by Alis Hawkins
‘Ah, finally!’ Reckitt rose to his feet as I walked in. ‘I have news.’
‘Good day, Reckitt. I trust you’re well?’ I took my seat and handed Saunders-James’s letter to Lydia.
He brushed my pleasantry aside. ‘Yes, very well, thank you. As I say, I have news. I would have delivered it yesterday, but on my way home from the funeral in Eglwyswrw, I was asked to oversee a difficult birth. I was there all night. But I believe I may have identified our corpse.’
‘Really? Who is he?’
‘I said “may”, Probert-Lloyd.’ Reckitt sat down again. ‘At Lizzie Rees’s funeral, I seemed to hear nothing but muttering about somebody who had failed to attend. People were considerably more interested in discussing why he wasn’t there than they were in speaking well of the deceased.’
‘And the “he” they were referring to?’ I asked.
‘A Nathaniel Stockton – a farm worker from somewhere near Felindre Farchog.’
Nathaniel Stockton. The incomer who had been sweet on Lizzie Rees. Her sisters had told John that he had found a job in the area so as to be near Lizzie after they had met while she was working in south Pembrokeshire. ‘Did you get a description of him?’ I asked.
‘I did. And it fits him in every particular.’
‘Had he been missed before the funeral?’
‘That wasn’t clear. Nobody else from the farm he worked on was there – they weren’t neighbours or fellow parishioners. But I’m told that this young man walked over to Eglwyswrw every Sunday to attend church so that he could see Lizzie Rees. And that he was there last Sunday, presumably not having heard that she was dead.’
‘What’s the name of the farm where he works? Or worked.’
‘Gilfachwen. And I have directions.’
John
On Thursday morning, we were back in Cilgerran bright and early to meet Caleb Richards and a farm servant from Gilfachwen who was going to tell us whether the body in the Pendre’s back room was Nathaniel Stockton.
In theory, that was all we needed to hold an inquest. A name and the body to put before a jury. But that’d never been enough for Harry before, and it wasn’t going to be enough this time.
When we got to the Pendre, it seemed a lot longer than a couple of days since we’d been there. What with Matthew Thomas’s death and inquest and now Mr Ormiston going, I felt as if I’d aged a year in less than half a week.
Harry and I hadn’t talked much about the resignation letter. I’d read it to him and Lydia when I got back to Glanteifi from the wool factory, but we’d agreed to talk about it all when we’d finished with this inquest. ‘But you need to know,’ Harry’d told me, ‘that I’d very much like you to take over from Mr Ormiston. We just need to decide how exactly things are going to be run from now on.’
I knew how I wanted things to be run, but I wasn’t sure Harry would agree. Still, best not to think about that for now.
When we walked into the Pendre’s taproom, I had a surprise. Caleb Richards and our witness weren’t there yet, but Benton Reckitt was. I’d never seen him up before nine o’clock in the morning before, unless there was a dead body to be looked at.
We sat down at the table with him. ‘If this does prove to be Nathaniel Stockton,’ Harry said, ‘I assume we all agree that his death must be related to Lizzie Rees’s? It surely can’t be a coincidence that a young man who was by all accounts courting her turns up murdered two days after her death?’
‘Circumstantial,’ Reckitt said, ‘but definitely worth bearing in mind. Incidentally, if this is the young man we suspect it is, the gossip at Lizzie Rees’s funeral suggests he wasn’t well liked.’
‘Not surprising,’ I said. ‘A foreigner courting a local girl’s never going to win friends, is he?’
‘There seemed to be more to it than petty jealousy.’
I stared at him. Petty jealousy? Hadn’t he stitched up enough men after fights over women to know there was nothing petty about it? Jealousy in one form or another caused more violence than anything else, in my experience.
‘What kind of comments did you hear, Reckitt?’ Harry asked.
‘People seemed to feel he thought a lot of himself. That he considered himself better than the locals.’
‘He thought himself better than them?’ Harry asked.
‘That sort of thing, yes.’
‘But that actual phrase?’
Reckitt blinked. I could almost see the effort as he tried to remember.
