How many times had she imagined that scene? How many times had she dreamed of her father coming home?
“Why couldn’t it work?” Rachel twisted on the seat, lifting a hand to screen her eyes from the glare of the lamps. “You said it yourself. It would be the stunt of all stunts.”
“I wasn’t serious.” The car slowed as they approached a light. “It’s only a stunt if someone knows I’ve done it.”
“You would know you’d done it.” She wanted this, more than she’d ever wanted anything. Urgency made Rachel reckless. “Think of the power of it, fooling everyone like that.”
Mr. Montfort frowned at her. “You would need a place to stay.”
“A bedsit—”
“In the wrong part of town? No.” Before Rachel could respond, he said slowly, half to himself, “There is my mother’s flat. She’s always having cousins to stay.”
“Wouldn’t she mind?”
“She’s in America at the moment. In New York.” Mr. Montfort kept his eyes on the road, one hand relaxed on the wheel. “I could have the whole of the Ballets Russes to stay and she wouldn’t raise a brow—she might rather like that, actually.”
“I wouldn’t want to put you out.”
“We wouldn’t be sharing a washbasin. I have my own bachelor quarters in Piccadilly. It’s perfectly respectable.” His gaze flicked sideways, toward Rachel. “You would need a good story as to why no one had heard of you before.”
“I’ve been in France … with an invalid mother.” In the car, in the gathering dusk, Rachel could almost believe that this might be possible, brick by brick, lie by lie. She could feel her excitement rising with the roar of the engine, the thrum of the wheels against the road. “At an obscure watering place.”
“That would,” said Mr. Montfort, moving smoothly around a dawdling Morris, “explain your lack of worldliness.”
“I’m not unworldly,” Rachel protested.
She’d seen the world. Admittedly, she’d seen it in snippets, from odd angles: when she brought the children down to curtsy to their parents, through the gossip in the servants’ hall, from the top of the stairs as guests swirled in below, jewels sparkling, hair coiffed. Peering through the banisters with the children had provided an excellent view of the top of a great many heads.
“There are worlds,” said Mr. Montfort, “and there are worlds. This particular world is a very small one. It has its own rules, its own language.”
“Are you afraid I would embarrass you? I know which fork to use.”
“You haven’t the slightest idea, have you?” He was not referring to forks. He swung the car smoothly to one side, down a lane where the hedgerows crowded thickly on either side of the car. “No. As much as I enjoy putting the cat among the pigeons, I do draw the line at cruelty to kittens.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Unlike her sister, the lovely Lady Olivia, Rachel was no pampered debutante. She’d been making her own way since she came of age. And, at the moment, she was feeling particularly fierce. “I’m twenty-seven—nearly twenty-eight. I cut my claws years ago.”
The lane had broadened ahead of them. Mr. Montfort pressed down on the accelerator, making the great car swoop forward.
Rachel grabbed for the edge of the seat.
Mr. Montfort pitched his cigarette neatly out the window. “Not among this set, you haven’t … Vera.”
“That was a cheap trick.”
“Life is a cheap trick. Hadn’t you realized?”
“Not until today.” She had always believed that if one worked hard, if one did unto others and put money in the collection plate, the universe would respond accordingly. That was what her mother had taught her, and Rachel had never seen any reason to doubt her. If they didn’t have much, they still had more than many. And they had each other.
Rachel felt rebelliousness boil up within her, raging like the workings of the car’s engine. Her mother had lied; Cousin David had lied; it wasn’t fair, any of it.
“If you won’t help me, will you at least promise not to expose me?”
Something in her voice, an edge of desperation, perhaps, caught her companion’s attention. The great car slowed, then stopped. Mr. Montfort turned in his seat, his eyes on her face. “You’re determined, aren’t you?”
Rachel nodded, wordlessly. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
For a long moment, they sat frozen in tableau, Mr. Montfort’s eyes, dark and inscrutable, studying her, so intently that Rachel found she was holding her breath, her chest tight with the effort. Around them, the world was dark and still, the only sounds a lamb bleating in the darkness, a bird trilling in a tree.
