The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  Then Ida suddenly did understand. ‘Mr Skews was a drug addict?’

  Miss Haines nodded, ashamed for him. ‘Barker was capable of exploiting him for it, using it against him, I know it.’

  Ida felt as if the pieces of the puzzle, the mysterious game far larger and complicated than any she’d known, were finally falling into order. ‘But how do you know?’

  Trembling, the woman reached for Ida’s water glass and poured herself a little more from the jug. She drank it down, steeling herself to reply. ‘I once worked at Summersby, you see,’ she said, at last, ‘and after that I worked at an establishment in Melbourne called Constantine Hall.’

  Ida fell back in her seat. ‘What did you do there?’

  ‘I was Margaret Gregory’s lady’s maid . . . Before your friend Aggie took the job.’

  Ida stared, open-mouthed. ‘You know of the tragedy, then? You know of what happened to Matilda?’

  Miss Haines just looked back at her, sadly. ‘That tragedy was not what it seemed, Miss Garfield.’

  Once-dark clouds began to part in Ida’s understanding.

  • • •

  Ida ran down Mostyn Street hill where she found the Summersby horse had indeed slipped its tether and was pulling the trap on its own towards Lyttleton Street. Miss Haines ran ahead and secured the horse, which seemed glad for the firm attention, while Ida ignored the negative remarks of onlookers. She needed Miss Haines’ help to climb inside the trap and then found that her nerve was failing badly in the accumulated shock.

  ‘You’re not at all well, either,’ Miss Haines told her.

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ said Ida, determined. ‘I’ve got to go back there. Stay with Aggie please, she needs someone like you near her. And there’s also Mr Skews.’

  ‘His life’s been lost, but others can be helped yet,’ Miss Haines insisted. ‘Think of your Mr Samuel – he’s just a puppet in all this.’

  Ida did think of Samuel then and felt sick to her heart. She had thought she understood everything about him now, but she had been wrong. Yet still she knew he was little better than Aggie had always said he was, just not as bad as others.

  Samuel had not understood Barker. Samuel had not understood Matilda.

  Those two and what it was that they wanted Ida to do, she now understood fully.

  She shook the reins and the horse fell into step in her hands.

  • • •

  The hour for midday dinner was approaching and the scene Ida foresaw of Barker taking Aggie her plate and discovering her gone was a torment. Ida knew he’d be made violent by it and the thought of what he might do made her sick with dread – sicker than she was already feeling. She remembered her rage, remembered how it had driven her. She looked for it again and found it, the faintest of echoes.

  Her head started to throb. All she wanted was relief, just the chance to go on and face what she need to do and with her wits about her, if nothing else. Ida knew her mistress had a small supply of sedative powders in her old room. As she went about the kitchen peeling vegetables and adding more wood to keep the oven at an even temperature for the lamb, the lure of those powders grew strong. Ida had never stolen anything from her betters, and had never even thought about it, what’s more, unlike so many other girls in service. But now she thought about those powders and the relief they might bring. She dropped the peeler and potato in the sink.

  Ida crept up the servants’ stairs to the second storey, emerging to find the hallway deserted. She stole along the passage towards the Chinese Room, just as she heard footsteps from the opposite wing. Panicking that it was Barker, Ida looked for somewhere to hide. An alcove was the best she could manage and she squeezed into the gap, feeling exposed, ready to deny everything until he resorted to slapping her.

  It was Samuel who walked past, not seeing her at all, focused upon his destination.

  Her chest pounding as hard as her head, Ida stepped from the alcove, peering after him. He entered the Chinese Room.

  Ida made her way unhurriedly towards the room, hands clasped before her at her waist. Samuel emerged before she got there, and when he did, Ida merely curtsied. ‘Be serving luncheon soon, Mr Hackett,’ she told him, with her eyes to the floor, ‘nice lamb shoulder today.’ It was the most she had said to him in weeks.

  If he was pleased at being spoken to by her, she did not care. And why should he be pleased, Ida thought to herself, he had everything he wanted now, thanks to his marriage. Well, almost everything. He did not have her.

