by Alis Hawkins
‘I did. I could see them quite clearly. When they came clattering in, they had enough torches with them to light up the dark from now till Christmas.’
‘And did you recognise any of them?’ I tried not to sound too urgent.
There was a small silence. I imagined her shaking her head regretfully, her eyes on me, pitying my state; I had no doubt that her husband would have told her about my sight.
‘No, every one of them was blacked up. It makes it so difficult to recognise a person. I don’t believe I’d know my own children if their faces were blacked.’
‘And you, Mr Williams?’ I asked. ‘Were you able to recognise any of them?’
Williams was clipped. ‘I was not.’
‘My husband went out to try and send them on their way,’ Mrs Williams proclaimed, ‘and the ruffians laid hands on him and held him with his face to our own back door so that he shouldn’t see anything. Disgraceful!’
I had to admire Mrs Williams’s subtle undermining of her husband. Under the pretence of abhorring the Rebeccas’ treatment of him, she had provided us with a humiliating picture of his impotence.
‘Did they lay hands on Margaret?’ I asked her.
‘They didn’t touch her. She only came out to the top of the steps – and they wouldn’t dare go into the loft – it’s one thing coming on to the yard but it’s another thing to go invading somebody’s buildings.’
‘That didn’t stop them firing my barn a few days later!’ Williams challenged.
I had quite forgotten that Rebecca had burned one of the Waungilfach barns to the ground. It had happened in the days immediately after Margaret’s disappearance and had been of little consequence to me in comparison.
‘Mrs Williams,’ John broke the sudden tension, ‘did you see anybody lingering after the rest of the Becas had left the yard? Anybody that might have spoken to Margaret after the rest had gone?’
‘No. They all went off, all of them. And she went back inside the loft.’
‘If our information about Margaret’s involvement with Beca is correct,’ John continued, ‘somebody must’ve spoken to her very soon after that night. She couldn’t read so they must’ve come here to see her.’ He paused, allowed them to take this in. ‘Did you, possibly, see anybody around the farm on the days before she disappeared? Anybody at all?’
Did they look to me? I had no idea so I let John’s words stand. ‘There are always people coming and going,’ Mrs Williams said. ‘But I don’t remember anybody out of the ordinary.’
The words had barely left her mouth when her husband spoke, as if he was affording her the smallest feasible degree of courtesy. ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant, but somebody was supposed to have come who didn’t.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘A messenger was supposed to have been sent but failed to turn up.’
‘A messenger? Who from?’ This was Mrs Williams.
‘Price over at Pant Yr Hebog said he’d sent a messenger.’ I could tell that Williams’s face was turned towards me, answering his wife’s question whilst appearing to do nothing of the kind.
Mrs Williams was undeterred. ‘Price? What did he want?’ I was keen to know that myself.
Williams’s tone, when he answered, spoke of an old grievance.
‘According to him, he sent a message summoning me to appear at a Rebecca gathering.’
I was taken aback. ‘For what purpose?’
‘For the purpose of forcing me to take part in their illegal activities!’ Williams failed to control his irritation. ‘To make me their accomplice! To ensure that I was implicated in activity that would haul me up before the bench if ever I was tempted to see justice visited upon them!’
It was easy to see why Williams might be bitter. Though he could not plausibly have informed on the men who had brought Samuel to his door, Morgan’s band might well have been afraid that Williams would take what he knew of their intimidation of Margaret to a magistrate. Involving him in illegal activity would not absolutely have ensured that he would make no accusations, but it would have put him in an acutely compromising situation; compulsion is a weak defence at best and he would have done his dubious social standing no good whatsoever by protesting it.
‘You said according to him?’ John echoed Williams’s earlier words. ‘Did you have some reason to disbelieve what Mr Price said, Mr Williams?’
I heard Williams’s fierce intake of breath, as if he was about to leap up and grapple with John. ‘Yes. I did! Price maintained that the Rebeccas fired my barn as punishment for not coming when I was summoned. But Price would have done it anyway, just because he could.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I’ll tell you what makes me think that, Mr Davies. When I went out to the fire that his men had set raging in my barn, Price was still there. His henchmen were long gone but he’d stayed. He had the gall to stand there as my barn burned and tell me I’d brought the whole thing on myself.’
I wondered whether his anger had been as poorly disguised that night. If so, Price can only have considered his job well done.
‘Said if I’d only come when I was bidden then neither of us would have been standing there.’
‘But, as far as you were concerned,’ I suggested, ‘you hadn’t been summoned. Is that right?’
‘Exactly! According to Price he sent a gwas bach over with a message for me. Said he told him to put it in my hand and mine alone. Liar!’
‘Did you ask to see the gwas bach?’ There was an edge to John’s voice. Clearly he thought he already knew the answer.
‘I wouldn’t lower myself,’ Williams spat.
‘Mr Williams,’ I began, ‘what night were you supposed to have ridden with Rebecca?’
The farmer hesitated. ‘The night before the barn was fired, I suppose. Yes, it must’ve been. Price accused me in those terms – you weren’t with us last night.’
