In Two Minds

by Alis Hawkins

Harry stood his ground. ‘Not related in any way to Jenkyn Hughes’s death?’

  ‘It’s about the inquest–’ James began.

  ‘Then I should like John to remain, if you don’t mind,’ Harry cut in. He wasn’t smiling any more. ‘Anything relating to the inquest is official business and John is coroner’s officer.

  ‘Official business? Listen to yourself, man! I’m asking to speak to you as a kinsman–’

  ‘We may be cousins but, in this, I am the coroner.’

  James Philips stared at him, hard. ‘Forget I asked. Let’s go downstairs.’

  But Harry grasped his arm as he tried to walk past. ‘If there’s something I need to know, it had better come out now rather than in public, under oath. Especially if it’s something to do with Jenkyn Hughes’s will.’

  Philips flinched at Harry’s directness. I looked away before he could catch me eyeballing him.

  ‘Very well.’ The words couldn’t’ve been colder or sharper if he’d chiseled them out of ice. ‘The point is, I really don’t feel that there will be any need for me to give evidence at the inquest. I can’t tell you anything that Mrs Parry wouldn’t be able to. And it’s not as if I had anything to gain from Hughes’s death. In point of fact, his death is nothing to me but a huge inconvenience.’ He seemed to be expecting a response, but Harry just waited.

  I kept my eyes away from him but I could feel James Philips glaring at me. . ‘I believe that my father made free with my private business.’ His voice was as tight as a snare. ‘Told you that I had incurred certain … expenses, where Jenkyn Hughes was concerned.’

  Incurred certain expenses? I’d never heard gambling debts referred to like that before.

  Harry inclined his head. Yes, he knew that.

  ‘Hughes came to see me about a month ago,’ Philips went on. ‘Just me. Said he wanted my help.’

  ‘What sort of help?’

  ‘My support. For a new will he’d written.’

  I expected Harry to say, The will in favour of Mrs Parry? But he didn’t. Discretion. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Previously, he’d been persuaded to leave his share of the business to Jones. But now he’d thought better of it. He felt the company would be in better hands if he left it to Louise – Mrs Parry.’

  ‘And why exactly did he need your support in that?’

  At the other end of the room, I saw Shoni Jones’s head rise up from the stairs. ‘The meeting’s waiting,’ he said.

  ‘Just one moment,’ Harry said, without turning around.

  Jones’s head sank down again. Now I’d been made aware of it, I could hear the restiveness of the crowd below. They weren’t happy at being kept waiting. Especially now that Mrs Parry and Shoni Jones were in front of them, doing nothing. They’d be wondering what quiet deals were being done up here.

  ‘Hughes needed my support because he knew his cousin would be livid. And he wanted me to speak up if there was a court case brought against the new will.’

  ‘And he ensured your support by remitting your … expenses as long as you agreed to speak in favour of the new will.’ Harry was nobody’s fool.

  Philips sucked in his cheeks and raised his chin. ‘Yes. He made me sign a statement saying that I both witnessed and supported the will, without any inducement or benefit to myself.’

  I hid a smile. Jenkyn Hughes had been a sly one.

  ‘I think it would be better,’ James Philips said, ‘if Jones could be prevented from making any statements, today, about his being the heir to his cousin’s portion of the business, don’t you?’

  Harry nodded. ‘Very well. If he looks likely to make any such statement, I’ll ensure that he’s prevented from doing so. It would be humiliating to him to have the truth made public after such a declaration so I’m sure he’ll be grateful to you.’

  James Philips’s expression told me exactly how much he cared about Shoni Jones’s humiliation. All he wanted was to make sure that there was as little gossip as possible about him or the emigration scheme.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Shall we go down, now, before we’re called to heel again?’

  Not far from the foot of the stairs there was a dais which I hadn’t noticed when we went up. Something to do with the grain-trading that went on there, I supposed. Now, the three representatives of the emigration scheme got up on to it and Mrs Parry opened proceedings.

