An Unconventional Heiress

by Paula Marshall

  ‘Couldn’t have done it wivout him,’ declared Sukie, whose diction seemed to be deteriorating with every sentence she uttered.

  ‘This way, Miss Sarah,’ said Carter gravely. He escorted her into the stables and to the ladder leading into the hayloft. ‘I’ll help you up.’

  There, in the hay, on an improvised bed, lay Annie, face ashen and eyes closed. Her breathing was rapid and shallow. Bloodstained cloths lay beside her.

  ‘She were taken much worse this morning,’ Carter told her. ‘I fear that she’s in a bad way.’

  ‘How long have you been hiding her in the stables?’ asked Sarah.

  ‘Since she ran away,’ Sukie said. ‘She was very ill when she came here and asked us to help her. We knew that if we told anyone Mrs Bell would come to take her away and would send her back to the mill.’

  Sarah knelt down in the hay with a total disregard for her pretty gown, and felt Annie’s forehead. Annie gave no sign that she was aware of her presence. Even with her limited medical knowledge Sarah could see that she was dangerously ill.

  She rose and, signing to Sukie and Carter to follow her, made her way down the ladder.

  ‘We shall have to send for her mother and for Dr Kerr,’ she said briefly, ‘and even then we may be too late to save her—if she was ever saveable, that is.’

  ‘No, no,’ gabbled Sukie, grabbing at Sarah’s skirts. ‘Don’t do that. It’ll be the death of her. Her ma will send her back to the mill and I shall be tried and sentenced to go to the Factory Farm for helping her. Carter will be punished, too.’

  ‘Even Mrs Bell can’t send Annie back to the mill in this state,’ said Sarah angrily, although at whom her anger was directed she did not know. Principally at herself, for her blindness in not connecting the missing food with Annie’s disappearance and the distracted Sukie’s altered condition.

  ‘I wonder at you, Carter, for helping Sukie. Why did you not tell me that you were hiding Annie? I might have found some way out for you, but now…’

  ‘The little maid didn’t seem quite so ill when she came to Sukie for help,’ said Carter. ‘She grew much worse yesterday.’

  ‘She was already ill when I last saw her,’ Sarah snapped. ‘But we mustn’t stand here idly gossiping. Carter, you must run and fetch Dr Kerr immediately. I can’t answer for Annie’s life if you don’t. We’ll think about saving you and Sukie from the law when we’ve done something for Annie. Most of all, we mustn’t let Mr John or Mrs Hackett find out about this yet. We shall all be sent to Sydney’s deepest dungeons if either of them discover what we’ve been up to before I’ve had time to invent something that will save us.

  ‘Sukie, go and sit with Annie. She shouldn’t be left alone.’

  Sarah went slowly back into the house when she had sent Carter on his way. There was no question of her setting off for Lucy’s party until Alan had come. She thought of him as Alan almost unconsciously. Alan would know what to do. Alan would think of something that would save Carter and Sukie from punishment for the imbroglio into which their kind hearts had led them. Alan might even be able to save Annie.

  How long had Sukie and Carter been hiding her? It must have been for at least a week, since it was about that time when Mrs Hackett had first begun to complain of the missing food. It was a little less than that when Mrs Bell had arrived at their door, breathing fire. Well, without knowing it, she had certainly come to the right place!

  Sarah looked at her little fob watch. It seemed highly likely that Sukie, having ruined Race Day for her by involving her in the birth of Nellie’s baby, was about to ruin Lucy’s birthday party for her, too.

  She shrugged her shoulders. Lucy would be wondering why she had not turned up by now, but she possessed no means of informing her that she might be delayed. It was a blessing that John was out on a painting expedition and was not due at the party until the tea board arrived. That only left Mrs Hackett to be avoided until she left for the afternoon.

  Fortunately this time Alan Kerr was at home and arrived very rapidly. Carter, instead of taking him straight to the stables, had the good sense to bring him into the house where Sarah received him. On the way back to the Langleys he had also given Alan a brief explanation of what he would find there, before he joined Sukie in her vigil.

  Alan’s face was grave. ‘So, all is explained—Annie’s disappearance, the missing food and Sukie’s odd behaviour.’

