Not One of Us

by Alis Hawkins

  How had she got away with it? She didn’t look like a man. I mean, she was plain, but she was obviously a woman. But then, as she’d said herself when we’d met in her employer’s house in Ipswich, put a person in a man’s clothes and give them a man’s job and that’s what people see. A man.

  If I dressed in a betgwn and apron and scrubbed floors or milked cows, would people see a woman?

  My hands were still shaking as I poured myself some more wine.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, scrambling to pick up where I’d left off, ‘what I’m saying is that the estate’s not just separate farms with tenants keeping to their own land. You can’t throw a family off their farm without altering the balance of things.’ I could hear myself getting louder, so I stopped, took a deep breath and picked up my knife and fork. There was cold gravy on the handle of my knife. I wiped if off with my napkin.

  Lydia’s eyes were fixed on me, waiting. But I couldn’t look at her. It wasn’t just that I’d talked about her previous life. I felt as if I’d crossed a line, stood with her instead of with Harry. But Harry didn’t want to listen, did he?

  ‘It might be all right if you just give one or two tenants notice,’ I said. I couldn’t have her thinking I was a child who wanted everything to stay the same for ever. ‘But it all depends on who takes over their land. Mr Ormiston thinks it’s better to let well-off farmers take a second tenancy to run alongside their original one, but that’ll throw things out of balance. Especially if that new tenant makes even more money and takes a third farm. Then suddenly you’ve got too many cottagers and smallholders and not enough farmers. A lot of poor people and only one who’s doing all right. Maybe more than all right. And that causes jealousies, resentment. Blame.’

  ‘And that’s not good for the estate.’ She said it like a statement, but it was a question.

  I shook my head. ‘It’s not good for anybody.’

  And now – this afternoon – I had to see if I could stop that happening.

  Harry

  After leaving Reckitt’s house and retrieving Sara from the livery stable tucked away behind Cilgerran’s main street, I spent most of the journey down to Llechryd bridge and the Cardiganshire side of the river trying to persuade myself that Lizzie Rees’s death was no longer any concern of mine. But try as I might, there was something about the case that would give me no peace. Of course, Mic Rees’s admission that he had allowed Lizzie to sleep in his own bed and that he had stripped, washed and re-dressed her went some way to explaining why he had felt the need to lie to us, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had failed to get to the bottom of his daughter’s death.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a horse cantering up behind me, and I steered Sara to the side of the road lest we get in the newcomer’s way. But instead of passing us with a wave, the rider pulled up alongside me. ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, I’m glad I’ve caught you!’

  My impression was of a youngish man, dressed in brown homespun. ‘It’s all right,’ I said, in Welsh, ‘you don’t need to speak English with me.’

  ‘Thank you, but do you mind if I do? I need to practise.’

  I was surprised at the request, but perhaps my speaking Welsh to him had encouraged him to be bold. ‘Very well.’

  ‘I’m the constable for Cilgerran parish. Caleb Richards. A body’s been found in the river and I’m asking you to come and see it. In your position as coroner.’

  I am ashamed to admit that I was pleased to have a legitimate reason not to return to Glanteifi; neither John nor any county magistrate could disapprove of my being officially summoned.

  As we rode back towards the town, Richards told me that Cilgerran coracle fishermen had caught the body in their net early that morning.

  ‘Drowned, I assume?’

  Richards hesitated. ‘Possibly, but it’s an odd one if he did.’

  ‘As you can see, I’m lacking my assistant today,’ I said. ‘If it’s a suspicious death, I’ll need someone to view the body with me.’

  ‘I’ve already asked for Dr Reckitt’s help,’ Caleb Richards said. ‘All being well, he’ll meet us there.’

  ‘There?’

  ‘I told them to take the body to the Pendre Inn to wait for you.’

  ‘Was it you who decided I needed to be called?’ If he had made the decision without reference to any higher authority, he should make the most of the privilege while he could. No doubt Pembrokeshire’s magistrates would soon follow Cardiganshire’s lead and make him seek permission.

