by Alis Hawkins
Contents
THOSE WHO KNOW by Alis Hawkins
Dedication
Epigraph
Glossary of Welsh terms
Part One
Part Two
Some historical notes
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Those
Who Know
Alis Hawkins
For Rob and Flo
Wishing you both all the happiness in the world
Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.
Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching
Glossary of Welsh terms
bara brith: speckled bread, a fruit cake
betgwn: the outer garment of most Cardiganshire working women in the nineteenth century. It featured a tight, low-cut bodice, worn over a blouse, with a long back, sometimes gathered up into a ‘tail’, and was worn over petticoats and an apron
ceffyl pren: wooden horse. A traditional form of folk justice in the area
cymanfa ganu: a singing meeting, usually to sing hymns at chapel
gwylnos: watchnight, a night sitting in vigil with the dead
plwyfwas: parish servant, a parish constable
Shoni Goch: Red John
swci lamb: a lamb whose mother has died and which has been hand-reared
Part One
John
Tregaron, 28th April 1851
If Llanddewi Brefi’s parish constable hadn’t been so keen to keep his job, we’d never have got involved in Nicholas Rowland’s death. It just would’ve gone down as a tragic accident and we’d have been spared a lot of trouble.
My boss, Harry Probert-Lloyd, didn’t have time to be looking at bodies just then. He’d been acting coroner for three months and he’d just got started on his campaign to be elected coroner for the Teifi Valley in his own right. An inquest was the last thing he needed.
When news of the death came, we were standing in Tregaron’s town square where carpenters were putting up a stage for the election meeting at the end of the week. Harry’s election agent, Jonas Minnever, had dragged us up there to do some canvassing.
Minnever. Even after knowing him for a month and more, I still didn’t know what to make of him. He’d just turned up at Glanteifi one day and, before we knew where we were, he was a fixture. Forever asking questions, making arrangements, insisting on things.
I know you’re not supposed to look a gift horse in the mouth but there is such a thing as buying a pig in a poke, isn’t there? Fair enough, Minnever might be more horse than pig but, in my experience, if a man you don’t know offers you something you haven’t asked for, he’s probably got a plan for you that you’re not going to like.
Mind, he was good company, as far as that went. Cheerful, witty, always asking your opinion and making you feel clever. But that was suspicious in itself, wasn’t it? Why would a man like him – somebody who knew everybody who was anybody in the county – go out of his way to make me feel important?
I never put the question to Harry because I knew what he’d say. That I’d come up in the world. That I wasn’t just the temporary coroner’s borrowed assistant any more. Nor Mr Solicitor Schofield’s clerk, either. That I might only be twenty years old but I was under-steward to the Glanteifi estate and about-to-be-qualified solicitor.
Which was all true. But Minnever’s back-slapping still put me on edge. And, whatever he said, Harry wasn’t really any happier to have him about the place than I was. Called him a necessary evil. Still, like him or not, Jonas Minnever had long pockets filled by powerful men.
So, there we were, standing about watching men work and listening to Minnever wanting to know when the stage’d be finished, could we put up an awning in case it rained, where were the chairs and lectern coming from, when one of the nameless Liberal Party hangers-on piped up.
‘Done much public speaking before, Mr Probert-Lloyd?’
Harry turned to him. ‘Before I went blind, I was a barrister, so my job consisted of very little but public speaking.’
But Mr Ears-on-a-stalk Minnever wasn’t having that. Left off what he was saying to put Harry right. ‘Speaking in public isn’t the same as public speaking, Harry. Electioneering is all about carrying a crowd with you. More like rabble-rousing than reasoned argument.’
I turned away to watch a carpenter mitring the end of a plank. We’d been in Tregaron two days already and I was sick of it all. Sick of the election. Sick of Minnever and the endless people who seemed to be working for him. Sick of being introduced to men who Minnever always called ‘one of us’. This is Mr So and So – he’s one of us. Liberal Party supporters, he meant. Was I one of us? I didn’t know, to be honest.
Most of all, I was sick of having nothing proper to do. For the last couple of months I’d got used to working flat out, whether it was learning the stewarding trade or studying for my solicitor’s exams or going all over the Teifi Valley with Harry as coroner’s officer. But here, on what Minnever called ‘the canvass’, I was nothing more than a note-taker and noticer of things Harry couldn’t see. And unwilling ally to Jonas Minnever.
‘What do you think, Mr Davies?’ he’d ask every time Harry looked unhappy about something he’d been asked to do. I knew he just wanted me to talk some sense but, every time he asked for my opinion, it felt as if he was trying to get me on his side against Harry.
I watched the carpenter putting his two mitred planks together in a right angle and longed for some honest work that didn’t involve telling people what they wanted to hear. I didn’t know it but I was about ten seconds away from salvation. And the person who was going to save me was clumping across the square on heavy legs.
‘Excuse me.’ The boy might be panting like a sow in the sun but somebody’d taught him his manners. ‘I’m looking for the coroner.’
I stepped forward. ‘This is Mr Probert-Lloyd, the acting coroner,’ I said. The boy’d asked the question in Welsh so he probably didn’t speak English. ‘Who’s died?’