‘The thing is,’ Harry said, ‘I heard something similar said about Lizzie Rees. The little maid at Dolbannon told me that’s what the older servants said about her.’
It didn’t seem like much to me, but Harry wanted the two deaths to be related, didn’t he? Because then he could go back and question Mic Rees again.
He hated being lied to, Harry, and he knew Mic’d lied to him.
* * *
Before long, Caleb Richards arrived with our witness, who he introduced as Evan Evans.
‘But they call me Cadi,’ Evans said. I could see why. It’d be short for cadno – fox. He had that colour hair.
‘Been working at Gilfachwen long?’ I asked as we trooped through to the back room.
‘Longer’n anybody else on the place. Must be nearly ten years now. Since I was a gwas bach.’
If he’d been there since he was a boy, I could see why he’d been the one to come and talk to us. Over the years, he’d have seen enough servants come and go to know a bit about the men who hired themselves out at the fairs. He’d be able to tell us the kind of man Nattie Stockton’d been.
Caleb Richards uncovered the body and Cadi leaned forward to peer at the battered, blood-filled face before stepping back as quickly as he could from the body’s putrefying stench. ‘Yes, that’s Nattie, poor dab. Caleb says he was pulled out of the river?’
Harry nodded. ‘Do you have any idea why he might have been in Cilgerran? Did he know anybody here?’
‘If he did, he never said. Far as I remember, he never mentioned Cilgerran at all.’
We went back into the taproom and Cadi answered Harry’s questions while we drank the beer the landlord’d brought for us.
‘Nattie was only here because of Lizzie Rees,’ he told us. ‘He didn’t need to look for work. His family’s got their own farm – and not a tenancy, either – down in the south. Place called St Florence. Never heard of it before Nattie came. Don’t have much to do with people down there, do we?’
We all agreed. The Teifi Valley might only be thirty miles or so from the south coast of Pembrokeshire, but that was a two-day walk, and unless there was a good reason to go there – like Lizzie Rees going for harvest work – it might as well be on the other side of England.
‘He was a good boy, though,’ Cadi went on, picking at some dried wax on the table. ‘Never a shirker, never tried to come the boss, if you know what I mean. He taught us to swear in English and we taught him some Welsh. One or two of the boys don’t speak much English – only “good day” and “if you please”, you know.’
I did know – those were the bits of English you needed to know if you didn’t want to get into trouble for being disrespectful.
‘And how did his courting Lizzie go down with the other servants at Gilfachwen?’ Harry asked.
Cadi shrugged. ‘Didn’t matter to us. Not one of our girls, was she? Out of our parish, Eglwyswrw. But the boys over there didn’t like it at all.’
‘Oh?’ Harry raised an eyebrow and looked somewhere past Cadi’s left ear. I could understand him wanting to try and look people in the eye, but when he missed, it made him look more blind than if he hadn’t bothered.
‘Tried to warn him off, didn’t they?’ Cadi said. ‘One Sunday, after the end of hay, some lads grabbed him on his way home from church and gave him a proper hiding. Told him he’d better stop chasing Lizzie or there’d be worse to follow, type of thing.’
‘Was that before or after she gave him the coron fedw?’ Harry asked.
Cadi looked up from his pint. ‘You know about that, do you?’ He shook his head, eyes focused on the past. ‘Came back from a church outing one Sunday with a grin all over his face and the crown on his head.’ He grunted at the memory. ‘The beating came after that. Because of it, I suppose. Boys in Eglwyswrw getting worried things were serious between them.’
‘Do you know the names of any of the men who attacked him?’ Harry asked.
Cadi wiped his mouth with his knuckles. ‘Nattie only knew Eglwyswrw people by name if they went to the church. Knew them by sight, mind. Said he’d seen them about when he walked home from church.’
‘Did it work – the beating?’ I asked. ‘Did Nattie stop seeing Lizzie?’
‘Didn’t have to. She went away just after that, down south for the harvest.’
‘When did you hear that Lizzie Rees had died?’ Harry asked.