  ‘Ida, I see so little of you nowadays. Won’t you talk to me awhile?’

  There was hurt in his voice, but she refused to look up. ‘I have my chores.’

  She saw his fingers dart for hers. She pressed her hands in her dress pockets, where he could not get to them.

  ‘What is it, Ida? Something’s wrong, I know it is.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Then why won’t you talk to me? I thought we were friends.’

  Rage bit at her, growing stronger once more. She looked at him now. ‘You’re not my friend, you’re my master.’

  He was thrown. ‘But nothing changes between us.’

  ‘Everything has changed.’

  He tried to appeal to her. ‘I told you to trust me, to wait. Everything will come well.’

  ‘How will it? You are married to my mistress. What do you propose? That “mistress” becomes a word I apply to myself?’

  His face flushed.

  ‘I believe everything will come well,’ she told him, meaningfully, ‘just not in the way you might have hoped.’

  Ida continued down the hall, as if on a visit to another of the rooms, but when she heard his footsteps descending the great stairs, she turned around and went into the Chinese Room.

  The blue vial stood on the dressing table.

  Ida felt the sickness drain away without a grain of powder needed. Rage remained. Miss Haines had told everything she knew and Ida had worked the rest of it out, worked out why she had been so manipulated and lied to. The vial was at the heart of it, and of course she was meant to find the foul thing once again. For as long as Ida had served at Summersby the sapphire blue vial had taunted her, appearing and disappearing. It was intended that Ida know it intimately, and know exactly what it could do.

  She picked the thing up. There was plenty of liquid in it, more than when she last had seen it. It had been topped up. But was it the same liquid, Ida wondered? She rather thought she knew: this time something different would be inside it.

  Ida placed the vial inside her apron pocket, and then placed her mistress’s powders there, too.

  All the way down the servants’ stairs the rage boiled inside her. When she reached the kitchen Barker was there.

  ‘I’ll be taking Aggie her dinner today,’ she announced before he could say a word to her. The look on her face must have given him rare pause. Barker just nodded, seemingly dismissing her and little caring for once, but when she turned to go back to the spuds she saw him glance at her waist. Let him guess, she told herself, he’ll never get his stinking claws on it. Barker left the room.

  She peeled a potato, thinking of the blue vial. Her rage wouldn’t lessen now. Bitterness for Samuel filled her. For all his good looks he was utterly characterless. Ida put down her peeler and withdrew the blue vial from her apron pocket. She tried the stopper. It easily came free in her fingers. She sniffed at the contents.

  It still smelled of rosemary.

  ‘Of course it does . . .’ she said to herself. Whatever it was this time, it would do more than knock a person out.

  She thought of Samuel anticipating his lamb.

  • • •

  Later, when the midday meal had been cooked and served, it hit Ida just what she had done. She felt a need for her chair. Calmer again, common sense returned. The blue vial must be hidden away where no one would think of it, she told herself, but not so hidden that she couldn’t lay hands on it again, should she ever have another need.
<
br />   Ida hid it at the very back of a shelf in the stillroom, behind the preserving jars.

  • • •

  Alone in the library, Samuel finished the last of his luncheon, using a bread slice to mop up the mint sauce. Observing him through the crack in the door, the long, long chain of fascinating questions and captivating things that Ida had assembled in her head from the very first day she had come to Summersby began to reform in her head. She thought about the day in the carriage, when it was made plain to her that Samuel and Barker were bound together by something secret, and that something, she had later worked out, was really someone secret: her mistress, and all of the secret wrongs that Samuel wrongly believed had been done. Ida now knew that Samuel and Barker were not bound together in quite the same way by those secrets – or by quite the same mistress.

  As Ida watched Samuel eat the last of his meal, she wondered whether his thoughts were not on the food but on who his wife might actually be. Had Samuel seen his wife for who she really was yet, Ida wondered? Had the telling error to his wife’s performance been no one particular thing he could have named, but rather, an accumulation of tells, tiny things seen over months, that together opened his eyes, just as Ida’s had at last been opened? Or had Samuel failed to notice anything at all? Ida wondered whether it was truly possible that she, a sixteen-year-old nobody, fresh off the farm, with no breeding or prospects, and nothing but inquisitiveness to aid her, could have arrived at a conclusion before Samuel Hackett had, the fine English gentleman, and her superior in every way.

