by Alis Hawkins
Harry was out of his depth with Glanteifi. I think he knew that but couldn’t admit it, so he’d just found ways to avoid his responsibilities. Ever since he’d been elected, he’d gone out to every sudden death that was brought to him, because being coroner gave him a cast-iron excuse not to think about being squire. If he was needed elsewhere, then he could leave everything to do with Glanteifi to his steward.
Or rather, to his steward and me.
When he first said he wanted me to be under-steward, I’d been pretty sure that what he really meant was that he wanted me to be always available as assistant coroner. Because the way Harry looked at it, if Mr Ormiston’d managed without help before, he could do it again while I rode off with him to conduct inquests.
But he’d forgotten the part of the deal that said Mr Ormiston would train me up for a year, then retire. I suppose, back in February, a year had seemed like a long time. But a twelvemonth wears out pretty quickly when you’re always looking from one quarter-day to the next.
I stomped over the little humpbacked Ceri bridge, through the evening smell of honeysuckle in a cottage garden and followed the road up onto the slope above the Teifi. There was still some light in the sky behind me, but it was almost dark under the trees. I’d left the mansion in such a hurry that I hadn’t thought to bring a lantern. But I’d be fine. It was only since moving to Glanteifi that I’d gone soft and had lanterns to light my way at night.
I jumped about a foot in the air as the sudden screech of a barn owl ripped terror through me like a red-hot wire.
Good job I didn’t believe in omens, or I’d’ve been expecting bad news in town.
* * *
As it happened, it wasn’t bad news I found in Newcastle Emlyn; it was Amos Bowen. As I walked over the bridge and up to the Drovers, I was beginning to worry a bit about the welcome I’d get. I hadn’t been there for months, and I had a pretty good idea that I’d get some nonsense from the lads about thinking I was too good to go drinking with my old friends and that kind of thing. But I’d been busy since I moved out to Glanteifi, hadn’t I? Studying for my exams, learning the ropes with Mr Ormiston, going out with Harry on investigations. I hadn’t had time to come into town drinking.
I saw Amos as soon as I walked in. He was sitting by himself in the corner, well away from the card-players and the arm-wrestlers, with a sheet of paper on the table in front of him. But it wasn’t him being by himself that made him stand out – it was the eyepatch he was wearing. I wondered where he’d got it – he hadn’t been wearing it at Plas Blaengwyn earlier on. But wherever it had come from, to my mind that patch meant that Amos was definitely Barti Ddu from Dolbannon, so it might be worth having a word with him.
But I had something else to deal with first. The heckling had started.
Oh, here he is, lads, Gentleman John Davies!
Didn’t think we’d see you in here again – too fine for the likes of us now you’re living with the crachach!
Come to buy us all a drink, have you?
Dead body in here somewhere, is there?
There were some comments that were a bit sharper than that, too, but they came from people I wouldn’t’ve given the time of day to back when I was here twice a week, so I took no notice and sat down with Dan James. These days he was a solicitor’s clerk in town, but I’d known him since we were at Mr Davies’s school in Adpar together.
‘Well, well, well, come crawling back to us have you, John Davies?’
‘I don’t see any crawling going on, thank you very much! Just here for a quiet drink.’
I shut him up by ordering a round for everybody at the table. We chatted about this and that for a few minutes before I nodded in Amos’s direction. ‘Know him? The man with the eyepatch?’
Dan shook his head. ‘No, who is he?’
‘The engineer at the new factory in Llandyfriog.’ The look on Dan’s face told me that he thought he knew why I was here now. ‘No, I didn’t come into town to see him, but I could do with a word with him, as it happens.’
Dan nodded knowingly. ‘Heard about the skirmish. The local carpenters and the ones up at the site. The man that got injured – died, has he?’
I stared at him. ‘Hold on – what d’you mean, local carpenters? Is that who attacked the mill?’ He’d thought I already knew, which meant that it was common gossip around town. ‘Is it?’ I pressed him.
