by Alis Hawkins
I took my coat off and hung it on the coat stand by the door. Harry’d given that coat to me. I know they look ugly compared to cut-away coats, he’d said, but they’re a lot warmer and more practical. London’s full of them. Mr Schofield’d raised his eyebrows at me the first morning I’d come in wearing it. All I’d had before was my ordinary jacket. Like every other working man in the world, if it was cold outside, I’d just got cold. Matter of fact, I’d been better off as a gwas bach – at least on a farm nobody cared if you wrapped yourself in sacks to keep warm because they were doing the same. But solicitors’ clerks couldn’t do that. Solicitors’ clerks had a position to maintain. And it often left us cold.
When I turned around, Schofield was staring at me. ‘And how, may a humble solicitor ask, are the coroner’s investigations proceeding?’
The Cardigan inspector of police has been antagonised, a doctor everybody thinks is a half-mad drunk has been employed and Harry Probert-Lloyd’s still got absolutely no idea who the corpse is.
The words ran into my head like floodwater over a threshold. And I might’ve said them, too, if it hadn’t been for that ‘humble solicitor’. As if I’d chosen Harry over him because I despised him. I’d’ve liked to know what choice he thought I’d had.
‘I think the investigation’s going well, thank you, Mr Schofield.’
The line between being polite and sucking up is so fine, sometimes, that you couldn’t rest a hair on it. And, at that moment, it felt as if I lived my whole life balancing as I walked along that damned line. But I was going to have to put that aside.
I took a breath to ask him for what I wanted. To say I don’t want to work with Mr Probert-Lloyd any more.I want to be your articled clerk. To have a future here as a solicitor. But then, in my head, I heard what he’d say. And who would pay for your articles, Mr Davies? What rich relative have you been hiding?
I had nobody to sponsor me. No rich kin. And, whatever I’d told Harry, I knew Mr Schofield would as soon give me the contents of his strong box as take me on without payment. So, I shut my mouth and let the air out through my nose.
Mr Schofield looked at me with that ‘Yes?’ look of his. He knew I’d been going to say something.
‘I expect there’s plenty for me to be getting on with?’ I said.
To my right I could see Peter, mouth open, ignoring the work in front of him and watching Old Schofield giving me the beady eye. I knew Peter like I knew the surface of my desk. Better than I wanted to. And he was waiting for something. What? Had the old man been complaining about me – about how willingly I’d gone off with Harry?
My palms itched. Was I going to get the sack?
‘Just come into the inner office for a moment, would you?’
Our desks in the front office were tall ones, designed for standing at or using a high stool but Mr Schofield’s desk in his private office was a low one. About an acre of inlaid leather top, it had, with expensive-looking things positioned carefully here and there for clients to see and be impressed by. Brass blotter. Fancy brass inkwell stand. One of those new steel-nibbed pens.
A delicately-made writing slope stood at one end of the desk, ready for him to use. But no papers, obviously. That might suggest he didn’t employ enough clerks.
I thought he’d leave me standing but he waved me to the client’s chair. That made me even more nervous.
Mr Schofield picked up the blotter and frowned at it. From what I could see, the paper was barely marked but he started sliding it out to put fresh in.
I waited.
‘Now. Tell me how the investigation is really progressing, John.’
I swallowed when I heard my Christian name. Mr Davies meant that everything was ticking along nicely, no nasty surprises in store. John … you never knew what was coming after that.
‘I hope you feel that I’m entitled to know,’ he said when I didn’t reply straight away. ‘Because, as you’ll no doubt be acutely aware, anything you do in the company of Mr Probert-Lloyd reflects on this office. On me. Therefore, whilst I understand that you have a duty of confidentiality, I hope you understand that you have an equal duty to me. Your employer.’
I was in trouble. He was going to make me say things I shouldn’t be telling him. He wouldn’t say my job depended on it but he didn’t need to. He was my employer and he was asking.
