by Alis Hawkins
Miss Gwatkyn shifted slightly and something about her posture seemed stiffer, less at ease. In the lengthening silence, I had the impression that she was ordering her thoughts, perhaps understanding certain things for the first time.
‘Nicholas had been more cheerful of late,’ she ventured, finally. ‘Despite the falling-away of support for his school. Despite Tobias Hildon’s increasingly vociferous opposition to it. When I commented on it, he told me that plans were afoot to secure the school’s future and that all would be well.’ She paused and, when she spoke again, it was as if she had allowed Nicholas Rowland to redirect her thoughts. ‘I know Montague Caldicot’s wife is wealthy. Do you think he had promised significant sums to Nicholas’s school?’
I would have given a week of my life to be able to exchange a look with Lydia, to have seen, in her eyes, a reflection of my own suspicions.
No. That is not what I think at all. Whatever the relationship between Montague Caldicot and Nicholas Rowland might have been, I think Caldicot panicked at what your friend knew and what it could do to his political career and murdered him.
John
All the way home – on the steamer to Carmarthen and on the road to Glanteifi – I found myself thinking about the Amorous Celtic Tales. The Mabinogi but very definitely not the Mabinogi at the same time.
Same events, same people. But in Nicky Revell’s hands they’d become something very different. And I don’t just mean more explicit about the intimate goings-on.
It was as if somebody with Harry’s views about equality and a taste for very florid erotic descriptions had written the Amorous Celtic Tales. In this version, the women of the Mabinogi had stepped out of the shadows cast by the men, grabbed hold of the stories by the scruff of the neck and shaken them into a different shape. The women weren’t just characters in the stories any more, they’d taken charge. They weren’t pushed into marriages. They weren’t mistreated or raped. They were powerful creatures who took their pleasure where they chose and did as they wished. They were equal – if not superior – to the men.
As I walked up from Carmarthen docks to the livery stable in town, I thought how even the servant-girl Goewin – King Math’s virgin foot-holder – had been transformed. In Nicky Revell’s version, instead of being raped by Gilfaethwy after he’d started a war in Dyfed to occupy his uncle and leave her defenceless, Goewin commanded Gilfaethwy to start the war, as a test. If he was determined and ruthless enough to do that, then she’d allow him into her bed. According to the Amorous Tales, Goewin was no virgin and it hadn’t been King Math’s feet she’d been holding.
But, when I thought about it, the original stories hadn’t had to be changed all that much to put the women in charge. Hardly at all, in fact.
Branwen and Goewin might’ve been badly treated but Rhiannon, Blodeuwedd and Arianrhod had all turned difficult circumstances to their own advantage and done more or less as they wanted.
Rowland and the girls had seen what I’d been too blinded by rape and incest and treachery to see – that the tales of the Mabinogi were full of women who were powerful and resourceful and clever.
They were the Odysseus of the tales while the men were more or less all Achilles. The women did the thinking and manipulating and the men did the acting.
Was that why Miss Gwatkyn was so fond of them – because she’d seen the women’s hidden power?
The Amorous Celtic Tales had given the women of the Mabinogi the only thing they lacked – authority over men. Well, that and utter shamelessness when it came to taking their pleasure.
I thought about what the Naughty Pupils had got up to. About Goewin stripping Gilfaethwy of his war-gear until he stood before her, cock-standing nakedness revealed. Was that what women were really like?
I thought again about the photographs I’d seen in Wych Street. Much as they’d disgusted me, they were only showing the truth. Because that was what women – young, beautiful women, at any rate – looked like under their clothes, wasn’t it?
So were the Amorous Tales also telling the truth – did women manage to wield power even when they had no authority?
As soon as I asked the question, I realised that, of course, some obviously did. Like Mrs Parry, the shipbuilder of Tresaith who we’d tangled with when we were investigating the death of her business partner, Jenkyn Hughes. And Miss Gwatkyn, obviously, though she was in a man’s position, as squire. But then there were the ladies like the Olive Leaf Circle in Tregaron. I remembered what Harry’d said after he’d come back from his meeting with them – that they might not have the vote but the ladies made it their business to be informed, so that they could influence the way their husbands voted. And, in the end, who was more powerful, the informed one or the one who put his mark on the voting paper?
What about Nan and Ruth? Were they just the lucky girls everybody painted them – girls fortunate to have been recommended to Nicholas Rowland by Miss Gwatkyn – or had they been as resourceful as the women in the Mabinogi and done everything they could to make sure they were the obvious choices? Maybe they’d even put the idea of recommending them into Miss Gwatkyn’s head without her knowing it.
In What the Girls Saw, Bess and Mary had been intrigued and excited by what they’d read in Fanny Hill and wanted to try it out themselves. But what had really happened when Ruth and Nan discovered the book on Rowland’s bookshelf? Whose idea had it been to write the books in my bag – Nicholas Rowland’s or the girls’?
My bet was on the girls but I knew what Harry’d say. He’d say that Rowland had corrupted them, that it would never’ve occurred to Nan and Ruth to do such a thing unless Rowland had manipulated them into it. He’d say they’d only gone along with it because money’d stopped coming in for their collegiate school and they were so desperate to see it a reality.
