“But it does.” With a hand beneath her arm, Simon guided her toward the chair by the empty fire. She could smell his soap, sandalwood and musk. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”
“All those years.” Rachel sank into the chair, the cushions molded by the imprint of Simon’s body. She gave a brusque, bitter laugh. “Remembering him … missing him … And he was here all this time. With his new family. When I learned that he was alive … I wondered if he ever thought of us. Now I know.”
Simon knelt by her chair. “You said you wanted to see him.” Outside, Rachel could hear the backfire of an engine, an irate voice, but within, all was still. Simon’s voice was soft, carefully neutral. “You’ve seen him. You could pack up now. Go home.”
“What home?” Such home as she had had was gone, back to Mr. Norris. It had only been leased, not owned. As, apparently, had her father, and her name, and everything else she had believed to be hers. A feeling of raw panic subsumed her. Shaking back her hair, Rachel looked fiercely at Simon. “And what of our bargain?”
Simon rested a hand against the arm of the chair. “I’m not going to hold you to a pound of flesh.”
His kindness was worse than his scorn. At least when he was being awful, it gave her something against which to pit herself.
Rachel resisted a mad urge to lean her cheek against that hand, to sob out all her frustration and disappointment. This was Simon, she reminded herself. Simon, who had an agenda and secrets of his own.
“That’s the danger of a pound of flesh,” Rachel said raggedly. “One can’t take flesh without drawing blood.”
Simon smiled at her, his lips quirking slightly around the edges. Softly, he said, “A Daniel come to judgment, yea, a Daniel!”
“Judgment, yes, but hardly a Daniel.” Rachel pushed up out of the chair, away from that smile, half mockery and half caress. Abruptly, she said, “You never told me you were engaged to Lady Olivia.”
Simon’s face seemed to close in on itself.
“Ah,” he said. And then, “Does it matter?”
Rachel gave a choked laugh. “It must, mustn’t it? Why help me, otherwise?”
Slowly, he rose to his feet, using the arm of the chair as a lever. “If you put it that way … it’s a nice little exercise in logic. If A, then B.”
“An exercise in illogic, you mean.” Even in her heels, he was a fair bit taller than she. She had to tilt her head to look up at him. “If it didn’t matter, why conceal the fact?”
“Did it never occur to you that it might be of insufficient importance to relate?”
“You forget,” said Rachel shortly. “I saw you yesterday at Heatherington House.” There had been something there still, although just what it was, she couldn’t say. And it was none of her affair. For the most part. “All I mean to say is that our interests appear to be aligned.”
Simon crossed to the coffee tray. Silver tinkled against porcelain. “Hell hath no fury and all that?” He handed Rachel a cup of coffee, stone cold, thick with cream. “You do realize, if you want revenge, you don’t need me. You can affect it easily enough, just by going to the papers.”
“No!” The denial was instinctive and vehement.
Simon raised a brow.
Flushing, Rachel said, “That would be cheap.”
“And blackmail isn’t?”
Rachel set her coffee cup down carefully on a folded piece of yesterday’s Times. “It’s only blackmail if you want something in return.”
Simon lifted his coffee cup in one graceful, long-fingered hand, pausing with it just beneath his lips. “But you do, don’t you? You want payment—just not in coin.”
Rachel folded her arms across her chest. “As do you.”
“Two rogues together.” Simon toasted her with his china cup. Draining the dregs, he said briskly, “All right, then. What do you want?”
That was the question, wasn’t it? Rachel wasn’t sure she knew.
A mélange of memories swirled through her mind. That last morning in the garden. Her parents’ picture in her mother’s drawer. A chess set, reverently handled, because it had been his. Sitting at dinner at the vicarage, imagining what it would be like to have a family, a sister.
No, hardly memories. Daydreams. Those daydreams she had held on to for so many years. But no more.
Turning, so Simon couldn’t see her face, Rachel paced toward the mantel, moving in short, restless bursts.
“I want him to … remember. I want him to wonder. As I did.”
“As revenge goes,” said Simon conversationally, “that’s rather milk and water, isn’t it? Thumbscrews aren’t in it.”
