by Alis Hawkins
‘Dr Gwynne, we’ve been told that Lizzie Rees came to see you before she travelled south to go harvesting. Is that true?’
Gwynne hesitated. ‘It is.’
So Lizzie’s sisters had been right about that, at least. ‘What was the nature of the consultation?’
Gwynne shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you that. It was between me and Elizabeth.’
Should I press him, or try a more subtle tack? John leant forward decisively. Press on, hard.
‘Dr Gwynne, whatever you disclose to us now cannot hurt Lizzie Rees. But we believe that her death and Nathaniel Stockton’s are related, and without wishing to prejudge the jury’s verdict, Mr Stockton was clearly murdered. He intended to marry Lizzie Rees and she came to consult you. If you know anything pertinent, I would urge you, in the interests of justice, to tell me.’
Gwynne hung his head as if the condition of the polished floorboards was suddenly of enormous interest to him. I waited while he wrestled with his conscience.
‘Lizzie’s sisters are convinced she asked you to tell her who she was going to marry,’ John said.
The doctor’s head remained lowered.
‘Dr Gwynne?’ I pressed.
I heard him draw in a deep breath. ‘No,’ he said, ‘she didn’t ask me that.’
‘But she did ask you something, in your capacity as…’ I hesitated, unable to bring myself to use the word wizard, ‘as somebody who she believed had an insight into the future?’
‘Not even that.’ He took another deep breath and sat up straight. ‘On your last visit, we discussed Mic Rees’s belief that his daughter might have been cursed. Lizzie had a similar fear.’
I waited.
‘Elizabeth had given the coron fedw to Nathaniel Stockton—’
‘Yes, we know,’ I interrupted before he could begin an unnecessary explanation.
‘What she wanted me to tell her was whether her marriage would be cursed if she married somebody else.’
John
It was threatening to rain as we left Dr Gwynne’s house, so we put our coats on before we got into the saddle. Easier not to have to ferret around in the saddlebags once it’d started.
‘According to what I got from her sisters and Llwyo,’ I told Harry as we trotted away from Felindre Farchog, ‘Lizzie Rees only really had one friend. Girl by the name of Sally Sips. If anybody knows who this other man is, it’ll be her.’
So off we went to Eglwyswrw.
I don’t know what Harry was thinking – probably wondering how a doctor trained in London could still believe in curses – but I was trying to get everything straight in my head. I was going to need to write all this up at some point, and if I thought it through now, it’d be easier; half the work would be done.
And to be honest, thinking about Nattie Stockton’s murder kept my thoughts away from Matthew Thomas’s suicide. We were going to have to go to his funeral tomorrow and I was dreading it. Half the people there would’ve been at the inquest and they’d want to know what Harry was going to do – how he was going to make sure nobody else was thrown off their land. And at the moment, I didn’t have a clue.
But we did know quite a lot about what’d happened to Nattie Stockton, and I stopped my thoughts wandering by making a mental list.
Fact: his body had been pulled out of the river at Cilgerran.
Fact (as good as, seeing as it came from Reckitt): he had drowned somewhere else, in water where pond weed grew.
Fact: the body had been put (hidden?) somewhere after Stockton’d died and before he was thrown into the Teifi. A place where for some reason he’d been propped up in a sitting position. Probably somewhere stony, given the wounds on his back.
Fact: he’d been in that position for up to twelve hours, according to the lividity and rigor.
Unsubstantiated fact (but probably reliable, coming from Reckitt): somebody had held one of his arms (twisted behind his back?) and forced his head down into stones at the bottom of – let’s say – a pond. (Because of pond weed.)
Fact: as yet we had no evidence as to who’d drowned him or why, but it seemed likely to be related to the death of the girl he’d been courting, Lizzie Rees.
Fact: Lizzie Rees had been sweet enough on Stockton to give him the coron fedw.
Fact (I couldn’t see any reason to disbelieve Dr Gwynne): Lizzie had had second thoughts about Nattie Stockton and was considering marrying somebody else.
Unsubstantiated fact: Lizzie wanted to stay home to wash the midnight shirt so she could find out who – or rather, which one of two men – she was going to marry.
