The Other Daughter Read Online Free PDF

her mother, and now her home, the home in which she’d grown. She glanced up at Alice. “You’re not dying of some terrible disease, are you?”
    Alice looked at her in confusion. “No. Why?”
    â€œI was trying to think what the third blow might be. That’s only two so far. Troubles are meant to come in threes.” Her voice was too fast and too high. Rachel took a deep breath and reached for another broken biscuit. “It’s an inalterable law of nature. Isn’t that what Mrs. Spicer always said?”
    Tentatively, Alice touched her fingers to Rachel’s arm. “You know that you can stay with us for as long as you like.”
    â€œDo you need a new nursery governess?” Rachel rubbed her aching temples with her fingers. “I need to work, Alice. Now more than ever. I couldn’t be beholden to your charity.”
    â€œIt’s not charity. We’re almost sisters, remember?”
    The words woke bittersweet memories. There had been a time when she and Alice had schemed to see their parents married to each other. And why not? Mr. Treadwell had been a widower since Alice was a baby, and Rachel had long since abandoned her daydreams of her father’s triumphal return. At twelve, one was too old for such fancies, but not too old to fancy oneself the more matchmaking sort of Jane Austen heroine.
    It would be splendid, she and Alice had agreed. They could be truly sisters, and share a room, and stay up late at night talking. With the sublime condescension of youth, they had decided it would be rather nice for the old people to have the company once Rachel and Alice were off in the world. Alice, Rachel remembered, was going to marry the Prince of Wales, while Rachel aspired to lead an expedition to the Arctic, complete with dogsleds.
    It was really an ideal plan—but for the fact that neither of the adults in question had the least bit of interest in being married to the other.
    Alice’s father, the vicar of Netherwell, was married to the theological treatise he had been writing and rewriting, with limited success, for the past twenty years.
    As for Rachel’s mother, she had sat Rachel down and said firmly but kindly that she appreciated their efforts, but it just wouldn’t do.
    I cannot marry Mr. Treadwell , she had said. Just like that.
    Why not? Rachel had protested.
    You forget , said Rachel’s mother gently. I am married. And I shall be until I die .
    Those simple words had shamed Rachel into silence, the memory of her father suddenly a palpable presence between them. It made Rachel feel small and cheap for having so entirely forgotten him, for having presumed that just because the time had passed, her mother’s love might be any less.
    Not real sisters, then. She and Alice had admitted defeat, and had resigned themselves to being almost-sisters, sisters in everything but name.
    But even almost-sisters grew apart. Rachel loved Alice; she would always love Alice. They were part of the furniture of each other’s minds. But the day-to-day discussions that had been the stuff of their friendship were long since gone. They communicated now, when they could, in scattered bursts of correspondence, always months apart and, in so many ways, a world away.
    Alice would always be a part of her past, but Rachel shied from the thought of intruding upon her present. If anything could make the memory of a friendship stale, it was the reality of that friend, permanently parked in one’s spare room.
    â€œI don’t know what I did to deserve a friend like you.” Rachel squeezed Alice’s hand, then let go. “But can you imagine me living in your spare room as a carping maiden aunt?”
    Alice lifted her teacup. “You don’t have to carp. And who’s to say that you wouldn’t get married?”
    Rachel looked at her askance. “The only eligible man for forty miles was Jim, and he’s been quite taken for some