Not One of Us

by Alis Hawkins

  But as I rode on, I was already arguing with myself. What was the point of telling him such an unlikely tale at all? Some people just died for no apparent reason. Why did Lizzie Rees’s death have to be somebody’s fault?

  Trouble was, what Ann and Gwen’d told me fitted in with what Llwyo had said about Lizzie not getting on with the other girls.

  I saw Gwen’s tear-stained little face in my mind’s eye, her words tumbling over each other as her fears poured out, little drops of spit catching the sunlight as she wailed at her sister.

  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…

  Ann hadn’t wanted to tell me what Gwen meant. She’d tried to shut her sister up and say it was nothing. But in the end, I’d got the whole story.

  ‘There was a girl,’ Ann’d said, sitting up primly on the grass with her legs folded under her, ‘up Lampeter way. It was in the papers. She died of fright after her friends tricked her when she washed the midnight shirt.’

  She looked at me as if she expected me to know what that meant. I made a face that told her I didn’t.

  ‘It’s to find out who you’re going to marry. Before you go to bed, you wash something you wear next to your skin and put it by the fire to dry. Then, at midnight, you watch to see what happens. If you’re going to die a spinster, a coffin goes through the house. But if you’re going to marry, the spirit of your husband-to-be comes to turn the shirt for you.’

  I knew girls giggled over divination games but surely nobody took them seriously?

  ‘Does it work?’ I asked. But of course that was a stupid question. A girl would never admit that she hadn’t seen her future husband, any more than a lad would admit he’d been refused when he asked a girl to walk out with him.

  ‘The girl in Lampeter – she was at a boarding-out school,’ Ann went on, ‘and she did the midnight shirt with the other girls in the house. One of them knew that there was a man who was in love with her but who the girl hated. So to pay her back over an argument, she dressed up like that man – made herself red whiskers and everything – and when the girl peeped round the door at midnight and saw him turning her shirt, she was so shocked that she fell down in a dead faint! They had the doctor to her and everything, but it was no good. She died.’

  Lampeter was on Harry’s patch. If this’d really happened, we’d have heard about it for sure. ‘When was this?’ I asked. ‘Recently?’

  Ann gave a little shrug. ‘I don’t know exactly, but everybody knows about it. It was in the papers.’

  She’d already said that, but it didn’t make it true.

  ‘And you think this Sally Sips played the same trick on Lizzie?’

  ‘Not Sally. I don’t think it was her. I think she’s a real friend to Lizzie. Was, I mean. But she was the only one. The others were always spreading lies about Lizzie on the sly. And they could’ve easily made Sally tell them what the Dewin’d said. She’s got a kind heart, Sally, but she can’t keep a secret to save her life.’

  I shifted my weight under me. As well as the sun going in, insects were starting to crawl into my clothes, and I was keen to finish this story. ‘But I don’t understand why Lizzie would’ve done this midnight shirt thing if she’d already given Nattie Stockton the coron fedw?’

  Ann bit her lip. ‘Mam told Lizzie she’d never let her marry Nattie. But Lizzie loved him.’ She didn’t say anything else, just looked at me with a worried little face.

  ‘You think she went to see Dewin Gwynne to ask him whether she was going to marry Nattie, is that it?’ I asked slowly. ‘You don’t think he told her to wash the midnight shirt?’

  Gwen could see I didn’t believe it. ‘She did do it!’ she said, sitting up suddenly as if somebody’d slapped the back of her head. ‘Her nightgown was still drying on the back of the chair by the fire when we got back from Ffynone!’

  Something in my riding boot bit me and I twitched. But I wasn’t going to take it off, not in front of these two. ‘Nightgown?’

  ‘The one she’d embroidered for her bottom drawer,’ Ann said.

  ‘She never wore it,’ Gwen butted in. ‘It was for when she was married.’

  ‘But she might’ve thought that if she washed something important like that, then the spell would be especially powerful.’ Ann’s face said she didn’t know what to believe.

  ‘Did your mam see the nightgown?’ Esther Rees struck me as a woman who was about as likely to believe in divination as she was to believe in marrying for love.

