by Alis Hawkins
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Map
Glossary of Welsh Terms
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Acknowledgements
Copyright
In Two Minds
Alis Hawkins
For Edwina
Glossary of Welsh terms
‘ngwas i: (colloquially) my lad
gwas bach: literally ‘little servant’. A term reserved for the youngest or most junior servants.
Banc Yr Eithin: gorse bank
tŷ unnos: literally ‘one-night house’
tai unnos: the plural form of tŷ unnos
crachach: gentry or upper classes
Duw: God
smwglin: a dockside drinking den where ale was brewed without a licence and smuggled spirits were sold.
betgwn: the outer garment of most Cardiganshire working women in the nineteenth century. It featured a tight, low-cut bodice and a long back, sometimes gathered up into a ‘tail’. It would have been worn over a blouse and petticoats with an apron over the top.
Mamgu: grandmother
Arglwydd annwyl: Dear Lord
bara brith: a light fruitcake or tea loaf
’machgen i: my boy
trist: sad
hiraeth: a longing for times or places past
Part One
Harry
Is there any argument more futile than one with an aged parent? The mere fact that you persist in opposing them simply reinforces their poor opinion of you.
‘This is preposterous, Henry,’ my father announced. ‘How can you even think of agreeing? I cannot conceive of Pomfrey’s suggesting such a thing.’
‘Not just Pomfrey. All the county magistrates.’
A brief, fraught silence. ‘Not so,’ my father said. ‘There was one member of the bench who was not consulted.’
I clenched my jaw on the urge to roar with frustration. ‘They couldn’t very well make you a party to the discussions, could they? I say Probert-Lloyd –’ I put on the exaggeratedly English tones of a Welsh squire – ‘what d’you say to your son standing in for Bowen pro tem? Like a terrier with a rat in that business of the Jones girl’s bones before Christmas – good coroner material, eh?’
No. As my efforts to discover the truth behind Margaret Jones’s death had demonstrated, the qualities that made a good death investigator were not entirely those of a gentleman.
‘And,’ I threw any remaining caution to the winds, ‘however much you fail to conceive of it, the magistrates’ purpose could not, in fact, be clearer. Leighton Bowen is dying and the county is in need of a coroner. Every member of the bench but you sees that I am eminently qualified to do the job.’
My father leaned towards me over his desk. ‘Do they know you’re almost blind?’
I resisted the temptation to lean forwards in my turn and meet him, nose to nose, across the desk. Apart from not wishing to give him the satisfaction of seeing that I was provoked, at such close range he would vanish completely into the whirlpool of my peculiar blindness. ‘My sight is irrelevant. What they know is that I succeeded in disproving the inquest jury’s ludicrous verdict when nobody else was even prepared to look at Margaret’s death.’
He pulled back as if, in mentioning her name, I had committed a regrettable faux pas. Only he and I knew quite how embarrassing my investigations into Margaret Jones’s death might have proved to our family.
I glared ineffectually into the blank whirl that hid his face from me. Was he attempting to stare me into submission as he had done when I was a boy? Failing sight did not confer many advantages, but at least it meant that I was immune to that particular form of intimidation.
‘Harry, why must you insist on behaving as if your faculties were unimpaired?’ His tone surprised me – sounding almost conciliatory. ‘First there was all that nonsense about becoming a solicitor and now this.’
In other words: why won’t you stop being so stubborn, learn your duties as my heir and settle down as squire-in-waiting?
‘I’m not behaving as if I’m unimpaired as you so tactfully put it. I made it clear to Pomfrey that, my sight being as it is, I’d need an assistant. We’ve agreed that I will be allowed to appoint my own coroner’s officer.’
‘By which you mean Charles Schofield’s clerk, I assume?’
‘John Davies is an ideal assistant. He’s observant, discreet and doesn’t need to be told anything twice.’
‘It’s not his aptitude that concerns me. Do you not see how showing preference for somebody like Davies, valuing him above your peers, will affect your place in society?’
‘I fail to see how having John as my assistant shows a preference for him. Or how the gentlemen of Cardiganshire can feel themselves slighted by his appointment.’
My father sighed. ‘One day, Glanteifi will be yours. Don’t make your becoming its master impossible.’
* * *
I rode to Charles Schofield’s office through a clear January afternoon without wind or cloud, nothing overhead but a fading blue of frosty purity. The beauty of the day should have cheered me but, as I contended with a lingering fury with my father and a growing apprehension at the prospect of speaking to John’s employer, my spirits remained anything but cheery.
In an attempt to master my mood, I turned my attention to the road ahead and tried to focus on what I could make out.
You’ll find you become better at perceiving things you would not previously have noticed, my eye doctor had told me. You’ll learn how to make use of your remaining vision. And he was right; despite the fact that one’s peripheral vision is not designed to register detail, I was learning how to interpret the tantalising, sidelong view it offered. The problem was, I was not learning quickly enough. Much of my seeing now depended upon guesswork and familiarity; anything new was difficult to make out until I was very close to it.