Dan shrugged. ‘That’s what everybody’s saying. Understandable, anyway, isn’t it? If Jeremiah Harborne wanted a mill built here, he should’ve paid local men to do it.’
He had a point. But as assistant coroner, I couldn’t say anything that might be taken as mitigation of a crime. ‘Last I heard, the man was still alive,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to wait and see. But if you know who did this, Dan, you’d better tell me.’
He held his hands up. ‘Whoa there, pony! I’m just telling you gossip. I don’t know anything for sure.’ He took a sup of his pint, looking at me over the mug. ‘If it’s not that, what d’you want to talk to him about? How d’you even know him?’
‘Met him at Plas Blaengwyn earlier. He was there with Harborne and I was there with Harry.’
‘Harry,’ Dan scoffed. Couldn’t get over me being on first-name terms with the squire.
I wasn’t going to tell him I wanted to know whether Amos was also known as Barti Ddu, so to answer his other question, I fell back on a half-truth. ‘There’s a young lad I know who’s keen to be apprenticed to him as an engineer.’
‘Oh yes? Who’s that, then?’
I opened my mouth to explain about Lleu, then shut it again. I was no better than Harborne, was I? He’d brought labour in from somewhere else, and here I was bringing a lad from Llanddewi Brefi to Amos instead of him finding an apprentice from town.
I tapped the side of my nose. ‘Better say nothing till the deal’s done, eh?’ Solicitors’ clerks know the value of confidentiality. We also know the value of knowing things nobody else knows yet, and Dan’d be bound to think I was keeping the secret for my own benefit.
‘Suit yourself,’ he said.
‘Anyway…’
‘Yes! Off you go for your little chat! ’Spect it’ll be another six months before we see you in here again, will it?’
I grinned. ‘To be honest with you, Dan, a man can have enough of wine.’
As I went over to Amos’s corner, I beckoned to the pot boy.
‘Evening,’ I said.
Amos looked up, head down in his shoulders as if he expected a stick across his back, but his face broke out in a smile when he saw me, and he straightened up a bit.
I signalled to the pot boy to fill Amos’s mug as well as mine.
‘Oh, th-thank you.’
I grabbed a spare stool and sat down. ‘Fetching eyepatch,’ I grinned.
‘M-Mr Jones the saddler said I c-could have it this evening if I c-came here to fetch it. I w-wanted to have it before ch-church tomorrow.’
‘Church, is it?’ I teased him some more. ‘Too good for chapel now you’re an engineer?’
He gazed at me earnestly for about a second and a half before looking away again. ‘I used to g-go with m-my old mistir and his wife.’
Most likely he’d chosen to go to church with Dai Dolbannon instead of chapel with the other farm servants just to get away from them for a bit. The endless standing up and sitting down and muttering things in English from a prayer book would’ve been a small price to pay for a morning of not being treated like something in a freak show. Still, I wondered how he’d got on with all the solicitors and shopkeepers and chemists at Holy Trinity. It was quite a well-to-do crowd, the church’s congregation here. Maybe he thought going to church would give him more of a place in society as the engineer to the factory.
He glanced up at me again from his beer. A lot more willing to look at me with his squint covered up, our Amos. He had eyes like a calf – big and brown, with lashes a girl would’ve been proud of.
‘Heard something just now that Jem
might be interested in,’ I said.
He looked at me, but said nothing. I drank some beer. I’d almost forgotten what the Drovers’ beer tasted like, and it brought back a flood of memories, not all of them very happy, to be honest. ‘Did the police go and see the man Jem thought was responsible for wrecking the mill?’ I asked, before I told him what Dan’d said. ‘The weaver?’
Amos nodded. ‘S-said it was n-nothing to do with him.’
‘And maybe it wasn’t.’ In the end, it was only gossip, as Dan had pointed out, so I was careful what I said. ‘I did hear that perhaps the mill wouldn’t’ve been touched if Jem had employed carpenters from Newcastle Emlyn instead of bringing in a gang from Llandysul.’
Amos nodded. I could see that he understood what I meant. ‘Y-you g-going to tell the police?’ he asked.