  ‘I’m the plwyfwas, so yes, it was me who decided.’

  I smiled. I might well have an ally in Caleb Richards.

  Soon we were riding back up the shallow slope into Cilgerran, passing two girls with bundles on their heads and a boy driving a pig along the road with liberal use of a switch.

  ‘Has the dead man been identified?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Nobody knows him.’

  ‘Is that because of the state the body’s in after coming out of the water?’ As yet, I’d not been called to a drowning recovered from the Teifi, but having been dragged to dissections by my medical friend, Henry Grey, while I was a pupil barrister, I knew that unless a drowned corpse was recovered quickly, it rapidly became grotesque. Fish fed on the soft parts and the river’s currents would dash it against the bank and floating objects; add to that damage the slippage of saturated skin and it took a strong stomach to view a victim of the water.

  ‘No. From the look of him, I don’t think he was in the river long at all.’ Richards pulled up. ‘Here we are.’

  From what I could see, the Pendre Inn was a decent-enough place. It had obviously been there since my grandfather’s time and seemed to have been much added to and changed over the years. The roofline had sprouted irregular dormer windows, and the roof itself, once probably thatched, was now covered in slate tiles – more than likely from the quarries downriver.

  Richards put his head around the door and gave a whistle that brought a lad out to take our horses, leaving us free to enter the gloom of the inn and to make the acquaintance of the corpse that lay within.

  John

  The office was quiet, and as I listened for sounds of Harry coming home, the only thing I could hear was my own pen scratching out the contracts Mr Ormiston’d left notes for. I’d finished the ones he hadn’t asked for – the ones he wasn’t going to like – before going to bed.

  There was a part of me that wanted to know what Dr Reckitt had found when he opened up Lizzie Rees’s body – of course there was. But I still hoped Harry wouldn’t get back before Mr Ormiston came in. I needed to get these papers finished.

  Time ticked by. Had there been poison in Lizzie Rees’s stomach? Had Reckitt and Harry gone back to Rhosdywarch?

  Concentrate, John! But my ears stayed pricked for any sounds outside the office door. At one point I heard Lydia Howell and Mrs Griffiths going past talking about where the ‘shower bath’ should go.

  That shower contraption’d caused a bit of a stir when Gus Gelyot had sent it as a birthday present for Harry a few weeks ago. Mind you, with the newspapers full of all the modern inventions at the Great Exhibition, nobody at Glanteifi had been quite as surprised when it arrived as they would’ve been before.

  My dear P-L, Gus’s birthday note’d said, I hope this will afford a little luxury in the taking of ablutions until such time as you are able to join the modern world and install actual plumbing.

  To be honest, the shower bath might be an engineering miracle in brass and copper, but it didn’t look all that robust, and I wasn’t going to volunteer to be the first one to use it. A hip bath or a quick wash all over was fine for me. Having hot water carried about the house whenever I wanted it was enough of a luxury, I didn’t need it to come down on me like rain.

  The shower bath was designed to be movable, but Harry had decided that it would be better to give it a room of its own, so as not to damage it with constant shifting about. Trouble was, building walls and putting in doors was exp
ensive, so for now, the shower was still standing in the corner of his bedroom, unused.

  Hearing Lydia Howell’s voice made me sweat at the thought of all the things I’d said to her last night. I’d had too much to drink, hadn’t I? And now I’d changed things between us. She knew my worries about the estate. And she knew I wasn’t going to pretend she’d never lived as a man.

  To be truthful, half of me was glad my tongue had run away with me – it’d all needed saying. But now I didn’t know where I stood with her. I’d avoided her so far this morning by getting up early and having breakfast in the kitchen before I started work.

  But I’d have to face her eventually.

  * * *

  Mr Ormiston came into the office on the stroke of twelve. Had he been waiting in the hall till the clock chimed?

