The Secret Heiress Read online

  Samuel’s temper rose. ‘Still you didn’t tell me?’

  Cooper seemed to be resisting the urge to hook a finger under his tight, high collar. ‘You praise my professionalism, so I’m sure you see I was in something of a bind,’ he said. ‘Miss Gregory was very much alive when I discovered it. It was not my right to inform you she had made another will with my departed colleague. It was her right to inform you and hers alone. If, as it seems, she chose not to do so . . .’ The solicitor trailed off.

  ‘Please show it to me,’ said Samuel.

  Cooper withdrew a stamped, sealed document from a case at his feet as Ida strained to see it properly through the crack. She couldn’t quite. ‘It is one of two copies,’ Cooper said, ‘the other remains in my chambers. I have read neither document, of course, and have no idea of the contents.’

  Samuel took the document, examining it closely for a moment, before lifting the wax seal and opening it. He took his time in reading what was there. Once finished he refolded the document but did not return it to the solicitor.

  ‘As I said, the sealed copy remains in my chambers,’ said Cooper when it seemed likely to him that Samuel would not speak first. ‘I shall open it upon my return and commence the executor’s duties formerly assigned to Walsh.’

  Samuel still said nothing, but now gave all the appearance of wrestling with some internal force. ‘Barker!’ He suddenly stood up, making Cooper jump. ‘Barker, I want you!’

  Ida lost her footing and tumbled into the room, barrelling into Samuel’s armchair.

  ‘Ida?’ he said, surprised.

  She blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘I . . . I’m so sorry, Mr Hackett . . . I must have tripped in the hall.’

  He placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘No harm done. I am afraid that Mr Cooper has been the bearer of unexpected news, that is all, nothing of concern.’

  But the look on his face told Ida that he was very concerned.

  ‘Where is Barker?’

  Ida was still blushing. ‘I don’t know.’

  Samuel looked annoyed but was making an effort not to speak harshly in front of her.

  ‘What is it, Mr Hackett?’ Ida asked, pulling self-consciously at her ill-fitting apron. It had belonged to a girl who had recently given notice.

  ‘It is quite all right, like I said, you mustn’t be concerned.’ He guided her towards the hall. ‘And try to remember to close the doors behind you when you leave a room. Has Barker given you any instruction?’

  ‘I’d be lucky if he gave me the time of day,’ Ida exclaimed before she thought, then saw the error in it and wanted to kick herself.

  She assaulted the drawing room doors on her way out, making a clamour of the task until she had them properly shut.

  Ida waited on the other side again, knowing herself to be mad for the risk she was taking, yet compelled to hear more all the same. By pressing her ear to the closed doors she could still make out the conversation.

  Cooper said, ‘Again, let me express my sadness and condolences, Hackett.’

  It was some seconds before Samuel answered. ‘Matilda’s money . . .’ His voice sounded weary and strained. ‘I am not the beneficiary of her estate. This second will nullifies me as her heir.’

  The solicitor was evidently shocked. ‘Has she named another?’

  ‘Yes.’ Samuel paused for another moment, as if he was giving what would come next due weight. ‘She names Matilda Gregory.’

  There was a further pause, until Cooper said. ‘But your fiancée had no other legal family.’

  ‘She still has no other legal family,’ Samuel said. ‘She is still the last of her line.’

  ‘Hackett, this is not making sense,’ Cooper protested. ‘Your late betrothed has willed her estate to herself?’

  Ida heard Samuel pass the document to him. ‘It seems my late fiancée was not, as she had me believe, Matilda Gregory at all. According to this will, she was Margaret Gregory, her twin sister, and she makes the deception clear.’

  Ida’s eyes bulged in her head.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ said Cooper.

  Samuel went on. ‘It would seem that she wished for the world – and for me in particular – to believe that she was Matilda, and in this she was successful while she breathed. But she says in this will that she was not Matilda at all, she was Margaret . . . and I’m sure you now appreciate the somewhat alarming implications here, Hargreaves.’

  In the pause that followed Ida wondered if the solicitor had now gone rather pale.

  ‘Allow me a moment to read the document, Hackett.’

  Ida waited, ready to spring away in an instant at the slightest sound of anyone approaching the doors from within.

