The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  The baby answered with agony and very soon afterwards, blood.

  • • •

  Ida came to consciousness again to find her mistress crouched beside her at the bed.

  ‘Ida,’ Margaret said when she saw her eyelids flicker and open. ‘Stay with me, Ida, I will get help.’

  Ida glanced at the room and saw that some of the furniture she had heaved against the door had been moved. Her mistress had been moving them, she guessed. Then the pain came back.

  ‘My baby . . . He hurt my baby . . .’ She began to weep again and saw that her mistress was crying with her. Ida’s housemaid’s dress was sodden with blood and the bed cover with it. ‘She’s gone . . . I lost her, miss.’

  Margaret pressed her hands protectively to her own belly on impulse, before she ran to the door again, trying to pull the dressing table aside, its legs scoring fresh marks in the floor. ‘I will help you,’ she promised. ‘We’ve been misused, Ida, we’ve been deceived by Barker and my sister but now it is done.’

  Ida heard this and shook her head, the pain terrible. ‘He’s still out there.’

  Margaret succeeded in getting the dressing table out of the way enough for the door to be opened. Ida felt herself losing consciousness again.

  ‘Ida!’ Margaret ran and clutched her hand. ‘Please don’t die. I will help you, I promise it.’ She placed Ida’s hand on her own belly. ‘See? I have a baby, too. It can be your baby now, Ida, if you like. Just please don’t die.’

  Someone began to push against the door from outside, twisting the handle, forcing it. Ida was terrified. ‘Barker! You get away! No!’

  The door came open, banging against the dressing table, but the face it revealed was a kindly face, a face to be trusted.

  ‘Marshall?’ said Margaret.

  Aggie pushed her way inside, revealing another face behind her, also kind.

  ‘Miss Haines?’ Margaret was astonished.

  ‘There, there, miss,’ said Miss Haines, coming towards her. ‘It’s all right now.’

  Aggie was at the bed, reeling at the sight of Ida’s blood.

  ‘She has miscarried a child,’ said Miss Haines, white-faced.

  Ashamed, Ida tried to cover herself. ‘Oh, Aggie.’

  Aggie clutched at her, bursting into tears. ‘Just hold on, Ida. We’ll get help for you.’

  Margaret stood. ‘But Ida has not lost her baby, so there is no cause for alarm. I have it here, see?’ She stroked her belly. ‘Do you see, Ida? I have it here.’

  Aggie and Miss Haines passed a look between themselves, before Aggie stood and took hold of herself. ‘I need towels, water.’ She turned to Ida again. ‘It will be all right, I swear it will.’ She made for the door. ‘Where is Mr Samuel now?’ she asked Margaret, fearful. ‘I have seen what has happened to Mr Barker.’

  The question sparked something in Margaret’s mind and she fumbled at the pocket of her dress. She withdrew a page torn from a book, on which she had written words to prompt herself. ‘The tower,’ she whispered, reading what was there. ‘We left them in the tower.’

  Aggie bit her lip, glancing upwards. Then she was gone from the room.

  ‘Will Ida be all right?’ Margaret asked Miss Haines.

  The woman led her to a chair. ‘It’s in God’s hands,’ she told her. ‘But we’ll do what we can to help Him.’

  Margaret shook Miss Haines’ from her and returned to Ida’s bedside. ‘Please,’ she begged her, ‘please don’t die. Fight for your little baby. Please . . .’

  Ida clung to her last shred of consciousness. ‘Is my baby not gone?’

  Margaret shook her head, resolute, hands at her belly. ‘She’s here safe and sound, see? She’s here with me.’

  Ida felt a great weight lift from her. It was true. ‘I am so happy, Margaret.’

  She watched as Miss Haines took her mistress to the door. ‘Best leave her now. Aggie and I will take charge.’

  ‘But did you hear her, Haines? She called me Margaret, not Miss. It means I am her friend.’

  Haines gave a little smile. ‘She is your friend, miss.’

  ‘Yes,’ said her mistress, beaming.

  BIDDY

  FEBRUARY 1904

  11

  Leaning anxiously against the wall, it was Jim who saw the front door open first. ‘Miss Garfield?’

  She stirred from where she had been dozing in the comfort of the hired carriage.

  ‘Miss Garfield.’

