by Alis Hawkins
I turned to pluck my coat from the back of the chair. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
Bellis stood in silence and watched me go. I hoped I would not live to regret my small victory.
John
I’d been to London before with Harry, so I wasn’t as nervous setting out on the coach for Carmarthen on Tuesday morning as I might’ve been. Plus, I had money in my pocket and a tongue in my head. One or the other’d get me out of any difficulties there might be.
The steamer across the Bristol Channel was just as unpleasant as I’d remembered, with its shifting deck and drifts of coal smoke and staggering passengers but I managed not to be sick and, once I was on land again in Bristol, I found a bed for the night near the railway station.
But then, with nothing definite to do, time dragged.
I ate the dinner which came with the room I’d paid for. I drank a pint of beer I didn’t really want. And I watched the other two people sitting in the grubby little parlour. A man and a young woman. He was old enough to be her father but any fool could see that that wasn’t the relationship there.
I started out for a walk to kill a bit more time but, after ten minutes of looking over my shoulder every time I heard footsteps behind me, I went back to the boarding house.
When I asked for a light to take upstairs, the harassed-looking woman who seemed to be in charge of everything, from cooking to making sure the street drunks didn’t stumble in over the threshold, offered me a candle. I smiled nicely and said I had work to do and could she let me have a lamp instead. She said she’d have to add the cost of it to my bill. Didn’t care whether I lived or died, that much was clear, as long as I paid for everything I got. If I died in my rented bed, she’d probably strip me and sell my clothes.
I shook the lamp when she handed it over to make sure she wasn’t going to charge me for putting oil in it as well.
The room I’d paid for was a garret at the front of the house. The stairs were worn and, as I climbed up, the lamp showed greasy stains on the wall from steadying hands. When I got up to the second landing, I could hear noises through the door next to mine. My trousers went tight as I realised what was going on in there. You can have cheap or you can have respectable, my old landlady used to say, but not both. She ran a respectable house, of course.
The room was just as depressing as when I’d come up to dump my bag, earlier. The rug rucked up when you opened the door. The narrow bed sat against the partition that divided this room from the knocking-shop on the other side. There was a tiny washstand under the window, and a rickety chair in the corner.
I tried looking out of the grimy window but all I could see were roofs under a dark sky. Carefully, I sat on the bed. It was a slat-frame and the mattress was thin enough for me to feel the slats through it. Maybe it’d be too thin to have many bugs.
At least the linen looked clean enough. I’m not saying it was changed after every lodger but at least it didn’t look as if it’d been on there for months. I remembered what my mother used to do to make sheets go longer between washes and whipped the blankets off to see if the sheets’d been top-to-toed. Didn’t look as if they had – when I pulled them untucked, they were still in clean creases under the mattress. So I put them back on the other way up and turned the pillow over.
Then I turned it back again. It’d been clean side up already.
I took my boots off and sat with my back against the chimney breast. There was no fireplace in the room but the wall was warm. I reached into my bag for the book I’d brought with me.
The third volume of the Mabinogi. Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest. Miss Gwatkyn had sent all three volumes to Glanteifi with Lydia Howell, along with instructions to encourage Harry and me to read them.
‘She said it would open your minds,’ Lydia Howell’d told us.
Turned out she was right. What she didn’t know was what it was going to open my mind to.
Harry
When my father first arrived in Cardiganshire, at the turn of the century, Cardigan gaol was a brand-new building, designed by John Nash who cut his architectural teeth on prisons and mansions in Wales before moving on to much grander things in London and Bath. Now, Nash had been dead more than a decade and his prison was in a shoddy state of repair. I had heard the magistrates’ concerns often enough from my father: leaky roofs, lack of a proper water supply, the poor state of the courtyards where the prisoners were supposed to exercise.
I was, therefore, expecting to find Jonathan Eynon in no great state either of comfort or health but, when he was brought to me in the spartan dayroom, his greatest complaint proved to be the solitude in which he was kept.
‘I’m used to close quarters below decks,’ he told me. ‘In a space the size of my cell, there’d have been half a dozen men and I’m going half-mad with my own company. Get them to move me to a cell with another man, will you?’
Awaiting trial, Eynon was kept apart from the prisoners sentenced to hard labour but that seemed a dubious privilege. Only during the short time each day allowed for prisoners’ exercise did he enjoy the company of other men.
‘I’ll speak to the governor,’ I promised. ‘But, meanwhile, are you well cared for? Do you have enough to eat? Is your bedding clean and dry?’
He had resolutely refused to answer me in Welsh so I had switched to English but I was curious about his reticence. Had he lived among English folk for so long that Welsh no longer came easily to him, or was he keeping a distance between us?
‘No complaints on that score. I’m not used to comfort or high living. Sailors’ rations wouldn’t put fat on a rat. As for my bed, it’s a luxury to stretch out. In a hammock you sleep like a child in the womb, curled in on yourself. Some mornings I can barely stand when I put foot to the deck.’
