Not One of Us

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘My mother’s a seamstress. She lives next door,’ Richards said. I could not fathom his wish to practise speaking English; he was fluent, confident. Perhaps he had ambitions to become a uniformed police officer; if so, he would have to cross the river. As far as I knew, there were no imminent plans for a county constabulary in Pembrokeshire.

  Reckitt moved to the other side of the table and began his removal of the corpse’s clothing. I shuffled closer. The dead man was lying on his side, his chin on his knees, his arms half flexed at the elbows. As far as I could tell, he was fully clothed.

  ‘What are his clothes like, Reckitt?’

  ‘Decent-quality Sunday best. He wasn’t down on his luck, but he wasn’t a gentleman either, I’d say.’ Reckitt put the shears down and crouched over the corpse. ‘He doesn’t have a gentleman’s hands, either.’

  ‘Any signs of violence – broken skin on the knuckles?’

  ‘All in good time, Probert-Lloyd, all in good time.’

  Reckitt had his method and he did not like to be diverted from it. I turned to Caleb Richards. ‘What time did the coracle men find him?’

  ‘A bit before sunrise.’

  ‘And they caught him in their net?’

  ‘Yes. Whoever threw him in probably thought the tide’d take him all the way to the estuary – out to sea if they were lucky. It was bad luck for them that the nets caught him instead.’

  * * *

  A little while later, after much snipping and tearing and teasing and pulling on the part of Reckitt and Richards, the curled corpse lay naked on the table.

  ‘There, just as I thought,’ Reckitt said. ‘The lividity pattern tells the story. Blood in buttocks and feet, in his hands and the lower part of his face. And here,’ he tapped at the man’s buttocks, ‘you can see contact blanching. I’d say he’d been sitting on a rough, stony surface for some time. The lividity’s fixed, which means he didn’t change position for a period of several hours while the blood was settling.’

  ‘And you’re sure he wasn’t on the stony bed of the river – at low tide, for instance?’

  ‘Quite sure. The body was forced into this position either before or soon after death. There’s no indication that he’d been bound, and I can think of nothing on the bed of a river that might restrict him in that way. He was put into the water in this state.’

  Reckitt continued his examination, and I heard a grunt that indicated the discovery of something significant. ‘What?’

  ‘There are no injuries to his hands, but there are marks – contusions – on his left wrist.’ He bent to the pile of now-tattered clothing that lay beneath the table and withdrew what looked like a shirt sleeve. Gathering it up in his hands, he leaned over the corpse again and touched the shirt to the left wrist.

  ‘Buttons,’ he said, straightening up. ‘At some point not long before he died, the little buttons on the cuff of his sleeve dug into the flesh on his wrist hard enough to leave marks.’

  ‘Any other signs of violence?’ I asked.

  ‘Difficult to tell until he uncurls, though…’ Reckitt bent down and stared at the man’s side, ‘there may be the beginnings of a bruise here, on his ribs. And…’ he moved again, craning his neck to try and see the man’s face, which seemed to have adhered to his kneecaps, ‘there might be some damage here, too. I’ll know better when I’ve been able to look at him properly. But you’ll have to call an inquest, Probert-Lloyd. It’s most definitely a suspicious death. And given that somebody threw him into the Teifi when he was good and stiff, I’d be amazed if he wasn’t murdered.’

  John

  Mr Ormiston and I parted company after we’d visited the last defaulter’s farm. He said he had business in Newcastle Emlyn, but I knew he just didn’t want to ride back to Glanteifi with me. Not after what we’d just done.

  I don’t remember the ride home. Seren got no instructions from me. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see what was around me. I was weighed down, weary with sadness and guilt. My head and my heart were full of it. I couldn’t stop hearing the voices of families pleading not to be put off their farms, promising to find more money, to do better, begging not to be thrown into the workhouse. They’d kept looking at me, speaking to me in Welsh so that Mr Ormiston wouldn’t understand, accusing me, shouting that I knew what would happen to them now. They couldn’t understand why I was letting this happen; how Harry could do this to them.

