None So Blind

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘I imagine the courtesies, generally, become difficult,’ he said. ‘They are built on such finely judged nuances, are they not?’

  I was surprised. Not simply at his joining me in my meaningless prattle but at his perceptiveness. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, they are.’

  Over the last few months I had actually begun to wonder whether my diminishing sight would render me mute. Until I became unable to see properly, I had not appreciated just how much of what we say is dictated by what we observe: a look of embarrassment causing a change of topic, a flush of enthusiasm and a bright eye egging one on, a new dress or hat demanding a compliment, confusion prompting a clearer explanation. Would things become easier now that I was beginning to admit to my difficulties? I feared not; so much emotion, so much thought, is simply not articulated. We are a visually acute species and our social intercourse is predicated on that sense.

  Suet pudding consumed and dishes removed, my father reached for the decanter of port and poured for us both. Barely able to distinguish his movements, I felt myself at a huge disadvantage; my peripheral sight diminished in proportion to the available light and my father had never favoured a brightly lit dining room.

  ‘Vaughan of Aberdwylan came to see me today.’

  I felt myself tense. Vaughan sat on the magistrates’ bench with my father. It seemed that we had arrived at the reason for my being here. ‘I suppose he dislikes my investigations?’

  ‘He does. He came to ask me, in the strongest terms, to force you to desist.’

  As I drew breath to reply, I heard my father sigh. ‘Please, do not simply refuse without hearing me out.’

  I was taken aback, his tone was almost pleading.

  ‘Vaughan came to see me because he, in his turn, had received a visit. From Roberts of the Salutation Hotel.’

  At the mention of Roberts’s name I was filled with the same sense of enraged mortification that I had felt when he tried to browbeat me. Some criminal has invaded my hotel after dark. I cannot have that happening. Nor can I have the other guests in the hotel put to fright by such grotesque appearances.

  ‘Roberts informed him that an offensive object had been left outside your door in the hotel.’

  ‘Yes, a ceffyl pren,’ I said, exasperated that he could not bring himself to articulate the words.

  ‘An object of rebuke,’ he insisted. ‘And of intimidation.’

  ‘That was its intention, certainly, but I confess to being less than intimidated.’

  I jumped as a thud made the glasses and the decanter rattle. My father had slapped the table in his irritation. ‘Must you be so solipsistic? I warned you that your intentions risked a resurgence of Rebecca activity and that is exactly what you have brought about.’

  ‘What I have brought about?’

  ‘Was it not you who insisted on an inquest?’

  ‘How could there not be one?’

  ‘Very easily! As Bowen pointed out, it was scarcely in the public interest. How does it benefit anybody to have all this raked up – all the old enmities and fears?’

  ‘So because the men who killed Margaret are now trying to warn me off,’ I tried to glare at him, ‘you find me to be in the wrong?’

  ‘The magistrates made a decision. The jury’s verdict should be allowed to stand. The jury’s verdict, Harry, not the magistrates.’ I tried to interrupt, to point out that he had not answered my question, but he spoke over me. ‘The jury wanted to draw a line under the whole affair. Could you not simply have acceded to their wishes?’

  ‘But it wasn’t their wish! It wasn’t their verdict.’

  Another sigh. ‘You surely don’t believe the rumours of jury tampering—’

  I could have screamed with frustration at my inability to see his face and it made me more combative than I might have been. ‘I believe what I was told!’ I did not quite shout but I knew I was being more forceful than my father would find acceptable. ‘By Dic Jones, the saddler, one of the dissenters on the jury.’ My eyes to one side, I tried as hard as I could to get some idea of what my father was thinking but I could see no movement, no expression. ‘He told me that a letter was circulated amongst the jury threatening that their houses or businesses would be burned down unless they brought in a verdict of accidental death.’ I paused for his response but my father said nothing. ‘Did you know that?’ I pressed him.