  She looked up and saw that Jim was now at the gate, Lewis behind him, and coming down the path from the Hall was her charge. ‘Sybil!’ Miss Garfield made to let herself down to the ground before Lewis remembered himself and helped her descend the carriage step. Jim had opened the gate and Sybil was now coming into the street. ‘Child!’ Miss Garfield called in greeting, before perhaps remembering that she should no longer use this term. ‘Sybil!’

  Sybil stepped forward and embraced her. Her eyes were shining.

  ‘Oh, Sybil.’ She stepped back from her a little, so as to better see her face. ‘Has all gone well within?’

  Sybil paused before answering. ‘It has.’

  ‘Oh, Sybil!’ Miss Garfield clapped her lace-gloved hands.

  ‘But nothing was quite as I expected.’

  She caught the strange tone to Sybil’s voice.

  ‘Nothing,’ Sybil repeated. She looked behind her where Biddy waited by the front door, happily observing everything.

  Miss Garfield was plainly unsure of what this might mean. ‘Is that a pleasing result?’

  Sybil considered this question. Then, to Miss Garfield’s panic, she moved to Jim Skews and took him gently by the hand. Jim at first looked as thrown as Miss Garfield was, and Lewis with him, but Jim did not let go of Sybil’s hand. Indeed, he soon looked empowered by it. Sybil smiled at him and Jim was soon smiling easily back.

  ‘Stone the crows,’ muttered Lewis, pushing his hat back from his brow. ‘You’re a dark one, Jim.’ He cast a look to Biddy, still waiting at the entrance to the house.

  He winked at her. She winked back.

  ‘There is something I must tell you, Miss Garfield,’ Sybil said.

  Perhaps at another time Miss Garfield would have required a chair for such a forthcoming announcement and quite possibly some smelling salts, too, Biddy thought, watching on from the front door, but Miss Garfield seemed unusually sturdy in her constitution at this moment and clearly believed herself ready for news of which she had already partly guessed.

  ‘Jim and I are in love.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Garfield.

  All of them waited for her reaction. Nothing came.

  ‘Aren’t you angry?’ Sybil prompted.

  Miss Garfield seemed to consider. ‘No, Sybil, I don’t believe I am.’ She looked to Jim. ‘You have chosen a very nice young man to give your heart to, a man we already know and like. I am pleased you are in love.’

  Jim and Sybil stared at each other in amazement. Biddy just smiled.

  ‘Have you been in love for very long?’ Miss Garfield wondered.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim, emphatically. He looked again to the beaming girl beside him. ‘We hope to get married one day soon.’

  ‘Stone the crows,’ Lewis muttered again.

  ‘Quite soon,’ Sybil stressed. Her other hand brushed against her abdomen in a gesture Miss Garfield noted but clearly didn’t yet comprehend.

  Miss Garfield hesitated to frame a new question. ‘And have you . . . informed those within this house of your happiness?’ She glanced at Biddy and Constantine Hall.

  ‘It is because I have informed those within and because they have reacted with such joy to it, that I am informing you now, Miss Garfield,’ smiled Sybil.

  Miss Garfield blinked. ‘So you have met the Secret Heiress?’

  Sybil opened her mouth to explain just as Biddy was joined by other people at the front door to the Hall and they all began to come outside.

  ‘I have met my parents,’ said Sybil. ‘I have met m
y mother, Margaret Gregory and my father, Samuel Hackett. And I have met the Secret Heiress, too.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  But as Sybil was about to tell her, Miss Garfield’s jaw fell. She saw a face she clearly recognised, the face from a photographic portrait she had no doubt once stumbled upon hidden among Sybil’s things. This face was coming down the path towards them now, supporting a fair-haired man who walked less steadily, suffering from some malady in his eyes. ‘Matilda,’ Miss Garfield whispered, remembering the name on the back of the photograph.

  ‘She is not Matilda,’ Sybil told her. ‘She is Margaret, her sister. And she is my mother.’

  ‘I am confused,’ Miss Garfield whispered, just as the new arrivals were about to come upon them. ‘Who is the Secret Heiress, then?’

  Sybil slipped her arm through Miss Garfield’s arm and kissed her tenderly on the cheek as she told her who it was that had been the extraordinary answer to the mystery all along. But the impact of the news was lost to Miss Garfield, for at this moment a final person came to the front door, linking arms with Biddy and beaming with joy. This was the person whose face Miss Garfield hadn’t seen in many years, and yet she had never stopped thinking of fondly and missing dearly, and to whom she was profoundly grateful for all that this person had done.