  She’d barely begun to speak when I saw Maggie Abel move away from the wall and start pushing her way through the crowd. She’d taken her husband by surprise, setting off like that, and she was a few paces ahead of him before he caught up with her and stopped her. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but he was speaking very intently. I watched Maggie. If she was listening to him, she gave no sign of it. She was just staring at the three people on the platform. And, the way she was looking at them, I was glad it wasn’t me up there.

  I told Harry what was happening. He nodded but said nothing, just carried on listening to Mrs Parry.

  ‘As far as we know at the moment,’ she said, ‘there’ll be nothing to stop us sailing as planned on the fourteenth of April. All bonds will be honoured and, I believe, there are still some places left.’ She looked around at Shoni Jones.

  ‘Yes, there were a few unsold bonds at my cousin’s lodgings so we can still offer them.’

  ‘That’s all I’ve got to say,’ Mrs Parry concluded. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘We heard the scheme’d gone bankrupt,’ a voice called from the middle of the crowd. ‘That’s not true, then, is it?’

  ‘No. It’s not.’

  ‘What about Jenkyn Hughes’s gambling debts?’

  That question started the crowd grumbling and chattering and heckling. As if she’d been waiting for the noise to hide her, Maggie Abel was on the move again. Her husband moved with her but, this time, he didn’t try and hold her back.

  When she got to the front of the crowd, she stopped. Just stood there, looking up at the dais like everybody else.

  I waited, heart thumping, stomach like a fist.

  She said nothing. Didn’t move. Just stood there, looking at Shoni Jones. Then she started nodding. Like you see very old people doing, sometimes, as if now they’ve started, they’ve forgotten how to stop.

  She was agreeing mightily with herself over something.

  Mrs Parry was answering the question about Hughes’s debts. ‘Any debts will be the responsibility of Mr Hughes’s legal heir. But if anybody thinks it’d be a good idea to start turning up saying they’re owed money, they can think again.’ Her eyes scanned the crowd as if she was trying to spot likely turners-up. ‘The solicitors acting for Mr Hughes’s heir will want to see IOUs. If you’ve got no IOU in Mr Hughes’s handwriting, you’ll get no payment.’

  That got the hecklers going, though God knows it shouldn’t have. Who pays up without a valid IOU? Anybody who’d been thinking they’d get away with that must never’ve had dealings with Mrs Parry, that’s all I can say.

  There were a couple of other questions about what’d been promised in Ohio and whether it would still be on offer now that Hughes wasn’t there to take them. I listened with half an ear but my eyes were on the Abels. Maggie was staring up at Shoni Jones as if she was trying to suck the life out of him with her eyes.

  You could tell he was rattled – he didn’t so much as look at her. He was trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed her standing there like a basilisk. But, fair play to him, when Mrs Parry asked him to answer a question, you wouldn’t’ve known there was anything wrong.

  ‘I’ve never been to Ohio, but I’ve spent months with my cousin and I’ve got his notes and his articles of agreement with various businessmen in the new settlement. I can promise you – if you had an agreement with him, there’ll be a record of it and I’ll make sure it happens just like he said it would. I’m the agent now.’

  There were some sarcastic cheers then, and Jones went red, out of anger or embarrassment.

  Then, suddenly, Maggie was shouting. She was up o
n the dais, shouting in Shoni’s face. ‘Nobody should believe your promises! You’re a liar. A liar!’

  And she hit him with a small fist to emphasise her point. Abel tried to pull her away but Mrs Parry put a hand on his arm. ‘Leave her.’

  Maggie took no notice of her husband anyway. ‘You said you’d tell the police,’ she raged. ‘You said you’d tell them what you saw. Make it all right. But you never did!’

  The whole room was listening now. The people who’d come for scandal and gossip were agog, they hadn’t expected anything as good as this.

