The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

Tom filled a glass with water from a jug kept upon the counter and passed it over to her, their fingers touching for just an instant as she took it from him, holding his smile as she sipped it. ‘Thank you. That’s kind,’ said Biddy.

  ‘So then, something for the Reverend’s supper?’ Tom enquired.

  ‘Yes, for starters,’ said Biddy, taking her eyes from his face long enough to peer at Mrs Rattray’s list. She glanced out the window again and spotted Queenie still there, now engaged in conversation with a stooped and elderly figure in widow’s weeds. Biddy frowned, feeling inexplicably uneasy. It was Old Mrs Daws, whom Biddy knew was blind, or near enough to it, given how much she talked about the trials of being sightless. Biddy thought Mrs Daws was a whingeing old wowser and she wondered what Queenie would ever have to talk to her about. The contents of the old woman’s basket were upended on the ground. She realised that Queenie must have somehow bumped into her.

  Biddy turned to handsome Tom again. ‘I suppose I’ll be lucky if you’ve got any decent loaves left,’ she said.

  He reached for one, handing it to her. ‘This one’s decent.’

  ‘It’s brown,’ said Biddy with disdain. ‘Everyone knows brown bread leaves you hungry again sooner. Haven’t you got any proper white ones, or am I expected to walk all the way to the baker’s?’

  ‘These are from the baker’s, you twit, got them fresh just for you.’ Tom reached for a more expensive white loaf and handed it to Biddy.

  She sniffed it. ‘I smell alum.’

  Tom rolled his eyes. ‘There’s no alum in that bread. It’s a proper white loaf made with good flour.’

  ‘Give me a hot knife and I’ll be the judge of it.’

  ‘You will not stick a hot knife in that loaf!’

  ‘How else can I be sure?’ asked Biddy, enjoying teasing him. ‘If there is any alum it’ll stick to the blade and then we’ll all know what law breakers you and Topp are for selling suspect goods.’

  ‘Just put the bloody thing in your basket,’ said Tom.

  Biddy did so. She glanced out the window again but could now see no sign of Queenie or the widow. She wondered where they might have got to.

  Once Mrs Rattray’s list was traversed, the moment came when it looked as if other topics of conversation would not, for once, arise between them, owing to the stifling effects of the heat. But the moment was gone before Biddy could even feel anxious about it when Tom launched a salvo regarding an editorial he’d read that morning in The Argus, which he thought Biddy would appreciate.

  ‘Go on then,’ said Biddy, in no hurry to leave.

  ‘Your situation might turn you against me for repeating it,’ Tom warned.

  ‘Not likely,’ Biddy scoffed.

  Tom let her have it, unfolding the thin broadsheet to read aloud. ‘Christianity,’ he quoted, ‘is no longer desired to be preached nowadays, except at a very safe distance by missionaries.’

  Biddy took a second to process this and then gasped. Tom laughed again at the look on her face.

  ‘The paper says that?’

  ‘Says that and more,’ said Tom, enjoying the blasphemy of sharing it with her. ‘Nobody wants to hear the word of God anymore, says The Argus, not when it runs counter to all that the toffs in Hawthorn and Kew hold dear.’

  ‘The toffs in Kew don’t believe in the scriptures?’

  ‘Well, they’d reckon they do, of course, and say as much on Sundays, but ask them to live as a Christian should and not one of them will do it, Biddy, because the only things they believe in are Making Money and Survival of the Fittest – the Fittest being them and bad luck for the rest of us.’

  Biddy’s jaw dropped again and Tom remained straight-faced for another moment, before giving her his wink. ‘Wonder if the Reverend read his paper this morning?’ he mused.

  Biddy burst out giggling with the outrageousness of it. Then she crinkled her eyes, appraising him in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, before she offered him a titbit from her own reading. ‘It’s no surprise people have given up going to churches,’ she said. ‘Have you heard about the Reverend J. Beer from East Melbourne parish?’

  ‘No. Who’s he?’

  ‘You mean you’ve never heard what the good Reverend Beer did that sent his whole congregation into shame?’ marvelled Biddy.

  ‘So tell me,’ said Tom.

  Biddy leant closer to him across the counter, lowering her voice. ‘Got his cook in the family way and then bribed a man from Lilydale to marry her.’

