by Alis Hawkins
This was Lydia’s recommendation. ‘If Mic Rees has been hiding things, best you talk to him by himself,’ she’d said after John had finished telling us the carpenter’s story the previous day. ‘It’s not your business to tell his wife secrets he’s been keeping from her.’
Esther Rees did not respond immediately, but went over to the fire and poked it into brighter life. I watched her in my peripheral vision, braced for the argument I feared was coming, but she merely said, ‘Just let me make you your tea, then the girls and I will go and get on with our work in the weaving shed.’
‘Thank you.’
Mic stood at the side of the box bed, where kitchen met bedroom, as if he was loath to hear what had brought us back to his house. Nobody spoke while Esther laid out teacups and milk, and the smell of damp tweed began to flavour the air.
I jumped when Mic spoke suddenly. ‘Gwen, Ann – take your work into the weaving shed like your mother said.’
The girls obeyed as their mother poured boiling water into the teapot and straightened up. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘my husband can see to the rest. I’ll leave you in peace.’ She strode towards the corner of the room, then turned. ‘I’m sorry, there’s no sugar. After the inquest, my custom isn’t wanted at the shop.’
I was surprised that her pride allowed her to admit such a thing, but then Mic spoke. ‘Esther…’
She ignored him, sweeping past him and out of the kitchen, her barb having found its mark. The shopkeeper’s refusal to serve her had no doubt been a reaction to the news that Lizzie had been courting not one, but two men from outside the area; that she’d given the coron fedw to Nathaniel Stockton while she had secretly been intending to marry somebody else. With her father’s connivance. Esther would not easily forgive her husband for going behind her back.
Mic Rees had been forced to step sideways out of his wife’s path but made no attempt to leave his corner.
I rose from his chair. ‘Mr Rees, please, come and sit down.’
He hesitated, then drew closer, but refused to displace me. ‘No, you sit there. I’ll have the stool when I’ve done this.’
He bent to the hearth to pour the tea, and I resumed my seat, feeling my damp britches cold against my legs.
I accepted the cup he proffered and put it on the floor to cool down. ‘Mr Rees, I believe you told Dr Reckitt and me when we first met that you were from near Llanybydder, is that correct?’
‘Yes.’ The word seemed to lodge in Rees’s throat, precluding the uttering of any more.
‘Do you have a cousin called Benji from up that way?’
‘Benji Rees of Cwmcille,’ John reminded me.
‘Yes, Benji Rees, Cwmcille. Which was still in your grandfather’s hands when you left to go droving, I believe?’
‘Who told you?’ Rees sounded defeated, as if a long struggle was over.
‘Mattie-Siôn the carpenter,’ John said. ‘He and a whole load of people you’d have known once upon a time are working on a new wool factory the other side of Newcastle Emlyn.’
‘Wool factory?’ Rees asked, momentarily distracted by the confusing term.
‘A man called Jem Harborne is building a mill for power looms over there,’ John said.
I did not want Rees distracted. ‘Mr Davies recently had reason to speak to Mattie-Siôn about one of the other carpenters, who’d been injured in an attack on the mill building.’
‘Who was it?’ Rees asked, clearly suspecting that this was another of his family. ‘Is he badly injured?’
‘Name of Jaco,’ John supplied, ‘brother of Mattie-Siôn.’
I saw Rees nod. ‘He’s making a good recovery,’ I said, keeping my voice low, despite the fact that we had heard the door to the weaving shed close. ‘But Mattie-Siôn told Mr Davies that it was a good job Jaco wasn’t from the other side of the family, or the family curse might’ve got him.’ I paused, but Rees said nothing. ‘I think you’d better tell us about it, don’t you, Mr Rees?’
John
As soon as Benji’s name was mentioned, Mic Rees knew the game was up. I could see it in his face.
‘I dare say Mattie-Siôn and Benji between them have told you everything there is to know,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what you want from me.’
‘The truth,’ Harry said. ‘Keeping secrets killed Nattie Stockton.’
Mic’s head drooped at the mention of Nattie’s name. ‘You’d’ve done no different if you’d lived with what I’ve had to live with,’ he said. ‘You’d have kept it a secret too.’
