In Two Minds

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘Not if I don’t come to the inquest he won’t. Not if he can’t find me.’

  ‘If you don’t turn up, that’ll make you look ten times more guilty! Why would you stay away if you’ve got nothing to hide?’ I got no answer, but he was stiff with wanting to lash out, fists ready at his sides. ‘And if you run off and hide,’ I pushed it, ‘that’s the end of taking over as agent on the American scheme, isn’t it?’ I gave him a couple of seconds, but he still wouldn’t budge. ‘Come on! Either you give us the evidence to prove you didn’t murder him or you lose everything!’

  He stopped, then, and turned to me. The sun, still rising towards noon, shone into his eyes. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I didn’t murder Jenkyn Hughes. Nobody did. He wasn’t murdered.’

  ‘What? Don’t talk daft, man! I’ve seen the body. Seen that bash on his head. He didn’t get that by accident.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was an accident.’

  ‘What then?’

  He looked about then, as if he’d only just realised how far we’d come. ‘Where are we going?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You just came out.’

  The truth was, neither of us’d wanted to stand about in the yard at Penlanmeurig in case his father came out to start more shouting. We’d just started walking.

  Shoni shook his head, lips all clamped up. ‘I can’t go back.’

  ‘Have you got any money?’

  ‘Not on me.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to.’

  He looked back the way we’d come. Seemed to be weighing things up, coming to a decision. ‘If you come with me, help me carry my things, I’ll tell you what I saw.’

  I didn’t much fancy going back into that house. Nor being a glorified packman. But I didn’t really have a choice, did I?

  Harry

  I sat in the study, my writing frame in front of me. After a weary few hours spent helping my father dress, eat and perform other basic functions, we had run out of things to say to each other. Or, perhaps more accurately, I had run out of things to say and his diminished communicative resources had been altogether exhausted. He was sitting quietly in a chair by the window now, though whether he was awake or asleep I could not tell.

  I turned back to the letter I was writing to Lydia Howell and dipped my pen.

  ‘I am sitting at my father’s desk watching himout of the corner of my eyeand wondering what now takes place in his mind. I would dearly love to put Reckitt’s request to him – part of me feels it is only fair to do so – but how can you tell a man who has recently escaped death that, in the event of his imminent demise, a person with whom he is barely acquainted wishes to cut his head open? Perhaps others could. I am sure Reckitt himself would suffer no such reservations. But I cannot.

  If the unfortunate event comes to pass, I will have to decide for myself.’

  I stopped and considered. It is hard to write a letter when one cannot see what one has already written. One’s flow necessarily becomes disjointed. But perhaps my blindly-written letters were actually a more accurate representation of my true thoughts than those I had composed when perfectly sighted. Letters are generally written in a form which implies that thoughts have flowed seamlessly and inevitably, one from another, whereas, if we were to write down our thoughts as they occurred to us, rather than as we would prefer them to have occurred, our correspondents would know us for what we are – beings who barely deserve to be described as rational.

  ‘Perhaps it is the disordered nature of my life at present,’ I continued, ‘but I find it difficult to remember the order in which I have written things to you or, indeed, you to me. I find I am simply responding to the matters that press in upon me most at present.

  I mentioned to you, I believe, that I was considering the wisdom of offering John the post of private secretary. Quite how it has come to pass I am not sure but, instead, I have proposed that he become assistant to our steward. He has asked for time to give it due consideration and has disconcerted me by confiding that, like you, he has been mulling over the merits of emigration.

  Is it simply envy that makes my heart sink at the thought? Such a course of action would be impossible for me for reasons which, I am sure, will be readily apparent, and I find it is hard to bear the thought of either of you abandoning me for life on a different continent.’

  I stopped. What kind of declaration was I making to Lydia Howell? I was overwrought, half undone by lack of sleep and by concerns that had, suddenly, begun to overwhelm me. I was not thinking of the consequences of my words, only of their truth.

  I steered away from the rocks of potential misunderstanding.

  ‘I have never been the sort of man who has packs of friends as other men have hounds. One or two good friends have always sufficed at any given time. But, now, I see the folly of this failure to be generally sociable. I am alone and without society and this has made me resolve to exert myself more. Indeed, I believe I am already making a friend of Reckitt. I suspect few will applaud this choice but he is an interesting man who is not afraid to speak his mind and I find that both refreshing and appealing.’

  Then, despite my misgivings, I began a fresh sheet of paper and tacked recklessly back towards the rocks.

  ‘Lydia, I find I cannot remember what this letter was supposed to be about.

  Did you feel utterly alone in the world when your brother died? If you did, you will understand how I feel, now. Though my father has not succumbed, I know now precisely how alone I will feel when he breathes his last and that realisation has disturbed me.’

  My pen scratched to a dry halt and I closed my eyes. Both edge-sight and whirlpool vanished. I saw what every person sees when they lower their eyelids. Nothing.

  ‘Harry?’

  I opened my eyes. ‘Father?’

