by Alis Hawkins
‘His father was also a dyn hysbys, I take it?’
‘Oh yes. Llywelyn Gwynne. They used to say he could raise the dead and change the weather. Or cure you of piles or tell you who you were going to marry. He was also supposed to be able to see what was wrong with people just from looking at them.’
Could he? It was on the tip of Harry’s tongue to ask; it was written all over his face. ‘And his son, Cadwgan – is he similarly gifted?’
‘So they say.’
* * *
Dr Gwynne’s house sat back from the road a good way, tucked into the hill behind it, and looked as if it’d been there a while. The windows were small and the house’d seen so many years of limewash – a century at least from the look of it – that you couldn’t see the shape of the stones underneath, only smoothed-over bumps in the walls.
There was nobody handy to take charge of the horses, so we stood there, reins in hand, while I grabbed the rope hanging from the lintel and rang the bell.
Mrs Gwynne came to the door herself. She had to be the doctor’s wife – no servant would’ve been that haughty-looking.
‘Good day to you, I’m John Davies, coroner’s assistant, and this is Mr Harry Probert-Lloyd, coroner for the Teifi Valley.’ She looked like the kind of woman who’d be impressed by titles. ‘Do we have the pleasure of addressing Mrs Gwynne?’
‘You do.’
I glanced across at Harry. He couldn’t see her expression, but he’d’ve worked out that she wasn’t exactly welcoming from the way I’d spoken to her.
‘Good day to you, Mrs Gwynne,’ he said, giving her a little bow. ‘Might it be possible to have a few words with your husband?’
‘I’ll see if it’s a convenient moment,’ she said eventually. ‘I know he went back to his charts after a busy morning.’
Charts? Of course – astrology. Gwynne’s father’d been famous for saying, ‘Tell me the moment of your birth and I’ll tell you the moment of your death.’ Cadwgan must’ve carried on the star-consulting tradition. Mind, why anybody would want to know exactly when they were going to die was beyond me.
We waited on the doorstep while Mrs Gwynne disappeared inside. Not very genteel, leaving us standing here; she could’ve invited us in. Then again, we still had hold of the horses, so perhaps not.
She was back in less than a minute. ‘Dr Gwynne will see you now.’ She turned and jerked her head at somebody standing in the hall. A boy slipped past and took the mares’ reins without looking at us or uttering a word. Son or servant? Difficult to tell. Either way, he was firmly pressed down under Mrs Gwynne’s thumb.
We followed her through the hall and into a passage that separated the rooms facing the road from those that looked up the hill. I don’t know what I’d been expecting from a wizard’s house, but you’d’ve seen the dark paintings and red-tiled floor in any number of well-off people’s homes. Then again, there was mistletoe over the door Mrs Gwynne opened for us.
The consulting room – if that was what this was – was surprisingly light. Granted, it was south-facing, but the windows were small. Then I saw them. Mirrors. They were on every wall, cleverly angled to catch and reflect the light. And the room needed a lot of light, because it was full of plants. Pots and pots of them on long, deep shelves that ran around the room. The air was filled with the summer tang of them, as if somebody’d walked past and put a hand out to disturb the leaves of each one before we’d walked in.
Dr Gwynne was standing in front of a small desk to one side of the fireplace. The fire wasn’t lit, but I noticed that the fat-bellied coal scuttle was full of decent chunks of anthracite, not cheap dusty coal or culm. The doctor must be doing all right for himself.
‘Gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to my home. I assume you’re here to ask me about the death of poor Elizabeth Rees.’
Didn’t take a fortune-teller to know that, did it – why else would we be here?
‘We are,’ Harry said. ‘I hope you don’t mind our coming unannounced.’
Harry was matching his Welsh to the doctor’s – the kind of elevated, educated language you’d expect of a professional man. He could go up and down the scale with the best of them, and hearing him talk to a stable boy in exactly the kind of language the boy’d use himself was a sight to behold, I can tell you. Or rather, the stable boy’s reaction was.
I wondered if Gwynne did the same, or if he always spoke like this, to show his patients what a learned man he was.
