The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  The kettle boiled and Ida took it from the gas. The actions of making and drinking a fresh pot of tea seemed to help her in saying what she had never said before. ‘I didn’t tell my mum, my aunties, anyone what had happened to me at Summersby. For years, while you were still very small, I kept sending my wages as a means of keeping my family away. This money went to schooling my sister, Evangeline, who was always the bright spark. When Evie finished her education, Aggie gave me the greatest gift she could. She hired Evie as governess for Sybil. This was when I took our little house in Carlton, and took for us both a new name, MacBryde, from a nice man I was friends with here.’

  ‘He was nice,’ said Biddy, remembering, even though his son Gordon had proved less so.

  ‘I didn’t want my family to find me,’ Ida said. ‘I didn’t want you anywhere near the Hall. I kept the secret of your birth from you, and let you believe you were an ordinary girl and not an heiress; a girl with no knowledge of shame. I never told you about a twin sister. I know now how very wrong this was. So many times I came close to telling you the truth about yourself, Biddy, and so many times I failed. It was no one’s fault but my own when the opportunity was stolen from me. The day Samuel Hackett came to this house, having followed me home, was almost the worst day of my life. But maybe I should think of it as the best day. In telling you he was your father, he ended the lies forever. There can only be truth with us now.’

  • • •

  When Biddy and Ida had each dried their eyes and sought out cake as a comfort, Biddy remembered with embarrassment that Lewis was still outside waiting for her in the street, no doubt rolling cigarettes.

  ‘Gawd, I’d almost forgotten about him!’

  Ida gave her a wry look. ‘As if you’d forget about him.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Biddy, blushing, knowing that her feelings might be on show.

  Ida waved the question away. ‘I’ve known Lewis Fitzwater since he was tiny,’ she said. ‘He and Jim Skews were taken under Summersby’s care. Aggie saw to that, although she was always more partial to Jim.’

  Biddy brought some cake outside to Lewis, along with some tea.

  ‘Thought you’d forgotten me,’ he said, grinning, pleased to see her.

  Ida was right. Looking at him in light of the late afternoon sun, Biddy knew she could never forget about Lewis. She was madly in love with him. Once he’d consumed the cake and tea and thanked her for them, she kissed him for the entire world to see. Peeking through the parlour curtains, Ida certainly saw it.

  Biddy came back inside, holding smiling Lewis by the hand.

  ‘Planning a double wedding with Sybil and Jim then, are you?’ Ida asked, cheekily.

  Mortified, Biddy was about to insist that they weren’t when one look at Lewis told her he might have other ideas.

  ‘He’s taken a shine to you,’ Ida declared in a stage whisper.

  Talk turned to future plans and Ida made to excuse herself. ‘The past has sorted itself out for me,’ she said, ‘the future can wait its turn.’

  Biddy was insistent. ‘You’re part of our future, Mum, and don’t think you’re getting out of it. I’m an heiress now, remember, the one they always called the Secret Heiress. If I say there’s a future then we’re bloomin’ well having one, and you can just lump it.’

  ‘I know my future already,’ said Ida, getting cross, ‘it’s the same as my present and the same as my past. I’ll go on working as lady’s maid to Miss Margaret up at the Hall.’

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said Biddy, folding her arms.

  ‘Oh, no?’ said Ida, mirroring her. ‘And how have you got that figured?’

  ‘Because there’ll be no more Hall,’ said Biddy. ‘The Hall is through.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ said Ida, incredulous.

  ‘What I’m talking about is going back to Summersby. All of us. We’re a bloomin’ family aren’t we?’

  Ida’s eyes popped.

  ‘We’re family,’ Biddy repeated. ‘And Summersby, for all of it’s dreadful draughts, and dogs in the night, and loonies and ghosties and crooks, is also a lovely place, a glorious place, and guess what, Mum, it’s home.’

  AGGIE

  FEBRUARY 1904

  12

  The news was brought by telegraph. With Jim still in Melbourne and no one else at Summersby who could work the machine, the message had been sent to the village Railway Stores and there conveyed by a boy in a horse and trap to Mrs Marshall. She’d been contemplating baking something when he’d shown up. Once she’d read the long message and digested it, she made the Railway Stores boy stay for some dinner. Then she sent him on his way. She returned to her oven and made rhubarb crumble. It didn’t take long.

