by Alis Hawkins
‘You see those sheep?’ he asked, suddenly.
I peered into the rain. There was a flock of ragged ewes on the other side of Morgan’s farm lane. ‘What about them?’
‘Black faces or white?’
‘Black.’
‘Thought so but I couldn’t be sure. The sheep’s head on the ceffyl pren that was left for me was black.’
‘Doesn’t prove anything.’
‘I know. But still.’
I rubbed my hands together to try and dry them. The black-faced sheep might mean that Isaac Morgan was behind the ceffyl pren. But, then again, they might just be sheep.
We clopped over the brow of the hill and Morgan’s farmyard came into view. ‘Not a bad-looking place,’ I told Harry. ‘House is a decent size, the windows have all got glass in them and there’s a couple of windows in the eaves, too.’
Harry nodded. Windows like that meant that Morgan had gone to the trouble and expense of putting boards over the kitchen to make a second storey. Might even have gone as far as raising the roofline. Not a hand-to-mouth tenant.
‘And the roof’s tiles, not thatch,’ I told him. ‘Barns and byres look well-kept too.’
‘Any sign of anybody around?’ Harry asked.
My mouth was open to say no when I saw a boy coming out of one of the outbuildings.
‘Hey!’ I called out to him. ‘We’re here to see Isaac Morgan – is he here?’
The boy stopped where he stood. He took in our horses and clothes, turned on his heel and went back into the shed. A few moments later a middle-aged man appeared.
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd. Good day to you.’ Polite. In English. I stared at his face. No sign of any lingering black streaks. Was that the voice from last night? With him speaking in English, I couldn’t be sure.
‘Good morning, Mr Morgan.’ Harry. Just as polite but in Welsh. ‘May we have a few minutes of your time?’
Isaac Morgan didn’t answer straight away so Harry pushed him along. ‘I’m sorry if anything about me seems odd to you. You may have heard a rumour that my sight is failing. It’s quite true. I’m going blind.’
I saw Morgan’s embarrassment and I realised Harry’d done it on purpose. Announcing his blindness put Morgan on the wrong foot, made him uncomfortable. Especially if he’d been leader last night. Hopefully, now, he’d be thinking about all the humiliations he’d dished out to a blind man.
‘Come inside,’ Morgan said. Invitation or instruction? The way he said it, it was hard to tell. He turned to the boy who was standing on the threshold of the barn, watching us. ‘Don’t stand there like a simpleton! Come and hold the horses.’
We followed him into the house. His wife scurried in through the door ahead of us and swung the kettle over the fire. ‘You’ll take some tea with us, Mr Probert-Lloyd, Mr…?’
‘John Davies,’ I said.
‘Mr Davies – you’ll have some tea?’
‘Thank you, Mrs Morgan,’ Harry said, ‘you’re very kind.’ We took seats on the settle at the side of the fire.
‘Go and finish your work,’ Morgan snapped at his wife. ‘The water’ll be a few minutes yet and the gentlemen don’t want you hovering.’
She went.
‘I won’t waste your time or ours, Mr Morgan,’ Harry said. ‘I expect you know why we’re here?’
I hoped Morgan was pissing himself with fear that Harry’d say he was going to be up before the bench for what he’d done last night. But if he was, it didn’t show. He just shook his head, eyes wary. ‘No.’
‘I’m looking into the murder of Margaret Jones.’
Morgan blinked. Then, as if he couldn’t help it, he looked at me. He was holding something in but I couldn’t’ve sworn as to exactly what. Shock, fear, anger?
‘There wasn’t a murder,’ he said, eyes back on Harry. ‘They said. At the inquest. Accidental death.’
And then I knew. Without a doubt. It had been Isaac Morgan the previous night. I could hear the words he’d used.
This is where God saw fit to bury her and take her life. The jury brought in an honest verdict. Accidental death.