‘Benji Rees hasn’t.’
‘Benji’s a fool who loves to hear the sound of his own voice. And his sister didn’t die.’
‘Tell us about your sister, Mic,’ Harry said gently, when Mic just sat there looking like he was fighting back tears.
At first I thought he wasn’t going to say anything. Harry had no authority over him now, did he? But I was wrong.
‘Susan. That was my sister’s name.’ He gave a deep sigh, as if he’d just put a heavy load down. ‘She grew up terrified,’ he said. ‘All our lives, me and her, we’d been told about the family curse. Our grandfather’d died of it when our father was small, and our father’s brother – an uncle we’d never known.’
He stopped, and I watched his face, wondering what it must be like talking about something you’d run away from and tried to forget for twenty-odd years. I thought of what Benji Rees had told me when I’d asked Mattie-Siôn if I could have a word with him.
‘They didn’t fall ill then die,’ he’d said. ‘They had no weakness or pain or any of that. They just upped and died. One minute they were fine, the next minute they were gone.’
According to Benji, the family curse went back generations, and each death was remembered in stark detail. Every memory passed down. Some had died in their sleep after going to bed perfectly well. One or two had died when doing heavy work. Others laughing and dancing. ‘That’s the worst of it,’ he’d told me. ‘It’s not just that you go through life not knowing if you’ll wake up in the morning. The worst thing is that you can’t do what everybody else does – you’re always afraid of working too hard, you never really let yourself properly enjoy anything in case it brings it on and that’s the end of you.’
‘When did your sister die?’ Harry asked Mic quietly.
‘Just before I went droving. But it wasn’t the curse that killed her. Well, it was and it wasn’t.’
Harry drank his tea and waited.
‘It was too much for her,’ Mic said, eyes on Harry. ‘Every day she woke up and thought – is it today? Will I die today? She’d never play with the other girls for fear of laughing too much. She’d lie awake at night, terrified of going to sleep in case she didn’t wake up again. She prayed and prayed for a sign that the curse wouldn’t touch her, but it never came. So she went through her days like a ghost, only half living, to try and keep the curse away.’ He stopped, searching Harry’s face for understanding. ‘It affected her. Mind and body. She started dwindling away. Got thinner and thinner as the fear gnawed at her.’ He dropped his head into his hands and his voice was muffled after that, so we had to lean closer to catch what he was saying. ‘In the end, she couldn’t stand it. It was a living hell, a life of nothing but fear.’
I had a pretty good idea what was coming next.
‘She drowned herself in the river. My parents told everybody that she must’ve fallen in and been too weak to save herself. But I knew that was a lie. She just saw her chance and took it. She’d already told me that hell couldn’t be any worse than the life she was living.’
I looked at Harry, waiting for him to speak, but I don’t think he knew what to say any more than I did.
‘Things take us all differently, don’t they?’ Mic said. ‘Maybe because Susan was so afraid, I took the other road and just decided to live as if there was no curse. Because there are other things that can kill you just as unexpectedly, aren’t there? And we don’t spend our lives fearing them.’
True
enough. Jaco the carpenter could easily have died from the blow to his head, and I don’t suppose he’d got up on the morning of the attack on the mill worried that he wouldn’t see another day.
‘But you can see why I didn’t tell Esther or the girls, can’t you, Mr Probert-Lloyd?’ Mic pleaded. ‘I wanted to spare them the fear that killed my sister. I wanted them to grow up with hopes of marriage and children instead of the dread of sudden death.’
It seemed a fair point. But Harry had another question. ‘Do you think it was fair not to tell your wife what you might be passing on to the children you’d have together?’
‘Might, Mr Probert-Lloyd. Might. Would it have been right to cast a dark shadow over her life? To plant a fear inside her that she’d feel every time she looked at our children? There’ve been people in every generation of our family who’ve lived long lives. I hoped and prayed that I didn’t have the bad blood; that I wouldn’t pass it on.’
We sat there just drinking our tea for a minute or so, then Harry said, ‘So can you tell us now what actually happened on the night your daughter died?’
