The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  He continued past her to the great front door, where he stopped and turned to look at her once more. The door began to swing open behind him. ‘My fiancée was unbalanced, do you understand?’ he asked her.

  Ida did.

  ‘I don’t know that you do understand it, Ida.’ Samuel said, not unkindly. ‘She hid it very well to begin with, you see, but by the end she could hide nothing from me. She was determined to destroy herself and that is what she did. I now know it was guilt at what she’d done to her sister that drove her to it.’

  Ida opened her mouth to ask a question that burned inside her, but shut it again.

  ‘You understand why I should have wanted such a shameful thing kept secret?’ he asked her. ‘Even if it was impossible to do so.’

  Ida nodded. She did understand. ‘The scandal.’

  ‘Not for my sake, but for hers,’ he pressed, ‘for her memory. She was not a bad person, really. I have to believe that.’

  The door was open behind him and Barker revealed himself, gloved fingers curling and flexing.

  ‘She was like her sister once, like her sister is now,’ Samuel said, and at once Ida saw everything. ‘She had her sister’s same innocence, her sister’s same lightness,’ said Samuel. ‘Your new mistress is just how my fiancée was when we were betrothed; before the change came over her.’

  ‘I understand, Mr Hackett,’ said Ida, meaning it. He had loved Margaret and she had betrayed him with lies. Now Matilda had come into his life and perhaps he was hoping – however unattainable it might be – to love her in her dead sister’s place. Was that a crime, Ida wondered? Of course it wasn’t. No one would be hurt. ‘I understand how it is,’ she told him.

  Samuel looked at her with deep affection in his eyes, before he turned to go inside. But as he crossed the threshold, Barker standing aside for him, he said over his shoulder, ‘You will never tell your mistress how it happened, Ida. Promise me that?’

  Ida shook her head. She would never tell.

  ‘Matilda is everything her sister was,’ said Samuel, ‘and perhaps, if God allows, she will be everything her sister might have been.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hackett,’ Ida said, moved for him.

  Samuel entered the house and was gone.

  Ida looked at her feet for some seconds, humbled, processing what she had learned. Then she remembered the question she had burned to ask but in the end hadn’t dared. ‘But how did she do it?’ she whispered, giving voice to the thought. ‘How did she kill herself?’

  She looked up with a shock to see that Barker hadn’t followed Samuel into the house. The dark servant stepped onto the porch, the whites of his eyes glowing beneath his hair in the glare of sunlight. ‘That’s a thing to ask,’ he said. ‘What would you use, cretin?’

  She bristled. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘To top yourself,’ said Barker, ‘I asked what you would use?’

  ‘Mr Barker, I didn’t mean anything by it—’ Ida started to say.

  ‘But you did mean,’ he said. ‘So what method would you fancy?’ He grew impatient when she gave him nothing. ‘Come on. Are you really so much of an idiot? How would you meet your Maker before your due time?’

  Ida felt the muscles in her arms tighten. She felt like hitting him for his continued unpleasantness. It was a mystery to her why any of the girls in town had talked of him as if he was somehow special. He was repellent. The valet smiled without smiling, his mouth in a rictus of hard, white teeth, and his black eyes hard.

  ‘Maybe I would use a noose,’ Ida offered him.

  ‘In the dining room?’ Barker scoffed. ‘You’d need a ladder for that to reach the chandelier, and still I’d not wager the thing would hold your great weight.’ He looked her up and down, as if condemning her for girth she didn’t even possess.

  Ida set her jaw at him.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Barker, ‘is that the best you can do?’

  ‘A pistol,’ Ida suggested. ‘I’d use a pistol.’

  ‘With all that mess?’ he said, laughing at her. ‘Blood and brains all over the walls? You’d never get stains like that hidden without fresh wallpapering. Does the dining room look like it’s fresh papered to you?’

  ‘No,’ Ida agreed, ‘it doesn’t.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  Barker snatched her wrist in his grip, twisting it.

  ‘Ow!’ Ida gasped.

  ‘So, what else is it, then?’ he prodded her. ‘You’re hell bent on doing yourself a nasty, but you’re yet to find the means. I said you were an idiot but maybe you’re worse? Maybe you’re a Mongoloid – thicker than dung?’