He took his specs off and pulled his polishing-handkerchief out of the desk’s top drawer. ‘So. How far have matters progressed?’
I looked at him, quickly, then away. He wasn’t keen on being eyeballed, Mr Schofield. Eyes on your work! But I could see he wasn’t going to be fobbed off.
‘Well, Mr Probert-Lloyd had assumed that, as he was meeting the jury on the beach, a proper inquest had been arranged. At The Ship Inn, at Tresaith. But the inn was locked up and nobody turned up except the jury. And the dead man hasn’t been identified, yet, so Mr Probert-Lloyd adjourned proceedings pending further investigations.’
Pending. A good lawyerly word. Mr Schofield would like pending.
‘I assume that the constabulary is involved? Mr Probert-Lloyd isn’t going to give us a repeat performance of his antics before Christmas, I hope?’
Mr Schofield had taken the magistrates’ line when Harry started looking into Margaret Jones’s death: that concerning himself with the fate of a dairymaid was unbecoming in a gentleman. And not in the public interest.
‘We went to see the inspector today,’ I said. It wasn’t a real answer to his question but it sounded like one.
Old Schofield looked at me. ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd is going to work with the constabulary, isn’t he? Not against them?’
Like he worked against the magistrates last year.
What could I say? I wasn’t supposed to be telling him any of this.
‘John?’
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd wants to leave no stone unturned.’ Surely he’d see that as a good thing in a coroner?
‘The whole county noticed his tendency to lift stones that should have been left in situ. As I recall, his actions brought the Rebeccas back into our midst.’
I wanted to tell him that, just because some men who’d ridden with Rebecca seven years ago had threatened Harry, it didn’t mean they’d been in our midst, but I knew better than to dare. That would be contradicting. One of the things Mr Schofield didn’t tolerate.
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd would be well advised to allow the police force to do what the ratepayers pay it to do and not interfere,’ he said.
But that was the trouble, wasn’t it? Harry wasn’t well advised. He wasn’t good at being advised at all.
‘One of the investigations he’s set in train,’ I said, carefully, ‘is nothing to do with the police. It’s something only the coroner can decide on.’
‘And that is?’
‘He’s asked for an autopsy examination to be carried out.’
Mr Schofield gave a dry little sniff. ‘Well, that, at least, seems prudent. It’s as well to leave the jury with no doubts. Otherwise anomalous verdicts are apt to be delivered.’
Like the verdict the jury’d delivered in the Margaret Jones inquest.The verdict that’d set Harry – and me – off on his investigations. No wonder Harry didn’t want to get this one wrong, he didn’t want somebody coming along and unpicking the decision his inquest came to.
‘Who has he asked to perform the autopsy?’
I knew I couldn’t hesitate. Mr Schofield would think I disapproved and he’d want to know why. And, anyway, I didn’t want to say anything against Reckitt. He might come across as odd, but I could see he knew exactly what he was talking about when it came to dead bodies.
‘Dr Benton Reckitt, from Cilgerran.’
‘Reckitt?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is he a fit person?’
A fit person. Not going to accuse Reckitt of being a drunk, was he? Not Mr Schofield. Too clever, too cautious.
‘It’s not my business to say, Mr Schofield. All I can say is that he seemed very compet
ent.’
‘Am I to understand that the post-mortem examination has already taken place?’
‘Yes. Mr Probert-Lloyd was keen to have it done as quickly as possible. Before the body’s moved to Cardigan workhouse.’
‘Why is he having it moved there?’
‘Mr Probert-Lloyd thinks more people’ll come and see the body, in Cardigan. See if they know the dead man.’
And they would come, no doubt about it. As soon as word went around, people’d come in droves just to see his face. To see how horrific it really was.
Mr Schofield didn’t so much purse his lips as purse his whole face. I knew what that look meant. He’s at it again, taking matters into his own wayward hands.
