‘Very pretty,’ Ida said. ‘They catch at the light.’
‘Samuel means for me to wear it.’
Ida’s heart skipped. It was a betrothal ring. Samuel had given it to her. Samuel had proposed. She steeled herself. ‘Was it your sister’s?’
Matilda looked knowing. ‘I asked brother Samuel that, too. Do you know what he said? He said, “How could you think so, Matilda?” It was the wrong thing to ask him but I have no idea why it was wrong. I said, didn’t you give her pretty things, too, brother?’
‘What did he say?’
‘He said, “I should like you to cease calling me brother.” ’
Ida watched her closely.
‘Then he said, “Of course I loved your sister. I loved her very much. But now I love you.” ’ She indicated the poem she had copied. ‘I have practised enough. I think I might write it all down, everything that was said. What do you think?’
Matilda looked to her with a beaming smile so bright that Ida’s eyes welled up. She had never seen such a look upon her mistress’s face before. Ida imagined how she herself might have felt had Samuel just asked for her hand. She knew she would have smiled just like Matilda did. ‘Do you love Mr Samuel, then?’
Matilda didn’t answer. She returned to her painstaking copperplate for a moment, before adding, ‘When he gave me the ring I closed my eyes expecting a kiss from him, but do you know, nothing came? I opened them again. He had left me alone beneath the robinia tree. That’s when my attention was caught by something wedged into a gap in the tree’s trunk.’
Ida felt a chill. ‘You didn’t find another letter, miss?’
‘Yes,’ said Matilda, surprised that Ida could have guessed it. ‘I found another letter entirely – from my sister, of course – which is what I mean by hiding places that are not for that purpose at all. I tried to pry it out with my fingers at first, but the thing was wedged in. I found a stick and succeeded in dislodging it.’
She withdrew a piece of paper from beneath the sheet she had been writing on. The other paper was identical, apart from being soiled and creased from where it had been placed in the tree trunk. The handwriting was not the beautiful copperplate, however, but the ugly, stolid hand that Ida was already familiar with.
‘What does it say?’ Ida asked in a trembling voice.
Matilda was about to show her when Aggie spoke up from the door. ‘You have accepted him, then?’ She had seen the ring on Matilda’s hand and was struggling to hide her own shock. Ida couldn’t guess how long Aggie had been standing there listening. She tried to tell from the look on her face.
‘I believe so,’ Matilda said, not sounding particularly sure. The jewels on the ring flashed blue in the glow of the lamplight.
‘You believe so?’ said Aggie, stressed. ‘Did you tell him yes or no, miss?’
‘I didn’t say either,’ said Matilda.
Aggie was made speechless.
Ida stepped in. ‘Miss, shouldn’t you give Mr Samuel a clear answer on such an important thing?’
‘But Samuel is in no doubt about it,’ Matilda responded. ‘He knows I mean yes, even if I didn’t quite say it that way. He actually knows me very well, I think. Almost as well as you both do.’
They watched her stand up and start to wander about the room picking up small items and releasing them – a glove, a shoe, a stocking – all while studying how the stones of the ring captured and reflected the light. ‘And besides, Matilda knows, too,’ she went to add, before stopping herself. ‘I mean, I am Matilda,’ she said, quickly.
‘Are you Matilda?’ Ida asked, watching her.
Aggie gave her a questioning look. Ida shook her head.
‘Aren’t I?’ Matilda wondered.
‘Who do you believe yourself to be?’ Ida asked.
Matilda pondered this.
Aggie stepped closer, reaching with the hairbrush to begin stroking Matilda’s long, dark hair. Matilda met eyes with Aggie in the looking glass. She gave no reply to Ida’s question, and now Ida wondered if she was unwilling to let her know any more of the true state of her mind.
Aggie changed the subject. ‘One day soon you and Mr Hackett will move into the master bedroom,’ she said. ‘Just think.’
Matilda looked about her. ‘I will begin a married life with him,’ she said. ‘I will be Mrs Hackett.’ She took on a dreamy look. ‘I am so fond of his hair,’ she said. ‘It is very . . . yellow.’