  ‘Yes. It would appear that we have been unwittingly sheltering Annie. I fear that she is very ill indeed. As soon as Mrs Hackett leaves the house you can safely visit the stables to discover whether you can do anything for the poor child. By great good fortune John is also absent.

  ‘Between us I hope that we can arrange matters so that we may save Sukie and Carter from the consequences of their folly. Good though their intentions might have been, they have put themselves in danger of punishment by the law.’

  ‘Carter told me that Annie was very weak and already spitting blood when she arrived here and Sukie asked him to help her,’ Alan said. ‘I’m afraid that your brother is going to find that New South Wales has finally corrupted him. However, that is by the by. First we must do what we can for Annie.’

  ‘Oh, Alan,’ Sarah spoke his forename without thinking, ‘I knew that I was right to send for you. What are we going to do?’

  ‘Do, my brave girl? Why, you must sit down and compose yourself. It is Lucy Middleton’s party today, is it not?’

  Sarah began to wring her hands, saying, ‘Yes, but I can’t leave here until I know what is happening to Annie. Indeed, I doubt whether I will have the heart to go then. At the same time it’s important that I attend her party and do not appear to snub her. I really am on the horns of a dilemma as you must see.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  He leaned forward to try to quieten her by taking her hands in his. ‘Come, Sarah, you must not fret. The case is hard, but you are doing all that is proper. We will find a way out for you if we can.’

  We, he had said we, and by doing so had associated himself with her in her attempt to save Annie, Carter and Sukie. Before Sarah had time to thank him there was a knock on the door. He dropped her hands and walked to the window when Mrs Hackett entered, her hard eyes on them. Suspicion was written in every rigid line of her body.

  ‘I’m off, now, Miss Langley. I can’t find Sukie. I think that she must be idling somewhere with Carter. No wonder food disappears when the servants aren’t under proper control.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure that I don’t blame you, Mrs Hackett,’ said Sarah giddily. ‘Pray enjoy your afternoon with a clear conscience.’

  ‘As to that, my conscience is certainly clear. I wish that I could say as much for others.’

  She left in high dudgeon and Sarah turned with relief to Alan. ‘Now we may go to Annie.’

  Alan’s examination of Annie was slow and methodical. More than ever Sarah was beginning to realise how different he was from most of the men she had met before. His care for Nellie and Annie was the same as for that of herself and John. She mentally contrasted him with the doctors at Prior’s Langley for whom the servants hardly existed as human beings. A brusque examination and a recommendation for them to return to work as soon as possible was the usual treatment prescribed.

  She watched Alan’s gravely concerned face while he knelt over the unconscious Annie, whose breathing seemed to grow shallower by the minute. Sarah had seldom been so conscious of her own helplessness and could tell by his expression that he was feeling the same. When he rose to his feet, he told the sobbing Sukie to continue watching over the dying girl before beckoning to Sarah to follow him down the ladder. She responded without a word.

  Once down he spoke to her in a low voice so that Sukie in the loft above them could not hear what was he was saying. ‘I fear that she is far gone, so far that I am not certain that there is anything I can do to save her. I will stay with her, but I am sadly sure that she has been slowly dying as a result of consumption for some time. Her mot
her should have called on me for help long ago.’

  Alan caught his breath when he saw Sarah’s stricken face. ‘You are not to reproach yourself, Sarah,’ he said, using her Christian name in the middle of this sad occasion, for they were simply a man and a woman in the face of death where all distinctions of rank disappear. ‘There is little you can do, or, for that matter, could have done, once her mother refused your help. What I am about to say may appear heartless, but reflect: it is your duty to go to your friend’s birthday party.’

  When Sarah made a sharp sound of demurral, he told her, his voice as kind as he could make it, ‘I know how you must feel, but Annie will have Sukie, Carter and myself to care for her. Lucy is your friend and I am aware, if you are not, that she is already troubled by Frank Wright’s feelings for you.’

  Sarah gave a start of surprise on hearing this. ‘No, that cannot be! I have said nothing to encourage him and he has said nothing of this to me. I am sure that you—or she—must be mistaken. I would never, ever, do anything to hurt Lucy she is my best—and my only—woman friend in Sydney.’

