by Alis Hawkins
‘Myself, Mr Davies. I left Treforgan to escape these men. I don’t want them coming after me now.’
‘Why should they?’
‘For the same reason that they threatened me then. I’d made fools of them.’ When neither John nor I replied she was forced to explain what she meant. ‘They discovered that I was a woman,’ she said. ‘From that moment on, I was in grave danger.’
As she told us the story of how her secret had come to be discovered, it became clear that Lydia Howell had had no choice but to leave Treforgan.
‘I soon realised that cutting men out of our band – sending them away – had been a mistake. While they rode with us, I’d been able to exert some control over them. Once they were free of me, there was no brake on their activities.’
I wanted to press her for details but instinct told me to hold back, to wait.
‘At first,’ she continued, ‘they went after girls who were known to tempt men in the hope of getting favours or gifts, you know—’
I did. My father had suspected Margaret of being exactly that sort of girl and Davy Thomas had implied it.
‘But, soon, they started on other women who’d offended one of them in some way. Landladies who refused to have habitual drunks in their houses, sour wives, women who’d rejected suitors.’ I heard her take a breath, as if she was panting through her story. ‘I tried to stop them. I preached against them and explicitly said that if anybody knew of their actions, they should report them to the magistrates.’
Another mistake. The men who rode with Rebecca hated informers above any other class of person.
‘That was foolish, of course,’ she admitted. ‘Words – preaching – had been my weapon once, but I’d shown them the power of taking action and men were not disposed to listen to words any more. After that sermon, one of my congregation came to me and told me as much.’ She paused for a moment. ‘He also told me that I should not worry too much, that no real harm would come to any individual. He would see to that, he said.’
‘How?’ John asked.
‘He rode with them.’ Lydia said, simply. ‘Though I’d excluded men outside my congregation from our band, I hadn’t tried to forbid Treforgan men from riding with any other. I couldn’t have done – I knew that some rode to gatebreakings – but I didn’t expect any of my own to continue harassing young women.’ She paused momentarily, then said, ‘He led me to believe that he rode with the other band so as to rein in the hotheads amongst them.’
At the edge of my vision, I saw her turn back to the cold fireplace as if she could not bear to look at me.
‘He wasn’t very successful, was he?’ I asked.
‘On the contrary,’ she said, her voice quiet, ‘until you came here, today, I had reason to believe that he wielded a good deal of influence over the band.’
‘Because there were no reports of violence?’ I asked.
She did not reply straight away, nor did she turn around. ‘No,’ she said eventually, ‘because he stopped them violating me when they discovered my true gender.’
Surprisingly, as if that shocking statement had freed her from some constraint, she turned and came to sit down once more. She did not speak again immediately but, discerning a degree of purposefulness in the way she had returned to the sofa, I did not press her.
‘It was after I preached the sermon against revenge and intimidation,’ she began again after a minute or so. ‘He warned me to expect a visit from Rebecca. Telling my congregation to go to the magistrates if they knew that girls were being harried had incurred the Lady’s displeasure.’
‘What did you do?’
‘What could I do? Nothing. I simply waited.’
‘They came,’ she said, ‘two days after he’d given me the warning. At some time just before midnight – late, anyway.’
It had been late of necessity; the time she was speaking of had been barely a month before high summer when full dark is a long time coming.
‘I don’t know what they’d expected – the doors barred, some of my congregation there with me, perhaps. Or simply that I’d take steps to arm myself. They clearly had not expected me to open the door to them and stand there, unprotected.’
I caught a movement which might have been her clasping her hands in her lap. I tried to remember what her hands looked like – what, I should say, Nathaniel Howell’s hands had looked like. I did not recall thinking them especially effeminate and I wondered how they looked in the lap of a woman.
