None So Blind

by Alis Hawkins

  I looked at the symmetrical diagram. ‘What categories?’

  ‘Women and babies here,’ his finger descended on a square. ‘The older children, here, the able-bodied men, here, and those unable to work, here.’

  ‘So families will be separated?’

  My father’s expression told me that, in his view, I had too many opinions and too little knowledge. ‘With limited space, it’s only proper to keep the men and women separate. The safety of young, unmarried women is the guardians’ responsibility.’

  ‘I don’t understand why the system has to change,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong with going on the parish like people do now?’

  My father rolled up the plans and tied them again. As usual, I had disappointed him. ‘The parishes can’t afford to keep paupers in that fashion any more. Nobody will tolerate a poor rate that increases every year. People are already complaining that the industrious work to keep the indolent. Banding parishes together into unions and giving each union a workhouse will save money.’

  But all the stableyard talk I had heard about the new law had left me with the conviction that it was a terrible, godless act on the part of the government. My father must have seen it because he sighed. ‘Being on the parish isn’t such a humane system as you seem to think, Harry. For people who’ve lost their homes, parish provision is little better than slavery.’

  ‘And won’t the workhouse be slavery? People are saying there’ll be hard labour.’

  ‘The inmates will have to work, of course. That’s only right if they’re fit and able. But the old and the infirm will only be given light work – and not even that if they’re truly incapable.’

  I looked at him. What he was saying seemed eminently reasonable but all the servants at Glanteifi, not to mention the labourers out on the estate, were dead set against the whole notion of the workhouse. Once you’re in you’ll never get out again was the general consensus. It’s a prison for people who’ve done nothing wrong but fall on hard times.

  ‘Isn’t it like punishing people for being poor?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s not a prison, Harry. People are free to leave whenever they like.’

  ‘Then why would they go there in the first place?’

  ‘Because they’re starving.’ The look he gave me was equal parts frustration and regret. ‘Believe me, if it’s a choice between dying of starvation and going into the workhouse, then the workhouse will seem a welcome haven.’

  I looked around me, now. A haven for the destitute it might be but the workhouse was an uninviting place. High, whitewashed walls pierced by small windows, yards paved in sluiced-down slate; it might not be a prison but it felt like one.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Though I could not see him, I still turned at Gus’s question. ‘That sound,’ he clarified.

  A slow thudding was coming from one of the yards behind the high walls, repetitive but ragged, as if many people were engaged on an enterprise to which nobody cared to bring any kind of method.

  ‘The able bodied men break stone,’ Davies said. ‘For the roads.’

  Davies left us at the dead-house, a low, slate-roofed building, with a single window let into each long wall. As Gus and I passed into the chill, gloomy interior, I was struck by how much the building resembled the dairy at Waungilfach where Margaret had worked. It had the same flat, cold light as the north-facing dairy and the walls were similarly plastered and whitewashed for cleanliness. Even the position of the door, at one end of the building, was the same. In the dairy, its position had been designed to stop the wind blowing dust into the skimming trough; here, I was at a loss to account for it.

  ‘Well,’ Gus said, ‘this lacks a certain welcoming air.’

  I made my way to the trestle table that stood under the window on the far wall.

  Evidently, Ianto Harries had been given an old blanket to transport the bones in. As I put my hand out to where the bundle lay, I felt how the thin, well-worn fabric had been gathered and grasped in the middle like a tinker’s bundle. Having carried the remains here, probably unwillingly, Ianto had simply dumped the blanket and its contents and made good his escape.

  ‘How did you come to know her?’ The kindness of Gus’s tone almost unmanned me. Until now, he had refrained from asking me any questions about Margaret Jones or her remains and I had repaid his delicacy by giving him no information whatsoever.

  I saw her and lost my head, I wanted to tell him, if not my heart. She filled my mind, my senses. I couldn’t sleep for thinking of her.

  I kept such gaze as was left to me fixed on the blanket. ‘My father and I were paying a social call at Waungilfach,’ I said. ‘I seem to recall there was a bull that Williams wanted my father to see.’

  I will carry my first sight of Margaret to the grave with me as the moment that separated boyhood from manhood. Bored by talk of bovine husbandry, I was standing a little aside from William Williams and my father and I saw her as she came into the yard, a cloth-draped pail of milk in each hand. Her auburn hair had been gathered up beneath an ancient felt hat but one curling strand had escaped to bounce against her cheek as she strode across to the dairy.

  I stared and, as the eyes of young people will, ours met. She might have been expected to look away – any Glanteifi servant certainly would have done – but she held my gaze and raised an eyebrow, causing a heat to rise not only in my face but, somewhat disconcertingly, in another area too.

  How lightly I took the gift of sight in those days – the gift of being able to catch the eye of a young woman and see interest there. I would have valued it so much more had I known that it was soon to be denied me. I would have gazed and gazed.

