by Alis Hawkins
‘As coroner, maybe. But not as citizens of the Teifi Valley. Rowland’s school idea was ambitious and it might not survive without his vision. If there’s money in the kitty for it, I think we need to know who supported him, who might want to take the idea and see it through.’
I stared at him. That was a load of what Mr Schofield would’ve called post hoc justification and my mam would’ve called pitiful excuses.
Harry saw my silence for the argument it was and started trying to justify himself. ‘The will says that if somebody can be found to carry on the school idea, they can have access to all Rowland’s funds. But, unless they know that, supporters might not come forward.’
‘Tell Silas Emmanuel to put out a public notice, then. Put it in the paper.’
Harry sighed and turned his face up to the sky as if he was looking for another way to persuade me. ‘Do you think the jury’s right, John? About Shoni Goch?’
What was I supposed to say? What answer would stop him picking at this like a scab?
‘More than likely,’ I said. ‘And I think the only reason you don’t is because all that stuff about him and Ruth came out of the blue. If somebody’d told us about him before – especially how he’d been here and then left, conveniently, the day after Rowland died – we’d have been up to Pantglas, quick-smart, to talk to Jeremiah Eynon, wouldn’t we?’
I could butter him up all I liked but Harry knew as well as I did that somebody had tried to tell us. We’d got Llew Price’s note days before the hearing but we’d been too busy with the election to go and see him. And too busy wasting time thinking suspicious thoughts about Montague Caldicot.
The Carmarthen Journal was going to have a field day.
I rode to the funeral alongside Miss Gwatkyn, with Alltybela’s gambo trundling along behind two sturdy cobs, carrying the household. Miss Gwatkyn was quiet, hadn’t spoken a word since we left the schoolhouse. Not like her servants. They were in high spirits, funeral or not. I wondered how much of Morgan Walters’s beer had gone down their throats.
The young people sat side-on to the flat bed of the cart, legs dangling in between the uprights, with the older people sitting on a bench in the middle. It wasn’t very stable but, with half a dozen backsides on it, the bench stayed put. To be honest, I was more worried about the wheels. A gambo like that’s only really meant for the fields and, from the look of it, the wheel strakes were old and likely to spring on the stony road.
Still, that wasn’t my problem, was it? Mind, I did wonder about the man whose problem it was. Where was Phoebe Gwatkyn’s steward? With her husband elsewhere, I would’ve expected him to be at her side for an occasion like this. But then, knowing Miss Gwatkyn, perhaps she did without a steward and ran the estate by herself. It wasn’t difficult to picture her going out to collect rents – or, more likely, people coming to the old hall in Alltybela on quarter days, their scraped-up shillings warm and grimy in their hands. Not that I’d have put it past her to let half of them pay in the old way. People’d got used to cash rents but that was mostly because of absentee landlords who had no use for butter and chickens and hay where they lived. They wanted cash. That was why they’d bought estates, to make money. Well, that and to look like the genuine article, like the old families.
But then, even the old families – like the one Harry’s father’d married into – needed cash, didn’t they? Especially when they’d taken out mortgages to improve their tenants’ houses and holdings. The figures Mr Ormiston had shown me came into my head along with a dull, nagging feeling that I should be there, at Glanteifi, with him now, doing something about the state of things, learning all the tricks I could. To be honest, in my less optimistic moments, I wasn’t sure I was up to managing the estate if Mr Ormiston decided to retire sooner rather than later. Not with the finances as they were.
To distract myself, I turned my eyes to the chattering Alltybela household. They looked a lot like the Glanteifi servants. Not well dressed. All a bit down at heel, really. But well fed. Healthy. The boy, Lleu, was sitting at the back of the gambo, dragging a stick along the ground to make the end into a sharp point. He’d be lucky. The horse needed to be going at least at a trot for that to work. I knew, I’d done it myself as a boy. At a walking pace all you got was a stick with a muddy end.
Suddenly, Miss Gwatkyn turned to me. ‘If somebody gives false testimony at an inquest and that comes to light, would the coroner be obliged to hold another inquest?’
I stared at her. Was that what she’d been thinking about, all this time? ‘You can re-open an inquest,’ I said. ‘But only if there’s new evidence which throws doubt on the verdict,’ I said. ‘Do you think somebody lied to the jury?’
She turned to me. Her solemn face looked out of place under her jaunty little felt hat. ‘I strongly suspect so. I don’t think the lie affected the verdict but Nicholas Rowland might have died because of it, if the same lie had been told before.’
I didn’t ask her who she suspected of lying. The more she told me, the more pressure I’d feel to tell Harry. And I didn’t want to give him any encouragement to carry on poking about into this case. It was best left to the police and the magistrates now.
Not that that stopped me wondering. In fact, I only stopped picking away at that question when we got to the Unitarian chapel and I saw somebody whose presence there was such a surprise it drove everything else out of my head.
Lydia Howell.
I’d never been to a Unitarian funeral before and it was different from what happened at other chapels. Mind, that might have had nothing to do with the denomination – it might’ve just been to do with Rowland’s circumstances. There was no widow to collect for, no orphans who’d need supporting, so the usual offerings stayed in people’s pockets and nobody was quite sure what to do instead.