But that was Harry and his tendency to see women through rose-coloured specs. The truth of the matter was that those girls might choose to speak English and give themselves airs but they weren’t ladies and they hadn’t had the upbringing of innocents.
Ruth was a farm girl. She’d grown up surrounded by animals – she knew exactly what Gilfaethwy and his brother had been forced to do by their animal natures when Math had cursed them to be deer, then swine, then wolves. And, on a farm big enough to have a few male and female servants, she’d more than likely have observed other things, too. The Rollicking Lads weren’t the only ones who could hide in dark corners and spy on courting couples.
And what Nan Walters might’ve seen and heard in the lane at the back of the Three Horseshoes was anybody’s guess. Llanddewi Brefi might be a small village but the oldest profession’s plied everywhere.
What if Nan and Ruth had got fed up with being Rowland’s assistants, with being the neat writers of letters and manuscripts that everybody thought were from him? What if they’d got tired of being overlooked and decided to claim some power for themselves?
If they’d decided to do that, maybe they’d also decided that they didn’t need Nicholas Rowland any more.
Harry
On Friday morning, I met with Minnever at his hotel in Newcastle Emlyn over breakfast and told him I would not be available for canvassing after the public meeting in town.
‘I’m afraid it can’t be helped,’ I said, in response to his inevitable protestations. ‘I know we’d agreed to ride to Lampeter together tomorrow morning but my plans have changed and I must go there today.’
‘Listen to me, Harry. If there’s the slightest chance that whatever it is will prevent you being at the nomination meeting on the dot of midday tomorrow, you’d better change your plans back again. I’m not having a Caldicot on my hands!’
I shook my head. I had not wished to tell him as I knew what his reaction would be but there was little point trying to keep the truth from him – he would find out the following day, anyway.
‘Nicholas Rowland’s will is being read at ten.’
‘Harry, we agreed!’ Minnever’s agitation propelled him to
his feet. ‘The inquest is done! You have to let the police make their case at trial.’
‘Which will either result in an acquittal and the case being abandoned or in Jonathan Eynon being hanged for something he didn’t do,’ I said, striving for a calm I did not feel. ‘Either way, the real killer is left at large.’
Minnever was still on his feet, looking down at me. ‘You don’t know Eynon’s not the killer.’
‘All the evidence points elsewhere.’
‘It’s still not your responsibility!’
But it was. It was my responsibility because I had failed to conduct a competent inquest.
Minnever sighed heavily and sat down once more, pushing his breakfast plate away, the meal unfinished.
‘I assume there’s no news of Caldicot?’ I asked.
Minnever called to a servant and ordered coffee for us both before responding. ‘No. None whatsoever.’
Though I had been plagued by fears for Caldicot’s safety since receiving his ‘I must leave it to you’ note, I could not deny that I felt a little cheered by the thought that I would not have to contend with his opposition this morning.
‘What did Crowther say when you told him you knew why Caldicot’d been cashiered?’ I waited. ‘Minnever?’
‘I didn’t tell him.’
‘Why not?’
Minnever pulled his watch out of his pocket, consulted it, then replaced it. Given his air of distraction, I would have been ready to offer a considerable sum against anybody who thought he now knew the time.
‘Two reasons,’ he said, finally. ‘Firstly,’ he leaned over the table so that I could hear his lowered voice, ‘there’s a significant chance that Caldicot has taken himself off somewhere and put a bullet in his brain and if I started slinging mud about it could look very distasteful.’ He leaned back, slightly, as if he was relieved to have got that off his chest. ‘And, secondly, it occurred to me that the Tories might be playing a clever game and keeping him out of the public eye.’
‘To what end?’
Minnever leaned forward once more, submerging himself completely in the whirlpool. ‘What if they already know why he was cashiered and were planning to call our bluff if we found out?’
‘In what way could they call our bluff?’
‘By having Caldicot stand on the hustings, admit his act of omission and dare you to say that you’d have behaved differently.’
I leaned back and moved my eyes to one side, but I could still see nothing of Minnever, his outline was simply silhouetted against the window behind him.
‘If he stood there and faced you down, could you honestly claim that you’d have marched those men straight to the authorities?’
I had hoped for a supportive crowd in my home town and the people of Newcastle Emlyn did not disappoint me. As I walked to the stage – placed in front of the church so as to be well out of the way of the market which, as always on a Friday, was taking place in the main square – I was cheered to the echo; and my speech – in which, once again, I referred to Caldicot’s absence and resisted the temptation to speak ill of him – could not have been better received had I been coached by Cicero.
Deputising for his candidate, the Tory agent spoke briefly, suggesting that the proof of the matter was not in fine words but in votes cast at the poll.
‘Oh, it’s easy to be here, today,’ he sneered in the face of the crowd’s taunts, ‘when you’ve come to town for the market anyway and somebody’s shoved a blue ribbon into your hand or a young lady’s pinned it to your lapel, but what about tomorrow when you’ve got to turn out again to actually vote? That’s when the men’ll be separated from the boys. That’s when the Tories’ll come out. Because they understand duty!’
