She might not have spoken. Cece pushed unsteadily out of Simon’s embrace. “You can be such a beast, Simon.”
Simon snagged Cece by the arm before she could fall, turning her neatly toward Rachel. “You see? You have that in common. You can unite in reviling me.”
“Don’t be an ass.” Cece peered muzzily at Rachel. Her eyes were a pale blue, watery, and vaguely protuberant. The effect ought to have been unattractive, but it wasn’t. It gave her a slightly helpless air, the perpetual damsel in distress. Her lashes had been blackened, making her eyes seem even larger and paler. “Merton … I haven’t met you.”
“How could you?” said Simon. “She’s just come from France.”
Cece shrugged pettishly. “I can’t be expected to keep track of all your cousins.” She tugged on Simon’s arm, as though Rachel weren’t there. “If you’re going to be horrid, you might at least dance with me.”
“On that swamp of a dance floor? It would take a braver man than I. Besides … don’t you have one of your trained monkeys for that?”
“Jealous?”
“Invariably. Which one is it tonight?”
“Goff.” It sounded like a cough. Rachel belatedly realized it was meant to be a name. “Too sleep-inducing.”
“You mean he’s been slow filling your glass.” Simon expertly hefted the champagne bottle in the cooler and tipped the remains into Cece’s glass. “Drink this and you’ll feel better, there’s a good girl.” He kicked a chair out from under the table and sat on it, drawing Cece down beside him. “Now. Tell us what we’ve missed.”
“Why? So you’ll have something to put in your column?” Without waiting for him to respond, Cece went on, “It’s been a deadly evening. The two Evelyns have been cooing together in the corner. Elizabeth Ponsonby tripped over a chair and ripped her frock and went home. Brenda—”
No one pulled out a chair for Rachel, so Rachel extracted one for herself. Apparently, regular rules of conduct didn’t apply in nightclubs. Or maybe it was just that they didn’t apply with Simon.
Wasn’t she meant to be catching Cece’s attention?
Simon angled his dark head toward Cece’s fair one, listening with flattering attention as the endless catalog of names went on. Or, at least, giving a fairly good pretense. His eye caught Rachel’s, and he made a slight gesture with his head.
Sit? Stay? Roll over?
Rachel arranged her chiffon panels carefully around her legs, trying not to fidget. What would Vera Merton do?
Dance topless on the table, no doubt.
“—and Brian is flirting shamefully with one of the waiters—”
There was a bottle of champagne in the cooler on the table, but the only glass was Cece’s. Rachel took the ebony cigarette holder from the bag and fitted a cigarette carefully into place.
“You appear to be in need of a light.” Simon’s hand suddenly appeared beneath her nose. “Cece, gasper?”
“Thanks awfully, darling.” Cece helped herself to Rachel’s cigarettes without so much as a nod. Turning back to Simon, she said all in one breath, “It’s all frightfully dull and I don’t even know why I bother.”
Cece dragged in deeply on her cigarette, trailing ash and ennui. Rachel felt like a nursery governess again, relegated to the quiet seat in the back of the room, seen and not heard.
So much for the effects of a flame-colored dress.
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” Simon agreed solemnly. “Too sick-making. What is one to do with oneself?”
“Have you tried nursery governessing?” murmured Rachel. That would cure her ennui.
Simon shot her a warning look.
More loudly, Rachel said, “In France, when we were bored, we used to pass the time at the castle telling fortunes.”
She hadn’t expected Cece to pay any attention, but she did. Her cigarette tilted in Rachel’s direction, and her watery eyes focused on her for the first time, instead of just shifting past her. “Oh?”
Simon raised a brow. “O my prophetic soul?”
He still hadn’t introduced her, not properly. Well, if he could carry on as though that didn’t matter, so could she. Rachel flicked ash off her untouched cigarette. “You’re mixing your plays. That’s Hamlet.”
There was amusement in the depths of Simon’s dark eyes. “I am nothing but a howling void of unrelated information.”
Rachel looked pointedly at him. “All sound and fury signifying nothing.”
