“Dearest Cousin Simon.” Rachel rose on her toes and pressed her crimson lips to his cheek, leaving a defiant smear of red. The lipstick hadn’t been a part of Mr. Montfort’s package. That she’d added herself, courtesy of Woolworth. “You are a pet to meet little me.”
Mr. Montfort squeezed her waist. “When the mater demands … Hullo, Simms. Do you think you might give us a bit of a hand with the trunks?”
“I’ll have them sent right up, sir.”
Pausing, Mr. Montfort turned back, waving a hand at Rachel. “Oh, and this is my cousin, Miss Merton. She’ll be staying at the flat.” To Rachel, he added, “You don’t want to get on the wrong side of Simms, my dear. He knows where all the bodies are buried.”
Simms smiled indulgently. “Don’t mind Mr. Montfort, miss. He will have his little joke.” He touched a hand to his cap. “I trust you will have a pleasant stay.”
“Yes, thank you, Simms. I am sure I shall.” She sounded like a schoolgirl, too prim and polite.
Rachel avoided Simon’s eyes, concentrating on not tripping in her unaccustomed heels. A dress rehearsal, she told herself. A bad dress meant a good first performance.
“If you will allow me?” Mr. Montfort possessed himself of Rachel’s arm, steadying her.
“Thank you,” Rachel murmured as he led her to the lift. This had seemed much easier in theory than in practice. In the taxi, in her fashionable frock, she’d felt so sure of herself. But it was one thing to look the part, and another to be it. It was a self-operated lift. The doors closed behind them, leaving them entirely alone.
The bread and cheese she’d gobbled down on the train turned over in Rachel’s stomach; her hands felt slick inside her expensive gloves. She missed the weight of her hair, the solid bulk of it at the back of her head, anchoring her.
Leaning over, Mr. Montfort murmured, “There’s no need to look quite so Sabine, darling. I’m hardly going to ravish you in the lift.”
Rachel snatched back her arm, managing an uneven laugh. “I’m merely reeling from your cologne.”
“Guaranteed to make the ladies swoon,” said Mr. Montfort smoothly, “or so the advert would have us believe. Would you like to provide a testimonial? It made me go all weak at the knees, says society beauty Miss Vera Merton.…”
“Yes, like the Thames on a hot day.” The bread and cheese settled back into Rachel’s stomach; the sense of blind panic lifted. There was something oddly steadying about Mr. Montfort’s nonsense.
“They’ve done wonderful work cleaning up the Thames.” The lift doors opened, depositing them on a landing with four doors. Mr. Montfort gestured Rachel to the door on the far right.
“I still wouldn’t want to swim in it,” retorted Rachel.
There were two locks on the door, shining and new.
Mr. Montfort slid a key into the first lock. “Better not,” he agreed blandly. “Those are deep waters. With swiftly moving currents. Unless you’re a stronger swimmer than you look?”
The second lock shot free and the door swung open.
“I can keep my head above water,” said Rachel, and strode across the threshold. She was so busy making a point—and trying to balance on her heels—that she was several yards in before she looked, really looked, at the flat that was to be her home for the next month. “Good heavens.”
“Like it?” Mr. Montfort leaned comfortably in his favorite pose, propped against the wall, pleased by her reaction.
“I’m blinded.” Sun slanted through the long windows, glittering off a glass-topped chrome-legged table. A sofa of dazzling whiteness sprawled beneath a Venetian glass mirror that looked as though it had been squeezed into shape by a crazed geometer, all unexpected angles.
Rachel had thought she was accustomed to the whimsy of the wealthy. The Brillac town house in Paris had dazzled with gilded walls and ormolu embellishments and enough mirrors to put Louis XIV to shame.
But this—this was something different.
Nothing in the room, Rachel realized, was quite what it seemed. The wall began in shades of navy blue at the base, but lightened nearly to white by the time it touched the ceiling, all shading so seamlessly together that it took one a moment to realize that the color changed every time one looked at it. The effect made Rachel’s eyes ache. And that was only the start of it. The doors of a respectable-looking eighteenth-century chinoiserie cabinet were propped open to reveal a hidden bar, boasting a daunting array of cocktail implements, sleek in silver. A gramophone horn peeped coyly out of a Louis XIV commode, while Chinese vases of impossible antiquity shared space with elongated figures cast in porcelain.
