The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the governess, faintly.

  • • •

  It was a bell that awoke Biddy, clanging consistently, yet irregularly from somewhere near to where she lay. She curled up tighter in the makeshift bed she’d found for herself in the old miner’s hut, clinging to sleep while the sky outside was still dark enough to allow it, but the bell kept on sounding, and after a time Biddy’s imagination engaged with the noise and she tried to determine just what sort of bell it was that possessed such a ring. It lacked the urgency of a school bell or the excitement of a dinner bell. It was nothing like a church bell, and besides, Biddy already knew for certain that there were no churches near, so she dismissed the possibility. Perhaps it was the bell on a cart? The peal was irregular; if it was a cart, then it was stopping and starting after very small distances. The bell was attached to something else that was mobile. The remaining sleep slipped from her grasp and Biddy found herself awake again and far earlier than she would have liked. It was still as dark as coal beyond the cracked, curtainless window of the dwelling she’d found for herself, and just as dark inside. Her only recourse to stop the fearfulness that had come when dark descended was to try to sleep all the way through it. The bell had put an end to that.

  It rang again, nearer now, and Biddy sat upright. She heard a footfall outside; heavy. There was someone there, someone carrying the bell. Biddy knew better than to panic, she, who set store by appearances. Her heart was thumping but she would not give in to it. She debated as to whether lighting the lantern was a sensible thing to do, and then proceeded to do so anyway. Biddy located the box, struck a match against the side of the empty kerosene tin that was her table, and applied it to the stump of candle she’d wedged inside an upturned half bottle. The sputtering light made the darkness flee only as far as the rough bark walls while Biddy crept from the old stretcher she’d been sleeping on, found her boots, slipped them on and then, with her other hand, rummaged among the piles of old rubbish until she found a broken axe handle.

  She listened for the bell, heard nothing more for what felt like many minutes, only to leap out of her skin when it rang again.

  She rushed to the hut’s rickety tin door and flung it open to the night.

  ‘I can hear you out there, you know!’ she shouted. ‘I’ve got very good ears! And it’s lucky for you that my sleeping husband is as deaf as a post, otherwise it’d be him you’d be dealing with now, not me, and he doesn’t need any axe handle to get his point across!’

  She waited, tense, to hear what might be said in reply. There was nothing.

  Then the bell rang again.

  ‘You lousy bugger, show yourself!’

  Biddy lurched into the dark, the lantern making shadows leap and dance around her as she swung wildly with the axe handle at anything and everything. ‘Think I’m scared of you? You’re the one who’ll be scared as soon as I wake my husband up!’

  The handle struck something on the backswing; something huge yet yielding, and Biddy spun around with the lantern to see what it was just as the recipient of the blow let out an objecting bellow so loud it knocked her clean off her feet.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Biddy, mortified. The handle had connected with a very large bullock foraging in the bush; a bullock with a sheet metal bell around its neck. Girl and beast stared at each other for several seconds, before the bullock registered its objection again with another bellow, equally loud, and then returned to plucking grass as if its assailant was beneath all further attention.

  ‘You stupid twit!’ Biddy shouted at it, picking herself up and rescuing the lantern from the dirt. ‘What are you doing stumbling around in the dark like that for?’

  ‘I reckon he’ll tell you it’s because it’s a pretty decent hour to get some supper,’ said a male voice.

  Biddy screamed and dropped the lantern again. This time the candle dislodged itself from the half bottle, coming to rest in dry leaves, the lit wick finding fuel among them before a big leather boot stamped out the flame. A broad, long-fingered hand stooped to pick up the candle stub again, reattaching it inside the half bottle.

  ‘And that’s a pretty decent way to start a bush fire.’ The boot and the hand belonged to the owner of the voice; someone Biddy could barely make out until the hand produced a matchbox of its own and relit the candle. The sight of the lean, brown face grinning at Biddy in the lantern glow did nothing to bring her voice back any sooner. She could only stare in shock, her mouth hanging open, useless.

  ‘You hit my best bullock. What did you go and do that for?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘What’s the matter with you? You had plenty of tongue in your head before.’