  A tear of anger rolled down Ida’s cheek. ‘You’re hurting me.’

  ‘No more than the mistress hurt,’ he chuckled, ‘hurt so much she killed herself.’

  ‘Poison,’ Ida spat at him. ‘I’d use poison.’

  ‘Ah, now that’d take some brains.’ He stroked his chin, pretending to contemplate the idea.

  She pulled her wrist free of him. ‘I might ask you a question, Mr Barker,’ she said, eyes blazing. ‘How do you seem to know so much about the Gregory sisters’ silly childhood games? “So they say” was your explanation for knowing of it, but who is “they” and when did they tell you?’

  He was brought up short.

  ‘Here’s another one,’ Ida went on. ‘Miss Matilda seemed to recognise you that day we took her away from the Hall, but not as a valet, she said. She seemed to think she knew you when you’d held some other position once.’

  He scoffed. ‘She’s a nutter. She’s lucky to remember how to use a bloody chamber pot.’

  Ida was pleased to see he was defensive. ‘Did you work here once before, many years ago perhaps . . . before you met Mr Samuel?’

  His dark eyes flashed. ‘You want a slap for an answer?’

  ‘Are you all right there, Mr Barker?’ said a voice behind them.

  The valet spun around to find Aggie there. She wasn’t looking at Barker but at Ida, her face fearful. ‘Get back to your work,’ he shot at her.

  Relief made Ida feel giddy. ‘Done it all,’ she said, keeping her eyes fixed on Aggie, her saviour and friend. ‘Got nothing left. Maybe I’ll have the afternoon off?’

  ‘No fear you will!’

  ‘But I feel tired. Can I have a little lie down?’ she asked, contemptuously.

  Barker went to raise his hand.

  ‘Mr Barker!’ Aggie cried out.

  The valet froze.

  Aggie stepped past him through the door, taking Ida by the arm. ‘Let me give you some jobs to do, you lazy girl,’ she admonished her. ‘Poor Mr Barker must be feeling very provoked.’ They moved with speed together back into the entrance hall and toward the marble stairs. Not once did either of them turn to glance at Barker on their way to the floor above. Only when they had reached the safety of the Chinese Room, closing and securing the door behind them, did they catch their breaths and stare at each other.

  ‘She poisoned herself,’ Ida said finally, pale.

  Aggie nodded, frightened by what had occurred.

  ‘Mr Samuel said she was ill.’

  ‘She pretended to be her own sister.’

  ‘She must have been ill then.’ Ida tried to convince herself that deception was evidence. ‘She must have been very ill with all the guilt of lying about it. Miss Matilda locked up by the lie. Terrible guilt it must have been.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that was it . . .’ Aggie trailed away.

  ‘Poor Mr Samuel,’ Ida remarked. ‘Such a young and handsome man to suffer such a trick.’

  ‘Yes,’ Aggie echoed.

  They fell quiet.

  ‘Still, you’ve got to marvel . . .’ offered Ida, thinking things through.

  ‘At what?’

  ‘Miss Margaret’s cunning. She fooled poor Mr Samuel most of all.’

  Aggie looked at her. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, Mr Samuel would have met Miss Margaret when she was livi
ng in the care of her old dad and Mr Hackett was working as his secretary.’

  She watched Aggie try to order the facts in her head. ‘Did you say Mr Hackett first worked for the late Mr Gregory?’

  Ida nodded. ‘That’s what Mr Samuel said that day we took our mistress away from the Hall. He’s a gentleman after all, he would have asked Mr Gregory for Miss Margaret’s hand in marriage.’

  ‘A woman may accept a man’s proposal without her father’s permission, Ida,’ Aggie said, ‘especially if her father’s deceased.’

  Ida scoffed. ‘As if she’d have got herself engaged without observing the due proprieties,’ she said. ‘Of course her old dad was asked, you mark my words, even if the poor bugger was on his death bed when it happened. She might have been ill but she was still brought up proper. Both girls were.’

  Aggie shook her head at Ida’s logic.

  ‘Well, I know,’ said Ida, ‘I’ve read lots of very interesting novels and I know how ladies are, and if our poor little mistress only got locked up under a falsehood once her dear old dad was gathered, then that means she was also around when Mr Hackett showed up in the first place and fell in love with her sister. I mean, where else would Miss Matilda have been but here?’

