by Alis Hawkins
‘There wasn’t any wool here to spin when I left, so who brought it? Was it him?’
‘Dear God, woman! Enough! It doesn’t matter who it was now, does it?’
‘It does if he was here. If he did something to her!’
‘That’s enough, I said! Nobody did anything to her.’
Silence fell, and before Mrs Rees could take her chances with her husband’s temper once more, Reckitt appeared, notebook in hand. It was his habit to take detailed notes during his examination of a body.
‘You said that your daughter had just come back from harvest work,’ he said, as if he and Esther Rees were in the middle of a conversation. ‘Was she used to hard physical labour?’
‘Of course. We all work hard. Before she went down south, she’d been haymaking around the farms with everybody else.’
‘With no ill effects?’
‘No.’
‘Did she ever seem short of breath or struggle to keep up?’
‘Never. She was strong; fit.’
‘And when she was a small child – did she have any serious illnesses? Fevers? Measles?’
‘No. She had colds sometimes, in the winter. And all of the girls had the chickenpox at one time. But that’s all.’
‘Did she ever seem dizzy, or faint?’
There was a brief silence. ‘She did faint every now and then,’ Esther Rees admitted. ‘But girls do sometimes, don’t they?’
‘Every now and again?’ Reckitt asked. ‘Was that every month, every two months…?’
‘No, nothing like that. No more than five or six times in her whole life.’
‘I see. And your wider family?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Are there sickly individuals – anything like this?’
Mrs Rees shook her head, but it seemed her husband could not say. ‘I left home at sixteen,’ he explained when Reckitt asked him, ‘to go on the road with the drovers, and I’ve never been back.’
‘Where are you from?’ I asked. His dialect was from further up the Teifi Valley.
‘Up towards Llanybydder.’
A wild and thinly populated area. He probably felt at home here on the slopes of the Preselis.
One of the girls suddenly appeared between the box bed and the wall. ‘Tea’s ready, Mam.’
As we all made to follow her back into the kitchen, Reckitt put a hand on my shoulder. ‘A moment, Probert-Lloyd…?’
Mic and Esther Rees hesitated, unsure whether to stay or leave us alone. ‘We’ll be with you shortly,’ I said, settling their dilemma, before turning to Reckitt.
‘This cold the girl supposedly had,’ he said, his voice pitched for my ears only. ‘I see no evidence of it. No reddening or roughening of the skin around her nose and lips as you’d expect. I think there’s something else here.’
‘Such as?’
‘I don’t know yet. But give me time and I believe I will.’
John
Late that afternoon, I left Lleu with the rest of the Alltybela lot at the enormous pink glass fountain that was the main meeting place in the Crystal Palace, and made my way back to the Gelyots’ house.
My head should have been full of the Exhibition, but it wasn’t. It was full of Jem Harborne and all the things he’d been talking about. Railways. People leaving. The coalfields. I couldn’t stop thinking about it all. According to Harborne, the railways’d be on our doorstep in five years. And then, everything’d change.
I tried to imagine the farms on the Glanteifi estate without their army of labourers and farm servants. With machines instead. What would happen to farmers helping each other – getting together to cut hay, to shear sheep? If it was all done with machines, everybody’d be on their own, wouldn’t they? No community at all. Just every farmer working by himself with his machines. It made me feel cold.
Would farmers back home riot over the use of machines, like they had in England? It wasn’t like we never rebelled – we’d done it over tollgates under the Rebeccas. But that hadn’t ended well. Nobody’d want to go back to night-time mobs and threatening letters. But did that mean we just had to stand by and let it all happen – let machines drive us off the land?
Jem Harborne hadn’t come back to the Exhibition with me and Lleu after our early dinner or huge lunch or whatever that meal’d been. He’d stayed at Soyer’s Symposium with a friend who’d spotted him as we were on our way out. Suited me. I’d had enough of hearing that machines were going to do away with manual labour.
But when we got back inside the Crystal Palace, it was all more of the same, wasn’t it? Improvements, inventions. Modern this, extraordinary that, revolutionary the other.