  I looked up as he opened the door into my little inner room. I’d moved back to my own desk this morning in case he came in earlier than he’d said.

  He took one of the contracts I’d written and scanned it. ‘What’s this nonsense you’ve written for Jones at Ffynnonwen?’ He glared at me.

  ‘A compromise.’

  ‘It says we’ll pay him money.’

  ‘Only if he’s forced to leave the farm after making improvements. And only for the next five years.’

  ‘Only for the next five years? Where do you imagine we’d find the money to compensate him,’ he waved the contract at me, ‘for making improvements to his own buildings?’

  I took a deep breath. Here we go… ‘But they’re not his own buildings, are they? He’ll build them, but they’ll belong to the estate.’

  ‘Be that as it may, as you know very well, the estate can’t afford to finance the improvements.’

  ‘No, but don’t you see how unfair that looks to John Jones?’

  ‘Unfair?’

  I barged ahead before he could tell me that running an estate wasn’t about fairness. ‘Yes, because half the farms on the estate had new buildings put up for nothing when Mr Probert-Lloyd senior was alive, but now we’re expecting the rest to do it for themselves, with no reduction in the rent and no guarantee that they won’t lose out if things go wrong!’

  ‘So you want us to guarantee compensation we can’t afford?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll have to pay any compensation, because it’ll make Ffynnonwen profitable and then we won’t have to give John Jones notice in a year or two’s time.’ While he was taking that in, I rushed on with the rest of the argument I’d practised. ‘If we can show him that he’s not risking anything by building another byre, he’ll do it. And then he’ll have room for four more milking cows. That’s a lot of butter to sell. And calves.’

  ‘But if he’s got enough money to build another byre and buy four cows—’

  ‘He won’t need money – he’ll quarry the stone on the farm and fell the wood for the roof. His servants’ll do the labouring. And he’ll only bring in one new cow at a time, and not for cash; there’ll be—’

  ‘Another one of your local arrangements?’

  That was something else Mr Ormiston couldn’t seem to understand – that most farmers didn’t use cash for anything except their rent. Everything else was done by fair exchange. That was why you had to know your neighbours. You had to know who you could trust – who was good to deal with and who wasn’t.

  ‘It’s the way things are done,’ I said, afraid that I’d annoyed him and still lost the argument.

  He dropped the contract back on the pile. ‘I’ll overlook the fact that you’ve gone against my instructions. All things being equal, a steward does well to think of the future, and I can see that’s what you’re trying to do. But I can’t just do as I please. Mr Probert-Lloyd has asked me to lay my hands on as much money as possible this quarter—’

  ‘To invest, I know. But he’s not going to need money for the railway shares for at least a year.’

  ‘There are other, more immediate investment opportunities. Glanteifi could take a quarry over at Cilgerran, for instance – the demand for slate is going up all the time with the building that’s going on in the coalfields.’

  Slate? Surely Harry wasn’t going to put his money into that? There was a lot of bad feeling about the Cilgerran works – the quarries were blocking the river with waste, and there was talk of a court case. And, anyway, it could only be a matter of time before the coalfields found slate somewhere nearer than Cilgerran. Then where would we be?

  ‘Can we have look at some of the other suggestions I’ve made?’ I asked, putting my hand on the pile of contracts and agreements.

  Ormiston hesitated, so I pushed on. ‘If we end up giving notice to everybody on the list, we’ll end up with six farms needing new tenants.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘But I’m worried we may find we’ve given ourselves more problems than solutions.’

  ‘By which you mean?’

  ‘Stepping in to bid for a tenancy where the farmer’s going unwillingly can cause a lot of bad feeling. Feuds, even. We don’t want that at Glanteifi.’

  I watched him wavering. His eyes moved from my contracts to the window and back to me.

  ‘Why don’t I go and ask Mrs Griffiths for some coffee and we can have a look at what I’m proposing? Then you can decide what’s best.’

