by Alis Hawkins
‘Nobody can deny that, Mr Abel,’ I reassured him. ‘It was self-defence of the purest kind. Mr Jones will testify to that at the inquest, I can assure you.’
‘Shoni Jones is not guiltless in this either! Maggie blamed herself for trusting him – for not going to the police straight away. And when she heard what had happened to Hughes’s face – that somebody’d tried to make sure he couldn’t be identified…’
I shook my head. ‘No, Mr Abel. We think that was an accident – an unintended effect of hiding the body in one of the lime kilns on Tresaith beach.’
While Abel digested this piece of news, I looked about to see if I could spy Reckitt. His clothing, I was confident, would be sufficiently different from the surrounding sailors and docksmen for me to identify him.
‘It’s as we thought, then.’ John ventured after a silent minute or so had passed. ‘Shoni Jones saw what had happened through his telescope, then went ashore at Penbryn and made his way round to Tresaith?’
‘Yes.’ Abel’s voice was bitter. ‘He told Maggie to go home before she was missed. Said he’d see to it all. Summon the coroner. Go to the police and tell them what he’d seen.’
But, instead, Jones had dragged Hughes’s corpse to the limekiln and buried it, leaving both coroner and police in ignorance for another fortnight.
When Reckitt arrived on the quayside, I asked him to wait with Abel and John for Margaret’s body to be brought out of the river while I returned home. I felt a pressing need to return to Glanteifi. Perhaps it was the effect of Mrs Abel’s sudden and unforeseen death but I was very conscious of the fact that, though my father might have cheated mortality thus far, it was by no means certain that he would continue to do so. I had never been a believer in premonitions nor did I feel myself to have experienced one now; nevertheless, I felt an unease which would be assuaged only by my going home.
As I quit the docks and made my way back up to the Black Lion’s stables, I considered those two weeks during which Shoni Jones had concealed the death of his cousin and of all that had befallen me because of them. Had he reported what he knew immediately, had he not concealed the body, it was quite possible – probable, even – that I would not have been asked to stand in as coroner. With Jenkyn Hughes’ identity never in doubt and Jones’s eyewitness testimony as to cause of death, only a brief inquest would have been necessary and one of the magistrates could have deputised. But, with an anonymous corpse discovered in an apparently mutilated state, an investigation had been necessary.
Shoni Jones’s actions might have had purely selfish motives, and they might – when an inquest was held into Margaret Abel’s death – be found to have contributed to the balance of the poor woman’s mind becoming disturbed, but they had also benefitted me enormously.
It was a sobering thought.
John
Rumours that Maggie Abel had murdered Jenkyn Hughes brought flocks to the inquest. We’d known it would happen and Harry’d asked me to arrange for the hearing to be held in the Black Lion’s assembly room – the biggest space we could reasonably expect to get in Cardigan.
Mrs Weston had taken a minute to consider whether she wanted the town’s gawpers under her roof but, in the end, the prospect of the magistrates’ money and the free advertising the Black Lion’d get from being mentioned in the papers as far away as Carmarthen and Haverfordwest brought her round.
It was strange, sitting there, watching Harry preside while I took notes of the proceedings. Barely three months before, I’d sat in the ballroom at the Salutation Hotel in Newcastle Emlyn, watching Leighton Bowen conduct the inquest into the bones that turned out to belong to Margaret Jones. Then, Harry’d been a curiosity and I hadn’t known him at all. Now, I hardly knew anyone better.
We hadn’t expected to learn anything new in the inquest, and we weren’t surprised. It was more or less a case of laying out what we’d uncovered. We got confirmation of a few things and clarification of some others – Teff Harris, for instance, admitted that he’d stripped the body because he was afraid of being accused of the murder.
‘Why was that, Mr Harris?’ Harry asked.
‘Because I knew people’d heard me threatening Mr Hughes.’
‘Again, why?’
‘He was double-selling coal. I found out and didn’t like it. I told him if he didn’t stop, I’d come for him.’
‘Come for him?’
