The Secret Heiress

by Luke Devenish

  ‘Not yet,’ said Sybil, ‘I’m enjoying our nice walk. And Miss Garfield will only propose something dull for me to do.’

  Biddy nodded and linked her arm through Sybil’s. Both girls glanced at the wire that stretched from the eastern wall, across the grounds, and all the way to Castlemaine.

  • • •

  Biddy and Sybil returned to the house via the kitchen door. The big room was hot and deserted. Something delicious baked in the oven and preparations had been made for luncheon, but Mrs Marshall was not in evidence.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Biddy.

  ‘So am I,’ said Sybil.

  ‘You had an upset tummy at breakfast and don’t pretend.’

  Sybil looked profoundly shocked that Biddy had guessed this without being told.

  ‘Well, you did,’ said Biddy, ‘you were looking very green around the gills. Do you feel better now?’

  ‘A little,’ said Sybil, self-consciously. ‘Enough to feel hungry.’

  ‘Shall we rob the pantry?’

  ‘Biddy, you’re so sinful.’

  ‘We’ll only be borrowing,’ said Biddy. ‘I’ll just add it to my long list.’

  ‘Biddy, you’re very naughty, and if I didn’t know you better I’d almost think you were making fun of me.’

  ‘Never, my beloved dear friend,’ said Biddy, striking an angelic pose. ‘Now what do you feel like eating? If I were still with the Reverend, I’d be going straight for the tins of condensed milk.’

  ‘Is that something nice?’

  ‘Heaven!’ said Biddy, in raptures. ‘But Mrs Marshall won’t get it in, so it’s no surprise you’ve never tried it.’

  Sybil tentatively poked around. ‘Mrs Marshall’s made some fresh butter.’

  Biddy was dismissive of this. ‘Very inferior, I’m used to factory-made butter,’ she said. ‘Mrs Marshall’s butter comes straight from the cow.’

  Sybil laughed. ‘Well, where else would it come from?’

  ‘It’s no laughing matter, Sybil, Summersby’s backward when it comes to Pasteurisation. Don’t you know milk’s got germs in it?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Summersby’s cows.’

  ‘That we know of,’ said Biddy. ‘What if they’ve been eating cape weed? That’ll knock the flavour halfway to Easter. And if it’s been churned too much? There’ll be lumps in it the size of your ear. And what if it tastes like soap? Someone forgot to wash the butter pail properly, that’s what. And if it tastes a bit flat? The dairy’s got riddled with damp. And God help us if it tastes like carrots. That means the butter turned out far too pale so someone went and made it yellow by fakery.’

  Sybil often seemed to marvel at the things Biddy knew – or gave the appearance of knowing. ‘How do you even have room for things like that inside your head?’

  Biddy considered. ‘I suppose I want them there. There’s nothing I don’t know that isn’t useful. How do you have the room for all that French and Latin inside your head?’

  ‘I have room because my relatives have instructed me to,’ said Sybil, matter-of-fact.

  Biddy let that sit uncommented upon. ‘My relatives wish it’ had come to be the explanation for far too many dull and dispiriting things at Summersby, which was especially rich, in Biddy’s view, given these mysterious personages didn’t even live here.

  ‘Something sweet,’ Sybil pleaded. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘Who’ll keep lookout then?’

  ‘I will,’ said Sybil, ‘I couldn’t hold my nerve to do any of the stealing.’

  ‘Borrowing.’

  ‘I still couldn’t do it. I’d go to pieces.’

  ‘And you won’t go to pieces if Mrs Marshall comes back and you have to distract her at the door?’

  Sybil looked comically stricken. ‘Gaining a sister has proved to be educating in ways I could never have imagined before I found you, Biddy.’

  ‘Quick! The clock is ticking.’

  ‘Just find some food!’ said Sybil, laughing.

  She went and stood at the baize door as Biddy popped into Mrs Marshall’s stillroom to see what she might uncover. Biddy was rewarded by the sight of several dozen freshly baked biscuits. Pinching four of them, she was about to conceal the booty in a fold of her skirt when she heard a cry from somewhere in the rooms outside. It was Mrs Marshall. Immediately there was a second noise, like a wail about to break out only to be cut off before barely a sound had emerged.