  Biddy remembered the axe handle still in her hand and swung it out in an arc that ended at the grinning man’s thigh.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘You keep away from me!’

  ‘What the bloody hell’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Keep away!’ Biddy swung the axe handle again and gave him another one in the same spot.

  ‘Jesus Christ almighty!’

  ‘I can keep doing this all night if I have to.’

  ‘Fair enough then, you flaming’ harpy, but do you mind if I put this little one out of harm’s way first?’

  Only then did Biddy realise he was cradling the curled-up form of a puppy inside his shirt. He sprang a couple of buttons and scooped out a melon-sized ball of cream wool that looked to be one half terrier and another half poodle. The puppy yawned, then complained, then sat upon the dirt where its master placed it until it registered Biddy as something new and interesting, and snuffled over to regard her boots.

  Biddy found herself speechless again.

  ‘Well? What you waiting for now?’ said the dog’s master. ‘I reckon me other leg needs a bruising just to balance it up.’

  Biddy let the axe handle fall to the ground as she knelt down to fondle the pup. When she looked up she was met by the grin again.

  ‘Bruising?’ said Biddy, wry. ‘You reckon I bruised you, do you? Crikey. Some bloke you are, letting himself get bruised by a girl . . .’

  • • •

  The grinner had more than a puppy on his person; he also had good Ceylon tea in a brown paper bag. Biddy could offer the billy required to turn the leaves into a decent brew, and there was water enough in the rain barrel – though it had a rusty colour – to grant them several mugs of it to drink while the night ebbed away to become dawn. Biddy hadn’t enjoyed a mug of tea since she’d left Melbourne, but didn’t plan on letting the grinner know of this.

  His name was Lewis Fitzwater, she soon learned. He was a roustabout and farm hand, doing jobs here and there, which included finding stray bullocks by their Condamine bells, which is what Biddy had been woken by. He was younger than his voice gave credence to, being just on twenty-one but blessed with a deep baritone that Biddy found rather pleasing. His hair was sand coloured; his eyes were a warm, chocolate brown. He was very tall in the way that Tom had been tall, but taller again and of broader build, being used, Biddy guessed while observing him as he talked, to working long hours out of doors with only his arms and legs to depend on. The sun had browned him almost as dark as a native, but only as far as his face, neck and arms. Lewis’s chest peeking through where he’d left his shirt unbuttoned was as white as the woolly white coat on the poodle pup he’d been cradling.

  ‘What are doing with a lady’s dog?’ Biddy asked him.

  ‘What are you doing out here all alone?’

  ‘Who says I’m alone?’

  ‘Well, you didn’t. You claimed you had a husband here before.’

  ‘Who says I don’t?’

  ‘Well, if you do, he must have a blocked-up nose as well as bung ears because if the noise of us hasn’t woke him up yet, you’d think that the smell of the brew would.’ He produced a small flat box of tobacco from his person, followed by a packet of Tally-Ho papers, from which he preceded to roll himself a cigarette.

  Biddy just narrowed her
eyes at him, nursing her tea in the old enamel mug she’d found along with so many other useful things when she’d stumbled across the hut. ‘Who says he’s not temporarily away?’

  ‘The lack of anything around here that speaks of a man being present at all. Unless he’s long dead.’

  Biddy dismissed that. ‘You didn’t answer my question. What are you doing with a lady’s dog?’

  But Lewis just gave her another grin; like Biddy, he was one to answer questions only when they suited him. ‘So, I suppose you’re not from around this district then?’

  Perhaps because of the early hour Biddy’s powers of storytelling weren’t fully awake. She found herself revealing the truth, or at least something closer to it, rather more often than she would have ordinarily. It was Lewis’s long, brown face that was making her more truthful; a face she liked the look of, much as she’d liked the look of Tom’s face once upon a time. But Lewis’s was a far nicer face, Biddy felt. ‘No,’ she answered, ‘not from here.’

  ‘I reckon you’re not even a country girl.’

  ‘Are you saying I’m not sweet natured?’ said Biddy, sticking her chin out.

