by Alis Hawkins
Bowen ignored him and addressed Williams. ‘You didn’t make it clear to her that she would have to leave?’ A gentleman would see that as the only course open to an employer. Allowing a girl in Margaret’s condition to stay would imply that he condoned immorality, not to mention the fact that it would encourage all the other female servants to think that they, too, could presume on his liberality.
‘No.’ Williams tried clearing his throat, as if he could summon up phlegm as an excuse. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘May I ask why?’ Bowen sounded genuinely surprised; unremarkably so, given my father’s emphasis on Williams’s desire to be seen, in every way, as a gentleman. As he waited for a response, people turned to their neighbours wondering, behind their hands, how Williams was going to explain himself.
‘Things were… there is… that is, there was a lot of feeling locally,’ he began, ‘about girls who got themselves into trouble.’
‘Feeling? What do you mean by that?’ Bowen was evidently tiring of the need to treat Williams with kid gloves.
‘Well,’ Williams’s voice strengthened as the topic veered away from events at Waungilfach and into a more public arena, ‘when Margaret Jones disappeared, the old system had only recently been replaced by the workhouse unions. People still hadn’t quite got used to the idea that girls couldn’t just go to the minister anymore and say that so-and-so had got them with child and expect the father to provide. There was a lot of resentment against the new law at that time.’
At that time. A frisson went through the room. Rebecca had been violently against the new Poor Law. During the riots the militia had been billeted at Newcastle Emlyn’s workhouse to protect it.
‘And I was conscious of that feeling. I didn’t want to outrage opinion by throwing Margaret out of house and home.’
For a few seconds, Bowen said nothing and a murmuring became audible here and there. It was too low for me to catch any words but I could have made a good guess at the substance. Then the inebriate in the corner gave voice to it. ‘You liar! You never kept her on to save her from the workhouse!’
Try as the coroner’s officer might to stem the onrush of corroboration unleashed by the accusation, I knew it to be true; Williams had had no compunction about throwing young girls onto the tender mercies of the Board of Guardians. I also knew that his neighbours had taken it upon themselves to mend his ways.
I knew, because I had been there.
Harry
Waungilfach, 1841
It was August. Margaret and I were courting in her corner of the loft, our voices discreet so as not to disturb Rachel, sleeping on the other side of the loft’s freight of hay.
As anyone who has been in a hayloft knows, they are ill-lit enough places by day; at night, the dark is almost absolute. And the dark has its own laws; I did and said things in the warm blackness of that loft that I would never have dared venture in the bright light of day.
That night, as had quickly become the habit between us, Margaret was trying to seduce me and I was resisting.
‘Why not? We both want to.’ I felt her fingers on my face in the dark. ‘Or don’t you want me, Harry?’
‘You know I do. But I’m not going to dishonour you.’
‘Dishonour me?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘What then?’ She was getting impatient. ‘Going to marry me, are you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Why not?’ In her exasperation, Margaret pushed me away and sat up. ‘Because I’m not a lady, that’s why. Because everybody would laugh at you. And at me.’
I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at the pale shape of her face in the dark. I did not need a candle to see that she was cross with me. ‘But what does it matter whether you’re a lady or not?’ I asked, desperate for her to take me seriously. ‘The world is changing.’ It was fifty years since French aristocrats had been dragged to the guillotines by working men in pursuit of liberty and equality, surely we could allow ourselves the gentler route down the aisle?
‘Don’t be stupid, Harry!’ She caught herself and moderated her tone. She did not want to have to explain my foolishness to Rachel. ‘We could never be man and wife.’
‘You’re wrong, Mags. I’ll talk to my father.’
‘Yes, and he’ll tell you I can be your mistress but never your wife!’
She sighed and put a hand on my face. ‘Harry, even if you carried me away and married me secretly, it wouldn’t work. I could never be a true wife to you. I’d be like the bearded lady at the fair – something to gawp at. Let’s just take things as they are and make the best of them.’ I took her hand and she lay down beside me again. Some minutes later, her hand found the front of my breeches and who knows what a different course both our lives would have taken had I not heard a shot at that moment.
Margaret tensed in my arms. ‘What was that?’
Unsteady with desire, I got up and staggered to the door. Open, it let in enough moonlight to allow me to make my way down the stone steps without missing my footing. ‘Stay there,’ I hissed back up to Margaret, ‘I’ll be back when I’ve seen what’s going on.’
The byre stood on the main yard, facing the back of Williams’s house. Ignoring the dogs who fawned on me to the ends of their chains, I crossed the yard in the direction of the house, its whitewashed bulk looming huge in front of me. As I made my way cautiously around the side, another shot rang out and I became aware of laughter and a scattered clatter as if boys were hitting things with sticks.
Something clawed at my shirt and a thrill of pure terror pierced me from head to toe. I stood, rooted to the spot for several seconds, unable to move until reason reasserted itself and told me that I had simply caught a tendril from the rambler rose that climbed the side of the house. Weak with relief, I unhooked the barbs and moved forward.
What I saw when I peered around the side of the house forced words out of me as a thump on the back forces breath.