  ‘Are you unwell?’ The words flowed from him as none had since his stroke and I found myself smiling.

  ‘I’m tired, that’s all. But you sound better?’

  ‘No. Sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes the speech just comes?’

  ‘Yes.’ The word was like a bullet. and it reminded me of something from my boyhood.

  ‘There was a boy at school who had a terrible stutter,’ I said. ‘His speech would do that sometimes. It was as if something had unfrozen and words shot out.’ I smiled. ‘It was mostly when he’d been taking claret, as I recall.’

  I detected something like a smile in my father’s voice. ‘I. Try.’

  ‘Try the drinking cure? Why not indeed? We’ll ask Moyle to bring some port in later, shall we?’

  It might be wise, I felt, to finish my letter before the port arrived. God alone knew what I would find myself saying to Lydia Howell under the disinhibiting influence of alcohol.

  John

  Shoni Jones hadn’t unpacked after his trip around the county, thank God, so he didn’t take long getting his belongings together. Mind you, it felt long enough to me, standing there in the kitchen with his family. Not one of them spoke a word to me. His parents sat on either side of the hearth, Mr Jones just staring at the fire, ignoring me, and Mrs Jones busy with her spinning. She didn’t have a wheel, just a drop-spindle. I thought the thread she was producing looked a bit uneven. Then I noticed how her hands were shaking and realised why.

  The sister had a bundle of sewing on her lap – putting sides to middle on a sheet, it looked like – and she glanced up at me over her work as she picked the cloth up and moved it along.

  It felt as if somebody’d died, with everybody sitting there in the middle of the day. Shoni’s news had knocked them out of the normal run of things.

  I found myself staring at a blue jug on the dresser. Its colour drew your eye and it looked bright and new. Had Shoni bought it for his mother out of the money he’d got from Jenkyn Hughes? If he had, I could see it having an accident before long.

  About five seconds before the awkwardness in the room forced me to start talking about the weather, Shoni came down the ladder from the loft with
a flour sack over his shoulder.

  He crossed to his mother and looked as if he was going to bend and kiss her when his father reared up out of his chair.

  ‘Out! Don’t you lay a finger on your mother! She’s worked herself to the bone for you and you’ve repaid her by throwing it all back in her face.’

  His son squared up to him. ‘You wanted us to have a better life – me and Wil. And that’s what I’m going to have. A better life than this.’ He waved a hand at the kitchen. At the scraped together, getting by-ness of it.

  His father clenched his teeth on whatever words were trying to burst out and just glared. ‘Go. Get out.’

  Shoni Jones dropped a hand on his mother’s shoulder. ‘Bye, Mam. I’ll see you in chapel.’

  Mrs Jones didn’t look up but her trembling hands had fallen into her lap. I looked down and saw that the strand of wool she’d been spinning had clutched itself together into a tightly-wound whirl on her apron.

  I fastened the flour sack to the saddle by tying the stirrup-leathers up on top of it and trotted Seren down the lane after Shoni.

  ‘I’ll see if I can have Jenkyn’s room at Captain Coleman’s,’ he said as I caught up with him. Good. I’d know where to find him. As long as he was telling the truth, of course.

  He said nothing else, just marched along in front of me.

  ‘Come on then. I’ve kept my half of the bargain. Tell me what you saw.’

  He flicked a glance across at me but his mouth stayed shut. I knew what that look meant. He’d got what he wanted, hadn’t he? All his stuff was out of Penlanmeurig, why should he tell me anything?

  That got my dander up. I’d had about enough of being yanked around like a puppy new to the lead. ‘I know Hughes was supposed to be meeting a woman,’ I said. ‘So that’s what you saw, is it?’

  ‘If you know, why are you asking?’

  ‘Who was she?’

  Jones didn’t answer, just marched along, as if I wasn’t there. Well it was my horse who was carrying his stuff and I wasn’t standing for this. ‘I heard you had that telescope at your eye until you were out of sight of the beach. Saw everything, did you?’

  Before I knew what was happening, he had me by jacket. ‘What are you saying? That I’m a pervert who likes watching–’ he stopped himself. ‘That’s disgusting. You should be ashamed, boy of your age.’

  Boy of your age indeed. I pulled away, straightened my coat, put a hand on Seren’s neck to calm her. ‘Well, if it wasn’t that,’ I said, ‘tell me what you were looking at.’

  Jones looked at me as if he had a nasty taste in his mouth. ‘Wanted to know who he was meeting.’

  ‘Why?’

  His jaw clenched. ‘Because I couldn’t trust him. Slippery bastard, he was.’

  I wasn’t going to get sidetracked on to that. I needed to know what he’d seen. ‘And it was a woman you saw?’

  He gave me the barest of nods, as if it hurt him to answer me.

  ‘Did you know her?’

  He set off walking again. ‘No.’

  I practised my next question in my head. Wanted to sound matter-of-fact. ‘Was she a whore?’

