Not One of Us

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘Two. But they’re younger. It wasn’t that.’

  ‘What, then?’

  Llwyo looked at me sideways. Probably thinking of asking for money for this information as well. ‘Family’s a bit odd,’ he said, in the end. ‘Keep to themselves, mostly. The father’s from away. Her mother met him on the road.’

  I was obviously supposed to ask, so I did. ‘On the road – like vagrants?’

  He grinned. ‘No. Esther Rees’d been working in London and she was on the way home. He was a drover. Or working with a drover. One or the other.’

  ‘And he came back with her?’

  Llwyo made a face that told me he was running out of facts he knew for certain and beginning to rely on things he’d heard older relatives saying when he was little. ‘No. I think he turned up later. When he’d saved enough.’

  ‘For the land, you mean?’ No man’d ask a woman to marry him unless he could provide a home for her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And is that the place where they live now, or have they moved up in the world?’

  ‘No. Always lived at Rhosdywarch. He’s got a weaving shed there and they’ve got an orchard as well as the land. Sell some cider.’

  Lydia Howell had told me that according to Reckitt, the dead girl’s mother’d been working away from home when the news came that her daughter had died. So if the family was scraping a living together with weaving and selling cider and taking work where they could to pay the rent, where did Miss Haughty’s attitude come from?

  We were out in full sun again now, heading down the steep slope to the river and the Llechryd road. I hated riding down that sort of hill, so I slid off my little mare, Seren’s back and walked at her side.

  ‘So why am I going to pay you five shillings for the names of three lads who were sweet on Lizzie Rees?’ I asked, craning my neck to look up at Llwyo, who seemed perfectly happy in the saddle. ‘From what I’ve heard already, there were no suspicious circumstances about the death.’ Best to make it clear to him that I already had some useful information; that I wasn’t going to roll over and give him money for just any old gossip.

  ‘If there aren’t suspicious circumstances, what’s your boss doing riding about asking questions?’

  Oh God. Harry’d started without me. ‘He’ll be wanting to make sure. If somebody calls him to a body, Mr Probert-Lloyd’ll give full consideration to all the circumstances of the death. He’s not one to just say “looks like natural causes” and go home.’ Especially not since an innocent man’d been transported to New South Wales on account of him not investigating hard enough during the coroner’s election campaign back in April. ‘If he was really suspicious, he’d’ve asked Dr Reckitt to do a post-mortem examination. To cut the body open, I mean.’ I turned to him. ‘He hasn’t, has he?’

  ‘Dunno. Might’ve by now. Heard they were arguing about it in the Sergeant’s last night. Dr Reckitt says they can’t know for sure that it wasn’t poison unless he opens her up.’

  ‘Who’d want to poison her?’

  Llwyo shrugged.

  ‘You’re never accusing one of the lads who bought spoons off you?’

  Another shrug. He wasn’t going to go as far as accusing them, but he wasn’t going to jeopardise his five shillings by defending them, either.

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. ‘Three shillings,’ I said.

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Three and six.’

  ‘Done.’

  I handed the money over and put the remainder back in my pocket. ‘Come on then – names.’

  Harry

  ‘Before you call for Barti,’ I said as David Jones made to follow his little maid, ‘why did you send him away while I questioned Elen?’

  ‘He frightens her.’ Jones drew a deep breath, as if he was fortifying himself before saying something difficult. ‘She’s got no reason to be afraid, because he wouldn’t hurt a fly, but… well, you won’t have been able to see, but he looks a bit… unusual. His eyes don’t work together – one of them wanders. He used to wear an eyepatch – that’s where he got his nickname from, Barti Ddu. Like the pirate,’ he added, in case I’d never heard of Bartholomew Roberts, also known as Black Bart – Barti Ddu.

  ‘Why doesn’t he wear the patch any more?’

  Jones put his hands in his pockets. ‘There was a bit of horseplay when he first came here to work.’

  ‘The others took it off him?’

  ‘They didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just not something you see every day, is it – a young lad with an eyepatch.’

  ‘But he won’t be able to see properly without it.’ I felt outraged at this young man’s treatment at the other servants’ hands.

