The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  The little dog was their escort, the dead little dog. Billy’s strong, hard nails on the boards of the spiral stairs had announced his arrival first, the sound unexpectedly sharp, causing Ida to twist and look about until she had seen the dog in the flesh and used this as confirmation that everything was exactly as she had come to understand that it was.

  But to Samuel the dog’s reappearance was impossible; he, like Ida, had been told by Barker that Billy’s corpse had been tossed onto the rubbish. ‘Am I dead, too?’ he joked with the animal. ‘I must be, eh? I must be dead to be seeing you there.’ Yet he knew that he was not dead, at least not yet. Grim purpose filled him to get to the top of the stairs. The little dog circled and ran about, barking and licking him, going up and then down, fluffy tail flailing like a whip, rustling Samuel along. ‘Good boy, Billy,’ Samuel told him, ‘you’re a good boy.’

  And yet still the stairs seemed endless, an Everest of stairs, and Samuel was no longer upright but upon his hands and knees, crawling in ascent. ‘One more step,’ Ida told him, and with herculean effort he surmounted another only to find another again. ‘One more step,’ she sang.

  And then all was quiet and still, and the sound of the little dog’s nails was gone, and with it the barking and the circling, and there were no more steps at all and Samuel and Ida had arrived at a room that was open, it seemed, to the elements, being flooded with light and air. There was a bed in the room; a comfortable chair; a wardrobe of clothes Ida recognised – identical clothes. The breeze was cool upon their faces, good-humoured in their hair, teasing them, inviting them to join. Samuel felt fingers at his waistcoat buttons and looked to see that they were his own fingers, divesting himself of his clothing. His jacket was already upon the floor. ‘When did I take this off?’ he wondered. The waistcoat landed on top of it. He tore at his boots, the buttons there popped and spat, and the boots joined the clothes.

  ‘How do you feel, Mr Hackett?’ Ida asked him, her eyes already watching who it was that waited for them in the room.

  ‘I feel freer now, lighter somehow.’ He took deep breaths.

  ‘You have found me then?’

  Samuel’s eyes were shut. He opened his lids to behold what Ida had already seen: his wife standing before an elegant, circular window, smiling at him, the breeze in the curls of her hair that fell loose like a shower of coal down her spine.

  ‘Matilda . . .’ He saw it again, the naked desire that was there for him and him alone when she would have him believe that she was the dead twin somehow made alive. Ida wondered if he knew her little tricks by now, whether he had guessed, as she had guessed, at how cleverly she had fooled him, had fooled everyone.

  He could stand upright. His strength had returned, his balance, too.

  ‘Samuel,’ she purred, opening her arms to receive him, with one smiling eye upon Ida. ‘Here I was all along . . . all you had to do was look.’

  His mouth was on hers, his lips, her lips became one. She guided his hand as they loved, placing it upon her belly. ‘Feel,’ she whispered, pulling from his kiss. ‘Do you feel our child there?’

  He could feel it. The child they had made. She was swollen with it, ripe, more luscious than ever.

  ‘You are an actress, my love.’ He opened his eyes to regard her. She opened hers. ‘An actress.’

  ‘Samuel, don’t be so cruel and unkind to me.’

  ‘It is I who is cruel?’

  She tossed her hair, still held fast in his arms. She was the coquette, the kitten, aflame with the thrill of entrapment.

  ‘Acting upon a stage,’ he told her, ‘and I am your audience.’

  ‘And me as well, Mr Samuel,’ Ida came in. ‘It’s been a little show for both of us, don’t forget – but I wonder if we’ve been watching the same show?’ She was fascinated, not remotely shocked by any of it. Nothing shocked her now.

  His wife laughed in delight, a sensual laugh; erotic. ‘But when have I acted? What has been my part?’

  ‘Oh, Matilda,’ he said, admonishing. He tightened his grip, his hands on her arms, squeezing her, claiming her. ‘What is your broken memory if not a play for my entertainment?’

  She laughed again, squirming now, the captive. ‘Nonsense.’

  There was pressure in his loins. Ida looked away. He needed his wife to know how he would tame her. ‘Your recall is total,’ he told her. ‘The memory loss was never real at all. I can see it now.’