  ‘His father would never have seen us treated like this,’ one farmer wept, tears running off his grey-stubbled chin. ‘Never. He was a good man, old Mr Probert-Lloyd. He looked after his tenants.’ He glared at me, his eyes running with tears. ‘Is this what it’s going to be like on Glanteifi land now? Pay up every penny every quarter or go? Never mind that our families have lived here for a hundred years?’

  A hundred years in which their lives would’ve been inseparable from the lives of the masters of Glanteifi. They’d have celebrated heirs’ coming-of-age up at the big house, they’d have raised hound pups for the hunting squires, they’d have turned out to make hay and shear sheep and harvest corn for their masters before cash rents came in. And now they were being cast aside. All for the sake of ready money.

  It was every bit as bad as I’d known it would be, but even though they ranted at me and Mr Ormiston, the families didn’t really blame us. Because they knew where the real blame lay. With young Mr Probert-Lloyd.

  And the truth was, Harry was to blame, wasn’t he? He’d told Micah Ormiston to get him as much money this quarter as he could, without putting so much as a single caveat in place.

  I’d looked around the kitchen at one of the tenancies we were ending, tears clutching at my throat and stinging my eyes. Everything the family had to sell had been sold, you could tell. No china on the dresser, only a few wooden plates and mugs. No chairs, just a rough bench knocked together for them all to sit at. It looked as if their table’d been sold too, because now there was just an old byre door on trestles, the bottom edge rat-gnawed, the grain stained with the red paint that’d been mostly scrubbed off, except for the stubborn edges of planks and the dents from feet and tools and horns.

  When I was a boy, our dresser at home’d had a pot on it. An old Toby jug. And that pot’d been the difference between solvency and debt. Every coin my mam earned with her spinning and knitting and butter-making had gone into that jug and it hadn’t come out for anything – not salt, not shoes, not bread, not school – until the rent’d been paid.

  You could tell this’d been a prosperous home once. Decent floor, not just beaten earth. A second storey to the house. Glass in the windows even, though the curtains were gone. I wondered what there was upstairs, whether they’d sold the beds, the good sheets.

  I looked at the weeping farmer. Did he drink? Was that where the money’d gone? Or had his wife insisted, once upon a time, on having things they couldn’t afford? Neither, probably, but Mr Ormiston’d still say it was their own fault. Because their land was worked out. Like most farmers in the area, they’d just carried on working the land in the same way their fathers’d done – cropped and cropped on the same acres year after year with no enrichment for the soil and only the odd fallow year here and there. And like everybody else, they’d sold their best animals because they needed the rent money, and left themselves with the weakest and smallest and most evil-tempered to breed from. So the sheep were small and scrawny, and every year, the lambs they produced got smaller and scrawnier. Same with the cows. Every year, unless there was a new bull, the cows gave less milk and were more trouble about it.

  With less butter to sell, stuff from the house’d begin to go, and then the family was on the slippery slope to ruin unless they got help from somewhere.

  Old Mr Probert-Lloyd had bled the estate’s bank account dry trying to prop up farmers who Mr Ormiston described as backward and inadequate, and if I’m honest, the old squire hadn’t had a lot of help from the tenants. Land’ll only be productive for so long unless you feed it – that’s one thing Mr
Ormiston’d learned from Mr Probert-Lloyd senior and I’d learned from him. Harry’s father had tried to persuade tenants to rotate what they planted and include green crops, like clover. But the tenants hadn’t been keen. It was a new idea, and new ideas don’t take root very easily in traditional soil.

  And this was the result. A cashless family who couldn’t pay the rent.

  As I’d stumbled out of that house trying to keep my dignity and not be seen with tears running down my face, the wife had caught my arm. ‘Can’t you do something? Speak for us?’

  ‘I’ve tried, Aunty.’ I’d wiped my tears with the back of my hand and tried not to sniff like a child. ‘I promise you, I’ve tried.’