  ‘He keeps the wandering one closed, mostly.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that improves his looks either! No wonder Elen’s frightened of him.’

  ‘It’s not just that.’ I was not sure whether Jones was defending himself or his servant. ‘He’s a bit odd. Walks around a lot at night. Doesn’t sleep with the rest in the loft.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, if they treat him like that.’

  ‘As it happens, he asked if he could have a place by himself when I first hired him. Says he can’t sleep when he can hear other people breathing and snoring.’

  ‘So where does he sleep?’

  ‘In the brewhouse. Not that he does sleep much. When he’s not walking around the fields at all hours, he’s drawing things. Spends any money he’s got on paper and pencils and lamp oil.’

  Perhaps it was not simply his squint that made the other lads pick on Barti. Somebody who behaved differently, who refused to conform, would always be treated with suspicion; I knew that to my cost. ‘So why did you choose him to deliver the message about Lizzie Rees’s death?’

  ‘Because we were harvesting and he’s the least handy with a sickle. With it being Sunday today, I wanted the corn in yesterday, while the weather held. If it’d been any other news, I’d have told Mic Rees to look elsewhere for a messenger, but in the circumstances… Besides, whoever went needed to take a spare horse for the girls, and I knew he’d be the best to ride and lead at the same time. He’s good with horses, Barti is. I’ll miss him for that, when he’s gone.’

  ‘What do you mean, when he’s gone?’

  ‘It’s his last day with us today. He’s got another job to go to.’

  As Jones walked off across the yard to fetch the young man, I hoped that Barti would find better treatment at the next farm he worked on, though it seemed unlikely if he was as different from his peers as it seemed.

  Had Lizzie Rees also been different? It seemed so, if what Elen had said was true. They said she thought she was better than everybody else. Different, perhaps, but not in the way that Barti was.

  Perhaps I had been wrong to assume that Lizzie did not share her mother’s ambitions for her. But if that was the case, did it have any relevance to her apparently natural death? Before I could give the matter any more thought, Jones was back with Barti.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Jones,’ I said as they approached. ‘I’ll come and speak to you again, if I may, when Barti and I are finished.’

  A perceptible hesitation hinted that Jones did not appreciate being dismissed in his own yard, but his tone was civil enough. ‘Very well. I’ll be in the house. I was writing a letter to George the auctioneer when you arrived.’

  And with his status thus reaffirmed, he left us.

  ‘Barti,’ I said, fixing the whirlpool just to the young man’s left so as to see as much of him as I could in my peripheral vision, ‘I gather that you were the one Mr Jones trusted to go over to Ffynone to tell Esther Rees that her daughter had died?’

  ‘Y-yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me exactly what message Mic Rees gave you to take to his wife?’ I asked. I did not know whether Rees had actually told her that their daughter was dead or had simply asked her to come home.

  ‘Th-th-that Lizzie had d-died in her sleep,’ he
said. ‘M-Mr Rees said he’d w-woken up in the morning and f-found her dead and D-Dr Gwynne had been and c-c-certified her death.’ He gasped in a breath. ‘N-natural c-causes. He said to t-tell Mrs Rees to p-please come home straight away.’

  So distracting were the painful blockages of his stutter and the subsequent barely intelligible rush of words that I almost failed to catch the significance of what he had said. ‘Wait a moment. Did you say that Dr Gwynne had been to Rhosdywarch before Mic Rees came here?’

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘Th-th-that’s right.’

  Odd. In my experience, most people delayed calling in the doctor to certify death as long as they could, as if some part of them clung to the belief that their loved one might yet revive. Certification made death a reality. Final.

  So why had Mic Rees felt the need to ask Cadwgan Gwynne to see Lizzie’s body before he had even sent word to his wife and daughters?

  ‘What time was it when Mic came to Dolbannon yesterday?’ I asked. Rees had told me that the house cow had woken him up well after sunrise. If he had gone to fetch Gwynne first – having already washed and re-dressed his daughter, if Reckitt’s theory was correct – he could not plausibly have reached Dolbannon before half past eight at the very earliest.