‘Please, do sit down.’
There was only one place for us to sit – a small chaise longue upholstered in dark-red velvet. It was an unsettling colour. Like dried blood.
Gwynne turned his chair towards us and sat waiting. He was as thin as a pole and very tall – sitting down, his arms and legs seemed to extend further than they should from his body – and his chestnut-coloured hair fell in long ringlets over his collar. Mind, he was soberly dressed. Grey wool and white linen that wouldn’t’ve shamed a preacher.
Harry pointed his eyes in Gwynne’s direction. ‘To begin at the beginning, Dr Gwynne, what time did Mic Rees arrive at your house yesterday?’
The doctor leaned forward and clasped his hands together on his knees. ‘Just after I’d broken my fast. It’s my habit to rise with the sun, walk for an hour and then come home to eat. Then I am fortified for the day ahead.’
I looked about. There was no clock in the room, but Gwynne had a watch chain. ‘Do you know exactly what time it was, Doctor?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it was just after half past seven. I always make a note of the time at which my patients choose to consult me.’
‘Why?’ I asked, when Harry didn’t.
‘Sometimes it proves significant. Not often, but I keep it as a rule, nonetheless.’
‘And how would you describe Mr Rees’s demeanour when he came to your door?’ Harry asked.
While Dr Gwynne collected his thoughts, I glanced around the room. It was completely different from the chaos at Reckitt’s place, but then Reckitt didn’t generally see patients at his house. Those who could pay summoned him, and he saw the rest at the workhouse.
If everything I’d heard about Dr Gwynne was true, people came as often to ask him to tell their fortune as they did to consult him about his specialisms – skin disease and madness. He wasn’t a bone-setter and I’d never heard of him stitching a wound. No, what Gwynne was famous for was curing the disfigured and the mad. As well as knowing things other people didn’t. And I’m not talking about the kind of things Benton Reckitt knew.
Still, I’d expected shelves with jars and bottles, like a chemist’s or druggist’s, but all there was here were cupboards and drawers. Some of the drawers were so small you’d barely have got a shilling’s worth of pennies in there. Obviously hiding rare and valuable stuff.
‘I would say that Mr Rees seemed as you might expect,’ Gwynne said in the end. ‘He’d found his daughter dead in her bed. He was confused, upset, not entirely articulate.’
‘And what did he tell you about the circumstances in which he’d found her?’
Gwynne’s eyes went up towards the ceiling, as if what he wanted might be written there for him to read. People often did that, in my experience, which was odd, really. You’d’ve thought it would be more helpful to shut your eyes, wouldn’t you? Memories are inside your head, when all’s said and done, not in the air in front of you.
After a few seconds, he shook his head. ‘I can’t remember precisely. Let me find my notes.’
He unfolded himself from the chair, squatted down to open one of the three drawers in his drop-leaf desk and took a book out. When he stood up again, he did it in one effortless movement, without putting a hand to the floor, as if his joints were oiled. Back in his chair, he started flipping through the pages. He settled on one and scanned it quickly.
‘Mr Rees told me that he’d been woken sometime around sunrise by a sound. He didn’t know what it was, only that it had woken him and he was filled with dread.’ He
was obviously quoting Mic Rees’s own words. ‘I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something terrible had happened,’ he read, ‘so I went to rouse Lizzie. It was nearly time to milk the cow, but really, I just wanted to know that she was all right.’ He looked up. ‘Mr Rees told me his daughter had had a cold, though I could see no sign of that when I examined her.’ He scanned the book again, then closed it, leaving a thumb in to keep his place. ‘When he went up to the loft to rouse her, he found Lizzie “with no breath in her body”, as he put it.’
‘Mr Rees told me that he was woken by the cow lowing,’ Harry said. ‘He didn’t mention that to you?’
Cadwgan Gwynne checked his notes, but you could tell that he already knew.
‘No. Just that he felt something was wrong.’
So Mic Rees’d felt the need to come up with something better than ‘a sound woke me’ and ‘I felt something terrible had happened’ by the time he spoke to Harry. Because he was lying? Or because he’d been afraid the truth sounded weak?