“A tale told by an idiot,” Simon agreed. “Flies to wanton boys, and all that.” Turning to Cece, he said blandly, “There’s your antidote to boredom, darling. Hold out your hand, and all shall be known. Coins in the box in the front, mockers and doubters to the back of the line. Meet my cousin Vera, mistress of the mystic arts.”
He’d dropped her in it now, hadn’t he?
But it had its results. Cece leaned her elbows on the table. A diamond-encrusted bangle glittered on her wrist. “Can you really tell the future?”
EIGHT
“Well…” An evil imp took hold of Rachel. Simon had said she needed a stunt, hadn’t he? “I didn’t believe it myself, at first. Fortunes! Too terribly superstitious and silly. But, then, there was that affair with Jean-Luc.…”
“Jean-Luc?”
Rachel shook back her dark hair, leaning forward in an imitation of the other woman’s fashionable slouch. “We laughed when we saw the cards … but, then, when his horse came back to the stable without him…”
“Shocking,” said Simon drily.
Cece’s eyes were as glassy as the mirrored tiles on the wall. “Was he dead?”
Rachel thought fast. “Fortunately, his groom had heard about the cards—you know how servants gossip—and found him before it was too late. He believed. And, then,” she added, “there was Leonie. The cards warned her to avoid dark men. But did she listen?”
“Ah, yes,” said Simon seriously. “Poor Leonie. A shocking affair. Too tragic.”
Rachel sent him a warning look, but she needn’t have worried; Cece was lapping it up. “Can you tell my fortune?”
“Perhaps.” Rachel leaned back against the chair, crossing her silken legs at the knee as Cece had. Her bangles jingled on her wrists. “You needn’t cross my palm with silver, but I wouldn’t say no to bubbly.”
“That can be arranged.” Simon signaled to a passing waiter. Holding his hands in the air, he intoned, “The spirits are telling me … you’ll have a terrible head in the morning.”
“Be quiet, Simon. Well?” Cece imperiously thrust one hand at Rachel, palm up.
Despite herself, Rachel felt a sudden twinge of sympathy. Cece’s voice and dress were all sophistication, but her hand was as small as a child’s, the large rings on her fingers a child’s trumpery trinkets.
Except that they weren’t. And Cece Heatherington-Vaughn was no child. At her age, Rachel had already been earning her own living.
“Darling!” Rachel imitated the other woman’s twittering tones. Time to think quickly. “Only little old gypsy women can tell your fortune by peering at your palm. I’m hopeless without my cards.”
“Do you have them with you?”
“Yes, coz,” echoed Simon. He was watching her as a man might a bear who blundered into a jig, impressed and amused, slightly disbelieving. “Do you?”
Rachel gestured at her tiny beaded evening bag. “They’re at the flat.”
She half expected Cece to demand they hop in a taxi right away. “Thursday, then,” said Cece decidedly. “My mother is having a deadly little person come to lecture. You can bring her, Simon.”
“One of your mother’s lectures?” Simon made a show of stifling a yawn. “Darling, we’d have to be mad.”
Rachel tried desperately to catch his eyes. An invitation to Cece’s home? It couldn’t be better.
And she hadn’t even had to dance topless.
“No, really. You must come. We’ll slip away to the study.” With that decided, Cece raised a jeweled arm in the
air, waving it languidly in the direction of the group of men standing behind them. “Brian! Darling! Look who I’ve found!”
“M-M-Montfort.” Rachel swallowed her annoyance at the interruption as a dark-haired man sauntered over, looking, Rachel thought, like a particularly well-fed cat. “Are you sniffing out sc-scandal for your de-de-delightful little column?”
“Always.” Simon slanted one last thoughtful look at Rachel before turning to the newcomer. “Anything to share, old bean? Or is it merely more of the same?”
“D-d-don’t look to m-m-me, my dear! I reek of virtue, p-p-positively I do.” The man’s heavy lidded eyes roved toward Rachel. “And who is this r-r-ravishing creature?”
Cece leaned bonelessly back in her chair, dangling one high-heeled slipper from her silken toes. “This is Simon’s cousin, Sarah—”
“Vera,” Rachel corrected, smiling determinedly at Cece, feeling edgy and alert, a soldier in the thick of battle.
“—who is going to tell my fortune.”