  ‘I-I don’t know, M-Mr Probert-Lloyd. Th-there’s nobody here has a pocket watch and M-Master’s clock is in the house.’

  ‘I don’t need to know the exact minute. Was it before or after you’d all been in for breakfast?’ Farm servants ate breakfast only after all the early work was done, which at this time of the year would be between half past seven and eight o’clock.

  ‘B-before breakfast,’ he answered. ‘B-but not long before.’

  Almost an hour too early to fit the chronology of Mic Rees’s account.

  ‘What time did you get back from Ffynone?’ I asked, in an attempt to establish the exact sequence of events. ‘Before midday, would you say?’

  I could not tell whether his hesitation was a result of uncertainty or a different manifestation of his stutter. ‘D-definitely.’

  ‘How much before, would you say?’

  He did not respond, and as I waited for him to speak, I realised my mistake. Lacking a watch, he had no reference points for fractions of an hour. ‘How far could you have walked, do you think, in the time before midday?’

  A considered pause. ‘To Eglwyswrw.’

  Somewhere between half an hour and three quarters of an hour, then, depending on how fast a walker he was. So he had returned by half past eleven or thereabouts.

  ‘You were able to leave Ffynone pretty swiftly, then?’

  ‘M-Mrs Rees went to tell her niece what had happened and the girls went to fetch their things. Th-then we came back.’

  I wondered what kind of grief-stricken truth lay behind those few words. Surely Esther Rees had not remained so stoical in the face of such an enormous blow, still less her young daughters? I pictured Ffynone’s female servants gathering around, Lizzie’s sisters crying and comfort being offered. Work would have been set aside for a few minutes in the face of such a tragedy, but once Esther had chivvied her girls onto the horses, whoever was in charge of the laundry work must have breathed a sigh of relief. I did not know the Colbys of Ffynone personally, but they were successful businessmen. They would be unlikely to tolerate delays out of sympathy for their servants’ relations.

  I had assumed that Barti had simply come back here after his trip to Ffynone, and I had asked about timings accordingly. But perhaps I had underestimated Mr Jones’s generosity with his servant’s time. ‘Did you take Mrs Rees and her girls all the way back to Rhosdywarch,’ I asked, ‘or did you just bring them back here and let them walk home?’

  ‘M-Mr Jones said t-to take them home first, th-then come back.’

  ‘And it was still well before midday when you got back here, to Dolbannon?’

  ‘Y-yes.’

  I believed him. People who measure their waking hours by daylight do not need to consult the height of the sun in the sky at any given moment; it is as much part of their awareness of their surroundings as the ground beneath their feet or the smell on the air they breathe.

  All of which made it very clear that one way or another, Mic Rees had not told me the truth. Either he had discovered his daughter’s death far earlier than he had been prepared to admit, or he had not fetched Dr Gwynne to certify her death before coming to Dolbannon for a messenger. Indeed, if he had already fetched the doctor, why would he need to send a messenger to Ffynone? Surely he could have begged the loan of two horses and gone himself?

  Lizzie Rees’s father was hiding something.

  John

  Harry wasn’t at the Sergeant’s when I arrived in Eglwyswrw, but an old ostler told me that he’d left a message for me to meet him at the Rees family’s place, Rhosdywarch, and told me how to get there.

  As Seren trotted along, I wondered if there was any value at all in the gossip I’d paid Llwyo three and six for. Three names. Three lads who’d bought spoons to give to Lizzie Rees. Or at least, so he suspected. None of them had said who they were for, but according to him ‘everybody’ knew that the three of them were fighting over her.

  ‘Mind, they were only the ones with the money for spoons,’ he’d said. ‘I’m not saying there weren’t others sniffing after her. I’ll give you one name for free. Nattie Stockton.’

  I turned to eyeball him. ‘Go on.’

  ‘From down south. Heard it was serious between them. Stupid, mind, if it was. People wouldn’t stand for it, would they?’

  People being the local lads. They’d see any man from away as poaching on their patch if he tried to court a local girl. And poachers don’t get treated well as a rule.

