by Alis Hawkins
Looked like I’d hit the nail on the head. The girls fidgeted, and Ann shifted her position so that instead of sitting with her legs crossed under her apron, she was sitting up, legs beneath her. She looked more alert, more wary, and she kept darting glances at her little sister, who was making another daisy chain, weaving buttercups into it after every third daisy.
‘Is that why she didn’t go with you to Ffynone?’ I asked. ‘Because she wanted to go over to Felindre Farchog to see Dewin Gwynne but she knew she’d never be able to get away from your mother?’
Even Gwen looked troubled now, and her sister’s mouth might as well have been sewn shut for all the sound she was making. But if I could guess what had happened, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t deny it if it meant lying to me.
‘I know your mam doesn’t think much of Dr Gwynne,’ I said. That must be true, because she’d gone straight for Reckitt, no matter that Gwynne had already been here and given his opinion. ‘But your father trusts him, doesn’t he? Did Lizzie persuade your father to let her stay home so she could go and see him?’
But that wasn’t it, I could tell. Ann looked ready to bolt now, and even though Gwen was still working at her daisy chain, she was crying quietly.
Her sister put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t cry, Gwen fach…’
But her gentle words made things worse. Gwen looked up, tears streaming down her face. ‘If she’d come with us, she’d still be here.’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Yes we do!’ Gwen wailed, spit or tears coming out of her mouth. ‘Sally Sips must’ve told everybody what Lizzie was going to do, so they came here that night. They must have! You saw her things…’
‘Gwen, husht!’ Ann put her arm around her little sister, but I could see her trying to watch me out of the corner of her eye.
A sudden breeze had come with the clouds, and it was swirling about in the little valley where we were sitting, turning the leaves of the trees upside down to show their pale undersides. I shifted, trying to move into a more comfortable position without tearing a hole in my britches – there was a nasty sharp stone making itself felt under me. Seren didn’t appreciate me accidentally pulling on her, and threw her head up, almost yanking both reins out of my hand.
‘Gwen,’ I said gently, ‘do you think somebody came to the house on the night your sister died?’
‘She doesn’t know anything,’ Ann said, pulling her sister closer. ‘She’s just being silly. You know you are, Gwen.’
‘No I’m not!’ Gwen wailed, looking more and more like the little girl she was with every new tear that ran down her blotchy cheeks. ‘I’m not being silly. They hated Lizzie! And Sally Sips must’ve told them what she was going to do and they came to frighten her. They killed her! They killed our Lizzie!’
I looked at Ann. She wasn’t telling Gwen off any more. There was something going on here, something more than a little girl getting upset about people’s spitefulness to her big sister.
‘I think you’d better tell me what Lizzie had in mind that night,’ I said. ‘Don’t you?’
Harry
‘I let her sleep in the box bed,’ Mic Rees said. ‘Like I told you, she hadn’t been well, and I wanted her to have a good night’s rest. The box bed keeps the draughts out – and the early morning light – so she could sleep in a bit. There was only the two of us here…’
The implication was clear: his wife would never have agreed to such a thing.
‘Why didn’t you tell us this straight away?’ I asked.
‘My wife…’ He pulled himself up, then regrouped. ‘She’d’ve said that if I’d made Lizzie go with her, she wouldn’t’ve died,’ he said. ‘And perhaps she’s right.’
‘Nonsense,’ Reckitt said. ‘I suspect it was a brain aneurysm that killed your daughter. If I’m right, it would’ve been far more dangerous for her to be doing hard work like washing sheets and tablecloths.’
Rees’s head came up. ‘Is that true? Do lots of people have them, then, these…?’
‘Aneurysms. Yes, I’d say they’re one of the most common causes of sudden death in the young. They’re badly formed vessels that burst.’ There was a brief pause while, apparently, Reckitt took in the fact that Mic Rees was very little the wiser. ‘It’s like when you blow up a pig’s bladder for football,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes there’s a weakness and the wall of the bladder bulges out in a bump instead of being nice and round, and it might burst. An aneurysm is like that. A weakness in the wall of an artery.’ He used the English words for aneurysm and artery. I wondered whether Cadwgan Gwynne would know their Welsh equivalents.