“There are worse tortures than the physical.” Rachel wondered what it must have been like for her mother all those years. How had she felt, cutting out those clippings? Had she hated him? Or had she, as she claimed for Rachel, loved him still?
I am married. And I shall be until I die.
Yes, and so was her father. To Violet, Countess of Ardmore.
“He must have thought he was well rid of us.” The memory of her father’s embrace was a physical ache. “Or, at least, easily rid of us. It would be rather nervous-making, don’t you think, to suddenly be faced with the prospect of exposure?”
“There are greater men who have weathered worse scandals.”
“Yes, but Cece says that Lady Ardmore is a great stickler.” Rachel scarcely noticed the familiarity with which Cece’s name rolled off her tongue. “And my father has a reputation for probity. It would matter to them.”
“And,” put in Simon blandly, “to Mr. Trevannion. A rising Tory MP cannot be too careful about with whom he allies himself.”
Rachel paused in her pacing to look narrowly at her host.
“As you say,” said Simon quietly, “our interests are aligned.”
It was the admission Rachel had been angling for, but instead of feeling vindicated, she felt strangely disappointed. “Are you hoping to clear the field for yourself?” she asked. “Or merely to sow salt?”
“Does it matter?” he asked.
Are you still in love with my sister?
Rachel bit back the question. Simon was right; there was no practical reason it should matter. All that mattered was the help he was offering her in their shared enterprise. If he was using her to get to Lady Olivia—well, she was using him, too, wasn’t she? At least they both knew where they stood.
“No,” she said slowly. “I suppose it doesn’t.”
“Well, then.” Simon set his coffee cup down on the tray, the fabric of his shirt stretching across his back. When he turned back to her, his manner was brisk, businesslike. “What are your plans?”
Hesitantly, Rachel said, “I have pictures. One of my parents together.”
That one picture, previously so precious, sole relic of the lost years. She hated the idea of parting with it. But what was it, really? Testament to something that had never been.
Rachel swallowed hard and blundered on. “Also some of my mother with me. Some from before. And some … after.” After her father had left them. Rapidly, she said, “If I were to put something in the post, would the earl open it himself, or a secretary?”
“Himself,” said Simon, without hesitation. “The countess employs a social secretary—or, rather, a relay of them—but not the earl. His letters are brought to him at breakfast.”
“Are you sure? It has been some time…”
“Since Lady Olivia jilted me? The habits of a lifetime don’t change in six years. You intend to send the snaps one at a time, I imagine?”
Rachel nodded, the plan mapping itself out in her mind. “At irregular intervals.”
“To keep him guessing?” Simon’s expression was carefully bland. “You terrify me. The earl, I am sure, shall be found like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story, the letters clasped in his hands and a silent scream on his cold lips.”
“That,” Rachel said acidly, “would defeat the purpose.”
“Ah, yes, alive and remo
rseful. Tearing his hair and beating his breast and crying, ai, me!”
Rachel gathered up her bag in her gloved hands. “If you’re going to mock, I’m going home. I mean—back to the flat.”
There was something reassuring about being back in the familiar pattern of blow and counterblow.
Simon followed her through the door of the drawing room. “Is that my cue? Shall I implore you to stay? Would you like some coffee? A handkerchief? A shoulder on which to wallow?”
“I don’t wallow.”
“No, you plot. Admirable woman.” Simon rested his palms on her shoulders, looking down into her face. In a voice devoid of its usual mockery, he said, “Are you sure this is what you want? Once you begin … there’s no going back.”
He was right, she knew. The masquerade as Vera Merton had been one thing; it might have been brushed off as a lark, a frolic. This was different. Darker. Blackmail, Simon had called it, and he wasn’t far wrong.
But what was the alternative? To walk away, leave her father to his other life. Pretend that she and her mother had never existed—as, to him, they hadn’t. She couldn’t do that, any more than she could go back to two months ago.
Wearily, Rachel shook her head. “I can’t just leave it.”
“All right.” Simon gave her shoulders a brief squeeze, then let go. “Do you want the countess to see the pictures?”