Still, Lleu was only a boy, and he’d been thoroughly excited by the whole thing. And not just the machines. He’d especially loved the elephant in the Indian section. It was a huge stuffed specimen, wrapped in so much gold cloth you could hardly see it, and saddled with a canopied pavilion for people to ride in.
The boy’d also stood for a long time looking up at a huge eagle, wings outstretched, holding the flag of the United States. I’d wondered if he was imagining himself going to America, finding his fortune. I’d considered it for myself, to tell the truth. Still did, every now and then.
But the thing that’d impressed Lleu the most had been the Crystal Palace itself. We’d gone right to the topmost gallery, and as we were looking down on the people far below, he suddenly spoke up. ‘I’ve decided,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be an engineer.’
‘What’ll Miss Gwatkyn have to say about that?’ Lleu was about to go off to school at Phoebe Gwatkyn’s expense.
‘She’ll be pleased. She’s always telling me to be ambitious. Saying I don’t need to think about where I’ve come from, just where I’m going.’ He looked round at me then, and I had the peculiar impression that I wasn’t just seeing the boy he was but the man he was going to be as well. Eagerness and determination in the same face.
‘The other day,’ he said, ‘she was telling me about a man called John Lloyd Davies – he’s the High Sheriff of Cardiganshire, and Miss Gwatkyn says he’s going to be an MP as well. But he started off as a pot boy in a hotel.’
He didn’t need to say any more. Pot boy. Hall boy. If this John Lloyd Davies could do it, so could Daniel ‘Lleu’ Williams.
The thought brought our own hall boy at Glanteifi, Wil-Sam, to my mind. I wished it hadn’t. Wil-Sam’s father was one of the tenants in arrears. One of those Mr Ormiston wanted to get rid of. How would I ever be able to look the boy in the eye again, let him clean my boots and run errands for me, if I stood by and allowed his family to be thrown off their farm? More than likely they’d end up in the workhouse.
I didn’t honestly know which was more terrifying, the thought of letting that happen and having to tell Wil-Sam, or standing up to Mr Ormiston and trying to prevent it.
* * *
I mentioned Lleu and his engineering ambitions to Gus’s father that evening at dinner.
‘If he’s got ideas of being an engineer, he should study technical drawing,’ Mr Gelyot senior said. ‘That’s the coming thing. I know my father would’ve insisted on it if there’d been such a notion when I was a youth.’
I didn’t know where Miss Gwatkyn was sending Lleu to school, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to study this new technical drawing there. Latin and Greek and mathematics, yes. But nothing that would fit him to design buildings or machines. ‘Do the National Schools teach technical drawing?’ I asked.
Mr Gelyot put his wine glass down. ‘I doubt it very much. Your boy might have to come to London.’
More talk of leaving Cardiganshire. And if he left, would he go back, Miss Gwatkyn’s little Lleu? Perhaps he would if there were enough people like Jem Harborne wanting to build weaving mills there.
‘Such a shame you’re not able to stay longer, Mr Davies,’ Mrs Gelyot said, waving a footman over to fill my glass up for me again.
‘I’m afraid I’m needed back at Glante
ifi, Mrs Gelyot,’ I said. ‘The Michaelmas quarter-day will be here before long and I have a lot to do before then. As well as assisting Harry when he’s acting as coroner, of course.’ I looked up and offered a smile to the wine-pouring footman. He ignored me.
‘Knowing Harry,’ Gus said, ‘he’s probably been out to half a dozen suspicious deaths while you’ve been away.’
I glanced across at him. As usual, he was exaggerating for effect, but everybody in the Teifi Valley knew that Harry wanted to be informed about any unexpected death, so he might well have been called out.
I didn’t want to think about that. If Harry went out to view a body while I was away, he’d have to take Lydia Howell with him to act as his assistant. And she’d be very competent. More than competent. She’d barely been in Cardiganshire for five minutes when she’d joined us on the coroner’s hustings in April and found herself in the middle of an inquest. Without any fuss, she’d taken charge of two witnesses who would’ve run rings around Harry and me without her. She was quick, Lydia, and she could read people as easily as reading a book.