  ‘Sybil . . .?’ Biddy hissed. She could half hear voices from a hushed conversation being held beyond the baize door. Mrs Marshall had evidently returned, found Sybil’s ‘guarding’ to be rightly suspicious, and the nervous girl was now spilling everything. Biddy felt a rush of indignation. ‘Whose house is it, anyway?’ she said to herself. ‘Why can’t she have a bit of food? She’s not bloody Oliver Twist!’

  But Biddy looked at the biscuits in her skirt fold and immediately shoved them back where she had found them, guilty. She crept to the stillroom door and stood, not daring to peak out. She heard the low tones of Mrs Marshall’s voice distinctly now, and some kind of halting reply from Sybil, before the fluty tones of Miss Garfield came in on top of both of them. Biddy felt ill. ‘They’ve both got into it . . .’ she said. ‘That’s it then.’

  Smoothing down her skirt and trying to hide her escaped fronds of hair, Biddy took a deep breath. She couldn’t let Sybil make a mess of things all alone.

  ‘Who’s there?’ called Biddy, brightly, and stepping out from the stillroom as if being discovered in there was the most natural thing in the world. She was at once brought up short by Sybil, the housekeeper and the governess all staring at her from the baize door, their expressions as one in shock.

  Biddy decided it was pointless attempting to make up stories when indignation might prove the stronger weapon. ‘Why shouldn’t she have a snack between her meal times?’ she demanded. ‘It’s not going to kill anybody and there’s plenty to spare!’

  ‘Biddy . . .’ a pale Miss Garfield started to say.

  ‘She’s got growing pains!’ Biddy overrode her. ‘If you two crows knew how bad she had them you’d be ashamed of yourselves for denying her the sustenance.’

  Miss Garfield flushed. ‘Biddy!’

  ‘Well, it’s true. You’re both so stiff and sour you’ve forgotten what growing pains feel like.’

  Mrs Marshall stepped forward, angry. ‘That’s quite enough, my girl.’

  Biddy flinched, her gall failing. ‘I’m only trying to be a good companion.’

  This unexpectedly silenced both women.

  ‘Well, I am,’ said Biddy.

  Sybil stepped forward and Biddy only saw now that she had taken on an air of calm, at odds with the two women who corralled her. ‘It doesn’t matter about the food.’

  Biddy blinked. Sybil was transformed, empowered somehow, yet dignified with it and suddenly looking older. The girl clearly believed she possessed some kind of upper hand, but Biddy knew she was deluded. ‘It does matter,’ she said, ashamed. ‘I’m a dreadful companion making you do wicked things, Sybil. If Mrs Marshall doesn’t want you to eat between your mealtimes then I’m terrible for making you go against it. She wants what’s best for you and I’ve got no right to tell you otherwise.’

  ‘Enough!’ barked Mrs Marshall.

  Biddy blanched.

  ‘Biddy,’ said Sybil, ‘you mustn’t worry about any of that now.’

  ‘All right . . .’ Biddy realised then that something of considerable importance was about to be made known to her, and a sudden, fleeting image of Jim Skews huddled over the telegraph machine entered her head before it snapped from her sight like a lightning bolt.

  ‘My relatives have sent a telegraph message,’ said Sybil. ‘That is what the young man you saw earlier does for us—’

  ‘Sybil . . .’ Miss Garfield warned.

  The girl ignored her governess. ‘He sends and receives such things for us.’

  Biddy tried to look as if this was news. ‘Why not just
send letters?’

  ‘The message that came this morning concerns you.’

  Biddy’s heart stopped. The housekeeper and governess, standing on either side of Sybil, looked stunned, Biddy realised; both were at sea with whatever it was that had happened.

  ‘Our dear Mrs Marshall and Miss Garfield are mystified,’ said Sybil. ‘They did not know my relatives knew I had taken a companion at all. They had not told my relatives themselves, you see.’

  Biddy did see, but gave no indication of it.

  ‘Nobody told them and yet somehow they knew.’

  Biddy ventured to say something but stopped. She realised that she wasn’t about to be accused of anything.