‘So was the gwas bach sent with the summons for that same evening, or for the following day?’
‘He was supposed to have been sent the day before. At first, when Price said he’d sent a boy over, I told him it was no wonder I’d missed him because we’d all been turning the place upside down looking for my missing dairymaid. But he said I couldn’t use that as an excuse, he’d sent the boy the previous day.’
‘Then the messenger came on the same day that Margaret disappeared?’
‘I’ve told you, there was no messenger!’
I held up a quieting hand. ‘Let’s just suppose, for a moment, that Price was telling the truth. That there was a gwas bach. Perhaps the boy brought a message for Margaret at the same time? A message that told her to meet somebody in the Alltddu?’
‘But why would Price want Margaret killed?’
‘We don’t know,’ I said. ‘That’s why we need to speak to Rachel Ellis.’
John
Williams came with us to the Ellis’ cottage. I was glad of it. Having him riding between us kept Harry from speculating about Price’s gwas bach.
But that didn’t stop me wanting to grab Williams by the lapels and shake him till his teeth rattled. To tell him that Price had sent somebody with a message. Me. It was a real temptation, just to see the astonishment on his face.
But then I’d’ve had to explain everything, wouldn’t I? Explain to Harry that I’d seen her die, I knew what had happened.
Except that I didn’t, I reminded myself. I didn’t know. Not really. Not everything.
I knew Margaret Jones had been murdered but I couldn’t tell Harry why. I couldn’t put a name to the face I saw in my nightmares. The face of a well-dressed, fluently literate man.
Or could I?
Things Edward Philips had said kept coming back to me.
She made all their clothes so she could dress them just the same. As soon as his tutor taught him to read and write, Harry was teaching Davy.
David Thomas. Educated. Well-dressed.
Had he been the man who insisted on taking U
ncle Price’s letter from me?
And, if it had been him, what had he read?
I could’ve read that letter myself. Even then, I knew how to read – I could have opened the letter and read it.
But no. It had come from Beca. I would no more’ve opened it than spat in Uncle Price’s eye.
This time, it was Aaron we found digging in the potato field. Patches of blue sky overhead or not, the wind made it colder than when we’d found Rachel out here and the three of us dismounted and stood next to our warm horses as soon as we could. Aaron was in his shirtsleeves, jacket folded over one end of the potato basket. Digging’s hard work.
His ‘Good-day’ was civil enough, and he got it in before Harry or Williams spoke. But his eyes told a different story. Cold as the earth he’d been turning over. Wary as hell.
Harry’d asked Williams to speak first and he spoke to Aaron in Welsh. Even though he wasn’t a real gentleman, it sounded wrong.
‘Aaron, previously I asked you not to speak to Mr Probert-Lloyd about anything Margaret Jones might have told your wife.’ Williams looked pretty uncomfortable at having to explain himself but Harry’d insisted. ‘Circumstances have changed, now. There’s no need for you or your wife to keep silent. I’d like you to give him any help you can.’
Aaron kept his expression blank but what man likes being told what to do? Especially on his own land.
Harry piped up. ‘It’s really your wife we’d like to speak to, Mr Ellis.’
Aaron turned to him. I could almost see his thoughts. My wife, the woman you think you were friends with. If you ever so much as laid a hand on her…
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, without sounding it, ‘she’s not here.’ Then he added, ‘She’s gone to the weavers with the wool.’ Didn’t want us to think he was being unhelpful.
Harry was trying not to look confused but I knew what Aaron meant. My mother used to spin, too. Most women did, for the extra income. Some of the weavers would collect the yarn but you got paid extra if you took it to them.
‘You can ask me your questions, if you like.’ Aaron offered. Harry’s smile looked as if it’d been pulled into place by a string.
‘Unless you were there the night Rebecca came to threaten Margaret Jones, I doubt you’d be much help, Mr Ellis.’ Then his expression changed. ‘Or perhaps you were there?’
It was possible. Aaron and Rachel could easily have been courting seven years ago. Their little boy looked to be at least five.
Aaron wanted to say he’d been there. I could see it flit across his face. The temptation to lie, to keep Harry Gwynand his questions away from Rachel. But he was a good chapel man and he couldn’t have a lie like that on his conscience.
‘No. I wasn’t.’
‘Will Mrs Ellis be back before dark?’ Harry asked.
‘I can’t say, Mr Probert-Lloyd. The days are short now, aren’t they? Once she’d been paid, Rachel said she’d go into town for some bits.’
Town. Newcastle Emlyn. Rachel would be glad to stop there for a while, rest her feet, have a gossip while she bought her tea and soap and mending thread. A brief memory of my mother doing the same while my sister and I looked at sweets we couldn’t have made me feel heavy and sad.
‘In that case,’ Harry said, ‘we’ll come back tomorrow, if you don’t mind.’
What could Aaron Ellis say? He wasn’t allowed to mind.