  But neither man rose from his chair and Cooper began to read aloud from the will: ‘. . . in the months before my father died I discovered a provision in his will stating that I, Margaret Gregory, was not to inherit any portion of his fortune. This fortune would instead be bequeathed to my twin sister, Matilda. Furthermore, as willed by my father, I was to leave Summersby upon his death and move to Constantine Hall, there to receive a small income from a trust, unless I chose to leave, in which event I would be left completely penniless and destitute. In short, Summersby was never to be mine nor the wealth and position that came with it.’

  Ida tried to get her head around what she was discovering. She thought she grasped it, but the notion of wills and counter wills was all very new.

  ‘I believed this provision in my father’s will to be unnecessarily cruel,’ Cooper continued to read aloud, ‘it was ample evidence of his lack of love for me and his relentless obsession with controlling my heart and happiness. Moreover, the prospect of leaving beloved Summersby was intolerable, and so, in the days of his last illness, I committed a deception I had committed many times before: I exchanged places with my sister, who is identical to me in appearance. She is also, regretfully, an impressionable and vulnerable person, extremely naïve in her being, and she agreed to the trick, just as she had so often done before in our childish games, but this time she did not know the real reason for it. At my insistence, the deception was maintained up to and beyond my father’s death, and Matilda, very wrongfully, was subsequently removed from our home under the false belief of others that she was I.’

  There was another pause and Ida tensed to flee again, ears strained to hear the slightest creak of a footfall on the floor. But the solicitor returned to reading the will.

  ‘I have carried this dark secret into my engagement but I cannot carry it to my grave. Although I love my fiancé dearly, I pray that he some day comes to understand my reasons for willing Summersby, along with all my wealth and property, not to him, as it should be, and would be if we wed, but to Matilda, from whom it was so shamefully gained . . .’

  There was a further pause, and then Samuel said, ‘The real Matilda Gregory is very much alive.’

  ‘But this beggars’ belief,’ Cooper told him, ‘it’s an appalling deception, and that it has somehow been allowed to continue undiscovered for this long – it’s almost inconceivable. Where and what is this Constantine Hall?’

  ‘That’s the best part, Hargreaves,’ Samuel said, ‘the part you’ll enjoy the most—’

  ‘Hackett, I am finding this bewildering enough,’ Cooper interjected. ‘Is it one of the great houses along the Bellarine?’

  ‘There’s very little great about it,’ said Samuel, ‘Constantine Hall is a genteel institution for the well-to-do insane.’

  Ida gasped, appalled.

  Inside the room Samuel delivered a coup de grâce. ‘The real Matilda Gregory is confined to a mad house.’

  Her eyes wide, Ida’s real fear of discovery at last outweighed her need for scandal. She tore herself away only to run little more than a yard into the entrance hall before she saw Barker at the end of it with his arms crossed, glaring at her. The shock of this proved short lasting.

  ‘You can scold me or even sack me, but if you’ve got any sense at a
ll you’ll not do neither, Mr Barker, and you’ll ask me what I heard instead,’ Ida declared.

  The valet regarded her through flinty eyes.

  ‘Well?’ she wondered.

  Barker took a single step towards her. ‘I’ve worked with some muck-common types in my time,’ he told her, ‘but a scrap like you would make a flophouse look respectable.’

  Ida bit her lip at that but chose to brazen it out. ‘The sack then, is it? Your loss, Mr Barker, and a crying shame, too. You wouldn’t believe what I just heard.’ She made to walk past him, head high and aloof, but failed to note the boot he stuck out in front of her. Ida tripped and fell sprawling to the floor. Stunned, she flipped inelegantly on to her backside, fearing he’d now give her a kicking, but when he didn’t she just blinked at him from the floor in dismay.

  ‘No one’s giving you the sack,’ said Barker, eyes glinting beneath his hair, ‘unless . . .’

  ‘Unless what?’ Ida shot back.

  ‘Unless what you tell me proves to be as miserable as you look right now.’

  She told him.

  While Ida waited for Barker’s response to the news she saw the ghost of a smile appear and disappear on his lips in the space of a heartbeat; long enough for her to tell that the news had actually pleased him. Ida guessed she’d not be getting her marching orders yet. She took a chance on climbing to her feet again and was further relieved when he didn’t do anything else to humiliate her. ‘What do you think of it, then, Mr Barker?’