  The young man didn’t know why she’d drawn that conclusion. ‘I’m saying no country girl would ever consider shifting into this heap of sticks and dust,’ he said, meaning the hut. ‘But a city girl might; one who’s down on her luck and doesn’t have much in her experience from which she might pass judgment on a place like this.’

  Biddy made to protest, but his nice-looking face knocked the struggle out of her again. ‘It’s not very decent, is it?’ she conceded.

  ‘Least there’s lots of rubbish you can use. How’d you come by it?’

  ‘I inherited it.’

  Lewis waited, sipping his tea.

  ‘I found it, then,’ Biddy admitted.

  Lewis nodded. ‘No crime in that. It’s been sitting empty for donkey’s years. Why shouldn’t you use it if you’ve got the need? No one else is.’

  Biddy felt a rush of gratitude at this lack of condemnation for her. Lewis was someone to confide in, perhaps, someone who would prove to be a friend.

  ‘I’ve hit hard times,’ Biddy told him in a small voice.

  Lewis nodded, screwing his mouth up in sympathy.

  ‘Nothing shameful,’ Biddy added quickly, ‘not like that, it’s just, well, it looks like I might have reached a dead end to my prospects. For the time being.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ was all he said.

  ‘Something I’d set my heart upon didn’t work out.’

  ‘What was that then?’

  ‘A position. I thought it was mine but when I got there it wasn’t. They showed me the door. I didn’t know what to do or where to go, so I just started walking. I thought I was on a road for a while, but then it seemed to run out and became something else, a track I suppose you’d call it, and I realised that it wasn’t the same road that the coach had taken me on. I got myself lost. I had to sleep in the open the first night. It was horrible. But on the second night I ended up here.’

  ‘Do you even know where you are?’ he asked in amazement.

  Biddy actually did. ‘Knowing that I’d found this place to live in for a while, I retraced my steps and scouted about a bit. I worked out where I was in relation to things; to the little village that’s near.’

  He was impressed.

  ‘I thought I’d just stay here, at least for a bit. It hasn’t been cold and there’s a stretcher inside to sleep in and even a bathtub out the back. Whoever lived here left a lot of things behind.’ She hoped he wouldn’t ask her the difficult question of how she’d been managing to eat.

  ‘What do you do then, Biddy, for a quid? At least, what did you do before you came here from wherever it was you came from?’

  ‘I cooked,’ she said, but as soon it was out it felt like a story again. ‘I mean, I can cook some things, not everything, you understand . . .’

  But Lewis had already seized on this, his eyes lighting up. ‘You’re flash with the tucker?’

  ‘Well, maybe, but not—’

  Lewis sprang from the log he’d been sitting on in front of the billy fire. ‘I reckon this is your lucky day!’

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘There’s a place round here that’s damn near desperate for a cook!’

  Biddy stood, too. ‘There never is?’

  ‘You bet your sweet life, it’s the joke of the district!’

  ‘A joke?’

  ‘A mean one, but it’s got folks laughing for sure. Oh, crikey, they’ll love you as soon as they look at you, Biddy. And don’t go splitting hairs that you can’t cook “everything” – if you can even cook anything at all they’ll be pleased to have you and will pay good money for it.’

  Biddy clapped her hands in excitement and the little poodle pup woke up from its snooze and began to watch her again with new interest. ‘Lewis, I knew you’d be a friend to me!’

  ‘Eh, what’s that . . .?’ he said, looking at her askance.

  ‘A true friend, someone who sees this life like I see it: full of reasons to be hopeful!’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s what I do.’

  ‘And that’s just what you’ve given me – hope,’ beamed Biddy.

  Lewis beamed back and the rising sun hit his grin at that precise moment, causing Biddy to think of him then as something like an angel come to earth, with glowing eyes, teeth and sand-coloured hair. ‘I’m so ashamed that I hit you with the axe handle.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. There’s mozzies that’d do worse damage.’

  ‘And the poor bullock.’

  ‘Something tells me you failed to put him off his feed,’ Lewis winked.

  He rummaged inside the canvas swag he’d been carrying and pulled out a battered, cardboard bound book from its depths. ‘Got something to write with?’

