The Heiresses

by Allison Rushby

  It was at that moment that a shriek rang out, high above the patter of voices and resting of forks on plates, piercing the mood of the Grand Foyer. Everyone in the room quieted and turned in their seats in order to see where the sound emanated from.

  A girl of their own age absolutely bolted through the elegant room. She was the most artlessly beautiful person Thalia had ever seen in her life, with a perfect dark bob that swished just so and a black dress with an odd front made to look like a gentleman’s dinner shirt that seemed shockingly masculine. She dragged a very expensive-looking fur stole along on the ground behind her carelessly and her eyes scanned the tables in the room rather furiously, hunting for something as if her very life depended upon it. Before long, her eyes came to rest on the tiered cake stand of their party, which lay virtually untouched.

  “Oh, do tell me you have just the tiniest cucumber sandwich to spare?” she said as she raced over toward them. “Just the one! It’s for our scavenger hunt, you know, and I must win today, I really must.”

  Hestia gave the girl a long stare. “Do go home, Venetia. You’re making rather a fool of yourself, don’t you think? What would your mother say?”

  “I swear you won’t miss it at all.” Venetia ignored Hestia’s words, stole one of the cucumber sandwiches, blew the four of them a kiss, and took off once more. As she exited the room, there was another shriek. “I found one!” she proclaimed to someone out of their range of sight.

  Over their untouched tea and cakes, the foursome turned back to stare at one another. “Do you have any questions?” Hestia eventually asked.

  “I have one,” Thalia said. “Who was that? And what on earth was she doing?”

  “That was Venetia Saville. And she was doing what she usually does—precisely nothing but at a very high volume, preferably with most of London watching. Today, it seems, she’s on a scavenger hunt, treating the city as her playground, competing against some of her little friends and most likely her equally silly brother, Edwin. I’m sure we’ll read about it in all the newspapers tomorrow. Now, do we have any real questions? About the matter at hand?”

  The three girls’ eyes met. There were so many questions. Hundreds of questions. About each other, about their parents, about their half brother, about this fortune Hestia had mentioned. But, right now, not one of the girls could put a voice to any of them. There were simply so many questions jostling for attention, aching to come out, that it was difficult to define and ask the first one. Hestia seemed to understand this. “There will be plenty of time to ask. Many, many years, I am hoping. But for now, I must force you to drink your tea and eat at least one cake. I’m sure that is what your mother would want for her three beautiful daughters.”

  Silently, the girls did as they were told, washing down the cake that caught in their throats with the now lukewarm tea.

  * * *

  Ro had another question entirely—one that neither of her two sisters had even considered. It had been bubbling inside her since the very moment she had laid eyes on Clio, the third triplet. On every instance of Hestia pausing for breath, or asking if the girls had any questions, her question bubbled a little higher inside her, rather like a kettle on a hot stove, though the fire, in this case, was lit by what Ro knew. Something, obviously, that the others did not know. With another sip of her tea, she tried to quench the fire, but she was becoming more and more worried that, soon enough, she would have to speak up. How could she not? They could not continue this … farce. She busied herself, replacing her cup upon her saucer and found that her now shaking hand made it clatter noisily. Should she tell them? Now? Just as she had looked up once more and was about to open her mouth and start speaking, however, Hestia continued her incessant chatter.

  “I’m determined to win this money back for you so you need never depend upon a man as your mother had to. Yes, despite the Married Women’s Property Act and all because of our archaic paternal grandparents with their positively Victorian ideas about money. I have one word for you girls: independence. Independence is everything in this man’s world. There is nothing more liberating than being able to make your own decisions in life. We will claim this money from Charles. It will be yours. And while we are doing so, I suggest that you come and live with me, in London, under my care. To begin our quest, I have arranged for all of us to meet with him tomorrow and—”

  “Wait! Stop!” Ro spoke up a little too loudly, putting a halt to the barrage of information. Her shoulders sagged slightly as soon as the hasty words exited her mouth. She had not meant to start this way, but now it was too late—the kettle had boiled over. Several parties at tables situated nearby glanced over to see what the commotion was about. “Sorry,” she said more quietly. “It’s just that”—she paused—“I must say something…”

  “Yes?” Hestia urged her on, under the interested gaze of her sisters.

