Recklessly, Rachel said, “Then don’t marry her.”
John sat up abruptly. “It’s hardly as simple as that.”
“Why not?” Rachel’s head was fizzing with champagne and defiance. Bother her father’s world and its rules. “If it makes you feel better, I don’t think Olivia is all that keen to marry you either.”
John choked on his drink. “Did she tell you that?”
“Call it female intu—intu—instinct.” Her tongue didn’t seem to be working properly. Rachel solved the problem with another swig of champagne. “You haven’t set a date.”
“If I cry off, Lady Ardmore will kill me.”
Rachel gestured expansively with her empty glass. “Marry Lady Ardmore, then.”
John didn’t appear to see the humor in this. “Worse than kill me, she’ll kill my chances in the party.”
Rachel braced a hand against the ground. “Then join a different party,” she said with energy. “Go to the Liberals. Go to Labour. Strike a blow for Whiggery.”
John gaped. “There haven’t been Whigs for fifty years. Longer.”
“Then refound them,” said Rachel imperiously. “Take a chance. Be bold.”
A reluctant smile touched John’s lips. His fingertips brushed hers. “You’re so brave.” He leaned closer, his fingers inching up her glove to the bare skin above the elbow. He traced the path of the gold armlet she had clasped around her upper arm. “So bold. So … uninhibited.”
Rachel could have told him that she wasn’t uninhibited at all, that most of her youth had been spent at the vicarage, that her hair had, until April, fallen past her waist, and her skirts to a point well below the knee, but he didn’t give her time. He leaned forward and kissed her.
“But—” Rachel began, but John only pressed forward, throwing her off balance, and it was easier to just wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him back, to lean into that illusion of intimacy, and feel, for that fleeting moment, as though someone, someone in this vast, lonely world, cared about her just a little.
John thought she was special; he had said so. And Olivia didn’t want him, not really, so it wasn’t as though they were betraying her. No, don’t think of Olivia, looking up at Simon. Think of John, good, kind, earnest, conscientious John, whose tongue was wetting her ear and whose knee was bearing rather heavily on one of the flounces of her skirt.
“Vera,” John murmured, his breath heavy in her ear.
Rachel pulled back just enough to say, “My—my mother called me Rachel.”
“Rachel?” John’s tie was askew, his breath came fast. “No. It’s too workaday.”
Rachel let out a helpless laugh. “I am workaday.” A nursery governess in heiress’s clothing.
“You haven’t any idea, have you?” said John huskily. He touched his fingers to her smudged lipstick. “You haven’t any notion how glamorous you are.”
“Yes, but that’s not me.” Just a veneer, put on for the occasion. It seemed, suddenly, very important that John should know that. Rachel tried to sit up, but the world was wobbly. Her champagne glass tumbled over, rocking on its side.
John only smiled patiently and looped an arm around her waist. “All right … whatever you like.”
“But it’s not what I like.…” Rachel pressed her eyelids together, trying to remember what she’d been thinking, what she meant to say. John took advantage of the moment to lean forward again, his body mashing her backward. “Wait. What about Olivia?”
John leaned obligingly back. “What about her?”
Rachel looked at him blankly. “You’re engaged.”
“Does that really matter?” Rachel could feel John’s champagne-sweet breath against her neck, her ear. “Olivia doesn’t need to know about—well, about this.”
For a moment, she thought she had misheard him.
“This,” Rachel echoed.
As from a distance, she could see it, the whole sordid picture. Her own crumpled dress and smudged lipstick, the diamante clip in her hair askew. John, jacket undone, tie crooked.
“Get away from me.” Staggering to her feet, Rachel scrubbed the back of her hand against her mouth.
“Don’t be like that,” John said plaintively.
“Like what? With morals? With values? With a basic sense of self-respect?” Rachel was shaking, but not with cold. The ground was still wobbly beneath her feet, but her head was clearing rapidly. She almost wished it wouldn’t.
“I hadn’t thought you’d mind.” John assumed a wounded expression. “You’re so sophisticated. So … modern.”
