None So Blind

by Alis Hawkins

  That made her stop and think. She wouldn’t want to give people the idea that she couldn’t control her servants.

  ‘No,’ she said, when she’d finished thinking, ‘we wouldn’t have allowed that.’

  Bowen made some more notes and Esme went back to smoothing her skirts. Probably trying to draw attention to the fact that in a roomful of betgwns and aprons she was wearing something expensive and fashionable. And yellow. It was very showy, but it didn’t suit her complexion. Made her look peevish.

  I took a breath, sat back in my chair, folded my arms. Didn’t want Peter asking what I was so strung-up about. But the look on that man’s face had scared me to my bones.

  ‘Mrs Williams, your husband stated that he would have known if anybody had come to Waungilfach on the night Margaret disappeared because the whole family was wakeful. Is that your belief, too?’

  ‘Oh yes, no doubt. The dogs would have barked if somebody came onto the yard. They always do.’

  Some clown at the back started barking. Beer. Always makes men think they’re funny.

  Mr Bowen ignored the dog noises and checked his notes. ‘But my understanding,’ he said, ‘is that the house was hardly silent. Your husband told this inquest that your youngest child was crying so much that nobody slept that night.’

  Their youngest child. Hah! Her husband’s youngest he might’ve been. But not hers. Little Samuel, born the wrong side of the blanket. Hidden behind the pretence of charity so Williams could hold on to his respectability.

  ‘Yes. He cried all night with the colic.’

  ‘So, if the dogs had barked, you might not have heard them over the child crying?’

  ‘Well… I might not – because I was in the nursery at the front of the house. But the big bedroom is at the back overlooking the yard. Mr Williams would hear the dogs from there.’

  The ‘big bedroom’. Hers and Williams’s. No gentleman’s dressing room for William Williams, Waungilfach. Was that why Esme tolerated his behaviour with the maids? Why she was prepared to treat his bastard son like her own – because she was sick of having to share the ‘big bedroom’ with him?

  ‘And you’re quite sure that Mr Williams was in the bedroom at the back of the house all night? He didn’t come into the nursery to see the child?’

  ‘No. He leaves the children to me.’

  He’d have to, wouldn’t he? The Williamses might have a ‘nursery’ but they couldn’t’ve afforded a nursemaid. Not if gossip was to be believed.

  ‘Mrs Williams, was it not somewhat unusual for female servants to be sleeping in a hayloft? Would it not be more customary for them to have a place in the house?’

  It was a good question and a few in the crowd whooped and clapped at it. Yes, Esme, why were they sleeping out? Margaret Jones wouldn’t’ve been able to leave the house as easily as she’d slipped away from the loft.

  For the first time since she’d come up to give evidence, Esme Williams looked uncomfortable. ‘To speak plainly, Mr Bowen, our house is a good size, but, by the time we’ve found space for all the indoor servants there’s nowhere for the outdoor ones to sleep. Better for the dairymaids to be in the loft than on the kitchen floor.’ In other words our house might not be the size of a gentry house but, by God, we employ a lot of servants!

  Something that might have been a sly smile fought with the lines on Bowen’s grey face but the tone of his voice didn’t change. ‘You weren’t worried that the young women in your employment might not be safe, sleeping in the loft?’

  ‘No. The dogs are chained up outside that byre. Nobody could get in.’

  Nobody the dogs didn’t know, at any rate.

  ‘It’s your belief, then, that Margaret Jones must have left of her own free will, taking her possessions with her?’

  ‘Yes, I’m quite sure of it.’

  ‘But you don’t know why she might have done that?’

  Esme looked at him as if he was a fool. ‘I can only hope it was from shame, Mr Bowen.’

  The coroner nodded as if he was agreeing with her. But the longer the pause went on, the more it looked like he was just letting her comment sit in the air between them. Because it wasn’t only Margaret Jones who had reason to be ashamed.

  ‘Mrs Williams,’ he said finally, ‘one of the things this inquest must determine is whether the jury is required to bring in a verdict on the deaths of one person or two. Do you think it’s possible that Margaret Jones might have given birth before leaving the loft? That she might have been taking her child somewhere?’

  I kept my eyes down, then. I knew the answer to that question and I didn’t want anybody to see it written on my face.

  Esme pursed her lips. ‘No, I don’t believe it is possible. The girl showed no signs of being uncomfortable at servant supper and she would if she was in the early stages of labour.’ Esme Williams, mother of three daughters, seemed quite sure of herself. ‘I don’t think it would be possible for her to give birth and get away before the morning.’

  You don’t think it would have been possible, I corrected in my head. Who did she think she was fooling, acting the lady?

  ‘Do you think she might have gone to the midwife?’

  ‘Possibly. First children usually take their time coming, so she might.’

  What did Esme know about midwives? Williams would’ve made sure that he had a doctor at the birth of his children.

  ‘Mrs Williams, as you were awake the whole night with your little boy, do you happen to remember what the weather was like?’

  ‘Yes. It rained most of the night. Not much wind, just rain and more rain.’

  Rain and more rain. I could still feel it dripping down the back of my neck. If it hadn’t been for that rain, I’d never’ve seen what I’d seen.