“How d-d-droll.” The man called Brian took a delicate sip of his drink, a frothy concoction of cream and something else, smelling strongly of nutmeg. “Shall I c-c-call you sylph or s-s-sibyl?”
The man’s pose was languid, but those heavily lidded eyes were assessing. Sniffing for a whiff of scandal? Well, she was meant to be a scandal, wasn’t she? The right sort of one.
Rachel struck a pose with her ebony lighter, saying, “You can call me either—but I answer to Vera.”
“Vera … veritas…” Brian turned the name over on his tongue, rolling it, playing with it. “Come to t-t-tell truth?”
“Come to drink bubbly,” said Simon, as the waiter set a fresh bottle into the cooler, doling out glasses all around. “Vera?”
“I never say no,” said Rachel provocatively, and stretched her arm out for the glass, setting her gold bangles glittering.
Her hand brushed Simon’s. For a moment, as he handed her the glass, they were shielded from the others, his lips close to her ear. “Not bad for someone so long in France,” he murmured.
Rachel could feel energy fizz through her like champagne. “I’ve always been a quick study … Cousin.”
Now was clearly not the time to tell him about the vicar’s annual amateur theatrical.
Brian seated himself beside her, brushing back his tails. “Now. You m-must tell me. Where has darling S-Simon been hiding you?”
Rachel opened her mouth to parrot the planned story about being abroad, with suitable embellishments, but Simon got there first.
With a lazy smile, he said, “That would be telling.”
Brian clasped both hands over his heart and feigned a stagger. “My d-d-dear. You whet my c-c-c-curiosity, you positively do.”
“Good,” said Simon. Taking Rachel by the hand, he drew her up from her chair. “If you’ll excuse us? Vera made me promise to show her the Matisse on the stairs.”
“You are a d-d-disciple of the m-m-muse?”
“Purely an admiring amateur,” Rachel said hastily. She was vaguely aware that there was art labeled as modern, but what it was, and what one was meant to see in it, she hadn’t any idea. It all looked like so much mush to her. “I can’t draw a straight line.”
“My dear! How refreshing.” In Brian’s plummy accent, the r’s came out as w’s. “Now tell me you aren’t writing a novel, and we shall be friends for l-l-life.”
“Why should one chronicle life when one can live it?”
“My dear boy”—Brian blew a smoke ring at Simon—“how, but how, did you find this treasure?”
“An accident of birth,” said Simon blandly. “Come, Vera. You mustn’t miss the Matisse.”
Rachel waggled her fingers over her shoulder at Cece and Brian. “He will insist on trying to educate me,” she said gaily. To Simon, she murmured, “You’d promised I didn’t have to be artistic.”
“That was before I knew the full extent of your talents.” Simon lowered his head intimately to hers. “Do you know how to read the cards?”
“I will by tomorrow evening.”
There had to be books on that sort of thing. If the cook at Brillac could do it, so could she. At worst, she could make it up as she went along. Cece, steeped in champagne and gin, would hardly know the difference.
Simon raised his brows. “You have a talent for deception.”
Rachel’s smile turned sour around the edges. “I come by it naturally.”
Together, they wove their way around the crowded dance floor, Simon’s hand beneath her elbow. “A useful legacy.”
Some of Rachel’s elation at her successful first foray ebbed away, leaving her feeling cold and tired. “Under the circumstances.”
“Under any circumstances. We’re all liars, my sweet. Some of us are simply better at it than others.”
To argue would be to fall through the looking glass again, talking in circles until she’d forgotten her original purpose. Simon had a talent for that. Rachel kept herself sternly to the point. “Who was that? With Cece?”
“You mean Brian? Brian Howard. Self-proclaimed man of letters and man about town. His opinion matters with this lot.” Glancing down at her, Simon added, “You handled him well.”
A little praise shouldn’t please her so.
Rachel shrugged, saying brusquely, “That wasn’t me, it was Vera.”
“Pass my compliments to Vera, then.” With a light touch on her bare arm, Simon stopped halfway up the stairs. “Here is the infamous Matisse. I need to see a man about a dog. Can you look after yourself for a bit?”
“But—” Rachel bit down on her lip, swallowing her instinctive protest.