‘Mr Rowland. Our teacher down in Llanddewi Brefi. Fell out of the loft, he did. Mr Jones, the plwyfwas, sent me.’
‘The plwyfwas has done the right thing,’ Harry told him. ‘Has the body been moved?’
Llanddewi Brefi might be a bit out of the way but I was pretty sure that the parish constable, this Mr Jones, would’ve heard that the acting coroner was fussy about his corpses. There’d been a case a few weeks before where Harry hadn’t been called in until the body’d been taken home, washed and laid out. Nobody in the Teifi Valley would be making that mistake again.
You could see that the boy was thrown by Harry speaking to him in Welsh. ‘No, sir,’ he stammered. ‘Mr Jones said we should leave it for you to see.’
Harry turned to Minnever and the others. As usual, politeness put him at a disadvantage because the more directly he looked at them the less he’d be able to see. ‘Gentlemen, I’m afraid there’s been a death that requires my attention so I shall have to take my leave. Will you excuse me?’
Minnever wasn’t having any of that. Rubbed his hands together as if he hadn’t heard better news in a week. ‘Excellent,’ he said, ‘an in vivo demonstration of your methods! Who could have wished for better?’
Harry
I would not have admitted it to anybody, even to John, but I welcomed Schoolmaster Rowland’s death like a gift from the gods. For weeks now, Minnever had been taking me about, praising me to party supporters, discussing strategy and introducing me to the men who would organise public meetings in the fortnight running up to nomination and polling day; and though my determination to secure the coronership had not wavered, I found myself ill at ease with the election process.
From the outset, I had had misgivings about becoming embroiled in politics, an attitude Mi
nnever clearly found naïve.
‘Despite a general sympathy for your recent bereavement,’ he’d said on his first, unannounced, visit to Glanteifi as he moved restlessly around the drawing room. ‘I fear you lack allies in Cardiganshire, Mr Probert-Lloyd. And you’re going to need support. Substantial support.’
I had not known how to respond to his oblique reference to my father’s recent death, or how to ask what kind of support he had in mind; I feared sounding embarrassingly ignorant but Minnever continued as if my very lack of response had been an answer.
‘If you’re going to successfully oppose the Tories, you’ll need—’
‘The Tories?’
‘Yes.’ Minnever’s tone suggested that he was not sure what exactly my surprise signified. ‘Their candidate, Montague Caldicot, has moved down from London and is waiting in the wings.’
I had seen no public announcement from this Caldicot and his existence as a rival candidate was an unpleasant surprise. ‘But why the party affiliation? This isn’t a political election.’
Minnever sighed audibly and ran a hand over a pate that seemed, to my limited vision, to be completely bald. ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, believe me when I tell you that there is no such thing as a non-political election! The Tories will be out in force behind their man. And they’re not accustomed to being beaten. Not here.’
I was finding it difficult to assimilate what Minnever was telling me. Having been asked by the county magistrates to act as coroner during the previous incumbent’s final illness, I had expected to stand unopposed in the subsequent election to the post. The notion that I had been a mere placeholder while the Tories manoeuvred their favoured candidate into place was humiliating.
‘Suppose,’ I said, ‘that I accept that political support might be useful. What would the party want in return?’ Though there was absolutely no prospect of my being able to fund an election campaign on my own behalf – not with the estate teetering towards bankruptcy – I was unwilling to enter into some species of Faustian pact.
Minnever hesitated before answering. ‘There’s going to be a general election next year,’ he said, rocking on the balls of his feet in front of the fire, as if he would like to break into a run. ‘And, for the first time in a generation, both the borough and the county seat will be contested. We want to see how much work we’d need to do in order to carry the day in both constituencies.’
He paused, presumably expecting derision at the idea of anybody but a Tory winning an election in the county seat, but I had no intention of fulfilling his expectations.
‘This election is important for you,’ he said, when I failed to react. ‘And next year’s is important for us. We can help each other. What do you say?’
I had seen no alternative but to acquiesce and, as a result, I had not been the master of my own fate since.
Now, however, there was a body, and I could go about the job for which I had discovered such an aptitude. Minnever’s motives for backing my campaign might be entirely political, but having the opportunity to witness my competence could only make his support more wholehearted. Or so I hoped.
John
It wasn’t only Minnever who rode down to Llanddewi Brefi to see the body with us. So did Benton Reckitt – workhouse doctor, anatomist and Harry’s preferred medical witness. Dr Reckitt looked at corpses and gave us his opinion on how they’d died. At length, if we weren’t careful.
He wasn’t in Tregaron by accident. Far from it. Reckitt had taken it into his head to try and get himself elected coroner. The fact that he was Harry’s friend didn’t seem to have struck him as a reason not to.
He was an oddity, Reckitt.
The boy who’d come for us rode pillion behind me. I was glad we had a headwind – the whiff I’d got off him as I hauled him up on to the mare’s back had been ripe. The stale smell of smoke from a fire that’s mostly turf. Damp homespun. Linen not washed enough and only in water. And a body barely washed at all. The fact that I knew I would’ve smelled exactly the same at his age didn’t make him any sweeter. My life’d changed since then, thank God. Changed out of all recognition.