  Samuel’s wife was ill, but not in the way that he had tried to make her ill. His wife’s instability of mind was at once far deeper, and in the same breath simpler than anything he had tried to drive her to becoming. Hers was a performer’s illness, the madness of the actress leaping crazed upon the stage; for a stage was what Summersby had become to its mistress, Ida now understood, and she, along with Samuel, was the audience of two.

  Ida opened the door to enter and clear the things away. She made herself attentive. ‘Did you enjoy it, Mr Hackett?’ she asked him, eyes bright. She looked fully at him.

  He smiled and nodded in response, plainly delighted by her. But as he stood from the table he seemed light-headed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ His eyes seemed to be having trouble focusing upon her.

  ‘Of course I’m all right, thank you, Ida, an excellent lamb.’ He finished his glass of claret, and Ida watched him swallow it, gulp by gulp.

  ‘It’s just that you look very strange.’

  He smiled at her again, his eyes struggling. Ida placed the luncheon things on her tea trolley.

  A thought seemed to occur to him. ‘Have you seen Mrs Hackett?’

  ‘Not in a little while. She likes to take her dinner a bit later now.’

  ‘You’ve not seen her at all?’

  Ida pointed a finger to her chin, as if illustrating ‘thinking’ in pantomime. ‘Well, I do know she’s not in the Chinese Room, Mr Samuel. I’ve looked.’

  If she was making some point with her remark, it was lost to him. ‘If you find her, will you find me?’

  Ida readied to depart. ‘Yes, I will.’

  She watched the light-headedness hit him in waves.

  ‘I say . . .’ said Samuel.

  ‘Yes?’ she paused at the door.

  ‘I was just thinking of Marshall, I do believe I’ve seen little of her of late . . . almost as little as I’ve seen of you.’

  ‘She’s been very ill,’ Ida told him, revealing nothing.

  The dizziness seemed to depart in him again and with it came clarity. ‘Do you know, Ida,’ he told her, ‘if I set my mind to it, and without making too much of a noise, I do think I might visit every room in this house, go to all of them, you see, one by one, and in one of the rooms I might find my wife.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘No doubt with desire in her eyes.’

  She betrayed nothing. ‘No doubt, Mr Samuel.’

  ‘I would be rid of her desire, Ida, if I could.’

  He could see Ida, but not quite see her. His mind was dissolving with what he had unwittingly consumed.

  ‘That’s a very fine idea,’ she told him. ‘Why don’t we look for her together?’

  As they left the room they passed the body of Barker in the hallway, slumped where he had fallen, the remains of his own roast lamb and claret strewn across the floor.

  • • •

  The hallway seemed to expand and retract with each breath he took, swaying to the side and back again. ‘It’s almost like being at sea,’ he remarked.

  Following a short distance behind, Ida encouraged this. ‘Perhaps you are at sea, Mr Samuel?’

  ‘I say . . .’ he said, struck by this. ‘I believe you might be right there, Ida, I’m rounding Cape Hope en route to a New World!’ He laughed uproariously, before confiding, ‘Soiled my nest badly in the Old, don’t you know.’

  ‘Oh dear, that’s unfortunate.’ She knew that she needn’t have gone to the library until well after Samuel had succumbed, but she’d been driven to see the results of her deed. She had wondered if she would find him slumped in his chair, just as Barker had been slumped, she hoped that she would, but that had not been so, and for a moment she had feared she had failed at first. Then it had become plain that success was just slow in arriving with Samuel. The effect of what she’d added to his claret hadn’t been obvious at first, until, all at once, it was blinding.

  Samuel struggled with his balance. ‘Lucky I’m such a natural sailor, unfazed by the waves . . .’

  ‘Very lucky,’ Ida agreed.

