by Alis Hawkins
‘I only ask because when Dr Reckitt examined her body, he didn’t find any of the reddening or chapping that you’d expect from a cold.’
‘Well… it wasn’t a bad one. Just one of those summer things, you know.’
‘But bad enough to keep her here rather than go to Ffynone with her mother and sisters?’
‘She was tired, like I said to you earlier. After walking home.’
Reckitt was right, there was something here. But if Mic Rees was going to insist on this cold, I might do better to leave it and see whether Lizzie’s sisters had any light to shed on the matter.
‘When he came, did Dr Gwynne offer any opinion about when your daughter might have died?’ It seemed a gentler formulation than ‘how long she had been dead’.
‘No.’
‘And what sort of examination did he perform?’ I asked before Reckitt could.
‘He looked in her mouth… as best he could.’ Rees swallowed audibly. ‘He opened her eyes. He looked at her hands and then at her throat and chest. And he felt all over her head.’
Whatever Reckitt thought of his medical qualifications, Dr Gwynne had obviously had the wit to look for the most obvious signs of trauma.
‘Did he remove any of her clothes?’ As was his custom, Reckitt had not touched the body before asking that Lizzie Rees’s garments be removed.
‘No. Well, not exactly. He lifted her petticoat.’
‘Did he examine her private parts?’ Reckitt asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Mic Rees muttered. ‘I couldn’t look at her like that.’
‘The young man who brought the wool,’ I said. ‘Why had your wife taken against him?’
Rees sighed. ‘In my wife’s eyes, nobody will ever be good enough for any of our girls. Not unless they’ve got a hundred acres, money in the bank, and no brothers and sisters to keep.’
‘And your daughter? Was she as interested in this young man as he was in her?’
Rees hesitated, and again I missed John fiercely. He would have guided me, indicated whether I should push on this.
‘Mr Rees?’
‘It doesn’t matter whether she was or not. Like I said, Esther wouldn’t have it.’
‘And you, Mr Rees, what did you think?’
‘Not married, are you, Mr Probert-Lloyd?’
‘I’m not, no.’
‘No. Well you’ll find, if you don’t mind me saying, that it’s best not to oppose a wife in matters relating to marriage.’
I allowed a small silence to develop while I constructed my next question. Let him think he had offended me; if it put him on edge, that might work to my advantage. ‘Just so I’m clear about who was here the day your daughter died, did this young man in fact bring wool for her to spin?’
‘He did, yes. But that wool didn’t cause her death, did it? Dr Gwynne said she just died in her sleep. That’s all.’
Though Rees’s tone fell short of belligerence, he seemed to be losing patience. Perhaps it was easier to do so with me than with his wife.
‘Your wife thinks you’re hiding something, Mr Rees. Why might that be?’
In my peripheral vision, Mic Rees’s head drooped. ‘She wants somebody to take the blame. Somebody she can shout at.’ He raised his head once more. ‘As far as she’s concerned, it’s my fault. I was here and I let Lizzie die.’
I had heard similar sentiments before. Human beings do not readily accept randomness, and the notion that there must be something that might have been done was common after an unexplained death – a greater vigilance that might have been observed, some extra precaution that had been overlooked.
‘And you, Mr Rees – do you blame yourself?’
Rees drew in a long, shuddering breath. ‘What man wouldn’t? There I lay, in my bed, while my girl breathed her last. The thought of it will haunt me every time I close my eyes to sleep.’
John
It was a long two days’ journey home. Train from London to Bristol then coaches from Bristol by stages all the way back to Newcastle Emlyn, with a night’s stop on the way.
But if I didn’t enjoy the journey, I was enjoying the thought of being home even less. As soon as I was back, I had to try and change the way Mr Ormiston was running the estate. I was dreading it. He hadn’t exactly been impressed when I’d tried to make him see things from the tenants’ point of view, and what I was planning now was a lot worse. I was going to go directly against his wishes.