Apples didn’t fall far, Mrs. Spicer said. “Not that modern.”
Was that how her father had justified it? That sort never minds anyway; she couldn’t possibly have expected anything more. A modern version of the droit du seigneur, without the chivalric trappings.
Rachel pulled her wrap tightly around her. “And what about Olivia? Did you stop to think of her while you were pawing me?”
John saw his advantage. “It’s not like that with Olivia,” he said persuasively. “It’s an arrangement. She knows that.” Before Rachel could question that, John added, “And I am very fond of her.”
“Fond,” Rachel repeated flatly. Fond enough to kiss other women. “That’s a curious sort of fondness.”
John didn’t let himself be distracted. “It’s different with you,” he said earnestly. “Olivia is so ordinary, so conventional, but you—you’re something special.”
“Did you know that Olivia wanted to study economics?” Rachel wasn’t quite sure where the words came from; they just popped out. “Did you know that she won a scholarship at Somerville?”
“No,” said John, giving Rachel a confused look. “Lady Ardmore never mentioned it.”
Of course she hadn’t. And John had never bothered to find out for himself.
She had thought she had known him, that he was something solid and good, when, instead, all he was was a pasteboard character of her own inventing. Just like her father.
“What a toad you are,” said Rachel, and, gathering the scraps of her dignity around her, she turned on her heel.
“You won’t—” John hurried along behind her, real alarm in his voice. “You won’t tell Olivia?”
Rachel gave John a long, level look. “That,” she said, as distinctly as she could, “is the least of your worries. Go away, John. Go to your fiancée. Because if you don’t, someone else will.”
He didn’t make any effort to follow her. Well, that was hardly surprising, was it? Too busy scurrying off to secure his interest with Olivia and his safe seat.
Rachel blundered into a yew bush, the prickly shrubbery scraping her bare arms. In her eagerness to get away, she had gone too far, into a formal garden of dramatic scope, well away from the lights and music from the terraces above. These bushes could grow and grow around her and no one would ever know.
Don’t be silly, she told herself, and wrenched her skirt free from a trailing rosebush. There must be gardeners. They would fish her out before she began to smell.
And wasn’t that a cheerful thought?
“There you are.” Gravel crunched behind her. Simon’s voice came out of the darkness, smooth and sophisticated. “I was wondering if I ought to dredge the moat.”
She should answer in kind, Rachel knew, make some light response, but there was no lightness left. She felt raw and bare, just a collection of bones with nothing left on them.
She pressed her balled fists to her eyes. “You were right,” she said, without turning. “You were right all along. I ought never to have come. It was a mistake, all of it.”
“Rachel.” Simon was behind her, his hands on her shoulders, so different from John’s hands, the smell of musk and sandalwood cutting through the sickly sweet smell of late-season flowers. “Rachel, are you all right?”
Mutely, Rachel shook her bowed head. “It was a horrible idea, from the start. You should have stopped me.” Twisting, she faced him, breast to breast, nose to chin.
“Why didn’t you stop me?”
There was little light in this part of the garden. Her own face had to be as shadowed as Simon’s. But whatever he saw in it made him draw her roughly into his arms, resting his cheek against the top of her head. “Oh, Rachel. I’m so sorry.”
For a moment, she allowed herself the luxury of leaning against him, blinking bitter tears against the smooth wool of his jacket. Her head fit comfortably into the hollow beneath his ear; his arms just the right length to go around her waist. Around them, the garden was dark and still, the sounds of revelry very far away.
If she had been Olivia and Olivia Rachel …
Rachel pushed back, saying with a rough attempt at a laugh, “Well, at least you needn’t go to New York anymore. You can stay here and marry Olivia.”
Simon looked at her as though she’d grown a second head.
“She doesn’t want to marry John. It’s you she loves.” Even as she said it, Rachel wasn’t entirely sure of it. But shouldn’t someone be happy? “You can live happily ever after together.” The more Simon stared, the faster she spoke, her voice rising to fill the empty space. “That’s why you took me on. Wasn’t it? To get close to her. I don’t know why she jilted you—”
“Olivia didn’t jilt me.” That was all he said.
