Startled, Rachel sat up, dislodging the pillow and sending the paper, whatever it was, fluttering to the floor. It wasn’t a letter. The paper was thin and glossy, the sort of paper one found in expensive magazines. It had been folded; on the side facing up, Rachel could see an advertisement for Turkish cigarettes.
Her mother didn’t smoke. She would have been horrified at the very idea. Unless—perhaps it was something that Jim had accidentally dropped beneath her pillow? Yes, because doctors so frequently inserted bits of magazine beneath their patients. Leaning over, Rachel fished up the page, shaking it open.
Her father stared up at her in grainy black and white.
Rachel blinked, hard, but the picture was still there. She smoothed it out against the counterpane with hands that weren’t entirely steady, wondering if she were seeing things. How long had it been since she had slept? Years, it seemed like, if one didn’t count the odd doze on the train, her head jerking against her chest. Perhaps she was asleep now, asleep and imagining that she had reached beneath her mother’s pillow, found this odd, odd picture of her father.
It all had the curious unreality of a dream: the picture, the image flattened by the glare of a flash; the discreet block letters at the upper right-hand corner of the page, which proclaimed the paper THE TATLER. That in itself was odd enough. The only paper her mother ever read was The Morning Post. The Tatler was for other people, people who followed society and its doings.
And the picture itself … the picture was her father and not her father. Tall like her father, yes, with the fair hair that Rachel hadn’t inherited and the deep-set gray eyes that she had. There were the gold-rimmed spectacles, the slightly stooped posture.
There was even the slight shadow of a scar on his chin. She remembered running her fingers along that scar as a child, feeling the curious ridge of it.
But this man was older, older than her father had ever lived to be. As old, in fact, as he would have been if he had lived. And he was dressed as Rachel had never seen him, in evening clothes, a white scarf around his neck, a tall hat on his head, the ribbon of an order shimmering on his breast, and a fair-haired young woman on his arm.
The caption beneath the picture read, Lady Olivia Standish, escorted by her father, the Earl of Ardmore.
The date was December 1926. Only five months ago.
THREE
The paper crinkled beneath Rachel’s palms.
Her father … and yet not her father.
For heaven’s sake, what was she thinking? Rachel pushed the paper away, rubbing her knuckles against her sore eyes. Her father had died, twenty-three years ago. And she rather thought she would know if her father had been an earl. The very thought was laughable. She might as well imagine herself the daughter of the Prince of Wales.
Ardmore … The name was vaguely familiar. It had cropped up from time to time in her history books. There had been a d’Ardmore in the train of William the Conqueror, a Lord Ardmore switching sides at Boswell Field, an Earl of Ardmore, new-minted, whispering in William of Orange’s ear in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. They were powerful people, important people, people so far from Rachel’s touch that they might have been on the moon.
And what did she remember, at that? When was the last time she had looked at a picture of her father? She remembered him, largely, as a collection of disembodied attributes. As a cold cheek and the scratch of the collar of a greatcoat on a winter’s day; as a warm lap and a pair of hands holding a book open as he read her a story; as the press of lips against the side of her forehead.
Rachel breathed in deeply through her nose, striving for common sense. When she thought about it logically, it wasn’t wonderful that she should be imagining her father. It wasn’t the first time, after all. When she was very young, she had imagined she saw her father everywhere.
And now—now, in losing her mother, she had lost her father all over again. They hadn’t spoken of him, but he had always been there, with them, a shadowy presence just over her mother’s shoulder, a whisper of a memory.
Through the sheen of tears, Rachel looked at the magazine page on the coverlet. The paper was creased, the picture blurred. She might, she thought wildly, have as easily imagined her father into an advertisement for men’s hats—or, for that matter, Turkish cigarettes.
Still, just to make sure … There was, Rachel knew, a picture of her father in her mother’s night-table drawer. It was, she had always thought, very much like her mother to keep him tucked away like that. Her mother was a great believer in keeping the personal personal.