  When, eventually, he replied, his voice was low, almost confiding. ‘Harry, you haven’t been here – haven’t lived here – since the riots. You don’t know the remorse, the fear with which people look back on those events. What started as a response to a genuine grievance turned into something monstrous – farmers hid amongst their corn so as to escape the messengers that would summon them, they paid proxies to go on Rebecca’s illegal errands rather than risk transportation.’ He took a restorative breath. ‘It was madness, Harry. Authority was defied on every hand. And people don’t want to remember it.’ He punctuated this last phrase with light thuds of his fist on the table. ‘They want Rebecca – even the memory of it – to die. Why do you think nobody but you wanted that inquest? Nobody wanted to give evidence – indeed, the witnesses scarcely gave evidence! Were we one jot the wiser at the end than we were at the beginning? No. But it had all been stirred up again. Rebecca had been resurrected.’

  He stopped, abruptly, and the silence in the wake of his speech was stifling. I could scarcely breathe for it.

  ‘There hasn’t been a sniff of the ceffyl pren for years,’ he went on, ‘and, now, you have one deposited at your door. Is this really what you want, Harry? To unleash the madness of insurrection and intimidation all over again?’

  I did not know how to respond. He was right, of course. Nothing had been heard of Rebecca since ’forty-three. After that extraordinary summer, whatever impulse had brought Rebecca forth had subsided again and, improbable though it had seemed, life had resumed its former pattern.

  ‘You say I’ve resurrected Rebecca,’ I said, ‘but that would imply that she’d died. And, however devoutly people might wish that she had, Rebecca cannot die while those who killed Margaret Jones remain unpunished. While the secret of her death is being kept, Rebecca is merely in hiding.’

  ‘Dead or in hiding, it makes no difference. The phenomenon had disappeared entirely from view. And now you are flushing it into the open, making people afraid.’ I could feel his earnest gaze fixed on me, beseeching me to agree with him. ‘Fear is dangerous, Harry. People who are afraid do desperate things.’

  The nape of my neck prickled at his words. Had somebody been afraid of Margaret Jones? Of something she knew? Was that why she had been murdered?

  ‘I can’t give up now,’ I told him. ‘If I do, fear and intimidation have won. Rebecca won’t go away if I give up – whoever threatened the jurors and put that ceffyl pren outside my door will simply conclude that they can do what they like. There may be no more trouble now – possibly not for months. But the next time somebody’s afraid of a verdict, what’s to stop them using Rebecca’s name? This has to be seen through to the end.’

  In the light of the candelabra in the middle of the table, I saw his hand reaching for the decanter and heard the sound of more port being poured into our glasses. My father pushed my glass towards me but said nothing. And as he continued not to speak, I found my attention focusing itself on the unhurried tick-tick-tick of the long-case clock that stood in the corner of the room. It suddenly seemed intrusive, louder and more insistent than before, as if the silence between my father and me had somehow amplified it.

  Tick-tick-tick-tick.

  Since becoming more reliant on sound, I had begun to hate the way in which a room could be filled with the beat of time being meanly parcelled out, ticked off into sightless seconds. You can count on me to tell you the truth; everything else is blind guesswork.

  Tick-tick-tick-tick.

  I was sick of it; sick of not being able to see, sick of the caution which I had allowed my condition to inflict on me, sick of the viol
ence which I could feel building inside me like steam heat. Violence which had almost boiled over at Ezra Lloyd’s accusation. Damn it, if blindness was my lot, it was time to start using it to my advantage.

  ‘I can’t see your face, Father,’ I said, ‘so I have no idea what you’re thinking. You’ll have to tell me.’

  His voice, when he replied, sounded old, weary. ‘You do understand that you’re making a future as squire of Glanteifi impossible for yourself?’

  I sighed. I had no more idea how to respond to this charge, now, than I had when he had first made it on seeing me depart for the Salutation.

  When I did not answer him, his voice sharpened. ‘While you were a barrister you could avoid coming home and shouldering your responsibilities. But you quite clearly haven’t that recourse any longer.’