  ‘Bring a whiskey to my rooms, steward,’ he ordered the crewman he imagined to be passing. ‘And one for little Ida, too,’ he indicated her, following in his steps. He leant on the wall for support in the swell. ‘Nasty crossing for some, but not for a pair of old salts like us, eh, Ida?’

  She made no reply and watched as Samuel found himself not at sea but at Summersby again.

  ‘Good Lord.’ He returned to his task at hand, flinging open another door. Again there was no sign of his wife. ‘My love?’ he called out. ‘Why do you still hide from Ida and me?’

  Ida continued to watch as the corridor expanded and retracted for him. More doors loomed ahead. Servants’ rooms all of them, unused and unneeded.

  ‘This house is ridiculously over-appointed,’ Samuel declared.

  Ida agreed with this, given that she’d grappled with cleaning them all.

  ‘Now that I have committed myself to visiting each room, it occurs to me that there is simply so much purposeless space,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, Mr Samuel.’

  ‘I will amend this in time. All rooms unable to justify themselves will be ruthlessly excised.’

  Samuel leaned against the wall again as the ship he had previously imagined himself sailing returned once more, resuming its sway. ‘I am not really onboard ship, am I, Ida?’ he asked her, sounding worried now.

  ‘Only if you wish to be,’ she told him.

  ‘I do not wish it,’ he said, ‘I fear this swaying is illusory. I am ill, perhaps, gravely ill, possibly – it has come on very suddenly.’

  She studied him. ‘Are you worried by it, Mr Samuel?’

  He considered this. ‘No, my purpose is all . . .’

  Samuel looked to where his hand steadied him, pressed against the wallpaper, and he saw another door, different than the rest, the crack of its opening just inches from his palm. ‘Is this really a door at all?’

  Ida had already recognised it. It was a door disguised as a wall or perhaps vice versa. It was papered and dado-ed, and yet it also held a handle. It was the one locked door in all of Summersby. Ida knew without testing that it wouldn’t be locked now. It was a door they were intended to open.

  Samuel blinked, as the handle fell in and out of his focus. ‘Like something from Lewis Carroll,’ he said.

  ‘Will you try it, sir?’ she asked him.

  Samuel did so and immedia
tely fell down, striking his chin. His balance had failed him and with it his legs. Ida didn’t help him get up again. He spat out a chip from a tooth. Had he bitten his tongue? Ida didn’t care. ‘Don’t be put off, Mr Hackett,’ she told him. ‘Up you get now.’

  With effort he righted himself and re-steadied against the wall, reaching for the handle once more. The small, brass knob seemed to lurch all over the surface for him, denying him grip. ‘Stay still, damn you!’ he commanded the thing. It obeyed. His fingers found purchase and he ordered them to twist.

  The door opened without sound.

  Inside was all gloom, yet from somewhere high above came hints of daylight. The room was not a room but a staircase.

  The sensation of a draught upon her skin was something Ida had grown used to at Summersby; the little gusts of air, the breeze upon her face when she was inside the house and not out in the garden, where a person might be expected to feel air. Summersby was drafty, and yet it had struck her at once as strange that small wafts of air could start and then stop just as suddenly; draught felt just the once and then not felt again.

  She felt the breeze now as it played along her arms, making the fine hairs stand on end. This time the draught didn’t cease and Ida knew at last where it came from, where it had always come from: the tower. Whenever the locked door to the room with the spiral stairs had been open the breeze had blown through the house below. So, who had held the key to the door?

  ‘Very good, Mr Samuel.’

  The sound of a dog’s hard little claws upon boards filled their ears.

  • • •

  He could barely see each step in front of him. His progress seemed glacial, as if the ascent was one of untold miles and not a spiral flight of stairs at all. Ida had to keep telling Samuel that this was all it was, a journey to the floor above, to Summersby’s tower, a trip of no more than seconds. And yet the seconds ticked by and became minutes, then hours it seemed, and then time itself had fallen away for him, no longer measurable, and Samuel still climbed, step by single step to a tower that wouldn’t come.

  ‘Billy,’ Samuel called. ‘Good boy, Billy.’