  I took the next road on the right and found myself going down and down towards the stream Llwyo’d said I’d cross at a ford. On either side of me, the hedge-topped banks sprouted hogweed that narrowed the road by half its width and left its pollen on Seren’s chest and my boots. The piggish smell of it got up my nose as Seren trotted through it, and as my head went back for a sneeze, I caught a glimpse over the hedge of the stubbly bank field beyond. It’d not long had some late hay taken off it, and I wondered if it belonged to Mic Rees. It wasn’t bad land. South-west-facing so it’d get a lot of sun, which brought the grass on no end.

  But of course, once Seren’d splashed through the almost dry ford, I realised that the Rees’s land would be on this side. North-east-facing wasn’t such good news. Less sun, so less profitable.

  A little way up the hill, I saw the apple trees I’d been told to look out for and pulled up. Rhosdywarch wasn’t a bad-looking place. The land was well kept and the house was better than I’d been expecting. Not a full two storeys, but a window’d been knocked into the roofline at one side, so Mic Rees had made the loft a decent space for sleeping in, not just a dark attic under the thatch. To one side of the house was a low-roofed lean-to. Probably the weaving shed Llwyo’d mentioned. The thought of weaving made my stomach lurch, and I pictured Mr Gelyot senior listening to Jem Harborne’s big plans for wool factories in the Teifi Valley, then shaking hands on a deal. My fault. And all because Gus had poked fun at us.

  I stared at the Reeses’ place and tried to forget about Jem Harborne.

  I’d heard that in some parts of Pembrokeshire the houses were pink from adding pigs’ blood to the limewash, but the Rhosdywarch cottage was white like those on our side of the river. Perhaps the pink ones were only in the south, where they spoke English and gave themselves airs.

  There was no sign of Harry’s little mare, Sara, so either she was on the other side of the house or Harry wasn’t here. To be honest, a bit of me was relieved at the thought of putting our first meeting off for a bit longer. Harry and I had barely been speaking to each other before I went up to London.

  Still, we’d have to talk now, wouldn’t we? We were on coroner’s business. And anyway, who knew, perhaps me disappearing off up to London to see the Ex
hibition’d given Harry time to think, take stock a bit.

  I looked up and down the road as far as I could see which was about twenty yards in either direction. Nobody. I was going to have to face Lizzie Rees’s bereaved parents and ask them if they knew where Harry was.

  It was generally Harry who dealt with grieving relatives. He was good at it, didn’t just stick to the usual phrases everybody trots out when there’s been a death; he sounded as if he meant it. Seemed as if he could sense what people needed to hear. Don’t know how he did it without being able to see, but it was a valuable talent for a coroner to have.

  I carried on sitting there for another minute, nerving myself to go up to the house. But then I remembered what day it was. I took my watch out. Nearly eleven o’clock. They’d almost certainly be at chapel, so I could wait here for Harry without worrying.

  I nudged Seren with my heels and up we went to the cottage. The door stayed shut, but I slid down out of the saddle and knocked just in case. Didn’t want to be caught sneaking about the place.

  When there was no answer, I moved to one side and looked through the window. Another point in Mic Rees’s favour. The window had glass in it, not just a shutter. Inside, I could see a fair-sized room with a dresser pretending to be a wall. The fire was banked up, so they must still be out. I moved to the other side of the door and peered in through the second window. Box bed. Rag rug. Chest of drawers. Stool. Was the corpse in the bed?

  Another couple of paces and I was standing at the lean-to window. It was covered with a sheet, so now I knew where the body was.

  Suddenly I heard some scuffling coming from the far end of the house and turned to see two faces peering round the gable end at me. They pulled back as soon as they saw me looking at them, so I dropped Seren’s reins, tiptoed up to the end of the house and peered around. They were hiding there – two little girls. They squealed and grabbed at each other and started laughing in that high-pitched, half-excited, half-terrified way girls have. I could tell they were about to run away, so I spoke to stop them.

  ‘Good morning, ladies! My name’s John Davies and I’m the coroner’s assistant. Is Mr Probert-Lloyd here?’