  Alan said gently to her, ‘I don’t think that you are aware of the effect that you have on men, Sarah, it is one of your nicest traits. Do not ask me how I know of young Wright’s feelings for you, and that Lucy Middleton is disturbed by them, but that is the truth. Consider: if you do not attend her party without being able to offer her any reasonable excuse for not going—since we must, by all means, conceal what Carter and Sukie have done—what will she think? She might even assume that you are cutting her out in order to annex Frank. However hard it may seem, your duty is to the living, not here. Leave me to attend to Annie and to arrange that Carter and Sukie escape punishment. You may help me again when you return—if help is still needed.’

  Sarah’s trust that Alan would always tell her the truth was so strong that although her eyes filled with tears, she said to him, ‘I know you well enough to be aware that you will always tell me to do what is right. I have never felt less like going to a party, but I see that I must, since Lucy may always mistrust me if I don’t turn up today.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘You must know that I have never given Frank—or Stephen Parker—any encouragement. Besides, even if I had grown to love Frank, which I haven’t, I would never injure Lucy by taking him from her.’

  ‘I believe you, and I also believe that you will be brave enough to go to her party and give nothing away.’

  Alan had never admired, nay loved, her more. He watched her walk away; he would have wished her to stay for his own sake, but he was adamant with himself. Ever since his disgrace he had tried to live his life by the highest principles and, valuing Sarah as he did, he could not ask less of her than he would have asked of himself.

  Now he had Annie to care for—he dare not say save—and would have to do so without the grace of Sarah’s presence. Well, he had been alone before, and doubtless would be alone again. He turned towards the loft ladder and to his duty to the dying child.

  Sarah offered Lucy a concocted excuse for her late appearance, but was relieved to see that Lucy’s enjoyment was such that she scarcely realised how late she was. That she had come at all was sufficient. The fan was given and admired and Sarah soon found herself the centre of an excited crowd of young men and women. The guests in the Middletons’ comfortable parlour overflowed into the garden where, for once, she did not find Stephen Parker’s attempts to monopolise her tedious, since they enabled her to dodge Frank Wright who, perforce, satisfied himself with Lucy.

  She was relieved that the party was not one to which Tom Dilhorne would ever be invited, so there was no shrewd eye to note her pallor and her withdrawn air. She even managed to find a quiet corner away from the noisy gaiety where Lucy’s little brother and sister had been left, and kept them quiet by teaching them a card game that she and John had played long ago at Prior’s Langley.

  Somehow the afternoon and evening passed. She refused both Frank and Stephen’s offers to drive her home. John, she said, was due to arrive soon and he would see her safe. Lucy did wonder a little at Sarah’s subdued mood, so unlike her usual flash and fire, but she put it down to the fact that Annie Bell was still missing, and that John was late.

  His excuse when he finally arrived was one that Sarah and the Middleton’s could not argue with: the Governor had come upon him in the grounds and had detained him over tea.

  ‘More likely port,’ said Lucy, privately and shrewdly to Sarah when John and Major Middleton retired into the garden to smoke an early evening cigar, forbidden in the house.

  Sarah had already exercised her mind over what to tell John when he finally decided that it was time to go home. In the event, since he was so full of both the Governor’s and the Middletons’ port, she decided to say nothing—which proved wise. They arrived home to find it brilliantly lit, Mrs Hackett in full cry, and a sobbing Mrs Bell being comforted by Dr Kerr in the Langleys’ drawing room.

  Alan’s shrewdness in sending Sarah away was fully justified. It was he who explained to a bemused John what had happened and why Mrs Bell was in his drawing room, exonerating Sukie and Carter while he did so. After Sarah had left that afternoon, they had found Annie dying in the street, he said, and had taken her in. They had sent for him, and after that he had sent for Mrs Bell.

  ‘And Annie, what of her?’ asked Sarah, although she already knew the answer, for both Mrs Bell’s behaviour and Alan’s gravity told her that the worst had happened.

  He turned to her, his manner as kind as he could make it. ‘Oh, Miss Langley, I’m so sorry, but there was nothing I could do for the poor child. She was so ill that her death from consumption was certain. She breathed her last in Sukie’s arms scarce half an hour ago.’