‘Mr Rees’s first thought was to come to you,’ Harry said. ‘Not to go and fetch his wife. Why do you think that was?’
Dr Gwynne gave a thin smile. ‘You think Mr Rees might have come to ask me to raise his daughter from the dead, is that it?’
I knew that wasn’t what Harry’d been thinking at all, but fair play to him, he didn’t turn a hair. ‘You do have a certain reputation, Doctor.’
‘A reputation that is out of all proportion to my abilities, I assure you. I have never done anything half as dramatic.’
‘But your father was supposed to have worked a miracle,’ I said. ‘So perhaps people think you could too, if you wanted to.’
There wasn’t even the pretence of a smile now. ‘My father never claimed to have raised anybody from the dead, Mr Davies. What he in fact accomplished, on one occasion and one only, was to revive somebody from a state of utter unresponsiveness that had persisted for three days, during which the afflicted man neither ate nor drank, did not speak nor respond in any way, even when pins were stuck into him. He had suffered no seizure, no fit, no fever nor other sickness. He had simply lain down and ceased to behave like the living. He was not dead – he still breathed and his heart beat, if slowly – but in all other respects he might as well have been.’
That was a story he’d told before. Irritated or not, he was word perfect.
‘As a matter of interest, Doctor,’ Harry asked, ‘how did he revive the patient?’
Patient. Clever. Giving the old man credit as a proper medical man.
‘By throwing him into the river.’
‘That’s not very medical!’
Cadwgan Gwynne turned to me. ‘You’re assuming that all cures must be based in science, Mr Davies. In anatomy and physiology or the administration of drugs. But as Shakespeare knew more than two centuries ago, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in anybody’s philosophy. He knew that the greatest mysteries lie in the human heart and mind. We may bring about our own cures if we understand that, without medicines. Jesus Christ also knew that. Otherwise why would he tell the woman with the persistent haemorrhage that it was her faith that had made her well?’
So he didn’t just dress like a preacher, he spoke like one as well. That was unexpected.
‘But if not for a miracle, why would Mic come here first?’ Harry persisted. ‘I’m at a loss to know why he wouldn’t have gone to convey the sad news to his wife and asked you to come and certify the death afterwards.’
Gwynne nodded. He could see the sense in the question. ‘Mr Rees wanted to be able to tell his wife – and to be certain himself – that nobody else was responsible for his daughter’s death.’
Harry looked as confused as I felt. ‘But there was no evidence of any injury on her body. Why did he think…?’
‘He wasn’t looking for evidence of physical foul play, Mr Probert-Lloyd. He wanted me to tell him whether Lizzie’d been cursed.’
Harry
‘You should not scoff at things you do not understand, Mr Probert-Lloyd,’ Gwynne said. Evidently my incredulity had been clear. ‘For people who believe in such things, the power of a curse is strong. It works on the mind and may indeed provoke illness or even death.’
‘But did Mr Rees have any reason to believe that somebody had cursed his daughter?’
The doctor did not respond immediately. At my side, John remained still, silently counselling patience.
‘Mr Rees gave me to understand that his daughter was a headstrong girl, apt not to take too much notice of what other people thought of her,’ I prompted, then waited once more as Gwynne drummed his fingers softly on the arm of his chair.
‘She was courting a young man,’ he said. ‘Not a local boy. Some of the other young people in Eglwyswrw felt that she shouldn’t be encouraging him.’
‘Not local? Was it, perhaps, a young man I’ve heard called the Englishman?’ I asked, remembering what the old groom at the Sergeant’s stables had said.
‘Possibly.’
‘Or Nattie Stockton?’ John asked. Where had he heard that name?
‘Ah, Nattie – do they call him the Englishman? Perhaps. I know he doesn’t speak Welsh. You’ve heard the rumours, then?’ Cadwgan Gwynne seemed relieved, as if this removed a burden of discretion from him.
‘I was given his name as somebody who might have been sweet on Lizzie,’ John said.