  Ro closed her eyes for a moment and put her fingers to her temples, trying to gather the many thoughts that seemed to knock against each other in her head, all vying for attention at once. She wondered how to put what she was about to say. Was there any good way to say it? In the Grand Foyer of the Savoy, life continued to sparkle around them, voices chattered, people laughed gaily, forks tinkled against plates. It seemed wrong to give voice to these thoughts in such a place and before this timid, dark-haired, wide-eyed girl as well, which seemed particularly cruel. But she must say it before things went any further. She must.

  “Ro?” her aunt asked, trying once more.

  Ro opened her eyes and let the words spill forth, tumbling over one another as she spoke too fast. “This is all very interesting and I’m quite sure with all our similarities that Thalia and I are related in some way. I don’t know if you’re … confused, or whether it’s something else, but you see we can’t go rushing into claiming some sort of fortune from this Charles fellow, because we’re not triplets. Clio can’t be our sister. You said before that both our parents had blue eyes. That means we can’t have a sibling with brown eyes. Not a full sibling, anyway. You see, it’s scientifically impossible.”

  The Inheritance

  There were those few dreamy moments on waking in which Clio believed everything in her life to be normal—that she was home, beneath the warm, familiar blankets of her own bed, and her mother was close by, asleep in the equally small room next door. In the dim light of the early morning, she smiled slightly and turned over onto her side, pulling the blankets closer around her. And then she felt the strange smoothness of the sheets, smelled the odd crisp fragrance of the new pillow beneath her head. That was when she remembered it all—being dragged to London, where she was told she was a triplet and that she might also be an heiress. If she was willing to fight her half brother for money, that is. And then being told she couldn’t possibly be a triplet. Slowly, not wanting to believe any of it, she opened her eyes. Instead of her friendly bedroom and few belongings, each with its own history and neatly in its place, a vast, sparsely furnished room surrounded her, full of glossy wood, with sharp and unfriendly angles.

  Clio sat up now, her eyes skating over the furnishings. The overall effect was something akin to an expensive dollhouse where the owner had simply chosen the items all at once from a store—“Yes, I’ll take that and that and that”—and then simply discarded everything that had previously existed in the bedroom but now didn’t belong. As if money did not matter. And she supposed it didn’t. Just last night, Hestia had informed her nieces that if they needed money for little things, there was some kept in a desk drawer in the library. She had then proceeded to show them where. When Hestia had opened the drawer, Clio could not help but gasp—it was literally stuffed haphazardly with notes. Stuffed to the very brim! Instantly she had known that this was a different world she had stepped into. A world in which there was an endless supply of almost everything—money, furniture, food, clothes. Taking another look around the room, Clio knew one thing for sure: there was only one item that did not belong in this room. And that item w
as her.

  Clio got up now and crossed the room, drawing back the curtains when she reached the window with its twelve rectangular panes. It was earlier than she had first thought, she realized, as she looked down onto the empty street below. She felt the unfamiliar nightgown on her skin and ran her hands up and down her arms, remembering the events of the previous day.

  When Hestia had told them afternoon tea was over (and they had needed to be told, for no one had truly eaten very much), she had herded the three girls outside and hailed a cab. They had all piled in and returned to the town house in Belgravia. There, she had proceeded to inform them that they would be staying at the town house for the night, before meeting their half brother the following day. When Clio had tried to protest that she needed to return to her mother, Hestia had waved her concerns away. Surely her mother could spare her for one night? Hestia had telephoned Thalia’s family (though Thalia had not seemed to care one bit whether they were informed or not), left a message for Ro’s uncle at his hotel, and sent a telegram to Clio’s mother, as they had no telephone, of course.