  ‘Ida!’ she cried out, throwing her hands to her face. ‘Oh, my heavens, it’s Ida!’

  She had the gate open then and was rushing into her sister’s arms before anyone could even marvel at her uncharacteristic speed.

  • • •

  Some hours later Biddy took her seat in the kitchen of the little Carlton terrace house from which she had run away so long ago. She watched on warmly as Ida bustled at the stove, turned off the gas to the kettle and lifted it to fill a pot of tea.

  ‘I didn’t blame you,’ Ida told her. ‘I would have done the same. Well, I did do the same, or something like it, so I understood why you had to go.’ She brought the pot to the table to let it sit for the required five minutes with a cosy on top to hold in the heat. ‘Even if I didn’t much like it.’

  ‘Mum,’ Biddy started to say, but Ida hushed her.

  ‘I’m not your mum. It was lies,’ said Ida, bringing the cups and sugar bowl.

  Biddy felt tears prick her eyes again. ‘You are my mum. You raised me,’ she insisted. ‘I don’t care that you never gave birth to me, you’re still my mum.’

  ‘I should have told you the truth about it all,’ said Ida, shaking her head, ‘instead of letting you believe the wrong thing for so many years – and all for Samuel Hackett to turn up and tell you the truth himself.’

  ‘You never let me know anything about that place you worked – the Hall.’

  Ida nodded, ashamed. ‘Because of the circumstances, the scandal of it, Biddy, that’s why you couldn’t know.’ Then she said, ‘There’s something you should see.’

  She went to the kitchen dresser and opened a drawer. She withdrew a beautiful wooden box, inlaid with ivory in a Moorish design. She laid it on the table. ‘Open it.’

  Biddy did. Inked under the lid were the words ‘Remember Box’. Inside there were letters, dozens of them, in two different hands: one a perfect copperplate, the other less attractive. She had read a letter written in the latter hand before – the letter she had found in the hut; the letter that had felt somehow, but not quite, familiar, as if she had almost known of what it spoke.

  ‘Who wrote all these?’

  ‘The sisters,’ said Ida, ‘Margaret Gregory and her sister who died, Matilda.’ She pointed to one where the words were uneven, spotted with ink. ‘That’s Matilda’s hand. There’s a lot more of those. They make better sense. Read them first.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Biddy said.

  Ida took a chair next to her. ‘It’s all in there, everything that happened before you were born. Matilda put it all down. Read it, love, while we have our tea.’

  • • •

  Biddy broke off to look up at Ida. ‘That I even ended up in Summersby, Mum. It’s just so incredible!’

  ‘No incredible about it,’ said Ida, folding her arms. She looked to the ceiling and – Biddy imagined – towards some nameless deity beyond. ‘Some things are just meant to be and always were so.’

  Biddy returned to the letters.

  • • •

  Biddy was hugging Ida tightly before she’d even put the last letter down. Ida clattered and spilled her teacup. Neither of them cared.

  ‘I’m so sorry I ran away,’ Biddy sobbed.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Ida, crying too, ‘look what you went and found.’

  ‘It’s just so astonishing,’ Biddy said. ‘I went and ran away only to end up at the very place I was born.’

  Ida looked to the ceiling again. ‘That place is in your bones.’

  ‘But how was I born?’ Biddy asked. ‘The letters stop before then.’

  Ida took a long sip of tea. ‘Three women found themselves with child at Summersby seventeen years ago, pet. The first was Matilda, her pregnancy being the fruit of her wedding night with Samuel Hackett. The second was Margaret, whose love for Samuel was given flower the same night. But it turned out that Matilda wasn’t pregnant. Perhaps she thought she was at first, but time proved otherwise. That placed her in a spot because her sister was definitely expecting. In order to keep the lie going Matilda had to pad her own belly with cushion stuffing.’

  Biddy boggled at the lengths Matilda had gone to. ‘But who was the third woman?’

  Ida took a deep breath. ‘Me.’

  After all that she’d read, Biddy didn’t think she could know another shock, but she was wrong.

  Ida shook her head before Biddy could get the question out. ‘I’ll never tell you who the father was. I can’t bring myself to say it. You’ll likely guess anyway, but I only ask you not to speak the name to me.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’ Biddy’s tears were returning.

