None So Blind

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘She wasn’t anybody. It’s from the Bible. Something about Rebecca being the mother of thousands and possessing the gates of those that hate her.’

  ‘Quaint.’

  I did not correct him but, as anybody who has lived through a period of insurrection knows, once people unaccustomed to power have felt its potency, they are apt to begin wielding it indiscriminately, with results that are usually far from quaint.

  ‘Rebecca wasn’t a person’ I said. ‘There wasn’t a leader who went by that name. Rebecca was… an idea.’ An idea, I might have added, that persuaded men to do things they would never have done without its imprimatur; an idea that had swept through the three counties like a contagion, leading to a widespread rash of violence and unrest.

  I urged Sara, my little mare, into a canter. ‘Come on. I’d like to get this done while it’s still light.’

  John

  The news from Waungilfach spread like summer rain.

  It was as if it’d rushed about everywhere of its own accord. As if it wanted to be told.

  The air in the Drovers’ Arms was thick with it when I walked in after work that evening.

  ‘You remember that servant girl of William Williams’s? The one from before? The one with the red hair?’

  ‘What one?’

  ‘The one from years ago. The one that just went off.’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘They’ve found her.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Didn’t go off, did she? Somebody killed her.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘That’s right. And put her in the ground. Under a tree. On Williams’s land.’

  And so it went on. But it was that one phrase that stuck in my mind. Like a boot stuck in mud, it held me fast.

  The one from years ago.

  Years ago it might be, but the night she died was like yesterday to me. Wet. The sound of rain on dead leaves. The smell of damp earth. Drops from the trees cold on the hot skin at the back of my neck.

  I could still feel the terror. Terror that I’d be seen, that I’d lose my own life because of her.

  Seven years. You’d think the dreams would’ve faded.

  Every time I woke, panting and sweating, I told myself the same thing. You couldn’t have done any different.

  Rebecca was to blame. Beca. She ordered it. And Beca must’ve had good reason. The Lady always had good reason. It wasn’t for me to question it.

  But the dreams had never left me alone. And now, somebody had found her.

  I just had to hope they wouldn’t find me.

  Harry

  When my father arrived home, I was standing at the shuffleboard with Gus, about to win for the third time. Gus might scoff, but at least my long familiarity with the game allowed me to compete on almost equal terms; unlike billiards or cards, neither of which I would ever play again.

  ‘I hear you’ve been to Waungilfach on my behalf.’

  Having forgotten the uncanny speed with which Cardiganshire news travels, I found myself on the back foot. ‘I didn’t really have a choice in the matter. Williams sent a man over here at the gallop – I didn’t think it would be right to wait for you.’

  My father put an unaccustomed hand on my shoulder. ‘You mistake me, Harry. I wasn’t finding fault. You did exactly as I would have wished. You lifted the burden of responsibility from Williams and made rational provision for the disposal of the remains.’

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he turned away, embarrassed, perhaps, by his own demonstrativeness. ‘I’m glad you approve.’

  ‘Now, we must take care that they are interred with the minimum of fuss. Gossip will undoubtedly be rife and we need to discourage further speculation.’ I saw his hand reach out to pick up one of the shuffleboard pennies. ‘I assume you asked Davies to have a grave dug?’

  ‘No. She can’t be buried until—’

  ‘She?’ The frown in his voice was unmistakable and I realised that he did not know whose bones had been discovered. Of course; the gossip would have been judiciously edited when it reached my father’s ears.

  ‘Margaret Jones.’

  I am sure I did not imagine the fraught quality of his silence. ‘You think this is—’ he hesitated. Was he looking at Gus, wondering how much I had told him? ‘You think it’s Williams’s dairy maid?’

  ‘I’m quite sure of it.’

  His hand reached out into my field of vision and placed the gaming penny on the end of the table. ‘And am I to understand that you object to a discreet burial?’

  I moved my head slightly. His figure, outlined against the long windows behind him, seemed smaller than my memory of him and I wondered whether this was yet another optical effect of encroaching blindness. ‘I would like to give her a decent burial,’ I said, emphasising my own choice of adjective. ‘But first there will have to be an inquest, obviously.’

  ‘Obviously?’

  I should have known he would not allow himself to be swayed by rhetorical tricks. ‘Of course. I know the death isn’t recent but it’s certainly unexplained and quite obviously suspicious.’

  My father moved towards the fire, speaking as he went, his face turned away from me. A wasted effort if he was trying to hide his expression but he could not know that. ‘Have you informed the coroner?’

  The county magistrates controlled the public purse and, if they did not approve an inquest, nobody would be paid – not the coroner, not the jurors, not the parish officer who would be expected to find witnesses and empanel the jury. Given that my father was both a senior magistrate and the one whose land lay closest to Waungilfach, any decision to involve the coroner would, effectively, be his.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought you would wish to do that.’

  When he did not reply, I picked up the penny he had put down and pretended to look at it. ‘Don’t you think it would give rise to comment if we fail to hold an inquest?’

