In Two Minds

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Albion Thomas. He was in charge.’

  ‘Who else was on the lime boat?’ I asked.

  ‘Me, Scrim Richards and Shoni Jones.’

  My pulse jumped. ‘Shoni Jones from Moylegrove? Jenkyn Hughes’s cousin?’

  Another man would’ve shrugged. Maybe he was too musclebound.

  ‘Don’t know. He didn’t speak to Hughes. He just unloaded with me and Scrim.’

  ‘So Albion Thomas went ashore to talk to Jenkyn Hughes and you three unloaded the lime?’

  He didn’t agree or disagree. Just looked at me.

  I tried to picture the scene in my head. Three of them unloading the stone into the sea off the beach, Albion Thomas with Hughes on the sand. I wasn’t exactly sure where the limestone would’ve been dumped but it must’ve been a fair way out, where the water was deep enough for the boat. ‘How did you know it was Jenkyn Hughes on the beach?’ I asked.

  ‘Square patterned waistcoat. Light coloured trousers. Seen him before.’

  Those very identifiable clothes. Like some kind of calling card. ‘Where’d you seen him?’

  ‘About.’

  I stopped and gathered my thoughts. The stream’s stink was making me breathe through my mouth, and I could almost taste the stench on my tongue. Disgusting.

  ‘Look,’ I said, as if I was letting him in on a secret ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd – the coroner – he knows about Jenkyn Hughes gambling down on the docks.’ I didn’t say smwglins. Nobody who went there would call it that. It’d be like a criminal saying to his wife see you later, I’m just off to do a bit of aiding and abetting. ‘He knows Hughes was in debt.’ I was watching the big man for any sign that he knew what I was talking about but I’d’ve got as much information from watching the wall behind him.

  ‘We don’t want to get anybody into trouble,’ I said. ‘We’re not the police. It’s nothing to us who drinks where or who takes whose money off him at cards. None of our business. All we want is to find out who killed Jenkyn Hughes.’

  His eyes hadn’t moved from my face. It was a struggle not to look away from him, that stare of his was unnerving. ‘D’you know any of the men Jenkyn Hughes played cards with?’ I asked.

  ‘Played with anybody who sat down at the table with him.’

  I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely stupid or trying to be unhelpful.

  ‘Anybody particular he owed a lot of money to, then?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘D’you know who they were?’

  He blinked, then. Hesitated. It was the most emotion I’d seen him show. Hughes’s gambling wasn’t what he’d come to tell me about and he didn’t know how much to let on.

  I was uncomfortable, standing there. The dirt and coal dust and kicked-out cinder had been trodden into a gritty mud that seeped in through my boots. And the air around us was foul – not just from the stream, either. Smelt as if the foundrymen and labourers who worked here used this patch between buildings as a privy. They’d’ve done better to sit on the edge of the stream and shit in there. It was a public sewer anyway by the look and smell of it.

  His silence was making me nervous and I looked about. Being a Sunday it was quiet but that cut two ways. Fewer threats but also fewer witnesses.

  Suddenly, he spoke. But not to answer my question. Not exactly.

  ‘Some owed him money as well.’

  So far, we’d only heard about Hughes’s gambling losses. Could somebody have decided to get rid of him because they owed him more than they could pay?

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody that would’ve killed him.’

  ‘What, like a gentleman?’ I was sure James Philips’d been lying when he said he hadn’t seen Jenkyn Hughes anywhere but at the office.

  He gave a single forward tilt of his head. As if he thought he’d be able to take it back if he needed to.

  I pushed him. ‘Mr James Philips – of Philips and Lloyd?’

  No response. But I was pretty sure he’d’ve said no if it hadn’t been Philips.

  Well, well, well.

  ‘So,’ I said, keen to bring things to a close and get back to safety. ‘The night of the last-but-one delivery, you sailed up to Tresaith, you unloaded the limestone while Albion Thomas talked to Jenkyn Hughes, and then you sailed away again. Is that right?’

  He didn’t answer, but something about his cliff of a face told me there was more. ‘What else?’ I asked. He stared at me but still didn’t answer.

  The missing coal. It had to be. ‘You loaded some coal on board, didn’t you? And took it up the coast?’

  His mouth stayed shut, but I knew I was right, otherwise he’d’ve given me that deadweight ‘No’ of his.

  ‘How did you get the coal on board from the beach?’

  ‘Used the skiff. Sacks. Winch.’

  ‘And did you take the coal up the coast or down?’

  For several moments I thought I’d got all I was getting. But then he opened his mouth again. Briefly. ‘Up.’

  ‘To Penbryn?’

  Another deniable nod. I thought hard. ‘Shoni Jones,’ I said. I’d been going to ask if he knew where Jones lived but there’d been a flicker of something when I mentioned the name. ‘What did he do? He did something didn’t he?’

  The eyes on mine were flat, full of nothing. ‘He watched the beach with his telescope. Tresaith.’

  His telescope? I waited. Nothing. ‘What did he see?’