I knew this road well but that did nothing to lift my mood. Everything around me – winter fields, hedges, ditches, leaf-bare trees, even the stretch of the cold brown Teifi away down the bank to my right – belonged to my father’s estate, an inheritance and a responsibility I had never wanted, but which blindness seemed to have made inevitable.
Until today.
The magistrates’ request that I become Acting Coroner for the Teifi Valley held out the possibility of a different future. Unpaid and ad hoc the office of coroner might be but, if I could secure it permanently, the job would offer independent occupation and a potential escape from the combined exigencies of filial duty and blindness. As coroner, I would no longer be a mere footman to the status quo, standing in wait behind my father, slipping – when the time came – into his warm space on the magistrates’ bench, a prospect that was about as appealing as contemplating my own annihilation.
What cause does the jury find for the demise of this man?
He was stifled to death by gentility.
No. Whatever objections my father might raise, I was not prepared to play the docile squireling. Not while an alternative presented itself.
But, if I was to prove myself a credible coroner, securing John Davies as my coroner’s officer was essential.
John
When Harry walked into Mr Schofield’s office, I didn’t know whether to be glad or furious. At last! Where had he been?
Christmas had come and gone. Then the New Year. Then most of January. What had happened to that new beginning he’d talked about when we’d been working together? That new start in Cardiganshire as a solicitor who needed the right kind of clerk?
I’d thought he was better than that. Dangling a job in front of a man and then disappearing for weeks on end.
Old
Schofield stood up as Harry came in but, from the look on his face, I could tell he wished he hadn’t. Force of habit though, isn’t it, standing for the gentry? Mind you, Harry’s gentility was questionable these days. In Newcastle Emlyn, anyway. All that grubbing about after a dead dairymaid. Not to mention speaking Welsh like a farm boy instead of honking English up his nose like the rest of the local crachach.
I stared at him. He was wearing one of those new Mackintosh coats that they advertised in the illustrated papers – do I have to say any more? About as smart as the seat of a navvy’s trousers.
Mr Schofield cleared his throat in a way he probably thought was meaningful – though God alone knows what the meaning was – and he and Harry did the ‘how’s the family and can you believe it’s eighteen fifty-one, where’s the time going?’ dance for a bit. Then – finally – Harry got round to what he’d come for.
‘I’m afraid it’s becoming an unfortunate habit of mine, Mr Schofield, to come and ask you to indulge me with the services of Mr Davies.’
Indulge him? That didn’t sound as if he’d come to offer me a job.
‘Shall we go into my office, Mr Probert-Lloyd? We can speak more privately there.’
I waited for Harry to insist on me coming as well. But he didn’t. Just followed Old Schofield like a lamb.
Peter was watching me from the other clerk’s desk. Waiting to see what I’d do.
‘Privately be damned.’ I slid off my stool, tiptoed over, and put my ear to the office door. Had to be careful not to touch it – it didn’t fit very well and rattled on the catch if you put so much as a fingertip to it.
Harry was speaking loudly and distinctly. He knew a door with gaps round the frame when he heard it close behind him.
‘What you grinning at?’ Peter wanted to know. I shushed him and listened to what Harry was telling Mr Schofield.
So, Bowen the coroner was ill. That was no surprise. At the inquest before Christmas he’d looked as if he might drop dead in front of everybody. Grey, he’d been. Shrunk-looking.
Coroner’s election in due course. Obviously.
Need for stand-in now. Body on Tresaith beach, dumped with a shipment of limestone. For obvious reasons, need for a suitable assistant.
A body on the beach. Drowned then?
Naked too, I heard through the door. As to drowning, Harry couldn’t say.
So. A ‘suitable assistant’. Harry wasn’t here to offer me a job as his solicitor’s clerk, then. I wasn’t going to be making the bargain I’d been rehearsing for the better part of two months in my mind. Yes,I’ll be your clerk but you have to article me.
Old Schofield was speaking again.
How long would you need Mr Davies for, do you think?
A week or so.
We weren’t rushed off our feet. We’d get busier towards Lady Day with new contracts and agreements and so on but just now things were quiet. Mind, old Schofield didn’t like giving something for nothing. And his silence must’ve told Harry that.
I will, of course, recompense you. I wouldn’t expect you to pay John for the time he’s spending with me.
Some mumbly muttering then. Probably my employer having his cake and eating it. Trying to make out he didn’t need the money without actually turning it down. But what I hadn’t heard him say was yes.
Harry upped the stakes. Said he’d be standing for election in due course. To be the coroner. Officially.
That’d make old Schofield sit up and take notice, for sure. Because once you’d been elected as one thing, other positions were easier to be elected to. As long as you didn’t make a pig’s ear of it, of course.
I could almost hear the cogs going round in Mr Schofield’s head. Association with a member of parliament…
Perhaps, then, we should discuss this with the young man himself.
I was back on my stool, specs off to polish them so Mr Schofield didn’t wonder why my pen was dry, by the time he called me through.