‘What they could not know – what, I believe, no one can understand unless they have experienced the same thing – is how protected I felt by my masculine dress. Over the few years I had lived at Treforgan, it had become my armour, my defence against the world. No one looked beyond it to see Lydia. The clothes were Nathaniel – they gave legitimacy to my preaching, to my authority at chapel, to my very conversation. You can have no idea, you men, how much more attention is paid to the words of a man than to those of a woman. If I had spoken as Lydia, no one would have given my words the slightest credence. But because I was Nathaniel, my words were heeded. More than heeded – they were hung upon, Mr Probert-Lloyd. People hung upon my words!’
Did her vehemence indicate how much she felt she had lost in becoming Lydia once more? Did she regret her reversion to womanly form?
‘So you stood before them,’ I said, ‘unprotected and unarmed. Weren’t you afraid at all? You must have been aware that other Rebecca bands had manhandled clergy – beaten them even?’
‘Yes, but those were Anglican clergymen. What with tithes and the restrictions placed on dissenters, Rebecca had no love for the church of England. But there’d been no violence offered to any chapel ministers.’
‘Because, by and large, they stood shoulder to shoulder with Rebecca,’ I pointed out. ‘But you had stood against her. Or, at least, against some of her actions.’
‘Yes.’ The word was flat, uninflected. ‘And I was foolish enough to continue to do so, even as they stood on my doorstep.’
I shivered, suddenly chilly in the unheated room. The very notion of those men standing there, silent and soot-blacked, their faces ghastly in the torchlight, was like icy feet walking over my grave.
‘I told them that they brought dishonour on the name of Rebecca, that they encouraged the magistrates in their belief that we Welshmen were not fit to manage our own affairs, that they’d allowed their own personal grievances to overturn what should have been a proper concern for the good of the whole community.
‘And that’s when the hissing started.’ Her voice dropped away as she spoke the sentence, as if she could barely bring herself to articulate it. ‘As I spoke, one man began to hiss. Faces turned away from me, to him. And, when they looked back at me, they were hissing, too.’
From the tone of her voice, I could tell that she was seeing the scene she described in her mind’s eye.
‘That hissing—’ she faltered, ‘it’s hard to explain its effect on me. Here was a group of men – some of whom I knew – who had turned into something I didn’t recognise.
‘Disguise has a profound effect,’ she went on. ‘I saw it every time we went out – the blacking of faces, the putting-on of clothes not your own – it masks who you are. It allows you to do things you’d never do undisguised. And, of course, it was dark…’
I heard her composure waver, waited for her to collect herself. When she resumed, her voice was firm once more.
‘They may have looked like women in their aprons and tall hats but they sounded like a pack of wild animals. Worse than wild animals – wild men, men detached from all civilising influence. It was utterly chilling. Then one of them stepped forward. ‘You must be taught a lesson,’ he said, ‘you must ride the ceffyl pren.’
In the silence of the room, I heard her swallow.
‘They brought it up then – the ceffyl pren. There was no head, no sheet. It was just a pole.
‘I watched them as they came up with it—’ She broke off but my mind’s eye was able to flesh out t
he scene from what I had observed when she and her own congregation had brought the ceffyl pren to William Williams. Half a dozen men would have approached the person they knew as Nathaniel Howell – two holding the wooden horse between them, two quickly moving behind him to stop him from retreating into his house, two to manhandle him onto the torturously thin pole.
‘If I had allowed them to lay hands on me and put me on the pole, all might have been well.’ Lydia’s voice was firm, once more, as if she had made up her mind to what she must say. ‘But I didn’t. Something in me – some propriety that I thought I’d overcome, some fear or outrage – would not allow it. So I fought them.’
I could see the scene, all too easily. The men, tense with that peculiar kind of anxious exhilaration that Rebecca’s illegal sorties brought, would have welcomed Howell’s resistance as an opportunity for violence.
‘It was a stupid thing to do. There were too many of them. Of course they’d prevail. But my resistance wasn’t rational. A punch stunned me and I was barely aware of what happened next. Two of them lifted me up but another stopped them, made some disparaging remarks about my manhood – told them to take my trousers off me so they could see what a celibate –’ she hesitated momentarily ‘– organ looked like.’