  ‘I think many things,’ said Barker, enigmatically.

  Ida found this not very illuminating. ‘But Miss Matilda wasn’t even Miss Matilda,’ she ventured, amazed. ‘The real one’s locked up in a nut house!’

  Barker just crinkled his lips, still as a statue, saying nothing.

  ‘Don’t you even find this a shock?’ she harped.

  ‘Nothing shocks me when it comes to those twins,’ he said, flatly.

  Ida couldn’t fathom his non-response. ‘But to have changed places – to have had everyone fooled!’

  He shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘They spent their girlhoods doing it, so I’ve heard. Things got to the point where no one could have told you who was who anyway, even if they cared, which I hear no one much did. They were a pair of minxes both and best handled with thick gloves. Should be no surprise it came to this. Just desserts by the sounds of it.’

  Ida looked even more startled. ‘Well, I never . . .’

  The valet suddenly lurched from inactivity like stalled clockwork thumped free. She gaped after him as he loped down the hall towards the baize door to the kitchen. ‘Well, Mr Barker?’ she called after him.

  He stopped at the door, craning his long neck to look back at her. ‘Put your head to getting the bedrooms made nice.’

  ‘Why? Will the real Miss Matilda be coming to stay?’

  ‘It’s no business of a muck-common scrap like you if she is. Get on with it.’

  • • •

  The one bad thing about being at Summersby, Ida had decided, was the company she had to keep, or rather, the lack of it. The work itself was drudgery, but that was no better or worse than what she would have suffered if she’d been kept on at home, yet the company was decidedly poor, and it was this that threatened to get her spirits down. Aside from handsome Mr Hackett there was no one else to help make the days go faster.

  Ida had almost made a friend of Ruby, the kitchenmaid, when she’d first arrived, but that was over before it was barely begun when Ida came downstairs in the morning to be informed by Barker that Ruby had given notice and was just then being driven off to town in the trap. Ida had rushed outside to see Ruby in a Sunday bonnet, perched high in the seat, vanishing in swirls of dust. Not even a goodbye.

  In Ruby’s wake Ida had looked around to see who else might be a source of fun but had found the pickings grim. Summersby’s official cook had already departed before Ida had even been hired and the household was making do with Mrs Jack, who displayed little interest in the grand estate and even less in the staff. Worse, Ida feared Mrs Jack was of an indeterminate foreign persuasion, and Ida’s mother had warned her about the unwashed ways of Continentals. On most days Mrs Jack didn’t bother showing up, which was when the rest of them had to forage for something to eat from the kitchen stores, and from this somehow scratch up a meal for Mr Hackett. When Ida referred to ‘the rest of them’, she meant herself and Barker. The one or two outside staff that tended Summersby’s grounds had nothing whatsoever to do with those who worked indoors, looking after themselves in their own little cottage. Ida had no hope of friendships beyond Summersby’s walls. She lamented this the most when alone in her cot at night.

  ‘How long are you and me supposed to manage all by ourselves then?’ Ida complained to him one morning over the porridge.

  ‘None of your business,’ said the valet.

  ‘It is my business when I spend all day doing the work of hundreds.’

  Barker seemed to be eyeing the bumps of her breasts beneath the dull crepe uniform. Ida shifted awkwardly in her seat, self-conscious of her womanhood. ‘If you’re handing in your notice you’ll want to make a head start on it,’ he shot. ‘It’s a long walk to town.’

  ‘You sent Ruby home in the trap!’ Ida protested.

  Barker’s mouthful of porridge went down the wrong way and he coughed and spluttered it across the tabletop. ‘You can use Shank’s pony,’ he told her when he’d recovered himself. He took another mouthful.

  Ida sulked at this insult, but declined to quit. ‘Won’t we ever be getting some more new staff then?’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with me,’ said Barker.

  Ida wiped his porridge mess up with a rag. ‘You’re the valet,’ she said, ‘don’t you have a say?’

  Barker’s lack of comment on that gave Ida the further impression he was very happy for arrangements to stay as they were, though she couldn’t conceive why.