To me, it seemed an irascible and ill-judged speech; a challenge to the voters to turn out for me.
‘Just shows how rattled they are,’ Minnever said, when I shared my thoughts with him.
I hoped he was right.
Having submitted myself to an hour or so of glad-handing with voters to pacify Minnever, I quit the crowded high street and went to collect my little mare from the stables at the Emlyn Arms hotel.
I smiled and waved at the crowds whose faces I could not see, then, as soon as I was over the bridge and alone, I exhaled the breath I seemed to have been holding all morning and allowed myself to slump in the saddle. I felt utterly drained. My face was cramped from maintaining a smile, and the effort of keeping people in my peripheral vision while trying not to walk into pigs and sheep had given me a headache.
Letting the little mare find her own pace, I breathed in the warm spring air and enjoyed the peace and quiet of the Llandyfriog road until I reached the point where Lydia was waiting with the box cart. Though propriety had to be observed until the election was over, we had agreed that taking the carriage all the way to Lampeter would be both uncomfortable and a waste of Twm’s time.
I dismounted, tied Seren to the back of the cart and climbed up next to Lydia. The road ran very near to the Teifi at that point and the river’s quiet flow, just down the willow-hung bank, was like balm to my battered senses. There is something infinitely soothing about the slow, stately progress of a river, something simultaneously ageless and constantly renewed that calms the soul.
‘That’s a very splendid rosette,’ Lydia remarked as I took my seat.
‘Minnever insists,’ I said, unpinning it from my lapel and stuffing it into my pocket.
She laughed softly at my discomfiture. ‘He’d be negligent if he didn’t.’
‘I know. And he’s been very assiduous, I can’t say otherwise. But I think even he’s realised that there are limits to what it’s appropriate to do or say.’
As we set off, I told her about Minnever’s reservations about confronting the Tories, given Caldicot’s continued absence.
‘I thought your tone had something of the eulogy when you spoke about him,’ she said. ‘But don’t you think we’d have heard if anything had happened to him?’
Splashes of colour appeared in the trailing edge of my peripheral vision as we jogged past violet- and primrose-filled hedges. ‘Not if he’s drowned himself.’
‘A soldier? Throw himself into the river like a ruined housemaid?’
‘Drownings can always be written off as misadventure. It would spare his family the scandal.’
‘Which scandal are you referring to?’ she asked, turning to look at me. ‘Suicide, his possible implication in Rowland’s death or his sexual inclinations?’
She spoke the words as if they were part of everyday conversation and I tried to respond in the same manner. ‘Any or all of the above.’
Lydia did not reply, simply turned her gaze back to the road. From what I could see, she held the reins easily and the horse trotted along without fuss.
‘Do you really think he would have killed Rowland if there was a tenderness between them?’ she asked.
‘Tenderness?’
She made an impatient noise as if I had said something facile. ‘You think men like that – like Rowland and Leo Barton – are merely indulging a physical appetite? That two men couldn’t possibly feel, for each other, the tenderness that you felt for Margaret Jones?’ She was not asking; she was correcting me. ‘Judgement is easy. But walk a mile in a man’s shoes before you condemn him, Harry. Don’t judge him for being unable to wear yours.’
Thus chastised, I could think of no response and we continued in silence. But my mind was busy. Exactly what did Lydia know of such things? Had her dead brother confided in her? Or had the life she lived before our meeting in Ipswich informed her in ways I could only imagine?
As we bowled along, the horses’ hoof beats unhurried in the warm air, I tried to put aside my instinctive reactions and confront Lydia’s question with an open mind. Could one man feel for another what I had felt for Margaret? The sticking point, I found, was the word Lydia had used. Tenderness. Lust, I could imagine. Desire, even. But the feeling of protective fondness I had felt for Margare
t, that simultaneous, adolescent desire to possess her and to die for her if necessary? Both flesh and feeling rebelled against the idea that I might feel such emotions for someone of my own sex.
‘I know you don’t believe in Jonathan Eynon’s guilt,’ Lydia said. ‘But have you considered his likely reaction if, somehow, he’d got wind of how things stood between Rowland and Caldicot?’
‘We don’t know, definitively, that there was anything between them.’
‘Rowland was meeting somebody under cover of darkness,’ she said. ‘We know that from Billy Walters’s testimony. And Caldicot had written introductory letters for him and given him a substantial sum of money. Yet, he denies anything more than a slight acquaintance with Rowland. He’s hiding something.’ She paused. ‘And, if there was nothing between them, why did Caldicot slip in to the inquest?’
‘To observe me.’
‘Do you really believe that? Or are you simply struggling to believe that one man might love another?’
Not wishing to be thought either vain or narrow-minded, I did not reply.
‘If Jonathan Eynon – a man known to have an uncontrollable temper – heard that he was being thrown over in favour of a man who couldn’t even be a proper husband to the girl he’d expected to marry, don’t you think he might have reacted violently?’
The horse between the shafts slowed to a walk on a sharp incline and the sudden loss of speed made me feel unaccountably cautious.