The move back to business was dizzying. “This is between me and my father.”
She couldn’t quite articulate why she felt it should be so, but she did, strongly.
Simon paused, one hand on the doorknob. “You do realize that there’s little point to it unless you’re inside the household. How will you gauge his reaction if you’re not there to see it?”
Rachel was instantly wary. “Don’t tell me to befriend Lady Olivia. That will take years. And I don’t have years.”
“No,” Simon agreed, “you don’t. I’ve been offered a job in New York.”
For a moment, Rachel thought she must have misheard. “A what?”
“A job. Surely you’ve heard of them? Or have you become so nice in your tastes in your week of the high life?”
“Don’t be horrid.” The air in the little hall felt suddenly very close, hot and stuffy. Rachel frowned up at Simon. “Will you take it?”
“I haven’t decided yet. You’re welcome to stay on at the flat for as long as you like; I shan’t evict you.”
“Yes, but your mother might.” If Simon left, she would retreat to the bedsit in Holborn, to the humble life of Rachel Woodley.
In fact, she could do so now. Letter writing didn’t require a Mayfair address, or frocks made of chiffon and spangles.
But …
“New York?” Rachel echoed.
“It’s the New York Sketch. Haven’t heard of it? There’s a reason for that. They want an Englishman as editor. Beverley Nichols chucked it, so…” Simon shrugged.
“You sound as though you might like it,” Rachel said accusingly.
“Abandon my brilliant career as sycophant to the champagne-swilling set?” Simon flecked an invisible piece of lint from his sleeve. In profile, the stark lines of his face were even more pronounced, as were the hollows beneath his cheekbones. He was too thin, Rachel realized. Like someone burning with fever, consumed from the inside out. “I haven’t given them an answer. There are … considerations.”
“Considerations?”
Glibly, Simon said, “The plumbing, for one. It would be terribly tedious to have hot water whenever one wanted it. And those teeth! So terrifyingly white.” Changing the subject, he said, “There is a way to expedite the exercise—getting you into Ardmore House. Do you remember that story Waugh was telling the other night?”
“Which one was Waugh?” She had met so many people, a blur of faces and names.
“The male half of the canoodling Evelyns,” said Simon. And, more prosaically, “He was sacked by the Daily Express.”
Ah, that one. The auburn-haired imp who wanted his name spelled correctly in the gossip columns.
“I wasn’t paying much attention. My mind was on other things.”
“Mr. Trevannion, for one?” Before Rachel could retort, Simon went on, with exaggerated patience, “Let me refresh your memory. The Lygon sisters forgot their latchkeys…”
“And had to knock up the prime minister.” Rachel frowned at him. “I don’t happen to be acquainted with Mr. Baldwin.”
“I’m not suggesting you billet yourself on the prime minister. But if you were to contrive to leave your Crystal Ball and Bottle party at the same time as Olivia, you might share a taxi. And if it just so happened that you’d left your latchkey…”
“I don’t know.…” The idea of pushing herself off on someone like that was contrary to everything she had been taught. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”
Simon’s eyebrows soared toward his hairline. “Revenge, blackmail, impersonation … and you wouldn’t want to impose?”
Despite herself, Rachel’s lips twisted. “Old habits,” she said apologetically.
“Break them,” said Simon bluntly. “Cece’s set takes delight in crashing in when they’re not wanted; it’s all but a religion with them.”
“Yes, but Cece is the niece of an earl.”
Simon arched a brow. “And you are the cousin of a Montfort. You’re not Rachel Woodley here; you’re Vera Merton.”
But only for a few more weeks. Rachel set a hand on the doorknob. “When do you need to tell them about New York?”
“Soon.”
She had always known the masquerade was meant to be a short-lived affair. She just hadn’t realized quite how short.
Or how accustomed she might become to it.
Rachel pasted on a brave face. “Well, then. I’d better act quickly, hadn’t I?”
* * *
She sent out the first of the pictures that night.
FIFTEEN
“Those scarves! My dear, how too divine! And those earrings—!”