  ‘My relatives are very resourceful and this is a reminder to me and to all of us that we are wise not to underestimate what this resourcefulness might achieve.’

  ‘What do your relatives say about me?’ Biddy whispered.

  Mrs Marshall cleared her throat, about to object, but Miss Garfield held up a silencing hand. ‘It is nothing unpleasant, Biddy,’ she assured.

  Sybil lifted a sheet of paper she had been holding in her gloved hand. It was Jim’s transcription of Sybil’s relatives’ telegraphed words. ‘This is what they sent,’ said Sybil, turning the paper so that Biddy could read it.

  Biddy has been wronged. You must tell her what she needs to know.

  Biddy felt as if the floor had dropped from under her. Wronged?

  ‘Is that all?’ she asked in a small voice.

  ‘Yes. That is all,’ Sybil said, ‘but Mrs Marshall and Miss Garfield both agree it is more than enough.’

  • • •

  ‘So how can it be that you know nothing of the parents who brought you into the world?’ Biddy demanded of Sybil, when they sat alone together in Sybil’s room. Some information had now been explained to her by Miss Garfield and Mrs Marshall in chorus, but to Biddy’s mind all their words were worthless until elaborated upon in private by Sybil herself.

  Sybil rubbed at her tummy, feeling decidedly unwell again. She had taken off her corset in the privacy of her room. ‘It’s because I have no memory of them.’

  ‘But how can it be that no one has ever told you anything about them at all?’

  Sybil was seeking a way to answer this question. ‘Miss Garfield and Mrs Marshall have been given no facts regarding my birth,’ she told her, ‘aside from the knowledge that I have relatives, who are also their employers, and who also own Summersby. What Miss Garfield and Mrs Marshall have been given are my relatives’ expressed wishes that I be discouraged from acquiring the facts myself.’

  Biddy couldn’t help but think of how her once-mother Ida might have responded if told such information. ‘Well, that’s all very convenient, isn’t it?’ she sniffed.

  Sybil looked startled.

  ‘Well, isn’t it? Miss Garfield and Mrs Marshall don’t know anything and they’re under orders to stop you from knowing anything, too. Therefore, nobody knows a sausage! Your relatives might as well have made this rule just to cause curiosity, not to end it.’

  She watched the other girl processing these words.

  Sybil went to her mahogany dressing table and slipped open a drawer. Beneath a layer of silks was a small photograph mounted on card. She returned with it to Biddy by the bed. ‘I have this,’ she said. It was a portrait of a young woman, perhaps a little older than Biddy and Sybil were now, but with clothes arranged in the style of the 1880s. The woman was beautifully dressed, her dark hair falling down her back, her body angled away from the lens, her face turned over her shoulder to greet the viewer’s gaze.

  Biddy was almost struck dumb by the young woman’s dark beauty. ‘Is she an actress? She looks like she should be on stage at the Princess Theatre.’

  The woman in the photograph seemed to smile with her eyes only; eyes that knew secrets. Biddy turned the photo over. On the reverse, someone had written a name and date in fine, smooth copperplate.

  Matilda. 1884.

  ‘I believe she could be my mother,’ said Sybil.

  The name struck a chord for Biddy. Hadn’t the letter she had found and accidently burned at the hut been written by a Matilda? Biddy stared at the fine features of the young woman and could see a resemblance to Sybil that was undeniable. They shared each other’s large, smooth brow, and the gentle curve of their upper lips. They could be mother and daughter easily. And yet Biddy had thought the letter-writing Matilda sounded like rather a sinister person with her story of changing places to fool people, and the servant who had not been fooled.

  ‘I have had this photograph for as long as I can remember,’ said Sybil, rubbing her tummy again where it ached. ‘I found it when I was very small. I have never told anyone else of it, or shown anyone. Miss Garfield and Mrs Marshall have no idea I have it.’ She looked sadly at the photograph again, at the other young woman, so attractive in her 1880s finery. ‘I know nothing more than her name. The truth of her is, I suspect, that’s she’s long dead.’

  Biddy suspected this was right, given her letter had been lost in the hut. She felt sad for her. ‘Sit down and rest, you still look very peaky today,’ she said.

