by Alis Hawkins
‘Did Jenkyn Hughes actually tell you that he was knifed by another gambler?’
Mrs Parry sucked her tongue. ‘No.’
I waited but she didn’t say anything more. James Philips was looking anywhere but at me, as if I might disappear if he ignored me long enough, but Mrs Parry’s eyes never left me. And they were sharp, her eyes, sharp as ice. She was one of those people who could see without being seen, if you know what I mean.
‘Did he tell you he had gambling debts?’ I asked her.
James Philips snorted. Neither of us paid him any attention.
‘No. He wouldn’t’ve admitted anything like that to us.’
‘To keep up appearances?’
‘To stop us going down to the smwglins and pulling him out by his ear.’
By ‘us’ she obviously meant herself. I couldn’t see Philips walking into a drinking den. Not in that coat.
‘So how did you find out? About the gambling?’
Her face didn’t change. She just blinked, once, quite slowly, as if her eyes were dry from staring at me. ‘It pays to know what your business partners are up to, Mr Davies. Nasty surprises’ll bankrupt you if you’re not careful.’
And she was careful, I thought, as I urged Seren up the hill towards Cardigan workhouse and the corpse. That much was quite clear.
Harry
Deciding that I had had my fill of unprofitable introspection, I opened the door and called down into the hall. ‘Wil-Sam?’
Feet scrambled in the hall below and pounded up the stairs.
‘Yes, Mr Harry?’ He always answered me in English, regardless of the language I’d addressed him in; Wil-Sam was keen to better himself.
‘You came up those stairs at a rate,’ I remarked. ‘Did you go and see Mrs Griffiths about your boots, like I told you?’
‘Yes, I did!’ He laughed at his own audacity.
‘And what did she say?’
‘Same as you, Mr Harry – I mustn’t go round in boots too small. There were some old ones in the bootroom cupboard and they’re much better.’
William Samuel Jones had been our hall boy – carrier-out of all menial errands and taker of messages for the household – for a little over a year. In that time, not surprisingly, the hand-me-down boots that had come with him had started to pinch and I had found him hobbling about the house one day the previous week. Like all the servants, he knew better than to bother Isabel Griffiths with things of no account but I had assured him that our housekeeper would not want her hall boy crippled by his own footwear.
‘Right, Wil-Sam, do you know if Twm has brought my things back from Cardigan yet?’
‘No, Mr Harry, I don’t.’
‘Go and ask Mrs Griffiths for me, will you? If the answer is yes, tell her I’d like you to bring my bag up to me, all right?’
‘Yes, Mr Harry!’ And he was gone at a clatter, keen to pay me back for his new boots.
When the knock came a few minutes later, however, it was not Wil-Sam who entered at my invitation but Isabel Griffiths herself.
‘How is he?’ Her voice wavered uncertainly. It was only natural; she was not accustomed to being in my father’s bedroom, and I do not suppose she had ever been in it while he was in his bed.
‘Quiet,’ I said. ‘Resting, I hope.’
She came forward. ‘I brought your bag. I thought I’d bring it up myself – I wanted to let you know there’s a letter from your friend in Ipswich here as well.’
‘I don’t want to leave him,’ I said, quietly. ‘Would you mind reading it to me here?’
Mrs Griffiths did not reply immediately. I wondered whether she was looking over at my father’s unconscious form.
‘You think he’d object to your being here?’ I suggested.
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t be so rude as to object once you’d invited me, Harry. But I’m sure he’d mind. Me seeing him like this, I mean.’
I knew that the kind thing would be to let her make up her own mind but I was tired of my own company and keen to hear from Lydia.
‘I don’t feel comfortable leaving him,’ I said. ‘And I have nothing to do but sit here and think. My own thoughts are not the best company.’
She sighed. ‘Very well.’
I moved my chair to the fireside and we sat facing each other on either side of the small hearth.
Prior to my loss of vision, the tearing of a sealing wafer had been just one more barely-noticed sound in a world full of sights. Now, when letters brought news of life outside Cardiganshire, it was a sound that made my heart beat more quickly.
Lydia’s letter began with congratulations on my temporary position and gratifying compliments as to my suitability for the task. She went on to reflect on the anguish attendant upon sudden death far from home.
‘It saddens me,’ Mrs Griffiths read, ‘that a person should die alone, as this poor man on Tresaith beach did, uncomforted by friends or family. I am reminded, inevitably, of my poor brother’s death. Though I take comfort from the fact that I was with him at the end, the pain of having to bury him where we were, far from all who knew him, was very great and I would not have considered doing so had I possessed the means to take his body home and bury him next to my father.’
The recitation stopped. Isabel Griffiths required an explanation.
‘Her brother, Nathaniel, died on the way to his new parish,’ I said, carefully speaking the truth while knowing that I was misleading her. ‘She was travelling with him, intending to be his housekeeper.’
‘Poor dab!’ Mrs Griffiths was moved. ‘I hadn’t heard that he’d died.’
I did not reply immediately. I was trying desperately to recall how Lydia had accounted for her failure to correspond with Nathaniel’s congregation at Treforgan.