  Harry

  Like similar hostelries everywhere, the Pendre Inn smelled of beer, pipe smoke, tobacco spit and stale sawdust. It was not a combination I was fond of, but I had become used to it. Inns were a coroner’s natural home, with inquests commonly carried out in their large public rooms and unclaimed bodies routinely laid in the outhouses where barrels were stored.

  The taproom was low-ceilinged, and north-facing windows let in little light, which meant that I had to feel my way as I followed Richards through to a back room. There I found Reckitt’s unmistakable figure bent over what I presumed was the corpse. The doctor had a lamp in his hand, which he raised towards me as I walked in. ‘Ah, you’re here. Can you ask them to move our friend here outside, where I can see him better? They wouldn’t do anything until you got here.’

  I nodded to Caleb Richards, who ducked back into the taproom.

  ‘They’ll need to move the table as well,’ Reckitt called after him, as if the constable might think he wanted the corpse deposited on the ground, then strode through the back room’s open door into the yard beyond.

  I followed him, squinting. Though the sky was overcast, the light was uncomfortably bright after the gloom within.

  ‘The plwyfwas seemed to think he hadn’t drowned,’ I said. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because it’d be damned odd if he’d drowned sitting down,’ Reckitt said.

  I waited, knowing an explanation was on its way.

  ‘He’s in an almost foetal position. Thighs tight to chest, though his arms are loose at his sides. Were, I should say. He’s in full rigor, so there’s nothing loose about any of his limbs at present.’

  ‘And it’s impossible that he could for some reason have adopted that position in the water?’

  Reckitt drew in a long breath, considering the question. ‘Highly unlikely – can you think of a possible mechanism?’

  ‘Could he have been bound?’

  ‘There’s no sign of that, but I’ll know more when I can get his clothes off. And lividity’ll give us more information, of course.’

  Lividity – the pooling of blood in corpses under the effects of gravity – was a sure sign of the body’s position in the hours after death. In those who had gone into the water soon before or after death and had been buoyed up and moved about, it was usually almost entirely absent.

  ‘You say he’s in full rigor – so he’s been dead, what, at least twelve hours? Always assuming,’ I added, before Reckitt could give me a lecture, ‘that he wasn’t somewhere very cold or unusually warm.’

  ‘Correct. Somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours, I’d say. Though it might be much longer, depending on how long he was in the water. Having said that, from the condition of
his skin, he seems unlikely to have been submerged for long.’

  Reckitt’s confirmation of Caleb Richards’ opinion raised my estimation of the young constable’s judgement.

  Muttered sounds from within the outhouse were followed by a scuffling and shuffling, which preceded the emergence of two men carrying the trestle board bearing the crouched corpse. Richards carried the trestles, which he stretched out, and once the table was reassembled, its porters left.

  ‘Do you mind if I stay?’ Richards asked. ‘It might help me find out who he is.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, pleased at his volunteering to help. Parish constables generally melted away once I arrived, lest I find them things to do.

  ‘If you’re staying,’ Reckitt said, ‘be a good fellow and see if you can find some shears. It’s going to be next to impossible to get the clothes off him in any normal way.’

  ‘Do you think we should…?’ Richards didn’t finish the question, but I knew he would want to hand the dead man’s clothes over to the bereaved family intact if he could.

  ‘I don’t think Mr Probert-Lloyd’s going to want to twiddle his thumbs for twelve hours until the corpse is in a fit state for me to undress it.’

  I knew perfectly well that Reckitt’s impatience had nothing to do with my convenience and everything to do with his own eagerness to begin, but nevertheless, the examination was better done swiftly. An inquest was inevitable, and the more quickly I could begin my investigations, the better for all concerned, so I indicated that Richards should do as Reckitt asked.

  Somewhat surprisingly, he was back within a minute.

  ‘These are tailor’s scissors,’ Reckitt said as he took the proffered item.