by Alis Hawkins
I told her the whole story, and when I mentioned Jem Harborne’s name, she surprised me.
‘That’s the young man who’s putting up some big construction in Llandyfriog.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A wool factory.’
‘He’ll be lucky to see it built, the way he’s going.’ Ianto’s tongue was a lot looser in the kitchen than it was in the dining room.
‘What d’you mean?’ I asked.
‘People are against it. This factory.’
The other footman, Fred, dumped a bucket of anthracite in front of the range. ‘So they should be. That wool man took a smallholding that’d been promised to somebody else.’
‘How?’ I asked. A promise to sub-let was generally as good as a written contract.
Fred shrugged. ‘New squire over at Plas Blaengwyn wanted the factory on his land. Tenant didn’t have a choice, did he?’
‘So who’s going to do the land work?’ I asked. I couldn’t see Jem Harborne turning out whenever the farmer who’d sub-let the land to him needed an extra pair of hands, which was the usual agreement with sub-tenants.
Ianto shrugged. ‘Pay some poor bugger of a labourer, won’t he?’
‘Ianto Jones!’ Mrs Griffiths said sharply. ‘Language.’ With no butler, she was having to keep a firm hand on the footmen.
It was time I left. Ianto’d hold it against me for ever if I stood there watching him getting a telling-off, and I didn’t want to give him a reason to ‘accidentally’ pour soup in my lap.
Harry
The following morning, before I sat down to breakfast, I asked the Sergeant’s landlord if he could find somebody to take a message over to Glanteifi for me.
‘Present my compliments to my under-steward, Mr John Davies,’ I told the young man who eventually produced himself, ‘and ask if he’d be so good as to meet me here at his convenience. Take a horse from the stables and charge it to my account.’ At this rate, I was going to be significantly out of pocket if I decided not to call an inquest. Still, the quicker John got here, the more efficient my investigation would be.
Half an hour or so later, I went over to the stables to find Sara tacked up and waiting for me. Standing next to her was the skewbald animal Reckitt had been riding, also ready to go.
‘The doctor not going with you, sir?’
I turned to the grey-haired, slightly stooped little man who had spoken. ‘No, not this morning.’ All I required from Reckitt was that he re-examine Lizzie Rees’s body once rigor mortis had released her from its grip, a process that would not yet be far enough advanced. ‘You can stall his horse for a while yet.’
The man whistled and issued instructions to somebody I could not see.
‘And your mare, sir – will you be needing a stall for her later?’
‘I’m not sure. Possibly.’ I took the reins from him. ‘I’ve just sent a messenger over to Glanteifi—’
‘Yes, sir, young Dai Davies. First-class rider – he’ll be there in no time.’
‘If I’m not back before my assistant, Mr John Davies, arrives, direct him to the smallholding of Rhosdywarch, will you?’
I started to give him directions, but he forestalled me. ‘I know the Reeses’ place.’
‘Did you know the young woman who’s died?’ I asked. ‘Lizzie Rees?’ Being of a different generation, it was possible that he had not been acquainted with the girl.
‘Only to pass the time of day with if I saw her in the street, sir. She only came to the village for church as a rule, and I’m chapel.’
‘Have you heard anything about her death? Have people been talking?’
‘Gossip, you mean?’
I smiled, pointing my gaze in his direction. I had been practising with John and Lydia and had learned to look pretty well infallibly at a speaker’s face, but looking them squarely in the eye would, I feared, always be beyond me. ‘I find there’s often a seed of something even in the worst kind of tittle-tattle, don’t you?’
He took a confiding half-step towards me and lowered his voice slightly. ‘I heard Dr Gwynne’d given it as natural death, but Esther Rees wouldn’t have it – went straight off to Cilgerran for Dr Reckitt. Why would she do that?’
I hesitated, but sometimes it was necessary to give a little in order to get what one wanted. ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out. So, have you heard anything?’