Inside, the chapel was squarish in shape and full of light from the long windows in every wall. And very symmetrical. The only thing that threw the balance out was the pulpit which stood to one side at the front, high up, with a steep staircase curving round it.
Everybody was here. Even people I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen at the inquest.
Like Lydia. She was sitting in the front row of the chapel’s pews as if she was family, busy chatting with another woman. I didn’t go up to her. Plenty of time for that later. But that didn’t stop me wondering what on earth she was doing here.
I looked around. Coming straight from the inquest, the congregation wasn’t in what you might call a funeral mood, and instead of a chapel full of respectful, sad-faced murmuring all you could hear was gossip about Shoni Goch and the Eynons. People couldn’t wait to pass on the news to friends who hadn’t been at the inquest.
You’ll never guess who was secretly engaged to Mr Rowland? That fancy little piece Ruth Eynon! Yes, Eynon Pantglas’s girl. And without her father’s permission, too. Happy about it? About as happy as a man bitten by his own dog.
Conversations about Ruth and Rowland were going on all around the place. You could tell from the way eyes searched out Jeremiah Eynon and his family. The Eynons themselves weren’t doing any talking. Just sitting there, stiff as stooks.
Ruth was with Nan Walters. And, if she had any sense, that’s where she’d stay until her father calmed down. Or died. The sister who must’ve been nearest to her in age kept darting glances at her but Ruth huddled between Nan and Gwenllian Walters and kept her eyes down. Much good that’d do her if her father decided she was going home with him. Or would Miss Gwatkyn intervene?
The lady of Alltybela herself had been greeted by the minister as soon as we’d walked in. Was she a Unitarian herself? I wouldn’t have put it past her and she certainly looked at home, chatting with him. Her household weren’t sitting together like they had been at the inquest but were all scattered about the place, chatting to people as if they were here every week.
Soon, the ground floor was packed and people were starting to make their way up the spiral staircases at the back on to the balconies. Youn
g people were turfed out of their seats and shooed upstairs so that grandparents who couldn’t manage the steps could sit in their places and there was a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing as people swapped seats to be near friends or relatives.
Was the turnout so big because there hadn’t been a gwylnos – a vigil? Even if Phoebe Gwatkyn had held one – and maybe she had, who was I to say she hadn’t sat up all night with the body before coming to the inquest? – I couldn’t see the people of Llanddewi thinking it was their place to go and sit with her. It just wouldn’t have felt right, would it, eating the gwylnos cake and drinking tea with Miss Gwatkyn? That was what ordinary people did – the gentry had their own traditions, no doubt, and the two shouldn’t be mixed.
I tried to imagine Miss Gwatkyn in her blue tunic and furry boots, wrapped in a blanket against the cold of the small hours, keeping Rowland company on his last night above ground.
I’d only been to one gwylnos, myself. My grandmother’s, when I was seven years old. To my childish mind, the coffin had seemed too large for such a small woman. Huge, it’d looked, sitting there in our house on trestles borrowed from the chapel.
Had Phoebe Gwatkyn put candles at Rowland’s head and feet, like Mam did for Mamgu? Had she hung evergreen branches over the door?
My grandmother’s gwylnos had been a quiet affair, only a few of her old friends and us family. It’d been strange – being up all night, keeping the fire burning bright instead of banking it down, making tea, watching the candles burn down through hours when we’d normally have been fast asleep. The quiet talk of the old men and women, remembering a time long before I was born. I remembered falling asleep listening to stories of a mischievous girl with pigtails the exact colour of a blackbird’s wing. Somebody they’d known and I never had.
There was nobody in Llanddewi Brefi who could’ve talked about Nicholas Rowland like that. No family or friends of his youth. Had there been friends in London? If so, he’d left them behind just as surely as he’d left his family behind when he ran away from Aberaeron. Nobody, here, had known him as anything but the teacher who’d come to them with an ambitious idea.
I was just thinking about that when I heard a question behind me that made me sit up and take notice.
‘What I don’t understand,’ a woman said, not bothering to keep her voice down, ‘is why her father was trying to marry her off to somebody like his cousin?’
‘Ah, well now…’ a voice next to her replied. ‘Too young to remember, aren’t you?’
‘Remember what?’
‘Yes … you’d only have been four or five, I suppose.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Same thing, wasn’t it? Father wanted one thing; girl wanted another.’ The second woman waited for a question but none came so she had to go on of her own accord or leave the story dangling. I pictured the two of them in my head. With at least one of them too old for heads-together whispering, they’d be sitting six inches apart, each queen of her two feet of pew.
‘Mari Eynon – Ruth’s mother – was promised to the son of the farm next door. From the cradle, just about. You know how it goes – two small farms into one big one for the next generation.’
‘So who was the man she’d been promised to?’
‘Jeremiah Eynon.’
‘But that’s who she’s married to now!’
‘I know. But Mari wanted somebody else. She’d started courting somebody else, if you please, without her father knowing.’
‘Who?’
