by Alis Hawkins
‘The Reverend Howell. The minister at the Unitarian chapel.’
‘That’s Reverend Mudge.’
‘Oh. I see. Well, could you tell me where he lives, please?’
Brief directions were given and I saw the door close as John came down the steps towards me. ‘This way,’ he said and picked up the bags which he had left at my side.
‘Did you hear?’ he asked. ‘She said the minister’s called Mudge, not Howell.’
‘Yes, I heard.’
‘Do you think this Reverend Mudge will know where he’s gone?’
‘I sincerely hope so.’ I also sincerely hoped that Nathaniel Howell’s absence did not presage a dead end; in either sense.
We walked no more than two minutes before John said, ‘Here we are. This is what she said – black painted railings, blue door with an oval window over.’
We both approached the door and John gave the knocker a couple of good raps. A short while later the door opened and I heard a woman’s voice say, ‘Yes? Can I help you?’
The local accent was very different from London. Oddly, it resembled the speech of Bristolians more than anything that was to be heard around the capital.
‘We’d like to speak to the Reverend Mudge, please,’ John told her.
‘Master’s away. Won’ be back till ’omorrow.’
I felt my spirits plummet.
‘Your mistress, then?’ John extemporised.
‘Gone with ’im.’
I stepped forward and looked up the steps to where the servant stood. ‘We were actually hoping to speak to the Reverend Mudge about his predecessor, the Reverend Howell.’
‘The minister who was here before the Reverend Mudge,’ John explained, presumably having inferred from her expression that she did not know what a predecessor was.
‘I’ve not bin ’ere long. I’ll fetch th’housekeeper, Mrs Spicer.’ I discerned that she had turned to go when I heard her speak again. ‘Wai’ there, if y’please.’
‘Not been here long and not been trained very well as yet,’ I said, acutely aware that, had it not been for my blindness, John and I would simply have exchanged a knowing look. Words felt clumsy in comparison.
A minute or so later a figure appeared in the doorway. ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am Mrs Spicer, Reverend and Mrs Mudge’s housekeeper. How may I help you?’
‘Mrs Spicer,’ John said, ‘my employer and I have come all the way from Cardiganshire in South Wales because we were told that the Reverend Nathaniel Howell was minister here.’
‘I see,’ the woman replied. ‘You’ve waited a while to pay him a visit – it was years ago that poor Reverend Howell was due to come to us.’
Poor Reverend Howell. I did not like the sound of that. ‘It’s become necessary to speak to him, urgently,’ I said.
‘Well, I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey. The Reverend Howell died before he could get to us.’
‘Died?’ John and I spoke almost simultaneously.
‘Yes. Took ill on the journey. Never was strong, according to Miss Howell – that’s his sister.’
The sister with whom he had envisaged ending his days; sooner rather than later according to Ezra Lloyd. ‘Where can we find Miss Howell?’ I interrupted.
‘If you had let me finish, sir,’ she said, in mild reproach, ‘I would have told you. Miss Howell lives here. She’s governess to the Reverend Mudge’s children.’ Mrs Spicer allowed a small but pointed silence to form. Teaching me manners. ‘If you’d like to speak to her, perhaps you’d be so good as to step inside?’
Chastened, I allowed her to show us into the drawing room. It was chilly, presumably because the master and mistress of the house were away and the fire had not been lit.
‘I’ll tell Miss Howell you’re here,’ the housekeeper said. ‘Who shall I say is calling?’
‘Mr John Davies and Mr Henry Lloyd,’ I said.
The housekeeper closed the door behind her. Neither of us sat down.
‘Henry Lloyd?’ John asked.
‘We don’t know what Howell told her. I don’t want Miss Howell taking a fit of the vapours and refusing to see us.’
‘D’you think she’ll know anything?’ John asked.
I took in the stillness of him at the edge of my vision. Of course, this could not possibly matter to him in the same way that it mattered to me. ‘We’ll soon see.’
‘Why didn’t she write to the elders at Treforgan to tell them her brother was dead?’ he wondered. ‘They’d’ve wanted to know, wouldn’t they?’
‘No doubt she’ll tell us.’
I tried to form an impression of the room but, aside from the fact that the wallpaper was green, the windows were small and the chairs and sofa were upholstered in yellow, I could make out very little with any accuracy. A piano stood in the corner but its lid was down as if it was played infrequently.
The door opened behind me and, before I could turn, a voice spoke.
‘Prynhawn da, boneddigion. Or is it good afternoon, gentlemen?’
That voice! The shock hit me like a wide-armed slap and I spun around. ‘Nathaniel Howell!’
‘Harry!’ John’s voice sliced through the air between me and the person who had just entered the room. ‘This is Miss Howell.’
The begowned person who had greeted us, however, said nothing and my thoughts raced. Middling height, stocky. Padding could easily flesh out a womanly form. And Nathaniel Howell’s Rebecca had worn women’s clothes with a nonchalance none of the rest of us could muster. I had only ever seen him at night, his face blacked, so I could not speak of the condition of his beard but I imagined that a great deal might be done with a keen razor and women’s powder.