  That impotent heat rose in me again. I would not allow him to bring me to heel by pointing out my dependence. It was not possible to think of being master of Glanteifi on that basis. ‘I may not have the faculties to practice at the bar.’ I was trying, sadly less than successfully, to keep the emotion out of my voice. ‘But I think I could make a tolerable living as a solicitor.’

  ‘A blind solicitor?’

  How dare he taunt me with it? ‘I believe so. If I was to avail myself of the right clerk.’

  ‘Somebody like young Davies, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, somebody exactly like John.’

  ‘Are you paying Mr Davies for his assistance?’

  I felt the heat of my rage doused by a mortified kind of shame. In point of fact, I could not afford to pay John and I knew that, in persuading Mr Schofield to help me, I was exploiting my position as heir to the estate. But naming myself a hypocrite did nothing to deflect my resentment away from my father who inferred the answer to his question from my silence.

  ‘So Charles Schofield is, effectively, funding this enterprise?’

  Would he stoop to putting pressure on Mr Schofield to withdraw his support for me? I thought it possible; I had failed to reveal my true motives for this investigation and he was obviously suffering under increasing pressure himself.

  ‘How long can you remain solvent in your own right, Harry? How long before you cannot afford to live at the Salutation anymore?’

  ‘I hope to conclude my investigation before my savings dwindle quite to nothing.’

  He sighed, perhaps hearing the truth behind my stiff reply. ‘Father, I would like you to understand,’ I held up a hand as he tried to interrupt. ‘No, let me finish, please. I’d like you to understand why I feel compelled to do this. I know you believed that you were acting in my best interests when you sent me up to Oxford early. But, in doing so, you set in train a set of circumstances which, I believe, ultimately led to Margaret Jones’s death.’

  I had expected him to object but he said nothing.

  ‘I know it was a young man’s unwise affection,’ I chose my words with the utmost circumspection, ‘but I did care very much for Margaret Jones. I am aware that you will see it as further evidence of my immaturity – as did she, incidentally,’ a sad smile pulled at my mouth, ‘but I wished to marry her.’ Again, I was forced to hold up a forestalling hand, desperate to make him understand. ‘Then you sent me away and, when I came back, it was to discover that she was ruined.’ Somehow, I could not say pregnant. ‘Despite my affection, I chose to believe ill of her, chose to believe far worse of her than she deserved. I did not help her when I could have and, in doing nothing when I should have acted, I believe I was complicit in her murder.’ I paused but, now, he seemed to have nothing to say. ‘I will not,’ I concluded, ‘be complicit in her murderer’s escape from justice.’

  John

  I was glad to escape to the Drovers’ that evening. I’d run out of polite ways to tell Mr Schofield that I couldn’t discuss Harry’s investigation, and I needed a pint of beer.

  But, when I walked in, I didn’t get the friendly welcome I was used to. What I got instead was a lot of suspicious looks and eyes turned away. Working with Harry wasn’t winning me any friends. I was persona non grata as Old Schofield would’ve enjoyed telling me.

  I swallowed a hard lump in my throat. Sod them! I was here to do a job for Harry and I was going to do it. Dai Penlan was sitting in a corner with Ianto Harris. They saw me coming over and the two of them looked about as guilty as a cat with its face in the cream. After the inquest, everybody knew they’d been going to steal the root wood from the fallen tree. Mind, you’d’ve sworn they’d murdered Margaret Jones the way they looked at me.

  Made my job easier, of course. When I told them what I wanted, the words fell out of Dai Penlan’s mouth before I’d even offered to buy him a drink. Didn’t ask why I wanted to know, not him nor Ianto. But then, everybody knew what me and Harry were up to, didn’t they? I made a note in my book, just to let them know they’d given me official information, then nodded my thanks and got out of their way. You could’ve heard their sighs of relief on the street outside.

  Good, now I knew where Rachel and Aaron Ellis lived and I still had the money Harry’d given me to make Dai well-disposed enough to tell me, as he’d put it, so I fetched a drink for the man I’d really come here to speak to. Daniel James.