‘Oh my God!’
A great mass of people was streaming down the lane towards the front of the house, the way lit by torches and lanterns in the hands of a few at the front while those behind carried sticks and pots and horns and fiddles with which they were making a cacophonous uproar. As I watched, another shot was loosed off to great guffaws of excited laughter.
I jumped as I felt a hand on my back.
‘The ceffyl pren,’ Margaret murmured.
‘I said to wait in the loft.’ My pulse was racing from her unexpected touch.
‘You said you’d be back, too.’
I forbore to point out that I had been gone less than a minute and we both turned our attention to the people gathering in front of the house. Men draped in nightdresses, women with their menfolk’s coats fastened at the back, some with their shawls about their heads in the fashion of an Indian turban, children held by the hand and seated on their fathers’ shoulders. And every face – the face of every man, woman and child – was blacked so as to be almost invisible in the surrounding night.
A man stepped forward, a lantern in his hand, a grotesquely large wig on his head. Two other men followed him. Between them, on their shoulders, they carried a sheet-draped pole fixed, at one end, with the long skull of a horse.
The straw-wigged man strode towards the farmhouse door and hammered on it with the knob of his staff.
‘William Williams,’ he called into the cool summer air, ‘come out.’ I looked around at Margaret, ‘What are they doing here?’
She shrugged. ‘You know what he’s like.’
I certainly knew what she had told me: of Williams’s inability to keep his hands to himself, his obvious assumption that his female servants were there for his pleasure. So far, Margaret had not suffered his attentions but his pursuit of one of the housemaids, Hannah Rees, was relentless and Margaret feared that she would be next. ‘If he finds out you’re coming here to see me at night, he’ll be after me like a terrier down a rabbit hole,’ she had said.
The cool, night-furled petals of a rose brushed my cheek as I turned back to the crowd and I lifted my hand to break it off and give it to Margaret.
Quickly, she put her hand over mine. ‘Don’t. I can’t have it – they’ll say I stole it and I’ll be in trouble.’
A shout turned our attention to the front of the house. ‘William Williams!’ one of the men carrying the ceffyl pren shouted, ‘Come out! Or we’ll break your windows and come in!’
The crowd roared its approval of this threat and I felt a prickle of apprehension raise the hairs on my scalp.
‘That’s Elias Jenkins from our chapel doing the shouting,’ Margaret whispered, ‘I recognise his voice. The leader – the one in the straw wig – that’s our minister, Nathaniel Howell.’
Nathaniel Howell. That night, with Margaret, I could not know that I would be confronted by the minister, myself, in the months to come, Howell once more blacked and bewigged.
The sound of bolts being drawn back carried to where we were standing and the front door opened. The lantern in his hand showed that Williams was fully dressed. The ceffyl pren might be here to chasten him but he was not going to connive at his own humiliation by appearing in his nightclothes.
‘What is the meaning of this?’
It was bluster, nothing more; Williams knew perfectly well what was standing in front of him. And he must have known that they intended to offer him none of the privileges of gentry. He could protest all he liked in outraged English but both Nathaniel Howell and Elias Jenkins had called him out in Welsh, as their equal.
I waited for the cantwr to step forward and lay out the charges. If Williams was lucky, accusation would be leavened with amusement and the crowd would vent some of its anger in mocking and ridiculing him. Were they going to make him ride the ceffyl pren? Quite apart from the indignity of it, being forced to sit astride the wooden pole was, by all accounts, a physically painful experience.
Suddenly, I felt warm lips on my neck. ‘Let’s go back to the loft,’ Margaret whispered in my ear.
I turned to her in surprise. ‘Don’t you want to watch?’
‘I’d rather go back to the loft with you. Leave him to them.’
But I could not. Whether it was because I could not divorce the mob’s judgement on Williams from my own behaviour or because I could not countenance taking my pleasure with her while Williams was vilified and manhandled, I do not know. But I stood and watched till the end, till Margaret had left my side and gone back to her warm blankets, till Nathaniel Howell had issued his final threat.
‘Do not forget what we have said this night, William Williams. Your wife is watching at that window,’ he pointed to a spot above the farmer’s head, ‘and she has seen that you are known for a fornicator and deflowerer of young women. You and she are Uncle and Aunty to your servants – you are responsible for their welfare. Make sure that, in future, you look after them better. Or we shall be back.’
I waited until the last of them had disappeared before moving from my place at the side of the house. As I crossed the yard, intending to rejoin Margaret in the loft, a light appeared at a first-floor window in the farmhouse. Somebody, lantern in hand, was looking out over the moonlit yard.
Whoever it was could not have failed to see me.
John
For years, I wouldn’t let myself think about that night in the Alltddu. Not ever. If a memory came into my head, I slammed a door on it. Bang. I wasn’t going to give it houseroom.
I couldn’t help my dreams. Nobody can. And sometimes my body jumped me awake, my skin slick with terror. But a man’s waking thoughts are his own and I wasn’t going to think about it. It was past. Done. Nothing I could do about it.