He looked over his shoulder as Reckitt’s horse, now unsaddled once more, was led away by a small boy. ‘There was something. But it was just lads talking in their cups really…’
‘And what did they say, these lads?’ I asked when I realised that the old man would say no more unless prompted. It was a common trick amongst people who wanted to tell me what they knew but were afraid of being accused of passing on information that others might not want shared: if the coroner asked a direct question, there was no choice but to answer him, was there? It was the law.
‘They were going on about this one lad,’ he said, keeping his voice down lest the boy hear. ‘The Englishman, they call him.’
‘And what did they say about him?’
The old man sucked his teeth. ‘Only gossip it was, sir…’
‘Even so, it would be useful to know what people are saying.’
‘They said Lizzie Rees’s death wasn’t right. That it must be something to do with the Englishman. That’s all I know.’
And try as I might, I could get nothing more out of him.
* * *
The ride to Rhosdywarch was pleasant and my new familiarity with the route meant that I seemed to reach the smallholding much more quickly than we had the previous day.
As I forded the stream below the Reeses’ home, I slowed Sara to a walk, then pulled her up and closed my eyes for a moment. I was not used to conducting interviews without John, still less alone, and I needed to collect my thoughts. As soon as my eyelids closed on the whirlpool and the effort of trying to see the world around it, I became aware of birdsong all about me: in the trees along the water’s edge, in the sky above, in the hummocky, gorse-strewn fields ahead. I tilted my head the better to distinguish individual calls and songs, and felt the early sun on my cheek, smelled the sweetness of earth and plants warming from a chilly night.
It is a cliché to say that a blind man’s other senses become more acute in order to compensate for the one he has lost, and I do not believe it to be the case; it is simply a matter of paying attention to senses that are often ignored because of the overwhelming primacy of vision. In the year or so since my sight had failed me, I had forced myself to learn everything I could from my other senses and had been astonished at the amount of information human beings routinely disregard. As a boy, I had often heard farmers say that they could smell rain and had dismissed the notion as metaphorical, but now I knew it to be true. Similarly, music now seemed sweeter than any I had heard before, and I had been forced to wonder how often in my previous life I had failed to properly appreciate a performance because I had been distracted by the beauty of the singer or the bored twitchings of my fellow listeners.
Vision, I had come to understand, masks and weakens our other senses. Why else would a young woman close her eyes as she breathes in the scent of a rose she has just been given?
The thought, and with it the accompanying memory of a once-beloved face, sent over me a wave of acute melancholy. If I were to fall in love again, to marry, I would never know the face of my beloved in any but the most tantalising way: visible but never to be gazed at, drunk in, fixed upon.
Nudging Sara into a walk once more, I turned my ears to the birds again, catching the high, sweet twittering of a lark and seeing the fluttering littleness of it, high above, in my mind’s eye.
* * *
Rhosdywarch was quiet when I arrived, and I was afraid that despite my early start, the family might already have left for chapel. However, my shouts soon roused an answering greeting from the field on the other side of the little orchard, and one of the girls came running.
‘Is it my mam or my dada you’d like to speak to, sir?’ she panted as she pulled up in front of me.
‘Your father if he’s not too busy,’ I said, dismounting.
‘I’ll see if he’s out yet,’ she answered, already taking to her heels with my message.
Damn. I had been too slow on the uptake and now Mic Rees and I would both be embarrassed when he cut short his private business in the privy and presented himself.
John would have been quicker, would have called the girl back and asked her to fetch her mother. But then I knew perfectly well that John would have argued strongly against being here in the first place.
Dr Gwynne saw nothing suspicious, he would have said, and neither did Reckitt. You’re making too much of her father’s white lie. He just didn’t want to let Cadwgan Gwynne see her wet and stinking of piss.
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd!’ It was not Mic Rees’s voice that pulled me from my thoughts, but his wife’s. ‘I’m sorry, I know you wanted to see my husband, but he’s…’ She faltered to a halt.
