Not One of Us

by Alis Hawkins

  Unbelievable. Literally unbelievable. If you’d told me the previous September that in ten months’ time I’d be living in the mansion, calling the squire Harry and working with him, I’d have laughed in your face.

  And now I was going to be in charge of the whole estate. The old-fashioned title could retire with Mr Ormiston. I’d be Glanteifi’s agent.

  For months, I’d been looking forward to next April, when I’d been supposed to take over, but now that the moment had come early, I was terrified. Because it’d be up to me now, wouldn’t it? Everything. Making sure the estate didn’t go bankrupt. Keeping the tenants happy. Making sure they could pay their rents. Stopping a tragedy like Matthew Thomas happening again.

  Could I do it?

  I honestly didn’t know.

  Since leaving town, I’d been trotting along not really taking any notice of where we were going, but then, up ahead, I saw the pressmen’s carriage turn off the turnpike and up a little road on the side of the hill. I kicked Seren into a canter to follow them.

  The road zigzagged up the hillside. Ahead of me the springs of the pressmen’s open-topped carriage were working hard over the ruts and potholes. I could hear the sound of rushing water away to my right, and through the trees I got glimpses of a fast-flowing little stream. I peered down at it through the greenery. Barely more than a running jump wide. Was that big enough to power a mill?

  ‘Is Mr Harborne expecting you?’ I called to the newspapermen.

  Pritchard, who was sitting facing me, grinned. ‘Not unless he’s clairvoyant. Bound to be there, though, isn’t he – surveying the damage?’

  The word clairvoyant called Cadwgan Gwynne to my mind, but I wasn’t going to start thinking about him, nor Lizzie Rees, thank you very much. Harry rushing off to investigate her death when he shouldn’t’ve done had caused enough trouble without me wasting time thinking about it.

  Just then, I caught sight of something through the trees on the other side of the little stream. I couldn’t see it very clearly, but there was definitely building work in progress.

  Another hundred yards further on, the road levelled out and there was a newly built bridge over the stream into the fields on the other bank. The timber of the uprights hadn’t weathered yet, but you could see there’d been a lot of toing and froing over the bridge, because the planks of the bed were filthy from hooves and feet and wheels.

  The carriage driver pulled his horses up and sat there frowning, as if he had doubts about the bridge. It was quite long, because it didn’t just go across the stream – it carried on over the slope of the bank on the other side to where the field levelled out.

  I looked around at what I suppose Harborne’d call the factory site. To my right, back down below us, the building work I’d seen turned out to be a tall timber-framed building. There were cart tracks all the way down to it and piles of timber dotted around the place. Twenty yards or so to my left, there was an earth bank, and beyond that, a pond.

  At least, there should’ve been a pond. You could see that water’d gathered in the basin behind the bank because it was a mess of mud and puddles, and the yellowish grass around the edges looked as if it’d been combed flat. The water must’ve rushed out at a hell of a rate to make the grass like that – the way the water drains into a mill race when you open the sluice gate.

  And that was exactly what’d happened. Only instead of just opening the sluice gate, somebody’d smashed the earth bank where it’d been built across the stream.

  It didn’t seem much in the way of damage to me. The main structure of the dam was still intact, and the section directly over the stream would be easy to rebuild – that and the gate. Two men could’ve easily done it in a morning.

  ‘You haven’t come all the way just to see this, have you?’ I asked.

  The journalists looked around at me, but it was the carriage driver who answered. ‘Main damage is down the way.’ He waved in the direction of the building.

  Pritchard and Foster climbed down and the three of us went over the bridge, me leading Seren. The carriage driver didn’t have much choice but to follow us – he was blocking the road and there was nowhere else to turn around.

  Once we were on the other side, I got a good look at Harborne’s factory. I was surprised that he wasn’t building in stone. But then, when I thought about it, I realised that it was quicker to build in timber, and you could have much bigger windows in a wooden building than in a stone-built one. Because Harborne was going to need daylight for his looms, wasn’t he? There was no gas light here like there was in Newtown and Leeds.