The novelty of railway travel had worn off pretty quickly for me, and now I just felt the discomfort of it. Which included the endless prattling of the Alltybela servants. Thank God for Lleu – I made him sit with me and practise his English so he’d be ready to go off to his new school.
He got very excited when I told him what Mr Gelyot senior had said about learning technical drawing. ‘D’you think I could do that instead of going to Miss Gwatkyn’s school?’
I shrugged.
‘Or perhaps I should go for an apprenticeship instead – with an engineer?’
‘Do you know any?’
‘I know Mr Harborne.’
The boy was going to go far if he counted a casual meeting like that as knowing somebody.
‘I could go and live in Llandyfriog and be Mr Harborne’s apprentice at his new factory.’
When Jem Harborne had told us where he was building his wool factory, I’d been shocked. Llandyfriog was barely three miles from Glanteifi, and I couldn’t understand how we hadn’t heard of his plans. But then it was possible that Harry knew all about Harborne. I hadn’t had much time recently for anything except the estate and preparing for the solicitor’s exam in November. That’d been a good excuse to keep my distance after Harry refused to listen to what I had to say about the estate, and most evenings I left Lydia Howell reading to him in the drawing room while I studied in the library.
‘Building work on the mill started in June,’ Harborne’d told us. ‘This time next year we’ll be in production.’
As Lleu sat there thinking about his future as an engineer, I stared out of the carriage window at the stubbled end-of-summer English farmland and tried to forget that I might’ve put Mr Gelyot on the path to investing in Harborne’s factory.
I shouldn’t’ve let Gus annoy me with his digs about Cardiganshire being backward, should’ve kept my big mouth shut instead of boasting about Harborne’s mill as if it was already producing thousands of yards of flannel a year. If I’d kept quiet, his factory plans might have never got off the ground. I knew he was looking for more investment, because he’d told me and Lleu, as plain as you like, that he’d come to the Great Exhibition to find ‘forward-thinking men’ – by which he meant ones with deep pockets who could fund his factories full of machines.
I knew exactly what effect those machines would have. They’d be as bad for local people as a threshing machine arriving on the estate would. Half the women in the area made extra money by carding or spinning for the local weavers. What were they going to do when Harborne’s machines spun all the yarn he needed?
My mother’d been a spinner. Her strong, evenly drawn yarn had been in demand, and we’d never have paid the rent without the money she brought in. One winter, when things’d been really bad and there wasn’t enough extra labouring work for my father away from our little farm, my parents’d come to an agreement. My mother would work full time at her spinning and my father’d do the rest of her work. They never told anybody – my father was afraid of the other men laughing at him – but they’d had no choice. Mind, it wouldn’t’ve surprised me if that kind of thing went on quite a lot. It was easier for women to make extra money in the winter than men.
As I sat there staring at big open fields where hay could easily be cut with one of those new mowing machines, I thought of all the cottagers’ wives around Newcastle Emlyn who kept the family going with their carding or spinning, and a cold shadow walked through me at the thought of what Jem Harborne’s mill would do to them if it was a success.
* * *
I parted company with the Alltybela lot in Newcastle Emlyn. They were changing coach one last time and I was going to walk back to Glanteifi. As we parted, Lleu took me by the arm. ‘When you see Mr Harborne, will you ask him about me being his apprentice?’
‘I don’t know that I will see him.’
‘He said he’d see you soon.’
‘That’s just what people say, isn’t it?’
‘And Llandyfriog’s not far from where you live, he said.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘So when you see him, will you ask him? Please?’
I stared at him. He was a boy with a passion now. The Great Exhibition had fired him up and he had a purpose. ‘All right. When I see him.’
* * *
I left the Emlyn Arms coachyard and headed down to the bridge, walking quickly, eyes on the road. I didn’t want to have to stop and answer questions about the Great Exhibition. With Harborne’s factory already being built in Llandyfriog, it felt like the world of the Exhibition had followed me home.