‘The arteries are the pipes, if you like, that carry blood from the heart around the body,’ Reckitt’s explanation went on. ‘Sometimes the pressure of the blood is too much and the stretched-out bulge bursts. That’s one of the things I wanted to look for in your daughter’s brain and heart vessels.’
‘But what could’ve made it burst when she was in bed?’ Rees’s voice was barely above a whisper, his desperation suggesting that if he could only understand what had killed his daughter, somehow he might contrive to turn back time and change the circumstances that had led to her death. It was, I had discovered, a common reaction to the death of a child.
Reckitt, oblivious to the man’s anguish, simply answered the question. ‘In somebody with a cold, a sudden attack of coughing or sneezing is most likely.’
‘A sneeze could have killed her?’
‘If an aneurysm’s wall had been weakened enough, yes.’
As Rees sat there, his mug cradled in his hands, I realised that I had drunk none of my own cider. I lifted it to my mouth, and immediately the warm, dry sensation of cider-cured wood on my lips and the apple-laden aroma transported me to another time: to those days in my childhood and young manhood when I had roamed the farms of the estate. I had been oblivious to my status as Glanteifi’s heir then, accepting the hospitality shown to me as nothing more than that due to another pair of hands at hay or harvest, not understanding that I was welcomed by virtue of my position rather than my usefulness.
‘Mr Rees,’ Reckitt said, ‘Cadwgan Gwynne told us that he had examined your daughter in her own bed, in the loft.’
Mic Rees hesitated. ‘Yes.’
‘Was it difficult – moving her?’
I shifted uncomfortably. ‘Reckitt…’
‘I’m not asking whether moving your daughter’s body was upsetting,’ Reckitt clarified. ‘I’m asking whether it was physically difficult.’
Rees did not reply straight away. Was he looking to me for help? ‘She’s not a very big girl,’ he began. ‘Not very heavy.’
‘But carrying her up a ladder must have been unwieldy?’
Rees swallowed audibly. ‘I put her round my shoulders. Like carrying a ewe.’
‘Then death stiffness hadn’t set in?’ Reckitt used a colloquial Welsh term rather than the Latin one Rees was unlikely to understand.
‘No.’ Mic Rees let the word out gradually, as if he might want to pull it back at any moment.
Reckitt turned to me. ‘QED, Probert-Lloyd,’ he said. Then he switched back to Welsh. ‘If she was not yet at all stiffened, then your daughter had only recently died, and so late in the night her bladder would’ve been quite full. Therefore, when you found her, her petticoat must have been very wet. You changed her underclothes before anybody saw her. Why?’
Reckitt’s certainty seemed to breach Rees’s defences. I heard him take a long breath, and when he spoke, his voice was unsteady with emotion.
‘I couldn’t stand the thought of Dr Gwynne seeing her soaked in her own piss.’ Again he sucked in air, as if he needed more breath than usual to get the words out. ‘It was the last service I could do her. To let her have that dignity.’
I conjured up the likely sequence of events in my mind’s eye. ‘The mattress in the box bed must have been wet where Lizzie lay,’ I said. ‘How did you prevent your wife noticing that?’
Rees ran
a hand under his nose before replying. ‘Before I went for Dr Gwynne, I dragged the mattress into the yard. Rinsed the worst of it out. Then I hung it from a beam in the byre – for the water to drip out. After the doctor’d left, I laid it in the sun to dry while I went to Dolbannon.’
‘And her wet petticoat?’
‘Washed. Three times I had to soap and rinse to get the stink out.’
I waited to see if Reckitt would ask anything further, but it seemed he was content with having been proved right.
Mic Rees sat between us, head bowed, cider apparently forgotten. I found that I had lost the appetite for mine, too, and set it on the floor under my chair. My fingertips brushed the ground, and feeling the kitchen floor’s cold smoothness, I wondered whether its dark colour came from pigs’ blood. I had heard that combining it with mud and lime produced a durable surface, and Esther Rees was the kind of woman who would use what she had to hand in the most resourceful way.