If a party were to be judged by the volume of conversation, the Crystal Ball and Bottle party was a smashing success. The air was shrill with the parrot twitter of a hundred excited voices, as the same people who had seen one another at last night’s Hawaiian party greeted one another again, with as much surprised delight as a stranded traveler greeting a fellow castaway.
“However did you manage—”
“That shawl! Oh, the bliss of it!”
“And then Tommy said—”
“But, really, one could never—”
“My dear, how we roared.”
“Vera, my sweetie-bo! Those earrings! I die for them!” Elizabeth Ponsonby enveloped Rachel in a cloud of scent and silk fringe. Elizabeth was one of Cece’s dearest friends, a leader of the smart set, and permanently sloshed.
“Oh, do you like them?” Rachel extricated herself, by dint of several weeks’ practice keeping her cocktail glass aloft in one hand, her cigarette in its long ebony holder in the other. “Maison Woolworth, my dear.”
“You are clever,” said Elizabeth admiringly. Beneath her shawl, she wore an abbreviated dress that sparkled as she moved. She pirouetted, sending the tiny crystals chiming. “What do you think of mine?”
“Darling!” Dropping Tommy Digby’s arm, Lady Pansy Pakenham rushed over, splashing her gimlet over Rachel’s shoes. “You haven’t come as a crystal ball. Do tell me you haven’t. It’s too…”
“Too?” supplied Rachel, with an arched brow.
Tommy Digby leered in the general direction of Elizabeth’s hem. “I can read someone’s future in that.”
Elizabeth tossed her head, the light catching the facets of the diamante fillet binding her brow. “Don’t be vile, Tommy.”
“Behave,” said Rachel, tapping him with her cigarette holder. “Or it won’t be your future.”
Tommy guffawed appreciatively. “Read that in the cards, what?”
“No, just in Elizabeth’s face.”
“That’s
good, that is.” Tommy gave Rachel a friendly elbow to the ribs. “In her face.”
He wandered off in the direction of the bar, still chuckling to himself. Rachel had no doubt it would be even funnier after another drink.
In the past few weeks, Rachel had, somehow, acquired a reputation as a wit. Or, rather, Vera Merton had. Rachel couldn’t see that it had taken terribly much. All she had done was speak her mind. Within limits. But coupled with an ebony cigarette holder and a Paris frock, what Rachel considered plain common sense was transmuted by the curious alchemy of champagne and ill lighting into cutting witticisms that were repeated and embroidered upon with a titter and, “Oh, Vera!”
It baffled Rachel sometimes, how quickly she had become the fashion, how rapidly she had moved from Miss Merton, an unknown, to “Oh, Vera!”
No one seemed to think it the least bit odd that she was staying in Simon’s mother’s flat. “How lucky to be you!” was the general chorus, with complaints about the pickiness of parents or the pokiness of shared flats. Perhaps it was as Simon said; perhaps her instincts were too bourgeois. No one appeared to think anything of taking up residence with a relative, or even an acquaintance. It was applauded as a clever savings; more to spend on the all-important pursuit of amusement.
As the summer meandered on, Vera Merton had careened from party to party. Pirate parties and circus parties and Mozart parties where everyone came attired in white wigs and period garb, hastily hired out from costumers and theatrical outfitters. There seemed to be no end to the scrabble for costume, the endless parade of masks that did nothing to mask.
Rent, Rachel told herself. Fodder for Simon’s column. If she was the rage, it was largely because her activities were dwelt and embroidered upon with loving detail by the Man About Town, who added luster to her fake gems and exploits to her earlier evenings. It was all part of the bargain.
There was something dangerously seductive about the endless whirl that deprived her of the necessity of thought: the constant round of parties, the cocktails, the telephoning. The phone upon the bed-stand was no longer an oddity; it was a constant feature of her life.
Rachel, who had always risen early, now spent the hours before noon lolling in her borrowed bed, the receiver of the phone in one hand, dissecting such important matters as whether it was really quite wise to wear silver shoes with a gold dress, “Like a goldsmith’s shop, darling! All her wares on display!” or if there ought to be gypsy minstrels or a jazz band hired for the Crystal Ball and Bottle party.