But crossing the bridge over the Teifi, I couldn’t stop people wishing me good day and welcoming me home. I think I did a fair job of pretending everything was all right; I even managed a few smiles But inside I felt like a cat whose fur’s been stroked the wrong way. Because everything might look the same now I was back, but it wasn’t, was it?
The river might run bright and clear under the bridge the same way it always had, the Carmarthen coach might’ve pulled in to the Emlyn Arms just like it had all my life – but for how long? According to Jem Harborne, the railway’d be here in about five minutes, so there’d be no more coaches and the Emlyn Arms’d lose a lot of its business. And the Teifi – how long before there were woollen mills all along its banks, and the water was filthy with the stuff they used for fulling? How long before the river meadows were full of machines instead of people?
As I walked out of town up Adpar hill, I glanced across the road at Mr Schofield’s office. Five years I’d worked there as his solicitor’s clerk, and with every year that’d passed, I’d wished more and more that something would happen to change my life. Anything.
Now I could see that what I’d really been wishing for had been a fairy story where my fortunes changed but everything else stayed the same. And when Harry made me under-steward, I’d thought that was what I’d got. But everything was different from how I’d expected it to be. It wasn’t just me and Harry at the dinner table, or in the library afterwards; Lydia was there. And after old Mr Probert-Lloyd’s death, instead of carrying on his improvement works on the estate, Mr Ormiston’d stopped spending money and was coming down hard on the tenants. And Harry expected me to help him do it.
As soon as I’d exchanged greetings with the tollgate keeper and turned off the hill onto the road back to Glanteifi, I stopped and took my watch and its little key out of my pocket. Sunrise and sunset were about fifteen minutes later here than in London, and I’d changed the time on our journey up there so that we wouldn’t get in a muddle with trains and coaches, which followed what they called ‘railway time’. I hadn’t been going to bother changing my watch back to normal till I wound it last thing, but suddenly I needed to do it now. This very second.
I put my carpet bag down and opened the back of my watch to put the little key into the mechanism. Moving the hands back to the right time made me feel a bit better, and as a pair of buzzards started mewing overhead, I suddenly realised how quiet the air around me was. My ears’d been full of noise for a week – the noise of London and travel and people. Hundreds and thousands of people. Chattering, shouting, laughing, drunk, excited, bragging, begging. The sound of wheels and hooves and whistles and whipcracks and orders. A world of noise like a waterfall battering down onto rocks, each voice and sound being pulled into the general din.
But as I picked up my bag again and walked along the road – past fields and cottages that looked unbelievably clean and bright after London’s grey sootiness – each sound I heard was completely distinct. It was like individual drops landing in a quiet pool. A girl singing as she gathered in dry washing. A man whistling on his way home from a day’s work. Birds twittering as they fed the last of their fledglings.
I breathed in, deep down into me, and tried to still my thoughts, stop them racing on London lines.
But I couldn’t get Harborne and his factory out of my mind. Nor Mr Ormiston and his plans for the estate. Everything I’d seen and heard in the last few days’d made it more important for me to try and protect Glanteifi people from losing their farms.
But to be honest, without Harry on my side, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do anything.
Harry
I decided to speak to Esther Rees last of all, once I had heard what her younger daughters had to tell me. I asked the sisters to come in together; given their youth, I was afraid they would be intimidated if interviewed alone. Besides, experience had taught me that rivalry often induced siblings to say more if they were questioned together.
However, the ploy produced no revelations. On the contrary, Gwen and Ann were somewhat unforthcoming on the subject of their big sister, and I could not help wondering whether John, being closer in age to them, might have induced them to be more open.
The unsatisfactory interview concluded, and wanting relief from sitting, I accompanied the girls outside, leaving Reckitt to finish his notes. Though afternoon was now becoming evening, the sun was still bright above the western horizon.