  Mind, quick to build they might be, but it stood to reason that wooden-framed buildings’d be quick to knock down as well. And somebody’d put a good bit of effort into knocking this one down. There were planks and poles scattered all around the site, and window frames hung half in, half out of the walls, smashed out of place by a well-aimed sledgehammer. When we got right up to the building, I could see that a lot of what was scattered about on the ground wasn’t building material at all. It was bamboo scaffolding poles, some of them roped together to make walkways.

  At first I thought there was nobody about; then a stocky older man appeared from behind a pile of timber. The look on his face said, Who the hell are you and what’s your business here? But we were too well dressed for that kind of greeting.

  ‘Good day to you.’ When he opened his lips, I could see that somebody’d knocked out one of his front teeth for him.

  We introduced ourselves and Pritchard said they were hoping to speak to Mr Harborne.

  ‘Gone for the police,’ the man said. His voice lisped a bit through the gap in his teeth, which made him sound a lot less intimidating than he looked.

  ‘Any idea when he’ll be back?’ Foster asked. He must’ve been glad the man spoke English. Foster couldn’t speak Welsh, and it drove him mad that Harry always held his inquests in Welsh and he had to find a translator.

  ‘He’s been gone a while. Be back soon, prob’ly.’

  If he’d gone into town for a constable, I wondered if he had got caught up in the crowds at the marketplace. Had he stopped to watch the inquest? I hadn’t seen him, but then I’d tried to keep my eyes away from the spectators.

  Pritchard kicked a pole to one side and stepped over a long timber with notches cut into it. It looked as if whoever’d wrecked the building had smashed as much as they could reach from the walkways, then pulled the whole scaffolding structure down. I could see that it was going to set work back a bit and send costs up, but I didn’t think it’d stop a man like Jem Harborne.

  The foreman – if that was what he was – followed us as we stepped up into the two-storey skeleton of the building. The clean smell of freshly cut timber was strong, and I breathed it in as I looked around. From inside, you could see that somebody’d intended to do a lot more damage. Every supporting timber had a bundle of pitch-soaked rags nailed to it at about head height. Whoever’d been here had intended to burn the place down.

  I thought of the family who’d been promised this parcel of land. Was it them who’d been responsible? If it was, I couldn’t honestly say I blamed them.

  ‘Looks like they were interrupted,’ Foster said, flicking a finger at a clump of black-clotted rags.

  ‘Yes, me and the boys put a stop to it,’ the foreman said.

  ‘The boys?’ I asked.

  ‘The carpenters and labourers. We’re on site all the time.’ He jerked his head towards a wooden building further down the slope that I could see through the gaps in the walls. ‘Came up as soon as we heard the banging, but they had a couple of dogs, so there was only so much we could do. Saw them off in the end, mind.’

  ‘How many were there?’ I asked.

  ‘Four or five,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know who they were?’

  He spat on the ground and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Didn’t say a word, so I don’t know. And I didn’t know ’em ’cos I’m not from here, see?’


  That explained why he didn’t look familiar to me.

  ‘Mr Harborne brought me and the boys in from home. We’ve been making the frame up for months – only waiting to know where to bring it, we were.’

  ‘Where’s home?’ I asked.

  ‘Llandysul I’m from. Mr Harborne wanted the job done quick, so I had to find men from where I could. Mostly from Llandysul, but a couple are from Llanybydder and Pencader.’

  I nodded. Not local, but not from far away. Even Llanybydder wasn’t more than half a day’s walk. Well worth it if there was decent work to be had, especially if you were given lodgings on site.

  The foreman stood in the empty doorway, watching me and the newspapermen walk around his sledgehammered building. I stepped over a plank, minding my footing so I didn’t step on a nail or a peg, and noticed something on the wooden floorboards – a brownish stain about six inches in diameter.

  Dried blood.

  The foreman saw me looking at it.

  ‘That’s where one of my lads fell. Jaco,’ he told me, speaking in Welsh as the newspapermen were at the other end of the building scribbling notes.

  ‘What did they hit him with?’ I asked.

