by Alis Hawkins
Lydia’s coming to Glanteifi to work for me, however, was going to cause nothing short of a minor scandal.
At a meeting of roads, Miss Gwatkyn pulled her horse up. ‘If we were to follow that road to the north,’ she pointed, ‘in half a mile or so we would reach Loventium and the beginning of the Roman road.’
‘Did you bring Nan and Ruth to see the remains?’ John asked.
‘Hah! I tried, Mr Davies. But the girls are far more interested in the history of these parts as it relates to the romances of the Mabinogi. Sarn Helen, for instance. The roads are supposedly named for Elen of Caernarfon who was married to the Emperor Magnus Maximus – the Mabinogi’s Macsen Wledig. The story goes that he dreamed of a beautiful maiden in a castle and sent men all over the empire to find her. Building roads as they went.’
We rode in silence for two or three miles, the terrain becoming hillier and more demanding of the horses. Amongst the tightly interwoven hills with their sudden, gorse-hung slopes and stands of trees, the sound of water was ubiquitous. Tiny streams and brooks gurgled over stone and cut channels through fields. Drainage ditches oozed and trickled. And, everywhere, water seeped slowly but inexorably through soil and peat and moss, down to the streams and thence to the Teifi which would take it to the sea. It was a sound I had been unaware of missing until my failing sight had driven me home.
On the banks of one small stream, a scatter of houses, a forge and a chapel marked a village.
‘This is Capel Gartheli,’ Miss Gwatkyn said. ‘Saint Gartheli founded Christian settlements from one end of the country to the other during the Dark Ages, including Llanddewi Brefi. Llanddewi was only renamed after Saint David turned up at the synod of Brefi and preached so decisively against the Pelagian heresy that there was no more to be said on the matter.’ She paused and, in my peripheral vision, I saw her turn her face to me once more. ‘It might be worth your taking heed of Gartheli in your campaigning, Mr Probert-Lloyd. It’s not always the man who does all the spadework that gets the glory. Sometimes it’s the man who has the right argument at the right time.’
John
Aberaeron didn’t look like a Welsh town. Or, at any rate, it didn’t look like Newcastle Emlyn or Cardigan or Carmarthen. It wasn’t higgledy-piggledy. It didn’t have little roads and lanes going off in all directions and tiny cottages mixed in with shops and bigger houses. The houses were all the same – square-on to the road, two and three storeys high, double-fronted. Recently built and prosperous looking. Even the streets were grand – wide, well kept. And clean.
After parting from Miss Gwatkyn at the Feathers Hotel and leaving the mares in the stables there, we walked up to the quayside. It was as different as you could imagine from the little seaports I knew. Boats didn’t come up on to the beach, or on to wharfs like at Cardigan. At Aberaeron the sea was tamed by high, stone harbour walls. It looked … modern. Business-like. If I hadn’t already known how Aberaeron came to be, it still would’ve been obvious. Somebody with a lot of money had planned it and built it.
The quay was noisy after the quiet ride up – waves slapping against the harbour wall, boats nudging each other with a solid, wooden sound, iron-rimmed wheels on the cobbles as barrows and carts went to and fro. And that was before all the chattering and shouting of sailors and dockside men.
The air was thick with smells as well. That seaweed smell of the sea, the boats with their tar and fish, and a throat-catching, steamy smoke from billowing lime kilns.
The first person we asked about Rowland’s chandlery told us we were in the wrong place.
‘He moved – five, six years ago. He’s in Ship Street now. Behind this lot.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the impressive buildings that looked out over the harbour.
Ship Street turned out to be much less grand than the waterfront. It was narrower, with small commercial premises and workshops. Rowland’s place wasn’t hard to find. There was a sign hanging above the door – Ship’s Chandlery. Flaking and faded. Didn’t exactly encourage you to come here for your goods. If you were setting out on a long journey, you’d worry that your stores had been mouldering away here for months before you bought them.
The shop looked small from the outside, just a single window on one side of the door, and it wasn’t any more impressive on the inside. We walked into a longish, narrow room with a flight of stairs against one wall. There was a door at the top, so Rowland probably lived over the shop.
Before I could make out much of what was in there, a woman spoke to us from behind the counter. ‘Good day, gentlemen. Can I help you?’
She might’ve spoken in English, but her accent said she was as Welsh as I was.
‘We’re looking for Mr Rowland,’ Harry said. ‘Is he here?’
I could tell she was surprised that this gentleman in riding clothes would speak to her in Welsh but she tried not to let it fluster her. ‘My husband isn’t in the best of health today,’ she said, carefully. ‘But if there’s anything you’d like to order I can note it down…?’
Did we look as if we’d come to order ship’s stores? But then, I suppose she had to say something. Show willing. She looked as if she did a lot of that – her face had the kind of permanently worried look people have when they’re used to being at fault. About forty, I supposed. On the thin side but nicely dressed, and not in a betgwn and apron. Like the town, she had a more up-to-date look. Mind, having said that, her dress was faded with washing and she wasn’t any kind of needlewoman. The darns here and there were obvious.