Rachel drew out the drawer, and there it was, right on top: a faded daguerreotype in a silver frame, a tall, thinly built man, with fair hair and a pair of spectacles, not particularly handsome, not particularly remarkable, but for the love in his eyes as he gazed down at the woman next to him, Rachel’s mother, eighteen and lovely, even in the high-necked, long-skirted fashion of the time.
Slowly, Rachel drew the picture from the drawer and set it down next to the page from The Tatler.
They might have been father and son, but for the fact that no father and son had ever resembled each other so closely, right down to the faint shadow of a scar on the chin. Her father aged before her eyes, and on his arm was another woman, his daughter.
His other daughter.
Absurd. Absolutely absurd. There had to be some explanation. Chance resemblances happened. They did.
Even down to a scar?
Even down to a scar, Rachel told herself firmly. The idea that her father might still be alive, might be, in fact, an earl—no, no, and no again. It was straight out of a twopenny novel, the sort shopgirls read on their lunch hour.
Besides, Rachel thought somberly, the Earl of Ardmore had a daughter, Lady Olivia Standish. That meant, presumably, that he had a wife. There must be—or have been—a Lady Ardmore.
People like her mother didn’t have illegitimate children. In Rachel’s experience, illegitimacy went with untidy houses and unwashed hair and people who dropped their aitches and didn’t know who Wordsworth was. In short, the Trotters, down by the river, with their confused brood of half-clothed children.
No one was quite sure who the father of Dorcas Trotter’s children was, least of all Dorcas Trotter, which, Mrs. Spicer said sagely, wasn’t the least bit surprising, given that Dorcas’s mother had been no better than she should be. Apples didn’t fall far from the tree, especially when them apples were rotten, and no wonder.
Rachel’s mother used to bring the Trotters baskets: Rachel’s old clothes for the babies, soup for winter, soap and cleaning cloths and Jeyes Fluid in the summer, biscuits and oranges at Christmas.
Rachel had accompanied her mother on her errands of mercy, feeling pleasantly superior in her own neat little boater hat and tidy gloves.
Stand up, now. It’s the lady from Ivy Cottage. That was what old Mrs. Trotter would say, sharply, to Dorcas, when they knocked at the half-opened door.
They called Rachel “miss” and her mother “ma’am.” Rachel had accepted that, as of right.
The idea that she might be—that her mother might be—no. It was too absurd. Rachel’s mother took tea at the vicarage every Friday; she played chess with Mr. Treadwell.
And usually beat him, too. Mr. Treadwell was a very sweet man, but he didn’t have much of a head for chess.
No, thought Rachel. They were positively mired, steeped, in respectability. It was a chance resemblance, nothing more. That, in all likelihood, was why her mother had kept the clipping. She must have been struck by it, too. Rachel had never known her mother to read The Tatler, but perhaps Alice had brought it. And with flu-dimmed eyes, her mother had seen the picture and imagined her husband alive again.
Her husband, Edward Woodley, botanist. Just repeating her father’s name was reassuring. Edward Woodley. Not Edward Standish, Earl of Ardmore. The fact that they were both Edwards meant nothing. England was peopled with Edwards. One might as well suspect the late King Edward or the
Prince of Wales of being her father.
All the same, Rachel tucked the Tatler page into her purse before she left for Oxford the next morning. As a curiosity, she told herself.
Cousin David was the one person who had known them before Netherwell. He’d held Rachel as she’d been baptized, had guided her straggling baby steps across the garden in that half-remembered home of her infancy, and, once she was old enough to crave penny candy from the village shop, slipped her shillings beneath the seals of his letters, just as, he said, his godfather used to do for him when he was a boy at school.
Perhaps the Earl of Ardmore was a distant relation. Cousin David would know. He was a historian, after all.
And it was easier, Rachel thought wryly, as she stepped out of the train at Oxford station, to fret over fairy tales than to think of any of the many troublesome realities awaiting her, such as how she was to make her living.
Rachel pulled her coat more closely around her. Spring was clinging stubbornly to the memory of winter; there was frost in the air and the sky was dark as slate, threatening rain. The stones of Oxford, which glowed golden in summer, were a flat, unrelieved gray in the gloom.