It was all designed to make one look and look again, a vast visual tease.
Cautiously, Rachel ventured onto the white carpet. “Will it crack if I set my bag down?” she said, indicating the glass-topped table.
“Don’t be provincial,” said Mr. Montfort, and tossed it down for her.
“I don’t want to risk seven years’ bad luck.”
“That’s only mirrors, not tables.” He made his way unerringly to the chinoiserie cabinet that housed the impromptu bar. “What will you have?”
She’d had the odd bit of sherry over the years, but cocktails were a mystery. “You choose.”
“How very trusting of you.”
“Hardly. If you’d meant to ravish me you would have done so already.” The words were out of her mouth before Rachel could reconsider them. Frankness had always been her besetting sin. One of them, at any rate.
Gin bottle in hand, Mr. Montfort raised a brow. “Perhaps I was merely waiting until I had you in my lair.”
“And muss the white carpet?”
“That’s what the maid is for. She scrubs up after all my orgies. Lovely woman.” Mr. Montfort was busily pouring potions from glass bottles into a silver shaker. “A little Jeyes Fluid, and, voilà! Virtue restored.”
“So long as there’s no Jeyes Fluid in my drink.” Whatever he was pouring certainly smelled astringent enough.
“We haven’t quite been reduced to that. Unlike the States, where they’ll quaff rubbing alcohol if you pour it into the right sort of glass and mix it with bitters.” Glass and silver tinkled. “I believe you’ll find this reasonably potent.”
His smile as he held out the drink was so natural, so friendly, that Rachel found herself, for a moment, wobbly on her unaccustomed heels, the world out of balance.
Rachel’s fingers closed around the cold glass, the outside already slick with condensation, and Mr. Montfort turned away again, back to the bar, and the world settled back into place. It was the slanting shape of the mirrors, the shifting colors of the wall, Rachel told herself; they were enough to make anyone dizzy. There was no point in letting herself be so undone by a momentary show of—what? Ordinary kindness?
Mr. Montfort was many things, but she doubted he was kind. She’d do best to remember that.
They were business partners, that was all.
If he’d noticed her momentary confusion, Mr. Montfort made no sign. He was busy mixing another drink, dashing in a bit of this and a bit of that with a practiced hand. All the same, clasping her hands behind her back, Rachel made a show of examining the paintings on the walls, striving for a sophistication she was far from feeling.
Most of the paintings were modern, abstract to the point of incoherence. All except for the portrait dominating one wall. It featured a woman in the costume of the turn of the century, her hair piled high on her head, her neck impossibly long. Her arms curved around a child in a white lace smock, his head an angelic mass of curls.
On the face, it was a sweet domestic portrait. But when one looked closer, Rachel thought she could see a familiar glint of mischief in the moppet’s dark eyes. Black eyes, eyes so dark one couldn’t detect the difference between iris and pupil.
“How too precious.” Rachel masked her nervousness with mockery. “Was that you?”
“Was and is.” Mr. Montfort poured out his drink with a professional twist of
the wrist. “Minus the curls, of course.”
“And that is your mother?” The picture was too stylized to provide a good sense of likeness, but there was something very like Mr. Montfort about the cheeks and chin. It was a striking face, but not necessarily a restful one.
“Brilliantly spotted,” drawled Mr. Montfort. He dropped a cherry into Rachel’s drink. “Most beautiful debutante of her generation and international scandal.”
Rachel lifted her drink, sniffing it warily. “We have that in common, then. Scandalous mothers.”
“Mine married them. One after the other.” Before Rachel could decide whether or not to take offense, Mr. Montfort nodded to her drink. “Are you going to drink it or merely admire it?”
Rachel looked doubtfully at the murky liquid, the cherry bobbing in the midst. “What is it?”