‘Not my business, is it? Not unless the carpenter who was injured dies. Then it’ll be my business. Mine and Mr Probert-Lloyd’s.’
‘N-not Jem’s fault.’
No, strictly speaking it wasn’t Harborne’s fault. And the wreckers must be praying that the man they’d whacked around the head – Jaco, the foreman had called him – would come round and still have all his wits. Because if he died, there’d be an inquest, and me and Harry’d be after them.
I looked at Amos. He was in the same decent suit he’d been wearing earlier at Plas Blaengwyn, and had neatly cut hair and a decent shave. Didn’t look much like a farm servant. But he had to be Barti Ddu, didn’t he?
I decided to use one of Harry’s questioning methods and pretend I already knew the answer to the question I was going to ask. But I had to go in on the sly. ‘When I was up at the factory site on Thursday,’ I said, ‘the foreman told me somebody’d gone up to Llandysul to fetch Jaco’s family.’
Amos said nothing. To be fair, I hadn’t actually asked a question, and his stutter meant he never spoke unless he had to.
‘Did they come?’
‘I d-don’t know.’
I took a pull of my pint. ‘Speaking of messengers going to fetch family, I hear you went on a similar errand the day Lizzie Rees died. While you were still working at Dolbannon.’
His head snapped up as if somebody’d caught him a swift punch under the chin, and his one good eye stared at me.
‘It was you Dai Dolbannon picked to go over to Ffynone, wasn’t it?’
He didn’t answer, so I decided to give a bit of information in the hope of getting some back.
‘Harry’s holding an inquest for Lizzie Rees’s sweetheart, Nathaniel Stockton, in Eglwyswrw on Monday. He’s convinced his death and Lizzie’s are related.’
‘D-d-dead? N-Nattie Stockton’s d-dead?’
There was no reason why he should know, was there? He’d been gone from Dolbannon by the time the body’d been identified.
‘You knew him then, did you?’ I asked.
Amos opened his mouth. But the stop-rush-stop of his speech couldn’t seem to get to the rush bit this time. His neck was thrust forward with the effort of forcing a word out, and I could hear a noise coming from his throat, but nothing came from his mouth. Then he hit himself on his thigh, hard, and as if he’d released a jammed mechanism, a word spat out.
‘Church.’
Small world. I’d have been willing to bet that neither of them was a churchgoer by his own inclination, but they’d both found their way to Eglwyswrw church for their own reasons.
‘Coracle men at Cilgerran pulled him out of the river on Monday morning,’ I said.
Amos blinked furiously.
‘In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t suicide. Somebody killed him and threw him in the river.’
Later, I thought. They’d thrown him into the river later. Something about that started tickling at my brain, but I couldn’t think about it because Amos was trying to get a question out.
‘Wh-wh-why?’
‘Why would anybody kill him? Good question. Got to be something to do with Lizzie Rees’s death, though, hasn’t it? People get suspicious.’
Amos looked at me, his face a shocked blank. ‘D-D-Doctor Gwynne said n-natural causes.’
‘I know. But Harry went there with the anatomist, Dr Reckitt, didn’t he? That must’ve made people think he didn’t believe Dr Gwynne.’
Reckitt’d found nothing, of course, but people hadn’t heard that till later. Not till after he’d finished his testing of whatever had been in Lizzie’s stomach. But by then, Nattie Stockton’d been dead.
‘Wh-wh…’ Amos hit his thigh again, ‘when’s the inquest?’
‘Day after tomorrow.’ And tomorrow, Harry’d want to go over to Eglwyswrw first thing.
I was dreading that ride.
Harry
The following morning, I rose early and, unable to face the stilted, avoidant conversations that awaited me over breakfast, made straight for Eglwyswrw.
Of course, the sensible course of action would have been to sit down and thrash the whole thing out with John, but I had been so derailed by his sudden rebellion that I had lost faith in my own judgement.
Leaving a note asking him to join me as soon as he was able, I headed for breakfast at the Sergeant’s Inn.