  Ann nodded.

  ‘And did she ask your father what it was doing on the back of the chair?’

  ‘He said Lizzie’d had it out to put more embroidery on it and the cat had jumped on it with dirty paws and she’d had to wash it.’

  ‘Did she believe him?’

  Ann shook her head miserably. ‘I don’t think so. Will you tell Mr Probert-Lloyd?’

  I don’t know whether she was afraid that I would or that I wouldn’t.

  Harry

  Lizzie Rees had not died of an aneurysm. Reckitt’s saw and scalpel revealed nothing out of the ordinary, neither in the dead girl’s viscera nor in her brain.

  Her stomach’s noisome contents, carried back to his house from Rhosdywarch for analysis, proved equally innocent. He had ruled out laudanum or prussic on first dissecting the body by the simple expedient of sniffing the stomach contents for their characteristic odours, but he had wished to test for arsenic as it was the most freely available of all poisons.

  ‘I can’t rule out strychnine because I can’t test for it,’ he told me the following morning, after he had woken me to deliver his news, ‘but I doubt it’s involved here. It causes seizures, and the body showed no indication of the girl having suffered any.’ He poured the coffee his maid-of-all-work had brought in and handed me a cup. ‘I’m no expert on plant poisons,’ he said, ‘but she didn’t appear to have ingested anything unusual. Her last meal was no longer evident, so she didn’t die very soon after eating it.’

  Placing my cup and saucer on the floor, I divested myself of the blanket Reckitt had provided me with and retrieved my jacket and necktie from the back of the ancient, battered couch on which I had spent the night. ‘She really did die of natural causes, then?’ I asked, looping my tie around my collar.

  ‘It would appear so.’ Another man might have been pleased at the result of his forensic investigations, but not Reckitt.

  ‘In that case, the certified cause of death stands. No need for an inquest.’ That would please John.

  Reckitt gave a weighty sigh. ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘Not happy with your own findings?’

  He sat heavily on one of the mismatched chairs that occupied his untidy parlour-cum-dining-room. ‘People don’t just die, Probert-Lloyd. There may have been no foul play involved, but something killed Lizzie Rees. Medical science simply lacks the knowledge, as yet, to say what that something might be.’

  I drank my coffee and waited for the rest.

  ‘Her brain showed no clots, no haemorrhaging, no tumours. All her organs were in perfect health, including her heart. And yet it simply stopped beating.

  ‘This is why properly trained medical men must be allowed to dissect every corpse before burial,’ Reckitt said, as if this was a novel opinion and not one he aired every time we had this conversation. ‘Instead of just being satisfied with discovering gross changes in the viscera, if we were mandated to examine every body after death we would learn to look for much more subtle signs, even those only visible under a microscope.’

  ‘But how would you know that such small changes were actually responsible for a person’s death?’

  ‘That’s exactly the point! You wouldn’t know if they were very rarely seen. But if many case histories were to correspond both in the circumstances of death and the histology—’

  ‘Histology?’

  ‘Bodily tissues under a microscope. The point is, Probert-Llo
yd, if there were small – apparently insignificant – changes in people who lived in the same circumstances or worked in the same occupation or had ingested the same substance, one might reasonably draw the inference that that common factor had contributed somehow to their death.’

  Shivering, I finished fastening my waistcoat buttons and searched the floor for my coffee cup. ‘But what then, Reckitt? Would you go about like some harbinger of doom telling people to move from where they live or to cease plying the family trade? Lizzie Rees worked as a farm servant – what could she possibly be counselled to avoid?’

  ‘You may mock, but there are cases in which going against the accepted orthodoxy has had remarkable results. There’s a Swiss doctor who has dramatically reduced maternal mortality in his obstetric hospital by simply insisting that all doctors wash their hands in chlorinated lime before conducting their examinations. He’d noticed that the women who’d been treated by a doctor were three times more likely to die than those who had been treated by a midwife. In the same hospital.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The doctors were coming straight to the ward from conducting dissections. Something was obviously being transmitted on their hands.’ He fell silent, and I had the familiar and perpetually uncomfortable sensation of being stared at. ‘We don’t have to understand exactly what’s causing illness and death to stop it. We may simply change habits. We know that moving people out of the stench of London to the countryside materially improves their health – and that’s just one example.’