  Daniel and I had been at Mr Davies’s school together. Now, he worked for Glanteifi’s estate lawyer and he was in the Drovers’ almost every evening. Said it was professionally useful to keep his ear to the ground.

  ‘How’s business, Daniel?’ I shuffled myself onto the bench and put a second mug of beer in front of him.

  ‘What do you want, John Davies?’

  ‘Daniel! So suspicious!’

  ‘If a man buys me a drink, he wants something.’

  I grinned. ‘You’re right, I do need a favour. But it’s not for me, it’s for my boss. My temporary boss.’

  He picked up the beer and spat in it. ‘Now you can’t take it away when I say no.’

  I made a face at the childishness of the gesture but we both knew I’d’ve done the same.

  ‘So by “temporary boss”, I suppose you’re talking about Harry Glanteifi?’ he gave me a sly grin. ‘Heard he’d managed to persuade old man Schofield to let you work for him for nothing.’

  That was Newcastle Emlyn for you. You could share a confidence in the morning and it’d be town gossip by the evening.

  ‘Yes, well, the person who’s asked him to make enquiries isn’t paying,’ I said, looking sideways at the men nearest to where we were sitting. Didn’t want anybody paying too much attention to us.

  If Daniel noticed, he didn’t follow my lead. I think he’d already had a couple and his voice was louder than I’d’ve liked. ‘So, what favour does your temporary and not very well-off boss need? Why isn’t he well-off, anyway? I heard he was some big lawyer in London.’ I shrugged and raised an eyebrow at the same time. I know but I can’t tell you. We lawyers’ clerks knew how to value discretion as much as information. ‘I can’t talk about Harry’s finances—’ I stopped. Daniel was asking a question.

  ‘Is that what you call him? Harry?’

  I shrugged. ‘What else would I call him?’

  ‘To his face?’

  ‘No, to his arse! Yes, of course, to his face.’

  Daniel gave me a look. Half of him didn’t believe me, the other half was unwillingly impressed. ‘Well then? What’s the favour?’

  ‘We need – that’s to say Harry needs – some information from the Glanteifi estate records.’

  He watched me over his beer, waiting.

  ‘An address,’ I said, ‘that’s all. There was an old boy – a groom, Harry can’t remember his name,’ he’d believe that, a gentleman not remembering the name of a servant, ‘who retired a few years ago. He wants to talk to him, see if he remembers some things from back then.’

  Daniel looked at me over his pint. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘The old chap’ll have a pension from the estate, won’t he? There’ll be an address attached to his name on the re
cords.’

  Daniel put his empty mug down. Then he looked into it and up at me. I picked it up and waved it at Mrs James, who wandered over with her jug and refilled it. Refilled mine while she was at it.

  She flirted with us for a bit, like women of a certain age always do with young, unmarried men, then she went to fill somebody else’s mug. I waited till she started speaking to them, then turned to Daniel. ‘Well?’

  ‘You want the name and address of a groom who’s been pensioned off in the last few years?’

  ‘Yes.’ I’d picked a groom because, once or twice, a stable lad had been mentioned in connection with Harry’s youth. A man employed to work in the stables would know who this lad was. Ezra Lloyd had talked about a David Thomas. Was he the one Harry’d gone about with as a boy?

  If Harry was right and there had been a Beca band that wanted to teach young women a lesson, what Lloyd had said made me think this David Thomas might’ve been one of them. So why weren’t we asking him questions?

  ‘How will I know whether I’ve got the right one?’ Daniel wanted to know.

  I thought quickly. ‘There can’t be that many grooms who’ve been pensioned off in the last ten years,’ I said, throwing my net fairly wide. ‘Just bring me the names of any grooms who’ve been given a pension since the end of the riots.’ I knew that mentioning the riots would get his interest. ‘Yes, since eighteen forty-three. From what Harry said that should do it.’