by Alis Hawkins
‘Assistant? And with what is he assisting, may I ask?’ The way he asked the question, I was pretty sure he already knew the answer. Had Old Schofield been bragging about Harry recruiting me?
‘I’ve been asked to make enquiries into the circumstances surrounding the death of Margaret Jones,’ Harry said. ‘And into the rumours that the jury’s verdict was procured by threats of violence.’
It was a good addendum. The chemist wouldn’t care two farthings about a dead farm servant but he’d’ve been furious to be outvoted by cowards on the jury. But Harry didn’t give him time to answer, just waded straight in, so I knew he had noticed Pridham’s rudeness and was paying him back.
‘I understand that you were one of the two jury members who refused to bring in a verdict of accidental death?’
‘And from whom do you understand that?’
It was a challenge and Harry wasn’t having it. Just stood and waited with his eyes somewhere near Pridham’s face.
‘Jones the saddler being indiscreet, I suppose. I shall have words with him.’
‘I would rather you said nothing to Dic, if you don’t mind.’ Harry sounded pleasant enough but it wasn’t a request. ‘He couldn’t very well refuse to answer my questions.’
If Harry was going to take that tone with people like Pridham, in front of me, we weren’t going to get far. The chemist was looking at me as if he’d like to see me struck dead on the spot.
‘I think perhaps you’ve forgotten that you’re not in London, now, Probert-Lloyd. The Metropolitan police and associated magistrates may choose to ride roughshod over the ancient customs of our democracy but, here, we respect the verdict of a properly constituted jury.’
Harry didn’t turn a hair. ‘You consider it to be a legitimate verdict, then? Despite the intimidation of jurors?’
‘I know of no such intimidation.’
‘Others have borne witness to it.’
‘I cannot comment on what others have seen fit to tell you.’ Pridham narrowed his eyes at Harry. ‘But I can assure you that nobody attempted to suborn me in any way.’
I was shaking, waiting for Edward Pridham to turn on me, doing my best to pretend I wasn’t there. Harry was as calm as a Sunday afternoon.
‘May I remind you of Burke’s maxim, Pridham? When bad men combine, the good must associate.’
‘Bad men?’
‘You don’t consider an attempt to cover up a murder to be bad?’
‘I see no evidence of such a thing! I may not have agreed with the jury’s verdict at the time but, on mature reflection, those who voted in favour of accidental death can be allowed to have a greater experience of the lives and motives of girls like that.’
No. That wasn’t right. Men like Pridham didn’t change their minds. Not so they agreed with working men at any rate. Somebody’d been talking to him. Not Beca, I didn’t think. Not in his case. More likely the magistrates. They’d changed his mind for him.
‘You’d do well to pay more heed to your father, Probert-Lloyd. He understands these matters. Go home. Be reconciled. Don’t make a fool of yourself – and him – over this.’
I was looking at the carpet so as not to catch Pridham’s eye, so I couldn’t see whether Harry’s expression changed. But, when he spoke, something in his voice was stretched very thin. Like a rope that’s holding a weight too heavy for it. You’re just waiting for the snap to whip it into your face.
‘One last question, if I may. Did you receive a letter instructing you to bring in a verdict of accidental death?’
I couldn’t help myself then. Had to look up and see how Mr Pridham took that. But I had a surprise. He was laughing.
‘You see? This is what I’m trying to tell you. You don’t understand our ways here. Nobody would attempt to threaten a man of my standing. They’d be all too aware that I would go immediately to the magistrates and insist that whoever had done such a thing be found and prosecuted.’
A brisk clop, clop of horses trotted a carriage past the window. It felt like advice – hurry on to the next thing, down the road and away. Harry didn’t heed it, of course. ‘And yet,’ he said, ‘you didn’t go to the magistrates when you saw Stephen Parry’s letter.’
I watched Mr Pridham from under my eyelashes.
‘Probert-Lloyd, I am beginning to find your persistence somewhat insulting. I know my duty before the law. If I had seen such a letter I would have reported it. I did not. Now, if you will excuse me, I have business to attend to.’
The maid was rung for, and we were back out on the street quick-smart. A small rain was falling again, fine and clinging. I was all a-jitter but Harry looked as if he’d just had tea with his grandmother.
‘So,’ he said, ‘do we believe him? Did he not get a letter?’
Was he really asking for my opinion or just thinking out loud?
‘John?’
Real question then.
I stepped over a puddle. ‘Beca probably wouldn’t’ve bothered sending him a letter. More likely to threaten people she knew she could frighten.’
We walked past the baker’s shopfront and the smell of bread made my head turn. The baker’s boy, Iorri, was just coming out with his baskets full and covered against the rain. A bit late to be delivering bread. Must’ve been a special delivery – cakes or something. Iorri caught my eye and nodded a greeting. He didn’t speak because I was with Harry but I nodded back at his raised eyebrow and he trotted off ahead of us up the high street. He’d be asking about this next time he saw me, that’s what his raised eyebrow’d said.
Harry hadn’t seen any of that, of course. His mind was still on threatening letters. ‘Dic didn’t get a letter, either,’ he said. ‘Which makes me wonder whether Parry’s was the only one.’