Mr. Montfort raised his brows, his expression a dare. “A Montfort Original, of course.”
Was this a test? The glass was slippery in Rachel’s hands. Or maybe it was her hands that were slippery. She played for time. “Original sin?”
Mr. Montfort downed half his drink, his expression abstracted. “No sin is original, no matter what the Bright Young Things may hope. We’re all merely playing to a theme.”
Rachel narrowed her eyes at him. “How unambitious of you.”
His attention recalled to her, Mr. Montfort’s lips lifted in an unexpected smile. He saluted her with his cocktail glass. “You have put me in my place.”
Rachel sat gingerly on the white sofa. “It’s my training as a nursery governess. You are nothing compared to Albertine, Amelie, and Anne-Marie.”
“I am reduced to my proper place, among the infantry.” The cushions creaked as Mr. Montfort joined her, his long legs seeming to take up half the space in the room. “It’s not a bad analogy, though. You won’t go wrong if you think of the set to which I am about to introduce you as members of a nursery party. They enjoy making mud pies and can generally be soothed by sucking on a bottle. They are also,” he added, “impossibly young. You’ll be on the geriatric side, but I imagine we can smooth that over.”
“I shall endeavor to keep my old bones from creaking too audibly,” said Rachel.
“You seem to keep the gray at bay.” Mr. Montfort leaned forward, curling a stray lock of hair behind her ear.
The gesture was entirely natural, unstudied, but Rachel froze all the same.
Mr. Montfort looked down at her, close to her, but not touching. “We’re cousins, remember?”
She could feel the deep murmur of his voice straight through to her bones.
Nervously, Rachel moved back, tucking the same strand of hair back behind her ear. “I’d thought we were distant cousins.”
“As in opposite ends of the couch?” The mocking note was back. Mr. Montfort leaned back, against the far cushion. “Is that distant enough to suit you?”
Rachel felt, obscurely, annoyed at both herself and him. At herself, for the loss of a closeness she knew was only illusory, and at him for putting her in this position in the first place.
“Yes, thank you,” she said primly.
In his most obnoxious society drawl, Mr. Montfort said, “You have been in France all this time, after all. The last time I saw you … you were a mere ankle biter with skinny legs and big bows on your braids. Just think of my astonishment at seeing you all grown up!”
“And think of my astonishment,” retorted Rachel, “at seeing you so sadly reduced to writing sensational pieces for the papers!”
Mr. Montfort grinned at her. “Now, now, play nicely. You ought to be grateful for my miserable column; it’s the reason you’re here.”
Rachel crossed her legs at the ankle. “A business venture.”
“Precisely.” He watched her from beneath lowered lids. “If we’re to pull this off, you ought to call me Simon. If you can do so without doing violence to your principles.”
“I believe I can manage.” What a fool she was. It was all playacting. That touch on her cheek had been nothing more, just part of the game. Cousinly closeness. “I’m hardly so Victorian as that.”
Mr. Montfort—Simon—retrieved a torn piece of newspaper from beneath his jacket and set it down in front of Rachel. He had folded it so that the caption was hidden. “Do you recognize him?”
The man in the picture wore riding kit, his face blurry beneath the overhang of his helmet, the features rendered even more anonymous by the strap under his chin. There was a champagne bottle in one hand; the other held the bridle of a horse. A woman, a fashionable one, with a fur wrap so large it appeared to be eating her chin, simpered from the side of the picture.
Rachel shook her head. “No. Should I?”
Simon cast her a look of mingled amusement and reproach. “You ought. This is your brother, Viscount Summerton. Better known as Jicksy.”
She had a brother? It shouldn’t have come as such a shock, but it did. She’d known her father had another daughter, a daughter in silk and pearls, a daughter with an honorific before her name. But she’d never stopped to think that there might be others.
Rachel’s hand tightened in her lap, to stop herself from grabbing for the paper. “Half-brother.”
“As you will.” Mr. Montfort—Simon—shook out the paper, so that she could see the full picture, with the caption beneath. “He’s currently up at Oxford. In theory, at any event. He spends more time in London than at Christ Church. He makes excellent copy. He can usually be found smashing motor cars against telegraph poles and pinching policemen’s helmets. Often at the same time.”
