The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  ‘You’re very sweet-natured. Country girls are always sweet-natured. Girls from the city so often put on airs quite at odds with any right they might have to do so. So few of them have anything much to justify the entitlements they lay claim to at all, I find.’

  Biddy wholly agreed. ‘Frauds, the lot of them,’ she whispered.

  Miss Garfield really had to giggle at that.

  Biddy suddenly located her brother. She’d been unobtrusively looking for Gordon from the moment she’d walked in off Collins Street, but hadn’t seen him. Now he appeared across the room, on the other side of the ground floor, and Biddy regarded him discreetly, her mind ticking over, while she continued to explain items to Miss Garfield.

  Gordon MacBryde had always been passably good looking, to Biddy’s critical eye, apart from his stained teeth. Not quite eighteen but he had the manner of a man somewhat older. Gordon wasn’t charming with customers so much as he was oily; which, in salesmanship, amounted to the same thing, Biddy supposed. No other junior floorwalker could slide a chair under a customer’s behind with his speed. Few could issue tellings-off to shop girls with his level of sting. When Gordon’s roving eye suddenly took in the sight of Miss Garfield gaily trying on skirts, shirtwaists, hats and other garments his thoughts clearly went to determining which of the assistants was actually attending to her. It was then that the penny plainly dropped – none of them were. The person performing such effective attendance upon this spendthrift was not an employee of Alston & Brown at all, but grinning Biddy.

  Miss Garfield was furnishing a humorous explanation of the current disastrous state of the Summersby kitchens as Gordon neared with panic alight in his face. Biddy was all ears to Miss Garfield, well aware of her brother’s presence.

  ‘Things got so dire that our poor housekeeper, Mrs Marshall, felt she had no other choice but to hire the Chinaman as a cook,’ said Miss Garfield. ‘Can you imagine?’

  ‘But don’t they eat funny food?’ wondered Biddy, thinking fondly of Johnny’s uncle’s delicious chop suey shop in Carlton.

  ‘Ungodly,’ said the governess, ‘but he swore he could do good English meals and he had a reference from the Shamrock Hotel in Bendigo, so Mrs Marshall, citing Christian charity, gave him a chance.’ Miss Garfield drew a deep breath, enjoying herself. ‘Well . . .’

  Biddy allowed her eyes, wide with knowing anticipation, to land upon those of her brother.

  ‘Not only did she discover that Ah Sing stoned the pudding raisins with his teeth,’ continued Miss Garfield, ‘but his method for moistening dough required him to spit in it.’

  Biddy gasped with horrified delight.

  ‘Oh, it’s dreadful,’ said Miss Garfield. ‘Mrs Marshall will be driven to advertise again, if she hasn’t done so this morning. No great house of Summersby’s standing can possibly continue with such a dismaying betrayal of standards, even if it leaves no other option but to advertise, simply to alleviate such horrors.’

  Suddenly Gordon was before her. ‘Madam is making a very fine selection of purchases, I see?’

  Miss Garfield blinked at him, allowing Biddy to fill the void. ‘Madam’s found some lovely new items,’ Biddy informed her brother, presenting him with a beaming smile.

  ‘Perhaps I can carry them to a counter for you, madam, to allow one of our assistants to tally and package them?’ Gordon wondered.

  ‘No need,’ said Miss Garfield, ‘your lovely girl Biddy is taking such excellent care of me, and loosening my purse strings no end.’

  Gordon laughed, hollowly.

  ‘I intend presenting her with a generous tip.’

  Gordon nearly choked. Biddy smiled and blushed, but refrained from adding that such kindness wasn’t necessary.

  ‘Please, madam, it’s really no trouble for me to begin the boxing process for you,’ Gordon insisted, with a murderous glance at Biddy. Employing a movement so quick that the unsuspecting Miss Garfield missed it, he kicked a mannequin at its pedestal, causing the gowned display to teeter. ‘Watch yourself, girl,’ he said to Biddy.

  Biddy looked up in time to see the dummy crashing down upon her. ‘Ow!’

  Gordon had his hand at Miss Garfield’s elbow and was already gliding her away, as Biddy looked helplessly after them. He clicked his fingers at two legitimate assistants to clean up the mess and see to the governess’s purchases. Miss Garfield looked worriedly back at Biddy. ‘She deserves my tip, she really does . . .’