  Basket under her arm, and accompanied by Joey, Mrs Marshall moved along the kitchen garden path that led to the gate in the far wall. Pushing it aside, she surveyed the stretch of Summersby grounds for a moment, the stone cottage in the distance. The housekeeper made the short walk to her destination, displaying a tight smile. The dog ran around her in happy circles and Mrs Marshall dwelled on the joy he had brought her. It was Margaret who had sent Joey all the way from Melbourne, Joey being the fourth generation of offspring from the original pairing of Matilda’s Billy, whom Margaret took with her to the Hall, and beloved Yip, whom Margaret found there, still devotedly waiting.

  Mrs Marshall reached the cottage and saw again with disapproval the evidence of those who lived there. Kicked off boots and cigarette ends among other unsightly debris. It was too much a male domain and Mrs Marshall made mental notes on how she would feminise it in future. Some potted pelargoniums could be bought and put in, she decided.

  She went to rap her knuckles on the door before re-thinking it. Leaving the basket at the doorstop, she went around the side of the cottage, Joey at her heels, and looked for the candle box. It wasn’t far from where she’d left it the last time, so she put it to its purpose again beneath the high window, standing on top to peer in. This time the bed and the room were empty.

  Mrs Marshall climbed down and went to the rear of the dwelling. A rickety wire door hung half off its hinges. The wooden door behind it was shut. Mrs Marshall hesitated and then tried the handle. It was unlocked. Turning the knob as quietly as she could, the housekeeper looked in. Inside was an ill-kept kitchen, as empty as the other room. She heard a dull noise from somewhere further inside the house that sounded like an object being dragged along the floor. Joey’s ears pricked up and he began a low growl.

  ‘Hush, Joey,’ Mrs Marshall told him.

  The dog fell quiet.

  A curtain divided the kitchen from the hallway beyond. Mrs Marshall lifted the fabric. There she found Barker shuffling along the floor on his crutches, making for the basket she’d left at the front door.

  • • •

  He fell upon the rhubarb crumble like a starving pig.

  ‘I thought you might appreciate a little something nice,’ said Aggie, watching him stuff his mouth with it. ‘Especially with the boys away.’

  In order to eat with something approaching decorum, Barker had heaved himself into his easy chair by the cold kitchen fire. Aggie suspected he’d have dined straight from the floor if there’d been no witnesses to it, and again she marvelled to herself at how easily he was able to get about, his battered pair of crutches being his preferred means of transport. His old injury had not much cowed him over the years, although it was true that he preferred to spend most of his days in bed.

  ‘There now,’ Aggie said when he had finished the rhubarb dessert, ‘I bet you’ve been missing good cooking, Mr Barker?’

  Barker’s automatic response would have been to sneer at her and most likely fire off an insult, but the possibility of further meals was plainly his incentive to remain civil for the moment. ‘It was passable,’ he said. He managed a smirk.

  The sight of those teeth, unfathomably hard and white as they ever were, was enough to make Aggie wish he’d kept them to himself.
‘So then,’ she said, regretting the lack of fire to boil a pot of tea. ‘Let’s have a chat about all that you’ve been up to, shall we?’

  She waited for his affronted look to pass.

  ‘Oh please, Mr Barker, let’s not have games between us. I think we’ve known each other long enough for that, don’t you?’

  She waited again.

  Barker’s look evolved to one of almost pantomimic innocence. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, woman.’

  ‘Mr Barker, do you really wish to offend me?’ Aggie wondered, with a chuckle in her voice.

  The chuckle had its effect. The ghost of a smirk appeared on Barker’s face beneath the fall of greying hair. Aggie tittered at seeing it. ‘There, just as I thought.’

  Barker snickered, too. ‘You’re a sharp one.’

  ‘You are incorrigible, Mr Barker,’ she told him, eyes twinkling. ‘A very wicked man.’

  ‘So what if I am?’ he shot. But he was enjoying himself with her now.