I buttoned my jacket up. It was cold out, after the warmth of Pridham’s house. ‘Dic Jones would’ve said, I think, if anybody else on the jury’d had one.’
‘You think people would’ve spoken up – admitted to getting a letter themselves?’
‘No reason not to once Parry’d shown his about.’
‘So,’ Harry’s face said he was thinking as he spoke, ‘assuming there was just Parry’s, why? Whoever sent it was taking a risk in assuming that Parry’d be able to persuade the rest of the jury.’
The eaves above us dropped fat drops of water on our heads. We were both bareheaded. My old cap was too worn to wear for best but goodness knows why Harry wasn’t wearing anything. Perhaps he thought he’d be too London for people if he wore a tall hat in Newcastle Emlyn.
‘Maybe Parry was just the one who received the letter,’ I said. ‘Nothing to say it wasn’t addressed to all the jurors, not just him.’
Harry looked over at me. I knew he couldn’t see me properly but I still made my face look respectful. Habit.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘Something along the lines of “we know who you all are, we know where you all live and we can burn your houses down if you don’t say what we want?’”
A face appeared in my mind’s eye. A face I hadn’t seen, outside my dreams, since that rainy night seven years before. Say nothing boy or I’ll kill you! I shivered. Was he behind the threats, the intimidation? What if Harry’s investigation brought me face to face with him? What would I say? If I said what I knew, would anybody believe me?
No. Too much time had passed. Why didn’t you speak up then, people’d ask. Very convenient that you’re remembering these things, now, when you’re working for Harry Glanteifi.
I had to put my faith in Harry. And in my own wit to steer him. ‘It’d be safer to only write one letter,’ I said. ‘Most people don’t have much use for writing paper, do they? They don’t keep it at home. It’d look very suspicious if somebody who doesn’t usually buy paper went into Parry’s shop and asked for fourteen lettersheets. And Stephen Parry’d know exactly who’d bought it when he got the letter.’
Harry nodded. ‘True enough. Come on, we need something to eat before we go any further.’
Tha
nk God for that. I’d begun to think he wasn’t going to stop all day.
I’d never been in the Salutation’s dining room before, never mind eaten my dinner there. The food wasn’t anything special if I’m honest, but there was a lot of it and just being in that dining room made me feel as if I was going up in the world.
Just before he put a forkful of beef into his mouth, Harry asked, ‘Does your family have a connection with Mr Schofield?’
I knew what he was asking. Who are you, where are you from, what’s your family like? Maybe Edward Pridham’s sneer at me had made Harry think twice about who he was associating himself with.
‘No. Mr Davies at the grammar school found a place for me with Mr Schofield.’
‘You were at Mr Davies’s school? I hadn’t realised.’
Now I’d gone up in his estimation again. Mr Davies’s academy was famous. Boys came from miles to him. ‘Yes. He took me in when I was eleven years old.’
‘Took you in?’ Harry wiped his lips with a pocket handkerchief. Used to napkins, obviously. ‘You’re an orphan, then?’
‘Yes. Both my parents died when I was young.’
His eyes were on his food. But he couldn’t see it, could he? He was trying to look at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It must be hard to lose your parents when you’re a child.’
I remembered what Mr Schofield had said about his mother dying in childbirth. ‘Harder never to have had them, perhaps.’ I held my breath. Was I allowed to mention his family?
He half-smiled. ‘I’ve got nothing to complain of. My early life was less conventional than it might have been with a mother on hand but none the worse for that.’
Alright then, I was allowed to mention them. But I wasn’t going to push my luck. Curious I might be about that ‘less conventional’ start but I couldn’t ask. Not yet.
Still, the way Harry spoke Welsh was an oddity. When he’d asked if we could use the language between ourselves, I thought he’d use that old, formal Welsh some of the gentry take it into their heads to learn. But no, he spoke the local dialect, same as I did. Who’d he learned it from? Or, as Mr Schofield would insist, from whom had he learned it?
Whoever it was, Harry Probert-Lloyd’s Welsh made him feel less like the squire’s son and more like one of the clever older boys I’d known at Mr Davies’s school.
I pushed my scraped-clean plate away. ‘Can I ask you something, Mr Probert-Lloyd?’
‘Of course.’
‘Do you think the plwyfwas, Matthew Evans, is one of them – a Rebecca?’
Sometimes, when Harry’s eyes fixed in one position, you didn’t know whether he was thinking or trying to see you. It was uncomfortable. ‘I’ve been asking myself the same thing. I don’t know him, personally, but he was friendly with somebody I knew, years ago.’ Harry hesitated, thinking. ‘He’s old enough to have ridden with Rebecca.’
‘D’you think he knows who killed Margaret Jones?’ I asked. I knew it wasn’t him who’d killed her, but if Harry was going to have a hope of finding out why Beca had Margaret Jones murdered, we needed to talk to the men who’d ridden with her.
He pulled in a big breath, eyes on the table. ‘I don’t know. As plwyfwas, obviously, he’d have been in a position to hand-pick the jury—’
‘Not really,’ I interrupted before I could help myself. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered.
