The Other Daughter Read Free Page B

hadn’t been a botanist, but a secret agent, off on a deadly mission. Or the heir to a lost kingdom, one of the smaller European sort, forced to go underground to evade the forces of the rebels who had taken over his homeland.
    Her father was a daydream, but her mother was real. She was a cool hand on Rachel’s brow when she was ill; a voice reading Peter Rabbit ; a firm hand bundling her into her coat and off to school. More recently, she was an English postmark on a letter, a package in the post: a pair of warm gloves, a piece of the Christmas pudding for luck. Little things that made Rachel feel less far from home.
    Her mother was very good about the little things.
    Rachel hunched forward in her seat, urging the sleepy train to move faster. Good heavens, did they have horses towing the blasted thing? What was the point of a train at all if it didn’t go any faster than that?
    It was past two in the morning when the train decanted Rachel into the chill of the Gare du Nord. The ticket windows were shut, the bookstalls closed. Only a handful of stranded travelers were scattered around the echoing room, sitting on their trunks, sunk into the collars of their coats, their bundles clutched to them.
    The train to Calais, according to the board, was due to depart at three.
    Rachel could feel the hours stretching ahead of her. Maddening that they could zap a message across wires in a matter of minutes, but human travel was little faster than it had been a century ago. She had always enjoyed the novels of H. G. Wells. Now she found herself wishing for one of his time machines, something to whisk her back to five days ago. No, earlier, before that, twenty-three years ago, when they were all three together. She could stop her father going away, stop her mother getting sick.…
    And what then? History did strange things when one played with it. They would never have lived at Netherwell; her entire upbringing would be different. Useless speculation to beguile the extra hour. Rachel shivered and hugged her carpetbag closer.
    She didn’t need to fight for a seat on the train to Calais; at that hour, it was all but empty. Only another twelve hours—how long those twelve hours seemed—and she would be back in Netherwell, back at the cottage in which she had grown up.
    And her mother … her mother would be sitting up by now, demanding to be let out of bed, to be allowed to do something, for goodness’ sake. Like all healthy people, her mother made a dreadful patient.
    Apples didn’t fall far from the tree, Mrs. Spicer, who “did” at the vicarage, always liked to say. If Rachel was impatient, she came by it honestly. She couldn’t picture her mother sitting still; she was always moving, doing, working.
    Well, she had had to, hadn’t she? Just as Rachel had to work now. Botanists, it seemed, weren’t too plump in the pocket. Whatever legacy her father had left, it had been enough to cover the essentials of rent and food, no more.
    Even now, as a nightmare, Rachel could remember those dark days after her father died, her own childish voice, bleating, “Where is Papa? Where is Papa?” Her mother’s face, still and set, her eyes red-rimmed, but her mouth firm. The hurried departure from their home, taking only those things that were most precious: her mother’s piano, her father’s chess set, the pawns bearing the marks of small teeth, where Rachel had used them, as a baby, to ease her aching gums. The gold brooch at her mother’s breast, with its intertwined E and K .
    Through it all, her mother had never broken, never wavered. She had comforted Rachel’s tears, packed their few belongings, saw them settled in a new home, set about finding a way to make their meager ends meet. She’d gone on.
    Dawn. The sun was rising just as the train chugged into Calais, tinting the water of the Channel rose and gold. Rachel stumbled off the train, her legs stiff, her