by Alis Hawkins
‘They’re already here – good. What’s the time?’
I slipped my watch out of its pocket. ‘Ten minutes to.’
Harry’d got into the habit of waiting until the dot of ten, then striding up to his seat and beginning proceedings without so much as waiting for silence. It was an inquest not public entertainment. If people wanted to hear what was going on, they had to shut up quick-smart.
‘Is Caldicot here?’
I hadn’t seen him but I looked around the schoolroom again to make sure. Yesterday, he’d been wearing a perfectly-tailored dark suit. No lumpy home-made seams, no hairy nap to make it easy to brush dirt off. If he’d been here, wearing that suit, he’d have stood out like a raven among chickens. ‘Can’t see him.’
‘If I were him, I’d slip in at the back as we start. He’s not going to want to be stared at.’
‘Well, at the moment, it’s us getting stared at,’ I said. ‘So, what do you want to do? Are you going to try and speak to Price first?’
‘I think I need to speak to the whole jury, not just Price. Hildon’s obviously been making his feelings known and I want them to be sure of their rights and responsibilities. Can you ask Simi Jones to bring them out?’
Rat-face was sitting with Mattie Hughes at the front of the room on what’d been Rowland’s desk. As he and the jury stood up to file out, I looked at Hughes. ‘Will you be all right for a minute?’
He nodded and picked up the stick that was leaning against his wooden leg. ‘Got protection, haven’t I?’
The stick didn’t look much and my face must’ve shown it because he held it out for me to take. I almost dropped it. Weighted with shot. Not something you’d want to be hit with. And if Mattie Hughes was carrying it, then he knew exactly how to use it.
Mr Hughes is a soldier. He knows a dozen ways to kill a man.
As I made my way back through the crowd, I heard bits of conversation, like you do. Mostly, people were speculating about the inquest but one sly comment caught my ear.
‘What’ll Miss Gwatkyn do for company now, with Mr Rowland gone?’
I stopped just behind the woman who’d spoken and pulled my watch out. While I pretended to wind it, I strained my ears back. Mrs Gossip obviously hadn’t got the reaction she was after, so she tried again. ‘Spent a lot of time over there, didn’t he?’
One of her companions rose to the bait. ‘Friend of her husband’s, wasn’t he?’
‘So they say.’
I couldn’t just stand there listening, people’d wonder what I was doing, so I moved on. Had there been something going on between Phoebe Gwatkyn and Nicholas Rowland? Was that what Tobias Hildon had been getting at when he said that Miss Gwatkyn had ‘connived’ with him to ‘procure’ the girls? The lady of Alltybela had certainly come running over to the schoolhouse when Simi Jones sent word to her about Rowland’s death. And she always referred to him as Nicholas. Mind, she had odd notions about what it was appropriate to call people. Renamed her hall-boy Lleu Llaw Gyffes, hadn’t she?
But, then again, she’d been pretty quiet on the subject of her husband. We hadn’t even known he existed to start with.
As I looked toward the back of the room, I saw three men sitting in the middle of the last row of spectators. Busy writing in their notebooks, they were, hands flicking along the lines as they squiggled their shorthand.
I knew them from other inquests. They were from the newspapers. The Welshman, The Cambrian and the Carmarthen Journal. They’d be here for the election meeting as well as the inquest. Their editors’d be delighted – one set of travel expenses instead of two.
Before I walked back out into the sunshine, I looked around the room. Who did we know here, Harry and I? Hardly anybody. It wasn’t right. If we’d been here for an inquest five or six weeks earlier – in the time before we’d even so much as heard of Jonas Minnever – I knew for a fact that I would’ve been able to name at least a dozen people we’d spoken to, and I’d have known a dozen more by sight. That was how Harry did things. Left no stones unturned. Asked awkward questions.
As it was, we knew Nan Walters and her family, Ruth Eynon, Tobias Hildon and Mattie Hughes.
And Miss Gwatkyn of course.
What would the newspapermen think if they knew that half the people who should’ve been giving evidence were just going to sit there, watching? The Journal would think that was quite right. As far as its editor was concerned, an inquest into the death of a teacher who taught ragged-arsed children in a cowshed had no business questioning the great and the good. But The Welshman, The Cambrian? They agreed with Harry. Nobody was above the law.
As I reached to pull the door open, it came towards me and I saw that the Alltybela household had arrived. I stood aside as they came in and took the places that somebody’d made sure were kept free for them. I expected Phoebe Gwatkyn to go down to the front where Minnever and Mr Hildon were sitting but she didn’t. Just parked herself there, with her cook and her butler and the rest.
Outside, it was fresh and quiet after the noise and the stink of people. A mountain range of clouds was lumbering off towards the horizon leaving the sun free to flood the valley and bring out every shade of green known to creation.
I stepped out of the path of the jury who were straggling back in to the schoolroom, all except Llew Price who was hovering.
I gave Harry his cue. ‘Five minutes to ten, Harry. And here’s Mr Price.’
Harry turned. ‘I’m sorry I’ve not been to see you, Mr Price. My time isn’t my own, at the moment, what with the demands of the election. I believe you have some information for me?’