  Gordon was the voice of kindly reassurance. ‘Of course she does, madam, and I promise you personally that Biddy will receive exactly what’s due to her.’

  • • •

  Biddy’s replacement story, the moment it was said, proved to be as tissue thin as the one that preceded it a minute earlier, but this time Gordon laughed in response and Biddy took heart that she’d succeeded in entertaining him at least. The mirth was short lived.

  ‘Bulldust,’ said Gordon. ‘You’ve been sacked from whatever rotten job you got yourself when you nicked off from home.’

  The truth of her situation delivered as baldly as this left Biddy out of breath.

  ‘What did you do to ruin it then?’ he demanded, arms folded condemningly across his ribs. ‘No, wait, don’t bother telling me, I might spare myself any more of your stories.’

  Biddy squirmed upon the tea chest she’d been made to sit on after Gordon had hauled her up the service stairs to the attic storeroom where there’d be no further risk of her shaming him.

  ‘I was hoping you might help me, as my brother . . .’ Biddy ventured.

  ‘But I’m not your brother.’

  She winced. ‘Yes, you are – as good as, anyway.’

  ‘Biddy,’ he began, his smile falsely bright, as if he was talking to a dim-witted child, ‘do you remember that day, oh, a year and half or so ago, when a certain gentlemen calling himself Mr Samuel Hackett came to our door?’

  Biddy didn’t want to remember it but she knew she would never forget. It was the strange visitor’s fair hair that had so captured her attention at first – like honey it was, the nicest hair she’d ever seen on a man – but her mother Ida had been very angry to see him turn up at their house, and then he had started speaking of things that he claimed Biddy needed to know. ‘Let’s not bring all that up again . . .’

  ‘Why not? Sorry, but you don’t get to stick your head in the ground with me.’

  ‘Please, Gordon, don’t bring it all up!’

  But he wouldn’t let her off. ‘That Mr Samuel Hackett came round to our house and he made some startling pronouncements, didn’t he, Biddy, the chief one being that he, and not my poor old late dad, was actually your father?’

  Biddy wanted to die. ‘It wasn’t true.’

  ‘Oh, but it was,’ said Gordon, ‘it was as true as I’m standing here. We knew it was true from the look upon Ida’s face. Your mum and my dad had told us a little lie, a lie we’d believed our whole lives, but that’s what it was – a lie. My dad was never your dad. Your mum was never my mum. That’s what Mr Hackett made plain to us. Our family was nothing but big, fat fibs.’

  She was miserable. ‘But what does any of it matter now?’

  He laughed. ‘It mattered to you – you ran away! Took off like a shocked rat, you did! But I guess you got a bigger surprise than I did because what else did Mr Samuel Hackett tell us that day, Biddy, do you remember?’

  ‘Don’t, Gordon, please don’t do this.’

  ‘He told us your mum wasn’t even your mum! Neither parent was yours – a double blow!’

  She hated him for making her relive this terrible experience.

  ‘Shame Ida kicked that Mr Hackett out before he could finish what he had to tell you, otherwise we might have heard who your mum actually was – you must have been busting to know the truth, given it wasn’t Ida at all. All the more so when Ida wouldn’t tell you the truth herself. She said she’d take the secret to the grave!’ He hooted at the memory. ‘No, I can’t blame you for bolting. Lies had been told to
you by the person you loved most in the world. I suppose you had to run away and make a new life just to be rid of them.’ He sniffed. ‘So, I shouldn’t be surprised, really, that you’ve turned up lying to me now. The whole sorry experience must have left you with a very strange notion of what “truth” even is.’

  Biddy had heard enough of this. ‘Ida was always kind to your poor dad!’

  ‘And as well she might have been – she stole his bloody name!’

  Biddy cringed. ‘It’s a fine name, MacBryde.’

  ‘Just not the one you were born with. Wonder what it really is? Guess we’ll never know now. I’ve turned my back on Ida, you see, just like you have, though I bet it hurt you more to do it.’

  Biddy blinked back a tear. Eighteen months might have passed but the wound of running away still felt raw.