Though bodies are easily disguised, voices are generally harder to change; but Howell’s voice, a light tenor in a man, needed no alteration to become the low contralto of a well-built woman. ‘Nathaniel Howell,’ I repeated.
I heard a sigh. ‘Henry Probert-Lloyd. The last time we met, we were both in women’s clothing.’
I said nothing and the sigh came again. ‘Please, sit down. I’ll ring for some tea.’
While we waited for our refreshments, I decided to make my blindness clear.
‘Perhaps you’ll allow me to explain why I can’t look you in the eye.’ I spoke in Welsh though Howell had not. I did not want him to be able to hide behind the careful diction of English; I wanted him speaking the language of Rebecca.
A brief explanation of my condition concluded, I saw Howell nod. ‘That’s how you recognised me. You weren’t confused by my appearance.’
I schooled myself not to smile at his replying in Welsh. ‘At last,’ I said, ‘an advantage to blindness.’
My quip was greeted with silence. Good. I could turn his embarrassment to my own advantage; embarrassment can be led by the nose to garrulousness if it is managed correctly.
‘Why disguise yourself as a woman?’ I asked. ‘For the same reason that you didn’t want the congregation at Treforgan writing to you – because you were afraid?’
Before Howell could reply, John spoke, his tone careful as if he was speaking to me but looking at the other man. ‘Harry, I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake.’
‘How so?’
John did not reply straight away and I wondered what kind of look was passing between him and Howell.
‘What Mr Davies means, Mr Probert-Lloyd, is that though your hearing has correctly identified me as the person you knew as Nathaniel Howell, you are mistaken in assuming that I have disguised myself as a woman.’
I turned my head so that he appeared at the edge of my vision. He was clearly dressed in women’s clothing.
‘Nathaniel was the disguise. My real name is Lydia.’
So, then, it all came out. The whole history of how Lydia Howell had become Nathaniel. Children of the manse, she and her brother had been orphaned when Lydia was twenty and he twenty-two.
‘When our father died,’ she said, ‘Nathaniel had already completed his
ministerial training and been asked to come and preach at Treforgan with a view to becoming minister there. We were travelling down together – with Father gone, we’d intended that I would go to Treforgan with my brother as his housekeeper. I wanted to see the house and what it would need. Then, on the way, Nathaniel fell ill with a fever and died at Milford Haven.’
She stopped but I had the impression that it was out of respect for her brother’s memory rather than from any remaining grief.
‘He’d always been delicate. Not like me.’ I heard the smile in her tone and tried to see Nathaniel Howell as a woman. I remembered a square face with a definite nose. Not a feminine face but one with character. And shrewdness.
‘My brother’s death left me alone in the world with no obvious means of supporting myself. I was as educated as he had been and I’d always been more interested in the finer points of theology. He’d followed our father into the ministry as a dutiful son but he didn’t feel half the passion for the calling that I did. He knew that, and we both knew that I’d be writing his sermons for him. I’d already written the one for his preaching visit to Treforgan before he died. ’
I was finding it difficult to reconcile the voice I could hear with what it was telling me. It was Nathaniel Howell’s voice and yet it belonged to a woman. I tried my utmost to get a proper impression of Miss Howell but I could see nothing beyond a face framed with brown hair. What had Nathaniel Howell looked like under his soot black? I remembered a wolfish smile but any smile will appear outsized in a face blackened to the hairline. I had never seen the minister in ordinary clothes, only as a carrier of the ceffyl pren and a Rebecca. And disguise always lends a menacing cast to any figure.
‘But how did nobody guess?’ John blurted.
There was a shrug in Lydia’s voice. ‘People see what they want to see. They saw a preacher – and preachers are men, aren’t they? Even if they don’t grow much of a beard.’ She paused. ‘I was careful to make it clear, from the beginning, that I was called to the celibate life and wouldn’t be looking for a wife, so there wasn’t too much pushing of daughters at me.’
‘But, servants and so on…’ John clearly had the more intimate aspects of life in mind.
I heard the suggestion of a wry smile in Miss Howell’s reply. ‘I didn’t employ a housekeeper – there would have been things no woman living in could fail to have noticed – but I had Naomi and Peter Williams’s deaf-mute daughter in every day as maid-of-all-work. She was grateful to be out of their house and she wasn’t able to blurt out any secrets.’
‘Were you not afraid of being found out?’ I asked.
Lydia Howell drew in a breath. ‘Never afraid, Mr Probert-Lloyd. Not until…’ she stopped, redirected herself. ‘Before Rebecca, there were times when I relished the thought of being discovered, of watching all those pompous elders realise that the sermons they’d praised to the skies, the wisdom they congratulated themselves on discerning in me, despite my youth, had all come from a woman. A weaker vessel, incapable of abstract thought.’
‘So why did you revert to your real identity when you came here?’
She hesitated; she had not been required to articulate this before. ‘In the end, I discovered that it’s only possible to be somebody else for just so long. I was weary with vigilance. I wanted to be myself again.’