  ‘Given your opinion on the identity of the deceased, it will cause a damn’ sight more comment if we do!’ His tone took me by surprise. My father rarely blasphemed and it was an indication of his agitation that he would do so in front of a guest.

  ‘You think we should disclaim all knowledge and simply bury her anonymously?’

  He hesitated. ‘Will her family want an inquest?’

  As far as I knew, Margaret had had no family to speak of. ‘Whether they do or not,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t justice be done? Are we just going to ignore the fact that somebody murdered her?’

  My father made his way towards the cabinet in the corner and I turned my head in Gus’s direction in a kind of apology for his exclusion from the conversation.

  The cabinet’s ill-fitting door opened with its familiar whine, a sound followed by the scrape and clink of decanter and glasses and the liquid sound of brandy being poured.

  I walked over and picked up two glasses. My father acknowledged the service with a small grunt of thanks and moved to the winged chair nearest the fire. As he lowered himself into it, I realised that, between my increasingly sporadic visits, he had become an old man.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me exactly what you saw at Waungilfach and what Williams has told you.’

  As succinctly as I was able, I did as he asked. When I had finished, he sat, his chin lowered to his chest, eyes apparently on the rug at his feet.

  The quality of his silence was such that I found myself wondering whether he was thinking of happier times before my mother died; times when, every week, the rug would have been hung on a line in the garden and beaten to rid it of every speck of dust. It had still been taken out regularly when I was a little boy, when neighbours still called on my father but, in recent years, his widower’s demeanour had deterred all but the most determined callers, causing Glanteifi’s servants to sink into a kind of deferential negligence.

  Finally, he roused himself. ‘You must concede that there is little or no prospect of bringing anybody to justice for this crime. We have no information
as to when this young woman died, or indeed by what method—’

  ‘But we do! We do know when she died.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ His tone suggested that I might be eight years old again and guilty of some shocking linguistic faux pas.

  ‘At least…’ I tried not to stammer, ‘we know when she disappeared.

  It was May eighteen forty-three. The May of the riots.’

  Harry

  I had first got wind of the riots in a letter from home which arrived at my college in April a little more than seven years earlier.

  Dear Harry

  I trust this finds you well.

  I remember grinning at my friend’s salutation. It was the style I had been taught in my first term at school – You will begin your letters home, gentlemen, with these words – and, lacking any other model, he had copied it.

  I am sorry to write with unwelcome news but you are needed at Glanteifi. You have probably heard about the riots. Rebecca who broke the Efailwen gate three years ago is riding again. And she is here now. The farmers are meeting by night to break tollgates down. The trusts put them up again but they are down again the next night.

  The magistrates have made more specials and they are supposed to be out at night but they know what is good for them and they look the other way. The millisias – I stumbled over the misspelled word before realising he meant militias – have been called out but they are useless. Rebecca has been and gone before the soldiers can get on their horses.

  The magistrates have offered rewards but nobody is willing to speak against the Lady.

  Your father has put up notices ordering his tenants to have nothing to do with Rebecca and he has sent Ormiston round to all the farms on the estate to warn men not to ride out at night. Not even if they are threatened. But the farmers take no notice. They are afraid of Rebecca’s threats even if he is not. They know why Rebecca wants all of them to ride out. So nobody can think of informing on his neighbours.

  Beca won’t stand for your father’s pig-headedness. She has already sent him two letters telling him to show her more respect. The second one warned him if he did not keep his opinions to himself, his house would be burned down.

  And Beca will do it. She has power. The magistrates are going to have to learn that. They think that now the illegal gates are down, the Lady will go away. But they are wrong.

  Your father will not keep quiet. You know that. You know what he is like. You need to come home, Harry, and talk sense into him. I do not want us all to burn in our beds.

  He will not want you to know what is happening. I am sure he has not written to tell you about any of this.

  He had not. My father wrote, punctiliously, every Sunday, detailing events on the estate. He always filled exactly one sheet. Just one solitary page. I was not in the least surprised that he had mentioned neither riots nor threats.

  As you can see, it is urgent that you must come home.

  Your friend,

  David Thomas.

  David Thomas. Davy. Though he had not said it, I did not doubt for a second that he rode out on these nocturnal gatebreakings himself. Despite the fact that tollgates were no concern of his, he would be unable to keep away.

  I could readily imagine my father’s outrage at these ‘Rebecca’ riots; and I knew that there was not a threatening letter in the world that would persuade him to withdraw his opposition to them. He was a magistrate; he would see nothing here but a clear duty to uphold the rule of law.

  So, as swiftly as I was able to organise matters, I returned to Glanteifi, defying my father’s specific instruction to remain in Oxford until the end of my first year.

  In coming home, I had ensured that I was at Glanteifi when Margaret Jones most needed my help. But, for reasons which now seemed petty and ungenerous, I had failed her.

  No matter who had murdered her, I was partly responsible for her death.

  John

  ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, the magistrate, has summoned the coroner.’

  My employer announced it like a royal proclamation. Loved to know things, Mr Schofield did.