Cadi started picking at the wax again. ‘On Sunday at chapel. We thought that was why Nattie hadn’t come back from church – that he’d gone down to Rhosdywarch to see her family.’
‘And when he didn’t come back by evening?’
Cadi shrugged. ‘Thought he might’ve just gone back to St Florence.’
‘What,’ I said, ‘and left all his things behind?’
‘Didn’t have much. Only his working clothes and boots. Oh, and a writing box. But Mistir kept that in the parlour for him. Used to go in the house once a week and write home, he did. Regular as clockwork.’
‘You didn’t think he’d come back for that?’
Another shrug. ‘Didn’t really think about it at all till now.’
‘Did you think he might’ve run away because he’d had something to do with Lizzie’s death?’
Cadi looked me in the eye and shook his head, definite. ‘He couldn’t have. He hadn’t seen her for weeks.’
Hold on, hadn’t Mic Rees said he’d been there the day she died?
I turned to Harry. ‘Didn’t you tell me Mic Rees said that Nattie’d dropped some wool off for Lizzie to spin on Saturday?’ I asked. ‘A few hours before she died?’
He frowned. ‘That’s what I remember, yes. Though I wasn’t taking notes, obviously.’
Cadi shook his head. ‘No. Whoever took wool to Rhosdywarch, it wasn’t Nattie – wasn’t any of us, come to that. Gilfachwen’s got people closer to home to do our spinning. And Nattie never left the farm last Saturday. I was with him every minute until he went off to church on Sunday.’
‘You slept in the same loft?’ I asked.
‘Yes. The two of us and another outdoor servant. If Nattie’d gone anywhere, we’d’ve known about it.’
Harry looked as if he was staring at the battered, beer-stained table, which meant he was really looking at Cadi over the top of his blind patch. ‘Well somebody brought wool,’ he said, ‘because Mic Rees said Lizzie’d been spinning on the evening before she died, and according to Esther Rees, there’d been no wool to spin when she left for Ffynone. It had to’ve come from somewhere.’
‘So Mic Rees lied about who brought it,’ I said.
He was looking troubled. ‘Or maybe I’ve misremembered.’ That meant he thought he had. ‘I don’t have quite your recall for conversations, John, but I’m not absolutely sure Mic ever mentioned Nathaniel’s name.
Damn. This wouldn’t’ve happened if I’d been there. It was my job to nail details right down, because I was the one who had to write the inquest report, so I kept asking questions until I knew exactly what a witness was saying and what they weren’t. But Harry wasn’t so meticulous – he was prone to going off down other rabbit holes if they appeared, then forgetting to go back to where he’d been.
And things got missed like that.
‘So was there anybody else trying to court Lizzie?’ I asked.
Cadi made a face that stood in for a shrug. ‘From what Nattie said, half the boys in Eglwyswrw were after her. But I don’t know if any of them went any further than looking. Don’t go to church over there, do I, so I don’t know what was going on.’
Church and chapel. The two main places for young people to meet. What with Sunday school and Bible studies and hymn-singing practice and a second service in the evening, you could spend most of your Sunday with the same people if you wanted to. And you’d definitely want to if you were courting a girl – it’d be the only chance you had to see her.
If there’d been another man trying to court Lizzie, he had to be our main suspect, didn’t he? We were going to have to go and speak to Mic Rees again.
Harry turned to Caleb Richards. ‘Did you ask the farmer at Gilfachwen where I might contact Stockton’s family?’
The plwyfwas reeled off an address, and I remembered my father giving Mr Price the name of our holding when I was hired out, aged eleven. In case of anything, as Price had said.
‘Thank you. I’ll write to his parents today. That’ll give them time to get here if I hold the inquest on Monday. Meanwhile, I think we’ll go and pay Dr Cadwgan Gwynne another visit.’
Harry
As we dismounted outside Gwynne’s house, before I could ask John to ring the bell, the doctor appeared around the side of the house. With his long limbs and flowing hair, he was a sufficiently unusual-looking man that even I could recognise him.
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, Mr Davies! Is all well?’
‘As far as John and I are concerned, perfectly, thank you. Might we come in for a few moments?’