  The sailor put up a huge hand and rubbed one eye with his knuckles, like a child. ‘Don’t know’ he said. ‘But he was watching something. The telescope never came away from his eye.’

  They were the longest sentences he’d uttered. Perhaps it was the relief of finally getting it out. ‘Why didn’t you tell Mr Probert-Lloyd this when we spoke to you on the docks?’ I asked.

  No shrug. No shifting of the feet. Nothing moved except his eyes. They moved away from my face. It was as much of an admission that he wasn’t entirely happy with his own behaviour as I was going to get. ‘Some things it pays a man not to see.’

  He didn’t want to get a reputation for a loose tongue.

  ‘Why are you here now, then, talking to me?’

  His eyes moved back to mine. ‘Tried to speak to your master. But he had a boy with him.’

  A boy? When had Harry had a boy with him?

  ‘So you came to wait for him.’ I said. ‘Something was important enough to make you come.’

  ‘A duty was owed.’

  I waited, curious, but he’d said all he was going to say. And curiosity didn’t make it my business to ask.

  ‘Did you see the cousin – Shoni Jones – again after that?’

  It wasn’t a hesitation because none of his answers had come quickly but he seemed to think even longer about this one. I looked away from him, giving him time, putting my eyes on the shitty scum on the far edge of the Mwldan where it left a crust on the walls of the buildings above.

  ‘Heard he’d been at Captain Coleman’s.’

  Harry

  Prendergast left me on the landing and I listened to him making offended haste down the stairs before opening the front door and banging it shut. Moyle’s sense of household decorum would be outraged that nobody had been summoned to show the doctor out but, as far as I was concerned, Prendergast had departed as he had presumed to come up: without so much as a by-your-leave.

  I turned and went back to my father’s room.

  ‘Prendergast left, has he?’ Reckitt asked.

  Suddenly irritated beyond reason by the whole situation, I chose to hear a smug kind of triumph in Reckitt’s question.

  ‘Yes. And now, unless you have anything profitable to offer, I’d like you to leave too, please.’ I regretted my rudeness as soon as I heard the words leave my mouth, particularly as it had been entirely calculated. I put a weary hand up. ‘No. I’m sorry Reckitt. Forgive me. I’m afraid I had an almost sleep
less night and it hasn’t agreed with me.’

  ‘Understandable. Think nothing of it. But I will leave if you’d prefer.’

  ‘No, please, stay. I can’t tell you how sick I am of my own company.’

  Reckitt took the chair he had been sitting on and moved it away from the bed in the direction of the fire.

  ‘What advice has Prendergast offered about your father’s condition?’ he asked.

  Though the question was somewhat abrupt, I was glad of it. I needed advice and it was a relief to have the subject broached for me.

  ‘When I arrived yesterday, he told me that the next twenty-four hours would be crucial.’

  ‘Meaning that your father was highly likely to suffer another stroke and die of it.’

  Reckitt’s failure to leaven facts with empathy was shocking but, oddly, I found myself glad of its sinew-stiffening effect; I did not want my emotions roused in the presence of a near-stranger. ‘Yes. And he did appear to suffer another. He became unconscious. But this morning he woke and spoke.’

  ‘But not well.’

  ‘No. As I said, earlier, single words. And those effortfully.’

  Reckitt rested one ankle on the opposite knee, entirely at ease speaking about sudden illness. ‘Cerebral seizures – especially when they result from ramolissement – are often associated with disease elsewhere in the body.’ From his measured tone, Reckitt might have been speaking to the medical students at Guy’s. ‘Of course, one would, in any case, expect a man of your father’s age to be showing signs of physical decline. I have to counsel you to expect no great future length of life for him.’

  I pulled in an uncertain breath. It was no more than I had suspected myself but, still, it felt as if a sentence of death had just been pronounced.

  ‘Just as well that your appointment as coroner was ad hoc,’ Reckitt observed. ‘Your time will soon be taken up learning the ropes of squiring. A far cry from being a barrister, eh?’

  I sat down, heavily, in the chair opposite him, my attention removed from my father’s future to my own. ‘Was medicine your father’s profession, Reckitt?’ I asked. ‘Have you followed the family trade?’

  ‘No. My father is a clergyman.’

  ‘You weren’t tempted to follow him?’

  ‘I am a man of science. I prefer that things are visible and tangible. I dislike being told that I must simply have faith and live by a set of precepts apparently laid down by a being I can neither debate with nor disagree with.’

  ‘You’re an atheist, then?’ Even saying the word in my father’s bedroom felt transgressive.

  ‘I wouldn’t presume to rule out the existence of a deity altogether. But, if such an entity exists, it is unlikely to be the anthropomorphic vision we are invited to believe in.’

  ‘A scientific God, then?’

  ‘One not at variance with science.’

  A brief silence fell between us, the only sounds in the room rising from the stableyard behind the house.

  ‘You don’t seem shocked,’ Reckitt said. ‘The effect of London society, I suppose.’

