Free The Heiresses by Allison Rushby

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 was 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