I shifted my own feet on the bare floor of the small dayroom. Eynon had declined the chair offered to him and stood at the window, looking out. I thought of those sailors – whippet-thin from poor rations, folded like unhatched chicks into their hammocks. It was a life that was unlikely to suit any but wiry specimens like Jonathan Eynon.
‘You’ve been questioned by the police, I believe?’
‘Twice,’ he said without turning to face me. ‘Once when they brought me down from Aberaeron. Then again when they’d spoken to my cousin.’
His tone gave nothing away. He might have been speaking about gossip after church, not evidence which Bellis might use to have him hanged. He leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets, staring out over the courtyard of the prison.
‘Were you offered any violence?’
‘A few slaps. Any wharfside molly could’ve done me more damage than those constables. Soft, the lot of ’em.’
That had not been my impression of the Cardiganshire constabulary. Clearly the mollies who frequented the docks were tougher than the painted boys – some tricked out as women, some as dandies – who walked the seedier streets of London.
‘Did they tell you what Ruth Eynon had said?’
Still, he did not look round. ‘Had a lot to say for herself, ’parently.’
‘She accused you of making threats against Nicholas Rowland.’
‘That teacher she was s’posed to be marrying?’
‘Yes.’
Eynon grunted.
‘She told the inquest that you’d said he needed teaching a lesson.’
Finally, he turned to look at me. ‘Believed her, did you?’ His tone was flat, as if he expected little of me. When I made no reply, he continued in the same vein. ‘’Spect she cried. Seen her do that often enough to get out of trouble with her father. Convincing, she is mind. Very.’
John had used the same word. He had told me that Ruth Eynon’s crying fit at the inquest had seemed completely genuine.
‘Doesn’t matter what you think, though, does it?’ Eynon said. ‘You won’t be on the jury. Will they believe her, that’s the question.’ He raised a hand to his nose, turned his head and blew a plug of snot on to the floor. The intensi
ty of daylight through the window altered as, beyond the grim precincts of the gaol, the sun broke free of the clouds. In the sudden flood of light, the red hair that had given Shoni Goch his nickname was very conspicuous, though I imagined it had been brighter still when he was a boy. Like that of Billy Walters.
Red hair was not common in Cardiganshire and two people in the same parish with that colouring might well be related. ‘Are you kin to Morgan Walters?’ I asked.
He sucked his teeth. ‘His wife. Second cousins. Same as me and Jeremiah. All had the same great-grandfather.’ He turned to the window again and seemed to be looking up at the sky. The craning of his neck affected his voice. ‘Nasty piece of work, if you believe the family tales. Same as my grandfather. And Jeremiah’s father. Got a temper, the men in our family have.’
‘Including you, from what I’ve heard.’
He made a dismissive sound. ‘Told you about the fight that got me sent away to sea, did they?’
‘Is it true? Did you try to kill the man you were fighting with?’
Shoni Goch jammed his hands into his pockets again. ‘Ever been in a fight, have you? A real fight, not boys’ stuff?’
Boys’ stuff. I was suddenly assailed by unpleasant memories of my schooldays. Did he think that boys’ fights were never real, never potentially deadly? Nevertheless, I shook my head, fearing, as I did so, that he would think me soft, not a real man.
‘Then you won’t know what it’s like. You’re not always master of yourself. After a certain point, you’re not thinking any more. You just punch till they stop moving.’
There was something percussive about the way he uttered the word ‘punch’ that made me flinch. I was in a room, alone, with a violent man whom I could not adequately see. If he wanted to, he would be able to do me serious harm before the warder outside could respond to any cries for help.
‘Is that why Ruth didn’t want to marry you?’ I asked. ‘Because she was afraid of your violence?’
‘Hah! After what she said to me that day, I wouldn’t’ve married her if you’d paid me! It wasn’t her that was afraid of me, I can tell you that. That boot was on the other bloody foot and no mistake!’
There was something in his voice – a kind of grudging vehemence. How could a girl like Ruth Eynon have struck fear into the heart of a man who dismissed a police beating as ‘a few slaps’?
‘So? Are you going to tell me what she said?’ I prompted when he said no more.
Shoni Goch shouldered himself away from the wall and came to stand at the table before me. ‘What difference would it make?’
‘I won’t know till you’ve told me.’
‘You won’t get me off. The police’ve decided I did it and that’s that.’
Unexpectedly, he drew out the chair opposite me and sat down. ‘Look. I went to Pantglas because there was a letter waiting for me at the post office when my ship docked in Aberaeron. From Jeremiah. I got our mate to read it – he’s not too bad with his letters. It was from Jeremiah saying it was time for me and Ruth to marry.’
It was them who had the understanding – my father and Shoni Goch. Not me. They never asked me.
‘You thought that was what Ruth wanted?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Taken a fancy to her, I had, when I was home three or four years ago. Jeremiah was all for it. When she was more grown-up, like. So, when I got the letter, I went straight to Pantglas. Jeremiah told me it was time. That she’d got too hoity-toity to help around the farm. Wanted to be mistress in her own house.’
‘And you didn’t mind her being hoity-toity?’