  ‘Plank. Went down like a sack off a wagon. Nasty cut right here.’ He pointed to his own head, just behind his right eyebrow. ‘Thought he was dead at first because we couldn’t rouse him. That was when they ran off. Hadn’t come to do murder, had they?’

  ‘How is he now?’

  The foreman shook his head. ‘Still not come round. We had the doctor out to him and he said there was nothing he could do. We’ll just have to wait and see if he wakes up. One of the boys has gone up to Llandysul to tell his family. They’ll probably bring a cart to fetch him home. Live or die, he’ll be with his own.’

  Just then, I heard horses coming up the road on the other side of the stream. In less than a minute, Jem Harborne was walking down the slope towards us with a police constable.

  The wool man looked different from how I remembered him. His hair was untidy from his ride to town and there was no silky angola suit for him today – he looked much more like a practical man in brown wool.

  He sent the police constable off to talk to the foreman, then turned to me and the newspapermen. ‘Jeremiah Harborne at your service.’ He looked at me and I could see he recognised me but couldn’t think where from.

  ‘The Great Exhibition,’ I said. ‘We went to Soyer’s Symposium together.’

  He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. ‘John Davies! How the devil are you, sir?’ He thrust his hand out to me as if we were old friends.

  ‘This’ll put your schedule back,’ I said, shaking his hand and nodding at the mill.

  He waved the hand I’d just let go as if he was flicking off a fly. ‘Minor setback. Just need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But I’m pretty sure I know who’s behind it. A spell of hard labour should sort him out.’

  I realised that Harborne didn’t care what people thought of his factory. People could hate him for what he was doing here, but as long as he was making money, it made no difference to him.

  After what’d happened to Matthew Thomas, I had a feeling that was what people might think Harry was like too. He was going to have to work damned hard to prove them wrong. Or rather, now that Mr Ormiston’d gone, I was going to have to work damned hard.

  ‘You don’t feel any sympathy for him – the man who’d been promised the land?’ I asked. I knew it was Matthew Thomas’s inquest that was making me angry, as much as Harborne’s attitude, but I couldn’t help it.

  The newspapermen’s pencils started working and Jem Harborne frowned. ‘You think this is justified?’

  ‘Not justified, no. But understandable. You’ve got to admit, he’s got good reason to feel hard done by.’

  Harborne shook his head, eyes still on me. ‘I don’t agree. But anyway, as it happens, I don’t think he’s the man responsible. A windbag weaver’s been making a lot of noise. Goes round saying that factories have no place in the Teifi Valley and that folk here want honest cloth made by people they know.’

  People like Mic Rees in his one-man weaving shed. There’d be no weavers like him soon if Harborne had his way. I felt sick at the thought. By giving Harborne’s card to Mr Gelyot, I’d put myself on the side of machines instead of men, and that thought churned away in my gut along with guilt over Matthew Thomas’s death.

  Harborne was watching me. I don’t know what he saw, but he changed the subject pretty sharpish. ‘You had a young lad with you in London,’ he said. ‘Struck me as a proper bright spark.’

  I swallowed. Lleu. This was my chance to speak up for him and his dreams. ‘Daniel Williams. Yes, you made an impression on him too. Matter of fact, he wanted me to ask you if you’d take him on as your apprentice.’

  ‘My apprentice? What as?’

  ‘An engineer.’

  ‘I’m not an engineer. I’m a weaver – or was. And not a very good one, as it happens. Now, I’m a businessman. Still, my engineer’ll be here by the end of the week – he might take the boy on.’

  He took out his pocket watch and flipped it open. ‘Right, if I go now, I might just be in time to join the tail end of the Saunders-Jameses’ luncheon.’

  We fell into step as we walked back up to the bridge. ‘D’you know Mr Saunders-James well?’ I asked.

  ‘Only since I’ve been looking for land. Lucky to find him. He’s very interested in the factory. I’d never have got so far so quickly without him.’

  ‘Invested, has he?’