Harry
When William had taken his leave and cantered away, John and I walked our horses back along the little road out of the Ceri valley in silence. In between the sudden tugs of a gusting wind, the stillness of winter was everywhere; no birds sang in the newly bare trees, crickets and grasshoppers were dead or burrowed deep into the matted grass, people were indoors if they could manage it. The only thing to be heard was the quiet, inexhaustible seeping of water through soil, along ditches and down banks.
As we approached the junction with the road to Newcastle Emlyn, John spoke up.
‘Harry, I know we need to see Isaac Morgan, but it’s been a week since I’ve been into Mr Schofield’s office. I should go and pay my compliments to him. Feed him some tidbits to keep him happy.’
I smiled. John had changed since London; he was much more confident, more open. ‘Yes, do,’ I said. ‘Shall we meet at the Salutation at two o’clock? That will leave us enough time to get out to Morgan’s place and back in daylight.’
I was loath to accompany him into town and simply wait at the Salutation, so I decided to return to Glanteifi and beg lunch from Isabel Griffiths. My father would be in Cardigan on county business so I knew I would not risk his displeasure by appearing there, again, despite my continuing investigation. Besides, I felt we had achieved something of a rapprochement in finally talking about George. Certainly, there had been a sufficient thawing of relations to allow my father to suggest that, instead of constantly using livery nags, I should take Sara and her stablemate Seren with me when I returned to the Salutation the previous evening.
Now, with the scent of home in her nostrils, the little mare began to trot once we’d set foot on the drive but, before we came within sight of the house, I pulled her up and sat, looking – as best I could – through the trees and down the slope to the bend in the river.
The Teifi seemed swollen with recent rain and I knew there would be little white eddies here and there where the brown water caught on something beneath the surface and was whirled around before rushing on its way. I imagined twigs and leaves and other detritus snagged in the reeds at the water’s edge, pushed there by the swing of the river around its wide meander.
I jumped, startled by a sudden cry. A pheasant panicking its way into the air in the woods behind me, shrieking its foolish, tinplate cry. Davy had loved to go thrashing through the woods putting up pheasants and mocking their strangled alarm. He had called them the stupidest birds alive. Even more stupid than pigeons he’d say. At least pigeons’ve got the sense to come and steal grain off the yard.
The times we had spent in these woods, setting snares, looking for eggs, taking frogspawn out of a puddle, lying in a sunny patch watching little lizards bask and then flick away when they saw a hand move towards them. Davy had always lost interest in the eggs once we’d taken them home, leaving me to do the blowing and labelling and storing. Thrush. Woodpecker. Blackbird. Rook.
Likewise, once hunted down and brought home in triumph, the frogspawn failed to hold his attention until the bucket in the stableyard began to roil with tadpoles. Then he would spend whole afternoons taking out two at a time and poking them into races down one of the cobbled drain channels. The fact that they ended up wriggling to death in the mud and shit beyond the wall of the yard did not disturb him at all. As far as he was concerned most tadpoles died so it did not matter if he hastened the demise of a few. It was a pragmatism that was hard to argue with without seeming girlishly sentimental.
David Thomas.
Everything seemed to come back to him.
That spring, the spring when Margaret had died, the spring when Rebecca had woken into black-faced life, his letter had drawn me home, even though he must have known that I could do little to influence my father.
I knew you’d come home when I wrote to you about Beca threatening your father. I thought there’d be time enough for you to see you needed to clean up after yourself, then.
There was a question I had been asking myself since Ipswich; a question I kept, defiantly, answering in the negative. Now, it nagged at me again and I was no longer so sure of my answer.
Was it possible that Davy had written the threatening Rebecca letters to my father, himself, in order to force my return?
I had certainly found no justification for the urgency in his letter when I returned home. Rebecca had taken no actions against Glanteifi and, as far as I was aware, no further threats had been made.
But, supposing Davy had written the letters – what had been his motive for bringing me home? Was it possible that he was part of whatever plan Margaret had b
ecome embroiled in?
I had never stopped wondering why Davy had chosen to emigrate so suddenly.
Now, as I trotted Sara up the drive, I had to ask myself whether I was being wilfully blind; whether his emigration to New York was not very simply explained – as the flight of a murderer from the scene of his crime.
John
I’d lied to Harry. I wasn’t going to see Mr Schofield. I wanted to see David Thomas’s mother, Mari. Wanted to know why her son had gone to America.
My watch – Harry’s watch, I should say – read five minutes after eleven as we parted company. Almost three hours till we’d arranged to meet at the Salutation.
Plenty of time, even if I was going to have to put Seren in the hotel’s stables, like I would’ve done if I’d really been going to the office.
Edward Philips had told me where Mari lived – her cottage on the turnpike road to Cenarth would be an easy stroll from town. But the old man’d warned me that if I was set on talking to her, it’d be better to keep any good opinions of Harry to myself. ‘She’s very bitter against him. Blames him for her son going off to New York.’
‘Blames Harry? Why should she?’
‘Because that’s what she’s like – always looking for somebody to blame when things go against her.’
I also knew from Mr Philips that Mari was ill and not going out much. Still, it was a relief when she answered the door.