When Ann and Gwen had told me their story, I’d thought it was romantic nonsense that they’d come up with because of a nightgown drying. But what if it was true? Maybe, if there were two men in the running, Lizzie might’ve thought she needed a bit of a supernatural nudge in the right direction.
Harry’d asked Dr Gwynne if he knew who the other man was, but according to him, Lizzie hadn’t said and he hadn’t asked. Harry’d also wanted to know what answer Gwynne had given when Lizzie’d asked him whether her marriage would be cursed if she married somebody else after she’d given Nattie Stockton the coron fedw.
‘I told her that her marriage would certainly be cursed – in the metaphorical but no less effective sense – unless she was quite certain who she wished to marry. If she wasn’t, she faced a lifetime of wondering whether she might have been happier if she’d made a different decision.’
‘And did you give her any indication of how she might be so certain?’
‘I told her to pay specific attention to her dreams and to how she felt on waking from any dream about either young man. Sometimes our dreams tell us things our waking minds shy away from.’
And maybe Lizzie’d taken that to mean that she should wash the midnight shirt. Because when you thought about it, unless a girl pinched herself to stay awake into the small hours after putting out her intimate garment to dry, the so-called ‘visions’ of a coffin or a husband were likely to be dreams, weren’t they?
So perhaps Ann and Gwen’s story wasn’t so far-fetched after all. Except for the bit about girls who hated Lizzie coming and pretending to be another man to frighten her. That was obviously nonsense. You might get away with that sort of thing in a boarding school full of impressionable girls, but not at Rhosdywarch.
Back to facts.
Fact: Nattie Stockton’d been killed sometime on Sunday, after he’d left Gilfachwen for church. Which raised two questions in my mind. First, had he got as far as Eglwyswrw church? And second, was it possible that whoever’d killed him hadn’t known that Lizzie Rees had died?
When Cadwgan Gwynne’d told us there’d been a second man in the running, the thought that’d leapt into my head was that Nattie must’ve been killed to avenge Lizzie. That for some reason the other man believed that Nattie’d killed Lizzie, and thought he’d get away with it because of Gwynne’s ‘natural death’ verdict. Everybody in the parish would’ve known by Sunday morning that that was what Gwynne had said.
But what if Lizzie’s other man wasn’t from the parish and – just like Cadi Evans – hadn’t heard about her death by Sunday morning? What if he’d just chosen a really bad time to go looking for Nattie Stockton to get rid of the competition?
As we trotted into Eglwyswrw, I told Harry what I’d been thinking and he nodded, with that look on his face that told me I’d had an idea he hadn’t. ‘Excellent reasoning. Which means that one of the things we need to ask Sally Sips is whether Nattie Stockton ever got to church that morning.’
* * *
Before we could talk to Sally Sips, we had to find out where she lived. Llwyo, the groom who’d fetched me from Glanteifi, seemed like somebody who might know, so we stopped at the Sergeant’s Inn stables and Harry stayed outside with the horses.
‘Sally Sips?’ Llwyo said when I asked if he knew her. ‘Who’d you hear calling her that?’
‘Ann and Gwen – Lizzie Rees’s little sisters.
Why? Isn’t that what people call her?’
‘No, no, it is – well, Eglwyswrw people anyway. It’s just odd hearing a stranger call her that. Not very complimentary, is it – Sally Sipsi?’
Ah, so Sips was short for Sipsi. Gypsy.
I watched Llwyo, waiting for him to tell me more. He was rubbing a horse down, keeping the animal between me and him.
‘So if you know her, I expect you know where she lives?’
He dipped down to brush under the horse’s belly. ‘Course I do, ’machgen i!’
But he didn’t tell me. Did he think that because I’d paid him for the names he’d given me before, I’d pay for the address now?
‘Well then?’ Harry said from behind me. ‘Where can we find her?’ He must’ve found a boy to hold the horses.