Harry’s tone didn’t change. ‘I don’t believe that. I believe the jury was intimidated into bringing in that verdict.’
Morgan grunted, but his eyes never left Harry’s face.
‘We know there was a group of men that broke with Nathaniel Howell’s Rebeccas,’ Harry said.
Morgan wasn’t surprised. I was watching.
‘We also know that they paid a visit to Margaret Jones – to warn her off. And we know you were there – that you rode with that band so that you could restrain them and so that you could report back to Nathaniel Howell.’
Harry was ignoring what Matt Evans had told me about Morgan being the leader of the group. Why? Keeping the truth in reserve in case he needed to threaten Morgan with it? Or just playing a careful game?
‘And we know that there was some kind of plan that involved Margaret Jones.’
He made a point of that ‘know’. He knew Morgan had been our accuser last night, too. ‘We believe that, whatever that plan was, Margaret Jones died because of it.’
Morgan moved towards the fire and nudged the kettle with his foot. As if he could bring it to the boil quicker, give us our tea and get us away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr Probert-Lloyd.’
‘You’re saying you didn’t know about the plan?’
‘I didn’t know about any of it. I don’t know where you got the idea that I went out with Rebecca.’
‘Nathaniel Howell told us,’ Harry said. ‘Or rather, Lydia Howell did.’
Harry was goading him. And there were no henchmen, no surrounding dark to escape into, here. Morgan’s eyes flicked towards me. Ha! I thought. Not so cocky now, are you, you bastard?
‘We don’t want to make trouble for you,’ Harry said, ‘or for anybody who followed the Reverend Howell. We’re only interested in whoever killed Margaret Jones.’ He was dangling a carrot. Nobody ever needs to know. Not about Lydia. Not about last night.
Morgan stared at him, then at me. ‘Nobody killed Margaret Jones. It was an accident. And, whatever the person calling themself Nathaniel Howell says, I don’t know anything about Rebecca, either. If a person is wicked enough to deceive us all in that way, I’m surprised you believe a single word that comes out of their mouth.’
Behind Morgan, I saw a flutter of something in the open doorway. Something grey, near the floor. Mrs Morgan’s apron. She was standing there, just out of sight, listening.
‘Mr Morgan—’
‘I’ve got nothing more to say,’ Morgan stood up. ‘You’ll find nobody who’ll stand in front of a magistrate and say that I rode with Rebecca. And if you bring that person back from England and she stands at an inquest and tells her lies, do you think anybody’s going to believe her after what she did?’
He laid hold of the hat that he’d taken off as he came indoors and stuck it back on his head. ‘I’ll send my wife in to make the tea. She’ll like to have news from you for a few minutes, I’m sure.’
‘Mr Morgan—’
I put my hand on Harry’s arm, making him look round at me, as Morgan went out of the door. ‘His wife was listening,’ I hissed. ‘She might know something.’
Almost before I’d finished speaking, Mrs Morgan was in and scurrying towards the fireplace.
‘Oh, look at the kettle boiling away there and none of you men taking any notice of it!’ She swung it off the fire and, with it still on the hook, tipped its spout into the teapot. Her eyes flicked to me, then to the door. I went and peered out. Morgan was going back to the barn he’d come out of.
I turned back, I cocked my chin at her. What have you got to tell us?
‘We’ll have to be quick,’ she said. ‘He won’t like it if you’re here too long.’ She reached for milk and cups, talking as she went. ‘He’s been worried ever since you went to see Stephen Parry. Our eldest girl’s maid-of-all work there. I didn’t want her to go, Pa
rry’s known to be very free with his fists but my husband said he’d deal with that.’ She glanced at me. ‘Anyway, she heard you talking to Parry. Said he was beside himself. A fire at his shop and he’d’ve been in the workhouse. Him and his children. He was terrified that whoever burned that ceffyl pren in his yard would hear that you’d been talking to him and they’d come back and finish the job.’