  He wanted me to be agog, I could tell. I tried to look eager for him. ‘Does that mean there’s going to be an inquest?’

  He nodded. ‘In all probability, yes.’

  An inquest. I swallowed a mouthful of panic. Calm down. Nobody knows. Nobody’s going to call you to answer questions.

  But who would the coroner call?

  William Williams, Waungilfach, obviously.

  What would he say? Anything to get his own neck out of the noose if he had any sense.

  Nobody in town was talking about the bones any more. Not since people remembered when she’d disappeared.

  It had only taken a whisper. ‘She went missing in Beca’s time.’

  Beca.

  The name still made men look over their shoulders. Power can be like a shadow, sometimes. Longer and darker with the passing of time.

  Beca was a name to silence tongues. To make people forget things. It was a name to force obedience. And in that way, it was just like the ceffyl pren – the wooden horse, as Mr Schofield always had it. As if he could tame it with its English name, with the Greek myth sound of it. But our horse was nothing like the Greeks’. The ceffyl wasn’t a sly trick, it was a warning. A punishment.

  Nobody’d carried the ceffyl pren in Newcastle Emlyn for years. Not since the riots. Not since before the riots.

  They still carried it in Cardigan. That was the main reason why the county magistrates had decided to go for a police force – to try and stamp it out. The magistrates hated the ceffyl pren. An arrogation of the law into the hands of people unfit to wield it – that’s what Mr Schofield said it was. I had to ask him what arrogation meant. I never liked asking him the meaning of words – he always gave me that ‘good boy you want to learn’ smile of his. You’d swear he’d invented me from his own designs.

  If you listened to Mr Schofield, the ceffyl pren was illegal. Carrying it was illegal and going out with it was illegal. Even if you were at the back of the procession with three hundred other people in front of you, being there was illegal. A breach of the peace. Hard labour if you were caught.

  The magistrates wanted people to take notice of the Queen’s law, didn’t they? But the ceffyl was our law. The old law. The punishment for adulterers and seducers and wife-beaters. For cheaters and beer-waterers. And magistrates’ informers.

  My parents took me out with the ceffyl pren once, when I was a tiny boy. Dada wore Mam’s everyday shawl and apron. Mam wore his jacket inside out and tied her Sunday shawl around her head like a heathen. Then Dada blacked our faces with soot from the chimney. Blacked up, he was a stranger, and his eyes terrified me – white and staring.

  Just like all the black faces I’d seen at the Nantyclawdd gatebreaking when I was with Uncle Price. I still wondered whether my father had been there.

  But – God! – the noise we made as we followed the ceffyl pren through the dark! The righteous din of people seeing justice done.

  Mind you, all I could think, as a little child, was how wrong it seemed, men and women being in each other’s clothes. It worried me, adults being so naughty. Made me afraid of what might happen. The men at the front of the procession pulled the man we’d come for out of his house and forced him onto his knees at his own threshold.

  The cantwr recited his sins and the man shrank and shriveled in front of us. Fear’ll do that to you. Believe me, I know.

  After the accusation came the shouting and spitting. Our leader just sat on his horse, silent, waiting for all that to finish.

  One by one, every soul in the procession fell quiet. Dada put me on his shoulders for me to see the man begging for forgiveness. Hoping to escape a beating, I suppose. But they beat him and tarred him anyway. Then, they put him on the pole of the ceffyl pren and paraded him around the village. Everybody knew what he’d done now. He’d better mend his ways.

  It took weeks for the tar to come off his skin. A
nd nobody from the procession spoke a word to him in all that time.

  I never knew what he’d done. I was too little to understand. But I understood the look on his face when he was pushed down onto his knees.

  The ceffyl pren struck fear into men’s hearts. And Rebecca was the ceffyl pren by another name.

  Harry

  Not only did Sir Leighton Bowen, coroner for the Teifi Valley, decline my father’s offer to stay with us while the inquest was being conducted but he failed to present himself at Glanteifi for breakfast, as invited, on the morning after his arrival. Instead, a note was delivered requesting a rendezvous at the workhouse.

  ‘Is he always so uncivil?’ I asked.

  My father placed his cutlery on his plate. ‘I don’t believe he intends it as incivility. It’s just Bowen’s general way of going on. He prefers not to sit down with people while he’s conducting an investigation.’

  ‘Meticulous,’ Gus observed.

  ‘He is that.’ My father agreed as he rose from the table. ‘Now, do you still wish to examine the bones before he arrives?’

  Our route to the mortuary took us through the workhouse complex and, as Mr Davies led us through the central yard, I vividly recalled looking at the plans for the workhouse with my father, just after he had received them. The memory of being able to see each detail clearly filled my throat with a hard lump of frustration.

  ‘It’s a plan drawn up for the government’s Poor Law commissioners throughout the country,’ my father had told me, unrolling the stiff paper. ‘Here, here, here and here,’ he pointed to four squares set on each side of a large quadrangle, ‘there will be blocks for different categories of inmate.’