by Alis Hawkins
I didn’t really want a drink but I couldn’t sit there without one. I nodded to the man nearest the beer barrel in the corner, and he put a pint pot under the tap without asking.
The fear of offending somebody stopped me looking around, so I just smiled weakly as the landlord stared at me. Like everyone who drew beer for a living he did it by ear as much as by eye and he stared at me as the beer ran out of the barrel into the wooden mug. Then, without looking down, he shut the tap and handed me the pot.
‘Tuppence.’
It was more than the beer was worth at Newcastle Emlyn prices but I wasn’t going to argue. I paid up and found somewhere to sit in the corner, my back to the wall.
Half an hour I’d said to the English sailor. Best if people didn’t see him and the Whaler leaving the docks hard on my heels. But half an hour was going to feel like a week with every eye in the place glaring at me like a magistrates’ informer.
I would’ve liked to do something to pass the time – make some notes or read the ones I’d already written – but I was afraid to take my notebook out of my pocket in case somebody thought I was writing things down about them. So I just sat there and tried to drink slowly. A pint was plenty when I needed to keep my wits about me.
The men in the corner were speaking again but they kept their voices too low for me to hear. God knows what they thought I’d want to listen to them for. But then, if you’ve got something to hide, you probably think every soul you see is earwigging.
What are you doing here, John Davies, I asked myself. Why are you still wandering around Cardigan asking questions when, more likely than not, it’s going to cost you your job?
But I’d come too far to go scuttling back to my clerk’s desk now. I just couldn’t face it.
I shuffled my arse on the bench and leaned away from the wall. It was striking cold right through to my skin. Cold and damp. I glanced across at the fireplace in the corner. The fire was what you might call grudging – if you’d sat right next to it your front would’ve been warm but your back would’ve been as chilly as the opposite corner.
I rubbed one boot up and down the other calf – there was a wicked draft down towards the floor. A strip needed nailing along the bottom of the door to keep the cold air from coming in.
The door opened and I felt something that was half fear, half excitement go through me. But the man who came in wasn’t large or bald. Not the Whaler. He went over to three men near the back who’d called greetings to him, and I tried to get my thumping heart to slow down again.
Excitement. That’s what was keeping me there, in the teeth of hostile looks and the prospect of unemployment. Excitement. I hadn’t realised how bored I was with being a clerk until Harry’d walked in to Schofield’s office that day back in November looking for an assistant. I suppose, apart from being a gwas bach, I’d had nothing to compare it with. But now I did.
I liked investigating. Finding things out. Getting the answers to questions. Perhaps I should give up clerking and become a policeman. If a miracle happened and Harry became coroner, I could be his officer then.
But working for Billy Go-About wouldn’t be like working for Harry, would it? There was no way in the world Bellis would treat you like his equal. It’d all be Yes, sir, No, sir, Three bags full, sir. Not like now. Now I had people calling me sir.
What would my poor mother have said if she could see me now? Dressed in a good woollen overcoat with a gold watch in my pocket and an urchin holding my horse for me on the bit of grass under the castle wall?
But, when I thought about it, I didn’t think my mother would’ve been all that surprised. I could see her nodding and smiling. You always were a quick one, ’machgen i.
She’d seen it even if my father hadn’t. My nimble-wittedness.
I finished the last of my beer but the dregs. To you, Mam.
What would she tell me to do, now? Go back to Mr Schofield and grovel? Buy a ticket for America? Go up to the police station and see if they needed any more constables? You could be Inspector one day, ’machgen i.
John Davies, Inspector.
What would they call me? When I was a gwas bach nobody’d called me by my name, there’d been a John and a Johnny working there already. No, they’d called me Jac and then Jac Wap – quick Jack. It hadn’t been a bad name even if it had come from what they shouted at me all day – Come now, quick!
Clerking, emigration or trying for the police. I had a choice to make.
The door opened again and, this time, it was the Whaler. Standing there in the low doorway, he looked even more huge and muscle-bound than before. He saw me but, instead of coming in, he moved his head sideways. Come out.
I’d forgotten the English sailor until I got outside. There he was, standing next to the Whaler as if he was showing off his prize bull.
‘Here he is, matey. As requested.’
I put what I thought was reasonable into his black-stained palm and waited for him to complain. But he just marched straight in to the Blue Bell to spend it. I wished him a better welcome than I’d had.
The big man moved off, forcing me to follow.
‘Why d’you want me?’ he asked, without looking round.
I scooted up to his side. ‘I wanted to ask you about Shoni Jones,’ I said, keeping my voice as low as I could.
‘What about him?’
I dodged around an open sack of sawdust that was standing outside a workshop door. ‘That last time you saw Mr Hughes – when he was on the beach to meet you – when you came back to Cardigan after dumping the lime and moving the coal round the headland to Penbryn…’ Moving, that was a good choice of word, I thought, when, to be strictly accurate, the phrase was ‘feloniously taking away’. ‘Did Shoni Jones come back to Cardigan with you?’