‘Don’t trouble yourself. I know you’ll all want to be getting off to chapel. Besides, you will be able to answer at least one of my questions.’
And indeed, it suddenly seemed serendipitous that I found myself speaking to Esther instead of to her husband. I might do well to defer my discussion with Mic Rees about the circumstances in which he had found his daughter’s body until I had more information about his own movements the previous morning.
‘I’ll help if I can.’
‘I’ve asked Dr Reckitt to come over later today to finish his examination,’ I began, hoping that this would predispose her to cooperate with me. ‘Once he has done so, he may find that he does not need to conduct a post-mortem.’
She did not reply, simply waited to hear what I wanted from her.
‘Meanwhile, I would like to speak to the man who came to bring you the dreadful news of Lizzie’s death. Can you tell me his name and where I can find him?’
There was something about the ensuing silence that told me that though Esther Rees might want to know how her daughter had died, she did not want me riding around the parish asking questions.
‘He didn’t see Lizzie. Just came to Ffynone to tell me.’
‘It’s just that there are protocols – ways of doing things – to be followed,’ I said, hoping that the use of such an officious, English term would deter her from asking more questions. ‘You yourself believe your husband may be hiding something,’ I reminded her, blinking as the sun came out from behind a cloud.
I waited, but she made no reply.
‘I’ll also be going to see Dr Gwynne,’ I said.
‘Why? Dr Reckitt’s seen her now.’
‘But it was Dr Gwynne your husband consulted.’ I gathered Sara’s reins. ‘Therefore I need to speak to him to see if he observed anything of note.’ I was particularly interested in Gwynne’s observations on her husband’s state of mind when he had appeared at the doctor’s door.
‘He didn’t see anything!’ Esther Rees’s vehemence spun me around to face her. The tension in her posture was visible even to me, her arms rigid at her sides, fists clenched. ‘That’s why I wanted Dr Reckitt! I want him to look inside her – to find out why she died!’
Before I could stop myself, I had taken a step toward her. ‘Mrs Rees, don’t upset yourself.’
‘If you’re not going to have an inquest, I’ll pay Dr Reckitt to do his examination. I can’t pay two guineas, but I’ve got the money Lizzie brought back from the south. It’s no good to her now.’
I could not allow her to take control of the situation in this way. ‘Mrs Rees, please be so good as to do nothing until I have consulted with Dr Reckitt myself. He will be here later, and if he arrives before I get back, I would be obliged if you would not make any such request.’
Esther Rees clutched at her apron with both hands as if she wanted to tear it to shreds. ‘But he said the longer it is, the more difficult it’ll be!’
Damn Reckitt and his impatience. ‘Poisons persist for a long time. Another few hours won’t make any—’
‘Poisons! You think somebody killed my Lizzie with poison?’
I was taken aback; was that not what she thought?
‘I don’t think anything,’ I said, striving for a calming tone. ‘But poison is one of the things Dr Reckitt would look for, certainly.’ As well as haemorrhaging and whatever asphyxia idiopathica was. My Latin was rusty, but it sounded suspiciously like a doctor’s obfuscating way of saying ‘died due to unexplained lack of breath’.
‘Now, if you’ll just tell me where I might find the man who fetched you from Ffynone, I’ll be on my way.’
John
As I left the kitchen and made my way to the estate office at the front of the house, I was still thinking about Jem Harborne and his wool factory. I wasn’t surprised about what Ianto’d said – there would be bad feeling, wouldn’t there? It was only to be expected. And not just from the family that was supposed to have been sub-letting the land Harborne was building on, either. Even if his factory was mostly producing cloth for South Wales or America, I could see that it’d affect local weavers in the end.
Of course there was bad feeling towards him.
I thought about the farmer who’d been forced to go back on his previous agreement to sub-let the smallholding. Harborne must’ve gone over his head, straight to the new squire at Plas Blaengwyn, and offered a lot more money. Half for the tenant and half for the squire, most likely.