‘Does Mr Probert-Lloyd not feel that employing a man like Benton Reckitt might bring the coronership into disrepute? I’ve heard it said that he is not always sober.’
He stared at me, trying to force me to agree. Perhaps I should have. Just to keep him sweet. But the truth was, Reckitt hadn’t been drunk. ‘I can only speak from the evidence of my own eyes, Mr Schofield. He seemed very competent.’ I sat there and let Old Schofield stare at me, eyes down so at least I’d avoid being accused of insolence.
‘If Mr Probert-Lloyd is in earnest about standing for election to the post of coroner,’ Mr Schofield was speaking in his listen-to-me-carefully-because-this-is-for-your-own-good tone, ‘I cannot help but feel that he is going about it in an entirely misguided way.’
I flicked my eyes up. He was still staring at me. Suddenly I hated him. I hated him and I hated Harry bloody Probert-Lloyd. Neither of them was going to give me what I wanted. They both droned on about having my best interests at heart, but neither of them was prepared to give me what I deserved.
‘People notice things you see, John. They will notice his choice of medical advisor and will draw their own conclusions about those in whom he puts his confidence. They will notice his tendency to keep the constabulary at arm’s length and they will conclude that he is a law unto himself.’
‘But, as I understand it, Mr Schofield, the coroner is a law unto himself.’
Why in God’s name had I said that? Why had I suddenly jumped down on Harry’s side of the fence and stood there with both feet planted, mouth open, singing like a stupid bird? Just for the moment’s thrill of crossing Old Schofield?
‘Explain.’ The word could’ve frozen water.
‘Well, obviously,’ I stammered, ‘nobody’s literally a law unto himself. What I mean is, coroners don’t have to be guided by the police. They’re entitled to make their own investigations. In fact, they’re required to do that. Aren’t they?’
‘Required to. That’s what Mr Probert-Lloyd thinks, is it?’
I took a deep breath. Now that I found myself on this side of the fence, it was probably as well not to look weak by trying to climb back up. ‘Yes, Mr Schofield. I believe it is.’
The way he looked at me, then, I felt like one of those dead butterflies stretched out and pinned under glass. ‘I must counsel you to be very careful, John Davies. Mr Henry Probert-Lloyd is far from assured of being elected to the post of coroner. Very far. His recent conduct won him few friends amongst those who will vote in that election.’ He paused, rocking his newly-filled blotter between us, to let his words sink into my unwise mind. ‘You may find that it is not entirely beneficial to your future to fall in behind his standard. There is such a thing as taint by association.’
Why hadn’t I kept my mouth shut? I’d never’ve said any of that before I met Harry. He’d given me what my father would have called ideas above my station.
And, now, those ideas had landed me in the shit. Right up to my armpits.
Harry
The embers had burned to ash in the grate and I was contemplating going up early to bed to see if sleep would come. Nights were not so bad in summer when I could be out and about in the long evenings but now, in the January dark, I was denied distraction and confined with my own thoughts.
Since my enforced return to Cardiganshire, it had occurred to me, more than once, that I should move into town, so that there would be readily-available society of an evening. But, without an independent income, such a move was impossible.
My friend Gus, whom I had last seen in December, when John and I had begged a night’s accommodation at his family’s London home, had suggested – only partly in jest – that I should look for a wife.
Who’d marry a blind man, Gus?
An ugly woman in search of a rich husband, obviously!
Sadly, there was more than a grain of truth in his quip. My position as heir to Glanteifi made me attractive to the ambitious parents of girls without fortune. Some of them – the buck-toothed or hirsute – might be grateful for a blind man, even if he did aspire to spending his time investigating unexplained deaths. But I did not want to be married for my position. Nor, if I was honest, did I wish to be pitied for my wife.
I stood up, determined to shake off such thoughts but the surrounding darkness pressed in on me from every corner. The candles reflected in the mirror over the mantelpiece seemed as feeble in the gloom as I felt. Feeble and ineffectual.