  He spat on the floor with contempt. ‘And how much money do you think they pay me here!’

  ‘I don’t want money!’ Biddy added quickly. ‘I’d never ask you for that.’

  ‘What then? Why are you here?’

  ‘Well,’ said Biddy, managing what she hoped was an endearing smile, ‘while I was serving that lovely lady . . .’

  ‘You were not serving.’

  ‘Well, whatever you’d like to call it.’

  ‘What you were doing was immoral; there are laws against it. You were representing this establishment when you had no business doing so. That’s fraud.’

  ‘There’s no need for any of that,’ said Biddy, worriedly. ‘If you’d just let me finish what I want to tell you.’

  ‘Finish it then.’

  ‘Like I said, when I was . . . talking to that lovely lady, I wasn’t doing it to make a fool of you, I swear.’

  ‘Bulldust.’

  ‘I swear it!’

  ‘Pull the other one.’

  ‘I was doing it as an experiment.’

  Gordon summoned another wad of spit in the back of his throat.

  ‘To see if I was capable of being an assistant here . . .’ said Biddy, triumphant.

  Gordon abandoned spitting for another crack of laughter that seemed to Biddy to go on for rather too long.

  ‘But that’s just it,’ said Biddy, ‘my experiment worked, didn’t it? I sold that lady all those things; skirts and shirtwaists, hats and scarves. She wouldn’t have bought none of that stuff without me. She said she hated this place before I got to her; she said the service here was criminal.’

  Gordon’s mirth died twice. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘A job?’

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘Gordon, just listen to me . . .’

  ‘You’re muck, Biddy; dung from the street.’

  She was stung. ‘But our dad – your dad – really cared for my mum, they were great mates . . .’

  ‘More’s the shame of it and I pray to whoever might listen that you’ll go to your grave with that knowledge shared with no one else,’ said Gordon. ‘Thank Christ my old dad’s gone to his grave ahead of you.’

  ‘Gordon!’

  ‘Your mum’s side of things were a humiliation from the very start. Some people reckoned she worked at a nut house – if so, she should have been locked up in there herself. She dragged my poor dad down to the gutter.’

  Biddy flinched at this fresh spike of pain. ‘He was already there!’

  Gordon pulled himself up to his full height. ‘Yeah? Look around you, then, Biddy. Who’s managed to make something of themselves despite it, eh? Who’s got prospects? Who’s stepping out of the muck? And who’s got a grimy old tram ticket to the doss house with a detour to the Little Lon knocking shops first?’

  Biddy’s tears, held off all afternoon, now threatened to spring forth. Gordon volubly spat again in response to her quivering lip. ‘Pathetic, you are.’

  ‘I’d never sink to any of that,’ Biddy managed to counter.

  Gordon said nothing else and offered her nothing to stem her imminent tears either. Biddy fished her old hankie from her skirt pocket and tried to wipe her face with it. ‘It’s just so unfair,’ she began.

  Gordon looked away.

  Biddy pulled herself together again. ‘I have another plan—’ she said, but he cut her short.

  ‘Moving in with me?’

  ‘I’ll keep a nice house for you,’ she vowed, ‘I learnt so many good things from Mrs Rattray.’

  ‘Where do you think I live now, Biddy?’

  ‘I don’t know. Wasn’t it in Fitzroy?’

  ‘You’re standing in it,’ said Gordon.

  Biddy looked around, confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I kip in this room. I work eighteen hours daily. What’s the point in paying rent? I’ve got my head screwed on correctly, haven’t I? Saving money, making progress. Not like some.’

  Biddy swallowed, now utterly humiliated, her fingers tightening around the little coin purse in her skirt pocket. ‘What I said to you before about money, Gordon . . .’

  • • •

  The spectre of the streetwalker, raised by Gordon as it had been in the attic room and presented to Biddy as her likely employ in the future, clung to her all the more portentously as she followed him down the five flights of service stairs, well away from the eyes of any customers, and into the alley where all the rubbish was hurled. Gordon solidified the spectre’s presence by handing Biddy a single gold sovereign, wholly in view of the storeroom lads who were puffing their cigarettes. They let out a spray of whistles at the sight of this and Gordon glared at the boys but didn’t even bother correcting them. They hushed eventually but kept on snickering into their hands.