  ‘The man who forced his baby upon me took her away. He was violent. I miscarried. The baby was barely formed.’ She sipped her tea again, composing herself before going on. ‘Aggie found me in a bloodied bed the same day she found everything else. She found the two Matildas, one who was really Margaret, and one who was dead from a fall. She found Samuel Hackett, too, addled by powders I’d given him. She also found the man of whom I will not speak, who was never allowed to be a threat to us again.’

  Biddy dabbed at her tears with the tablecloth.

  ‘It fell to Aggie to fix everything,’ said Ida, recovering. ‘There was no one else to do it. What had come to matter most to her was Summersby. When she came to that house she gave herself over to it. She told herself she would never leave. She dedicated her life to making herself worthy of Summersby, but in my view, it was Summersby that wanted making itself worthy of her. But that was not what she thought. Aggie was too in awe of the great house and she wouldn’t let the scandal of what had happened bring it down. But I just wanted to leave that place behind me. I’d been broken by it, you see.’

  ‘Please go on, Mum,’ said Biddy. She could only guess how long Ida had been keeping this story inside her.

  Ida took the kettle to the water tap again and filled it before returning it to the stove. She struck a match and readied to make another brew. ‘Samuel Hackett had known two wives,’ she said. ‘With one, Margaret, he fathered a child. The other, Matilda, was dead. Such a course of events had to be hidden away, let alone everything that had led to it. Aggie won an ally in Miss Haines and together they arranged things so that the truth about Summersby was never known outside. Matilda was buried in the same grave she was supposedly buried in when she faked her death. There was something very right about that.’

  ‘But the baby?’

  Ida nodded as she watched the kettle bring to boil. ‘Margaret reached the end of her ninth month in the late spring of 1887. The birth was a surprise, and yet not a surprise, given the Gregory family history. She was delivered of twins – two girls, but not identical. Th
e first born was named Sybil.’

  Biddy looked at Ida in wonder, guessing what was coming. Ida smiled back at her, eyes shining. ‘The second child, my precious Biddy, was you. Margaret is your mum.’

  Biddy leapt from her chair and hugged her tight. But Ida wasn’t done. ‘There was never any question that Margaret – or Samuel – would remain in Summersby once the babies were born. Margaret was unable to live as a sane woman might. It wasn’t her fault, but she was incapable of raising a child.’

  ‘Oh, goodness,’ Biddy said.

  Ida stroked her hair. ‘Samuel Hackett had been left in a damaged state by the fall down the stairs and by what I had put in his wine and by the weight of betrayal, I suspect, the realisation that he’d been so deceived. He was here but not quite here; seeing sometimes, blind at others. He was just as broken, really. The solution was Constantine Hall.’

  ‘I understand now,’ said Biddy.

  ‘Margaret went back to the place that had played such an important part in her story. This time she had Samuel with her, now a patient like her. The Hall’s servants were well paid to stay silent. Margaret’s first-born girl, Sybil, remained at Summersby in Aggie’s good care. It was Aggie’s hope to raise the girl in ignorance of her shocking beginnings, and for all I know she has been successful there – it seems you have come to know her well, Biddy? We knew you were at Summersby from the telegraph message.’

  Biddy gasped in realisation. Her scribbled words to Sybil’s relatives, tacked on the end of Mrs Marshall’s letter, had ended up reaching her own family, because they were one and the same.

  ‘When we got that message I was so relieved,’ said Ida. ‘I made them send in reply that you had been wronged by us all and that it was time for you to know everything. But it sounds like maybe they didn’t do that – or not quite everything, anyway.’

  Biddy didn’t know how to answer. ‘They didn’t know who I really was . . . and neither did I.’

  Ida shook her head. ‘No child can remain in ignorance of the past. I learned this to my cost.’

  Biddy hugged her again. ‘But how did I end up here?’

  ‘Aggie wanted to raise you as well,’ Ida told her, ‘raise you with Sybil as sisters. But Margaret did not want this. She wanted you to go to me. When I lost my baby it was Margaret’s words that saved me, you see. She told me my baby had not died but was happy and safe in her womb. She meant it. She wanted me to be that baby’s mother. I think it was because Margaret felt responsible for me. I felt responsible for her, too. When she returned to the Hall, I went with her. I became her lady’s maid.’