  ‘Possibly,’ I conceded. Then, because it was more pleasant to speak about abstract notions than about the potentially imminent death of my father, I asked, ‘You don’t agree with Edmund Burke then, that man is, constitutionally, a religious animal?’

  ‘No. I think he is religious by education and inculcation. As a means of social control, organised religion is without its equal. Voltaire implied as much when he said that, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. He felt that the excesses of the Revolution would have been far greater without the ameliorating effects of Christianity.’

  I smiled somewhat ruefully. ‘Should my father recover, may I advise against expressing that view in his presence? He thinks the Revolution was the most godless thing to have happened since the sack of Rome.’

  No sooner had I heard myself laughing with Reckitt than I felt guilty. How could I be mocking my father when he lay, close to death, not two yards away? And yet, the sensation of being able to open my mind to another person without the fear of being judged scandalously radical was a luxury I had almost forgotten.

  ‘Do I detect that you are not overjoyed at being expected to play the feudal lord?’

  From his tone, I imagined a slightly quizzical look on Reckitt’s face. How would a doughy face look quizzical? I realised that, in my mind’s eye, Reckitt had the corpulent appearance of an oriental panjandrum in a Punch cartoon; except that they were always depicted as inscrutable and Reckitt seemed to me entirely the opposite.

  ‘I always promised myself that I would never play the squire,’ I said. ‘I ran away to London and trained as a barrister to avoid it. I wanted to provide for myself, not be dependent on the labour of others.’

  ‘And then you went blind and that choice was taken from you.’

  His forthrightness was as liberating as it was shocking. ‘Yes. And I was forced to come home.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I wanted to stand for Coroner,’ I found myself admitting. ‘I hoped it would keep me off the bench. Squiring I can bend to, I think, but not being a magistrate. However, if I’m now to be denied the chance to show that I can be an effective coroner, I’ll come under ever-increasing pressure to sit on the bench.’

  ‘Just say no.’ Reckitt made it sound as simple as the uttering of a single word.

  I sighed. ‘If I refuse, I’ll offend every member of the gentry in the county.’

  ‘Why should you care? You aren’t squire of Glanteifi by their permission. You can do what you like.’

  ‘No man is an island,’ I said, quoting Donne for the second time in two days. ‘Nor should he be. We all need society.’

  ‘Not me.’ His tone was definitive. ‘What I need is my work. Society is a distraction at best.’

  ‘And at worst?’ I asked, intrigued at the suggestion that he might regard local society with all the esteem it felt for him.

  ‘A hindrance. The better people become acquainted with me, the more they feel free to tell me what I must and musn’t do. I find it intolerable.’

  Had I been able, I would have stared at him. I had never met a man who was so taken up with his calling that he truly did not require social engagement. Even Gray, obsessed as he was with his anatomical studies, was an entertaining companion. ‘You genuinely don’t have any regard for the judgements people make on you?’

  I saw Reckitt moving his head to and fro in a vague kind of denial. ‘If they pronounce me rude and rough in my manners, I dare say they’re right. I’ve never mastered the arts of refinement. But if they criticise my work, or my giving my time to it, it simply shows that they have not understood the seriousness of my endeavour.’

  ‘Which is?’ I asked, noting how quickly my own conversational style had fallen in with his.

  Uncrossing his legs, he leaned towards me and his tone took on a new passion. ‘To grasp the workings of the brain in all its different manifestations. To understand its diseases and their causes. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, to use anaesthesia to probe the material of the brain itself in living subjects.’

  ‘You would cut people’s heads open while they’re still alive?’

  ‘Alive but insensible. Anaesthetised. Conscious of no pain whatever.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Perhaps it might be possible to remove tumours. Restore people to health.’

  ‘How?’ I asked, incredulous.

  ‘I can’t tell you, yet. But that’s why it’s vital that we carry out post-mortem examinations. To find out what effects tumours have, we must follow the path of a person’s illness, then dissect their brain and other organs. If our ambition is to cure patients, then first we must be able to investigate these tumours – discover how integrated they are with surrounding tissue and how much damage would be done to the patient by their removal.’

  I was silenced by the thought of such dissection.

  ‘Probert-Lloyd.’ After a
brief silence, Reckitt’s tone was restrained once more. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing what you and Prendergast said to each other outside the door.’

  Momentarily befuddled, I shook my head.

  ‘You told him that you would allow me to perform an autopsy on your father. Were you trying to confound him or did you mean it?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Reckitt,’ I hissed, instead of answering his question, ‘have some kind of care for my father. God knows what he can hear in his state.’ My alarm was partly fuelled by guilt because, truth be told, Reckitt had hit the nail on the head. Yes, I had been trying to confound Prendergast. But, now that I was put on the spot, I found that I did not know my own mind on the subject. The dissection of my father’s corpse was not something I had ever thought to be confronted with.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Reckitt said. ‘I was taking it as read that he was unconscious and would hear nothing. I beg your pardon.’

  I could not decide whether he was genuinely contrite or whether this was simply an attempt to mollify me. His next question did nothing to clarify the issue.