Simon paused, looking at her searchingly.
“That invitation,” Rachel said hastily. “Was it good?”
If Simon knew that wasn’t what she’d intended to say, he gave no sign. “Do you mean will Cece be sober enough to remember in the morning? Yes. And if she’s not, I’ll remind her by ringing up. Protesting volubly all the while. I think you might have another engagement … but can be persuaded into doing her the favor of stopping by.”
“Be careful.” She wasn’t sure she had it in her to come up with a second stunt.
“I know what I’m doing.” Simon moved aside as a cluster of women came down the stairs, chattering together. “Trust me.”
“That’s the last thing I would do,” Rachel shot back.
Simon laughed, a genuine laugh. It made him look much younger. “Wise girl. You’ll be all right?”
If she said no, would he stay with her? Rachel grimaced at herself. Perish the thought. Simon wasn’t the sort to play nursemaid. And she wasn’t the sort to cling to a man’s coattails. However tempting it might be.
Rachel took a long, deep draft of her champagne. It was warm and beginning to go flat. “You needn’t worry yourself. You’ve performed your part of the bargain.”
“My dear, we’re only just beginning.” Simon paused three steps up, and nodded toward her glass. “Go easy on that.”
“Sauce for the goose,” said Rachel defiantly, and had the dubious pleasure of seeing Simon’s fleeting grin.
And then he was gone, lost to view through a door at the top of the stairs, leaving Rachel alone with a half-empty glass of champagne in one hand, staring at a painting that looked as though it had been composed by a prurient ten-year-old boy.
Not entirely alone, Rachel reminded herself. She could go back, find Cece Heatherington-Vaughn, or that Brian person. She could pretend she’d just been to the powder room and lost Simon on her way back. But she wasn’t sure that would be wise. She wanted to keep her air of mystery, to keep Cece guessing. She might have impressed Simon, oh so briefly, with her veneer of Vera, but she wasn’t sure it would maintain prolonged scrutiny. Particularly after half a glass of champagne.
Rachel glanced uncertainly up the stairs, the way Simon had gone. No knowing what was up there, or just how long this man with a dog was going to take, whatever that dog might be.
/> Could she just go home? Go down the stairs, get herself into a taxi? It was a tempting thought. It had to be past midnight already, and her ankles ached in her ill-fitting shoes. But she oughtn’t go without telling Simon.
A bit, he had said. How long was a bit?
Rachel shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, feeling gauche and out of place. Serve Simon right if he came back and found her gone. She ought to have suggested it herself before he left.
But for the fact that she never seemed to be able to quite get her thoughts in order where Simon was concerned.
It was, she decided, his elliptical style of conversation, which was quite as muddled and muddling as the poor excuse for a painting on the wall in front of her.
“It’s hardly that bad.” The voice came from behind her, a pleasant tenor, lighter than Simon’s, without the supercilious drawl. Rachel looked down to find a man standing two steps below, his hand on the banister. With a friendly smile, he nodded to the wall in front of her. “The picture.”
Rachel spoke without thinking. “It looks as though it was drawn by a ten-year-old boy with a poor sense of perspective.”
“Shh,” said the man, “they’ll toss you out if they hear you. Even if I do happen to agree with you. John—” His last name was lost in the blare of a saxophone.
Rachel nodded distantly, glancing up the staircase. No sign of Simon. “Vera Merton.”
John whatever-his-name-might-be stayed a respectful two steps down. Rachel judged him to be about medium height. His hair was a sandy light brown. Altogether, an entirely unthreatening character. “Have you lost your party?”
“Misplaced them on the dance floor,” Rachel lied. She borrowed Simon’s excuse. “I’d thought of venturing out there, but it’s a sort of swamp, don’t you think?”
“Frightfully murky.” A ghost of a dimple appeared in his right cheek. “I’ve lost my people there as well.”
Despite herself, Rachel began to relax. No one with a dimple could be all bad. “Do you think we ought to send out a search party?”
“Too perilous,” John said solemnly. “They’d be trapped themselves, and then where would we be?”
Rachel hefted her glass. “Left finishing all the bubbly on our own?”
The Other Daughter Page 10