  ‘But a house this size – I can’t keep up with it, Mr Barker.’

  The porridge tried to stick in his throat again until he forced it south. ‘You’re keeping up well enough,’ Barker said.

  This took Ida by surprise. Had she been complimented on her work? She decided she had been and shot a smile at him.

  He groped for his mug of tea. ‘His Lordship’s going away soon,’ Barker announced, ‘and me with him. Things will be sorted, one way or another, upon return.’

  Ida took some heart from this. ‘Oh, it’ll be nice to have someone else to talk to!’

  ‘You’ll not be talking to anyone,’ Barker told her, slurping at his tea.

  The heart fled as quickly as it had come. She felt depressed. Contemplating yet more days and weeks of unrelieved loneliness, save the occasional snatches of chat with Samuel, it was almost as much as Ida could get her head around without crying. She thought of her sister Evie so happy and loved in the little Castlemaine school, the apple of the teacher’s eye, praised to the skies by her mother and all her maiden aunts, and herself sent packing to a life of domestic drudgery without so much as a word of gratitude from any of them. Ida felt abandoned.

  ‘I heard the dog again,’ she whispered. ‘It was wandering around when I was trying to clean.’

  Barker looked up sharply from his cup.

  ‘I heard the clip of its nails on the floorboards.’

  Barker slammed his cup on the table ‘What bloody dog?’

  ‘The dog that lives here,’ said Ida. ‘She wouldn’t let me pat her, she wouldn’t let me find her even. I wish she would, she’d be a bit of company.’ She felt a sob catch at her throat. ‘At home we have a dog called Daisy.’

  Barker stared at her through night-black eyes a moment. ‘Summersby doesn’t have any dog.’

  Ida took a sip of her own tea. ‘Yes it does. I heard her.’ The tea had grown cool.

  ‘It has a dead dog,’ said Barker.

  Ida blanched. ‘Don’t you try to hurt her!’ she said, clutching her cup. ‘Poor thing’s not doing
any harm. She doesn’t even do her mess inside!’

  Barker was chilly. ‘It’s already dead, you little idiot. Carked it the same day as the mistress did.’

  Ida blinked at him. ‘They died together?’

  Barker just sniffed.

  ‘But, but I’ve been hearing it, Mr Barker.’

  He mocked her. ‘What you’ve been hearing is the sound of your own bloody cretinism.’

  Ida fell back as if struck.

  ‘And what sort of dog kennel will I find those bedrooms looking like when I kick open the doors in two minutes?’ he wondered.

  Ida squirmed and knocked back her last mouthful of cold tea. ‘Which bedrooms?’

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ said Barker, toying with her. ‘I’ll decide that on the run.’

  ‘They all look spick and span, I swear they do!’ Ida protested, mentally counting off those rooms she’d cleaned and those she’d merely ‘tidied’.

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ said Barker, ‘and I judge hard.’

  Ida was off from the table before he’d shifted a muscle.

  • • •

  Once it became apparent that Barker’s threatened inspection would likely not be happening anytime soon, Ida ceased her panic somewhat and set her mind towards putting what she termed ‘finishing touches’ to the bedrooms she’d been assigned. Of the six or seven rooms that had fallen to her care the one she liked best was the one she called the ‘Chinese Room’, on account of its Chinoiserie screen of pagodas and dragons. Ida very much saw it as a lady’s bedroom, even though it wasn’t typically feminine. She put all her efforts into making it as attractive and comfortable as she imagined a fine lady would require it. It was Ida’s belief that a lady would be gracing the room before long. The extraordinary confession from beyond the grave had seared itself into her mind. A poor, hapless woman, the real Miss Matilda Gregory, had been shut up in a madhouse by her own twin’s lie. Ida was very shocked to think that the now-dead sister, the one who had come to Ida’s mother’s farm so elegantly dressed and seeming so nice, had in fact caused such a thing to happen. And yet how had it happened? To Ida it raised far more questions than it answered, and her mind went back to something she had felt so sure about on her very first day at Summersby: the late Miss Gregory had hired her because she asked questions. The late Miss Gregory had been pretending to be her own sister so as not to be shut away, committing a deception that was certainly despicable, yet all the same, she was still the one who had hired Ida. So, questions she would ask.