‘Reckitt,’ I said softly, ‘would you go and see if you can find any evidence of dampness on the feather mattress in the box bed?’ It was as well to be sure; Mic Rees had lied to us before.
As Reckitt rose from his creaking chair, Rees roused himself. ‘You’ll need to feel underneath the mattress, Doctor. I turned it over in case it was still damp when we went to bed.’
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Rees, lying down to sleep in the place where the previous night his firstborn child had breathed her last. Though I had not been excessively attached to my father, still for weeks after his illness and death I had barely been able to enter the room where he had died.
‘Please, Mr Probert-Lloyd, don’t tell my wife.’
Rees’s plea, along with the sound of the box bed’s door being slid open, pulled me back from stark recollections of my father’s deathbed. ‘As long as there’s no need for an inquest,’ I said, ‘your wife does not need to know.’
‘But there won’t be an inquest now, will there?’ His voice rose half an octave. Had he hoped that telling us the truth would ensure that no further action would be taken?
‘There’s something else you haven’t been honest with us about,’ I said.
‘What?’ Did I imagine the edge of desperation in his voice?
‘The time. If you didn’t discover Lizzie until the cow started complaining, by my reckoning there wasn’t time for you to wash her and put her in her own bed, then go for Dr Gwynne and still be over at Dolbannon by the time I’m told you arrived.’
‘I…’ He faltered. ‘Lizzie was always up at first light to milk.’
‘Even so…’
‘And it didn’t take me long to get to Dewin Gwynne’s – I ran along the river.’
It might be true. There was nothing of Mic Rees; he was as thin as a whippet. But I did not think Cadwgan Gwynne would have run back here with him. And had Rees, subsequently, run all the way to Dolbannon too? Yet I could see no good reason for him to be lying. I did not ask him about the other discrepancy – the cow’s lowing he had told us about but omitted when he spoke to Gwynne – for it seemed petty in the light of the anguish that had driven him to hide the truth about where his daughter died. No doubt by the time Reckitt and I had arrived, he’d had sufficient time to reflect on the sound that had woken him and conclude that it must have been the cow.
Reckitt rejoined us. ‘Some residual dampness confirms it,’ he murmured to me before resuming his seat. ‘Mr Rees, will you allow me to examine Lizzie to see if I can find a burst aneurysm? If that’s what killed her, you and your wife will have peace of mind that no matter where she’d spent those final hours, your daughter would still have died.’
‘But what if you don’t find one? What then?’ The man’s distress was clear, but Reckitt was not fond of hypothetical questions. ‘No,’ Rees said when he received no reply. ‘I don’t want you cutting my Lizzie up any more.’
‘I’m offering you—’
‘Reckitt, Mr Rees has made his feelings clear,’ I said. ‘We have what we need to determine whether an inquest is required. At this point, anything further is vexatious.’
I stood, hoping to avoid further argument, and as I did so, the door opened. I turned my head to see the tall figure of Esther Rees.
‘Doctor! I’m so glad to find you here. And you, Mr Probert-Lloyd—’
Her husband interrupted. ‘Did you get the money for the funeral?’
She spun around. ‘Funeral? Is that all you can think about – getting her safely into the ground?’ She stepped towards Rees, who had risen to his feet as she entered. They were a similar height, and when she stood toe to toe with him, it was he who seemed the smaller, as if he shrank before her. ‘Do you think burying her is going to stop the gossip? Because if you do, Michael Rees, you are as wrong as wrong can be. Do you know what I heard everywhere I went? His name. That damned foreigner’s name!’
John
By the time I walked into the Rhosdywarch kitchen, the battle about Reckitt taking his scalpel to the rest of Lizzie’s body was almost over. Mic Rees was still fighting, but you could tell from the beaten look of him that he knew he wasn’t going to win.
And looking at Esther Rees, I doubted that he won very often. Nothing her husband said seemed to have any effect on her – it was like watching a man try to drill a hole with a mallet.
I didn’t want to stand there with them arguing, so I backed out.
Harry followed me.