  He glanced over at me. To see if I was blushing, most likely. He’d’ve laughed if I had been. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Hughes had a reputation. Sorry, I know he was family, but it’s the truth.’

  Jones coughed, spat the phlegm onto the ground. ‘I know his reputation and it wasn’t that. He had women but not ones he had to pay.’

  ‘So not a whore, then?’

  ‘Keep saying it, boy. In the end, it’ll seem like any other word.’

  I ground my teeth and kept my temper. ‘So, what did you see? What happened between them?’

  Jones kicked a stone out of his way into the dead grass at the side of the road. ‘She went up to him and started talking – that’s what it looked like – her talking, him listening.’

  ‘Just talking?’

  ‘Yes. But she wasn’t persuading him, whatever she was saying.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  Jones stopped and turned to me, folded his arms. ‘Stood there like this, he did.’ He glanced up as a flock of lapwings took fright at us and flapped their way into the bright air. I drew breath to bring him back to the subject but he carried on of his own accord.

  ‘She showed him something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A piece of paper, it looked like.’

  ‘A letter?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  A piece of paper. It had to be a letter, didn’t it? Or a bank note.

  ‘Anyway,’ Jones seemed to be warming up to the task of telling me what he’d seen, ‘then he started shaking his head. And she tried to lay hands on him.’

  ‘Lay hands on him how, exactly?’

  ‘Like this.’ Jones turned to me and, before I could stop him, put one hand on my chest, made a fist with the other and started beating it against me. I backed off and Seren threw up her head so she almost hit me. I felt the graze of her cheek through my hair and my specs were suddenly crooked on my nose.

  ‘Enough!’

  He gave me a half-sneer then turned and started walking again. With one hand I pushed my specs back on and, with the other, I rubbed at my chest, shivering as the movement let cold air in under my shirt.

  I dragged Seren on to catch him up. ‘What then?’

  No reply. His eyes stayed on the road.

  ‘Come on, I need to know everything that happened.’

  He walked on. But the way he was staring at the road ahead had changed. As if he was collecting his thoughts from a long way away. ‘He grabbed her hands – to stop her hitting him – and held them.’ He held his fists in front of him, miming the grip. ‘Then he started talking and she started shaking her head.’

  ‘Was he threatening her?’

  He gave me a look. ‘Thought you said you knew his reputation? He wasn’t threatening her...’

  I nodded, tried to look as if the possibility of Hughes propositioning this woman had been my next question. ‘So she resisted him?’

  ‘Yes. Pulled her hands away and turned to walk off. He grabbed her by the shoulder and pulled her back. Tried to kiss her. She pushed him off. Turned and ran. He ran after her. Grabbed her. Pulled her shawl off and was going to open her betgwn. She got away from him and started to run again. But then–’ He stopped and looked at me. His face was pinched – was he making this up or was it the truth? ‘She fell and he went down on his knees over her – one knee on each side to pin her down. I saw him go for the front of his trousers – you know, to open his…’ he motioned at his own fly-buttons. ‘Then I saw her arm move. She was holding something in her hand. Something she’d picked up off the ground.’ He looked me full in the face. ‘She hit him with it. Hard. Just once. On the side of the head. He went down sideways.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘She pushed him off her, got up and ran away. But she couldn’t run fast – that’s why he’d caught her so easily. She had a bad limp.’

  ‘Did she limp before, when she came up to Hughes? Or was she injured when she fell?’

  ‘I think she was limping before. But she walked quite quickly, limp or not, as if she was used to it.’

  That was useful information. ‘Did you see her put him in the kiln?’ I asked.

  Jones looked away. ‘I didn’t see her do anything else. We rounded the headland to Penbryn.’

  I frowned. ‘If you could see well enough to see her hit him with something, you couldn’t’ve lost sight of them that quickly.’

  ‘You calling me a liar, John Davies?’

  ‘I think you’re trying to protect this woman.’ Did I think that? Truth to tell, the words’d just come out of their own accord. Either way, it made him sound like a better man than he was, so it might encourage him to tell me more.

  He thought for a moment. ‘The truth is, when I lost sight of them, she was still lying there, with him on top of her. I think
she was crying.’

  Something made me look back at his sackful of belongings and I saw that it was slipping gently over to Seren’s other side. I grabbed at it and re-tied it.

  ‘One more thing.’ I could see Shoni Jones out of the corner of my eye. He was tense enough to bolt. ‘Was that why you went ashore with the coal at Penbryn? Did you walk back to Tresaith to see if your cousin was lying there injured? Did you go back to try and help him?’

  I was pretty sure he had gone back – otherwise why had he got the lime boat to leave him at Penbryn beach?

  ‘I’ve told you what I saw, John Davies. I saw a woman I didn’t know hit a man who was going to rape her. That’s it. That’s all.’

  I got nothing more out of him, all the way to Captain Coleman’s.

  Harry

  John came to Glanteifi hot-foot from his conversation with Shoni Jones. Finally, it seemed, we knew how and why Jenkyn Hughes had come by his fatal head wound.