Gwynne sighed. ‘There was a certain amount of bad feeling about her favouring him over the local lads, I believe. It even turned the other young women against her, according to Mr Rees.’
She thought she was better than everybody else. Had a belief in her own superiority made Lizzie Rees cast her eye beyond the usual pool of suitors?
‘And were you able to sense anything when you looked at her body?’ John asked. ‘Anything that told you she might’ve been cursed?’
This time Gwynne’s response came immediately. ‘No. Nothing at all.’
I found it interesting that the doctor took seriously not only the existence and efficacy of curses but his own ability to discern such a thing post-mortem.
Inquests, however, could only deal in facts, so I steered away from superstition onto the path of solid evidence and asked Gwynne where Lizzie’s body had been lying when he had examined her and what condition her petticoat had been in. As expected, he told us that he had examined her in her bed in the loft and that her petticoat had been quite dry. ‘Though I did not lift the body to see the condition of it underneath.’
‘Did you not find such dryness odd?’
‘Each death is different, Mr Probert-Lloyd. And each body likewise. We cannot expect one to react in the same way as another.’
I knew that Reckitt, fond of what he called fundamental physiological facts, would disagree.
* * *
Once we were back on the road and I was able to voice my scepticism as to Gwynne’s claims, I was taken aback by John’s response.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps he’s right. From what you’ve told me, Reckitt’s basing all his suspicions on a dry petticoat. And even he says it wasn’t a clean one. Where would Mic Rees have got one she’d already worn if the one she was wearing was the one that got wet?’
‘Point taken. But what about this curse business?’
‘I don’t believe in curses. Not if you mean someone using bad magic on you. But I think Dr Gwynne’s right – if you know you’ve been cursed, it might work on the mind, as he said. Make you worried, afraid even.’
‘But you can’t worry yourself to death!’
‘I don’t know. You do hear of people dying of fright.’
‘Only in sensationalist fiction.’
John sighed in a way that told me he didn’t entirely agree but knew logic was on my side.
I urged Sara into a trot. Wherever the boy had taken the mares while we had been speaking to Gwynne, they had obviously been in full sun. My saddle had been uncomfortably warm as I mounted up and it had not cooled dow
n with me on it. Rising to the trot was a relief.
‘You know what we should’ve asked him?’ John said, drawing alongside again.
‘What?’
‘Whether Lizzie’d ever consulted him.’
‘I asked her parents that. They said he’d treated all the girls when they had chickenpox, but that was the only time.’
‘I’m not talking about seeing him for that sort of thing. She might’ve gone to speak to him about this supposed curse. He’s well known to cast horoscopes, and I know for a fact that people go to him to ask who they’re going to marry.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’ John’s face turned towards me. ‘If you think about it, seeing your future in the stars isn’t that different from what people get told at chapel. Well, some chapels anyway – the Calvinists. You know, everything’s predestined, whether you’re going to heaven or hell, everything you’re ever going to do. Even if he’s not that way inclined, your minister’ll still tell you God knows everything about you – now and for ever. Except God keeps it all to himself, doesn’t he? But if all that knowledge is there somewhere, why shouldn’t it be readable in the stars or planets? That’s what people think, anyway,’ he added.
‘All right, yes, I can understand that, even if it is nonsense. But tell me why you think it’d make any difference if Lizzie Rees had consulted him.’
‘She might’ve mentioned names,’ he said. ‘I know there were some lads sweet on her. I got their names from Llwyo – Dai Davies, the messenger who came to fetch me. Twm y Gof, Dai Blaengwndwn and Wil Llain. And the one English-sounding one I mentioned to Gwynne – Nattie Stockton. But maybe it’s girls we should be looking for. Jealous girls.’
‘But what would those girls have done? You can’t honestly think they scared her to death? We’d have a hard time proving that.’
However, poison was a great deal easier to prove, and Reckitt had yet to rule that out.
* * *
Back at Rhosdywarch, we found Reckitt in the middle of an argument with Mic Rees; an argument that became audible as we rode up to the house, even though it was taking place somewhere out of sight.