  ‘I waited and waited and they never came!’

  This was what David Abel hadn’t wanted to tell us, what he’d wanted to say only once, at the inquest. That Maggie had been sitting at her child’s bedside, watching her die, praying for a miracle and, all the while, waiting for the police to knock on the door. To question her about the humiliation she’d suffered on Tresaith beach. To demand to know how Jenkyn Hughes had died.

  Maggie hit Shoni Jones again and he staggered back. James Philips grabbed his arm, though whether it was to keep him from falling or to stop him from running away was anybody’s guess.

  ‘Nobody said anything about him!’ Maggie shouted. ‘Nobody knew he was dead! Nobody! You lied! And I was a miserable sinner and I did nothing. I did nothing and Lizzie died. She died! Because the iniquity of the fathers shall be visited on the children!’

  What was she saying? That no miracle had saved her daughter because she’d believed Shoni Jones and not gone to the police herself? That was madness if ever I’d heard it.

  Whatever it was, it was enough for David Abel. He took his wife by both shoulders and turned her around. I suppose he was going to try and get her out and home but he never had the chance. With more strength than I’d ever’ve credited her with, Maggie Abel pushed her husband backwards into Jones and his partners. Then, while they all fell in an air-grabbing tangle, she turned and limped quickly away.

  The crowd parted for her like the Red Sea. As if they were afraid her madness was contagious.

  Of course, somebody should’ve gone after her, straight away. Easy to say that, later. But there was something so shocking about what she’d just done, about seeing four people tangled up with each other on the floor, that it froze you. And, then, the crowd surged into the space where she’d been and started helping the partners to their feet, each wanting to be the first to see if one of them was really hurt.

  In the end, we came to our senses and fought our way out of the Corn Exchange, David Abel scrabbling to follow. But by the time we reached the high street, she’d gone.

  ‘This way,’ Abel said. We followed him down a narrow lane towards the docks, clattering down the cobbled hill, squeezing past foot- and cart-traffic. I looked past Abel but I couldn’t see his wife ahead of us.

  ‘Are you sure she won’t be over the bridge and on the road home?’ I panted. This looked like a wild goose chase to me.

  ‘She’s not going home.’

  Harry was quicker than me. ‘You think she’s going to do away with herself? Throw herself in the river?’

  ‘She did once before.’ Abel stumbled on. I looked round at Harry but all his attention was on following Abel and not bumping in to anything.

  David Abel darted down the first alleyway that would take us to the river. I could see his reasoning. If his wife wanted to jump in, this would be the quickest way.

  But we got to the quay and there was no sign of her. No crowd looking into the water or shaping up to get her out. She hadn’t come this way.

  I looked for Abel. He was staring upstream, looking to see if she’d carried on to a spot further along the quay. I left him to it and turned the other way.

  It was down to the two of us. Harry couldn’t be expected to look for her.

  I wish David Abel had looked downstream instead of up. Then I’d’ve been spared the sight of his wife falling from the middle of the bridge.

  Arms held out to the sides as if they could steady her against the rushing air, legs bent, the wind filled the skirt of her betgwn, freed her apron to flap like a flag and cover her face. I didn’t want to see her hit the water so I turned away and my last sight of her was her hair trailing up into the air as she fell.

  Harry

  Maggie Abel could not swim and, even had she been a proficient swimmer, she could not have survived; her clothes filled with water and the rushing tide dragged her under. Of course, that was what she had wanted; she had jumped from the bridge for no other reason than to secure her own death. Whether that action had been a rationally taken one would have to be decided later. The inquest into her death would, inevitably, hear of the circumstances attending the death of her child and that of Jenkyn Hughes, and the jury might well come to the conclusion that the balance of her mind had been disturbed.