I could almost smell the animal scent on the air which the brief outbreak of violence would have caused. The urgent need to humiliate, to gaze and to mock. And voices echoed in my head.
Get his drawers off, let’s see what the little Welsh maid has between his legs. Let’s see if he’s as much of a girl below as he is in his pretty little face!
‘I could do nothing,’ Lydia said. ‘I had no strength in my limbs to resist them.’ She broke off and, for once, I was glad I could not see her. I had no wish to be a witness to such mortification as she must be feeling and I hoped John was showing sufficient decency to keep his eyes elsewhere.
‘At first,’ she said, her voice curiously flat, ‘I believe they thought I’d been mutilated. That I was a man despite the evidence of their own eyes. Then one of them—’ she broke off again and I knew she would not continue. Even a woman who had lived as a man for several years could not be expected to speak of an action which ascertained that she was, in fact, female.
‘Once they understood that I was a woman, pandemonium ensued.’
Pandemonium indeed – not least the demon of lust, I imagined.
‘I’d always known that, if I were to be discovered, there would be anger and disgust – revulsion, even. But I hadn’t anticipated their hatred. Their need for revenge, for punishment.’
Punishment for impersonating a man. I saw her covering her face with her hands. There could only be one punishment when she was lying there, stripped of the trousers that had conferred masculinity, her true sex revealed. Rape must have leapt into the loins of more than one man. A woman! And a woman who had preached at them – a woman whose preaching they had listened to, obeyed! A woman who had claimed power over them.
She drew in a deep breath and was mistress of her own emotions once more.
‘But they were prevented from—’ John stopped, the question clear enough.
‘Yes. By the man I spoke of earlier.’
An uncomfortable silence developed as we waited to see whether she would name him. When it became obvious that she would not, I asked, ‘And who was he, this man?’
‘Isaac Morgan.’ Her voice was steady again and I wondered at her fortitude.
‘Was he one of your congregation?’ John asked.
‘Yes, an elder, though he comes from some distance away. From the hills up towards Hermon. He’d argued with his own minister about the Holy Spirit and, when he heard that I was a Unitarian, he came to Treforgan.’
The ease with which Lydia Howell slipped from the most horrifying recollections to an acknowledgement of lay disagreements on points of theology was extraordinary; a demonstration of the strength of character she had needed in her life as Nathaniel.
‘He called them to heel. Told them that I’d be no further trouble. Told them to go. He was the last to leave.’ She hesitated. ‘Just before he went, he came to me. “Do not think you can preach another Sunday,” he said. “If you’re still here on the Sabbath, I will not stop them.”’
John
I’d thought Gus Gelyot’s money meant I wouldn’t have to share a bed with Harry again but I was proved wrong. Maybe he hadn’t asked Gus for enough. Or maybe he was just taking care of what he’d borrowed. Either way, one bed was all he paid for in Ipswich that night. Granted, it was a better bed than last time, and we didn’t get bitten. But that wasn’t much comfort in the middle of a sleepless night.
Carrying our luggage about the place had left me stiff and sore. And, on top of that, I was lying on a lump in the mattress. I could’ve sat up and punched it out but then Harry’d have known I was awake and he’d have started talking. And I didn’t want to talk. Especially not about what Lydia Howell had told him as we were drinking our second pot of tea. The look on his face had been pure shock and I didn’t want to have to pretend I hadn’t seen it.
Lydia Howell. Nathaniel Howell. I’d never clapped eyes on so-called Reverend Howell so I didn’t know what kind of a man Lydia’d made. But it was hard to imagine. Not that she was a beauty – too thick through the body and square in the face for that. But there was no question that she was a woman. If Harry’d been able to see, he’d never have made the mistake he did. But then, who’d guessed the truth, sitting in the chapel at Treforgan?
Lydia was right: people accept what you tell them. When I’d turned up on Mr Davies’s schoolhouse doorstep he hadn’t questioned the information I’d offered. I told him I was from Cynwyl Elfed, that my parents were dead, that I could read and write, and I wanted to learn. I’d chosen to ignore the previous six months. To pretend they’d never happened. And Mr Davies never found reason to doubt me.