  ‘Ha!’ roared Tom.

  ‘Then he sold off all his furniture and skipped to California. Disgusting! But that’s nothing compared to what “Demon Hughes”, the Reverend from Ballarat did.’

  Tom loved Biddy’s tales, be they invented or not. ‘What was his trouble then?’

  ‘Invited four little girls to his luxurious manse where he plied them with ether and had his wicked way with them. When he let them go afterwards the doctor discovered all four girls had come down with incurable syphilis.’

  Tom roared anew.

  ‘It’s the fact that these stories appear in trusted newspapers that makes people sit up straight with their eyes open,’ said Biddy. ‘Did you hear about Reverend Booth, the Methodist minister from Wangaratta, and what he did to that poor dog?’

  At some point during their laughter, and well before they’d finished trading stories of lurid clerics, they heard the front door’s bell tinkle, meaning a customer was coming in. Tom clocked the new arrival, nodded, but did no more than that because the customer fell heavily into a seat and started fanning themselves, content with resting without need for further service for now. Biddy didn’t bother turning around to see who it was, too busy in stitches, and as the talk went on she forgot there was anyone else there at all.

  ‘Then there was Reverend Taylor from the Baptist Church in Collins Street,’ said Biddy, reaching a crescendo in scandal mongering. ‘You must have heard about him, Tom. They say he had to resign for moral offences so grave that no torture on earth would ever draw a word from him about it!’

  The shout of horror from behind Biddy’s back brought her down to earth with a start. The two of them remembered the heat-affected customer fanning away in a chair. It was Old Mrs Daws.

  ‘You should both be ashamed of yourselves!’ cried the old lady, lurching to her feet. ‘What disgraceful slanders – and a disgrace to repeat them!’

  With a flash of dreadful certainty, Biddy knew that Queenie had somehow sent the old woman in to deliberately catch her.

  ‘Mrs Daws, please let me help you there,’ said Tom as he hurriedly came around from the side of the counter.

  Biddy had the presence of mind to take the water jug from the counter and pour the old lady a glassful. ‘Mrs Daws, here you go, you look done in. Isn’t it a horribly hot day?’

  ‘Biddy MacBryde, I knew it was you the second you laughed like an imp,’ said Mrs Daws, squinting in condemnation at her.

  ‘Now, Mrs Daws . . .’

  ‘You, the Reverend Flowers’ girl, daring to say such terrible things about godly men; he took you in from the gutter!’

  Biddy went crimson. ‘He did not do that!’ An older story had come back to bite her. Biddy had once invented a background that was quite Dickensian, complete with a claim of orphanhood.

  ‘You know full well he did, you ungrateful girl,’ admonished Mrs Daws, who had fallen for that tale. ‘No parents; living in squalor and shame; you had nothing when he hired you and you’ve gained nothing since.’

  Biddy reddened to the roots of her hair.

  Tom took control. ‘Please forgive us for holding an unsavoury conversation in your earshot, Mrs Daws; I don’t know what came over us. We’ve had our heads turned by inflammatory words in The Argus.’

  The old lady wasn’t having it. ‘My poor eyes might be defective but my mind isn’t, young man,’ said Mrs Daws. ‘You two are carrying on with each other like a couple of cursed anarchists.’

  ‘That’s not true either!’ cried Bidd
y, ‘I’ve only come in here to do Mrs Rattray’s shopping.’

  ‘Carrying on under the noses of your betters; stabbing the good Reverend Flowers in the back. What a way to repay him for all his decent Christian charity.’

  Biddy now spotted Queenie through the window again, her friend wearing a mocking smirk. She knew Queenie had sent the old woman into Topp’s store in the hope she’d make trouble. ‘Mrs Daws, I beg of you, we didn’t mean any of it, it was just a bit of silliness,’ Biddy protested.

  ‘Silliness is it, plotting against the Church? That’s what anarchists do, and nihilists; scheming to shoot good Christians in their beds.’

  ‘Mrs Daws, can I assist you with any grocery purchases?’ asked Tom, taking the most respectful tone he could, and flicking his head towards the door to give Biddy the hint.

  ‘Well, I really don’t know after all this. It’s been a great shock to me.’

  ‘Of course it has and I apologise again.’ His look told Biddy to go, and fast. ‘There’ll be no more of it. You’ve put us right and done well to be mad. We had it coming and deserve worse from you again for saying what we did.’