‘He knew what I meant.’
And Harry, who also knew what he meant, left it at that.
Then there was Obadaiah Vaughan. He’d been taken off the jury so he could give evidence and I don’t suppose it was just me who saw him as a bit of a pathetic figure standing there, trying to look like something he wasn’t. Like one of Iolo Morgannwg’s great bardic circle when, in reality, he was just a small farmer who wrote verses to seduce women.
He was there to give evidence about finding the American coins in the lime waste but Harry got him to admit that it was him who’d written the anonymous note to Billy Go-About.
‘I did, yes, and I’d do it again.’
‘Why didn’t you just come forward?’
Vaughan’d seen that question coming. ‘Teff Harris and I aren’t friends. I knew my motives would be suspected if I said what I’d seen. But I wanted to report it so that seemed the best way.’ The words slipped off his tongue like honey off a warm spoon
Harry stared at where Vaughan was standing for a long while. How many people in the room knew that, with his eyes pointing there, Vaughan was the one person he was guaranteed not to see? But Dai’r Bardd didn’t know where to look. Or what to do with his hands. He tried putting them in his pockets but then you could see he’d felt how that looked and pulled them out again.
Witness after witness, I watched Harry summoning facts and questions without the use of notes and knew how impressive that would look. The people who were gathered in the assembly room didn’t know that we’d gone over and over the facts the previous night at Glanteifi, that we’d drawn up the witness list, in order, and gone through it again and again until Harry knew exactly who to ask for at any given moment.
Who comes after Teff Harris?
Matthias the registrar.
Who’s after Mrs Parry?
The Whaler.
The inquest was the beginning of Harry’s campaign to be elected coroner for the Teifi Valley. And when he accepted the jury’s verdict on Jenkyn Hughes’s death – manslaughter in an act of self-defence – and called for an hour’s break before he began hearing the facts surrounding the death of Margaret Abel, he sounded like the coroner. Every inch.
To spare witnesses the need to give their testimony twice, Harry’d taken the unusual step of asking the Hughes inquest jury to sit for the hearing into Margaret Abel’s death as well.
He began the second inquest with the words, ‘Gentlemen of the jury, you viewed the body of Mrs Margaret Abel and have stated that you are content that this was, in fact, the deceased’s identity. You have heard details of Mrs Abel’s state of mind before, during and after the events on Tresaith beach and you will now hear details of the events immediately before her death.’
And then he called me to bear witness.
I’d seen Maggie Abel’s actions at the public meeting and heard every word she’d said. I’d chased her down to the docks, along with her husband and Harry and I was the only one of us to see her jump from the bridge. My opinion – that she’d jumped and not fallen off the bridge – was confirmed by witnesses who’d been crossing the river at the time and had seen her climb onto the parapet. One had even tried to prevent her from harming herself but was left with nothing but guilt at what’d happened.
‘Perhaps, if I hadn’t run towards her,’ he said, ‘she might’ve taken a moment to consider what she was doing and stepped back from it.’
But Harry disagreed. He reassured the witness that he was quite certain Margaret Abel had climbed on to the parapet with the sole intention of ending a life which – in her grief and mad
ness – had become intolerable.
The jury took notice of the emphasis he’d put on that phrase and brought in a verdict of suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed. So David Abel had permission to bury her in the churchyard at Blaenywaun alongside her Lizzie.
Meanwhile, after the second inquest, Billy Go-About arrested Shoni Jones on charges of failure to report a death. Although Harry hadn’t questioned him too hard during Jenkyn Hughes’s inquest on why he’d left the body in the limekiln for two weeks, during Maggie Abel’s hearing Jones’d had to admit that he had promised to tell the truth of what he’d seen and had failed to do so in order to serve his own ends. The hecklers had hissed him then and I can’t say anybody at the inquest blamed them. Unless Harry could persuade the magistrates to fine Jones instead of putting him in gaol, it seemed unlikely that he’d be going to America with the emigrant ship in April.