I was watching him carefully over the whirlpool so I saw him grin. ‘I like a woman with a bit of spirit. Mind, there’s spirit and there’s madness.’ The approval had disappeared from his voice.
‘Madness?’ Not a word I would have associated with Ruth Eynon in any context. ‘What do you mean?’
He drew in an audible breath then huffed it out as if he was expelling something. ‘Look, I believed what her father said, right? That she wanted to be married to me. And soon.’
There seemed no reason to challenge him with Ruth’s version so I simply nodded.
‘But when I raised it with her, that Sunday after chapel, she was all quiet, wouldn’t say anything. Wouldn’t give me an answer. Wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Well,’ he shifted in his chair, ‘that got my temper up a bit. No, no—’ He was quick to correct the assumption he saw I had made. ‘I didn’t lay a finger on her. Just said her father’d told me she wanted to marry me. And, as soon as I said that, she just turned on me.’
‘Turned on you?’
Eynon did not reply. Simply pushed his chair back and stood. I knew that if I did not press him now, whatever he had meant to tell me would be battened down again. ‘Mr Eynon – how did she turn on you?’
He stopped and glanced over his shoulder at me. ‘No point me saying. You wouldn’t believe me.’ The words might almost have been muttered for his own ears only for I barely heard them.
‘You don’t know me, Shoni Goch,’ I said, switching to Welsh and roughening my voice. ‘You don’t know what I’ve been called on to believe in my time.’
Unable to see his reaction, all I could do was wait for a response. When he spoke, finally, he too had slipped into Welsh.
‘Well, I wouldn’t’ve believed it. Not of Ruth. But I heard it with my own ears.’
I stood and moved to where I could more easily see him. ‘Why don’t you tell me what she said and then we’ll see, won’t we?’
Eynon hawked and spat on the floor.
‘Whatever she said,’ I pushed, ‘if it meant that you didn’t want to marry her then you had no motive to kill Rowland. You need to tell me.’
‘All right.’ He took half a pace forward. ‘I told her that her father’d said that’s what she wanted – to marry me. And she said—’ He pulled himself up. ‘No, she screamed in my face, that, if her father forced her to marry me – forced, mind – she’d wait till I’d had enough to drink one night, then, when I was asleep and snoring, she’d come for me with a butchering knife.’
I tried to imagine Ruth Eynon’s carefully cultured voice saying such a thing. Perhaps it had been easier to say in Welsh, but to ask him what language they had been speaking would have been a distraction.
‘She threatened to killyou?’ I asked, matter-of-fact.
From a slight movement of his head, I got the impression that his eyes had moved away from my face. He rolled his shoulders. ‘No. Not to kill me.’
‘What then, man?’
‘She said she’d cut my cock off.’
‘She’d—’
‘I told you you wouldn’t believe me.’
‘No, I do.’ It seemed too outlandish a threat for him to have made up. ‘But—’
‘Why would she say such a thing?’
‘Yes.’
Jonathan Eynon’s shoulders slumped. His whole demeanour had changed, as if, in telling me of Ruth’s threat, he’d crossed a line he had not meant even to approach. Now, his voice was different, but in a way that was hard to identify; it gave me pause.
‘There are things you don’t know,’ he said.
The light in the room changed as clouds covered the sun and the sudden gloom mirrored the darkening atmosphere in the little room.
‘So, tell me.’
For a long while Eynon seemed stranded there, neither moving nor responding. Then, he turned and resumed his seat at the table. I did likewise, locating the chair carefully so as not to knock it awry, wary of breaking the charged silence between us.
Opposite me, Eynon ran a hand over his face and I heard rope-thickened skin rasping against stubble. ‘I believed Jeremiah when he said Ruth wanted to marry me,’ he said, at last, ‘because she had reason to want to get away from Pantglas.’ He put both hands to his head and scrubbed at his hair as if lice were plaguing him. ‘Was Mari – Jeremiah’s wife – at the inquest?’ he asked.
‘I was told he had his whole fami
ly there with him.’
‘And were you told that Mari had bruises on her face?’ I did not reply which was clearly answer enough. ‘Never forgiven her, has he?’
‘For not wanting to marry him?’ I asked, cautiously.
‘For coming to the marriage bed with Llew Price’s bastard in her belly.’
Outside the window I could hear a blackbird singing and wondered at such a hedgerow sound within the bare stone precincts of the prison. There must have been a garden tucked away somewhere within the walls.
‘Would Ruth not have wanted to stay at home to protect her mother?’ I asked.
He grunted. ‘Not just Mari he took it out on, was it?’
I moved my eyes a fraction, tried as hard as I was able to read something, anything, from his posture besides an acute reluctance to tell me what he knew.
‘Mr Eynon. What are you trying to tell me?’
‘Things weren’t right in that house,’ he said, from between gritted teeth.
‘Go on.’
Again, his hand rasped over his face. ‘Jeremiah’s one to hold grudges,’ he said, laying words down as carefully as he might have coiled a rope on the deck. ‘Nurses ’em like swci lambs. And he’s been nursing a grudge against Mari ever since his wedding night.’