  Biddy looked dismayed at this but Tom wanted her gone, so she picked up her basket of groceries and slipped out the door, upset at the way the interlude had ended.

  • • •

  Biddy carefully carved a slice of the fresh, white, alum-free bread at the place of pride it occupied on the board at the end of Mrs Rattray’s kitchen table. Loaves were exulted in the Reverend Flower’s household and eighteen months of working as his kitchenmaid had given Biddy some much-needed skills. One thing she could now do well was slice the bread. Few things were as insulting to a man of quality as to be handed a slice of too-thick bread. That was what working men ate, slathered with dripping, because that was all that their pitiful earnings not thrown away on drink would afford them. A man of quality ate his bread sliced thin, and the slice Biddy placed upon a butter plate before being coated in a spoonful of jam was as thin as seventeen months of careful training could make it.

  Biddy handed the plate with a curtsey to the Reverend Flowers, for the want of knowing what else to give him. Supper was still some hours away and he’d already had teacake fifteen minutes before. The Reverend’s lofty presence was making Biddy nervous, but she knew he expected an audience for everything and anything he spoke. Today’s sermon concerned the Melbourne summer.

  ‘The worst, the very worst of it, child, is the deleterious effect it has upon the constitutions of the young,’ he droned, scratching his mutton-chop whiskers.

  ‘Yes, Reverend.’

  ‘You agree with me? Well, of course you do, you’re a good girl. The Australian heat is so sapping, you see, for that’s what it does, most especially to the young – it saps their vigour near clean away.’

  ‘Yes, Reverend,’ Biddy nodded, her hands clasped in front of her apron.

  ‘And this is why I fear for our new nation so gravely, child,’ said the Reverend, biting into the bread, ‘this is why I cannot partake of the hope to which our countrymen adhere so readily, so thoughtlessly!’

  ‘Is it, Reverend?’ said Biddy, now eyeing the fresh bread herself and wanting a slice of her own, and not a thin one.

  ‘What hope can there exist for a nation whose young persons are wholly sapped of vigour? Wholly crippled by lethargy? This is a nation depleted by the heat!’ He now had apricot jam on his whiskers.

  ‘That’s very, very true, Reverend,’ said Biddy, gripping the bread knife again in such a way as to have an observer believe she had no intention of going near the bread with it. ‘I’d never thought about the way the summer sun depletes me, apart from sunburn of course, but I can see what you mean now, and do you know, I very much fear for my health.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t mean girls of the working class,’ said the Reverend, waving off her attempt at accordance, ‘or the working men for that matter. You need not fear; you could pull a dray all summer long with that good, strong back of yours.’

  Biddy’s brow creased at him. She attacked the bread.

  ‘No, it’s the upper-class young who feel it,’ said the Reverend, putting the now empty plate aside and stretching out in his chair, ‘our nation’s future leaders. The havoc this accursed heat plays upon them. Each successive generation faces further enfeeblement.’

  Biddy took a healthy spoonful of jam and slapped it on the liberated slice. She was about to eat it in front of him when the stern visage of Mrs Rattray appeared from the hall.

  ‘Biddy, that’s unacceptably thick. Have you forgotten everything you’ve been instructed?’

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Rattray,’ said the Reverend, taking the bread slice from Biddy’s hands, ‘this heat has instilled a famine within me, I think; Biddy has done well to provide a larger portion.’

  ‘Very good, Reverend,’ said the housekeeper. ‘You enjoy your bread and jam and I’ll ensure that Biddy tests no more of your patience.’

  ‘I wasn’t—’ Biddy protested.

  But Mrs Rattray cut her short. ‘What are your tasks, girl, and what have you still to complete before tea?’

  ‘Festoon the veranda posts in Christmas greenery, if it’s arrived on the cart,’ said Biddy, beginning to reel off her mental list.

  ‘It has arrived and Queenie’s already doing it,’ said Mrs Rattray. ‘What’s next?’

  ‘Check on the goose.’

  ‘I haven’t started cooking it yet, that’s another day off.’

  ‘Check on the goose where it sits in the ice box, I mean, to ensure it’s not gone fowl.’