  Ida shook her head, and wondered if he could actually see anything, if he ever could. Matilda had been right to call him unintelligent.

  ‘Do you?’ his beloved taunted him. ‘But what do you see?’

  ‘I see a girl who never lost her mind – who only played that she did.’

  ‘Played it? But why?’

  ‘To confuse your father, to confuse the world – who knows? If you’ve forgotten anything, it would be that one thing: the original reason why. No doubt it made sense when you were just a little girl – when you pretended to be your sister, and behold there were two of you, both with broken memories, both having fun.’

  She stopped squirming now, regarding him thoughtfully.

  ‘But now your sister is dead, yet the play still remains and you would have me believe in it still,’ Samuel told her.

  Ida pitied him. He had misread the signs. She and Samuel had each seen a different show, where only the star was the same.

  Her smile was gone. Her face was expressionless. ‘But why would I persist with such a thing . . . when I love you?’ Her hand slipped from his grip and went to her belly, stroking the child that was theirs. Then she went to his loins, resting there lighter than ether, testing him, owning him.

  ‘To punish me.’ He put a hand to his temple as it began to throb.

  ‘But for what?’ she breathed, her lips brushing his. ‘Whatever would I punish you for?’

  Samuel swallowed. The strain at his waist as exquisite as it was unbearable. ‘To punish me for what I did to your sister . . .’ She kissed him. ‘For what I did to Margaret.’

  ‘But what did you do?’

  ‘I made you write messages – on scraps of paper – messages to play on her guilt.’

  Her fingers found his fly buttons, released them one by one. ‘Matilda says you suffer the torture of guilt? Matilda says love’s happiness is a lie?’ she quoted.

  He nodded. ‘Her guilt at confining you, imprisoning you in that place.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Letting the world think she was you, while letting herself think that I was aiding her.’

  Her hand was inside the fabric, pressing against his bare skin. ‘Then you were not aiding her?’

  ‘No.’ He closed his eyes in ecstasy. ‘I betrayed her. I used the scraps of messages you wrote to make her unstable. I hid them where she would find them one by one. They played on her guilt. I used them to make her take poison.’

  ‘Matilda says drink it and you will know peace . . .’ Her fingers seized the hidden parts of him, the points of her nails digging into the flesh. He groaned. ‘And why did you do such a terrible thing? Drive my sister to kill herself?’

  Ida saw the full extent of his shame at last, his mask was gone; the shame was glaring in his face. ‘You were the better sister . . . better in your heart. Matilda was too dangerous, unstable. I feared what marriage to her might bring. But marriage to you, well . . .’

  ‘Yes . . .?’

  ‘It seemed the wiser option. I would still have Summersby, but with a bride I might control.’ He looked to Ida. ‘And perhaps somehow find happiness, too, where I had not expected it.’

  Ida’s mistress had contempt in her eyes. ‘And you would murder for it?’

  He blanched. ‘I never touched her.’

  ‘As good as murder, you drove her to it.’

  He was paralysed by the pain; her fingers twisting him, exacting her claim.

  ‘For that is how she left this world, isn’t it?’ she whispered. ‘Driven to drink poison at your hands?’

&nbs
p; He nodded, grimacing, tears pricking his eyes. ‘I had to have Summersby.’

  ‘Yet did you do a thorough job?’

  Ida sighed, sadly. She’d been waiting for it to come to this, knowing everything now as she did, knowing that it was inevitable.

  Samuel stopped. His wife was smiling at him again, but no longer as the wanton, hers was the smile of someone else. Was it the victor’s smile, Ida wondered?

  ‘She is cold in her grave,’ Samuel reminded her.

  ‘Ah, but am I now?’ She released her grip on him.

  He stepped back from her, protecting himself. There was something in her face he had not seen before; something vile. There was a vicious thing that lived in her smile that Ida herself had only been allowed to see twice. Once on the night of the ball, and again when Aggie had been struck with the Remember Box. It was the thing that was wholly Matilda.

  Billy’s ears pricked up. Ida heard someone mounting the spiral stairs below.

  ‘Am I really dead, Samuel?’ The catlike smile was curling about his wife’s lips.

  ‘You are not she,’ Samuel said. ‘You are only you – Matilda Gregory – and the only lie was that of the broken memory you wore like a costume . . .’