‘Llew Price. The grocer.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Begged and pleaded with her father, Mari did. Said she loved Llew and wanted to marry him. Might as well’ve tried to stop the wind with a sieve. An only child, wasn’t she? No brothers to take the farm over. Llew’d never make a farmer and her father didn’t want to see all his work go to somebody outside the family when he was gone, did he?’
‘That doesn’t explain why Jeremiah Eynon’s making his daughter marry his cousin.’
‘Yes, it does.’ Dramatic pause. ‘Because she’s not his daughter.’
‘Never! Llew’s then, is she?’
‘Yes. Thought they’d force her father’s hand, Mari and Llew did. So she went to him and said she was carrying Llew’s child. Thought that’d be the end of the matter.’
‘But he made her marry Jeremiah anyway?’
‘He did.’
‘Did Jeremiah know?’
At first, there was no answer. Or maybe there was one of those shrugs that tells you more than a hundred words. ‘He will’ve done soon enough, even if he didn’t know before the wedding. And everybody else knew, too, when the baby came. Been counting, hadn’t they? You can put it about that a child’s come before its time till everybody’s deaf from hearing it, but … everybody knew. And Jeremiah Eynon knew they knew. Hates the sight of Ruth, he does. Treats her no better than a skivvy.’
‘Wicked.’
‘That’s the Eynons for you, isn’t it? Always been a strange lot. Hard. Eye for an eye, they want.’
There was silence behind me, then, and I pictured the two women staring at the Eynons.
‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ the older one said, after a bit. ‘I wouldn’t be Ruth when he gets her home.’
All through the service, I couldn’t stop looking over at Lydia Howell and wondering why she was here. Had the note Harry’d left for her at the Talbot asked her to come?
I stood for the hymns and sat for the readings and the eulogy like everybody else but I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that Harry might’ve asked Miss Howell to come here. Didn’t he think I’d be a good enough representative for Glanteifi? Or was this about her being a Unitarian? Perhaps he thought she’d be able to get some information from the minister.
The last hymn done and the blessing given, we all trooped out to watch Rowland put in the ground.
Afterwards, I made my way towards Lydia Howell and waited till the woman she was chatting to left with a friendly touch on her arm and a quiet, ‘I hope it all goes well for you, my dear.’
‘Good afternoon, Miss Howell,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised to see you here.’
She smiled. No, she grinned. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Davies. I must admit, I hadn’t expected to find myself at a funeral.’
Mr Davies. She’d often referred to me as John in her letters to Harry but I was glad she didn’t assume she could call me by my given name. And, if she hadn’t known there was going to be a funeral, Harry couldn’t have asked her to come. Good.
‘We’d expected to see you later, at the Talbot,’ I said.
‘Waiting for the pair of you?’ That grin was waiting to come out again. ‘The note Harry left for me said you’d be busy most of the day with the inquest,’ she said. ‘So I decided to come and talk to Mr Owens.’
I blinked. Mr Owens was the Unitarian minister. ‘Are you acquainted?’
‘No. He wasn’t here when—’ She hesitated. ‘When Nathaniel was at Treforgan.’
She could see I wanted an explanation.
‘Unitarians are few in number compared to Methodists and Baptists,’ she said. ‘We tend to know each other and news travels quickly from one to all the others. I knew that if I came and introduced myself here, word would go to Treforgan ahead of me. Now, I’ll be less of a wonder than if I’d suddenly appeared unannounced.’
Treforgan had been Nathaniel Howell’s chapel, a short walk from Glanteifi’s mansion.
‘The longer something stays unknown,’ she said, when I didn’t reply, ‘the more it’s talked into being a mystery. If I can make myself known as Nathaniel’s sister, and prove myself to be quite ordinary, rumour and gossip are less likely to fester.’
Which just went to show that she wasn’t as clever as she thought she was.
People weren’t quite sure what to do once the earth was being shovelled over Rowland’s coffin. They hung about in dribs and drabs, gossiping, enjoying the sunshine, waiting to see what
everybody else was going to do. And whether Miss Gwatkyn was going to propose anything.
Meanwhile, Phoebe Gwatkyn spoke to a lot of the mourners, getting curtsies from the women and respectful hat-holding from the men. But talk was all she did. And, in all fairness, why should she do more? She’d given his body houseroom when nobody else knew where to put it and she’d had a very decent coffin knocked together for him. Anything more would’ve claimed kinship. Or given the parish something to gossip about.
Gave the funeral meal for him, she did, as if she was his sister.
Or his wife…
I watched as her servants gathered around her like chicks to a mother hen, then made my way over to the paved path where she was standing. I hadn’t intended introducing Lydia but when Miss Gwatkyn’s eyes looked past me I had no choice.
‘Miss Gwatkyn, may I present Miss Lydia Howell.’
‘Delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Howell.’
‘And yours, Miss Gwatkyn.’ Lydia gave that angled nod of the head that ladies use instead of a bow. Then she gave that grin again. ‘Mr Davies is being delicate in neglecting to tell you why I’m here. I’m Mr Probert-Lloyd’s new private secretary.’
Miss Gwatkyn’s face changed entirely when she smiled. ‘Are you indeed? How marvellous! You’ll have to get Harry to bring you over to Alltybela for tea tomorrow.’