Undergraduates might come and go, but the porter’s lodge at Merton looked just the same, with its litter of bicycles, the baskets piled high with books and bunched-up gowns and what looked like someone’s lost top hat.
The porter’s face was forbidding beneath his bowler hat, but it lightened as soon as he recognized Rachel. “I hardly knew you, miss, you look so grown up! I thought you were one of them women students.”
The way he pronounced it made it sound just a step away from scarlet woman. Suggs was a purist when it came to his university.
Rachel held out a hand. “How do you do, Suggs?”
When she was a little girl in a sailor hat and her best dress, Suggs used to conjure boiled candies from his bowler hat. They were always lightly fuzzed with lint, but Rachel had eaten them all, every one. It wouldn’t do, her mother had said, to hurt Suggs’s feelings.
Rachel could picture her mother standing there, in her good wool coat, her gloves pristine, her hair coiled beneath her hat, holding tight to Rachel’s hand as she urged her to say thank you to Mr. Suggs.
“I’ve seen better days,” said Suggs darkly. “But there you are. And you’re a sight to cheer a dark day, miss. It’s nice to see a woman what looks like a woman.”
With that, he cast an ominous look down the street, where a lady scholar, gown flapping over her frock, was bicycling toward the High Street.
“I’m just back from France,” said Rachel briskly, avoiding both the compliment and the complaint. “It is nice to be back.”
Suggs nodded knowingly. “You’ll be wanting to see your cousin.”
“Is he in?” Rachel didn’t know what she would do if he wasn’t. Build a willow cabin at his gate?
Suggs inclined his bald head. “For you, miss, he’s always in.”
“Please give my regards to Mrs. Suggs,” said Rachel politely, and went up the familiar stair, to Cousin David’s rooms on the second floor.
The oak was, mercifully, unsported. Rachel knocked, for form’s sake, on the inner door, before letting herself in. They had only visited two, perhaps three times a year, but she had had the run of these rooms for as long as she could remember.
The familiarity of it all enfolded her like a comfortable old coat, the old-book smell of Cousin David’s rooms, mingled with tobacco, last night’s Stilton, and just a hint of Jeyes Fluid. There was the chair where she had kicked her heels as a small girl, and the window with its cracked and bubbled old glass. She used to look for patterns in the bits of lead that held together the fragments of old glass, finding letters and shapes.
Cousin David was in his favorite chair by the bookcases, a long-necked lamp behind him, a hassock at his feet piled high with books. The books might have changed over the years, but the chair and hassock hadn’t.
At Rachel’s entrance, he jumped to his feet. “Rachel!”
“Cousin David,” she said, and lifted her cheek to be kissed, as she used to when she was a little girl. They didn’t embrace—her godfather wasn’t an embracing sort of man—but Rachel felt her shoulders begin to relax at the warmth and nearness of him. “Thank you for seeing to the arrangements.”
“I can’t say how sorry I am.” Cousin David looked nearly as weary as she felt. “We tried to find you, but—”
“I know.” Unreasonable to ask him why he hadn’t tried harder, why he hadn’t waited longer. Rachel spoke as lightly as she could. “I could murder the count’s valet—he didn’t bother to pass the messages on. I didn’t even know she was … ill until Monday.”
Cousin David awkwardly patted her arm. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”
Rachel’s lips twisted. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Er,” said Cousin David eloquently. Rustling himself into action, he waved a hand in the general direction of the tea table, an octagon of dark walnut, heavily carved in an exaggerated example of Victorian gothic. “You’ll be wanting coffee, I imagine? You mustn’t worry that it’s the swill they serve in Hall. Spence makes coffee that is coffee. Hi, Spence!”
Feebly, Rachel protested. “Really, it’s quite all right. I’ve had so much tea I’m sloshing with it. I don’t need—”
“No, no, you mustn’t worry. It’s no trouble at all. Two coffees, Spence,” said Cousin David, thrusting the coffee things at his scout, who received the tray impassively. “And I should have some brandy about somewhere.…”
He began poking through a forest of bottles incongruously stashed in a cupboard below the bookshelves.