  The real truth of this suddenly seemed to strike Aggie, even if Ida somehow missed the significance of what she had said. ‘Ida, have you been eavesdropping with complete abandon?’

  ‘Not really,’ Ida lied.

  ‘How else could you know such things?’

  Ida waved this away. ‘I just think about it,’ she said, ‘a lot. Therefore,’ she added, looking quite triumphant, ‘you have to marvel at just how cunning that Miss Margaret really was. Mr Samuel didn’t know that the sister he was engaged to was really Miss Margaret and that the one who got locked away was really Miss Matilda. It’s especially cunning when you consider that their dad must have told him who was actually who when he first turned up at Summersby. Yet still Miss Margaret managed to switch places and fool him later on.’

  Aggie just stared at her.

  ‘What is it?’ said Ida, seeing her friend’s expression change.

  ‘My God, Ida, he knew,’ said Aggie, aghast.

  ‘We just said that, didn’t we?’

  ‘No, no, he knew who he was courting, he knew who he was proposing to,’ Aggie whispered, ‘it was Margaret – and he knew her by that name, of course he did. He knew everything.’

  Ida squinted, not quite following the logic now, even though she’d been responsible for it.

  ‘When Mr Gregory died and our mistress was collected to be taken away to the Hall,’ Aggie elaborated, ‘she would have protested who she really was, surely? She would have said she was Matilda, the wrong girl, but her lying sister would have claimed she was Margaret.’

  ‘One sister’s word against the other,’ lamented Ida. ‘Makes you wonder how anyone believed anything at all.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Aggie, gripping Ida by the arm, ‘so why did anyone else believe it? Because someone supported the lie, someone whose word held weight.’

  Ida’s puzzlement remained for another moment until she saw what Aggie meant. ‘You don’t mean Mr Samuel?’

  Aggie nodded. ‘He lied for Margaret . . . He knew everything.’

  This shocked Ida greatly. ‘He would never do that!’

  ‘Well, he loved her, I suppose,’ Aggie ventured, ‘and perhaps, as Mr Gregory’s secretary, he may have learned what was intended in the will.’

  ‘That Margaret was to be sent to the Hall?’

  ‘Yes,’ Aggie went on, ‘and perhaps it was all too much for him to allow because of his love for Miss Margaret . . .’ She paused, considering another possibility. ‘Or perhaps he just saw a golden opportunity.’

  ‘What opportunity?’ said Ida, feeling very upset on Samuel’s behalf and regretting the conversation now.

  ‘To make a dishonest profit,’ Aggie suggested. ‘And Margaret was very happy to oblige because she needed him so as not to get locked away. They hatched a plan together to lie to the whole world.’

  Ida thought of the second will and the revelation it contained that dead Matilda was not Matilda, but dead Margaret. If what Aggie believed was true, then Samuel had known of this already and the will was not a revelation to him at all. If this was so then he would have been pretending throughout the entire meeting with Hargreaves Cooper, and then ever since. But how could he have carried this off?

  Ida wrapped her arms about herself, shivering. ‘I won’t believe it of Mr Samuel, Aggie. I won’t! Miss Margaret was the rotter, not him; he was tricked along with everyone else. And anyway, Margaret took poison in guilt, didn’t she? That’s what Barker wanted me to guess. So, why isn’t Mr Samuel feeling guilty, then?’ she asked. ‘There’s proof right there that he’s blameless.’

  Aggie gave her a wry look. ‘What’s going all the way to Melbourne to let poor Miss Matilda out of the Hall if it’s not guilt then?’

  Ida just screwed up her mouth, hurt on Samuel’s behalf.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ said Aggie, ‘but I don’t like the sound of this one little bit and I intend looking out for my mistress – our mistress – where I can.’ She folded her arms across her chest, determined. ‘Are you planning on helping me, Ida?’

  Ida tried to maintain a glare at her friend but failed. She nodded, looking away. ‘Of course I will. What do you take me for?’

  But to her mind ‘helping the mistress’ did not mean doing the opposite thing to Samuel. She knew he was blameless. Yet Ida’s inquisitive mind would not be silenced, no matter how kind her heart.