Did it matter? “All right. My father made you break it off. There’s nothing so romantic as star-crossed lovers.” Rachel rubbed her gloved palms against her eyes. “What a wonderful revenge on him, throwing his by-blow in his face. Although I can’t say it was an enjoyable experience, being a human cannonball. Quite unpleasant, really.”
“Rachel. Rachel.” Simon caught her shoulders, giving her a brisk shake that left her teeth chattering but stopped the spate of words, the words she couldn’t control, that poured out of her mouth without volition. “You have it all wrong.”
TWENTY-THREE
“You mean I’m all wrong.” Drunk, sloppy. A drag on him. Rachel flapped a hand. “Go on. Go back to Olivia. I’ll be all right.”
As if on cue, one of her heels twisted under her.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Gently but firmly, Simon led her to a bench, so hidden by trailing vines that Rachel would never have found it on her own. “As for Olivia…”
He had seated Rachel, but didn’t sit himself. He stood over her, looking down, twin furrows between his brows.
Abruptly, Simon said, “I couldn’t stick it—the engagement. I ran out on her. Jilted her.” Before Rachel could do more than make a small sound of surprise, he added brusquely, “Do you know why I was here, at Caffers?”
Why did anyone go anywhere? “For a Saturday to Monday?”
“How quickly you pick up the lingo.” Simon’s lips twisted in a grin, but the moment of amusement was fleeting. He jammed his hands into his pockets, spoiling the line of his suit, looking out somewhere over Rachel’s head, his eyes blank. “During the war, they turned Caffers into a mental institution. Officers only, of course. Lady Ardmore wouldn’t have settled for anything less. It was no concern of hers if an enlisted man wanted to put a bullet into his brain. Let them shiver it out beneath the bridges, in the pub, in a cardboard box on the green. What was one more serf more or less?”
“Oh, Simon.” The mockery in his voice was terrible to hear, but Rachel knew now that it was a front, and what she heard beneath it made her heart ache. How had she not guessed? How had she not known? “Did you try to kill yourself?”
“Not like Peter.” Simon’s hand shook as he drew a cigarette from its case. “Nothing quite so direct. Gasper?”
Without a word, Rachel took one, holding it out to Simon to be lit.
It took Simon several tries before he managed to touch the tip to the flame. Rachel didn’t try to help, just let him get on with it. “It seemed quite ungentlemanly of Death to have taken so many and overlooked me. I used to fantasize about being hit by a lorry or falling down a well. Enough booze, a misstep on the street … and farewell, mortal coil.”
Rachel struggled to keep her voice matter-of-fact. Pity was the last thing Simon wanted. “Why not just fall on your sword?”
Simon gave a twisted smile. “Because I’m not an antique Roman. Or a Dane. I couldn’t do that to my mother. Or Ginny.”
“Ginny?” Rachel felt a small, ugly spark of jealousy at the name, spoken with such affection.
“My sister. She was only ten. It would have been rotten for her.”
Rotten. That was one way of putting it. Rachel thought of Cece, sobbing on the floor, what she had seen, and knew Simon was thinking of it, too.
“Since then, I’ve tried to stay away from them as much as I can.” For a moment, Simon’s eyes met Rachel’s. “Easier for them not to get too attached.”
With difficulty, Rachel found her voice. “You idiot. Of course they’re attached.” Not all the years she had been in France could do anything to lessen her mother’s love for her, or her for her mother. Her tongue felt thick. “It’s not the seeing that counts.”
“I thought it might be rather easier on them if … It was all rather touch and go for a while.” Simon took another deep drag on his cigarette. “I was meant to be working on a book about King Harold, but my hand shook too badly to form the words. Every time a car backfired, I thought it was a shell.” He looked around, taking in the boxwood, the roses, the carefully plotted paths. “We were only allowed out here with a keeper. Too much chance of our doing damage to ourselves, as they so politely put it.”