“Please, Cousin David, if I have any brandy, I’ll be asleep before Spence brings the coffee.” Rachel touched a gloved hand lightly to his shoulder. “You needn’t fuss, really.”
Cousin David rose slowly, brushing his hands off against his trousers. “I just wish—”
“I know.” She didn’t, really, but she couldn’t bear the thought of sympathy just now, even from Cousin David. Especially from Cousin David. Better to be brisk and businesslike, to focus on the necessities. “I understand you took charge of my mother’s affairs?”
“Yes, yes. Just let me find the papers.…” He began rustling in a pile on one of the tables. The appearance of disorder was deceptive. Cousin David could locate a specific source from underneath a chair. In this case, it only took him a moment to extract a thin sheaf of papers and hand them to Rachel. “You should find it all present and accounted for.”
“All” consisted of her mother’s will, a short and simple document, written in her mother’s own hand and witnessed by Jim and the vicar. The writing was sloping and uneven, very different from her mother’s usual tidy script. It would, Rachel realized, never have occurred to her to make a will. Before.
Biting her lip, she went on to the next item in the pile, her mother’s bankbook, with a balance of one hundred and thirty-eight pounds.
Rachel drew a deep breath, struggling for equanimity. “I’m better off than I expected. If I’d known, I might have splurged on a second-class ticket.”
There were worried lines between Cousin David’s eyes. “It’s precious little to be going on with. Will you be returning to France?”
“Everyone seems very eager to send me back to France. Thank you.” Rachel took the chair he pulled out for her, tucking the will and bankbook into her bag. “If I can scrape the funds together, I’ll take a typing course and hire myself out as a secretary.”
Cousin David moved a pile of books out of the way and sat down across from her. “If training is what you want,” he said hesitantly, “I can find you a course here. And then … the dean of Somerville might be in need of a new secretary.”
“You mean that you’ll ask the dean of Somerville if she could possibly be in need of a new secretary?” Rachel couldn’t hide the affection in her voice. “There’s no need to contrive for me. I’m quite looking forward to the challenge of it, striking
out on my own.”
He couldn’t quite hide his relief. Cousin David might love her as a niece, but he had no desire for a daughter. “If you ever need anything … Ah, thank you, Spence.”
The cups were set out before them, the fragrant brew poured. Rachel waited until Cousin David had put sugar in his coffee before asking diffidently, “Did you see my mother, before—?”
“Yes.” Cousin David stirred his coffee, around and around and around. “I arrived in Netherwell on Friday morning.”
“Did she—” Rachel concentrated on her coffee. “Did she say anything?”
A shadow crossed Cousin David’s face. “She was rambling,” he said at last. “Delirious with fever. But she did give me this to give to you.”
Cousin David fished in his waistcoat pocket, drawing out a thick golden oval, a thin chain threaded through the hasp. His fingers closed around it for a moment in a quick, convulsive grasp, before he held it out to Rachel.
“Here. It’s only right that you have it.”
The gold was heavy on Rachel’s palm. It was a brooch, ornate, old-fashioned, dominated by two intertwined filigree letters: E and K. Edward and Katherine. Her mother had once had other pieces of jewelry. A pearl ring that Rachel remembered from when she was little. A little brooch of seed pearls. A heavily engraved gold bracelet that had belonged to Rachel’s grandmother. All those had disappeared, piece by piece, to pay the butcher and the baker, and, later, Rachel’s school fees.
But the brooch had never left her breast.
“Thank you.” Rachel’s throat was tight. Her fingers closed around the brooch. “I can’t remember her without it.”
“No,” Cousin David agreed. “It was one of the few things she had left of your father.”
“Speaking of my father…” Rachel looked down at the elaborate E and K, woven together for all eternity. Easier to think about oddities than about the brooch and what it meant that it was now in her possession. “It sounds silly even to ask, but—is the Earl of Ardmore a relation of my father?”
Cousin David’s hand jerked on his coffee cup, spilling brown liquid. “Clumsy, clumsy,” he murmured, mopping at the liquid with a napkin. “Why do you ask?”