Ida thought to herself that Samuel’s hair was indeed very appealing.
‘I wonder if your sister liked his hair, too?’ Aggie said, apparently without thinking. When she dared to raise her eyes, she found Matilda eye’s looking hard upon her. There was jealousy in her face.
‘Perhaps we might pack away some of your less-needed things for the move,’ Ida said, breaking the tension.
Ida felt a draught of cool air, over almost as soon as it began, by no means the first time she had felt it. She wondered vaguely at what continued to cause it.
Matilda drifted to the hall outside, happy with her thoughts, leaving Ida and Aggie shocked and alone with their own.
‘She knows that I fear for her,’ Aggie whispered to Ida, looking at the door though which Matilda had gone.
Ida tried to match Aggie’s unease but found she could not get Samuel from her mind. All she could think of was how nice it would be to have him as her betrothed. Had he asked Ida she would have said yes to him on the spot, even if she was an unlucky quadruplet and he had been engaged to her identical dead sisters. A man with Samuel Hackett’s looks could make any past misfortune go away. She clung to this conviction like glue. ‘Perhaps we should just be happy for her?’ she offered.
Aggie’s look was withering.
The day’s events pressed at Ida’s conscience. ‘Aggie, I did something today which might make you cross, but I couldn’t not do it, you see. I had to find something out.’
Aggie wasn’t listening, looking out into the hall again. ‘I have to speak with her about it. I can’t let this continue.’
‘Wait, before you do—’
But Aggie had left the room.
Ida looked at the Moorish box and thought of the blue vial and the visit to Mr Skews. She thought of Matilda at the ball and her comment that she didn’t think her sister had killed herself – a comment that no one else echoed at all. If Matilda didn’t think her sister had taken her own life, then how did she think she had died?
Ida took the vial from her little bag to put it back in the box. Just as she curled her fingernails under the lid to open it, Matilda appeared in the room from nowhere.
‘Stop it!’ She flew at Ida and snatched the box from her hand. ‘That is not yours to see!’
Ida blushed at being caught, the blue vial still in her hand. ‘I’m . . . I’m sorry, miss, I didn’t mean . . .’ She let the vial slip to the floor.
Startled, Aggie reappeared at the door. ‘I didn’t see you come back in here, miss!’
Matilda hugged the box to her chest. ‘We’ll say no more of it,’ she muttered, turning to walk past her and leave.
‘Actually, I think we will say more of it, miss,’ said Aggie.
Matilda stopped dead.
‘If not about the box exactly, then about some other things,’ Aggie said, treading with the greatest of care. ‘And when I’ve said what I have to say, then we will say no more about it, if that is your wish. But until I’ve said it I will not rest.’
Ida held her breath as she waited for their mistress’s response to this shocking speech.
The look upon Matilda’s face was one of cold incredulity. ‘Speak then,’ she said.
Aggie cleared her throat. ‘It is my belief that Mr Samuel had . . . an understanding with your late sister.’
Ida waited for another show of jealousy from Matilda but there was none.
‘It was more than simply being betrothed,’ Aggie said, ‘he had an arrangement with her, a deal.’
Ida couldn’t believe that Aggie was dari
ng to talk of this, but Aggie kept her quiet with a look.
‘It was an arrangement that saw you wrongly confined at Constantine Hall, miss.’ Aggie’s voice caught in her throat and Ida saw how much she truly loved Matilda. Nothing she said was from malice.
‘It was a deal that required Mr Samuel to lie about who you really were, and maintain that lie all through your false confinement and up to and beyond your sister’s passing.’ Aggie braced herself to deliver the worst of it. ‘It’s a lie that he continues with even now . . .’ She paused, eyes shining with feeling. ‘It has become a lie of omission, a disgusting lie, a lie that did you great wrong and will continue to do so, I fear it, miss,’ she implored. ‘Mr Samuel is a liar,’ she said, placing all the terrible emphasis she could upon the word.
Ida’s heart stopped as she waited for Matilda’s reaction. Yet Matilda said nothing, holding the box tightly before her as she stared in wide-eyed silence at her maids.
