Those Who Know

by Alis Hawkins

  But no. Lydia Howell had decided not to do any of that.

  ‘Harry, I’m your secretary, not your slave,’ she told him, calmly, when he demanded to know why she’d gone against his express wishes. ‘Which I take to mean that I must act in your best interests rather than simply on your instructions. And, if that’s not the case, then it would be best for all concerned if we proceeded no further with this experiment in employment.’

  The look on Harry’s face was a picture. Bitten off more of a mouthful than he’d realised in employing Lydia, hadn’t he?

  I’ll be honest, there was a part of me that hoped she would just pack her bags and go. Things’d been simpler before she arrived. But, with my sensible head on, I knew that my life’d be a damn sight easier, in the long run, if I wasn’t the only one trying to make Harry see sense.

  ‘It was simply expedient,’ she said, when Harry didn’t respond. ‘Having spoken to Miss Gwatkyn on Saturday evening, it seemed to me that there was a significant chance that Morgan Walters might do something like this. I didn’t want to arrange a second inquest on your behalf, only to have to send letters cancelling it again the following day.’

  Harry still said nothing and she shot a look at me. I nodded. Carry on.

  ‘If my suspicions had been proved wrong,’ she said, ‘you’d still have had ample time to hold the inquest on Friday, as planned. But, if Billy Walters has been persuaded to say that he made it all up…’

  She didn’t need to say any more. Without Billy’s testimony, the only new evidence was the erotic books and Harry wouldn’t want to bring them to the attention of Llanddewi Brefi. On their own, they didn’t give Nan and Ruth a reason to kill Rowland but even a sniff of their existence would ruin the girls’ reputation.

  Harry stalked over to the cabinet in the corner of the library, yanked it open with its usual squeak and pulled a decanter out, knocking glasses over in the process. He picked one up, poured himself a measure of something – brandy, I think – and drank it down in one gulp. Then he poured some more before good manners got the better of him and he held the decanter up. ‘Either of you?’

  We both declined.

  I watched him carefully. He wasn’t generally much of a drinker and I hadn’t seen him like this before. He drank half the brandy in one go, put the decanter back and shut the cabinet. He had to nudge it with his knee to make sure it caught and I saw him lose his balance for a second.

  ‘Am I going to have to justify every single request to your personal satisfaction in future?’ He sounded like a defiant boy who knows he’s lost the argument but can’t let it go.

  Lydia stood up and went over to him. ‘Harry, did you really think that Morgan Walters was just going to stand idly by and let his daughter be ruined? He’s a determined and resourceful man and I dare say Jonathan Eynon’ll come out of prison to a tidy little sum when he’s served his sentence.’

  Harry swallowed the rest of his brandy and put the glass down with a thud that made me flinch. I knew it was difficult for him to judge how far away things were but he usually took more care than that.

  He turned his back on Lydia and walked over to the library window. He wouldn’t like the fact that she’d predicted what Morgan Walters would do when he hadn’t. Harry prided himself on knowing what criminals were like. He might not’ve been a barrister for long but he’d been paid to defend any number of people and he was convinced that he could tell a born criminal from somebody who’d just been forced into crime by miserable circumstances. But they’d been London people, hadn’t they, and London crimes? He was going to have to get used to the way Cardiganshire people thought and acted.

  ‘Bellis will try and see Jonathan Eynon hanged,’ he said, still looking out at whatever he could see in the late afternoon light.

  ‘Not if you give him reason not to.’

  The look he turned on Lydia Howell then made me wish I’d taken the brandy he’d offered. I wasn’t used to an atmosphere like this. Couldn’t breathe properly for the tightness in the air and I finally understood what was going on here. Harry’s anger wasn’t about Lydia’s going against his wishes. Or not mostly about that, anyway. It was about her seeing things he hadn’t. Being quicker on the uptake.

  ‘And how will I do that?’ he said, as if he’d much rather not know.