Mic shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to tell. You heard it all at the inquest. Everything apart from Amos almost going mad because he thought it was his fault and me having to tell him that it was the curse. I had to, in the end,’ he said, his head sagging again. ‘The boy would’ve done himself a mischief otherwise.’
So that was what the head shake had been about. Amos’d wanted to know whether he should tell the inquest about the curse.
‘Why did you go to Dolbannon for a messenger?’ Harry asked. ‘You must’ve known there was a chance David Jones would send Amos.’
‘That’s why I went there,’ Mic said. ‘I knew Dai would call Amos from the harvesting. Everybody knew he hated working in the field gang – even Dai Dolbannon, and he doesn’t generally care for anybody but himself.’
Harry frowned. ‘Wasn’t it cruel to send Amos with the news?’
‘No. When I sent him back to Dolbannon before he was missed, he was still jittering about it being his fault and getting hanged for it. I told him I’d get Dewin Gwynne over to certify the death. He’d see it was natural. I had to tell him what the doctor had said.’
‘Dr Gwynne told us that you asked him to tell you whether your daughter’d been cursed,’ I said.
Mic Rees hung his head and sat there shaking it slowly. ‘I wanted to see if he could tell what’d killed Lizzie. Wanted him to explain it to me, tell me how I could know whether my little girls are cursed too. But he couldn’t see anything. Said no, it was just natural death. And I couldn’t tell him the truth. I just couldn’t.’
‘What if he’d been suspicious, said he wasn’t sure that it was a natural death, would you have told him then?’ Harry asked.
‘Yes. I wouldn’t’ve put Amos at risk of being arrested.’
He’d put Nattie Stockton at risk, even if he hadn’t realised that. But it wasn’t his fault Amos’d been seen leaving Rhosdywarch and that Amos and Nattie were both average-sized, dark-haired lads, was it?
‘Please, don’t tell anybody. It won’t help Nattie’s parents, and if my wife and daughters find out, it’ll ruin their lives. I don’t want Annie and Gwen to suffer like my sister.’
Harry took a deep breath, his eyes on Mic’s midriff so he could see as much of his face as he was going to, and nodded. In his inquests, he kept the whole truth quiet often enough when it would do nothing but cause distress.
Mic Rees’s keeping quiet might indirectly have caused Nattie Stockton’s death, and he’d have to live with that. But I wasn’t sure I’d’ve done differently.
Epilogue
John
One evening three weeks or so later, I got back from a day out and about on the estate to find Lydia by herself in the library.
‘Where’s Harry?’
‘He got Twm Davies to take him into town in the trap. He was quite evasive about what he was doing, but I’m pretty sure he’s gone to see Llewelyn Kerr.’
I sat down by the fire, my spirits suddenly lower than they had been ten seconds ago. If Harry’d gone to see the estate’s solicitor, it must’ve been about the sale of the Moelfryn farms. We’d had several arguments about the whole business – not so much about whether he should sell the land to Anthony Saunders-James but about what to do with the proceeds. He still thought we should invest the money, though at least he wasn’t talking about investing in Harborne’s mill any more. Now that Mr Gelyot senior wasn’t taking his quarter-share, the mill’s future was in doubt, and work on it had stopped for now.
‘Are you all right, John?’
I looked up. ‘Just thinking about wool factories. Even if Harborne’s doesn’t get built, do you think that’s the future here?’
‘Yes. Possibly not this year or next. But in ten years, I’m sure there’ll be factories like that here. You can’t stop progress.’
Just then I heard the sound of the trap coming up the drive.
‘Here he is,’ Lydia said, looking out of the library window at Twm pulling up for Harry to get out at the front door. ‘Now we’ll find out what he’s been up to.’
We listened to the sounds of Harry coming into the house and chatting to Elsie as she took his coat and hat before he joined us in the library. As usual, at the first hint of dusk, Lydia had the place blazing with candles and lamps for Harry’s benefit.
‘Afternoon,’ I said, standing up, ‘or is it good evening already?’