  After this there was more food in the dining room, which Clio could not eat, as before. She supposed it was dinner, but she found she had lost track of time, and the conversation ricocheting back and forth across the too-wide table made her head spin. Thalia, especially, made her nervous. She was beautiful and confident, for a start—traits that always struck fear into Clio’s heart, because beautiful, confident people never seemed to be at a loss for words, as she often was. Also, people rarely disliked her, yet Thalia had seemed set against her from the moment she had laid eyes on her. She didn’t know how to make it right. As for Ro, while she was lovely and seemed kind, Clio could not help but look from her, sitting on one side of the dining table, to Thalia, sitting on the other. She did this over and over and over again. As if to torture herself. They were a matching pair. And she … well, who knew what she was? Perhaps Hestia sensed her agitation, because they did not spend long in the drawing room after dinner, when Hestia suggested an early night. She could not remember ever having been so relieved to go to bed.

  Leaving the window, Clio made her way around the large room, touching this and that—the enormous wooden wardrobe, the long, thin writing table, the dressing table—all the while doubting they had ever been touched by a guest before. She paused beside the dressing table to stare at the neat little sink, tucked in beside it. She had never seen a sink in a bedroom before. Beside the sink, on a small stand, there was a washcloth waiting for her, as well as some tooth powder, a toothbrush, and lavender-scented soap. She made use of all of these things and then located her clothes, which for a moment she feared had been stolen away, but found they had simply been hung in the wardrobe. She supposed this must be what it was like to be wealthy. Imagine having everything done for you at every turn!

  After this, Clio tidied the room, located the book she had borrowed from her aunt, sat down gingerly in the armchair that looked as if it had never been sat in before, and read, too scared to exit the room, her stomach flip-flopping with hunger and worry about what the day might bring.

  * * *

  “If you’d like to follow me to the drawing room, I have something to show you,” Hestia told the girls after they had finished their breakfast in the dining room. Thalia glanced at Ro to see if she knew what this was all about and Ro shook her head slightly. Why did everyone believe she knew more of what was going on than they did? Ro noticed that Thalia did not bother asking Clio.

  In the drawing room, Hestia motioned for all three of them to sit beside each other on one of the long, low sofas.

  “Here we are.” Hestia picked up a thick, dark cardboard box that was lying on a small, square side table. Then she moved a chair, coming to sit close by, and opened the box carefully on her lap.

  “Oh, photographs!” Ro leaned forward in her seat.

  “There aren’t very many, I’m afraid.” Hestia took the few photographs out of the box. “Things were a little different then. You didn’t simply have your picture taken all the time. Oh…” She paused on seeing one particular photograph. “Now, this is my favorite.” Hestia laughed, passing it to Clio first, who was seated closest to her.

  Ro leaned over to see the photograph as well and then smiled when she realized why her aunt favored it. “You’re scowling!”

  “Yes, quite the scowl, I’m afraid! I’m scowling because your dear mother had just kicked me in the shin. To be fair, I deserved it. We’d been made to stand around for simply ages and I’d been pinching her and sticking out my tongue at her relentlessly. I got in terrible trouble for scowling in every single photograph.”

  The four of them stared at the photograph for a moment or two, taking in the two figures, both dressed in their white, wide-sashed dresses, their long hair pulled back on top with a ribbon—one girl was smiling triumphantly, eyes bright, while one girl was scowling, but both possessed the same fair hair and large, light-colored eyes. “The sashes were blue, to match our eyes,” Hestia said, dreamily, reaching out to touch the photograph once more.

  “How old are you here?” Clio looked up from beneath her dark lashes.