In her previous life, she’d had years of being trusted to lead people, make decisions on their behalf. If she got the chance to show what she could do as coroner’s assistant instead of just his private secretary, Harry might decide that I was too busy as under-steward and he’d do better with Lydia at his side.
‘Has he had to deal with many poisonings?’ Mr Gelyot wanted to know. ‘Not a week goes by here but the papers are full of somebody going on trial for poisoning their master or their husband.’
I glanced at Mrs Gelyot, but she seemed to be taking talk of murder in her stride.
‘No. To be honest, we haven’t seen any,’ I said.
‘The Welsh, Papa, are an unusually law-abiding people.’ Gus grinned at me. ‘Apart from their drunkenness, obviously.’
I didn’t rise to the bait.
‘Is that true, do you think, Mr Davies? Are your people unusually law-abiding?’
I smiled, trying to make it look as if I didn’t mind Gus needling at me. ‘As it happens, Mrs Gelyot, I think we just have less detectable ways of killing each other if we feel the need.’ To be honest, I didn’t think we were as inclined to murder each other as the English, but ‘unusually law-abiding’ sounded more like an insult than a compliment. Made us sound as docile as cattle.
‘I do find Harry’s enthusiasm for the post of coroner somewhat surprising,’ Mrs Gelyot said. ‘He was always such a dedicated social reformer that I was certain he’d end up in Parliament. Of course, I suppose he still could.’
The notion that a blind man might become an MP one day didn’t seem as foolish this evening as it would’ve done yesterday. On one of the display stands in the American section of the Exhibition I’d seen a specimen of something called ‘tactile ink’, designed to let the blind read. That was the kind of invention that might change everything for Harry.
Gus opened his mouth to say something, but I got there before him. ‘He could indeed, Mrs Gelyot. Like Thomas Wakley. An MP and coroner for Middlesex.’
‘Ah yes, Mr Wakley. Such an interesting, energetic man.’
Of course. Thomas Wakley had eaten dinner with the Gelyots. Anybody who was anybody in London had eaten dinner with the Gelyots. Reading Gus’s letters to Harry was like reading about the doings of high society in The Times.
‘Yes, but then he’d be MP for Cardiganshire, Mama,’ Gus said, waving the footman over for more wine. ‘And nothing ever happens in Cardiganshire so what would be the point?’
I couldn’t tell whether he meant it or was just trying to provoke me for his own amusement, but I’d had a few more glasses of wine than I should have. The footman kept refilling my glass, and I didn’t want to make a fuss by saying no, so my tongue was looser than usual.
‘I think you might be surprised, Mr Gelyot,’ I said, feeling the heat creep up my neck and onto my face. ‘I met a man today at the Exhibition – a man from near where we live in Cardiganshire – and he’d laugh if you told him nothing happens there.’ Unwisely, I tried to cool myself down by drinking more wine.
‘Oh, and what does he do? Is he a farmer, or a preacher?’
‘Neither. He’s a textiles producer.’ I put my empty wine glass down. ‘As it happens, he’s building the first wool factory in the Teifi Valley.’
‘Is he, by God?’ Mr Gelyot senior joined the conversation.
‘Yes. He thinks West Wales can steal the American market from Manchester and the other northern towns.’
Mr Gelyot leaned his elbows on the table and looked intently at me. It was an invitation to say more, so I did. ‘He’s got ambitious plans for a Cardiganshire woollen industry and he’s in London to look for investors. He’s got wind of various plans for new railway and sea links to and from West Wales. And those plans mean that the sooner he can get his factory built and running, the better placed he’ll be to capitalise on transport to his markets – including America.’ Considering how much I’d had to drink, I was pretty pleased at how sober I sounded. Lucid, even. Articulate.
‘And what’s his name,’ Mr Gelyot asked, ‘this Welsh wool wizard?’
‘Jeremiah Harborne,’ I said. And then I did something I regretted as soon as I was sober. I took my card case out of my pocket and put Jem Harborne’s calling card into Mr Gelyot’s outstretched hand.
Harry
Before I could begin speaking to the family, Mrs Rees was obliged to deal with neighbours who had come to offer their condolences on Lizzie’s death. Custom dictated that they be welcomed in and offered hospitality while the solemn circumstances of the death were shared, but of course that was out of the question while Reckitt and I were in the house.