  One. Samuel and Barker were bound together by something unknown. Could it have been the shared secret of the mistress of Summersby’s real identity?

  Two. When eavesdropping Ida told Barker of what she had heard about the shocking deception and the second will he had taken it in his stride. Was this because there was no reason to be shocked if he already knew?

  Three. Could both these things combined explain why Barker treated Samuel so contemptuously? Was the supposedly loyal valet using the secret to his own advantage?

  • • •

  ‘Has your memory always been so rotten?’ Ida tactlessly asked, smoothing the silken fabric of the ball gown once Matilda had stepped inside and Ida had helped pull it up to her shoulders.

  Aggie cringed, but said nothing to censure her. Four days had passed and Ida and Aggie were helping Matilda get dressed for the District Ball.

  Matilda caught Ida’s eye reflected in her looking glass. ‘I can’t remember.’

  A smile appeared at Ida’s mouth before she collected herself. ‘Must be awful,’ she said, ‘not to recall the things that have happened to you.’

  With Aggie holding pins ready to arrange Matilda’s hair, Ida watched Matilda process this remark. More often than not, the lack of recollection meant nothing to Matilda at all, it seemed. Matilda plainly didn’t know what it was to have her past at reaching distance. In Matilda’s mind, Ida guessed, nothing was easily reached at all.

  ‘Do you remember when you first went to the Hall?’ Ida wondered.

  ‘No,’ said Matilda, shaking her head. ‘I can’t remember that.’

  ‘What about your sister and Mr Samuel?’ Ida pressed, with an eyebrow raised for Aggie’s benefit. ‘What do you remember of them being together?’

  Aggie frowned at Ida, but still didn’t say anything. She wanted to hear Matilda’s answer, if she had one. She began to work on pinning Matilda’s beautiful hair as the young woman thought upon this.

  Ida recognised the startled look her mistress took on when something dislodged itself inside her mind.

  ‘Matilda went to a ball once,’ Matilda said.

  Aggie and Ida looked at each other, pained. ‘You are Matilda,’ Aggie reminded her once again, gently.

  ‘I remember what she wore!’ Matilda exclaimed.

  ‘What your sister wore, miss,’ Aggie interjected, but Matilda leapt up from the dre
ssing stool and made for the table at the side of her bed. ‘Your hair, miss, careful . . .’ Aggie called after her.

  Matilda took the Moorish patterned box from where it sat on the bedside pile of books. She prized open the lid and seized the photograph that Ida had been surprised to learn was inside.

  Ida only realised then that other items had since been placed beneath it. She saw what looked like letter paper and below that, the hint of some other object.

  ‘See – see here,’ Matilda said, dropping the box onto the bed. She held the photograph in her hand. ‘This is what she wore – isn’t it lovely?’

  Ida and Aggie regarded the portrait with some interest. ‘Beautiful,’ Aggie murmured. She turned the photograph over and they both saw what was written there in smooth, flowing copperplate.

  Matilda, 1884.

  Matilda turned the photograph over again in Aggie’s hands. ‘That is what she wore to the ball.’

  But Aggie studied the back of the photograph. ‘Do you recognise the handwriting, miss?’

  Matilda stared at it. ‘It is my own,’ she said at last.

  Aggie nodded. ‘You wrote your own name and the date on the back – over two years ago, not long before your father died and you went to the Hall – perhaps to help you remember?’ She turned the photograph back to the portrait side. ‘Because that’s you there, isn’t it?’

  Matilda looked at the beautiful face in uncertainty. ‘Is it?’ She glanced up to see Aggie and Ida nodding.

  ‘That’s you, miss,’ said Ida. ‘You must have gone to a ball.’

  Matilda resumed her seat, a little deflated.

  ‘And I owe you an apology, miss,’ said Aggie, pinning Matilda’s hair. ‘You told me before that Matilda went to a ball, and I said you were confused and that really you must have meant that Miss Margaret had been to one, but I see now that you really meant yourself. What else can you recall of it?’

  Ida watched as Matilda tried to focus her mind. She wondered what images, if any, might be fighting to emerge: feet in dancing slippers, perhaps, laced with ribbons that wound tight around ankles; fingers at piano keys; a man with a violin; an airy hall on a balmy summer’s eve.