Harry’s eyes were turned away slightly, when I went in, so that he could see me. Could see I was there, at any rate. Not much more. Which was why he needed me, of course.
When the question came, what I really wanted was to talk to Harry by himself. To ask him what his plans were. He owed me that. But Mr Schofield wasn’t going to take himself off so I could speak to Harry like an equal.
‘Well boy? What’s your answer – will you help Mr Probert-Lloyd for a few days?’
I wanted to, God knows I did. After working with Harry, life in the office was even duller than before. Ruling lines a third of an inch apart. Copying wills and deeds and affidavits in a fair hand. Keeping the fire in and filling inkwells. Watching people walking up and down the hill outside the window. It was enough to make you want to gnaw your own arm off.
‘Won’t it leave you short-handed here, Mr Schofield?’
The old man gave me his ‘you’re a smarmy little shit but you’re my smarmy little shit’ smile. ‘As Mr Probert-Lloyd values your assistance so highly, I’m sure we can spare you.’
I looked at Harry but his face was blank. I sometimes wondered whether not being able to see other people’s expressions made him forget to pay attention to his own.
He had nobody else to turn to, I knew that. But if I was going to work for him again, there was going to have to be an understanding about my future. Because I did not intend to stay in Mr Schofield’s office for the rest of my life.
‘If you’re sure, Mr Schofield,’ I said. ‘I’d be glad to.’
Harry
Given the need for a swift response to the suspicious death on the coast, Pomfrey, the magistrate, had arranged for a jury to be assembled from the local list and convened on Tresaith beach at ten the following morning, together with the man who had discovered the corpse. ‘Get the corpse identified, instruct the jury as you see fit, and everybody’ll be satisfied,’ Pomfrey had said.
There was an inn on the beach where the proceedings could be held and I assumed that its keeper would have disseminated news of the proceedings so as to draw a good, beer-drinking crowd.
But as our horses picked their way down the hillside overlooking the little bay, John confirmed my impression that there was not a soul to be seen. ‘Perhaps they’re in the The Ship,’ he said. ‘Or the outhouse. You said that’s where the body’d been put?’
Pomfrey had deplored the corpse’s being lodged in a lean-to beer store, but, as the only buildings overlooking the sandy beach were a small cottage and The Ship Inn, there had been little choice.
‘Actually,’ I admitted, ‘it’ll suit me if we’re here before the jury. We’ll be able to take a preliminary view of the body in peace. Or rather,’ I forced a grin, ‘you can view it and tell me what you see.’
Somewhat disquietingly, however, on reaching the beach we found The Ship locked and deserted.
‘Are you sure this is the time you agreed with Mr Pomfrey?’ John asked.
‘Quite sure. But, even if we were early, surely there’d be somebody here? Inquests usually mean good business.’
We tried the tiny cottage, which was set into the hillside behind two sea-facing limekilns. Though not locked, it, too, was unoccupied.
‘If this is the lime burner’s house,’ I said, ‘he’s probably gone elsewhere for work till the season starts again.’ Very little lime was burned along the coast in the winter months, the burners confining their activities to the times when building and agricultural lime was in demand.
‘He’s got plenty of limestone waiting for him,’ John said. ‘I don’t know if you saw it but there’s a huge pile of the stuff above the high tide line. Must be fifty tons or more.’
I nodded, though, as it happened, I had not seen it. ‘Let’s see if the outhouse is open,’ I said. ‘If not, we’ll have to break in.’
John turned towards the inn. ‘Who owns the place?’
‘I can’t remember his name, but he’s a boat builder – or was, anyway. Hence The Ship. When I last came here, there was a sma
ck being built on the beach.’
‘No sign of any building now. The only boat here looks like it belongs to the lime burner.’ He waved his hand vaguely towards the cottage beyond the limekilns, from which I inferred that the dark shape standing against the gable end was a rowing boat.
We walked to the outhouse. It stood at the back of the inn, tucked into the hillside, its only door facing north. With no fire inside, the lean-to would be constantly cold – suitable for the preservation of both beer and dead bodies.
‘John.’
He turned. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s not going to be very pleasant.’ I had shared lodgings in London with Henry Gray, a student surgeon, who had insisted on dragging me to the mortuary in order to see a man dissected. It had been both fascinating and horrible.
‘All right.’ He moved towards the door, and I heard the thumb-latch click down. ‘At least it’s open.’
As we walked into the outhouse, I stumbled, suddenly deprived of vision. I was almost truly blind in dim light, and the small room had no windows. Standing aside so as to make the best use of the light coming through the door, I looked around as best I could. The object of our interest was immediately obvious – a pale-draped shape that lay on some kind of trestle table opposite the doorway.
‘What have they covered him with?’ I asked.
‘Sailcloth. Probably trying to keep the rats off. Wouldn’t’ve stopped them for long, mind. Got teeth like needles, rats have.’
He was speaking more quickly than usual. ‘Would you rather wait for the constable and the jury?’ I asked.