Birthright

I had been planning the tea party for longer than Eleanor knew. I sent the invitations on her notepaper, which she had told me I was welcome to use anytime. I chose the guests with care. Mrs. Alderton, who had not kept a secret since childhood. The Pembury sisters, who went everywhere together and talked constantly and were therefore worth three ordinary women. Mrs. Crane from the charitable society, who could not witness anything without making it into a slightly more dramatic story than what had actually occurred. Six women in total, every one of them exactly the right kind.

I told Eleanor it was her idea. That she had mentioned wanting to host something and I had taken the liberty while she was at the dressmaker. She looked slightly surprised and then pleased. She said how thoughtful I was. How she never would have done it herself but she was so glad I had.

The morning of the party I came downstairs early and helped arrange the sitting room and found a moment alone with Marta in the kitchen while Eleanor was still dressing. I had spoken with Marta twice before, alone, carefully. The first time I mentioned that I sometimes heard Eleanor moving about at night and that I worried about her, and asked had Marta noticed. The second time I said I hoped Eleanor was well, that the inheritance was a great responsibility, and that I sometimes wondered privately whether Grandmother Agnes had truly been herself at the end. Marta had gone very still both times. She said nothing either time. But I watched the idea settle into her.

I was patient with Marta. I always was.

The guests arrived at two. Eleanor came downstairs in her blue dress and was everything a hostess should be. I sat beside her and poured when she forgot and laughed when it was time to laugh and thought about nothing except the note I had sent to the magistrate's office three days prior. Unsigned, plain paper, written by a hand that was not mine. Strange herbs found near the Hawthorne property. A young woman arrived under unusual circumstances. An elderly rich woman's death that had come on very suddenly.

They knocked at half past three.

The room went quiet. The constables were polite. They said they had received information and needed to ask some questions and would Miss Hawthorne please come with them. Eleanor looked at me. I stood up immediately and said there must be some mistake, that my cousin was a decent and respectable woman and I would not hear a word otherwise, and I looked at the constables with the face of a woman who is frightened and furious on behalf of someone she loves.

Mrs. Alderton's eyes went wide. The Pembury sisters had hold of each other's arms.

Marta came forward from the doorway. I had not told her to. I had not needed to. She told the constables that Miss Hawthorne had a habit of going out at night. That she had worked for the Hawthornes her whole life and that Eleanor had come to them as a stranger and that Lady Agnes had been perfectly well until very suddenly she was not, and that she did not like to say it but she had her suspicions and had had them for some time.

Eleanor turned to look at Marta. I will not describe that.

They took her out through the front door. I stood on the steps and called after them that I would find a solicitor, that this was an outrage, that Eleanor had done nothing and I would make sure everyone knew it. Mrs. Alderton was just behind me. The Pembury sisters. Mrs. Crane. All of them watching me stand up for my cousin.

I went inside and poured myself a cup of tea and drank it while the fire was still going and the little cakes Eleanor had made that morning were still on the table.

I have always been the sort of person who notices things.

My mother had it too. A particular attentiveness to what a person's hands are doing while their mouth is talking and the small contradictions most people let slide. I think examining them would cost more effort than they are willing to spend. I have never been able to let things slide. It has cost me a great deal over the years and I have never once been able to stop.

I was born in Hawthorne Manor. I learned to walk on its floors. I know which stair creaks (third from the top) and which window latch sticks in the cold and where the loose board is in the east bedroom, grandmother used to use it for letters she did not want found. I know this house. I could navigate it blind. Every corner of it.

So when the courts decided it belonged to Eleanor, I did not leave.

Where would I have gone.

My grandmother died in October. By December the solicitors had reviewed the documents Eleanor arrived with and found them satisfactory and that was that. I stood in the entrance hall and listened to a man in a grey coat explain to me that Miss Eleanor Hawthorne was the rightful heir and that I was welcome to remain at the property as a guest of the new owner until alternative arrangements could be made. He said alternative arrangements as though I had some. I thanked him and showed him out and stood in the hall for a long time after the door closed, looking up at the portrait of above the stairs. Lady Agnes, father, mother, and myself. Elenor wasn’t in the portrait, and yet she is the heir?

Eleanor arrived on a Tuesday in January. I had the fire going in the sitting room and a plate of shortbread on the table. She had a small trunk and a canvas bag and she was younger than I expected, prettier, without a single maid. She looked at me and then past me into the hall and I watched something move across her expression, some private feeling. It was like the look of… satisfaction? Maybe. Or something more complicated than that.

I smiled and said I was so glad she had come. That I had always wanted a sister.

She looked back at me and her face did the thing I would come to know well over the following weeks, that opening, that willingness, and she stepped inside and hugged me. A proper hug, arms around the shoulders. What a strange girl. Even if we are cousins that behavior is unbecoming of a proper lady.

The head butler guided her to Lady Agnes’s room. As the lady of the house it was rightfully hers. The grandmother she never knew, and yet everything was left to her.