With an abrupt nod, Mr. Montfort put the car into gear. “All right. I’ll help you. But for my own reasons. Not yours.”
His eyes were focused on the road; all Rachel could see was his profile, the long line of his jaw, the tense set of his shoulders. Instantly suspicious, she asked, “What reasons?”
He gave a brief, humorless laugh. “Nothing like that.”
Rachel sat up a little straighter. “I didn’t think—”
“Didn’t you? You ought.” Mr. Montfort cast her a quick sideways look that made the color rise in Rachel’s cheeks. Before Rachel could think of anything to say, he added, more prosaically, “My column grows dull. The same old names, week after week. You’ll make a change. The lovely and elusive Miss Vera Merton—”
“Not too elusive,” said Rachel smartly. “I need that invitation to—”
“Caffers,” said Mr. Montfort. “Short for Carrisford Court. Ancient seat of the Earls of Ardmore. The house in Eaton Square is Ardmore House. Ardles for short.”
The names rolled off his tongue like an incantation. Uneasily, Rachel glanced at the man sitting beside her in the car. She knew nothing of him, not really. Only that he had once been Cousin David’s student. Or so he said.
But one thing was clear: he knew her father’s world. He spoke its language.
“I’ll square it about the flat,” said Mr. Montfort, as casually as though he were ordering tea. “And see about your wardrobe.”
Rachel turned in her seat to look at him, the lights playing off the planes of his face. “You’re going to a great deal of trouble.”
“If it were trouble, I wouldn’t do it.” His voice was clipped, brisk, a warning not to inquire further. With a deliberate effort at urbanity, he said, “Isn’t there an expression about gift horses?”
Yes, but when one was advised not to look them in the mouth, it was generally because something was wrong with them.
Rachel glanced sideways at Mr. Montfort. His long, lean form was sprawled comfortably in his seat, his mobile mouth relaxed, but his hands, tense on the steering wheel, told a different story. My reasons, he had said. Not yours.
Rain silvered the windows, making the landscape beyond shiver and shimmer, curiously insubstantial, the world seen through a soap bubble.
How dreadful could it be? He was hardly going to sell her into white slavery, Rachel mocked herself. That was straight out of the world of penny dreadfuls. Mr. Montfort was offering her a place to stay, a wardrobe, an entrée into her father’s world. She would be mad to refuse.
Whatever his reasons.
Rachel straightened her shoulders. “What do I need to do first?”
SIX
The salon at which Mr. Montfort made Rachel an appointment was in King’s Lynn, on a side street. The windows were dingy, the brave gold paint of the lettering flaking off in large chunks. The bright spring sunshine was merciless, ruthlessly revealing every inch of peeling paint, every streak of soap scum on the windows.
The place had a downtrodden air about it, the sort of establishment patronized by shopgirls hoping to look like what’s-’er-name from the talkies.
That was part of the plan, wasn’t it? Rachel reminded herself. She wasn’t meant to be seen anywhere she might be recognized until she’d made her transformation. No one in this sad little shop would think to connect Miss W
oodley, in her worn hat, with the glamorous Miss Vera Merton, darling of the London gossip sheets.
Presuming that Simon Montfort made good on his promises. It had been nearly ten days since that wet afternoon in Oxford. What had seemed entirely reasonable in Mr. Montfort’s motor, with the engine a soft thrum in the background and the lamps glittering on the raindrops, seemed distinctly less plausible on a bright May morning.
Rachel couldn’t let herself think about that. Forge forward, that was the order of the day. She’d begun the grim task of sorting her mother’s clothes into boxes and bundles, searching for a clue, any clue, anywhere, as to her mother’s secret past. It didn’t exist. Aside from that one telling Tatler clipping, her mother’s belongings were exactly what they should be, the workaday attire of a genteel widow fallen on hard times.