‘Looks like you’ve got what you wanted from Mic,’ I said quietly, so that Gwen wouldn’t hear. She was at the weaving-shed end of the house, holding Seren for me.
‘Yes, he lied about not changing Lizzie’s petticoat.’ Harry kept his voice down too. ‘He just didn’t want Gwynne to see her like that.’
‘Right then. I’ll get back to Glanteifi.’ I was already walking towards Seren, keen to be gone now we knew there was nothing more to Mic’s lies than embarrassment. But Harry followed me.
‘At least stay until Reckitt’s completed the examination,’ he said. ‘Then we can ride as far as Eglwyswrw together and I’ll go on to Cilgerran with Reckitt. I want to be on hand while he analyses the stomach contents, then there’ll be no delay if I have to call an inquest.’
‘You stay if you like,’ I said, ‘but I’ve got work I need to do before tomorrow. By rights, I shouldn’t have come at all.’
‘Surely Ormiston—’
‘No. There are things only I can do at the moment. And they need to be done today.’
He wasn’t happy, but in the end he had to let me go.
* * *
I trotted Seren away from Rhosdywarch, furious that Harry put nursemaiding him above my estate work. And that he thought I should just let Mr Ormiston get on with it. Fair enough if he’d been a competent steward; maybe I could’ve picked and chosen what work I did when. But he wasn’t competent. At least not now, when the estate’s future was hanging by a thread.
Micah Ormiston thought the solution to the estate’s financial difficulties was simple. Just replace tenants who were stuck in the past with more ambitious men who’d pay higher rents and who’d be more forward-thinking about crops and stock. But it wasn’t that simple. Farmers didn’t work on their own, not like weavers or carpenters or blacksmiths. They had to cooperate or nobody’d survive.
The tenants Mr Ormiston wanted to get rid of all had something that couldn’t be easily replaced. Sam Dangraig had a boar that was always in demand for on-heat sows because it sired big litters and was docile to walk between farms. Tomos Iscoed, father to our hall boy, Wil-Sam, had inherited his position as leader of the local haymaking group from his father; without him, haymaking on the ten farms that worked together would be a shambles, because there was another farmer who thought he should be in charge and only Tomos could handle him. Dan Penralldywyll had a plough pair that went out to every neighbouring farmer, and if he sold them – which was Mr Ormiston’s ‘simple solution’ – it wasn’t only him who’d have no means of ploughing his land.
And it wasn’t just the men, either. The farmers’ wives were in charge of gleaning, and they were often better shearers than their husbands. Mari Cwmderi was known as the midwife who’d take over from Ann Davies when she retired, and Sally Treloyw had a reputation as a marriage healer. If their families were turned off the land, their skills would be lost.
Then there was Deio’r Gwahoddwr – the bidder-to-come – who carefully crafted wedding invitation verses and sang them to every farm in the district. He could no more be replaced by whoever took over his holding than could the distinctive staff he carried. It’d been carved for his grandfather when he’d served twelve years as the Gwahoddwr, and old Wil y Gwahoddwr hadn’t given it up until his grandson’d proved a worthy successor.
If all those people ended up in the workhouse, or on a farm miles away doing drudge work for a charitable relative, all their skills would be lost and Glanteifi’d be the poorer for it. In both senses.
But, after Harry’d told him that he should do whatever was most profitable for the estate, all Mr Ormiston cared about was retiring next April with as much money in the Glanteifi bank account as possible. Or at least with our debts not increased. Then he’d go off and live with his daughter, and I’d be left with the impossible task of knitting the community he’d unravelled back together.
I tried to put it out of my head and think of something else, but then my mind filled with the bizarre story I’d got from Ann and Gwen.
I was glad Harry hadn’t had time to ask me whether I’d got any sense out of the pair of them. The story they’d told me was completely fanciful and I didn’t want him to think I believed in such nonsense. And if there was still a chance that Reckitt might find a brain aneurysm or poison when he did the rest of his examination, there’d be no need to repeat any of the girls’ fancifulness.
Of course, if Reckitt found nothing when he opened her up, it’d be a different story. I’d have to tell Harry then.