  ‘A little. But the main thing is, he’s offered to stand surety for me in some loans. Most of the landowners I approached laughed at the idea of a factory here. But Anthony’s not like other squires.’

  ‘No. Made his money from guano, I heard.’

  ‘Yes. Started off importing it, now he’s digging the stuff up in East Anglia.’ He looked sidelong at me. ‘I know your Harry Probert-Lloyd’s home-grown, so to speak, but I wonder whether he might be cut from the same cloth. Forward-thinking, you know. I’d very much like to meet him.’

  Shame for him that Harry’d had to send his apologies for the Saunders-Jameses’ luncheon party.

  ‘I’m sure you will eventually,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I’ll make sure of it,’ Jem Harborne said. ‘Don’t you worry.’

  Harry

  After John had left in pursuit of the journalists, I went to the Emlyn Arms hotel to pick up anything that had come for us on the mail coach.

  ‘Only a hand-delivered letter for you today, Mr Probert-Lloyd,’ the servant in charge said. ‘No big parcels this time.’

  I don’t know if he made the same remark to Twm, who normally came for the mail, or whether he simply could not think of anything else to say to me, but he had repeated the same weak quip every time I had fetched the mail since Gus Gelyot’s damned shower bath had arrived a few weeks ago. The carrier had stopped in Newcastle Emlyn to ask directions to Glanteifi and seemed to have informed the town’s entire population about the wonder he was carrying to us.

  I smiled, thanked the post clerk, and stowed the letter in my pocket as if it was of little consequence, but in truth, as I rode over the bridge and up Adpar hill, I could think of nothing else. Had I still had my sight, I would have unfolded it as soon as I had left the hotel and read it immediately. As it was, I had not the slightest indication even of who it might be from, though the good-quality paper suggested that it was from somebody of significance. I profoundly hoped it was not another billet-doux from the county magistrates.

  Of all the trials and inconveniences my blindness caused, not being able to read was, I think, the most frustrating. There was simply no circumventing it.

  John had been excited by the so-called ‘tactile ink’ that had been exhibited at the Crystal Palace, but I doubted my ability to make much sense of fractionally raised writing. At the very least, it would be painfully slow, as reading by magnifying glass had become during the last stages o
f my sight’s deterioration. Struggling to read one word at a time, finally reduced to guessing at each by its blurred shape, I had usually forgotten how a sentence had begun by the time I reached its end. The notion of something even more painstaking was unappealing, however much John and Lydia thought it might revolutionise my life.

  But even my frustrated curiosity as to the provenance of this letter could not long blot out the vivid, painful moments from the inquest that kept obtruding themselves upon my thoughts, however much I might try to turn them aside. Particularly difficult to displace was the comment Owen Thomas had made after describing how he had found his father hanging from the beam of one of the cowsheds, the milking stool he had stepped off kicked aside. ‘His toes were only six inches off the floor,’ he had said. ‘It didn’t seem far enough to have killed him.’

  * * *

  In the stableyard at Glanteifi, I slid off Sara’s back, handed the reins to Twm and went inside without a word. God alone knows what he and the other grooms made of such incivility, but I did not feel equal to conversation.

  As I stepped into the hall, I was greeted by Isabel Griffiths. Had somebody nipped through from the stableyard to the kitchen to tell her I was back?

  ‘Dr Reckitt’s here,’ she said. ‘Miss Howell’s entertaining him in the library.’

  The letter in my pocket – was it from Reckitt? Was he here to talk about something he already expected me to be aware of? I passed the folded sheet to Mrs Griffiths. ‘Would you see who this is from, please?’

  She took her pince-nez from an invisible pocket and unfolded the letter. ‘It’s from Mr Anthony Saunders-James. Regretting that you can’t attend his lunch today and asking if you and Miss Howell would join him on Saturday instead, as there’s somebody he would like you to meet.’

  It was gratifying that Saunders-James was so keen to meet me but my response would have to wait; I could not think of luncheons at the moment, not while I had yet to set a date for an inquest on the unidentified man in Cilgerran. I thanked Mrs Griffiths and made my way to the library.