  Biddy did, going inside the hut to recover the pencil stub from her little portmanteau. She came back and saw what the book was: bush poems by Mr Paterson. Lewis went to tear out a blank page from the back cover. ‘Don’t tell the Mechanics’ Institute,’ he smiled.

  ‘Wait,’ said Biddy, ‘don’t tear up that nice book. I’ll find something else to write on.’

  She dashed back into the hut and looked around the dusty mess for a piece of paper she could give him, one that had somehow escaped being fed to her billy fire already. She spotted a brown and sorry piece of foolscap, balled up in a corner of the room. She picked it up and smoothed it out, seeing that one side had been written on but that the other was blank. She returned to him with it.

  Lewis proceeded to write the details of how to get to the place that was so desperate for a cook, and included the name of the person Biddy was to ask for when she got there. He stopped. ‘You can read, can’t you?’ Biddy nodded that she could read, and Lewis continued pencilling it out.

  She found herself so dazzled by the sight of him in the early dawn glow that it seemed like an eternity before she took her eyes from all his appealing aspects and directed them onto what he was writing. When she did she felt her heart sink.

  ‘There you go,’ Lewis said, proudly, handing her the scrap.

  The hope had gone from Biddy totally, but she wouldn’t let him know of it. ‘You’re a true friend,’ she told him, ‘you truly are.’

  It almost broke her spirit to see him blush.

  ‘I best be off.’

  Biddy smiled, nodded and looked down at the devastating details on the paper again, before glancing up suddenly to find his lips upon hers; soft, warm and unexpectedly gentle in the crisp morning air. He broke the kiss and they looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, each one finding absolute surprise in there, except that there was no surprise at all and Biddy’s imagination had run away with her. There’d been no kiss, just a rush of desire on Biddy’s part that a kiss might happen. She blushed that her hope might have been transparent.

  ‘Be seeing you then,’ Lewis said, slightly puzzled by all the odd expressions that seemed to grip
Biddy’s face.

  Biddy pressed her fingers to her lips, as if the ghost of Lewis was still engaged there. It was the first time a boy had ever taken such a liberty with her, imagined or not, and now that it was over it didn’t seem to Biddy to be half as scandalous as it ought to have been.

  ‘Be seeing you then,’ she whispered.

  Lewis turned to take the bullock from its tether and lead the beast home.

  Once he had disappeared from view Biddy glanced bitterly at the words he had written.

  Summersby House. Ask for Mrs Marshall, the housekeeper.

  She threw the paper into the billy fire embers, where it landed with its other side exposed, and for the briefest moment Biddy actually read the faded words that had been penned there by an unknown hand at an unknown time in an awkward, ugly hand. There was far more written on the paper than at first she’d realised. Overcome suddenly by an urge to know, Biddy snatched the paper from the embers again just as it started to smoke.

  Biddy stamped it into the dirt, to make sure it wasn’t smouldering. Then she picked it out and, still standing up, began to read what was there.

  Dear Margaret,

  At Summersby there was a pair of us, twin sisters, and the father who did love us both, Henry Gregory. We twin girls were identical in all ways – in our clothes and our hair, in our likes and our tastes – identical in all things except this: you suffered a misfortune at birth, dropped so they said. The consequences were felt in your mind. You could remember the things that you’d done, but rarely when you wanted to remember them. Such is the reason for all that I am about to write down for you. It is all for your Remember Box.

  As identical twins are wont to do when children, we took delight in confusing others as to who was who. We played this little game in an unusual way. Rather than each of us swapping identities, only one of us would make the change. I, the sister whose mind was whole, would tell the Summersby household that I was really you. You, the twin whose mind was so cruelly damaged, never swapped at all. And so, Summersby would find itself with two girls who were equal in bewilderment – but only I was acting the part. Most of the servants fell for this trickery, but one was never fooled. In the grounds there worked a vile-natured youth, who knew exactly which of us was which. I found his skill of seeing right through us both fascinating and frightening. Even though he knew, he never exposed us. It was because he was in love.