  ‘Ah, memory,’ said Matilda. ‘And what will we remember of today, I wonder?’

  Ida listened to the tread on the stairs. She knew who was coming to find them all.

  ‘I will remember a wife that was bettered, a wife that was cowed,’ Samuel told her.

  ‘Really?’ She turned her attention to somewhere behind him, to the place in the floor where the spiral stairs were, from where he’d crawled to her panting and blinking only moments before. ‘And what will you remember, sister?’

  Ida stood respectfully aside for the new arrival.

  ‘I will remember my hurt at this,’ said Margaret from behind.

  Samuel turned to see the mirror image of his wife staring at them both from the mouth of the stairs, hands held to her belly. He looked to the first wife, the one who had kissed him and held him and who regarded him now with mirth – Matilda Gregory. He looked to the second wife, the one who was identically dressed, but whose eyes held confusion and hurt – Margaret Gregory. No sister had died. The funeral was a fraud. What had been placed in the coffin, Ida wondered, rocks? There had been two sisters all along, which was exactly as Mr Skews had told Ida in his dying words. There was Matilda the mistress who had pretended to be her sister, and there was Margaret the mistress who had never pretended at all.

  Samuel fell back. ‘It’s impossible . . . One of you is dead!’

  Ida was gentle with him. ‘I tried to tell you. You thought you had helped send the wrong sister to the Hall, Mr Samuel, but you were wrong as it turned out. The right sister was in the Hall all along, safe and protected as her late father had hoped she would be.’

  Samuel froze.

  ‘By making everyone think that Margaret was actually she, the conditions of old Mr Gregory’s will were still met,’ Ida explained to him. ‘Miss Margaret became the heiress because seemingly she was Matilda – the plan worked because of Miss Margaret’s confusion . . .’ She felt terrible saying this. ‘It worked because of her damaged mind, you see, half the time she didn’t know who she was anyway. For a while I thought she was one sister with both personalities. Then today I saw how I’d been wrong. The real Matilda has been with us the whole time, hiding away in this tower with Billy.’

  ‘Husband,’ pleaded Margaret near the stairwell. ‘I love you . . . you must not listen to what Matilda says.’

  Matilda laughed. ‘But Samuel has listened to everything and believed it.’

  ‘But I love him!’ cried Margaret, coming closer. ‘I am carrying his child!’

  Matilda stroked her own belly. ‘But we are both expectant mothers, dearest. Look, don’t you see? Our husband has expressed his love with each of us.’

  Ida shook her head, disgusted, having suspected this, too.

  Margaret’s eyes widened as she realised the apparent truth of this. Each of them was with child – Samuel’s unborn children.

  As Ida watched, the tower room began to tumble and spin for him. He was seeing double. ‘What have you done to my mind?’

  ‘What have we done?’ Matilda laughed.

  Margaret was stricken by his suffering. ‘Oh sister, is he ill? Is he dying?’

  Matilda shrugged, grinning at Ida, who held her gaze.

  Margaret tried to go to him but he pushed her away, shaking with fear. ‘What have you done! Tell me, for pity’s sake!’

  ‘But we are innocent,’ said Matilda. ‘The girl Ida is who you should blame now.’

  Margaret paled.

  ‘Yes,’ said Matilda, enjoying her sister’s shock. ‘Ida put something on the lamb, something from inside that pretty blue vial. You would never have detected it, Samuel. Its properties were disguised by rosemary.’

  ‘Not Ida.’ Margaret was devastated. ‘She never would do such a terrible thing.’

  ‘Oh, but she would,’ Matilda insisted, ‘and she did . . . didn’t you, Ida?

  Margaret saw Ida’s face, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Please, say it’s not true.’

  Ida said nothing.

  ‘She can’t,’ Matilda crowed. ‘She can’t because she did it – and did it because I wanted her to. She did it because everything I’d let her see and hear and read and experience in this house led her to do it. Everything! She did it because Samuel needed to be punished for daring to think he could better me, and she was my means for punishing him!’

