’t planned on you.”
Something about the way he said it made Rachel’s head come up.
Simon’s eyes met hers, reluctantly, ruefully. “And you were so … gallant. So bedraggled and spitting defiance. In that horrible hat.”
Rachel, opening her mouth to retort, bit her lip. “It was a horrible hat, wasn’t it?”
“But there was you,” said Simon, and there was something in his face that made Rachel’s chest tighten. He turned away, bracing a hand against the rail. “I’d spent so much time running away from things, and there you were, running into them, headlong.”
“Pigheaded, you mean,” said Rachel faintly.
“Brave.” He turned back to her, his shoulders straightening. “I wouldn’t have taken the New York job but for you. I’d meant to turn it down. Too much responsibility, too close to everything I’d tried so hard to avoid. But when you showed up at my flat that day—if you could face up to your demons like that, how could I do less?”
Considerations, he had said, and she, blinded by her own preoccupations, had assumed he meant Olivia.
“My demons—they’re hardly on the same order as yours.” Belatedly, Rachel remembered the paper in her bag. “There’s something I wanted to show you.”
Simon was quicker than she had been. After a rapid perusal, he glanced up from the single sheet of paper. “Shall I call you Lady Rachel?” Folding it carefully, he handed it back to her. “It’s happy endings, then. You’ve everything you wanted.”
No, no, no. This wasn’t at all the way Rachel had meant this interview to go. They might have been polite strangers, standing at a careful arm’s length at the rail. Where was all the easy banter of the past months?
Rachel clutched the paper in both hands, making new creases against the old folds. “But it’s not what I want. I want to come to New York. With you.” When Simon didn’t speak, she added, “If you’ll still have me?”
The breath was crushed out of her as Simon’s arms clamped around her, lifting her off her feet, whirling her in a giddy circle.
“I thought you’d come to say good-bye,” he was saying, between kisses, while Rachel said confusedly, “No! Would I come all this way for that?”
She could feel Simon laughing into her lips. “And that’s why I love you. Why waste time on the amenities?”
“I can observe the amenities,” Rachel protested breathlessly, and then, “Love me?”
“Didn’t you know that by now?” There was a wicked glint in Simon’s eye. “I’d profess it trippingly off the tongue, in limping rhyme, but you’d have me over the side of the ship.”
“Yes, if all you could manage was limping rhyme. Don’t I deserve a sonnet?” Rachel felt giddy with happiness, lightheaded in the salt air.
“A sequence of them,” promised Simon extravagantly. “All written with a quill pen.”
Rachel put a hand on his breast. “Spare the chicken, I beg you. A simple I love you will do.”
Simon pulled back, looking down at her. “Will this do, then? I love you.”
Not a question this time, but a statement, simple and unvarnished, with none of the usual protective smokescreen of verbiage.
“Very nicely,” said Rachel softly. A vision of the future spiraled out before her, an unknown city with all its hustle and bustle, but Simon beside her. “Very nicely, indeed.”
Simon’s hands tightened briefly on her shoulders, his expression growing sober. “Are you sure? You’ll peg your future to
a broken-down wretch such as I? You could be the toast of London. You might have your pick.”
His tone was light, but she could hear the uncertainty beneath it.
“You are my pick,” said Rachel bluntly. “Can you see me sitting in a drawing room, pouring tea for Lady X and the Honorable Y? I’d die of boredom. I’d rather spar with you than murmur polite nonsense with anyone else.”
“Bad dreams and all?”
“Bad dreams and all.” A thought struck Rachel. “Will your mother be appalled?”
Simon’s arm tightened around her. “She’ll be delighted.” His lips curved in a grin, making his face look very young, and very boyish. “She doesn’t believe in polite nothings either. We will have to tell her the whole story, you know. She’ll be frightfully disappointed that she missed your star turn as Vera.”
“She won’t think less of me?”
“She’ll be sorry she didn’t think of it herself.” When Rachel still looked unconvinced, Simon said drily, “My mother has made a career of flouting society’s conventions. She’ll give you three cheers and throw you a dinner party.”
Whistles sounded, unbearably shrill. The tempo of the deck had changed, the creaking of the winches stilled, the stevedores fading away, stewards moving busily through the crowd, chivying visitors away down the gangplank.
“That’s me, I suppose.” Reluctantly, Rachel pulled away. “I’d best book a cabin on the next ship over.”
Simon snagged her around the waist. “Do you really want to go back to the flat and follow in a fortnight?”
“Of course not! But I’ve no cabin, no clothes—” Rachel darted a look up at him, struck by sudden suspicion. “You didn’t book me a cabin, did you?”
“No, nor pack you a dressing case,” said Simon mockingly. “I wasn’t that sure of myself. But, by God, now that I have you, I’m not letting you slip out of my clutches. There’s plenty of room in my cabin. I’m sure the captain would find the voyage much enlivened by a marriage at sea.”
Rachel set her hands on her hips, trying to look indignant and failing utterly. “And the small matter of clothing?”