‘Nobody, locally, had met Lydia,’ I said eventually, ‘so she wouldn’t have known who to write to. By the time a new minister could reasonably be expected to be in the manse, I think she’d reached a point where she couldn’t bear the thought of recounting the details of his illness and death again.’
‘Yes. I’d feel the same.’
Her tone indicated a fellow-feeling born of shared experience and, to my utter chagrin, I realised that I knew nothing about her family. As a child you take the adults in your world for granted, their presence a given, requiring no explanation. But my failure to rectify this situation since I had returned home now seemed shameful.
‘Do you have brothers, Mrs Griffiths? Or sisters?’
‘Three brothers and a sister, as it happens. All younger than me and all living, thank God.’ She paused for a second or two. ‘But I well remember the death of my mother. Straight away afterwards, you’re caught up in all the mourning and the way things have to be done. You write and tell anybody at a distance that you think needs to know – and that’s all right. It’s part of every death, like sitting for the wake and marking the month. But, later, when people came to the forge who didn’t know she’d died – then it was hard to talk about it.’
I nodded. ‘Your father was a blacksmith?’
‘Yes. In Moylegrove.’
I nodded, but my thoughts were torn away from Isabel Griffiths’s early life to my own current preoccupations. Moylegrove was where Jenkyn Hughes’s alleged cousin was supposed to live.
Mrs Griffiths raised the letter and resumed her reading.
‘I am glad to knowthat John Davies is going to be working with you again. He seemed a competent and intelligent young man who might do a great deal better than solicitor’s clerk. Working with you will expand his horizons, I am sure.’
I caught something in Isabel Griffiths’s voice. ‘Don’t you approve of my expanding John’s horizons, Mrs Griffiths?’
She sat very still and I could read nothing in her posture. ‘It’s not for me to say anything about who you employ or in what capacity,’ she said.
‘But if I were to ask your opinion?’
The letter came to rest in her lap once more, and she gave a soft sigh. ‘S
eeing new, exciting horizons is all very well. As long as they’re within your reach. But showing somebody a life they might dearly wish for but can’t have is cruel.’
‘But who knows what’s within John Davies’s reach?’ I protested. ‘Your own life tells you that you may aim higher than you dreamed, surely? Did you think, as a blacksmith’s daughter, that you would one day run a house like this?’
‘No, Harry. I thought one day I would run a house of my own.’
Her voice was calm, kind; but I was so discomfited by her words that she might as well have slapped me.
‘You say I run this house,’ she went on, ‘and that’s true. I’ve been happy to run it. But I would have been happier with a husband and a home of my own. If I upset your father–’ She faltered, worrying, perhaps, that he was listening. ‘If I upset him, he could turn me out and I’d have nowhere to go and nothing to depend on but the charity of my family.’ She paused and, in spite of the discomfort her words caused me, I willed her to go on, anxious to understand the uncertain truth of a life I had always taken for granted as settled and secure.
‘To the maids and the footmen and to young Wil-Sam,’ she said, ‘I’m Mrs Griffiths, queen of the house. Perhaps I’m that to you, too.’ I heard the small, sad smile in her voice. ‘But I have no more claim on my place here than Elsie-Margaret, who arrived a month ago. I may be running the house because there’s no mistress but I’m still a servant, Harry.’
I swallowed. ‘This is why I don’t want to be squire,’ I told her. ‘This business of gentlemen always living in houses that are ludicrously too big for them, so big that they require an army of servants to run – servants who must live in, not employees who can come and go to their own homes.’
‘But those servants are better off in the big houses, Harry. Most of the girls and boys we employ can’t live under their parents’ roof because there are too many mouths to feed. You won’t have been able to see but Elsie-Margaret’s put on at least half a stone since she’s been working here and eating three meals a day.’
‘That’s not the point though, is it? The big houses don’t exist to provide employment!’
‘Don’t they?’
Her question pulled my gaze to her in surprise, and she disappeared into the whirlpool.
‘What would you do, Harry? Sell this house and live in a Newcastle Emlyn bow-front with a cook and a girl coming in every day?’
‘Why not? That’s what my mother’s cousin, Mr Philips in Cardigan, does.’
‘And is he a justice of the peace? Does he make decisions that affect the whole of the county, the way your father and the other county magistrates do?’
‘No, he’s a merchant. He’s responsible for a great deal of the wealth which the magistrates spend!’
‘I never thought to see you turn your back on your family’s traditions, Harry. I thought you’d come to your senses, with time.’
‘But they’re not my family’s traditions, Mrs Griffiths! I’m not a Probert by blood. I have no right to Glanteifi. I’m a Lloyd – grandson of a Cardigan solicitor.’
‘And of an English landowner. Just as much.’
‘If I have to choose a family tradition,’ I said, ‘I choose the Lloyd one.’
‘We aren’t put here to choose, Harry,’ she said, quietly. ‘All we can do is accept the place God has put us in and make the best of it.’
I couldn’t help myself. ‘Is it? Ask Lydia Howell what Nathaniel preached. According to him there is no Greek or Jew, male or female, slave or freeman in the Kingdom of God. Everybody’s equal!’