  I sipped my coffee. It was burned, as usual; Reckitt’s maid never drank the stuff and consequently had no idea how her carelessness affected the taste. Nevertheless, I was glad of its warming effect. The fire was not lit and the room, with its small window, was cold, a fact to which Reckitt seemed oblivious.

  I added the two chunks of sugar in my saucer to the coffee and stirred it, wondering what Cadwgan Gwynne would say to the idea of universal autopsy. Few medical men saw it as practicable, even if it might ultimately prove informative. For if every single death in the country were to result in a post-mortem examination, doctors’ time would be monopolised by the dead to the detriment of the living.

  My stockinged feet tingling with the cold, I finished my coffee and pulled on my boots. ‘Will you go to Lizzie Rees’s funeral tomorrow?’ It was Reckitt’s usual habit to attend the interments of those he had dissected, as a mark of respect.

  ‘I see no reason why not.’

  I rose to my feet. ‘Keep an eye out for me, would you?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Malicious gossip,’ I said. ‘It would be helpful if you could quash any rumours you hear of foul play. The family’s not altogether trusted locally – Mic Rees is an incomer, and you know how people can be.’

  I had seen often enough where a parish full of rumour and mistrust led, and I did not relish the thought that my becoming involved might have given rise to suspicions that would not now be allayed by an inquest.

  John

  I woke up on Monday morning with a sense of dread. That afternoon, if Mr Ormiston had his way, we’d be going out to tell six families that they were going to be turned off their land. Six families who’d probably spent yesterday on their knees praying that instead of giving them notice we’d take whatever small amount they could pay for last quarter’s arrears and give them another quarter’s grace. And I was going to try and persuade Mr Ormiston that we should do exactly that. In fact, I’d spent hours writing carefully worded contracts to that effect.

  The previous evening, I’d been in the office slogging through those – and the paperwork I’d abandoned to go rushing off after Harry and his ridiculous suspicions of Mic Rees, a man who was guilty of nothing except doting on his daughter – when Clara, one of the maids, bobbed in to tell me dinner’d be ready in five minutes.

  I saw her looking at my boots. That meant that Mrs Griffiths, who missed nothing, knew that I was still in my riding clothes after going straight to the office when I got back from the other side of the river. She’d want to give me time to get changed like a gentleman before sitting down to dinner with Lydia Howell.

  I hadn’t seen Lydia since I got back, so when I took my place at the dining table, a bit breathless and damp from a quick wash and change, I should’ve been prepared for her first question.

  ‘How did the pair of you get on in Brynberian?’

  The pair of you. She was yoking me and Harry together like mischievous boys or a pair of dumb oxen. It got under my skin like a tick. Set me right on edge. What did she think – that I’d been happy to go haring off when Harry crooked his finger? How dare she think she knew me, knew what was most important to me?

  I took my time laying my napkin in my lap, watching her out of the corner of my eye. She looked the same as she always did, clean and neat and governess-like in her plain high-collared dress. Calm and steady. Respectable, even. But she hadn’t always been this person, had she? She’d been fiery, once. A rabble-rouser. She of all people should know better than to judge.

  ‘Bit of a wild goose chase, as it happens,’ I said. Good. I sounded calm.

  But fake calm couldn’t stop an image of Ann and Gwen sliding into my mind. Lizzie Rees’s sisters didn’t think it was a wild goose chase. They were convinced Lizzie’d been killed by the Eglwyswrw girls’ spitefulness.

  I pushed the thought out of my mind.

  ‘Didn’t deserve a minute of Harry’s time as far as I could see.’ I felt my heart pushing against my ribs. Dismissing Lizzie Rees’s death like that felt wrong, but I wanted Lydia to know that I wasn’t always delighted to go chasing around three counties on a whim of Harry’s. ‘To be honest, my time would’ve been better spent here. And his, come to that. There are far more serious things happening on the estate than he realises.’

  She looked at me. ‘Go on.’