We listened to Esther Rees gravely accepting words of comfort then saying firmly, ‘Dr Reckitt’s here to see Lizzie, and Mr Probert-Lloyd with him, so I can’t have you in, but thank you for coming. If you see anybody else on the way over, can you tell them tomorrow would be better?’
She latched the door behind her visitors and immediately began marshalling her daughters to pour the tea, insisting that Reckitt and I take the only two decent chairs in the place. It was hard to reconcile her demeanour with that of a mother who not five minutes before had overseen the examination of her deceased daughter’s body.
As she stood in front of the dresser, arms folded, Esther Rees was a commanding presence, but it was essential that I take control of the situation now. In putting off her neighbours, she had made it common knowledge that the coroner was on the premises; a considered judgement must be made public as soon as possible. However, unaccustomed to dealing with coroner’s business without John at my side, I felt disconcertingly exposed.
‘If I may, I would like to speak to you individually, please, starting with you, Mr Rees. Nobody here is under suspicion,’ I clarified when neither Mic Rees nor any of his family moved. ‘But I do need to speak to you all if I’m going to decide whether to ask Dr Reckitt to look more closely at Elizabeth’s body.’
For a few moments there was total stillness in the room. Then, without warning, Esther Rees clapped her hands. ‘Girls! Come on – out! Leave Mr Probert-Lloyd and your father to talk.’
‘Would you like me to leave as well, Probert-Lloyd?’
‘Actually, Reckitt, would you mind taking notes?’
I took my seat in a heavy chair made of dark wood, whose silken patina beneath my fingertips suggested great age. ‘So, Mr Rees, tell me about this man your wife mentioned – the one who brought the wool. Who is he?’
Mic Rees, squatting opposite me on a stool, sighed audibly. ‘He’s just a servant on one of the farms nearby.’
‘And why did the notion that he’d been here agitate your wife so much? Was he paying court to your daughter – sweet on her?’
‘There were several young men who were sweet on Lizzie.’
I noted this evidence of the dead girl’s popularity and, presumably, prettiness. ‘But Mrs Rees didn’t favour him?’
‘No. She didn’t.’ Rees shifted his slight frame on the stool as if he was uncomfortable, and thrust his legs out in front of him. ‘She has strong opinions about people, Mr Probert-Lloyd. Like Dr Reckitt, here – she sets great store by him. Heard a lot about what he’s done at the workhouse, hasn’t she?’
Since taking up the post of physician to the Cardigan Workhouse Union, Reckitt had been responsible for improvements in diet and hygiene at the workhouse, changes that had significantly improved the health of the inmates.
‘Do you think you’ll be able to tell us why Lizzie died, Doctor?’ Rees asked.
‘That depends on what examinations I am permitted to carry out.’
As Reckitt spoke, I ran my fingertips back and forth along the smooth underside of the chair’s arm, thinking. Rees had adroitly deflected my attention from his daughter’s would-be suitor, and in good time I would find out why. But first there were procedural matters that needed to be settled.
‘Mr Rees, your wife told Dr Reckitt that a doctor had certified your daughter’s death as being from natural causes. Who was that?’
‘Dr Gwynne, the local—’
‘Doctor Gwynne?’ Reckitt was suddenly galvanised. ‘Cadwgan Gwynne is no doctor. He’s a hedge witch, a charmer—’
‘He’s in the medical directory!’ Rees protested.
‘That means nothing. Half the quacks in the country are listed—’
‘That may or may not be so,’ I interrupted, aware that this was a subject on which Reckitt could hold forth indefinitely, ‘but Dr Gwynne is entitled to be consulted and to certify a death. Had he attended your daughter before, Mr Rees?’
‘Not recently. Only for the usual childish things, years ago. His remedies for the chickenpox were very good, I remember. Stopped them scratching straight away.’
‘So he hadn’t seen her recently for any reason?’
‘No.’
‘Was Lizzie still feeling under the weather yesterday evening?’
‘A bit.’ Did Rees sound a little defensive?