  ‘Biddy, if that’s your attempt at levity then I despair of you,’ said Mrs Rattray. ‘What’s next and stop wasting my time and your own.’

  ‘Boil and scrub the threepenny bits in readiness for the Reverend’s plum pudding.’

  ‘Indeed, set to doing so at once.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Rattray.’

  The bell at the front door rang and the housekeeper retired to answer it.

  The Reverend Flowers was eyeing the loaf again from his chair, but Biddy pretended not to notice as she twisted the lone tap above the sink to fill the kettle. The pipes behind gave a shudder before issuing sounds like consumptive coughing. Nothing else emerged.

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ said Biddy, ‘now there’s no water for it.’

  ‘This heat . . .’ the Reverend muttered.

  Biddy was vaguely aware of Mrs Rattray dealing with some kind of consternation at the entrance to the Manse.

  ‘Too much draw upon the supply, I suppose,’ said Biddy. ‘Always happens, doesn’t it, Reverend, just when we want it on a hot day? I’ll leave the tap turned on and maybe something will come out of it in time.’

  The Reverend expressed discomfort, scratching at his mutton-chops. ‘I had been contemplating a cooling bath.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Biddy, ‘that is a shame.’

  The housekeeper reappeared from the hall and when Biddy glanced up she saw such an unexpected look upon the older woman’s face that she felt a chill from it.

  ‘Mrs Rattray . . . I . . . I can’t do anything about the water, there’s just too much draw upon the supply,’ Biddy told her.

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Mrs Rattray.

  Reverend Flowers realised that something was amiss. ‘What is it? Has something happened?’

  Mrs Rattray’s eyes were steely. ‘There’s a parishioner at the door, Reverend, and very put out. I’m mortified to say she’s made some disgraceful claims.’

  ‘Claims?’ said the Reverend, standing up, ‘What sort of claims? What is this about?’

  ‘About ingratitude,’ said the housekeeper.

  Biddy at once felt the blood leave her face.

  ‘What on earth do you mean? Who is here, Mrs Rattray?’

  The older woman stood aside to allow a furious figure in widow’s weeds show herself from the hall.

  ‘Mrs Daws!’ exclaimed the Reverend, coming forward. ‘What is this of ingratitude? Who has
been ungrateful?’

  • • •

  The water finally came through after an hour, and then it was only a trickle, and worse, a brown trickle smelling of sulphur.

  ‘The only reason tea is so popular in this country is because it disguises the tone of what so distressingly comes from the taps,’ said the Reverend, accepting a cup of sugary brew from Mrs Rattray.

  ‘The very best Ceylon tea improves it quite out of bounds, Reverend,’ the housekeeper agreed with him, sipping a cup of her own.

  They fell silent, aware that Biddy had finished packing her bag in the little room she shared with Queenie at the rear of the Manse, and was now passing the kitchen door. Biddy stopped and peeped in, still shocked by how quickly things had turned so sour. But the deed had been done and so had the Reverend’s decision; there was no shifting it now, after all that had been said, and he wouldn’t meet Biddy’s eye or in any other way acknowledge her further. Biddy opened her mouth to say something more, but Mrs Rattray’s look froze her cold and so Biddy said nothing. The shame of what had happened and the speed with which she’d been punished for it warranted no additional comment from anyone.

  The Reverend and his housekeeper remained stock-still in their kitchen chairs until Biddy’s footsteps receded and she’d gone out the front door, carrying her little portmanteau.

  On the Manse’s wide veranda Biddy took in Queenie’s handiwork with the Christmas greenery. She’d done a fine job of it, Biddy thought. Large sprigs of eucalyptus leaves freshly cut from the Heidelberg hills and brought into town on a cart. Queenie had threaded them all through the wrought-iron lacework of the veranda posts; they looked extremely festive and smelt lovely, too. A stab of memory from happy Christmases past brought the threat of tears to Biddy’s eyes, but she’d held off crying so far and wasn’t prepared to shame herself further by ending her employment with waterworks. She sniffed them back and cleared her throat a little.

  Queenie appeared from the side veranda carrying a broom to sweep up stray leaves. Biddy hoped her friend had been too occupied to overhear the dreadful exchange with Old Mrs Daws and the Reverend.

  ‘You’ve got your good shirtwaist on, Biddy,’ noted Queenie, ‘did you pull it straight off the line?’