While Minnever listened to Harry explaining what would happen when we got there, and Reckitt concentrated on staying in the saddle, I had a little chat with my passenger. If previous sudden deaths were anything to go by, there’d be plenty of people who’d want to put their tuppence in, but children see the adults around them in a different way. Sometimes more clearly.
Enoch, the boy’s name was. I commiserated with him about having to run all the way to Tregaron with the news of this teacher’s death and, in return, he told me everything I wanted to know. Turned out that the dead man, Mr Rowland, had come to teach in Llanddewi a bit more than three years ago. His school was popular – between twenty and forty children at any given time, Enoch said – because he’d never turned anybody away, even if they couldn’t afford their teacher’s pence.
‘Dic Penwarren came to school for a whole winter without ever paying a penny,’ he told me. ‘He’d bring an egg in his pocket for Mr Rowland every day and Mr Rowland said that was enough. And Mr Rowland got Anna Dangraig specs!’
‘Did he indeed? Doctor as well, is he?’
‘No! He saw her screwing her eyes up to try and make the letters clear and he took her to Miss Gwatkyn. It was Miss Gwatkyn that got her the specs really,’ Enoch admitted. ‘But she wouldn’t have known about Anna if Mr Rowland hadn’t told her, would she?’
‘And who’s this Miss Gwatkyn, then?’
‘Miss Gwatkyn, Alltybela,’ he said as if that explained everything. ‘The big house.’
The big house. The mansion. Miss Gwatkyn was obviously somebody to be reckoned with locally.
According to Enoch, Mr Rowland never used the birch – not like some, he said – and he didn’t just make them read by rote. ‘He told us what we were reading about – explained things.’ And he hadn’t only taught them to read and write. ‘Nobody’ll be able to swindle me any more,’ Enoch boasted. ‘Mr Rowland taught us our pence tables as well. And how to reckon money.’ And, apparently, the teacher had always talked about how it was a big world. ‘We’ve got a map of the world on Mercator’s projection,’ Enoch told me, producing each syllable carefully.
‘Do you know any English?’ I asked.
‘Only a bit to read. Not to speak,’ he told me. ‘Mr Rowland says we should learn in our own language first, then, if we want to carry on, we can learn English. He says how can we know what we’re reading if it’s in a language we don’t understand?’
That took me back to my first proper day school, sitting in a ragged row with a strange English book that none of us understood a word of to begin with – The Ready Letter-Writer. To this day, I remember copying out ‘A letter from a young gentleman to a lady, begging her acceptance of a present’. I don’t know where that winter’s teacher’d got hold of it but that’d been our only English primer.
‘Do any of the pupils stay on to learn more – geography or history?’ I asked, following Enoch’s lead and referring to the school in the present tense. Best not to upset him with thoughts that Mr Rowland and his school were both in the past, now.
‘Some, yes. The ones with parents who can afford it.’
The children of Llanddewi Brefi were unusually fortunate. In most schools that came and went with the seasons you were lucky if you learned anything but how to read the Bible and write your name. Your parents’d pay for you to go for two or three terms and then the money’d go back to paying for things the family’d gone without for you to learn your letters. Soap. Tea. Shoes.
From Enoch’s prattling, it sounded as if his family was better off than most. He’d attended the school ever since Mr Rowland had arrived in Llanddewi Brefi, three years ago. Apart from the times when he’d been needed to work in the fields, obviously.
‘Did any of the older pupils help with the teaching?’ I asked him. They might well have done if Mr Rowland had been taking the brighter ones beyond the basi
cs.
‘No. He had Miss Walters and Miss Eynon for that.’
I stored that information away. Mr Rowland must’ve had ambitions beyond his score or two of pupils if he’d been taking on assistants.
‘So, did everybody like him?’
Enoch hesitated. ‘Nearly everybody. Not Mr Hildon, though. The vicar.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
‘Mr Hildon wants a different kind of school. A church one.’
‘Chapel was he, Mr Rowland?’
‘Yes. Unitarian.’
I nodded. The Unitarians were big believers in education. I decided to poke a bit more at that nearly everybody. ‘So,’ I said, ‘no enemies, eh?’
Enoch would never’ve told Harry, but I was different. I’d asked the boy questions that told him I’d been like him once upon a time.
‘Only Old Mattie,’ he said.
I soon had the whole story. Old Mattie’d been the local teacher before Mr Rowland came. Hadn’t been much good at his job, from what Enoch said, and none of the children’d liked him.
‘What does he do now?’ I asked.
I felt the boy shrug against me. ‘Past couple of months, I think he’s mostly been threshing.’
Threshing was what kept the poorest out of the workhouse in winter. Old Mattie must’ve had a thin time of it after Rowland and his progressive ideas arrived. ‘Enemy’ probably wasn’t far off the mark.
Llanddewi Brefi turned out to be a small village. The whole place looked as if it had washed down out of the hills, every shop and dwelling separate from its neighbours, with the church stranded on a rise above the houses. Rooks were flying around the square tower like a ragged black cloud, cawing as if they hadn’t seen each other for a year.