  Sarah ignored Mrs Hackett, the hysterical Mrs Bell, who was acting as though she were the most loving mother ever to be bereaved, and John. She had enough self-possession to realise that she must deceive him if the true facts were not to be revealed, but she felt compelled to say, ‘I must see Annie before she is taken away. Where is she?’

  ‘Really, Sarah,’ exclaimed John. ‘She was suffering from consumption, is this wise?’

  ‘She is in the hay loft where Sukie and Carter put her when they found her. They dared not hide her in the house for fear that she might be discovered. By the time we realised how ill she was it was too late to carry her indoors,’ offered Alan smoothly. ‘Of course, you may see her, Miss Langley, if that is your wish.’

  ‘She was my pupil and I did not wish her to go to the mill, which has been the death of her,’ said Sarah steadily, ignoring both John and Mrs Bell, who had begun protesting at her last words.

  Alan said nothing further, but took her arm and led her out of the room and finally to the hay loft, where she sank on her knees beside the dead child. Sukie was there, sobbing, but tried to speak to her.

  ‘Hush,’ warned Sarah. ‘The less said the better.’

  Her own hot tears fell on the shawl around Annie’s shoulders, an old one of hers that she had given to Sukie, who had used it to cover Annie. She slipped the nosegay of flowers, which Lucy’s little brother had picked for her from the Middletons’ garden, and which she had pinned to her dress, into Annie’s hand where it lay on the horse blanket, Carter’s last piece of practical help.

  Alan, looking at her, thought that Sarah had never looked so beautiful as she did now, grieving for poor Annie whom they had been unable to save.

  ‘I will come back for you,’ he said, not wanting to leave John Langley alone too long with Mrs Hackett and Mrs Bell. Sarah hardly heard him. She was past caring what John, or anyone else, thought.

  Her world had shrunk down to Alan, Sukie, Carter and the dead girl; she could hardly imagine what would come after.

  Life, of course, went on. The death of one poor mill girl was nothing in the great scheme of things, even in a world as small as Sydney’s. Alan told John to let Sarah grieve when John expressed his impatience at what he considered Sarah’s undue con
cern for the servant class.

  ‘The less you say in disapproval, and the more you leave her to her feelings, the sooner she will recover,’ said Alan firmly.

  Lucy came round to see Sarah and in her warm-hearted way she comforted her. ‘How dreadful for you to return from my party to find such awful goings-on in your absence. Oh, Sarah, when I heard that that poor child had run away I never thought that it was going to involve you.’

  ‘Nor did I, and to think that I was making silly jokes and enjoying myself whilst she was roving round Sydney’s streets and dying in them.’

  The explanation, which Alan had concocted and had pledged Carter and Sukie to sustain, had been accepted by everyone and Sarah had kept up its fiction by stealing the odd tit-bit from the kitchen, so that Mrs Hackett should not connect the thieving of food with Annie’s disappearance and Sukie and Carter’s harbouring of her.

  Lucy swallowed the story like all the rest and sympathised with Sarah. The only heretic was Tom Dilhorne, who stopped Sarah in the street, offered her his sympathy for Annie’s death, rather than for Sarah’s lacerated feelings, and then murmured, ‘I hear that you are still losing food, Miss Sarah, and old Hackett is still complaining.’ The Langleys’ mysterious thief had become part of Sydney’s folklore.

  Sarah looked him full in the face and smiled. ‘Some disappeared yesterday, Mr Dilhorne.’

  ‘A wise move that, Miss Sarah. Your thief has an apt sense of timing.’ His expression was as angelic as he could make it. ‘I hear that you managed to attend Miss Middleton’s birthday party…’ he paused ‘…after all.’

  Sarah’s grief was not so great that she could not be amused by Tom’s prevarication, and by his knowledge of everything that went on in the colony.

  ‘Oh, yes…’ she paused, too. ‘It was my duty to attend, and it was a great shock to return to discover what had been going on in my absence.’

  His expression was blander than ever. ‘Indeed, it must have been. I gather that your brother’s man, Carter, is Miss Sukie’s beau these days. That must be very useful.’