I would’ve been very glad if I could’ve pretended to myself that they’d never happened. That I hadn’t seen what I saw in the Alltddu. That I hadn’t run away, back to Cynwyl Elfed, in terror. That I hadn’t got back to our farm to find my parents and sister dead. All of them. Dead.
‘Lucky you weren’t here, boy,’ one of our neighbours told me when I turned up, ‘else you’d be dead of the typhoid, too, for sure’. Maybe he was right. But luck hadn’t saved me from the Alltddu had it? Luck would’ve given my fate to somebody else. Another messenger would’ve taken the note to Waungilfach that day, not me. A different pair of eyes would’ve seen what I’d seen. Somebody else would’ve been tormented with nightmares.
Those nightmares. At least that was one good thing about being sleepless – no chance I’d wake up shaking and panting in terror. How would I have explained that to Harry?
I listened for his breathing. It was quiet. Too quiet for somebody who was asleep. He must be thinking about what Lydia’d told us. The truth about Margaret Jones and her child.
After she’d told us how her disguise came to be discovered, Lydia Howell had gone to fetch more tea and Harry leaned back on the sofa, shaking his head.
‘I’m sitting here, listening to Nathaniel Howell’s voice but the person speaking is wearing a woman’s clothes – even I can see that. I can’t put the two together, John. Tell me what she looks like.’
I stared at him. His eyes were on an angle to see me but I knew he couldn’t tell that I was looking at him. ‘She’s… well, she’s not slim, but not fat either.’ She had none of that soft roundness that fat women have. ‘She’s… solid, I suppose you’d say.’
‘And her face?’
‘Not one that would stop you in the street – not either way. Pleasant enough.’ I sighed, frustrated with myself. ‘Quite a mannish chin, I suppose. And a big mouth.’ Generous, I should have said, but big was the truth.
‘Eye colour? Hair?’
‘Eyes? Not sure. Greyish, I think. And her hair’s a kind of light brown. Not properly fair, no red in it, it’s like…’ I tried to think of a good c
omparison. ‘The colour of a mouse, I suppose.’ But that gave him a false impression – small, scurrying, anxious. I tried again. ‘Or like oat straw.’
The door opened and Lydia Howell came back in with a fresh pot of tea. If she wondered what was like oat straw, she didn’t ask.
After the story she’d just told us, I thought Harry’d treat her a bit more gently. But no, he was straight back to the questioning. Perhaps he felt she’d made a fool of him as much as the other Rebeccas.
‘You said Margaret Jones came to see you in fear of her life, Miss Howell. When was that?’
Lydia kept her eyes on the tea she was pouring. ‘Unfortunately, it was the day after I’d been discovered and I was—’ she made a sound halfway between a cough and a laugh. ‘I was going to say I wasn’t myself but I didn’t know who or what I was after Beca’s visit. I’d been Nathaniel for so long… I wanted to be Lydia again but I’d almost forgotten how.’
She met my eye. I knew she was only looking at me because Harry couldn’t see her but it still made me feel important.
‘You might imagine that, on my own in the evening, I became Lydia again. But I didn’t. I was Nathaniel morning, noon and night. I wore his clothes. I read his books. I even used his razor on my face though all I got for that was sore skin.’
She stopped and looked from Harry to me.
‘In as many respects as I was able, I was Nathaniel. Being discovered left me no choice but to flee but I didn’t know whether I should leave as Nathaniel or as Lydia.’ She stopped, took a steadying breath. ‘It was only Margaret Jones’s own agitation that prevented her from seeing that something was badly wrong.’ She glanced at me. ‘She’d received a visit the night before, too. In fact, I believe they must have gone on to Waungilfach from the manse. Given the state they were in, it’s a wonder they didn’t do the poor girl some injury. As it was, they’d frightened the wits out of her.’