Harry gave a half-smile but didn’t reply. He was carrying some documents, which he put down carefully on the table. I thought I saw his hand trembling, and my heart started beating faster. If Harry was nervous, he’d done something serious.
‘Been to the solicitor’s?’ I asked. Better to know the worst as soon as possible.
‘Let him sit down before you start questioning him, John!’
But Harry didn’t sit down, just stood at the table with one hand still on the documents as if they might fly away if he stopped holding them down.
‘Come on then,’ I said. ‘Tell us what you’ve got there.’
Harry chewed the inside of his lip and said nothing. I looked at Lydia and she moved to his side. ‘Would you like me to read it?’ she asked.
‘No. I know exactly what it says. I dictated it myself last week, and Llewelyn Kerr read it to me word for word less than an hour ago. And then he tried to persuade me to rip it up.’
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’
‘A deed of sale.’
‘For the Moelfryn farms?’
Harry trained his eyes somewhere to my side, trying to see me in his peripheral vision. ‘No. For Glanteifi.’
I felt as if the ground had given way under me. ‘What?’
Lydia moved past Harry and took my arm. Did she think I was going to faint? Perhaps she was right. My brain was whirring, but I couldn’t seem to think. Sell Glanteifi? How long had he been thinking about this? What was I supposed to do now? Could I really earn my living as a solicitor? Would Llewelyn Kerr give me a job? And what about Lydia?
All these questions poured through my head in half a second, but I couldn’t answer any of them.
‘Harry, come and sit down and explain,’ Lydia said. ‘You too, John.’
Just then, Elsie arrived with tea. Lydia took the tray and told the girl that she could go. Then she gave me a cup with three chunks of sugar in the saucer. I knew what that was for. Shock.
‘You didn’t mention that you were thinking of selling,’ she said. How could she sound so calm? Hadn’t her future just fallen around her ears as well?
Harry unclamped his jaw. ‘No. I had to be sure in my own mind before speaking to you two.’ When he took the cup she passed him, it rattled in its saucer. His hands were shaking. ‘But I knew I had to do something, because the current situation is intolerable. I never wanted to be squire. I don’t have the temperament.’
‘So our lives get turned upside down because you don’t like being squi
re?’ I knew I sounded upset. I was upset.
‘I hope your lives aren’t going to be turned upside down,’ he said. ‘I hope this will be good for you.’
I leapt to my feet, tea sloshing into my saucer. ‘How can selling Glanteifi be good for us?’
‘Because it’s you I’m selling to.’
I stared at him. Had he gone off his head? He knew I was looking at him, and he just lifted his cup and took a sip of tea, as if he hadn’t just said something completely ridiculous.
‘Harry,’ Lydia said. ‘Please explain.’
Had she known about this? ‘Did you know—’
She shook her head and held up a hand. Let him speak.
‘While I own Glanteifi and you both work for me, we can’t be equals,’ Harry said. ‘And I wish above all things to live amongst my equals. I’m not like my father. He saw his position as squire as part of the natural order. I don’t. I want you to be able to tell me when I’m making bad decisions without being afraid that I’ll sack you. I want you to be able to tell me your opinions without holding back because you’re just servants.’ He pointed his eyes in Lydia’s direction when he said that, so that was obviously a conversation they’d had. ‘I don’t want you to have to think before you speak lest you upset my delicate sensibilities. I lived my whole life before I came back here – school, Oxford, the bar – amongst my peers: arguing, fighting, discussing, debating, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. But always on equal terms.’
I glanced at Lydia. From the look on her face she didn’t know anything more about this than I did.
‘This deed of sale,’ Harry said, putting a hand on the document on his lap, ‘effectively divides the ownership of Glanteifi into three equal shares. I will retain one share, and I am proposing that you each buy one of the two remaining shares. Then we’ll be equal. I’ll no longer be squire. We’ll all be responsible for the running of Glanteifi. For all decisions equally.’
‘That’s all very well,’ I said, trying to sound calm, ‘but there’s one small problem.’
‘Money isn’t going to stop us doing this, John. The sale price for your shares is a shilling. Just one shilling.’