  It wasn’t a word of a lie. I had tried. Hard. I’d plied Mr Ormiston with coffee and Mrs Elias’s fruit cake and tried to make him see what the consequences of his actions would be for the estate. And in the end, after pleading and reasoning and raising my voice and apologising for raising my voice and proposing new strategies and saying shouldn’t we talk to Mr Probert-Lloyd before making so many people homeless, I’d managed to save half of them. Three families who’d stay on the farms their grandparents had been born on – for now, at least – and who’d try every way they could to find a way to pay the rent next quarter.

  And perhaps it’d been my lucky day or perhaps I was just – finally – learning how to persuade Mr Ormiston, because I’d also convinced him to issue the contracts I’d written promising that the estate’d pay compensation in the event of eviction to the two farmers most likely to ensure that the improvements they made would turn a profit.

  But now, as I rode back up the drive to the mansion at the end of the longest day I could remember, I knew it wasn’t enough. Of course it wasn’t. But at least it was something. I’d managed to do something.

  Still, my heart was heavy with the knowledge that this time tomorrow, there wouldn’t be a single person on the whole estate who hadn’t heard about the heartlessness of young Mr Probert-Lloyd. Harry’s reputation with the tenants was going to take a battering.

  But there was something else that was making me feel low. Something that had nothing to do with Harry’s poor judgement and everything to do with mine. Because what’d happened today would happen again and again if Jem Harborne’s mill was a success. No extra money coming in to pay the rent. More families destitute. The guts ripped out of a community.

  In my mind’s eye I saw Mr Gelyot senior’s face as I told him about Harborne’s plans that night in London, and I wished like I’d never wished before that I’d had the sense to shrug off Gus’s mockery and keep Harborne’s calling card in my pocket.

  Harry

  I rode back to Glanteifi after instructing Caleb Richards to gather a jury to view the body the following morning and to bring in the publicans of Cilgerran to see if they recognised the dead man. He might be a stranger to the village, but it was possible that he had stopped to drink in one of the public houses.

  John was out on estate business with Ormiston when I got back to the house, but Lydia proved a ready audience, interested not only in the coracle men’s grisly catch but in what Reckitt and I had learned the previous day. And as I told her everything we had discovered, my concerns that Mic Rees had not been entirely honest with us resurfaced.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Lydia asked. ‘Perhaps he does have something to hide, but if Reckitt says his daughter’s death wasn’t suspicious, then it’s not your responsibility to find out, is it?’

  I pushed aside the plate that had held a late lunch of bread, cheese and pickled onion and carefully accepted a cup of tea.

  ‘John thinks it might have something to do with what Cadwgan Gwynne told us,’ I said. ‘He thinks that if Lizzie knew she’d been cursed, it might have affected her mind, her health even.’

  ‘You should take more notice of John’s opinion,’ Lydia said. ‘He’s very astute.’

  I fixed the whirlpool over the crockery between us so that she appeared in my peripheral vision. ‘That was a little pointed. Are we still talking about his opinion on curses?’ Though I smiled as I asked the question, I felt a sudden apprehension.

  Lydia stood and walked over to the French windows, where her sturdy, habitually upright frame was silhouetted against the light.

  ‘John surprised me yesterday evening.’ Despite the fact that her face was turned to the window, her voice carried to me clearly, and I had a sudden disconcerting memory of hearing that same slightly husky contralto directing a torchlit crowd of men, holding the reins of their compliance as confidently as a postilion on an old and favoured horse. ‘He confided in me. He hasn’t done that before.’

  John’s confidences must concern me; she would not have raised the subject otherwise. ‘Are you going to tell me what he said?’

  Lydia turned, and her skirts swirled visibly around her legs with the sudden motion. ‘No. But I’ll tell you what I’ve observed. He’s struggling to understand your attitude to the management of the estate.’

  ‘I leave that to Ormiston.’

  ‘Precisely.’ I could feel her gaze fixed on me. ‘What would the Harry Probert-Lloyd I first met – the young firebrand who wanted to ride with my Rebeccas – say to you now? What would he think of you letting your steward run the estate in whatever way he sees fit, without even bothering to ask whether the tenants are treated well or badly?’