Then the inquest was announced, and the memories seemed to grow a will of their own. They wanted me to remember. Dozens of times a day they came. Scores. Hundreds. Hundreds of times a day, a picture of that dark wood slid in front of my eyes. I couldn’t keep the memories out. I couldn’t work properly. I couldn’t sleep. Dared not sleep.
And the questions. They came with the memories. They were in my head all the time. Asking, asking.
Who gave the order?
What had she done to offend Beca? Why did she have to die?
Until then, I’d never asked myself why. That was Beca’s business, not mine.
Until then, I’d never wanted to know her name or who she was.
There was nothing I could do for her. I didn’t want to know.
Now it was everywhere. Margaret Jones. Margaret Jones. Margaret Jones.
And I couldn’t keep any of it in the back of my mind any more.
Because the questions I’d slammed the door on were going to be asked in court.
Who? Why?
I was terrified of what I knew. Terrified of the new dreams that started. Dreams where I stood up in front of the coroner and said I can answer your questions.
I was terrified of going to the inquest. Terrified I’d see him. That I’d give myself away. That something I did or said would tell the coroner that I knew the truth.
Stand up, John Davies, and give testimony!
I could do Margaret Jones no good. She was dead and gone. But I could do myself a world of harm.
So I sat there in the Salutation’s assembly room, stiff with fear, Mr Schofield on one side of me, Peter on the other. Old Schofield probably thought I was being respectful, sitting up and taking notice of every single word. Especially when Peter was sprawled in the chair next to me, legs wide as if he was waiting for a dog to rush up and sniff his crotch. The only way he could’ve looked as if he cared less was if he’d started picking his nose and eating it.
I envied his couldn’t-careness so much I could’ve punched him. My heart’d been banging my ribs so hard when we walked in that I kept expecting Mr Schofield to ask what the noise was. I looked about, casual-like, as if I was searching for a friend.
I saw plenty of people I knew, but nobody that looked like him.
Perhaps he’d keep away. Or perhaps he just wasn’t there yet.
I was glad when Mr Schofield took us to sit on the chairs near the front. Most people’d only see the back of my head.
William Williams’s wife was called to give evidence straight after him. I could only hope, for her sake, that the drunks’d already had their fun shouting at her husband from the back of the room. Still, the way they were putting the Salutation’s ale away, the hecklers soon wouldn’t be able to speak, never mind shout.
Good thing for Esme Williams.
People in Newcastle Emlyn still called her Esme Owens sometimes – not to her face, mind, only when they were talking about her. She’d married above herself – married into land – and she tried to play the lady. Did her no good. Not in Newcastle Emlyn where everybody knew she was Owens the grocer’s daughter.
I don’t think the coroner knew, mind. Gave her almost the same respect he’d given her husband, he did. Except, thinking about it, I didn’t think he’d’ve asked a real lady to give evidence at all. Especially not in front of the rough crowd who’d come in out of the rain that day. ‘Mrs Williams,’ he said ‘can you tell us what kind of young woman Margaret Jones was?’
The crowd got in before Esme could open her mouth.
‘A slut!’
‘No better than she should be!’
If Mr Schofield was right and Henry Probert-Lloyd was behind this inquest, then he was doing Margaret Jones’s memory no favours at all. People were remembering her, now, and nothing they remembered was to her credit. Always the way, isn’t it? Do ten good things and one bad, and the one bad deed is what you’ll be remembered for. Guaranteed.
‘Isn’t it obvious what sort of young woman she was?’ Esme asked Mr Bowen when Matthew Evans, the plwyfwas, had shut the crowd up. ‘She was carrying a child out of wedlock.’
‘Quite so.’ Mr Bowen nodded. Then he took his little pinch-nose specs off and looked over at her. ‘Mrs Williams, I hardly like to ask the question I’m going to put to you
next, but circumstances dictate that I must.’
Esme smoothed her skirt down as if she’d just seen a crease in the silk.
‘Mrs Ellis has stated that she did not know who the father of Margaret Jones’s child was – do you have any suspicion or knowledge in that regard?’
‘In other words,’ a voice called out, in English, ‘was this another of your husband’s bastards?’
Half the crowd rocked with laughter and the other half turned to ask its neighbour what he’d said. I looked around to see if I could spot who’d spoken and saw a group of men at the back, all slapping the shoulder of one man or trying to shake his hand.
That man! His expression almost made me retch with fear. The look of him as he stared over at William Williams was savage. Like the face in my nightmares. The face of the killer.
I’ll kill you boy!
No. It wasn’t him. Too old. Nobody aged that much in seven years. But that look! Hatred – that’s what it was.
Eyes on Esme, I put my hands on my knees, gripped tight to keep them from shaking.
‘No, Mr Bowen,’ Esme raised her voice above the heckling, ‘I do not know who the child’s father was. But I do know, from speaking to respectable people, that young men gathered around Margaret Jones at the chapel like wasps around a windfall.’
‘She was popular with the young men?’
‘So I’ve been told.’
‘But you can’t recall one young man in particular who made a nuisance of himself at your farm?’