  But I was ignorant of so much, then. At the beginning of that summer, I had a head full of learning but no experience of female company. Before our encounter in the yard at Waungilfach, I had nurtured no expectations of the months before I began my studies at Oxford beyond helping with haymaking and harvest – if my father would still allow me those boyhood pleasures – and indulging in whatever idle pursuits came my way. But Margaret Jones’s unabashed gaze, her simple lift of an eyebrow, turned my head completely and, from that moment, any day on which I did not see her was a wasted day.

  I do not know whether William Williams saw that first look pass between me and Margaret or whether he simply wanted to flaunt the productiveness of his farm in front of my father but, whatever his reason, he barked a question as she walked away from my blush.

  ‘Margaret Jones – a moment!’

  She turned quickly towards him causing the milk to slop in the pails, catching at the covering cloths and soaking them. Later, when we exchanged memories of our first meeting, Margaret told me that she hated getting the covering cloths wet because rinsing milk from them took such a lot of water. ‘If I don’t rinse them properly, she knows,’ Margaret told me, referring to her employer’s wife, ‘she sniffs them every day to see if they’re clean.’

  ‘How much butter is there to take to market tomorrow?’ Williams asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Uncle,’ Margaret said. ‘Do you want me to go and count?’

  She called Williams ‘Uncle’ in accordance with local custom, just as she would call his wife ‘Aunty’. At that moment, my gaze still full of her flirtatiously raised eyebrow, the nomenclature seemed a silly infantilisation.

  ‘No,’ Williams said. ‘Leave it. I thought you’d know, that’s all.’

  Just then, the dogs started barking and, a few moments later, a man strode into the yard carrying a long staff tied with brightly coloured ribbons. He banged it on the ground three times, swept his similarly beribboned hat from his head and began declaiming.

  It was Shoni Penglais, the local Gwahoddwr, and I listened as he recited verses of his own composition, inviting friends and neighbours to the wedding of Hepzibah Jones of Henllain and Thomas Roberts of Pantyrefail.

  My father, knowing what was happening but unable to understand anything beyond the names and farms of his tenants, t
urned to me.

  ‘The wedding’s a week on Saturday,’ I told him. ‘Bidding the day before, obviously.’

  He nodded. ‘We must send something.’

  Williams took his cue. ‘I expect I shall have to give all my servants leave to go or there will be grumbling.’ He smiled indulgently but the look he gave Margaret was sharper than his tone.

  ‘It would be kind of you to let us go, Uncle.’

  ‘Of course you’ll go. And I’ll send something for the young couple with you.’

  And I would be there. From that moment on, nothing would have stopped me.

  I looked at Gus as best I could. ‘Margaret caught my eye,’ I told him, ‘and I’ – my own youthful audacity seemed amazing to me, now – ‘contrived a meeting.’

  ‘And then?’

  And then I had fallen in love. I had made a fool of myself, or been made a fool of. But I did not want to have to explain any of that to Gus. With both hands, I began opening the blanket so that its edges trailed over the sides of the trestle table, leaving the contents in a mounded-up heap in the middle. Though the light from the window above fell directly onto the table, I was unable to distinguish bone from stone and earth. All was a jumble of darker and paler browns in what Figges, the eye doctor at Moorfields hospital, called my peripheral vision.

  ‘I’m going to need your help, Gus.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  I stifled an impulse to punch him. How dare he make a joke of my failing sight? I obviously failed to hide my feelings because he made an inarticulate noise of contrition. ‘Sorry, P-L. Nerves. Never been in the company of the dead before. How can I assist?’

  I took a hard breath. My chest felt tight, as if somebody had put a fist beneath my diaphragm. ‘We need to separate the bones from the earth and lay them out decently.’

  ‘Then we’ll need a second table.’ As he spoke, Gus moved away from me and I made out several boards stacked against the wall, trestles beside them.

  With a second table set up at right angles to the first, I stood, suddenly reluctant to begin. Though it had to be done if I was to be certain that this was Margaret, separating bones from grave-soil suddenly seemed horribly intrusive.

  Gus must have sensed my reluctance.

  ‘Right, P-L, you stand here,’ he manoeuvred me to one end of the debris-covered table, ‘and I shall stand here,’ he shuffled himself into the right angle formed by the two boards. ‘We shall be methodical and go through the soil picking out the bones as we find them. If you pass whatever you find to me, I shall attempt to lay them out in some kind of skeletal order.’

  ‘Gray would be proud of you,’ I said, referring to a medical friend.

  ‘For once, I’m grateful for all his endless droning about bones,’ Gus said. ‘Now. Let’s see if we can remember anything he’s forced us to listen to.’

  Invoking Gray and his meticulous approach had the effect of steadying both of us and we set to.

  Our first task was to spread the contents of the blanket evenly along the trestle board so that the bones might more easily be seen, at least by Gus. We had hardly begun to do so when I became aware of something anomalous beneath my fingers. I picked up a small clot of something lighter than earth and rubbed off the worst of the clinging soil. As much by feel as by sight, I discerned that it was a knot of fabric. I held it out to Gus.