He stopped in his tracks. ‘Why?’
‘Because I think he saw something through that telescope of his that made him want to go back to Tresaith on his own.’
I was watching his face, side on, but he didn’t so much as glance at me. It was as if he couldn’t look at you and speak at the same time. ‘Why should I tell you?’
A wagon came along the narrow lane then and we had to move. Now, I was standing behind him. ‘You told me you owed a debt to Jenkyn Hughes,’ I said, hoping he’d be happier with me speaking to the back of his head. ‘If I know what Shoni Jones saw, it might help to catch Hughes’s killer.’
He turned around. ‘Jones, is it? Jones killed him?’
I swallowed. Something had sparked in those marble-blue eyes and I suddenly feared for Shoni Jones if I said yes. ‘I don’t know. But I need to speak to him about what he saw.’
The big man turned away from me and began walking again. ‘Shoni Jones got off with the coal at Penbryn. Stayed there.’
I trotted after him. ‘Why? To meet whoever was coming for it?’
‘Said he’d walk back round to meet Mr Hughes.’
I drew alongside him again. ‘So why didn’t he just stay with him on Tresaith beach? Didn’t he trust the rest of you to deliver the coal?’
He didn’t answer straight away and I was so busy staring at him that I almost walked into an aproned man with his hand on the rim of a cart wheel.
‘Mind yourself!’
I dodged round him and darted after the Whaler who hadn’t slowed down at all.
‘Why didn’t Shoni Jones stay with Jenkyn Hughes in the first place?’ I asked again. ‘Why did he walk back from Penbryn?’
Abruptly, he stopped. Afraid of a fist, I hung back, but he half-turned. ‘Mr Hughes was meeting somebody.’
I took a step forward. ‘Who?’
‘Don’t know.’
There was more, I could tell. I waited.
‘Said he was meeting a woman,’ he said, finally. ‘He said a word and they laughed. Albion and Shoni Jones. They laughed.’
‘Do you know what the word was? D’you remember?’
‘No.’
I tried all the English words I knew for prostit
utes and he shook his head at all of them. Then it dawned on me that the word might’ve been to do with the meeting, not the person.
‘Was it tryst?’ I asked. ‘Not trist in Welsh, there’s an English word – tryst – means a lovers’ meeting.’
‘No.’
‘What about tête-à-tête?’
‘Sounds French.’
‘It is.’
He shook his head.
‘Assignation?’ I suggested. A word he probably wouldn’t know but a reasonably educated man like Hughes would. The kind of word men of the world like Jones and Albion might well have laughed at.
‘Say it again.’
I did.
‘Might’ve been. I wouldn’t swear to it, mind. Not if a man’s life depended on it.’
So, Shoni Jones had been ten minutes’ walk from Tresaith beach where Jenkyn Hughes had had a pre-arranged meeting with a woman.
I wasn’t sure whether things were getting clearer or more confused.
Harry
The news that Jenkyn Hughes had altered his will in Mrs Parry’s favour mere days before he was murdered was, to say the least, surprising; though Reckitt might not have agreed, of course. Had the growth in Hughes’s brain been responsible for this sudden alteration? Or had the intimate relationship Bets Parry had suggested between her mother and the American been at the root of his change of heart? In either case, assuming Mrs Parry knew that she was now the main beneficiary, it might represent a motive to wish Hughes dead. Especially as his gambling had made him a liability to the Cardigan-Ohio Emigration Company.
Carried home through increasingly insistent rain at Sara’s brisk stableward trot, these – to my shame – were the questions that preoccupied me.
Had I been a dutiful son and a willing heir to Glanteifi, however, my thoughts should have been entirely occupied with what I had learned in the latter part of my interview with Llewelyn Kerr.
I had, I confess, been so disconcerted by news of the change to Hughes’s will that I might have forgotten the real reason for my visit to Mr Kerr altogether had the lawyer not been practised in dealing with clients who had received surprising news.
‘Your original intention was, I think, to speak to me about another matter, Mr Probert-Lloyd?’
I hope I did not look quite as witless as I felt in that moment. It required an actual effort of will to recollect what, in fact, I had come into town to speak to Kerr about.
‘Indeed.’ Briefly, I summarised my father’s state of health and his keenness that I see the documents he had produced for me that morning.
‘If you’d rather wait for confirmation, from Dr Prendergast or Dr Reckitt, that my father is as incapacitated as I say,’ I suggested. ‘I would take no offence.’
‘My dear Mr Probert-Lloyd, that would be a very poor beginning to our association. I am perfectly willing to accept that matters are as you say.’
‘Thank you. I’m afraid that practice at the London bar inclines one to forget that dependence on a gentleman’s word still exists.’
I had expected Kerr to summon a clerk to procure a copy of my father’s will but, instead, he said, ‘I can give you the bones of your father’s will without even consulting it. He revises it periodically as one might expect of a man whose minor beneficiaries predecease him. It’s entirely uncontroversial. A few kind bequests to old or current servants and a trinket or two here and there to acquaintances for whom they may be supposed to have a particular significance. But the entire estate and all your father’s assets are left to you as his only surviving offspring.’