  Ida stepped forward, ready. ‘What I actually did, miss, long before I realised it, was let you manipulate me, yes, and let you make me your little pawn. What I did was let you lead me down the garden path and on a merry dance while I went there. What I did was let you make a fool of me, really.’ Her voice caught in her throat. ‘And then make me into something far worse than a fool.’ She swallowed, thinking of what she had added not to Samuel’s lamb, but to his glass of claret, and Barker’s, too. ‘A killer . . .’

  Margaret rushed forward and grabbed her sister by the hair. ‘What have you done to poor Ida – and to Samuel? You tell me!’

  Matilda twisted in her grip. ‘Sister, please . . .’

  ‘You tell me!’

  Ida saw that the room was now spinning in Samuel’s eyes.

  ‘It is not what I have done,’ Matilda tried to calm her sister, ‘my hands are clean, I have done nothing – it is all Barker!’

  Margaret stared at her, releasing her hold.

  ‘Barker is the most loyal of men,’ Matilda went on, fingers patting at her scalp. ‘There is nothing he wouldn’t do to serve me.’

  Samuel’s eyes were tiny specks of darkness, lost in the drug.

  ‘Barker has helped me in everything I have ever asked of him,’ Matilda said. ‘There is nothing he has not been willing to do for me – nothing – right from the very start.’ She smiled at her sister.

  Ida had already reached this conclusion herself. ‘Mr Barker worked here at Summersby as a boy,’ she told Margaret, ‘before he’d ever met Mr Samuel. You remembered him from the stables. Mr Barker was the only one who’d never been fooled by the childish little games your sister made you play. He was the only one who always knew exactly who was who. He knew because he loved Matilda.’

  ‘Yes, husband,’ said Matilda, turning to Samuel, sympathetic. ‘I’m afraid that any agreement that you had reached with Barker was already ruined by an agreement he had reached with me. No doubt you thought he was helping you – placing all those scraps of messages written in my sister’s lovely hand around the house where I’d find them; coercing the poison from his own brother-in-law Skews and then placing it in the hope that I’d drink it – yes, he did all those things for you, but really it was for me – all of it. I knew you’d try to betray me. It was the very reason why I allowed you into my confidence at all. I had you believe I was really Margaret and that my father would have me locked away.’


  Samuel’s mouth had gone dry.

  ‘But I am not Margaret,’ she said. She nodded to the identically dressed woman who resembled her in every way. ‘She is . . . and she is utterly mad,’ Matilda said, simply. ‘But she is also my twin, and there is no one I love more. Our father was very wrong thinking he could separate us, so I’m afraid I used you, Samuel, to ensure she was freed. Everyone needed to think that she was actually me and that Margaret the madwoman was dead.’

  Samuel heard all this, Ida knew. He was willing himself to stay focused before the effects of the claret took his strength away entirely.

  ‘Yet in a way I also love you, Samuel,’ Matilda whispered. ‘I hadn’t planned upon it, but it happened. It made what I had to do so much harder.’

  ‘Not love,’ he whispered. ‘That’s not love.’

  A tear slid down Ida’s cheek for him.

  ‘You hadn’t factored your heart in this adventure, husband, and neither did I,’ Matilda said, sadly, ‘but it was insufficient for either of us to abandon our plans. After all, you hoped that whatever it was you had known with me would somehow be found in my sister.’

  Transfixed, Margaret’s eyes filled with tears, too.

  Matilda looked to her twin. ‘I will always love my sister more.’ She looked back to him. ‘And you will always love money.’

  Matilda reached into a pocket of her dress, withdrawing a shiny gold guinea. ‘Billy loves money, too,’ she added. The little dog tensed at her feet. ‘See, Billy,’ she teased, ‘see what I have here?’

  The dog’s eyes glowed.

  ‘Don’t you love it?’ Matilda went on. ‘Don’t you want it, Billy?’

  A bead of sweat dripped from Samuel’s brow.

  ‘Surely you want this pretty, shiny thing?’

  She tossed the guinea and the little dog leapt to catch it. The sudden movement made Samuel snap. The coin was in front of him, spinning in the air. He reached out to snatch it before the dog could, leaping as if his legs were made of springs.

  ‘No!’ Margaret screamed.

  His hands went for the coin as he fell in a single, balletic motion that saw him plunge into the yawning mouth of the stairwell.