This was what her father had left them for. “He sounds a paragon.”
“He’s a cliché,” said Simon dismissively. “His exploits wouldn’t raise nearly as many eyebrows if Ardmore didn’t have such a reputation as a pillar of virtue.”
The irony of that wasn’t lost on Rachel. She cleared her throat, saying, with difficulty, “Why Jicksy? That can’t possibly be his real name.”
“Something dating back to the nursery, no doubt. You’ll have to get used to it. It’s all part of the argot. Someone,” said Simon lazily, “ought to compile a dictionary. Mayfair to English, Commoners, for the Instruction Of.”
Was the change of subject for Rachel’s benefit, to give her time to compose herself? Before she could stop herself, she asked, “Does my sister have a nickname, too?”
“No.” Simon tossed the paper to one side.
Rachel might have let it go at that, but the image of the Tatler clipping haunted her still, her father’s other daughter, poised and groomed on his arm. “What ought I know about Lady Olivia?”
Simon took a long swig of his drink. “Lady Olivia recently announced her engagement to a rising young Tory MP. He’s only a baronet’s son, but they say he’ll go far. Everyone agrees that it will be the wedding of the year—if they ever set a date.”
“How lovely for them.” Happily ever afters all around. It shouldn’t have hurt, but it did. Rachel asked fiercely, “Are there others? Other children?”
“Only one. That I know of.”
It took Rachel a moment for the penny to drop. “Me?”
Simon raised his glass to her. “Who else?”
Who else, indeed? Rachel took a tentative sip of her own drink, sweet on the surface, but with a burn beneath. For all she knew, her father might have a dozen bastards tucked away in the countryside, littered around little hamlets like Netherwell. What made her think she was unique? Just her own muddled memories of warm arms around her, tucking her battered stuffed rabbit in next to her in bed, lips brushing her hair.
She blinked away sudden, unexpected tears. “I’m sorry, you were saying something?”
“Just sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Simon gave her a long assessing look. “We don’t have to go through with this, you know.”
“And waste all this?” Rachel gave her pleated skirt a shake. “No. I’m ready. Really, I am.” She was painfully aware of just how unconvincing she sounded. “Well?
Do we have a plan?”
“We?” Simon didn’t stint on the sarcasm, but he didn’t, as Rachel half expected, try to argue her out of it. “Assuming that Jicksy doesn’t drink himself into an early grave before the third of August, the earl and countess will be rolling out the red carpet, laying in the champagne, and hauling half of London out to Caffers for the official celebration of Jicksy’s twenty-first. An heir,” he added, “is an heir, is an heir, no matter how much of a wastrel he might be. And the countess does like putting on a good show for the tenantry.”
Rachel shifted on the couch, the cushions too soft, too deep. “What has that to do with me?”
Simon’s eyes were very black and very blank. “If we’re to pull this off, we need to secure you an invitation to Jicksy’s twenty-first.”
“The third of August is two months away,” Rachel protested. “Don’t tell me you want to be lumbered with me for that long.”
“Little enough time to establish your bona fides.” Simon twisted his glass, studying the effect of the light on the liquid. “It is a large enough event that a Miss Vera Merton might slip by. Provided you make the right friends between now and then.”
Rachel smelled a rat, although she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was something in the fixed way Simon was regarding his glass.
Or maybe it was just that every fiber of her being revolted against the idea of joining in the celebrations for her father’s son by another woman. All hail the legitimate heir!
Rachel set her own glass down on the table with a decided clink. “But—”
Simon kept going as though she’d never spoken, raising his voice to be heard over her. “There is every chance we’ll stumble across your brother, sooner rather than later—he runs with the fast and the fashionable. Although it might be more apt to say that he staggers along with the fast and the fashionable.”
Rachel’s stomach was twisting itself into knots. She didn’t give a damn about her brother, except as a means to an end. “Is that the plan, then? Do I make friends with—with Jicksy, in the hopes of an invitation to his twenty-first?”