Aggie took another deep breath. ‘That you are now engaged to be married to him is of great concern.’ She softened her tone, taking a step towards Matilda. ‘Surely you see that he is untrustworthy and undeserving of your heart?’
Matilda flinched and took a step away.
Aggie hardened herself. ‘He stood by while you suffered the loss of your liberty; he enabled it. He remains silent on it now, exploiting your natural confusion, imagining that the truth of what he did will never be known.’
‘My “natural confusion”?’ Matilda said at last. Her look was suddenly dangerous.
Ida felt Aggie falter. ‘Your memory, miss,’ Aggie said, ‘it is not as it might be, you’re the first to admit.’
‘My memory is excellent,’ said Matilda.
Aggie stood blinking at her in surprise for a second, and then seemed to spot an advantage that might be pressed home. ‘Perhaps you remember when Mr Samuel first came to Summersby then, when your father was still alive?’
Matilda’s eyes had a burning new intensity to them that alarmed Ida. She could easily have believed then that her mistress did remember the event and was replaying it in her mind. Yet the answer, when it came, was the expected one. ‘I have forgotten,’ Matilda said.
Aggie was gentle. ‘It is because of your confusion that Mr Samuel exploits you. If you did remember it, miss, you would remember meeting him as who you really are – as Matilda, not Margaret, whom he so wrongly told people you were much later. Do you see, miss?’
Matilda pulled herself up to her full height. ‘I see perfectly, Aggie.’
Aggie smiled in relief. ‘I’m so pleased, miss.’
But Matilda was icy. ‘And if this matter is ever, in even the tiniest way, mentioned by you again, you will be the worse for it, do you hear me?’
Aggie took a shocked step backwards. ‘Worse, miss?’
‘You will be dismissed from here.’ Matilda advanced upon her. ‘Expelled from this house. You will receive no references from me or from anyone else. Your prospects will be nothing if this happens, do you understand? You will be made futureless by your own actions.’
Ida felt a sob breaking in her throat and tried to say something to help her friend. ‘Aggie doesn’t mean to upset you.’
Matilda turned on her. ‘But she upsets me greatly. She outrages me.’
‘Please . . .’ Aggie tried to counter.
Matilda shook her head, turning to Aggie again. ‘That you dare to hold opinions on my life at all is a dismissible action. That you dare to impose those opinions to my very face in an effort to somehow control me is a criminal act. What business there might have been between Mr Samuel and my sister has so little to do with you as to be laughable.’
Aggie began to tremble.
‘You are just a servant here, nothing more,’ Matilda spat at her, ‘and as of today, substantially less.’
Aggie began to cry. ‘But how can you ever trust him? How can you ever marry him?’
With one swift action, Matilda stepped forward and struck Aggie hard in the face with the box she held. Aggie cried out and fell to the floor.
‘Miss!’ Ida screamed.
Matilda turned to Ida, knuckles white as she clutched at the box. ‘Because I love my sister,’ she said. ‘Ida understands that, don’t you, Ida?’
Ida was frozen.
‘Don’t you, Ida?’ Matilda repeated.
‘Yes, miss,’ she answered in a tiny voice.
Matilda smiled. ‘Of course you do. And I will continue to love her, what’s more, on terms that are wholly my own and no one else’s.’ She regarded Aggie sobbing at her feet. ‘Most especially yours.’
Matilda left the room.
• • •
Shattered, Aggie retired to her bed at Ida’s insistence. Ida succumbed to tears of her own for some time until her inquisitive mind told her she must pull herself together again.
On Matilda’s dressing table sat the letter found in the trunk of the robinia tree, the handwriting ugly and ink smeared.
Ida couldn’t stop herself.
Dear Margaret,
This is for your Remember Box.
At the heart of my plan was the age-old game so loved by all identical twins: swapping places. But here I did something new. I took my time in befriending Samuel Hackett when he came to Summersby, remaining elusive to begin with, perhaps, but never anything less than seductive. I allowed time for old stories of our little games to reach Samuel’s ears from the servant gossip, so that he would become accustomed to the notion of identity being a somewhat changeable thing. Then, when I was quite sure that two things had occurred – first, that Samuel had uncovered for himself the terms of our father’s last will and testament; and second, that Samuel was highly aroused by me – I claimed that I was you, Margaret, and that hitherto I had only been pretending to be me, Matilda.