  ‘What confuses me is why you didn’t exploit young Jim?’

  He stroked his chin. ‘Do what now?’

  ‘Mr Barker.’ She was stern. ‘Didn’t we say no more games? Your nephew holds a very trusted position in the Summersby household, sending and receiving telegraph messages for us as he does. We’re almost at his mercy, really, with all that personal information that he sees. Yes, you could have done something there, surely, if you’d wished to, just to hurt us in some way.’

  ‘But I didn’t,’ he countered. ‘Yet you’re right, I could’ve.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Aggie, ‘especially if Jim had done something he shouldn’t have, perhaps? Something you found out about and thought you could use against him?’

  There was a long minute’s silence.

  ‘Who says he hasn’t then?’ said Barker.

  Aggie’s eyes widened. ‘Has he?’

  Barker just smirked, leaning back against the cushion.

  ‘Has he, Mr Barker?’ Mrs Marshall pressed. ‘Please tell me if he has. I would hate to think that our trust in Jim might have been misplaced in some way.’

  He leant forward in his chair, toying with her. ‘Give you such a nasty shock if ever you found out about it,’ he taunted. ‘A nasty shock indeed.’

  Aggie patted his knee. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘Is it that Jim and Sybil are sweethearts?’

  Barker’s stubbled jaw set.

  ‘I see that it is,’ said Aggie, gratified. ‘I’ve only recently found out about it myself as if happens.’ She thought of the message the boy had brought. She’d had time to grow accustomed to the shock of it – and it had been a shock – but Barker wasn’t to be allowed to know how badly it had hit her. ‘I think they’ll be very happy with each other,’ she declared, as much to persuade herself as anything else.

  ‘You were always a charmless liar,’ said Barker, seeing right through her.

  Aggie’s mouth tightened. ‘Unlike yourself, I suppose?’

  ‘What’s all your Secret Heiress palaver if not a half-cut fairytale from the start? You’d have done better to claim she just died at birth.’

  ‘You know very well that Sybil’s sister is real.’

  ‘I know very well you made a bloody big bogey out of it,’ said Barker, enjoying the high moral ground with Aggie for once, ‘and a rod for your own back now your lovely Sybil’s old enough to think. It gives me hours of pleasure mulling on how it must be coming back to bite you now.’

  Aggie drew a deep breath. ‘It was her mother’s wishes that the girls be separated. She was fearful of history repeating itself.’

  ‘You were fearful of it, more like; fearful of everything and anything that threatened your precious house. The lengths you went to hide it all!’ He laughed at the icy look on her face. ‘Nothing stays hidden forever, you know,’ he added.

  But Aggie did know. ‘You did try to exploit Jim, didn’t you?’ she asked. ‘You tried to blackmail him in some way, get him to tell you little secrets about us, so that you could upset us all with them somehow, and upset me more than anyone I have no doubt.’

  He watched her, expressionless.

  ‘But Jim said no. He called your bluff. He’s too decent a young man to be manipulated by you. Perhaps he guessed what really happened to his father all those years ago? Guessed you’d had more than a hand in it? That must have made you very cross to be refused by your nephew. Did he add insult to injury by laughing in your face? I can only imagine how angry that must have made you feel . . . so angry you wanted to hurt someone.’

  His eyes twinkled. Despite everything, he was delighted with himself; thinking he’d scored another mark against her.

  ‘Is that why you poured that nasty stuff into the bread?’ Aggie wondered.

  She saw him catch his breath.

  ‘Was it inside that old blue perfume bottle?’ she asked. ‘I went and looked in the stillroom afterwards, you see, because of something Biddy said, and that’s when I looked at the shelves. I found an old blue bottle up there from the late Mr Skews’ apothecary – a bottle I recognised, as well I should. Someone put some very nasty stuff in my food once. Did it come from the same bottle?’

  He was frozen, watching her.

  ‘There was nothing left inside when I found it this time, sadly, but I guessed that there had been up until then. There was no dust on it, you see. Someone else had rubbed it off.’ She looked at Barker’s near-useless legs, skeletal beneath his filthy trousers. ‘It beggars’ belief that you got into my kitchen without me seeing, but you did somehow, didn’t you, Mr Barker, and you have been coming in for some time. Late at night, perhaps, snooping about, stealing bits of food? That’s how you found the blue bottle at all, isn’t it? With you it’s always been where there’s a will there’s a way.’