* * *
Unsurprisingly, the inn was far from crowded when I arrived, and the landlord installed me on the settle next to the fireside. He fussed over me, insisting on speaking English and offering me coffee while I waited for my breakfast.
As I sat, allowing the coffee to warm and stir me, I could not help overhearing a conversation being carried on by the inn’s only other Sunday-morning patrons. Either the two men concerned thought I would not understand what they said, or being overheard did not trouble them, for they took almost as little care to moderate their voices as Benton Reckitt.
I soon realised that they were anticipating Nathaniel Stockton’s inquest the following day.
‘Lizzie Rees’s father’ll have something to do with it, you mark my words,’ one said. ‘Mic y Porthmon. Always been a bit odd, that one.’
‘Good weaver, mind,’ his companion observed.
‘Maybe, but I’ve never seen such a lazy mower. Don’t know why Dai Dolbannon keeps him in the team.’ He paused. ‘Unless there’s another reason.’
‘What sort of reason?’
‘Got an eye for a pretty girl, Dai Dolbannon has.’
‘Lizzie, you mean? Never!’
‘Come on – she was a beauty, wasn’t she? Maybe Dai was keeping her father on so she’d bring his food to him while we were mowing.’
A silence suggested that his companion was giving this some consideration. Eventually he spoke. ‘No. I don’t believe it. Not with his wife sick at home.’
‘That’s the point, isn’t it? Margaret Dolbannon won’t see Christmas if I’m any judge.’
‘Hah – hark at you! After Dewin Gwynne’s job now, is it?’
‘Common sense, man! You can see it plain as day. Yellow she is, poor dab. Dai’ll be looking for the new Mrs Jones, you watch. Got little ones to look after, hasn’t he?’
‘So you’re telling me he was courting Lizzie Rees? Properly, not just looking?’ From a slight change in the sound of his voice, I could tell that the speaker had shifted his position, possibly so that he could look squarely into the face of his companion.
‘Well, she was courting in bed the night she died.’
‘What? Where’d you get that from?’
‘My wife heard it from—’
‘Tchah!’ his companion interrupted. ‘Women’s gossip.’
‘Don’t you be so quick! There’s something not right with Lizzie Rhosdywarch’s death.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense. The coroner went there and spoke to everybody, and Esther Rees had the workhouse doctor to her. If there was something there, those two would’ve found it.’
They fell then to discussing who might be called to give evidence at ‘the Englishman’s’ inquest, and I weighed up what I had just heard.
David Jones – Dai Dolbannon – had ackno
wledged that he knew Lizzie’s father, and that his family bought cloth from Mic. Had that meant Jones visiting Rhosdywarch himself?
And if he was the other man that Lizzie had told Cadwgan Gwynne about, did that explain why Mic Rees had gone to Dolbannon for his messenger – so he could tell Jones that Gwynne had ruled her death accidental?
I ate my breakfast and waited for the tolling of the church bell to summon worshippers to morning prayer. As soon as it stopped, indicating that the service was about to begin, I would cross the road and wait in the churchyard in order to test John’s theory about latecoming being habitual.
John. Would he do as I had asked and come as soon as he was able, or would he choose to find himself too busy and simply arrive in time for the inquest tomorrow? Our argument the previous evening had taken me completely by surprise, and following his abrupt departure, I had been forced to listen to advice I had not sought from Lydia.
‘You have to decide who you are, Harry. Are you the autocrat squire who simply makes decisions and expects them to be carried out, or are you the egalitarian you’ve always claimed? If the latter, then you must see that John is right – you have to find a way of reaching a consensus on things.’
In truth, it had simply not occurred to me that the decision on whether to sell the land to Anthony Saunders-James might not be mine alone to make, but had it not been for John’s reference to my father, I might have been able to discuss the matter sensibly. And Lydia had seen that. ‘It was the diaries, wasn’t it?’ she had asked. ‘The fact that your father gave them to John to read, not you.’
‘Fat lot of good it would have done, giving them to me.’