  Sybil shook her head and returned the photograph to the dressing-table drawer. ‘Perhaps my relatives do want me to be curious,’ she said, turning to Biddy, ‘and that, of course, is the test.’

  Biddy raised her eyebrows.

  ‘My life is full of tests and this is just another one,’ said Sybil. ‘I have every faith that one day I will be permitted to know my mother’s name, and know my father’s name, too, and indeed the names of all my relatives. But if I go and try to find things out for myself, whatever I find will only get back to them and bring displeasure.’

  ‘But these people don’t even live here,’ said Biddy in dismay.

  ‘They found out about you, didn’t they?’

  Biddy let the circumstances of that discovery remain obscure. ‘Why should it be forbidden to know the truth about your own beginnings?’ she asked. ‘It seems very cruel.’

  Sybil looked uncomfortable. ‘I believe that the circumstances of my birth must be a source of great shame, Biddy.’

  Biddy opened her mouth and closed it again without saying anything. She remembered Mrs Marshall’s dread of scandal.

  ‘The circumstances have never been called as such and I have never heard them uttered so by anyone, but shameful they can only be, for what other reason could there be for hiding them?’

  ‘But these people are your blood, aren’t they?’ Biddy asked, hurt for her. ‘Don’t they have love for you at all?’

  ‘My relatives love me with all their hearts,’ Sybil said, quickly, ‘I have never doubted that for a moment. It’s because I’m loved so much that everything, well . . .’ she gestured around her at the room and the house and the grounds beyond the windows, ‘everything is . . .’

  ‘Everything is strange and mysterious you mean?’

  ‘That’s not true . . .’ said Sybil, offended.

  Biddy dropped onto Sybil’s big, lace-covered bed, and looked up at the ornate ceiling as she sought a way to begin afresh. ‘Listen, Sybil,’ she started, ‘I’m your companion, aren’t I? Companions tell you their honest thoughts about things and I’m telling you that everything here is like nothing out there.’

  Sybil sat down next to her with a degree more delicacy, taking care not to crease her skirt. ‘I’ve seen so little of the world to compare it to.’

  ‘That’s something that you and I are going to put to rights.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Sybil, alarmed.

  Biddy waved the question away for the moment. ‘Why do these people keep you here when they don’t live here themselves? Tell me about that again.’

  ‘You’ll be tiring of me talking about it soon,’ said Sybil.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ said Biddy, ‘I’ll never tire of it. It’s like something out of a book. You’re like something out of a book. It’s the most fascinating topic in the universe to me.
No one could make up this sort of thing.’

  Sybil smiled at that. ‘All right then. They keep me here in readiness.’

  ‘For what? Kingdom come?’

  ‘Don’t blaspheme, Biddy. My readiness requires much preparation by way of education and refinement under Miss Garfield’s direction, and now that you’re here, preparation through companionship, too. When my relatives declare the preparation complete, why, then I’ll be ready.’

  Biddy waited.

  ‘For my inheritance.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Sybil got to her feet again and spread her arms wide. ‘All this. I am the Summersby heiress,’ she said.

  Biddy was looking at her cock-eyed.

  ‘Well, I am,’ said Sybil with a toss of her head. ‘My relatives own it.’

  Biddy studied the girl. ‘So, you’re the Summersby heiress, who has lived at Summersby your whole life.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Who has never known anything else but this grand house and its beautiful grounds . . .’

  ‘And the little village of Summersby, I know that, too.’

  ‘And Castlemaine when allowed chaperoned visits.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘But anywhere beyond that?’

  Sybil shook her head. ‘My relatives’ wishes are clear. I am not to journey any further until such time as it is permitted. That is, if I wish to remain the heiress. But I have every faith that one day the reasons for my restriction will be revealed to me.’

  Biddy narrowed her eyes. ‘So, you’re the Summersby heiress who has never known anything except Summersby and your whole life has been lived in preparation to inherit it . . . but you still might not?’

  Sybil set her mouth in a firm line.

  ‘Did I get that wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Sybil, finally. ‘You understood what Miss Garfield told you quite correctly, Biddy. I am the Summersby heiress, but I will not inherit my relatives’ wealth and property if I’m found . . . to be wanting in some way, when the call comes to meet my relatives in person . . .’