The grocer looked at him as if he was trying to decide whether he’d just been fobbed off or offered a genuine apology. Then his eyes moved over to me. ‘Have you spoken to Jeremiah Eynon, Ruth’s father?’
I shook my head. ‘As Mr Probert-Lloyd says, we’ve not had the time we’d have liked on this inquest.’
‘Then you don’t know anything about Ruth and Shoni Goch?’
Harry was too clever by far to ask who Shoni Goch was. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you know, Mr Price?’
The grocer shook his head. ‘There isn’t time to explain now. If you call Jeremiah Eynon to give testimony, I can ask the right questions.’
I could see Harry wasn’t happy about that. I wasn’t either, for that matter, but for a different reason. I had a feeling we’d made a terrible mistake in not making time for Llew Price. But I didn’t want Harry using up the remaining minutes before ten arguing with him. I needed to tell him the gossip I’d overheard about Miss Gwatkyn.
‘Thanks, Mr Price,’ I said, ‘we’ll do that.’ I put a hand on Harry’s arm to keep him quiet and Llew followed the rest of the jury back inside. If Harry wanted me to be his eyes, sometimes he just had to let me do what plainly needed doing.
‘There’s something you need to know,’ I said, before he could ask me what I thought I was up to. ‘There’s talk in the village about Phoebe Gwatkyn and Nicholas Rowland. Might be relevant, might not.’
I told him what the gossip-monger had said, then watched him sucking in a breath as if he was taking thoughts with it.
‘There’s no reason to have Phoebe Gwatkyn up to give evidence,’ he said. ‘It’s like Minnever said about Caldicot – without an eyewitness to say they’d seen her here, I have no reason to. Besides, if there was anything going on between them, she wouldn’t want him dead, would she?’
‘Unless they argued. You know, lovers’ tiff?’
‘Does she strike you as the lovers’ tiff type?’
What was the lovers’ tiff type? And what type was Phoebe Gwatkyn, come to that?
‘So you’ll call Jeremiah Eynon?’ I asked.
‘I’ve no choice in the matter, have I? You told Price I would.’
‘What else was I supposed to do? He’s the jury foreman. He asked to see us days ago on inquest business and we didn’t make time for him. I couldn’t have him going around, afterwards, saying that you
hadn’t allowed him to bring important evidence forward, could I?’
Harry turned on his heel and walked towards the schoolhouse door.
I caught him up in three strides. He could throw a peevish fit if he liked but I wasn’t going to let that stop me walking in side by side with him.
But Price’s question about a man nobody else had so much as mentioned had rattled us both.
We’d never walked in to an inquest less well prepared.
Harry
We marched down to the table at the far end of the schoolroom where John opened my writing box and arranged its contents as if they were some kind of official regalia.
While John scrutinised the witnesses, I would be making notes, using what he referred to as my ‘apparatus’: a frame of my own design that held a sheet of paper and allowed me to keep to a line as I wrote. Knowledge of my blindness naturally led people to expect that John would record the proceedings, and my taking up my pen tended to produce a valuable degree of bewilderment.
The inquest having been called to order, I started by inviting Simi Jones to the witness’s chair to explain how he had heard of Rowland’s death.
Always begin with questions you know the answers to, an old barrister once told me; then, when you get to the ones you might not be so sure of, the jury will already be disposed to think you know the whole story.
Despite the presence of Minnever and Tobias Hildon, I had decided to hold the inquest in Welsh, as was my usual practice. It seemed ludicrous to me that the presence of two monoglot Englishmen should override the comfort of dozens of people who spoke only Welsh and I had arranged for proceedings to be interpreted by Ruth Eynon.
Simi Jones’s uncontroversial evidence having been given, I thanked him and asked Nan Walters to come forward.
John and I had decided that, of the two girls, Nan would be the better choice to give evidence. ‘She wants people to see how much she knows, how important she is,’ John had said. ‘If the two of them know more than they’ve said already, we’ll get it out of her more easily than Ruth.’
In contrast to her demeanour when John and I had interviewed the two of them at the Three Horseshoes, Nan seemed subdued, even meek. The first spark of feeling she showed came not, as I might have expected, when I asked her to describe what her friend had done when she saw the disarray of Nicholas Rowland’s hair, but when I asked her what kind of employer he had been.
‘He wasn’t our employer! We didn’t work for him, we worked with him! We were his co-workers in a new educational venture.’
Welsh uses the same word for both ‘venture’ and ‘adventure’ and her use of it made their plans sound exciting, even a little daring.
‘By which you mean the new school proposal?’
‘No, this school!’ She flung out an arm at the barely-converted cowshed. ‘We didn’t just teach the children who came here to read and write – we taught them about their place in the world! How history’s brought us to this point. Where our country is situated in relation to the rest of the world. What learned men of the past can teach us about improving our own society.’
The suppressed muttering which greeted her words suggested that some of the parents who had sent their children to Rowland’s school had entirely failed to grasp the scope of the education on offer.
‘Yes, quite.’ I made an entirely unnecessary note, in order to separate my next question from her pride at their accomplishments. ‘You also helped him in a personal capacity, I believe – writing letters and so forth?’