  ‘So, wherever she was going,’ Bowen suggested, ‘Margaret Jones must have been determined about her journey – it wasn’t the kind of night on which a young woman would choose to go tramping about.’

  ‘No.’ Esme agreed with him. ‘The clouds made it very dark. And Margaret didn’t have a lantern.’

  Bowen took his specs off and smiled at her. ‘Mrs Williams, thank you. You’ve been most generous in coming to give testimony here. I’m going to release you, now, unless you have anything to add which would help this hearing determine whether or not these remains are those of Margaret Jones and, if so, how she came to be buried beneath a tree in your woods?’

  For the first time, Esme didn’t seem to know how to answer him.

  But she wanted to say something, you could tell.

  Then, about half a second before the layabouts got bored and started heckling her, she spoke. ‘It’s my belief that this is Margaret Jones. I don’t know how she died, but I do know how she lived. She was a young woman who had her eye on the main chance. And perhaps that’s what caused her downfall.’

  Harry

  I was glad when Bowen ordered a break at midday. Both MrsWilliams’s testimony and the drunken spectators’ comments about Margaret had made me feel profoundly uncomfortable.

  ‘We have a meal waiting for us,’ my father declared as soon as we had made our way out of the ballroom. ‘I asked James to arrange it before he took the carriage back.’

  ‘You have a more reliable coachman than my father does if you can trust him to do that,’ Gus said.

  ‘That,’ I managed, ‘is because you treat your servants as if they hadn’t the wit they were born with and they behave accordingly so as not to embarrass you.’

  Gus aimed a cuff at my shoulder which, not having seen it coming, I failed to avoid; a further indication, if my father had noticed it, that I could not see as well as I pretended.

  More evidence to that effect accumulated over lunch as local society presented itself at our table to pay its respects. Meeting a speaker’s eye guided solely by the location of their voice is a hit-and-miss affair and I knew that I must, often, be directing my gaze at necks and ears and hairlines. I would soon have a reputation as a shifty-eyed fellow
.

  Morosely, I wondered how many of the people I had met over the years who had seemed unwilling or unable to meet my eye had, in fact, been suffering from a similar loss of sight. My eye-doctor, Figges, had told me that my condition was far from unique, though it was more often seen in those of advancing years. ‘It does occur in the young,’ he said, ‘though far less frequently. Do you have siblings? I only ask because it tends to run in families.’

  I had always wished that I were not my father’s only living child, that there might have been a brother or a sister to share the burden of comparison with the dead and deeply lamented George; but now I felt my aloneness still more acutely. ‘If only I had,’ I said, ‘it would be a comfort to discuss this blindness with somebody who understood it.’

  But Figges had taken exception to this. ‘No, no, Mr Probert-Lloyd – your condition is not to be thought of as true blindness. If it follows the usual path you will always retain your peripheral vision – vision outside the central area.’

  Very well. I would continue to need lanterns and candles and I would, by constantly looking askance at the world, be able to see where I was going. But if I could not read, or see a person’s face, or scrutinise an object, was I not blind?

  I was oppressed by the knowledge that soon I would have to tell my father why I had come home, why I was not hurrying back to my practice at the bar. And then he would have the upper hand.

  Bowen had wanted to call Nathaniel Howell to give evidence. Not as leader of the ceffyl pren band who had visited Williams to warn him to mend his ways – Bowen knew nothing of that – but as the minister of Treforgan Unitarian chapel and Margaret Jones’s pastor. However, as the Reverend Howell had left, at the height of the riots, to take up a post somewhere in the east of England and could not, therefore, easily be recalled, the only witness left to examine was the local midwife.

  Unlike Rachel Ellis, the midwife gave not the slightest indication of being intimidated by Bowen or his proceedings.

  ‘You are Ann Davies and you act as a midwife, is that correct?’

  Though she waited for the interpreter to finish before she replied in Welsh, I wondered whether, in fact, Ann Davies understood English perfectly well.

  ‘I am.’

  I eyed her in my peripheral vision. She was not tall, but the way she held herself gave the impression of self-assurance.

  ‘Mrs Davies, were you acquainted with Margaret Jones?’

  ‘Not well, but I knew her to speak to.’

  ‘How did you come to know her?’

  ‘Sometimes the congregation from her chapel and the one I attend would meet to sing together.’

  Gus leaned closer. ‘Interesting. Both the labourers and Rachel Ellis directed their comments to the interpreter but she’s listening to the question then looking at Bowen to give her answer even though she gives it in Welsh.’

  My impression of self-assurance had not been wrong, then.

  ‘Did Margaret Jones consult you about the birth of her child?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you know she was carrying a child?’

  ‘Yes. Mrs Williams, Waungilfach, sent a message to me that the girl might need help.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ The sudden curtness of Bowen’s tone told me his suspicions had been aroused – as had mine – by her use of the word ‘help’; not to mention the disclosure of Esme Williams’s involvement.

  ‘The message said that the girl had no family near,’ came the unperturbed reply. ‘So she would need help to deliver the child.’