His voice was measured, precise, but something about that very lack of emotion sent a chill down Rachel’s spine. “They?”
“The doctors. We had our exercise in the great hall, round and round and round about, double time. The chapel was for solitary confinement. You could hear the chaps screaming, sometimes. God. I can hear them still.”
Did you think yours was the only family tragedy in Britain?
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“That I was mad? It’s not something that generally comes up in conversation.”
But it had, north by northwest. Rachel had thought it all a joke, nothing more than Simon’s banter.
A kaleidoscope of images shifted and turned, clicking horribly and finally into place. Rachel’s stomach twisted, sour with champagne and self-loathing. “That was why you didn’t want to come with me? Because of … before?”
The men screaming. The keepers.
Simon chucked his cigarette butt away, grinding it beneath his heel. With the air of one determined to make a clean breast, he said, “Olivia was the only sane thing in this terrible place. Her mother wouldn’t let her nurse, but she used to smuggle me poetry. Keats, Tennyson. When my hands shook too hard to turn the pages, she would read aloud to me. She brought me flowers from the hothouses and books on old masters, with glossy illustrations.” For a moment, Simon stood lost in memory. “It was like living inside a beautiful box of stained glass.”
Rachel could picture it all too well: Olivia, young and idealistic, her golden hair worn long, in curls, kneeling by Simon’s bedside in a bower of flowers, reading poetry in that husky, hesitant voice, the two of them tucked away from the world.
Rachel shifted restlessly on the hard stone bench. “And you fell in love with her. I know.”
“I fell in love with the idea of her.” The moonlight silvered Simon’s dark hair, lent an antique cast to the long lines of his face. “She stood for everything that was true and pure, everything that I had cared about before the war. And then Peter killed himself. And I realized it all for the sham it was. Lord Ardmore didn’t break it off—although his wife would have liked to see him try. I … left. I ran away.”
“You found Olivia a scholarship, at Somerville.” It wasn’t a question.
Simon made a quick, nervous gesture. “It was the least I could do. I’d dropped her in it, hadn’t I? Her mother was bad enough before. After…” There was no need to explain after what. “She made Olivia’s life a hell. And her father—he looked through her as th
ough she wasn’t there.”
He didn’t need to say more. Rachel knew that look. Those gray eyes, those Standish eyes, looking over and through her, dismissing her with chilling indifference. I have a daughter, her father had said, but he’d been no better to Olivia than to Rachel. He might provide her the protection of his name, but there was no warmth, no love.
So much for the father of her memory, a figment of imagination and wishful thinking. Had he ever been kind? Or had she made it all up out of whole cloth?
Rachel found she was shivering and couldn’t stop. “He’s a rather awful man, isn’t he?”
She felt something settle around her shoulders. Simon’s jacket, warmed by his body, smelling of tobacco and Simon.
“Won’t you”—hunched inside its comforting warmth, Rachel made an effort to be noble—“won’t you be cold?”
“That would sound more convincing,” said Simon, “if your teeth weren’t chattering.” He didn’t point out that it wasn’t that cold outside. Her cold came from within. He knelt down beside her, one hand on the side of the bench. “Rachel—what happened?”
“Oh, what one would expect.” Clutching the lapels of Simon’s jacket in her shaking hands, Rachel made an unconvincing jab at lightness. “He accused me of being a fraud, trying to blackmail him. He told me he … he already had a daughter.” Rachel looked up at Simon, feeling all the remembered pain of it, her father’s coldness, his scorn. “It wasn’t just that he didn’t know me. He didn’t want to know me.”
She was shivering again, shivering even in the warmth of Simon’s jacket.
Rachel made an effort to get hold of herself. “Stupid, I know, all of it. After this many years … I ought to have realized, oughtn’t I?”
Simon’s hand moved gently to cover hers. “What do you mean to do?”
Rachel pressed her eyes shut. Practicalities. Best to focus on practicalities. “What I always meant to do. A typing course. A bedsit.”
Not in London, not now. She would meet the shadow of her old life everywhere. York, perhaps, or Edinburgh.