Llwyo straightened up and I saw him dry-swallowing. His Adam’s apple went up and down like a chicken trying to peck its way out of a sack. ‘Her father keeps the grocer’s shop at the other end of the village,’ he said, all helpful now. ‘That’s where she’ll be. Mind,’ he said, looking away from Harry to me, ‘I haven’t seen her out and about since Lizzie’s funeral. Hit her hard, it has.’
Harry came to stand at my side and Llwyo ducked down out of his way to brush the horse’s legs. He could be very commanding when he chose to, Harry.
‘We’ve been given information that Lizzie Rees was courting somebody else, at the same time as Nattie Stockton,’ he said. ‘Happen to know if that’s true, would you?’
Llwyo stayed down. Preferred having his face within kicking distance of an iron-shod hoof to facing Harry. ‘No, sir, I wouldn’t. Like I told Mr Davies, half the lads in Eglwyswrw would’ve liked to be courting her, but it was only the Englishman had the ball— the guts to actually do it. Mind, he should’ve seen sense and left off, instead of…’
‘Instead of what?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘No, come on. If he didn’t see sense after the beating he got, what was he doing?’
Llwyo straightened up, started pulling the horse’s mane tidy. ‘Who told you about the beating?’
‘Dr Gwynne.’
He sucked his teeth. ‘Proper mess he was, from what I heard. Couldn’t hardly see, his eyes were so swollen.’
Poor dab – somebody’d given him quite a hiding. ‘So what was he doing when he should’ve been seeing sense?’ I wasn’t going to let it go.
‘Nothing.’
‘It’s not nothing, though, is it?’
‘Just gossip, that’s all.’
‘Tell us anyway and we’ll be the judges,’ Harry said.
Llwyo gave him a look that said he’d rather punch him than answer him, but Harry was the coroner and Llwyo knew he could make him give evidence at the inquest. And that’d be worse than telling him what he wanted to know now. At the inquest, everybody’d see him passing on gossip. ‘Somebody saw him – Stockton – coming away from Rhosdywarch,’ he said. ‘Before sunrise on the morning Lizzie died.’
‘Somebody – who?’ I asked.
‘Dunno. Told you. It’s just gossip.’
‘And what does the gossip say he was doing there at that time?’
Llwyo stared at Harry. Probably wondering how much he could see, like everybody did when they first met him. ‘If he wasn’t up to no good, there’s only one thing he’d be doing coming from there at that time, isn’t there?’ His eyes switched back to me, dared me to say it.
I nodded. Of course! Looked at in that light, it all made sense. Made sense of Mic Rees lying to us. Made sense of Lizzie being in the box bed.
‘Caru yn y gwely,’ I said. Courting in bed.
Harry
Courting in bed. I remembered how much of a Welsh bumpkin I had felt when I first realised that this was not something people did in other parts of the country. In England, young couples did not meet at night, bundled up in clothes and blankets in a bed or on the floor, bolsters often thrust between them by wary parents. Elsewhere, it seemed, courting was carried out in the light of day. But here, in a farming community whose every daylight hour was spent working to keep bread on the table, time had to be found after dark for a couple to decide whether they suited each other. And such a decision was vital, for unlike people of my station, who might easily choose to avoid their spouse by occupying separate parts of a large house, a husband and wife in a Teifi Valley cottage or farmhouse lived and worked cheek by jowl, all day, every day. If there were not, at the very least, a bond of friendship or mutual respect, the union would be miserable for both them and their children.
I had done my share of courting in bed in the dark of a night-time hayloft, but I did not wish to dwell on the memories of those dark hours of whispered lovemaking. They had, ultimately, resulted in her betrayal and murder.
‘So,’ I said, as John and I walked down the high street to the grocer’s shop, leaving our mares in the stables, ‘as Cadi told us quite categorically that Nattie hadn’t seen Lizzie since she’d been back from harvesting, and that he was in the loft with the other servants on the night she died, if there was a man with her in the box bed, it was this other suitor – agreed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Having said that, we need to avoid jumping to conclusions. We both know how rumours start after a sudden death. This one might have no truth in it at all.’
‘Yes, but it fits what we know, doesn’t it? Her being in the box bed instead of her own bed. Her lying about having a cold. And I’ll tell you something else that fits now, too – Mic Rees stripping her petticoat off.’