  ‘Billy Walters’s testimony,’ Lydia said. ‘I’ve transcribed it as far as I remember it and you and John can add to it if there’s anything I’ve omitted. I’ve also written a short explanation of the kind of books Rowland and the girls were writing together. Send all that to the inspector. Make sure he understands that you’re prepared to bring it forward as evidence if he thinks he can put Eynon on trial for murder. I don’t think Morgan Walters would actually send his son into the witness box and ask him to perjure himself. Do you?’

  Dear God, she wasn’t one jump ahead of him, she was three.

  I didn’t see much of Harry for the next few days because Mr Ormiston kept me hard at it. Lydia was busy, too, and not always with Harry. She seemed to be keen to build bridges with Mrs Griffiths and I came in, one afternoon, to find the two of them with their heads together over what looked like a set of accounts.

  She and Harry were civil to each other but, even by the end of the week, they still hadn’t got back to where they’d been before the argument and I wondered whether Harry was considering ending their ‘experiment in employment’ before the three months’ trial period that he and Lydia had agreed was over. If he did, the servants wouldn’t like it. They’d all taken a shine to Lydia.

  Then, on Saturday afternoon, Phoebe Gwatkyn arrived and changed everything.

  ‘I’m sorry to appear on your doorstep without so much as a note beforehand for a second time,’ she said, as Harry fussed over her and Lydia Howell asked the maid, Elsie, to bring some tea – for all the world as if she was the mistress of the house. ‘But, in the circumstances, I felt that promptness was more important than politeness.’

  Harry shepherded her to the comfortable chaise-longue. There were two in the drawing room and the stuffing in the other one was as lumpy as potatoes in a sack. ‘You’re more than welcome at any time, Miss Gwatkyn. I hope the circumstances to which you refer aren’t too…?’ He didn’t seem to know how to finish that sentence so he just left it hanging.

  Miss Gwatkyn picked up the carpet bag she’d brought with her and took out a blue paisley shawl. The drawing room was large and its fireplace was small so it was never very warm. ‘Unfortunate might be an apposite word,’ she said, as she wrapped the shawl around her shoulders.

  Lydia Howell sat down next to her and put a hand on her arm.

  ‘Oh no, please don’t concern yourself, my dear.’ She patted Lydia’s hand. ‘It’s just that I’m somewhat embarrassed.’ She looked at Harry, then me. ‘I’m not entirely sure what your intentions were for Nan Walters and Ruth Eynon, now that there’s to be no second inquest.’ Again, she looked at each of us in turn but we were still no help. ‘However, I’m afraid they’ve rendered the question rather moot.’

  ‘In what way?’ Harry asked.

  ‘They absconded on Thursday night,’ she said. ‘And I’m afraid they took the money you left in my keeping with them.’

  Harry

  It seemed that the first indication the Alltybela household had had of the young women’s disappearance was a missing horse. When the grooms had risen at first light, one of their mistress’s favourite hacks had been absent from the stable and a trail of hoof-muffling straw traced its path through the yard and into the fields behind.

  I imagined Nan and Ruth making their way over the same dark fields that John and I had crossed with the boy, Lleu, on the night of the ceffyl pren procession. As they reached the road, had they looked back towards Llanddewi Brefi and their homes, saying a silent goodbye? For, surely, such a clandestine departure suggested that they had no intention of returning.

  I wondered where they would go. With three hundred pounds they might travel anywhere the
y wished, set themselves up in business and never look back.

  They would not stay in Wales, I was sure, for they would too easily be found here. Would they make for London? With Mr Gordon eager for more erotic tales from ‘Nicky Revell’, they might keep themselves in funds indefinitely.

  But perhaps, given the circumstances, America was their most likely destination.

  On their stolen horse, they could have been in Aberaeron by dawn on Friday, travelled to Aberystwyth by coach and thence by sea to Liverpool to embark across the Atlantic. Well provided for financially, they would not have to endure the notoriously unpleasant conditions in steerage but could take a decent cabin for themselves, though they might be obliged to wait a few weeks for a sailing that had berths available.