‘And is that why you’re corresponding with his sister so confidingly?’ she asked, her voice still low, as if she did not want to disturb my father. ‘Because you were so taken by her brother’s ideas?’
Her words pulled me up short. Was I corresponding with Lydia because of Nathaniel? An image – clear and sharp as only memories were, now – came to mind; Nathaniel Howell in a huge straw wig, face blacked, eyes blazing in the light of lanterns and torches, shouting the challenges of Rebecca and being cheered to the echo by the band that followed him. Was that figure the reason why I looked forward to every new letter from Lydia? Was I looking to hear that same challenge, that same catch-me-if-you-can devilment?
‘No, Mrs Griffiths,’ I said. ‘I’m corresponding with Lydia Howell because I may go mad if I do not hear views that are in agreement with my own every once in a while.’
Lydia’s letter finished, Mrs Griffiths and I parted friends, as I devoutly hoped we always would, and she went back to ordering the household. But I was left to ponder her parting words.
‘Of course, you’ll have to find somebody to take over the inquest now, things being as they are.’
I knew she was right. That was exactly what I should do.
I was simply not ready to do it yet.
John
Cardigan workhouse. From the front entrance, you might have mistaken it for a mansion. High walls with gables in the roof, long windows and fine stonework. But, once you went through into the yards, there was a grim feeling to the place. It was in the air. The quietness of it. There were dozens of people in these buildings – men, women, children – but you’d never have known they were there. There was no singing, no cheerful shouting, no sound of playing. Just that ringing ‘tonk’ of hammers breaking road-stone. The female inmates did other work, but you wouldn’t hear linen being washed or oakum picked.
The sun was a bare touch on the back of my neck as I walked through the damp, grey courtyards. The man who’d been called to take me to the dead house at the back of the site hadn’t spoken when he was given his instruction, just started off walking. Hadn’t even looked around to see if I was following him.
Word of ‘the man with no face’ would’ve gone around town quicker than a dirty joke, so I’d asked the workhouse master whether anybody’d been to see the corpse before me. There was a type of person who’d stand in a queue and pay a penny to see a face like that.
The master’s response was terse. ‘A few.’
I pictured the timewasters – mob-handed and giggling. But even timewasters may know a man.
‘Nobody’s come forward to the coroner with a name,’ I told him. ‘Has anybody said anything to you?’
They hadn’t. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t been recognised. Any one of the gawpers might’ve done what I was here to do, and had a look at the dead man’s ribs for a knife scar.
For the umpteenth time I tried to remember whether any of the jurors had mentioned a partly-healed wound on his ribs. There’d been talk of a scar here and there from the first couple of pairs to see him but then Harry’d started telling jurors he only wanted them to testify about wounds that might’ve happened around the time of the man’s death. Fresh wounds. The gash Mrs Parry had described had been serious enough to bleed through Jenkyn Hughes’s waistcoat but not to threaten his life.
‘Just here,’ she’d said, putting her fingers to her own ribs just below her left breast and looking me in the eye. ‘That’s where it was.’
My guide stopped, jerked his head at a low, whitewashed building, then turned and stomped away without a word. I watched him go. His jacket was frayed at collar and hem, and you could tell from the way his boots sounded that he had no stockings. If he hadn’t been so surly I’d’ve felt sorry for him.
I opened the rattling plank door. I supposed there was no need to have a well-fitting one on a store for dead bodies – not going to feel the cold, were they?
If what Harry’d said about quicklime drying a body out so it wouldn’t stink was true, it hadn’t worked on our corpse – he’d begun to smell pretty badly. Then again, if he’d been clothed, the lime probably hadn’t been able to do its job.
Somebody’d wrapped him in an old sheet. It’d been sides-to-middled at one time and, when I pulled it open, the hemmed edges felt as thin as muslin under my fingers. If I didn’t have to look at that face, I wasn’t going to, so I managed to leave his head cov
ered and just get at the hairy torso of him. Had a bit of a nasty moment when I saw the crude seam where Dr Reckitt’d stitched all his innards back in, but I swallowed hard and pulled myself together.
The dim light from the small windows was enough to see that his skin was rotting. Even when Reckitt had done the autopsy examination it hadn’t looked right. Loose and soft as if a fingertip’d pull it off his flesh. Hoped I could touch it without heaving my guts up.
Gingerly, I felt about under the hair of his chest. Found the wound pretty quick, thank God. About an inch and a half long, it was, but if it’d been deep when it was done, I couldn’t tell. The edges had closed together. Most likely, it’d been a slash rather than a stab. Or Hughes’d jumped back smartish when the knife came at him.
Had Hughes got into a fight at the smwglins or had he been attacked elsewhere? Because this was Jenkyn Hughes, no doubt about that any more. Mrs Parry’d doctored a wound in a very specific place on her business partner, and here it was on our corpse.
Gravely ill father or not, I knew Harry’d want to know.
Harry
In the wake of John’s brief visit with news from the dead house, I felt more alone than I had done before. That morning, I had been acting coroner; now, my role was suspended and I had had to cede responsibility to John, who – despite a valiant attempt to present the things he had discovered in a calm and businesslike way – was very obviously reveling in his new autonomy.