‘Did Parry know who sent him that threatening letter?’ Harry kept his voice low to match hers.
‘No. But it wasn’t my husband. He can read but he can’t write.’
‘A gang of men threatened me and Mr Davies, last night. Did your husband go out, Mrs Morgan?’
She shook her head. ‘I can’t say about last night. But I know he’s been worrying himself into the grave about a visit from you.’
Her eyes flicked back to the still-open door. ‘He can keep telling you he doesn’t know anything till he hasn’t got a breath in his body,’ she said, urgently. ‘But it’s not true! He knows what happened to Margaret Jones!’
‘How?’ I asked. ‘Did he—’
‘She came here,’ Mrs Morgan said, cutting off my accusation, ‘to tell my husband that it was all lies – what people were saying about her. She asked him to help her.’
‘And what did he do?’ Harry asked.
‘Sent her away with a flea in her ear. Said she might be able to charm young men who kept their sense in their trousers but she couldn’t charm him.’ Eyes on the door, she cut him off before he could ask another question. ‘Then somebody else came here. A man.’ She shook her head at a question we hadn’t asked. ‘I don’t know his name. I’d seen him at Treforgan chapel a few times but he was just one of the young men and I didn’t bother with them. Anyway, he came here one day shouting for Isaac.’
She poured the tea. Her hand was shaking. ‘I was pulling weeds in the garden behind the wall out there,’ she nodded at one end of the house and I remembered seeing a chest-high wall that would keep the wind and the animals out of the family’s vegetables, ‘and he didn’t see me. Isaac was in the yard and he came as soon as he heard his name being shouted. They didn’t go in the house because the children were in there – they had the chicken pox that summer – so they just stood there on the other side of the wall. I could hear every word.’
Before saying anything more, Mrs Morgan went to the door again and looked out.
‘He was very angry.’ She turned back to us. ‘Giving my husband the blame for something.’
Her teacup rattled as she picked it up.
‘He was shouting at Isaac. Said he’d gone too far. I don’t know what you said to the poor girl he said – and those were his exact words, Mr Probert-Lloyd I remember them, clear as day – I don’t know what you said to the poor girl, but you went too far.’
I looked over at Harry. His face was giving nothing away.
‘He said that, the night before, he’d been to see Margaret Jones but she wasn’t there. He’d been walking home through the Alltddu and stopped under the trees for a few minutes to shelter from the rain. And do you know what I saw, Isaac Morgan? he said.’ Mrs Morgan’s voice dropped as she realised that she’d almost been shouting. ‘Do you know what I saw?’
I could feel my heart going in my chest: run-run, run-run, run-run.
‘I saw her hanging there, from a tree. Margaret Jones. Dead. You frightened her into that, Isaac Morgan he said. You drove her to take her own life.’
I stared at her.
‘That’s what happened to Margaret Jones, Mr Probert-Lloyd. My husband and his Rebeccas drove her to despair. So she killed herself. You don’t know how that’s been weighing on my conscience all these years. Every time the minister preached about not keeping secrets it felt like he was pointing a finger right at me!’
She was quivering. She believed that what she’d just told us was the truth and she was glad to get it off her chest. But I knew that whoever came here that day had been telling a pack of lies.
Mrs Morgan was waiting for something from Harry. ‘My husband isn’t a bad man, Mr Probert-Lloyd. He didn’t mean for her to do away with herself. He would never do anything like that—’
‘What did he say next, Mrs Morgan?’ Harry asked. ‘The man who came to see your husband? What did he do when he found Margaret Jones hanging there?’
Again, Mrs Morgan’s eyes were on the door. I could tell she wanted to get up and look again, to check that her husband couldn’t hear what she was telling us. But she stayed where she was. ‘He said he cut her down and buried her, there, in the woods. In a hole under a tree.’