  I was stung. ‘Ormiston’s been managing the estate since before I was born! It’s not for me to interfere while he’s still steward.’

  ‘So you’re content to let him do as he likes and shelve any notion of a more enlightened management of the estate until John takes over in April?’

  She had teased me often enough that I had abandoned my principles, and even in jest, it rankled. This time, she was serious, and her words struck me dumb. Had she really no idea how difficult it was to embody Radical philosophy as a Cardiganshire squire when notions like equitable land tenure baffled the very people they were designed to benefit?

  Since coming back to Glanteifi, I had been forced to understand that as a barrister in London, surrounded by like-minded company, it had been easy for me to maintain the self-delusion that when I inherited the estate I would do something extraordinary with it. That I might sell it piecemeal, at a knock-down price, to my tenants; or form a model estate in which all the workers had an interest. That I might sell it to a rich industrialist looking to acquire the social standing of the landed classes and use the proceeds to set up some charitable foundation.

  Once blindness had left me unable to support myself and forced me back to my father’s house however, the realities of life in the Teifi Valley had soon become abundantly clear. Not one tenant in a score would contemplate taking the risk of becoming an owner-occupier, and there were no surplus funds with which to establish any kind of model venture. But even worse had been the unpalatable realisation of how completely dependent I was on the estate. Unable to work for my living, I would be reliant for the rest of my life on the rental income from Glanteifi’s tenants; an income that was currently proving insufficient to pay the bills.

  In the silence, Lydia strode back to the table and, palms planted, leaned towards me in a forceful, unladylike posture. I had to resist the urge to leap up and respond to the challenge.

  ‘Harry, I think you overestimate Micah Ormiston’s competence. And his role under your father. I’ve had sight of all the estate documents, don’t forget, and there’s not a single plan, not even so much as a note, written by Mr Ormiston. The only things in his handwriting are contracts and receipts.’ She paused while I took this in. ‘It was your father and his principles that ran the estate. I suspect Mr Ormiston was little more than a glorified rent-collector.’

  Feeling horribly at a disadvantage under her gaze, I pushed my chair back and moved away from the table. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she did not know what she was talking about, but the fact that she had read the estate papers, that she had first-hand evidence for her words, prevent
ed me. I had no facts of my own with which to launch a counter-attack, and that was nobody’s fault but my own.

  Throughout my years in Oxford and London, my father had written weekly letters that had laid out not only his plans for Glanteifi but also a meticulous account of the execution of those plans. Bloodlines improved on the home farm and his attempts to encourage his tenants to do likewise. Farmhouses, barns and byres rebuilt, extended, renovated. Drainage projects undertaken. Cropping rotations established. Trees planted. Rents lowered. Rents remitted. His pleasure at seeing one generation of an estate family hand on the reins to another.

  Since his death, I had been filled with self-contempt at my failure to respond as I should have to the steadfastness of purpose with which he had tried to teach me what he himself had taken such great pains to learn; and I had squirmed as I recalled the solipsism with which I had persuaded myself that his punctiliously regular letters were nothing but hectoring rebukes to my own dilatory correspondence. If I had kept those letters, I would now have what amounted to a comprehensive manual on how to run Glanteifi. Instead, I had used them to light the fire in my lodgings.

  Allowing Ormiston to continue to run the estate in the way he had under my father had felt like some kind of penance.

  I cleared my throat, trying to dislodge the lump that appeared whenever I was forced to confront the myriad ways in which I had been a negligent son and an undeserving heir. ‘You think I shouldn’t have stood for election as coroner?’

  ‘I don’t think that at all, though I’m interested that you should ask the question.’ Again she paused. ‘You’re a thorough and conscientious coroner. But that shouldn’t prevent you being equally conscientious in the running of the estate.’

  ‘But if what you say about Ormiston is true…’ I held up a hand as she drew breath to respond. ‘I don’t dispute it but if all Ormiston ever did was to carry out my father’s instructions, then all he has to do is continue in that vein. My father spent years planning the improvement of the estate. I don’t see how I can be expected to do better in less than six months.’