Perhaps it was true, what my mother always said – it was possible to be too clever for your own good.
Harry
On the Saturday after the inquest, I sat in the morning room with my father, looking out over the gardens and the drive to the river beyond. It was a glorious, spring-like day and I was trying to remember the exact state of trees and flowers at the beginning of February. What would be in bud or early leaf – snowdrops, daffodils?
My father’s condition remained largely unchanged and I knew that, soon, I must take up the reins of the estate and exert myself to understand its workings.
For now, however, my limited capacity for monologue having been exhausted, I was considering going down to see if the post had yet been collected from town when I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. Only a single horse by the sound of it, but coming at a fair speed. Neither carriage nor cart, then. As it came on to the sweep of drive before the house, I could see that it was a little trap, and watched as the driver jumped down and helped a lady out.
My pulse quickened at the prospect of a visitor and, with a hasty warning to my father that he might be required to receive company, I hurried downstairs.
Moyle had not yet answered Wil-Sam’s scurrying summons, so I loitered on the bottom stair; the butler would be displeased if I answered the door myself and, besides, it would be embarrassing not to be able to recognise the caller.
Moyle, as ever, opened the door as if his master was the Duke of Devonshire and not an obscure Welsh squire. ‘Good day,’ I heard him say to whoever stood before him.
Footsteps came closer to the door. Then I heard a voice that almost winded me. ‘Good day. Is Mr Henry Probert-Lloyd at home?’
My legs less steady than I would have liked, I descended the remaining step and called, ‘I’m here, Moyle. Do show Miss Howell in.’
A brief historical note on Welsh emigration to the Americas
The Irish diaspora and the influence that Irish people have had on the development of the United States is well known but few people are aware that the Welsh influence is also significant. There were several distinct waves of emigration from Wales to the Americas and each had a different impetus – religious, cultural or economic.
Pennsylvania
The first wave of emigration to America came about as a result of religious intolerance following the restoration of Charles II to the throne in 1660. When the Court of Great Sessions in Bala threatened to burn Quakers, a group responded by acquiring land in what is now Pennsylvania and emigrated there in 1682. The following year, having bought land on the banks of the Delaware, Baptists from mid and west Wales went to settle in Philadelphia. These settlements were in what was known as the Welsh Tract or Welsh Barony.
The original settlers negotiated with William Penn – Quaker founder of the Pennsylvania colony – to make the tract into a separate jurisdiction which would be administered in Welsh. This did not come about, but the Welsh language was used by the families that lived there and they gave Welsh names to their settlements, some of which still survive today, including Bryn Mawr, home to one of America’s most famous liberal arts colleges for women.
By 1700, a third of families living in the Pennsylvania colony were Welsh.
Almost two centuries later, in the mid-1800s, a new wave of emigration brought coal miners from south Wales to the mines of Pennsylvania. Many became managers and executives rather than coal-cutters and they were also influential in union politics.
To this day, Pennsylvania boasts the largest number of Americans of Welsh descent – approximately 200, 000, most of whom live in the coal producing regions of the state
Ohio
The nineteenth century saw the mass emigration to Ohio that forms the backdrop to the fictitious Cardigan-Ohio Emigration Scheme in In Two Minds. Early in the century, most emigrants were farmers but, as other industries developed, miners and quarrymen began to be needed in the new towns of the state. Many of these emigrants made for the Appalachian part of southeastern Ohio, including the two counties mentioned in the novel, Jackson and Gallia. So many emigrants made their way to the area that it became known as ‘little Cardiganshire’ and Welsh was still spoken in those communities well into the twentieth century.
As of 2010, over 126, 000 Ohians are of Welsh descent.
Interestingly, Cardiganshire emigrants ended up in Jackson and Gallia counties by accident. In 1818 a group arrived in the French settlement of Gallipolis, having made their way from Baltimore by wagon then boat on the Ohio, en route to the Welsh settlement of Paddy’s Run near Cincinnati. Somehow, during the night, their boats became unmoored (there is speculation that it was the work of some enterprising member of the Gallipolis commercial fraternity who saw his chance to vastly increase the population and create a ‘boom town’) and, as aconsequence, the emigrants gave up their journey to Paddy’s Run and settled in nearby Gallia county.