She hadn’t told Alice what she’d meant to do. Instead, Rachel had told her she’d scrounged up the money for that typing course, in London. Alice, run off her feet with Annabelle and Charles and the various demands of Jim’s patients, hadn’t inquired too closely, for which, Rachel told herself, she was grateful. She was.
“Miss Woodley.” A long gray shadow unfolded itself from the wall beside the window. “Prompt on your hour, I see.”
“Mr. Montfort.” Sun-blinded, she hadn’t seen him there. Rachel frowned into the brightness, which created a nimbus around his dark head, casting his features into shadow. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
That wasn’t part of the plan. They weren’t to have any contact until Miss Vera Merton came breezing into London. It was safer that way. They’d agreed.
Mr. Montfort proffered a large square package. “I’d thought you might rather this not show up at your humble cottage. And you can hardly appear in Mayfair wearing that.”
He gestured languidly toward Rachel’s good suit, the same suit she’d worn to Oxford, far too warm for a May day that had delusions of being summer.
Rachel’s hands were busy with the strings on the box. Inside was a silk crepe dress, an impractical white with navy blue accents, with a handkerchief collar and box pleats on the skirt. The fabric felt slippery and rich beneath her gloved fingers. Beneath it, pristinely wrapped in tissue paper, were matching gloves, bag, and a narrow, close-fitting hat, with a jaunty bow on one side.
It was an ensemble straight out of the fashion papers, the sort of thing the guests at the homes where she had worked might have worn.
While Rachel stared, Mr. Montfort added off-handedly, “The rest of your wardrobe is waiting at the flat.”
The rest of her wardrobe? He’d said something about seeing to her wardrobe, but she’d never imagined anything like this. There was something surprisingly intimate about it, the fabric that would drape her body, the hat designed to nestle close around her head. Intimate and a little disquieting.
Rachel bundled the clothes back into the box. “You are a very thorough Pygmalion, aren’t you?”
Mr. Montfort grimaced. “I have always thought there must be something rather lacking about a man who finds it necessary to chisel his mate from marble. I’m not in the market for a Galatea. This is a business arrangement, nothing more.”
Rachel juggled the heavy box. “And if our venture goes belly-up?”
Mr. Montfort plucked the box from her, tucking it effortlessly beneath his arm. “Vera Merton will disappear back into the woodwork and poor, honest Rachel Woodley will return—with a decent haircut and some proper clothes.”
Which reminded Rachel. “About those clothes. You must let me know how much—”
“They’re hand-me-downs,” said Mr. Montfort. When she started to protest, he added, “And quite above your touch.”
Well, that put her in her place. “From your mistress, I suppose,” Rachel said tartly.
“My sister.”
Caught unawares, Rachel gaped.
Mr. Montfort laughed. The expression made his entire face lighten. “What? Did you think I leapt from Minerva’s head full blown? My sister is the child of my mother’s”—he paused to count on his fingers—“fourth marriage. Her father is an American copper baron. Filthy rich. She won’t miss the frocks.”
“Won’t she notice?” Rachel was reminded of Goldilocks, creeping into the bears’ home, eating their porridge, sleeping on their beds. Or, in this case, wearing their frocks.
“That, my dear, is one of the first things we need to work on. You must learn to stifle these virtuous, bourgeois impulses. What’s a frock more or less?”
“Or three dozen,” interpolated Rachel.
“Or three dozen,” said Mr. Montfort equitably. “You, until now, have belonged to the class of people who only buy what they can pay for. I imagine, for example, you wouldn’t take a taxi if you didn’t have the fare.”
“Of course not.”
“If this illusion is to be convincing, we need to train you out of your middle-class habits.” Mr. Montfort swept one arm in the direction of the hairdresser. “Chop off your locks and your inhibitions.”
Rachel cast him a withering look. “I don’t think the one necessarily leads to the other.”
“Crushed,” drawled Mr. Montfort. “Let’s try it and see, shall we?”
He held open the door of the salon with a flourish.