  ‘Just to be clear, since we have a dead infant to consider in this inquest,’ Bowen said, his tone only slightly less pointed, ‘did Margaret Jones – or any other person – procure your aid in delivering and then doing away with her baby?’

  Ann Davies did not wait for the interpreter this time. ‘I am a midwife, Mr Bowen,’ she shot back, in English. ‘It is my job to bring children into the world not take them out of it.’

  But Bowen was not going to be fobbed off with stiff-backed outrage, however surprised he might be at her expression of it. ‘Answer the question, please.’

  ‘The poor translator’s trying to catch her eye to see what to do,’ Gus whispered. ‘But La Davies has fixed Bowen with a gimlet eye.’

  ‘Very well,’ I heard Ann Davies say. ‘No, Margaret Jones did not ask me to kill her baby. Nobody asked me to kill Margaret Jones’s baby. I did not kill Margaret Jones’s baby.’

  I had always wondered exactly what kind of pin’s drop was supposed to be audible in such silences. Now I knew. The very finest muslin-holding pin would have clanged to the ground in the hush left by Ann Davies’s vehemence.

  Bowen might have been expected to reprimand her insolence but he chose to take the midwife’s words at face value and to put her tone aside. ‘Thank you,’ he said, mildly, before pausing to make a note. I applauded the strategy: in not taking offence when he might easily have done so, he had given the midwife a reason to be conciliatory and, perhaps, give him more information than she might have intended. ‘Now,’ he continued, ‘you have said that Margaret Jones did not consult you, but did you seek her out, offer your services?’

  ‘As it happens, I did.’

  ‘And what was her response?’

  ‘She thanked me.’

  ‘And you left it at that?’

  ‘No. I asked her when her baby was due, so that I would be ready.’

  ‘And did she tell you?’

  ‘Yes. She said the baby was expected in the middle of May.’

  No. That was not right. Margaret had told me that her baby was due to be born in June.

  ‘When she disappeared, therefore, her baby was due within two weeks or so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The confusion and disquiet that I felt at this news was clearly not shared by the crowd; there was scarcely a murmur as Bowen paused to write something. Had Margaret been confused about when the baby would be born, or had she lied? And, if she had lied, who had she been trying to deceive – me or Ann Davies?

  ‘You have said,’ Bowen continued, ‘that a young woman with no family would need your help in giving birth to her child. Could Margaret Jones have delivered the child on her own, with no help?’

  For the first time, Ann Davies hesitated. ‘It does happen,’ she said, guardedly. ‘Young women who don’t know – or don’t want to know – that they are with child do sometimes deliver their babies alone.’

  ‘And are children delivered successfully under such circumstances? I ask merely to form an idea of whether this child could have been born before its mother’s death.’

  ‘Some are. Some are not.’

  I could not see Ann Davies’s mouth, but I would have been prepared to bet that it was shut tight, a line drawn across her face. There cannot have been many people in that crowded, muttering ballroom who were ignorant of the fate of infants born in those circumstances. As Ann Davies had intimated, many did not survive and there were no witnesses, save the mother, to say why.

  Was that why Mrs Williams had procured the midwife’s help before the event? So that Rebecca could not level accusations in Waungilfach’s direction? Letting the midwife know of Margaret’s need for help was the last thing I would have expected of Williams’s wife.

  Suddenly, I was aware of one of the jurors standing up. ‘Mr Bowen, may I ask Mrs Davies a question?’

  ‘Of course. That’s your right.’ It was notable, in fact, that the jury had addressed none of the previous witnesses.

  ‘Mrs Davies, I’ll ask the question the coroner is too delicate to ask. In your honest opinion, do you think it’s possible that Margaret Jones gave birth to her child and then killed it?’

  Did Ann Davies ask herself why the juror had requested her honest opinion? Was he reminding her that she was under oath to tell the truth?

  ‘As I said, I hardly knew Margaret Jones. I can’t say what she might or might not have done.’

  ‘You weren’t in the room when
Mr Williams gave his testimony,’ her interrogator continued, ‘but he said that because of the way people felt about the workhouse, he and Mrs Williams wouldn’t have dared to send Margaret Jones away. Do you believe that?’

  The room waited.

  ‘I can’t say,’ the midwife said, finally. ‘Yes, people were angry about young women and their babies going into the workhouse, but I can’t say whether that would have stopped the Williamses of Waungilfach from throwing her out. And,’ she added before he asked, ‘I can’t say what Margaret Jones believed either.’

  ‘Thank you.’ The questioner sat down.

  ‘Would any other juror like to ask a question?’ Bowen asked. Nobody spoke.

  ‘Then I will resume. Mrs Davies, I have one last question.’ The coroner paused. ‘Is it possible that Margaret Jones, feeling the onset of her labour pains, would have been able to pack up her belongings and leave Waungilfach farm without anybody being any the wiser?’

  ‘I can’t say whether anybody would know she’d gone, but I can say that if she was only in the early stages then she would’ve been able to pack up and leave. I don’t suppose she had very much to carry.’

  She seemed to have finished, but then added, ‘But, if she did that, where was she going? If she was looking for help with the baby, why would she take all her things with her?’