  Once a boat had been dispatched to recover her body and Reckitt summoned to certify death, John and I sat with Abel on the quay to wait. A respectful crowd made space for us in the lee of one of the huge dockside warehouses, and tea chests were produced for us to sit on. Those who work on the ships and wharves of a busy port are rarely famed for their compassion but death inevitably brings a certain reverence to the fore in even the most worldly soul.

  Feeling that it would be crass to speak about anything else, I asked Abel what he had meant when he said that Maggie had tried to end her life by throwing herself into the river once before.

  He sighed and looked down at his hands, fingers splayed on his thighs.

  ‘It’s how we came to be married. I saved her from the river.’

  I said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

  ‘I had recently lost my first wife and newborn son and I was almost lost to myself. I could not sleep and I’d been wandering most of the night along by the ferry over on the other side. When I saw Maggie wading into the water as the tide was rushing out, I didn’t stop to think what I was doing. I just could not bear the thought of another death.’

  Her spirit broken as much by his kindness as her own despair, Maggie had poured out her sorry tale to him.

  ‘It was Jenkyn Hughes,’ Abel told us. ‘Did your investigations tell you that he had been over from America before?’

  ‘Shoni Jones said that he’d met his cousin on one previous occasion.’

  ‘I believe he made two or three trips before this last one.’

  As Abel told his story, it became clear that Hughes’s eye for the ladies had been well developed prior to the growth in his head, as had his tendency to pursue his quarry relentlessly. If what Maggie had told her future husband was to be believed, his seduction of her better deserved the name of rape and he had left her with a child growing in her belly when he returned to America.

  A man of deep faith, and understandably tender where misfortune was concerned, Abel had seen Maggie’s situation as an opportunity to be an agent of God’s grace. He had offered her marriage and respectability.

  ‘Of course, when it became clear to folk that she was already with child when we married, there was a lot of talk. It seemed best to allow everybody to think that I’d tried to forget my grief in the embraces of a young girl and I claimed Lizzie as my own. Nobody but the two of us knew the truth.’

  Nobody, that is, until Maggie told Hughes on Tresaith beach. She had not gone to him simply as a representative of the Cardigan-Ohio Emigration company but as her daughter’s natural father.

  ‘She hadn’t wanted him to know about Lizzie,’ Abel said. ‘But when she was in such a state about Reckitt’s offer, she got it into her head that he was the one person who could save her. She decided that it was a means of forgiveness and reconciliation sent by God. That Hughes could provide us with the money we needed to repay the doctor as a way of expiating his sins.’

  Abel gave a small grunt which might have been a sob. ‘Hughes took a different view,’ he said. ‘He laughed at her.’

  I heard anger in Abel’s voice and I wondered whether he, too, had petitioned Hu
ghes to no avail.

  ‘How can a man refuse to help when his own flesh and blood is suffering?’ he asked. ‘How could he laugh at what Maggie told him and do nothing?’

  It was the question only a good man could ask, a man who could not begin to fathom the lack of concern another might feel for his own child.

  ‘And he didn’t just refuse to help, he insulted her as well,’ Abel went on. ‘He told her that any man might be the father of the child. I suppose, because he was immoral, he believed all men were like him. And he told her it was her fault, that she’d tempted him. So she took the blame on herself and started to believe it was her fault Lizzie was ill.’

  Abel shook his head. ‘Worst of all, he offered my poor wife the same violence that had left her with child all those years before. She hit him with that stone to save herself. He left her no choice.’

  He stopped then, and I nodded. ‘Of course.’

  I heard Abel swallow. ‘When Lizzie died, Maggie ran mad. Not just distraught like any mother might be but truly mad. She was tormented by the fear that no miracle had saved Lizzie because she was a sinner. That her sins had been visited on our child.’

  ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children,’ I said. They were the words Maggie had shouted at Shoni Jones.

  ‘Yes. The fathers!’ Abel’s tone was suddenly belligerent. ‘If anybody’s sins were to blame it was Hughes’s. And it was his sins that brought about his own death. My wife was defending herself as any honest woman would!’