‘We’re not here for supplies,’ Harry said, as if he was letting her into a confidence. ‘We’re here to speak to Mr Rowland about his son, Nicholas.’
Her eyes widened when she heard that and one hand went up to her face.
‘I don’t know—’
‘Please,’ Harry said. ‘We won’t keep him long, but it is important.’
Didn’t have much choice, did she? She turned away and started to climb the stairs. Slowly, dragging it out.
Harry turned to me and put his finger to his lips. I hadn’t been going to say anything, anyway. I knew what these places were like – only a plank floor separating us from the room upstairs.
I looked about. I don’t know what I’d expected – maybe something like a grocer’s shop only more so – but, whatever was on sale, it was all packed into boxes, barrels and drawers of every size on the wall behind the counter. Biggest at the bottom – wide and deep enough to hold a small child or ten pairs of boots – smallest at the top, for papers of needles and pins and that sort of thing.
It might have been small and gloomy but the shop was tidy, cared for. The air smelled of soap and clean linen and salt. Mind you, there was a slightly less pleasant smell coming from a big barrel under the stairs. A smell I was familiar with from my old lodgings. Cheap lamp oil. We might have been having to economise at Glanteifi but Mrs Griffiths, the housekeeper, hadn’t sunk to buying fish oil yet.
Mrs Rowland reached the top of the stairs and I heard her footsteps pattering across the boards. Then she stopped and spoke. Couldn’t make the words out. I waited but there was no answer.
I looked at Harry. His face wasn’t giving anything away.
Then there was some creaking, as if somebody was moving in an old chair whose joints were loose.
I heard Mrs Rowland speak, then came what was almost a shout. ‘Let me be, woman!’
A heavy shuffling overhead, as if a hefty weight was being pushed, a bit at a time. Then Mr Rowland appeared at the top of the stairs. Bent, one hand gripping the edge of the wall. He shuffled forward again and reached out with his other hand to catch hold of the rope that was fastened to the wall. It was a thick kind of ship’s rope, fed through eyelets attached to the stone. Not exactly a polished bannister rail but it did the job.
He came down, two feet to each tread. And if those feet were as knotted with arthritis as his hands were then he must’ve been in agony. Looked as if he’d have little more use of his fingers than his son�
�d had.
At the bottom of the stairs he half-turned and steadied himself on the oak post that was holding the first floor up. Head bent, he looked at me and Harry from under thick, white eyebrows. He obviously couldn’t straighten up properly and I realised that the joints in his backbone must be affected as well. The man was collapsing in on himself.
‘I am Caradog Rowland. What do you want with me?’ He was standing in the light from the window and I could see his eyes clearly. They were forget-me-not blue and seemed to have no pupils. I’d seen eyes like that before. In a woman who’d been dosing her grief with laudanum.
Harry moved forward, as if he wanted to spare the old man the effort of speaking too loudly. ‘It’s about your son, Mr Rowland,’ he said.
The old man kept his eyes on Harry. No matter that keeping his head in that position was causing him pain, making him shake, he didn’t look away.
‘I have no son.’ The words came out flat. Without expression. As if he’d said them again and again till they were meaningless.
Harry cocked his head on one side as if he wasn’t sure he’d heard properly. ‘Nicholas Rowland wasn’t your son?’
The old man didn’t move, eyes pointing straight at Harry’s. You could tell he would’ve given his right arm to stand up straight and face Harry down. ‘I had a son, once. Not any more.’
I saw a movement at the top of the stairs. Mrs Rowland was standing there, her hands knitted together in front of her.
‘Mr Rowland,’ Harry said, ‘I’m very sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But Mr Nicholas Rowland is dead. He was found on Monday morning, with a severe wound to his head, on the floor of the school where he was a teacher.’
There was a flicker of something on the old man’s face. Not sadness. Not pain. If you’d put a gun to my head and told me to name the expression, I’d have had to call it relief.
His wife started down the stairs towards him. ‘Caradog—’
Rowland didn’t so much as look in her direction. ‘Come down and mind the shop. My business here is finished.’ He turned to go but Harry stepped forward.
‘An inquest will be held. The day after tomorrow. In Llanddewi Brefi.’
The old man didn’t turn, didn’t stop. Just caught hold of the rope bannister and started pulling himself up the stairs. I could only imagine what it cost him. ‘That…’ his breaths were coming hard, now, ‘is no … concern … of mine.’
Mrs Rowland stood aside at the top of the stairs and I saw him knock her hands away as she tried to help him. ‘Let me be. Go and mind the shop.’
She came down almost as slowly as he had. When she reached the bottom, she looked from me to Harry and back again. Before she could speak, Harry inclined his head at the door and made an inviting motion with his hand. Let’s go outside where your husband won’t hear.
The sunlight was bright after the darkness inside the shop and it pinched at my eyes. Mrs Rowland put a hand up to shade her face. ‘You must forgive my husband,’ she begged, voice low in case he heard. ‘Some days he’s in such pain that he barely knows what he’s saying.’
‘The laudanum must help?’ I said.
She looked at me, shocked. I shrugged. ‘The signs are there if you’ve seen them before.’
‘He only takes it for the pain—’
‘Mrs Rowland,’ Harry said, gently, ‘we quite understand.’