I wished that it were possible to have gas lamps installed at Glanteifi. The lights John and I had seen at Gus’s London home had given night almost the appearance of day, and the thought of spending my evenings surrounded by such brilliance, even if I could not read by it, had been astonishing. But, in order to install gas lighting, it would be necessary to live in a town with a gasworks. Marooned here at Glanteifi by my financial circumstances, I seemed destined to spend my evenings sunk in gloom.
Perhaps I should become a solicitor, after all.
I was just beginning to give serious consideration to the thought when a knock at the library door made me jump.
‘Beg pardon, Mr Harry, but Mrs Griffiths says did you know a letter arrived for you today and would you like her to come and read it?’
I left my dreary mood in the library and went to find Isabel Griffiths, Glanteifi’s housekeeper, in her little sitting room at the back of the house.
‘Thank you, Lizzie-Ann,’ I said, as the maid who had lit my way retired quietly back to the kitchen where the rest of the servants would be sitting in the warm. All apart from Moyes, our butler. He left his staff to pass their evenings in Welsh while he sat in the pantry reading what my father liked to call ‘improving literature’.
All the way from the library, I schooled myself to expect a letter from Gus, or – just possibly – some kind of communication relating to the adjourned inquest. I did not want to allow myself to think that it might, already, be from Lydia.
Lydia Howell and I had become acquainted when I travelled to Ipswich during the course of my investigations into Margaret Jones’s death. Prior to that, we had met only briefly, in circumstances both of us refrained from referring to in our letters. Since the beginning of January, we had corresponded more and more often, and I had made increasingly frequent visits to Mrs Griffiths’s sitting room.
‘Describe your writing apparatus for me,’ Lydia had asked in one of her early letters. ‘I imagine, from the even spacing of the lines, that a ruler is involved?’
‘It’s a frame,’ I had written back, ‘whose interior dimensions are the exact size of a standard letter-sheet. I insert the paper, wind up a central ruler which operates on a ratchet system so that each turn of the knobs on either end moves the ruler down one line, and begin writing. The frame shows me where to start and stop and the ruler keeps my writing even.’
In truth, I was afraid that it gave my hand no more than the semblance of regularity. Though I worked hard on my letter-formation, sometimes the words I wrote were crushed, one against another, whilst at other times they were so spaced out that they appeared to want nothing to do with each other. I knew that to be the case because that was exactly what Lydia had written.
‘I am not asking you to remedy it,’ she had written. ‘I’m merely telling you because you asked and be
cause I find it rather endearing.’
Endearing.
Very quickly our correspondence had begun to include such sentimental terms, though we were careful to limit ourselves somewhat. Miss Howell might be able to read my words in private but I did not enjoy the same luxury.
‘Another letter from the young lady in Ipswich,’ Mrs Griffiths said. I could hear her trying to keep a straight face and failing. ‘You must be a fascinating correspondent, Harry.’
On my return from my first term at school, our housekeeper had tried to call me Mr Henry, and to speak English to me as she did to my father. But my thirteen-year-old self, appalled to think that I was no longer the boy who had been in and out of the servants’ part of the house all my life, eating leftovers, getting under feet and being told off, had refused to respond. Eventually, Mrs Griffiths had relented, reverting to Welsh and calling me Harry, and I had insisted that she do so ever since. But Isabel Griffiths knew her place and she thought she knew mine, too, which was one more reason to dread the day I became squire of Glanteifi; I did not want to be ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd’ to her.
I lowered myself into the visitor’s chair beside the room’s little fireplace. Without asking, Mrs Griffiths poured tea and handed me a cup and saucer. I believe she felt that it would be easier for me to have my hands occupied while she read. In Isabel Griffiths’s world, men did not passively receive, not unless they were in their dotage. Even if all I did was drink a cup of tea, something of the natural order was maintained.