The girls scampered off in search of their mother and I leaned my back against the house’s sun-warmed gable end, mulling over what I had learned. It was precious little, and so far I could see no reason to doubt that this was a natural death. Only Reckitt’s observation that the body showed no signs of the head cold that Lizzie had supposedly been suffering from gave me any pause for thought at all.
But perhaps he was making too much of this in an attempt to persuade me to allow a post-mortem examination; might not a mild cold – one of those summer things, as Mic Rees had called it – simply be invisible after a day or two of sleeping in her own bed again?
A thought occurred to me and I went back into the house. ‘Reckitt, have you examined the girl’s bed yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Would you mind doing so now, while we wait for Mrs Rees?’
Reckitt pocketed his notebook and pencil and rose with a grunt of discomfort while I went back out into the sunshine. Watching Reckitt about his task would be pointless, as I would gain only the most general idea of what he was doing; besides, he would give me as full an analysis of his findings as I would permit, in due course.
‘Here I am, Mr Probert-Lloyd.’
I jumped, startled once more by Mrs Rees’s silent, barefoot approach.
‘I’ve left the girls in the orchard – I hope that’s all right? They said you’d finished talking to them.’
‘Yes. Of course.’
She did not ask whether her daughters had been helpful, which I found interesting; most parents were keen to know that their offspring had not shown them up in any way. Perhaps she was so sure of her authority over her children that she regarded such a question as unnecessary. In which case, I wondered whether she had had similar confidence in her authority over Lizzie, and whether such confidence might have been misplaced.
As I stood aside to allow her into the house, Reckitt emerged.
Before even allowing Mrs Rees over the threshold, he asked, ‘The petticoat I asked you to take off your daughter before I examined her – was it the one she was wearing when she died?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re sure your husband didn’t put a fresh one on her?’
‘Quite sure. He said she was clean. I thought, because she was young…’
Like most women of her age and station, Esther Rees would be no stranger to laying out the dead. However, it seemed that her experience had been confined to the bodies of the elderly, as she clearly believed that only those whom age had weakene
d were apt to void bowels and bladder post-mortem.
‘I see,’ Reckitt said. ‘And has the bedlinen been stripped and replaced?’
‘No, I didn’t want…’ Those few strained words contained more emotion than anything I had so far heard from Esther Rees.
It was a common belief amongst uneducated people that the soul stayed in the house for several days after death, taking its leave of all that it had known and loved before departing. Even in the absence of such a superstition, my father’s death had taught me that for the first few days, the dead seemed not yet fully gone; so to look at Lizzie’s bed, at the indentation her body had made in the mattress, and instruct Ann and Gwen to take the sheets and wash them while she went to consult Dr Reckitt would – even for a woman as stoical and determined as Esther Rees – surely have felt like erasing her daughter’s last precious hours of life.
Reckitt stood aside to allow us into the kitchen and asked no more. But he would not have raised the question of Lizzie’s clothes and bedlinen had it not been relevant.
‘Mrs Rees,’ I began, once we had assumed our places, ‘why did you ask Dr Reckitt and me to come here today?’
‘Begging your pardon, Mr Probert-Lloyd, but I didn’t ask for you. Dr Reckitt insisted.’
It was as I had suspected: Reckitt had hoped to persuade me to call an inquest and allow him to perform a forensic dissection. Sometimes his determination to unravel the mystery of death got the better of him. ‘Very well,’ I amended. ‘Why did you ask for Dr Reckitt’s opinion?’
‘People don’t just die! Not when they’re young and healthy.’
Despite her vehemence, Mrs Rees volunteered nothing more. ‘You told Dr Reckitt that you thought your husband was hiding something.’
There was a pause. Given that voicing her suspicions to Reckitt had resulted in his involving me, perhaps Esther Rees regretted her candour. ‘Not hiding exactly,’ she said. ‘But I thought there was something he wasn’t willing to tell me.’
‘Such as?’