Samuel Hackett believed it. In not having lived through our childhood history of trickery, and only hearing second-hand about the chaos it wrought, Samuel overlooked what it was that had made all our earlier deceits effective: your damaged mind. And so, in claiming to Samuel that I was you, and that you were actually me, I relied on this being Samuel’s first experience of our game playing. He presumed that our identical appearance alone was enough for the ruse, and I didn’t tell him otherwise. What convinced him that I was really you was this: in claiming myself to be Margaret I was risking confinement at Constantine Hall. Who would ever put up their hand for such a thing? And here I hooked amoral Samuel with what I had planned.
That I was confident that Samuel would agree to my plan – which of course he did – reveals so much about my true abilities. Where my father saw a handsome, charming young man in Samuel with potential to bend to my whims, I saw all that and much more. I saw what our father did not see – that Samuel was a dishonest, opportunistic man who would agree to any secret arrangement that might benefit him, but always in the assumption that a better secret arrangement might yet be found. A dishonest man will treat all arrangements dishonestly: this was the important life lesson that I already well knew and wisely heeded.
Your sister who loves you,
Matilda
Ida finished the letter and folded it, breathing fast. Snatched words stayed in her mind among so much that was shocking.
. . . What convinced him that I was really you was this: in claiming myself to be Margaret, I was risking confinement at Constantine Hall . . .
The writer of the letter had falsely claimed to Samuel that she was Margaret. That meant she was actually Matilda. Matilda had written the letter to Margaret. Yet the letter was not in Matilda’s beautiful copperplate hand. Regardless of who had written anything, Margaret was dead and Matilda had been released from the Hall.
She felt sure that someone was intended to be deceived in all this, but the question was who?
Her head spinning with trying to fathom it, Ida opened the letter again and re-read the first line.
At the heart of my plan was the age-old game so loved by all identical twins: swapping p
laces . . .
That was the key to it, Ida realised with a jolt.
Ida’s mistress reappeared at the door: the young woman that she and everyone else had been calling Matilda when perhaps she was not Matilda at all, but Margaret, as she had repeatedly told them herself.
Her hands were empty. She no longer had the Moorish box.
Ida wondered what she had done with it but did not intend to ask. She deliberately turned her back on Matilda and began to place things in a drawer, trying to think of what she might say to her mistress now that she was starting to see. Another cool draught stirred the hair escaping from her housemaid’s cap, and once again, the gust was over almost as soon as it had begun.
Something flashed near the bed in the lamplight from the corner of Ida’s eye. She turned to see but there was nothing. Matilda remained where she was at the door.
The Moorish box now sat on its little pile of books upon the bedside table. Ida blinked in surprise. ‘How did it?’
Matilda crossed the room to the bed. ‘Why has she moved my Remember Box?’ she asked. She picked up the box, moving to the chest of drawers. Unable to conceive how it could have returned to the room unseen and of its own accord, Ida felt her flesh begin to creep. She stood aside as Matilda pulled open the desired drawer and stashed the box deep inside.
It was too much to deal with. Ida ran from the room.
BIDDY
JANUARY 1904
6
When the long discussion between Biddy and Sybil was over it was past the time for luncheon. Sybil withdrew to the library to eat with Miss Garfield. Biddy was not required and was not offended at being excluded. Mrs Marshall closed the baize door, her signal that she wished an hour or two of soul-searching. Biddy was given her own meal on her tray, plus a meal for Jim Skews, and asked to take the latter upstairs to him. Biddy kept her composure while the housekeeper explained how she might locate the telegraph room. Mrs Marshall made no suggestion as to where Biddy might eat her own meal and so Biddy took the two plates all the way to where Jim was working and tapped upon the door. She hadn’t intended returning to the telegraph room again if she could help it, but now the possibility of further information it might contain began to suggest itself.
The Secret Heiress Page 27