Once the horses had been led off and the maid instructed as to refreshments, we found ourselves invited once more into Gwynne’s house. But not this time to his consulting room.
‘We might be more comfortable in the drawing room,’ he said, opening the door to a room at the front of the house. As we walked in, I had the impression not of a conventional drawing room but of an orangery. There were plants everywhere: on tiered stands and windowsills, in huge pots on the floor and on tiny tables set here and there about the room. Some were in flower, some had huge striped leaves, others – as far as I could tell – were feathery and fern-like. I had assumed that the plants in Gwynne’s consulting room were evidence that he made up his own salves and tinctures, but it seemed that plants were not simply of professional interest to him; if this room was any guide, they were his passion.
The room had been adapted in order to admit sufficient light for vegetation to flourish; as well as a large east-facing window at the house’s gable end, French windows had been installed on the south side. And just as in the consulting room, what I had initially taken to be paintings on every wall proved, as I moved past them, to be mirrors endlessly reflecting greenery back and forth.
Gwynne clearly saw my surprise. ‘Being surrounded by plants is good for the soul.’
The soul? I was unaccustomed to that kind of comment from a medical man.
At Gwynne’s invitation, I sat on a small sofa while John took the high-backed chair that stood at right angles to it.
‘This chair is far more comfortable, Mr Davies,’ Gwynne said, inviting him to sit opposite me. But I knew John would decline; he had seated himself where he would be most visible to me.
Instead, Gwynne himself sat in the wingback chair. ‘How may I help you, gentlemen?’
‘The body of a young man called Nathaniel Stockton has been recovered from the river in Cilgerran,’ I told him.
‘Oh no! The poor boy!’
‘You knew him?’
Gwynne cleared his throat. ‘I believe we discussed Elizabeth Rees’s preference for Nathaniel the last time you were here Mr Probert-Lloyd?’
‘We did,’ I confirmed.
‘He was brought to me for treatment a few weeks ago after a severe beating.’ Gwynne paused. ‘The man who brought him here – a servant on the same farm – told me that his attackers had intended to warn him off Lizzie Rees.’
‘Did he give you any names?’ I asked. Cadi Evans had told us that Nattie had known his attackers by sight but not by name. However, it did no harm to ask.
‘No. Ne
ither would he go to the magistrates about the matter. With no witnesses, he said it was his word against theirs. But whoever they were, they’d underestimated his determination. Or perhaps the nature of his attachment to Elizabeth.’
‘He didn’t take the warning to heart?’
‘If you mean did he forsake Elizabeth, then no, I do not believe he did. In point of fact, he told me that he was going to ask her to marry him.’
Something in Gwynne’s voice told me there was more to be learned here if I only cared to dig for it. I fixed his face in my peripheral vision, the whirlpool over his chest. ‘Dr Gwynne, did you encourage Nathaniel Stockton to ask for her hand?’
‘It’s not for me to encourage or discourage such intentions.’
‘What if somebody’s asked you to cast their horoscope,’ John cut in, ‘and a certain person seems to be identified as a future husband or wife? Or if they wash the midnight shirt and see a vision?’
If Gwynne gave credence to horoscopes, did it follow that he believed in the powers of divination?
‘Horoscopes are never so specific as to provide names, Mr Davies.’
‘But did you have any reason to believe, one way or the other,’ I asked, ‘that Lizzie would say yes if he asked her to marry him?’
Abruptly Gwynne rose to his feet and went to the door. ‘Where is the girl with that tea?’
As he left the room, I turned to John. ‘There’s clearly something he doesn’t want to tell us.’
‘Agreed. Still,’ his voice brightened, ‘a cup of tea would be nice.’
I grinned, my mood lightened by his sudden levity. Perhaps now that Matthew Thomas’s inquest was over and Ormiston was gone, we could put past trials behind us.
After a minute or so, Gwynne returned carrying a tea tray. ‘Apologies for the delay, gentlemen.’
John and I watched in silence as the doctor poured milk and tea, and proffered sugar. When he had seated himself opposite me once more, I put my teacup next to a plant on the table beside me.