‘No – what were you going to say?’
I had to feel my way carefully, here. Didn’t want to sound like Pridham, with his you have no idea how things work here.
‘Well, there are men who generally sit on juries, aren’t there? Men who expect to be asked. You know, shows they’re well-off enough not to mind a day away from their business.’ I was watching his face. Waiting for any little sign that I’d said the wrong thing. So far, so good. ‘If Matthew went to other men for his jury,’ I went on, ‘men he knew he could intimidate – there’d be talk, wouldn’t there?’
Eyes on the table. I was pretty sure he was thinking. Chewing the inside of his bottom lip, he was. Peter in the office did the same thing. Sometimes he chewed the end of his pen, too. Old Schofield hated that.
‘It depends how clever he is, I suppose,’ Harry said. ‘Perhaps he was able to put the usual jurors off, subtly. You know –“I know you’re usually the man for the job, I’m just more loath to ask you this time because of all the rumours” – that kind of thing. Then whoever it is asks what rumours and Matthew makes up some blood-curdling tale about what Rebecca’s threatened. Then he says he’d quite understand if, on this particular occasion, whoever it is would prefer not to sit…’
I nodded. ‘Yes. I can see Matt Tregorlais doing that.’
‘Right then.’ He looked up, almost meeting my eye. ‘We’d better go and see him, hadn’t we?’
But it wasn’t to be. We hired livery horses to get up to Tregorlais farm but, when we got there, Matthew’s father told us that he was elsewhere, on parish business.
‘Gone down to see to some vagrant who’s been making a nuisance of himself by the church,’ the old man complained. ‘Of course, he had to do it today, didn’t he – when the rest of us are stone-picking? That damn vagabond’s been there more than a week, but Matthew had to go today. He’d barely put in half an hour with the stones when a boy turned up with a note and he was off.’
As we turned away, it started to rain again.
‘A boy with a note,’ Harry said. ‘Sounds as if somebody took the trouble to warn Matthew Evans that we were coming.’
Harry
Rebecca came for me that night. It was to be expected, of course; how could she leave me alone when I had chosen to start turning over her most concealing stones? She came to me in the Salutation Inn, while I was lying in my bed, shutters closed, fire banked.
Black faces, the whites of their eyes horribly vivid in the light of the lanterns and torches they carried; shawls and aprons and nightgowns pale in the darkness. They stood around me, silent and menacing. I saw a wig on one head, a huge straw wig. Beneath was an implacable face. One I had not seen for seven years.
And then another appeared, as if from the air. A huge face, soot black streaked with sweat and matted into his thick, dark beard. When he opened his mouth, a dark-lit hole in the moonless night, words emerged between bared teeth.
You are judged and found wanting, Glanteifi’s son
In the bones of the Alltddu, In what you have done.
You claim kinship with us, Glanteifi’s son,
But you have betrayed us
In what you have done.
I was terrified; all the more so as the voice that came from that terrible mouth, that huge, blackened face, was the voice of a woman. The cantwr sang my sins, charged me and accused me, so that Rebecca’s children could judge and find me guilty before meting out whatever punishment they saw fit.
A mouth opened behind the cantwr, a great red mouth of condemnation and fearfulness.
You shall be done to death and buried beneath a tree.
Then a great crashing thud came as every man standing around my bed raised his staff vertically before him and brought it down on the floorboards. Again and again; thud, thud, thud – a rhythmic threat.
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd!’
More thudding. But now it was coming from the door. ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, please open the door.’
I opened my eyes. The faces around me were gone, the tails of the dream whipping away and, with them, the clear sight that was always restored to me in sleep.
I lay, motionless, for a moment, unsure whether the fear coursing through me was caused by the dream or the beating at the door; unsure, indeed, whether the beating at the door was part of the dream.
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd!’
My knees trembling, I pulled myself out of bed, shrugged into my overcoat for warmth and decency and headed towards the knocking. After a few moments’ frustrated fumbling with the key, I managed to unlock the door and was able to make out two people in the early morning gloom.
Cultured Welsh accent, excellent English, average-sized man; the Salutation’s major domo, Mr Roberts.
I was thankful for the need to blink sleep from my eyes. ‘What is it, Mr Roberts?’
‘This.’ Roberts stood aside. The man behind him was clearly holding something swathed in what might have been a sheet or a tablecloth.
I made a show of rubbing my eyes. ‘I’m sorry Mr Roberts, it’s dim and I’m afraid I’m still a little blurry – what is it?’
Roberts moved back to his previous position. ‘It’s a ceffyl pren, Mr Probert-Lloyd. With a rotting sheep’s head on the end.’
I swallowed, having become aware of the sickly smell as he spoke.
It was left outside your door, sometime in the night. The boot boy found it.
‘I see. Was there a note attached to it?’
‘A note?’
‘A letter, then. A threatening letter or something of that sort.’
Roberts turned to his employee. ‘No,’ he said, facing me again after a moment or two, ‘nothing like that.’ Turning again he snapped, ‘Get rid of it. Bury the head and chop the rest up for the kitchen fire.’