‘We did, yes.’
‘And, in the course of assisting Mr Rowland, did you ever meet any of the potential donors to his collegiate school project?’
When we had asked the same question in her mother’s parlour, she had denied knowing the identities of any such gentlemen. But she had not been under oath then.
I waited, hoping that John would be able to tell whether her hesitation was born of an unwillingness to name names or from a dawning awareness that Rowland’s actions had not, perhaps, lived up to the fulsomeness of his words to her and Ruth.
‘No,’ she said, at length. ‘Or, rather, nobody apart from Miss Gwatkyn. But just because Mr Rowland didn’t feel able to name them didn’t mean that he’d had no success. He’d already acquired the necessary land—’
‘I beg your pardon,’ I interrupted. ‘What land?’
‘Five acres on the road to Tregaron.’
Judging by the audible reaction in the room, John and I were not the only people to whom this came as a surprise.
I waited for the turning, shrugging and muttering to subside. ‘I see. And how was this land acquired? Was it given to Mr Rowland or did he buy it?’
Nan hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Perhaps Mr Rowland already owned the land when he came here?’ I suggested.
‘No, I remember the day he told us. He was excited.’
‘But he didn’t tell you how it had come into his possession?’
‘No.’ She bit the word off short.
Allowing her a moment to contemplate Rowland’s reluctance to share important details, I dipped my pen and wrote, Is Phoebe Gwatkyn here? Asking questions of John audibly would make my need for assistance obvious; I hoped that writing created exactly the opposite impression.
John tapped once, softly, on the table. One tap for yes, two for no. Our other signalling system involved his posture. If he could see that a line of questioning was proving effective, he would lean forward in his chair to encourage me to push on. If he wanted me to desist and try a different tack, he would lean back.
I wiped my pen and turned to the onlookers. ‘Is there anyone present who has information on how this parcel of land came to belong to Mr Rowland?’
In response, the room fell utterly silent, save for the voice of Ruth Eynon translating quietly.
I waited. Having become accustomed to seeking information from inquests’ spectators, I was not deterred by the lack of any immediate reaction. Responses had to be coaxed out of a crowd; people were unwilling to put themselves forward in front of their neighbours.
‘If any of you know anything,’ I said, wondering whether their silence touched on Llew Price’s mysterious Shoni Goch, ‘it would help this inquest very much if you would speak. Mr Rowland is owed the truth, I’m sure you’d agree.’
In my peripheral vision, heads turned this way and that as neighbours passed my question from gaze to gaze, wondering how it was that not one of them knew how Mr Rowland had come by those five acres.
As far as I was concerned, if Rowland had raised the money honestly, he would have been well advised to celebrate the fact, use it as bait for more. Look, I have this much already – you would be joining a prosperous undertaking!
No response having been forthcoming, save some stifled coughing, I thanked Nan Walters, dismissed her and called her brother to come and give testimony. This provoked some considerable comment and Simi Jones was forced to call for order.
‘You were known to hang about watching Mr Rowland’s comings and goings,’ I said, as soon as Billy had been sworn in. ‘No, don’t deny it, I’m not interested in what you did or didn’t do, I’m interested in what you saw. Did you see anybody coming to visit Mr Rowland? Or watching him?’
When the boy did not reply, John leaned forward, urging me on.
‘William Morgan! Answer my question. Mr Rowland is dead and I need to know anything you can tell me. So does the jury. When you were watching Mr Rowland’s schoolhouse, did anybody come to see him?’
‘No!’ Billy sounded anxious to be believed. ‘I didn’t see anybody!’
John shifted his chair forward slightly. Persist.
‘That’s not true is it? Tell me the truth!’
‘Nobody came to see him all the time I was watching! But he’d go out. Quite late, sometimes.’
‘Where to?’
It was not necessary to see Billy any better than I could to read, in his posture, an acute reluctance to answer t
he question.
‘Where did Mr Rowland go when he went out late?’ I insisted. ‘You followed him, didn’t you?’
Billy, obviously deciding to make a clean breast of the spying he’d done for Mattie Hughes, gave us everything in one rushed sentence. ‘Up through the village and out to where the road goes off to Pontllanio – but I couldn’t follow him any further than that so I don’t know where he went after, I swear!’
John
My main job during inquest hearings was to watch people. Watch the witnesses while they give their evidence. Watch the jury for signs that they didn’t understand something. Watch the spectators in case trouble was brewing or somebody knew something.
Which meant that while Harry went after Billy Walters about following Rowland, I was watching the crowd. So I saw him come in. Montague Caldicot. He just opened the schoolhouse door a crack and slid in.
And, sitting right at the back where they’d see any comings and goings, the newspaper men saw him, too. They looked at each other and started writing. Knew exactly who he was, didn’t they?
Miss Gwatkyn’s Lleu caught me staring and swivelled his head to see who’d come in. When he saw who it was, he turned back to me and tipped his nose up with a forefinger. Bringing me down to his level, the little pup. We both know what he is. One of the crachach. The gentry. The nobs who look down their noses at us.