There were other, more minor, Welsh settlements in Tennessee, Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas, Maryland, Virginia, California and New York State. Utah, meanwhile, was the destination of choice for many Welsh Mormon missionaries, while others went to Idaho where they founded the city of Malad which still boasts the largest population of people with Welsh origins outside Wales (around 20%).
The Influence of Welsh Emigrants in the Development of America
Though, in comparison with emigration from other countries, the population leaving Wales and making their home in America was relatively small, their influence was disproportionate to their numbers. For instance, sixteen of the original fifty-six signatories to the American Declaration of Independence were of Welsh descent and one, Francis Lewis, was a first-generation immigrant.
The family of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, came from a village on the foothills of Snowdon and other presidents also had family roots in Wales, including James Monroe, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge and Richard Nixon.
Yale and Brown universities were both founded by Welshmen. Elihu Yale’s parents were first-generation immigrants to Boston and, when he died, he was buried in the parish church near his family’s home in Plas-yn-Iâl, Denbigh.
Morgan Edwards, co-founder of Brown University, came from Pontypool in Gwent.
Patagonia
Some early Welsh emigrants to America had attempted to set up Welsh colonies in order to retain their linguistic and cultural identity. One of the earlier Pennsylvanian settlements – Scranton – had been established with that intention but the Welsh residents soon found themselves being assimilated into a wider Anglophone society. However, in the 1860s, at a time when migration from the countryside to the industrial heartlands of the south Wales valleys was causing concern to those who feared that Welsh culture and identity was being lost, a new wave of emigration began. This time it was to somewhere few people had ever heard of: Patagonia.
Staunch nationalist, Michael Jones, principal of Bala college, had negotiated with the Argentinian government to allow a group of Welsh emigrants to settle in an area called Bahia Blanca. There, they would be self-sufficient and able to maintain their language an
d culture in a ‘little Wales over the seas’. (This was not a purely altruistic act on the part of the Argentinian government, however. The authorities hoped that the Welsh settlement it would resolve a dispute as to who controlled the land, sovreignty over which was claimed by both Argentina and Chile.)
The first group of settlers – mostly from north and mid-Wales – arrived in 1865 and their descendants are there still. Until a generation or two ago, Welsh was still spoken as a first language, along with Spanish, and links between Wales and Patagonia remain strong, with young people coming to Wales from what Welsh speakers know as Y Wladfa (the Colony) to re-establish familial ties and to improve their Welsh. In return, Welsh-speaking young people go to Patagonia to encourage the use of Welsh and to strengthen cultural links.
Acknowledgements
As ever, first and greatest thanks go to my other half and first reader, Edwina, for all her endless support and constant positivity. Not to mention her ability to rein me in when my enthusiasm for planning publicity events threatens to leave me with no time to actually write the books I’m supposed to be publicising.
Huge thanks to Rebecca Lloyd and Emily Glenister at The Dome Press who are an absolute joy to work with. No author could possibly enjoy working with an editor or publicist as much as I enjoy working with you guys. You are awesome!
I love designer Jem Butcher’s cover so much. It’s so great to have Harry and John going out into the world so beautifully dressed. Thank you, Jem.
Authors, being solitary workers without colleagues to keep us positive when the going gets a bit sticky, depend on others to remind us that we can actually do this writing lark. In this respect I am so grateful to have had a decade’s support from the Macmillan New Writing crew: Eliza Graham, Len Tyler, Aliya Whiteley, Frances Garrood, Tim Stretton, Deborah Swift and Roger Morris. More latterly but no less importantly, I have enjoyed much support and encouragement – not to mention joint festival appearances – from the Crime Cymru authors. Particular thanks in this context must go to Rosie Claverton, Bev Jones, Thorne Moore and Katherine Stansfield.