There was something terribly lulling about Mr. Montfort’s calculated rudeness, about the mockery he made of the normal rules of behavior. Like a court jester, constantly mumming. But she’d be a fool, Rachel thought soberly, to let herself be taken in by that. Beneath the banter lay something else entirely, something dark and dangerous and disconcertingly serious.
And she was, by her own choosing, placing herself in his power.
“Of course,” said Mr. Montfort blandly, “if you would rather just go home…”
Home. Home to Netherwell, where her belongings were sorted into stacks. After that, the alluring prospect of a cold-water flat, with a meter for electricity and a loo down the hall, shared with a half dozen other industrious souls, bickering over who had used whose cake of soap. Cabbage smells from the kitchen and stale biscuits for tea.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” said Rachel, and swept past him into the salon. “I mean to see this through.”
The hairdresser was swift. Hanks of hair fell around her. Rapunzel hair, long ropes of it. The hairdresser lifted the cloth from her shoulders, using a soft-bristled brush to sweep the last strands of hair from her back.
Rachel’s head felt strange, the back of her neck naked. She couldn’t help glancing at the hair on the floor, years and years of it, gone in an instant.
Dropping his paper on the bench, Mr. Montfort strolled over to her. She’d half expected him to leave, his box and message delivered, but he’d stayed, one shoulder propped against the wall, keeping up a running patter of sardonic commentary on the day’s headlines as the hairdresser did arcane things to the back of Rachel’s head.
“Cheer up,” came Mr. Montfort’s voice from behind her. “You’ve hardly sold away your soul.”
“No, just my hair.” The hairdresser swirled the chair around, holding up a mirror so that Rachel could see.
Mr. Montfort was right; the short cut did highlight her cheekbones. You have the cheekbones to be a Vera.
Rachel didn’t know who the woman in the mirror was, but she rather liked her.
She looked up at Mr. Montfort, who stood, frowning down at her.
“Well? What do you think?” Rachel demanded cheekily.
“You’ll do,” he said curtly.
Rachel gave her head an experimental shake, enjoying the way her hair swished across her jawline, the lightness, the freedom of it. “Keep paying me compliments like that and my head will be too big for my hat.”
Mr. Montfort didn’t take the bait. He bundled his paper up under his arm. “How soon can you come up to town?”
Rachel scrambled down out of the chair. A business relationship, he had said. He was certainly all business now. She hurried after him, toward the door. “
I need another week to get my affairs in order.” A week to transfer her old life into boxes and bags. “You seem very keen all of a sudden.”
Keen wasn’t quite the right word. More like a man hurrying to the dentist for a tooth extraction. It was hardly, thought Rachel wryly, a flattering comparison.
But, then, she couldn’t blame him, could she? It was his reputation as well as hers on the line. If it came out that he’d tried to pass off a nobody and failed … he’d have to endure a great deal of ribbing, at the very least.
Could he lose his job at the paper over it? Rachel wasn’t sure.
Mr. Montfort shrugged. “I don’t like letting I dare not wait upon I would. Unless … you’re getting cold feet?”
“Only from standing here.” Resolutely, Rachel took the large box from him, squinting into the sunlight. If it were done, it was best done quickly. “Shall we say a week Thursday?”
* * *
“This the place, love?” The taxi driver pulled up by a modern block of flats on South Audley Street.
“Yes, thank you.”
Rachel dropped the right number of coins into the cabbie’s waiting hand and emerged from the taxi, her French heels clicking against the pavement, her pleated skirt swishing just so against her knees. In the sunlight, she could see herself reflected in the window of the florist’s shop opposite, a walking fashion plate from her blue hat down to the matching heels. Her silk stockings—real silk, not rayon—were decadently slippery against her legs.
There was a porter encased in a glass box. Rachel started in his direction—she had her speech memorized—but before she could reach him, Mr. Montfort emerged from the vestibule.
“Cousin Vera!” He pecked Rachel on both cheeks with the awkward earnestness of a long-lost cousin. “I trust you had a safe journey?” In an undertone, for her ears only, he added, “If you gawk like that, they’ll know you for a fraud before you open your mouth.”
The Other Daughter Page 7