  I glanced over at Ianto, standing there like a statue, and Lydia caught my eye. ‘Ianto, we’ll manage by ourselves,’ she said. ‘You can go back to the kitchen with the others. We’ll call you when we’re ready.’

  He left, but not without a quick glance at me. Lydia might’ve spoken, but he knew whose fault it was he was being sent packing.

  My hands were trembling. Now I’d started, I wanted to tell Lydia everything, but hours writing my replacement contracts had chipped away at my own faith in what I’d decided to do. When I’d tried to talk to Mr Ormiston, weeks ago, about how we could help the tenants in arrears, he’d accused me of thinking too much like a farm boy and not enough like a steward. At the time, I’d told myself that that just showed he didn’t really understand how things worked – but what if he was right?

  I picked up my knife and fork, looked at my dinner and put them down again. Lydia started eating, eyes on her plate, which I was grateful for. ‘When I first met Harry,’ I said, ‘he told me that he didn’t want to be squire. He didn’t want to own the farms that people work on. He thought everybody should own their own land. Everybody should be equal.’ I picked up my wine glass and took a drink. It jerked against my lips, my hands were shaking so much. ‘He was probably talking similar nonsense when you first met him,’ I said. ‘Not in Ipswich, I mean. When you were here before.’

  As I put my glass down again, I risked a glance to see how she’d taken that. She was looking at me with that steady, self-composed look of hers. I didn’t have a clue what she was thinking, and my heart sped up. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve mentioned her previous life, but I was sick to the back teeth of all the things she and Harry never spoke about. And if I’m honest, I wanted her to tell me that Harry hadn’t really changed from when he’d been a lad riding out with her Rebeccas to break tollgates. That deep down he still believed in equality between people. That he wasn’t going to be just another don’t-know-don’t-care squire.

  Because if he was, I’d made a hell of a mistake taking the under-steward’s job.

  I watched her cutting up her chop with dainty movements that reminded me a bit too much o
f Reckitt’s precise scalpel work. ‘I know he’s given Micah Ormiston free rein to run the estate as he sees fit,’ she said finally. ‘Are you saying he’s favouring the estate over the tenants?’

  I swallowed the mouthful of mutton that I seemed to have been chewing for the last ten minutes and forced it down with a swig of wine. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, seeing the estate and the tenants as two different things is exactly the problem. The tenants are the estate!’ I drank some more wine.

  Lydia nodded and put her knife and fork down. ‘Like a chapel,’ she said, looking me in the eye. ‘Without the people – without the minister – it’s just a building. Is that what you mean?’

  The minister. Laying emphasis on it like that, she was meeting me on the dangerous ground I’d stepped onto when I’d mentioned her previous life. She knew I’d be picturing who she’d once been. Or pretended to be. Did a day go by without her thinking about it?

  ‘Yes. Exactly like a chapel. An estate’s just land until it’s got people on it. It’s the people who matter and I thought Harry knew that. But he’s let Mr Ormiston loose, and as far as he’s concerned, as long as every farm’s got a tenant, everything’ll be fine.’

  ‘But it won’t.’

  ‘Of course not! Think about what you just said – a congregation’s not just any old collection of a hundred people just to make up numbers, is it? It’s people who know each other, who depend on each other. They know who’s good at things – who can preach and who can sing, who can read and write, who’s always got a newspaper, who’ll lend you money and who won’t. Who’ll pay you back and who won’t. Who’s a true Christian and who’s a hypocrite!’ I picked up my wine glass once more, and drained it.

  Her face didn’t change, but her chin jutted out just a little bit when I said the word hypocrite. Had I meant it for her? If the cap fitted…

  As she moved her head, the pins in her hair caught the light, and just for a second I found myself wondering what she’d look like with her hair down. It wasn’t an interesting colour – kind of mouse-brown – but it was thick and vigorous and always seemed to be trying to escape. She pulled it tight to govern it, but having it scraped back so severely didn’t suit her face. How had she worn it when she was living under her brother’s name, wearing his clothes, doing the job that would’ve been his if he hadn’t died? Minister to Treforgan chapel.