  ‘Can you see whether this has a pattern to it?’ He took it from me.

  ‘Chequers. Red and blue.’

  In what remained of my vision, colours were muted, though I had been fairly sure that I was seeing something other than brown.

  Taking the knot of fabric from him, I turned it over in my fingers. Even though I was unable to look at it properly, I knew what it was. ‘It’s the fastening knot of a shawl,’ I told Gus.

  The chequered shawl she wore to chapel on Sundays had been Margaret’s most treasured possession. It had been her one bit of finery, the only item of clothing she possessed that said she was not a drudge, that she had hopes and dreams.

  ‘Have you told your father yet?’ Gus broke into my thoughts. ‘About your sight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think he knows?’

  How could my father have failed to notice that I could not look him in the eye, that I was constantly averting my gaze, that I failed to greet servants I had known all my life until they spoke?

  ‘I don’t know, Gus.’

  ‘Has he broached the subject of your turning up here out of the blue?’

  I shook my head and Gus said no more. What more was there to say? We both knew that, when I told my father about the dramatic deterioration in my sight, he would understand that my legal career was over, that I had no choice but to do what I had promised myself I never would – come home and learn to be squire.

  A few minutes later, Gus picked up something and held it to the light.

  ‘What do you think this is?’

  I took the object from him and positioned it at the edge of the central blur that dominated my eyesight, so that I could form an impression of its shape. Detail I could perceive only by touch and inference.

  Weighted at the bottom, Gus’s find had a slim, corroded shaft topped by sprung jaws. I tried to pull the little, flared lever which would compress the spring and open the jaws but rust had taken hold and the joint was stuck.

  ‘It’s a rushlight holder.’

  ‘What’s a rushlight?’

  I blinked. ‘It’s what it says – a light made out of a rush. A kind of small reed that grows in damp ground,’ I added. Rushes were unlikely to have figured much in Gus’s London childhood.

  ‘I see.’ There was a pause during which I was aware of him staring at the holder in my hand. ‘How do you make a light out of a reed?’

  I took in a breath. As a boy, I had been proud to know how to make a rushlight; now, with Gus waiting for an explanation, I was forced to acknowledge that it was an incongruous accomplishment for a gentleman. I put the holder down. ‘You take your rush,’ I said, miming the action of holding the delicate shaft with my left hand. ‘And you peel off half of the outer skin until you have the soft inside of the rush on display. The remaining skin supports it and acts as a wick. Then you dip the rush in whatever animal fat you have to hand, and let it soak into the pith. When it’s dry, you trap it in the rushlight holder like so.’ My fingers pinched at my imaginary rushlight. ‘You light the end of the rush like a taper and it burns for about twenty minutes.’

  ‘Why would you use that rather than a candle?’

  ‘Because you can’t afford a candle, Gus! Because you’re so poor you’re lucky if you’ve got the fat to make rushlights.’

  ‘I see.’

  But I knew that he did not see, not really. He had never encountered poverty in the flesh, it was as foreign to him as the Ottoman Empire. I turned the rushlight holder over in my hand, remembering its place in the loft where Margaret had slept. It was just as well for me that Gus could not see my memories; I did not want to explain myself to him. No doubt the inquest would furnish him with all the details he could wish.

  With both of us working steadily, after an hour or so, Gus had assigned most of the major bones to torso or limbs and my searching fingertips had found another of Margaret’s few possessions: a flat little tin in which she had kept her needles and some thread. Already dented and scratched before it had been interred under a fallen tree, it was now so stained and corroded that Gus was unable to see that it had originally been made in the shape of a tiny book. Margaret had told me that it had once held snuff though she had had no idea where it came from.

  ‘Somebody must have brought it back from the war, I suppose,’ she had said, taking the little tin from me and putting it on the wall-top that served her as a shelf.

  Why had she been carrying her rushlight holder and her sewing things when she was murdered? And why had she been wearing her best shawl?

  Could Williams have been right – had she been in the process of runnin
g away?

  When I had gone to Waungilfach looking for her, I had found the other servants thin-lipped. Nobody knew where she was. With the onset of blindness still two or three years away, the disapproval on their faces had been obvious: they all blamed me, in one way or another, for her disappearance.

  Guilt had sent me on a fruitless search. She had still been at Waungilfach, even as I rode over half the county looking for her. Murdered and buried less than half a mile from the loft that had been her home.

  Gus held something up to the window. ‘Pity Gray’s not here,’ he said, ‘he could tell us what’s a finger bone and what’s a toe bone.’

  Sidelong, I scanned the mass of drying earth and stones on the table. ‘Gus, can we put up a third table? I want to be able to sift all this and get rid of some of the earth.’

  Gus looked at me. ‘Are you going to look for every tiny bone?’ His tone told me that he thought I was being over-assiduous.

  ‘No. I’m looking for something specific.’

  ‘What?’

  I swallowed. ‘Little bones.’

  ‘What kind of little bones?’

  ‘Little ribs, little arm bones, little leg bones—’