  How would they fare in a city they did not know, prey to confidence tricksters, unscrupulous boarding-house owners and all manner of criminals? Somehow, I suspected that, between the two of them, they would manage tolerably well.

  All these thoughts occupied no more than a few seconds as Phoebe Gwatkyn gave an account of how the stolen horse had come trotting home later in the day.

  ‘They’d taken her bridle off,’ she told us. ‘And the note we found under the saddle said they hoped that, by not having a bridle to take hold of, she would avoid being laid hold of and stolen.’

  ‘Did the note say anything else?’ Lydia asked.

  ‘A good deal. They were at pains to point out that the money, having been earned by the sale of books they had written, was rightfully theirs and that they hoped nobody would begrudge it. They also lamented the fact that they’d had to leave without saying goodbye, and thanking me for all I’d done for them.’

  She fell silent but, before I could respond, she took up the thread once more. ‘Now that I’ve had time to think about the whole affair,’ she said, her words measured, careful. ‘I wonder, actually, whether I didn’t do the two of them a disservice in helping to educate them to the extent that I did.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, taken aback.

  ‘Because, as yet, there is so little employment for an educated woman in Cardiganshire. The education Nicholas and I provided raised their expectations and, when those expectations seemed unlikely to be realised, I fear they saw no alternative but to take matters into their own hands.’

  Was she referring to the pair’s flight from Alltybela, their complicity in producing pornography, or the circumstances surrounding Nicholas Rowland’s death? It was suddenly clear to me that, at almost every turn, Nan Walters and Ruth Eynon had been faced with a stark alternative: give up their ambitions and submit to the fate ordained by their sex and station, or deploy their native intelligence and education in pursuit of something better.

  ‘Surely our society and its treatment of women must shoulder some of the blame,’ Lydia protested. ‘If we were allowed to direct our own lives, give ourselves in marriage to whom we choose – if we choose to do so – those young women’s lives would have been very different.’

  As Lydia and Miss Gwatkyn continued in a similar vein, I turned in John’s direction. And, seeing me shift my attention to him, he inclined his head toward me in acknowledgement. It was the closest I would ever come to being able to catch his eye and share a smile.

  I wondered if John, like me, was seeing Nan Walters and Ruth Eynon in his mind’s eye as they began their new life away from the confines of Llanddewi Brefi. Did he see them standing on deck together – betgwns discarded in favour of less obviously Welsh attire – watching Liverpool disappear over the eastern horizon before turning and looking westwards to their new world?

  In my imagination, I could see the two of them quite clearly. Nan, sharp and determined; Ruth, an unstable compound of anger, intelligence and fear.

  I could only hope that America – if that was, indeed, where they were bound – would afford them greater scope for their talents than their native land.

  And that it would present them with fewer reasons to use those talents in their own defence.

  Epilogue

  From the Carmarthen Journal’s report on Cardigan assize courts.

  … Jonathan Eynon, a merchant seaman from the parish of Llanddewi Brefi, Cardiganshire, pleaded guilty of the manslaughter of schoolmaster Nicholas Rowland on the 27th April, in the course of an argument. The Cardiganshire Constabulary having brought aggravating circumstances to the judge’s attention, Eynon was sentenced to be transported for a period of seven years…

  Some historical notes

  Places

  As with the other books in the Teifi Valley Coroner series, where at all possible I’ve tried to use real places in Those Who Know.

  The Talbot Inn in Tregaron is still there on the main square, though it’s been extensively rebuilt and extended since 1851. Harry and John would think it much grander than the inn they stayed at.

  The Black Lion, which also appeared in In Two Minds, is still going strong on the High Street in Cardigan.