Mr Ormiston would approve. As far as he was concerned, the only thing that had to be considered when renting out land was bringing in as much money as possible for the estate. I’d lost count of how many times a tenant’d complained to me that this wasn’t how old Mr Probert-Lloyd had done things.
Ever since Harry’d given Mr Ormiston a free hand to manage the estate, everything had changed. Trouble was, with the same steward in charge, as far as the tenants were concerned it must be the new squire’s fault that they were suddenly being dealt with differently. So it was Harry people blamed when a farm up for re-letting went to the highest bidder instead of the next family member in line; or when a new tenancy agreement made the tenant, not the estate, liable for maintaining the property; or when the rent went up because the tenant’d made improvements in recent years and raised the farm’s value.
I’d tried to tell Mr Ormiston that he was causing trouble for Harry, but he wasn’t having it. ‘The tenants have had it too easy for too long,’ he’d said. ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd senior was far too understanding. The tenants took advantage. The balance needs to be redressed.’
But whatever he said, I knew things couldn’t go on like this.
When I opened the study door, the place smelled unused. Cold soot, ink, and a lingering smell of vinegar. The maids must’ve come in to clean the windows while I’d been away. Did that mean Mr Ormiston hadn’t been here for the last few days?
There was a pile of documents on my desk, along with a note in Mr Ormiston’s jerky, upright hand telling me that the contracts and agreements he’d left for me were needed tomorrow – two copies of each as usual. He wouldn’t be in the office until midday, the note said, so I should have plenty of time to finish the work. The thought popped into my head that if I didn’t have to get everything done today, I’d have enough time to go over to Eglwyswrw, but I ignored it. I had more work to do than just the drafting that Mr Ormiston’d left me.
My desk was in the little annexe that had been Mr Ormiston’s office when Harry’s father’d been alive and this had been his study. But I wasn’t going to sit at my desk today. Today I was going to take steps for the good of the estate, so I was going to sit at the big desk, the one that had been Mr Probert-Lloyd’s.
As I arranged my papers and unstoppered the ink bottle, I wondered what Harry would’ve said if Jem Harborne had come to him and asked to sub-let some Glanteifi land for his wool factory instead of the land in Llandyfriog.
Thank God that h
adn’t happened. It was bad enough having the tenants complaining about the way the estate was going – we didn’t need all the local weavers up in arms against us too.
But I’d done something just as bad, hadn’t I? If Mr Gelyot put money into Harborne’s factory, I’d be responsible for weavers losing their jobs.
I just had to hope and pray that nobody ever found out it was me who’d given him Harborne’s name.
Harry
It was not far from Rhosdywarch to the farm where Mic Rees had gone in search of a messenger, but the short ride gave me ample time to berate myself for my own incompetence. I should not have allowed myself to be caught up in what amounted to a confrontation with Esther Rees.
If John had been here, it would not have happened. His presence at my side gave my position a certain weight, and without him I felt insubstantial, lacking in significance.
Esther Rees’s directions had told me to look out for a farm lane immediately after crossing a small stream, and I soon found myself riding up to the farm she had referred to as Dolbannon.
I followed the sound of voices past a substantial farmhouse and into a courtyard surrounded on three sides by stone buildings. Most were thatched, though the largest – and presumably newest – boasted a slate roof; evidently whoever owned the land hereabouts was still in the process of improving his farms. I wondered sourly whether he, like my father, had decided to fund his renovations by mortgaging the estate.
The yard was busy with young men and women and I realised that I had arrived to find everybody ready for chapel. The farm’s harvest had just been brought in, and there was something of a holiday atmosphere in the air, with girls teasing the lads about the soaking they’d given yesterday to the caseg pen fedi – the harvest mare – which was the name given to the last sheaf of corn to be tied. By tradition, the young men’s task was to bring it to the farmyard unmolested, while the young women’s was to soak it. This year, the girls had won.