I was relieved; a niggle of doubt had begun to worm its way through my mind after my father’s performance in the library.
‘And the other document?’ I asked. ‘The mortgage?’
A sigh from Kerr told me that the information he had on this subject would be less welcome.
‘It cannot have escaped your attention,’ the lawyer began, ‘that recent years have not been kind to those who rely on land holdings for their income. When your father first came to Glanteifi at the turn of the century, he would have found an estate very different from the one he’d left in Worcestershire. Quite backward in all likelihood. Then the war came and, suddenly, ensuring that our agriculture was productive was not just about profit but about patriotism.’
For both Kerr and myself this was history, but the war against Napoleon had been the backdrop to my father’s young manhood. His brother-in-law, Francis, had died fighting the French in Spain.
‘Landholders got used to high prices during the war, but when it ended and we could import things again, their income slumped. Your father inherited the estate in eighteen hundred and eleven while the French blockade was still in place, and, from what my father-in-law told me when he handed over the Glanteifi account, Justice Probert-Lloyd was a very enthusiastic embracer of agricultural reform as a way of increasing production.’
That much I already knew. My father had spent much of his life trying to encourage his tenants to adopt agricultural innovations.
‘I don’t know how much you’ve had to do with the estate in recent times, Mr Probert-Lloyd, but that enthusiasm for new methods has recently begun to bear fruit. A new generation is acceding to tenancies and these younger men see what their fathers did not – that changes must be made if the land is to pay at all.’
‘Farmers are not, by inclination, great revolutionaries,’ I contributed.
‘Indeed. And when change takes years to accomplish through generations of careful breeding or the nurturing of soils through successive plantings and harvests it’s no wonder.’ Kerr obviously felt that I was speaking whereof I did not know, that I was a naturalised Londoner who should be listening and not presuming to have an opinion. I bridled, but held my tongue.
‘To come to the point,’ he continued. ‘In recent times, your father has been extending himself more and more, financially, in order both to acquire additional land as it became available and to modernise the estate’s holdings. Instead of building up reserves of capital to see the estate through lean times, he has – quite literally – ploughed all his profits back into the land. And, when returns proved insufficient to meet the tenants’ demands for new buildings and improved houses, he took out a mortgage on the estate so that he could get the work done sooner rather than later.’
‘I hope you’re going to tell me that this mortgage is for a reasonable sum and that it’s not going to endanger the estate?’ The question was intended to lighten the atmosphere. Kerr’s tone had implied that he was preparing me for bad news.
‘I am able to tell you no more than this. The mortgage is for a sum which makes repayments reasonable in years when nobody falls behind with their rent and when the home farm makes a healthy profit. Obviously, with the increased demand for produce of all kinds in Merthyr and the coalfields, farmers here have a ready market. But getting produce down to the ironworks isn’t cheap, or easy.’
‘Is the estate in danger?’ I asked.
Llewelyn Kerr sighed. ‘I’m not entirely privy to your father’s accounts but my understanding is that a single bad harvest would put it on a very weak footing – even assuming that only a quarter of the tenants fell into arrears. Two bad years in a row would bankrupt the place unless matters were managed extremely efficiently.’
Something about the way he said ‘extremely efficiently’ made me suspicious. ‘Are you suggesting that the estate isn’t managed as well as it might be?’
There was a small silence. Kerr sat back in his chair and folded his arms. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of the fact that Mr Ormiston – your father’s steward – suffered a tragedy two or three years ago?’
‘When his daughter and her children died?’ Their house had burned down with the whole family in it. I had been summoned home to attend the funeral.
‘Yes.’ The lawyer paused, and I remembered crowds at the graves’ side, openly weeping at the loss of five souls in one terrible night.
‘Since then,’
he went on, ‘I think it’s fair to say that Mr Ormiston’s heart has gone out of the job. He’s a shadow of the man he was. And his wife … poor woman.’ It had broken Mrs Ormiston’s health, I knew. From one of my father’s weekly letters – read, when I was still able to do so, with the aid of the most powerful magnifying glass money could buy in London – I had learned that the steward’s wife was now an invalid who rarely left the house.
‘Tenants are not being given notice as they should for non-payment of rent,’ Kerr said. ‘Income is slipping, but outgoings – relating to your father’s programme of improvements – remain high.’
‘Why have they not been put on hold?’ I asked. As little experience of estate management as I had, that seemed an obvious expedient to me.
I saw Kerr shake his head in incomprehension. ‘Your father seems determined to push through his improvements as quickly as possible.’
Now, my body moving mechanically in response to Sara’s brisk trot up the drive to Glanteifi, thoughts of Jenkyn Hughes were displaced by the agonising realisation that the indebtedness of the estate was my fault. My refusal to show any interest in its management had made my father fearful of the state into which Glanteifi would fall on his death and he had spent his declining years doing what he should have been able to leave in my hands.