  It’s a shame that the only pub I could find reference to in Lampeter in 1851 was also called the Black Lion. (Apologies to everybody who knows better – there is only so much time an author has for research!) I’ve taken a certain amount of liberty with the description of its coachyard and have described the inner aspects of the inn with reference to similar mid-century coaching inns rather than taking my description from any contemporary sources.

  The Three Horseshoes in Llanddewi Brefi is a figment of my imagination, as is Miss Gwatkyn’s Alltybela, though countless gentry mansions like it, many with additions from more than one period, peppered the countryside of the Teifi Valley.

  Llanddewi Brefi is, as I hope people realise, a real place and the parish in which it lies is the largest in Wales. The village was immortalised by Matt Lucas and David Walliams in Little Britain but, contrary to the impression they gave, it is not in a mining area.

  Early plans for St David’s College (now the University of Wales, Lampeter) situated it, as Phoebe Gwatkyn suggests, in Llanddewi Brefi. However, despite Llanddewi’s ancient history of scholarship, the college was eventually founded in Lampeter where land was provided for the purpose. The difference in size, status and prosperity of the two towns is, as John says, testimony to what having a university does for a place.

  Wych Street and Holywell Street were, as depicted, the centre of London’s pornographic publishing industry. As Gus tells John, publishers and booksellers in the area also published seditious literature but, following a government crackdown on sedition in the 1810s, publishers more interested in making money than in changing society had turned their attentions to pornography.

  Loventium (or Luentium): In Those Who Know, Phoebe Gwatkyn identifies Roman Loventium as lying a little over a mile to the north and west of Llanddewi Brefi, where it is clearly marked on contemporary maps. The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland, 1868 also sites it there. However, if you Google ‘Loventium’, you’ll be told that it’s near the Dolau Cothi gold mines, more than twenty miles away, in Carmarthenshire. Even more confusingly, the Wikipedia entry, whilst locating Loventium near the modern-day village of Pumsaint, near Dolau Cothi, gives its Welsh translation as ‘Llanio’ which is the name of the hamlet near Llanddewi Brefi where Miss Gwatkyn believed Loventium to be! If any classicists or archaeologists would like to tell me how this confusion has arisen, please get in touch via my website as I’d love to know.

  Sarn Helen is, as Phoebe Gwatkyn tells Harry and John, the name given to various ancient tracks through the Welsh heartlands from south to north and the name may, indeed, come from the story of Macsen Wledig in the Mabinogi. I’ve seen the suggestion made that these tracks should be joined up into one national path or cycleway from north to south, something I would love to see, as anybody who has tried to travel from one end of Wales to the other, by any means, knows what a monumental task it is.

  People

  Henry Richard, mentioned in the book as secretary of the influential Peace Society, was a real person and is a son of wh
om Tregaron is justly very proud.

  Simi Jones is not a real person but I should just say a word or two about his role as plwyfwas, or parish constable. In theory, after the establishment of the Cardiganshire Constabulary in the mid-1840s, the role of parish constable became defunct. However, change was slow to happen. People resented the ‘new police’ (a force which was, at any rate, thinly distributed across the county) and preferred to be policed by their own, as they had been for centuries. So, parish constables survived here and there, in the more remote locations, for some time after the constabulary’s establishment, as long as – like Simi Jones – they were seen to earn their keep.

  The Mabinogi

  The Mabinogi (also known as the Mabinogion) with which Nicholas Rowland and his assistants take such liberties is, as Phoebe Gwatkyn rightly maintains, an undeservedly poorly-known collection of medieval and pre-medieval Welsh tales. In fact, I’m told (and who am I to argue) they represent the earliest known prose fiction in Britain.

  The first popular translation of the Mabinogi into English from Middle Welsh was produced by the eminent linguist, industrialist, pioneering liberal educator, philanthropist and elite society hostess, Lady Charlotte Guest, in the early 1840s.

  I must offer my sincere apologies to Lady Charlotte and all who love the Mabinogi for John’s somewhat reductionist reading of the text and, more especially, for Nicky Revell’s shocking treatment of the tales.