  He put a hand to his temple as if the beginnings of a headache were coming on.

  On an impulse she kicked him in the shin.

  ‘Ow! Take a care, will you!? What’s the matter with you?’

  She leaned forward in the chair she was sitting in. ‘You didn’t give a damn who ate that bread, did you? No doubt you hoped that I would eat it or maybe Sybil, perhaps? It could even have been Jim who ended up with it as his dinner – would you have shed a tear then?’ She sniffed at him in disgust. ‘Probably not.’

  Aggie got to her feet and began returning the things she had brought to her basket. ‘I took some persuading not to bring the Law down on your head all those years ago when you did what you did to Mr Skews,’ she told him.

  ‘He was a drug fiend!’ Barker sneered. ‘I never got him hooked, that was all his own cretinism.’

  ‘Let alone for what you did to poor Ida.’

  He had no denial for that.

  Aggie put away the baking dish. ‘Such a vicious thing, rape. No matter how much you loved Miss Matilda, surely even you knew that that particular request was a step too far?’

  He sank deeper into his chair, trying to tune her out.

  ‘It was Ida who convinced me not to go to the Sergeant about it. She knew – and I knew, too, of course – that everything else that had happened would bring too big a scandal to Summersby, one we couldn’t have survived.’ She paused, thinking back on traumatic times. ‘So, I didn’t do anything to punish you back then. I suppose I thought being crippled was almost punishment enough.’ She covered the top of her basket with a folded dishcloth. ‘But I see now that it wasn’t.’

  She waited for that comment to register with him. It took a moment, but when it did he looked up at her. She was pleased to see a sliver of fear in his hateful black eyes. ‘Which is why I decided to punish you today.’

  Barker’s eyes bulged. The throbbing at his temple intensified.

  ‘I held onto that bread when I realised it had been poisoned,’ Aggie said, standing with her arms crossed protectively across her basket. ‘I put it carefully away, sealed so that no one could get to it. And when I worked out that it must have been you who’d put that stuff inside it
I resolved to make you eat it instead.’

  She pulled the curtain aside, ready to make the short walk to the front door. Joey was already waiting there, eager to be gone. ‘Not an easy thing to get a man to eat stale bread,’ she said, ‘no matter how hungry he gets. Then I thought of breadcrumbs. And then I thought of making a nice rhubarb crumble.’ Aggie took one last look at the repellent man who had made so many lives a misery; the man who’d exploited her fear of scandal and lived off Summersby grace and favour for too long. Aggie took comfort from the thought that the next time she looked at him he’d be lying stone-cold dead. ‘Do you know,’ she asked, as she ducked through the hallway curtain, ‘if you hadn’t been in a hurry to make a pig of yourself, you might have savoured my crumble a little more, you might have appreciated the hint of rosemary there. Not every cook would think to add rosemary to rhubarb, but my experience has shown me that it complements things very nicely. Very nicely indeed.’

  When Aggie pulled the front door closed behind her Summersby came into view. Retracing her steps towards the great house again, Joey by her side, Aggie found herself on the verge of a run. She made an effort to take hold of herself, conscious of her age and her standing. Then her mind wandered to the many tasks she would need to do if she was ever to prepare the house for the imminent return of the Gregorys. Before she knew it, Aggie was running fully, flying through the fresh autumn grass.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The Secret Heiress has been one of the longest creative roads I have ever hoed, and I have been humbled along the way by the patience and unceasing good humour shown to me by those who shared the trek at Simon & Schuster Australia, most especially Larissa Edwards, Roberta Ivers and Jody Lee. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my agent Lyn Tranter, who pulled no punches when reminding me of the differences between an intriguing mystery and a bewildering one. Andrew Brown, my partner of twenty-three years, experienced little joy in the creative journey, but this didn’t stop him feeding me, thank heavens. He also drove our move to Castlemaine a decade ago, and for that he’ll always be loved.