Harry didn’t answer straight away. He looked as if he was seeing it all in his mind’s eye. ‘And then?’ he asked, eventually. ‘Did it all stop? The riding out to threaten young women?’ His voice was pulled in tight.
‘Oh yes. There was no more after that. But that wasn’t why he’d come. Whoever he was. He wasn’t here to warn my husband – he wanted something.’
‘What?’
‘He said he was in danger. Somebody’d seen him burying her. A boy.’
My heart had been running before. Now it started to sprint. So hard it hurt.
I’ve seen you boy and I’ll know you again! Say nothing, boy, or I’ll kill you. I’ll find you and kill you!
‘What boy?’ Harry asked.
‘He didn’t know him – it was too dark to see. But the boy had seen what he was doing.’
Harry wasn’t interested in the boy. ‘What did this man want your husband to do, Mrs Morgan?’
‘He wanted help to get away. So that, if the boy went to the magistrates, he’d be safe.’
‘And did your husband help him?’
‘Yes. He said he’d pay for his ticket to America.’
Harry
Mrs Morgan’s account of what had happened filled me with self-loathing because, whatever Isaac Morgan and his renegade Rebeccas had done to make Margaret despair, I knew that I had done ten times worse.
As we rode away, the wind buffeting us like the shoves of a hostile crowd, I felt like a lunatic doused in cold water to bring him to his senses. The past clung to me with all the discomfort of wet clothing and I did not know which way to turn.
Was my despair obvious? I know that, when he spoke, John’s voice seemed forced. ‘Isaac Morgan might want to convince us there was no plan but I’ll be surprised if Rachel Ellis agrees.’
Surely he could not believe we still had more to discover?
‘What’s to be gained in speaking to Rachel? There was no plan. Margaret killed herself.’
‘No!’
I turned towards him, my gaze drawn by his vehemence, and he disappeared into the whirlpool.
‘There was a plan! I know there was.’
He sounded like a boy desperate to avoid a beating. ‘You put that much faith in Matthew Tregorlais’s version of events?’
‘More than I do in David Thomas’s—’
‘You never knew David Thomas!’ My words – a roar of anguish – silenced him. What was he doing? Looking away in embarrassment? Watching me with pity? God, how I loathed not being able to see what people were thinking!
‘Don’t do that!’ I shouted, causing Sara to throw her head up in alarm, jerking the reins in my hands. ‘Don’t just stop speaking! Dear God, I never knew what a weapon silence could be until I met you!’ I shut my mouth, grinding my teeth to stop any further petulance escaping.
When he answered, John’s voice was unsteady. ‘I may not have known David Thomas, but I do believe there was a plan. And I believe that Margaret Jones was killed because of it.’
‘She wasn’t killed! She committed suicide!’
‘So David Thomas said! You agree that it was him – the man who went to see Morgan?’
‘He certainly went to America.’
‘Yes, and all of a sudden, according to Edward Philips. From what he said, David Thomas’d never so much as mentioned emigrating. Then, suddenly, he was off!’
Was he waiting for me to tel
l him that was not true, that Davy had had a long-cherished plan to emigrate?
‘I don’t think the notion of Margaret Jones hanging herself fits with what we know,’ he insisted.
Without meaning to, I had pulled Sara up, and Seren had stopped at her side. Though I could see little of the landscape, three counties were laid out below us and the wind that had swept over the Irish Sea and up the Vale of Teifi rushed at the slopes of Moelfryn as if to repel us.
And yet, despite the cold and the despair that had threatened to overwhelm me a minute before, John’s words had sparked a tiny lick of hope.
‘What do you mean it doesn’t fit with what we know?’
‘Well, to begin with, if she meant to take her own life, why did she take all her belongings with her? Why not leave them for Rachel? She’d’ve known how useful they’d be to her.’
I did not want to think about Margaret packing her meagre possessions in her shawl, leaving the loft for the last time. I wanted to knock him down for his cool, analytical tone. Instead, I nudged Sara into motion once more.