Her words produced a moment of strange fellow feeling as I realised that I longed to be myself again, too. This blind person was not me and I did not know how to be comfortable as him. Like Lydia Howell, I was tired of the eternal vigilance required by my changed state. ‘But it wasn’t just a wish to be a woman again, was it?’ I asked. ‘Your preaching had got you into trouble – or, at least, the result of your preaching. You were running away. And, if Nathaniel Howell had died, then he was nowhere to be found. Not by anybody. Even Rebecca.’
Without warning, she was on her feet and moving across the room to the window. At one and the same time I found myself taken aback at the suddenness of her movement and aware that, had she been a man, it would have been less worthy of comment. Men act; ladies remain composed.
I had read Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on the education of women and I wondered whether Lydia’s father had, too. What must it have been like for Lydia in dead Nathaniel’s clothes, able to put to use the learning she possessed, to act as she saw fit and not as her gender dictated?
‘Is that why you’re here,’ she asked, keeping her face to the window. ‘Because of Rebecca?’
‘We’re here because Margaret Jones was murdered.’
She turned then. ‘Margaret Jones – William Williams’s dairymaid?’
‘Yes.’ Briefly, I outlined the finding of Margaret’s remains, the farcical inquest verdict, and our subsequent investigation.
‘And what do you want to know from me?’ She had returned to looking out of the window but her voice seemed distant, as if part of her – the part that had been most Nathaniel, perhaps – was, once more, back in Treforgan.
I spoke carefully. ‘Well, we know, obviously, about the Rebecca band that you led.’
She made no response.
‘It caused opposition, didn’t it – your crusade?’
Still she said nothing and, as the silence lengthened, it became clear that she did not intend to.
‘Is that why you left in such a hurry?’ I persisted. ‘Because those who opposed you were threatening you with harm?’
‘I was a fool,’ she said, her voice still somewhat distant. ‘I embraced Rebecca with the zeal of an innocent. Not that I blame myself for that, many people saw Rebecca as a force for good at the beginning – finally, it seemed, we had discovered a way of standing against injustice for ourselves.’
I heard my father’s voice in my head. The lower orders are not fit to wield power – they are not bred to it and do not understand the limits that must be put on it.
‘So you embraced Rebecca?’ I prompted. ‘Then what?’
‘I had ridden out with the ceffyl pren,’ she said, slowly, ‘and I thought that riding under Rebecca’s banner would be the same, only with greater moral purpose. And so it was, to start with.’
She faltered again and I wondered what she was seeing in her mind’s eye.
‘Almost every man from Treforgan rode with me – and with no coercion on my part. I didn’t want anybody to be able to say that I’d used my position to force him into breaking the law. But then…’ She sighed. ‘Rebecca excited men. Particularly young men. Being able to do what they wanted while the special constables and militias ran around looking for them went to their heads. I began to notice other men joining our band. Men who weren’t from Treforgan.’ She stopped. Was she looking for a response from me? I opened my mouth to ask who these men were but, before I could speak, she went on.
‘At first, I was pleased – I made the mistake of thinking they were all there as staunch opponents of the Poor Law.’ She made a sound of self-derision.
‘I soon realised my mistake. I should have known that some men – not all, but some – would use Beca for their own private reasons.’
‘So why didn’t you stop them?’ John’s tone was belligerent; had I not known that he was far too young I would have suspected him of being on the receiving end of what Lydia Howell was describing.
‘I thought I had. I told the men of Treforgan that I didn’t want anybody but them – my own flock – riding out with us. And I prevailed. Our band shrank back to members of our own congregation.’
‘But another band formed, didn’t it?’ I asked. ‘A band that wanted revenge on women.’
Lydia moved away from the window but did not resume her seat. Instead, she went to stand in front of the fireplace, as if the unlit grate could warm her.
‘They said that some girls were threatening men with a visit from Rebecca. That they’d forgotten their place. That they needed teaching a lesson.’
‘And was one of those girls Margaret Jones?’ I asked.
Did Lydia Howell nod? Shake he
r head? Shrug? John’s voice broke into her silence.
‘Miss Howell, can I remind you that Mr Probert-Lloyd can’t see? You need to give him an answer.’
I saw her turn but, if a look passed between them, it stayed between them. ‘Margaret Jones came to see me,’ she said. ‘In great fear.’
‘Fear for her life?’
‘Fear of harm, certainly. From the men I’m talking about.’
‘Because she had been free with her favours?’ I asked. It was all I could do to articulate the phrase.
‘Because the rumour had been spread that she had been free with her favours,’ Lydia Howell corrected. ‘William Williams’s other outdoor maidservant had overheard a conversation between two young men that she relayed to Margaret. One had been telling the other that he should be careful or Margaret would try and father her child on to him. He protested that she couldn’t – he’d had no carnal knowledge of her. But, according to the servant, the other man said something to the effect that it would make no difference – she’d been intimate with so many men that no one would believe he was innocent.’
‘Did she say who these young men were?’ I asked.
Her failure to answer immediately brought a sound of impatience from John. ‘Who are you protecting, Miss Howell?’