She nodded, close to tears.
‘We’ve been told that there was no communication between your husband and his son, Nicholas. It seems that may be true?’
Mrs Rowland dropped her eyes to the ground and laced her fingers tightly together again. ‘My husband never mentions him. If I hadn’t known, before I married him, that he had a son, I wouldn’t know Nicholas existed.’
‘What caused the rift between them?’ Harry asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, her face creased with all the many questions her husband’d never answered.‘He won’t talk about it. Never has. I soon learned not to ask.’
I remembered that move of her hand to her face when Nicholas’d been mentioned – was it Caradog Rowland’s fists that had taught her that lesson?
She was staring at Harry. Perhaps she was wondering why he was looking somewhere over her shoulder. A light breeze lifted a stray lock of hair off her temple. She might not have a single strand of grey yet, but lines of worry and tension had marked her face.
‘Nobody in the family told you anything?’ I asked.
‘All I know,’ she said, keeping her voice low and glancing up at the window above us, ‘and this is from others, not from my husband, is that Nicholas was taken to a doctor after an accident and never spent another night under his father’s roof.’
‘An accident?’ Harry asked.
‘It was in the old shop. The rope for the loft’s trapdoor snapped and it fell shut on Nicholas’s hands. My husband was out the back doing something and it took him a while to hear the shouts. The boy’s fingers were mangled beyond help, by all accounts.’
There was something in her voice – and her eyes – as she told that story. I don’t think she believed it.
‘And he was taken away to a doctor?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘And never came back?’
She shook her head, eyes troubled.
‘When exactly did this happen?’ Harry asked.
‘Must be getting on for twenty years ago.’
‘How long have you been married?’ He’d be going on the sound of her voice which belonged to a youngish woman.
‘To Caradog? Fifteen years. I was married before, but my first husband died.’
‘Do you and Mr Rowland have any children?’
Such a look passed over her face then. A look full of tears and despair.
‘No. I had a son from my previous husband when Caradog and I married. But he died.’
Old Man Rowland had no heir, then. Was it that, rather than age and infirmity that had brought him to cower in this backstreet?
A gull screeched overhead and I looked up. The bird’s smooth underbelly was a pure white against the blue of the sky. It screamed its challenge to the air and wheeled around to join the other gulls over the harbour. One step outside the chandler’s door and we were in a different world. Gloom and age and silence inside, sun and vigour and life outside.
If I’d been Mrs Rowland, I would’ve wanted to run and run. But then, where would she go?
‘When he died,’ Harry said, ‘Nicholas Rowland was in possession of a large sum of cash. Is there any possibility that some of it came from his father?’
Mrs Rowland seemed to drag her thoughts from wherever they were to what Harry was saying. ‘No, sir. We haven’t got a penny to give away. Much less a large sum. And even if we did, his son is the last person my husband would give it to.’
‘What about Mr Rowland’s first wife? Does she still have family here?’
‘Only me. She was my cousin. Everybody else close is gone.’ She looked at Harry again. ‘Everybody who might know, I mean.’
‘Friends? Former neighbours?’ Harry suggested.
An expression came and went, like a cloud skimming past the sun, flickering darkness, then gone. But she could wipe it off her face all she liked, I’d seen it. If you think my husband is the sort of man who’d blab family secrets, you haven’t got the sense you were born with.
‘No, sir,’ she said. ‘There’s nobody.’
Harry chewed his lip and nodded. I could tell he hadn’t expected any other kind of answer.
We thanked Mrs Rowland and left her on the doorstep. When I turned at the end of the street and looked back, she was still there. Still standing in the warm sun.
Harry
We had arranged to meet Miss Gwatkyn back at the Feathers Hotel and we walked in that direction now, past the tall, open arches of the town hall’s marketplace.
The smell of the sea was less pronounced here than it had been on the harbour, almost lost in the pervasive town smells of ho
rse dung and coal smoke. Still, there was something different in the Aberaeron air, something bracing despite the warmth of the April sun, and I could see why people had flocked to live here: elegant architecture, dignified civic buildings, a port that was attracting more industry by the month.
I was roused by a sudden outburst from John.
‘Did you believe all that nonsense about an accident with a trapdoor?’
I was taken aback. ‘You clearly don’t.’
‘Not for a second! A snapped rope? The old man conveniently out of the way? Something more deliberate happened there, take it from me. And that was the reason Nicholas never came back.’
‘You think he deliberately injured his son? Why?’
‘Who knows? But I don’t think it was an accident any more than I think Rowland fell out of the schoolroom loft of his own accord.’
The Feathers Hotel, grandiose and gleaming white in the sun, was as welcoming as the Talbot Inn but far superior when it came to the appointment of its interiors and the fineness of its tableware.
When we asked for Miss Gwatkyn, we were shown to a table next to the window in a small dining room. Divested of her travelling cape, she was dressed in a simple, blue-grey riding habit and, even to me, she looked very different from the figure who spent her days at Alltybela in a woollen over-dress and the eccentric footwear John had described to me. As we joined her, she put aside the book she was reading and asked for more tea to be brought.