  ‘It’s too much,’ said Biddy in a small voice, meaning the coin that was sitting unexpectedly heavy in her hand; it was the first sovereign she’d ever felt in her life.

  ‘I know it is,’ said Gordon, ‘but that’s how it is with insurance, Biddy. It’s comes dear.’

  ‘What insurance?’

  Gordon stuck his face in hers, his breath minty. ‘That’s what I’m paying for, stupid. Insurance that this is the last time I’ll ever land eyes on you; insurance that you’ll keep away from me for good. This is insurance that will let me forget that you and I were ever “family” and that you were from the rat’s arse end of it, what’s more. It’s insurance that’ll let you top yourself for all it matters to me, because I’ll never, ever hear of it. Do you understand me? This is my insurance that you’re done, Biddy.’

  He left her standing there in the trash-choked alley with the sovereign still flat in her palm. Biddy knew then that she understood her ‘brother’ very well, and it was only because the merest glimmer of her cheerfulness returned in that same instant, microscopically tiny, but there all the same, that she didn’t fling the coin to the storeroom boys and let them beat each other’s brains out for it in the filth.

  Biddy thought of Miss Evangeline Garfield, the kind-hearted governess at Summersby, a magical sounding place in very pretty country somewhere near a town called Castlemaine.

  She conceived a new story.

  • • •

  The journey by rail apparently wasn’t a long one by country standards, but to Biddy, who had never had reason to ride anywhere on a steam train before, the process seemed impossibly protracted. Her ticket bought, Biddy faced a wait of a number of hours upon the railway platform at Spencer Street, with all the other trains coming and going, and she seemingly marooned because none of them were the train that matched her ticket. For a short time, when the realisation of what she was planning hit her at last, Biddy thought about taking the electric tram to Carlton, which wasn’t very far away, and there finding Ida and somehow saying something that would make up for the eighteen months she had let her think she was dead. But then the prospect of doing so paled. Her life with Ida had been a total concoction, and not one with which she’d had any part in making. Biddy had promised herself that all future concoctions would be her own, and if she was ever to have any respect for herself at all she must continue to live by this p
romise, even if it killed her. But Biddy’s thoughts strayed to cherished memories of Ida again and it took her some effort to shake them off and will her cheerfulness to return.

  The platform slowly filled up with other passengers who would be taking the same journey, and the time for departure drew near. Most of Biddy’s fellow travellers had shopping with them; newly bought things, presents for themselves, surprises for others. Many had baggage with them, too, suggesting they’d been hotel guests while availing themselves of Melbourne’s pleasures. Biddy copied the facial expressions of those who waited with her, alternately ‘tired’ and ‘elated’, just like they were, and it made her feel as if she was equal to them; a girl with family and friends who had spent the hot December week within the capital, gaily shopping for Christmas and New Year gifts.

  When the train arrived at last, Biddy boarded, found her third class seat, regretted at once not forking out for first, and then chastised herself for taking on unwarranted airs. Third would do her until she had money honestly earned. Biddy hoped that someone might sit next to her, so she could pass the evening in company at least, but no one did. She’d not packed any books or even a newspaper, and so she resigned herself to watching whatever passed outside the window. Not much held Biddy’s interest, at least, not much she could see once the train left the electricity-lit tracks of Melbourne and found the gaslit tracks of the suburbs to the west. Soon there was nothing to be seen at all once the gaslight had petered out. Biddy tried to close her eyes but couldn’t sleep, in terror of missing the stop when it came. There was excitement fuelling her mind, keeping her alert.

  Biddy was still wide-awake when the steam engine chugged into the old goldrush town of Castlemaine, though it was very late. Biddy had no watch to tell her the time but a man on the carriage said it was two in the morning before he went back to snoring; an hour so late that Biddy had never before been awake for it. She emerged, stiff-legged, from the train, clutching her portmanteau, while the station master in his ornate uniform blew upon a whistle and supervised the unloading of newspapers, mailbags and luggage from the goods carriage. There were lots of other passengers alighting with her, full of yawns and greetings and complicated arrangements, and then there were rather less of them about and the stationmaster waved his all-clear flag and lantern as the train departed, and then there were no more passengers at all.