John obviously saw a significance there that I didn’t. I stopped in my tracks; sometimes the effort necessary to make out where I was putting my feet made thinking while walking nigh on impossible.
Mic Rees had told me that he had not been able to bear the indignity Lizzie’s memory would suffer if Dr Gwynne had seen her in her urine-soaked petticoat – that putting her in fresh linen was the last thing he had been able to do for her. Clearly, John now thought otherwise.
‘How does that fit?’ I asked.
‘Some people have courting sacks,’ he said. ‘They cover the girl all over so only her arms and her head are free. But if you haven’t got one, if you want to be sure nothing goes on, you can sew up the middle of a petticoat. Or nightgown. We know Lizzie’d had her wedding-night nightgown out because Ann and Gwen saw it drying on the back of the chair. That’s where they got all their nonsense about washing the midnight shirt from.’
‘And if Dr Gwynne’d seen her in that, with a line of additional stitches to ensure chastity, he would’ve known what’d been going on and might’ve asked awkward questions.’
‘Exactly. So Mic took it off her and put the petticoat she’d been wearing earlier back on.’
Which meant that Reckitt had been right about her petticoat having previously been worn. I imagined Mic Rees – and possibly this mystery lover – unpicking Lizzie’s careful stitches from her sodden nightgown by the light of a rushlight or candle. If we asked to see that garment, examined it, would we see stains where the flame had dripped tallow onto the fabric?
This new evidence raised as many questions as it answered. Chief among them the question of whether Mic Rees had hidden his daughter’s courting in bed in order to avoid having to answer to his wife, or to protect the man concerned. But if it was the latter, why would he do such a thing? Surely any man who had been with Lizzie on the night of her death must be complicit in it, Reckitt’s failure to find any evidence of foul play notwithstanding?
As soon as we’d finished with Miss Sips – whose surname, we had been told by Llwyo, was Jones – we would need to speak to Mic Rees again.
* * *
The grocer’s shop was much smaller than the one in Newcastle Emlyn and, lacking a large front window, was not well lit. Immediately feeling at a disadvantage in the poor light, I let John introduce us and ask whether we might speak to Sally.
As her father went to fetch her, I sniffed the air, trying to identify
the scents that lay just out of reach of anything but a concerted effort. I caught the rich, deep notes of molasses, and something that might have been tea. But the dominant note was the beeswax and turpentine of wood polish. Evidently Mr Jones kept his counter clean and buffed.
‘Miss Jones,’ I greeted the dark-haired young woman who followed the grocer back into the shop, ‘would you be so kind as to come for a short walk with me and Mr Davies so that we can talk to you about Lizzie Rees?’
Her father started to object, trying to insist that he be present, but Sally put a hand on his arm and spoke quietly. ‘It’s all right, Dada, it’ll be nice to have some fresh air. I’ll just get my shawl, if I may, Mr Probert-Lloyd.’
When she had gone, her father spoke up again. ‘She’s been very upset by what happened to Lizzie, our Sally has. I don’t know why you have to speak to her. Dr Gwynne said it was a natural death.’
‘There’s been another death, Mr Jones. A young man who was courting Lizzie. We’d like to talk to Sally about him.’
‘What – the Englishman? He’s never killed himself over her, has he?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t.’
Outside, we walked back along the road. ‘Shall we step into the churchyard?’ I suggested. It would get us off the public thoroughfare and provide a modicum of privacy. I must confess that I also hoped it would induce Sally to be more truthful with us than she might otherwise be; if she and Lizzie had been close friends, it seemed likely that Sally had also attended this church rather than the chapel in the village.
We skirted the side of the Sergeant’s Inn stables and walked through a gate into the churchyard, where the church sat on an area of gently raised ground. Under the lee of the west end, partly hidden from the main road by a tree, I turned to Sally.
‘It must have been a shock losing your best friend so suddenly like that,’ I said, offering her the chance both to express her sorrow and to deny any such closeness with Lizzie if she wished. We had, after all, only Ann and Gwen’s word for it that the two had been confidantes.