She thanked me for everything with that open warm manner and said she hoped we would be great friends, that she had never had family before, not really, and I said neither had I, which was true, and we went downstairs and had the shortbread and she asked me about the portrait in the hall and I told her about Lady Agnes and she listened with her whole face.

I thought to myself that this is almost too easy.

I spent the first two weeks simply watching. The house I already knew. What I needed to learn was Eleanor. How she moved through it, which rooms she favored, what time her light went out, when Marta arrived in the mornings and when she left.

Marta I had known for years. She was loyal, genuinely so.. She had loved my grandmother and she transferred that love to the house in general and to me specifically, and I could see her watching Eleanor in those early weeks with a careful neutrality. I was patient with Marta. I did not rush her.

Eleanor had dark hair. So do I. Our build is close enough that from a distance, in the right light, with the right coat, we could be taken for the same woman. I had noticed this the moment she walked through the door. And thank god she did, it was going to make everything easier.

She lent me things without my asking. That was her nature. She would see me reach for my shawl and say take mine, it's warmer, and press it into my hands before I could refuse. Within a month I had borrowed her amber brooch, two shawls, her grey walking boots, and the dark wool cloak she wore on cold evenings. I returned everything promptly and with thanks. I noted where she kept each thing and how she arranged her hair when she went out and which drawer held her hairpins.

I started going out at night in early February. I walked to the edge of the woods. Along the road past the stable. I let Thomas Marsh see me once from his window when I knew he was up with his mother. I let one of the guards see me twice, on different nights, neither time close enough to speak but close enough to be described later. I moved through the village in the dark and I did not hurry and I did not hide and I was back before dawn

Thomas Marsh was fourteen years old with a sick mother and nothing to pay the doctor. I had one conversation with him in the stable on a Tuesday afternoon. I spoke about illness and misfortune and how trouble gathers around certain people sometimes and he was a clever boy and he followed it without being led. I pressed coins into his hand before I left and told him I hoped his mother recovered.

Proctor the village clerk was at the card table three nights a week, always believing tonight would be different. Obviously, it never was. Two guards whose names I learned from an argument I overheard outside the alehouse.. These things are not difficult to find out if you are patient and you listen.

The herbs I took from the kitchen garden. Marta kept a useful garden and had no reason to watch what I cut from it. I wrapped them and put them in the drawer Eleanor rarely opened, the one at the back of the wardrobe, and I left them there for three weeks before anyone looked for them.

The dolls I made myself, in my room. Small cloth figures, pins set carefully into them. I used a scrap of yellow fabric from Eleanor's own mending basket. I hid the finished things beneath the loose board I had shown Eleanor on her first day.

The trial was three weeks later. I attended every session in the same black dress, same seat in the gallery. I watched each piece of evidence come forward. Thomas Marsh described the horse that had collapsed after Eleanor touched its flank. The guards described a woman moving through the village after midnight. Proctor said in his careful reluctant voice that he had harbored suspicions for some time and had not known what to do with them. The herbs were brought out. The dolls. Made from her own fabric, hidden beneath a board in her own bedroom floor..

Eleanor denied everything. Clear voice, steady. She said she had never gone out at night, never harmed anyone, never wished harm on anyone, and that she did not understand what was happening to her.

I looked at my hands.

The verdict came on a Monday.

I did not expect the request on the morning of the hanging. A guard came to me in the square and said the condemned had asked to speak with one person. The name she gave was mine. I followed him through the low door into the stone room.

Eleanor was standing near the far wall in the dress she had been arrested in, her hair loose. She was calm. Not defeated, just calm. She looked at me with the same open expression she had worn the day she arrived, when she had walked through the door of the house I grew up in and hugged me like she had known me her whole life.

She said, “Grandmother asked me to share the estate with you. She told me the winter before she died. I was going to tell you once I had settled in.” She paused. “I had already written the letter.”

For a moment, I said nothing. Then I told her I knew she was innocent. I reached for her hand as though I meant to comfort her.

She drew it gently away.

“Do not trouble yourself,” she said.

Did she know? Did she know what I had done?

Outside, I could hear the crowd shifting in the square.

I thought of her cloak around my shoulders as I walked through the village at night. The scrap of yellow cloth. The needle. The herbs hidden in her room.

“I am not a witch,” she said quietly. “And I will not have them think you had any part in this.” Her voice faltered, and she drew a careful breath.

“Please, take care of yourself, my dear sister. We knew each other for such a short time, but for the first time in my life, I felt I had a family. Someone who defended me. Someone who was on my side.”

She looked at me with complete trust.

Of course she did.

I nodded once and walked out into the square.

I slept very well that night. In my own room. In my own house. It was all mine again.

The deed came three weeks later. I stood in the entrance hall and looked up at Lady Agnes above the stairs. Her eyes were fixed at a point slightly left of where I stood, so wherever I moved they seemed to follow.

A painter's trick. That is all it is.

I have never removed the portrait.

Every morning I walk beneath it. The painted eyes follow me across the hall.