  “I was seven years old, which meant Demeter would have been eight.” The question seemed to return Hestia to the present and she looked down at her lap once more, selecting another photograph. “Here are some others from around the same time. Oh, and a picture of us as nothing more than babies, really. And another from when we are eleven and twelve.” She passed the photographs to the girls, who studied them dutifully. “And here is your mother on her wedding day.” This photograph Hestia seemed slightly reluctant to pass to them, her eyes resting on the image of her sister for some time.

  Ro took this photograph first. It seemed to have been taken as the newly married couple exited the church. The woman (her mother—how odd it felt to think this!) clasped the arm of the man—her father—in an odd sort of halfhearted, dangly way. Neither of them looked particularly happy. While the man gazed directly into the camera, the woman gave only the impression of doing so, her thoughts elsewhere. Her image bore a striking similarity to Thalia, but, oddly, not as much so as in the previous photographs of her as a child, Ro thought. In those photographs, her personality had shone through and was captured by the camera. Here, she seemed rather … subdued. She did, however, look beautiful. Breathtakingly so. Her long dress falling elegantly to the floor, a shimmering, sheer layer skimming over the top of her silk-covered form, her waist cinched to nothing, highlighted by the dress’s large square neckline. A matching veil had been thrown away from her face, held on by a glittering halo of diamonds in a tiara resembling a laurel wreath.

  “What a beautiful tiara,” Thalia noted, accepting the photograph from Ro.

  “Yes, our father had several of our mother’s jewels altered to create it,” Hestia replied, distracted. Ro glanced at her aunt to see another photograph in her hand. “But this photograph … this is the closest you will ever come to seeing what your mother truly looked like. There is everything of her here.” Now that Hestia had said this it was almost as though she could not bear to look at the photograph any longer. She held it out toward all three of the girls, as if begging someone to take it from her, then stared at the girls’ expressions, waiting to hear their thoughts.

  Ro took the photograph first and immediately saw what her aunt was talking about. It was of Demeter around the same age as her daughters were now, in a rowboat, obviously on somebody’s estate, as there was no one else around but a few well-dressed watchers-on standing on a small iron bridge. Behind them, the kind of basket and glassware picnic that required servants was laid out. It was an extremely informal photograph for the time and Ro suspected it was meant to be posed, but the situation had gone awry. There were several children in the boat with Demeter, one of whom (a boy of perhaps eight or nine) was standing up when he was surely not supposed to. Demeter’s face was turned to the camera and upon it was a mixture of laughter, exasperation, and love. She se
emed a completely different person from the one in the wedding photograph, Ro noted—carefree and happy. But the thing that truly took Ro’s breath away was the similarity to Thalia. It could have been Thalia in that boat, if Ro had not known better. There were undercurrents of her own looks, she could see that—the eyes, the hair, the nose—but the overall effect was Thalia. All Thalia.

  “Oh.” At the exclamation, Ro managed to drag her eyes from the photograph to see Clio’s hand fly to her chest and, watching her, she immediately regretted her hasty words yesterday, telling Clio she could not be one of them. Not that it mattered now, because, with not a single word uttered, this was worse—a slap across Clio’s cheek. “Oh,” she repeated. Ro could not blame her. There was nothing of Clio there. Nothing.

  “What’s the matter?” Thalia glanced over at Clio.

  “What do you think?” Ro hissed, sitting in between the pair. Why did Thalia feel the need to taunt Clio at every opportunity?

  After a moment or two, Hestia reached out hesitantly to touch Clio’s knee. “I do believe you are the image of your father,” she told her niece, with a decisive nod. Ro frowned slightly on hearing this, but said nothing. As for Clio, she shuffled the photographs in her hand until she reached the one from the wedding once more. She stared at her father intensely, as if looking for even the smallest resemblance. And, because there was none, all the time her eyes kept moving, moving, moving over the photograph. Beside her, Ro watched her expression, wanting to say something (was her aunt insane after all? Clio did not resemble the man pictured in the slightest!), but knowing that there was nothing to be said.