None So Blind

by Alis Hawkins

  I watched her notice us. She straightened up, one hand on her back, and sent her little boy running off. I didn’t know whether Harry’d been able to make out what was going on, so I told him.

  ‘She’ll have sent him off to get her husband,’ he said.

  We dismounted and walked the horses the last few yards. Rachel was trying to look busy with her little girl and the basket of potatoes they were carrying between them but she couldn’t keep the fear off her face. I’d seen that fear before. When she was answering Bowen’s questions.

  ‘Good morning to you, Mrs Ellis,’ Harry called, stopping at the edge of the potato rows.

  Rachel Ellis put the basket down and pinched her nose, just like she’d done at the inquest. ‘Good morning. Fine weather, isn’t it?’ Her speech still sounded odd.

  Her daughter looked up at her. ‘Who are they, Mami?’

  ‘Shh. Go in the house,’ her mother said, giving her a little push to send her on her way. ‘Wait there till your brother comes then the pair of you can go and fetch some water.’

  The little girl did as she was told but she looked back at us when her mother wasn’t looking. Wondering who we were and what we wanted. I watched her go into the neat, whitewashed house. It had a glassed window and good thatch. How many cattle in the byre end, I wondered. From the size of it, not more than two. But if Rachel Ellis made butter to sell – and there was definitely more money coming in than just a labourer’s wages, judging by that glass window – they’d need more than one to keep the milk coming all year.

  Harry’d dismounted and was getting the visiting-gifts out. ‘I didn’t want to come and take up your time and not bring something for you,’ he said. ‘Tea, sugar and flour,’ he put the packages in her hands, ‘I hope they’ll be useful?’

  With both her hands occupied, she couldn’t pinch her nose but ‘thank you’ doesn’t take much understanding.

  ‘You’ve got a tidy place, here,’ Harry told her. I wondered how much of it he could see. Could he tell that, beneath the limecoat, the house was built of clom, not turf? I doubted it. He’d just see white.

  Rachel didn’t reply, just stood, watching him look about. It wasn’t cold but she was shivering. Or shaking.

  ‘And two children – you must be very proud.’

  When he got no answer to that, Harry came to the point. ‘You know we’re trying to find out what happened to Margaret?’ She nodded and I wondered if he’d seen. ‘I don’t believe the jury’s verdict,’ he said. ‘I think they were told what to say. Threatened.’ Then he stopped, tried to look her in the eye. ‘You don’t believe Margaret would have killed her own child, do you, Rachel?’

  Rachel Ellis didn’t reply. She just shifted the packages he’d given her so that she was holding them in the crook of her arm, like a newborn. To give her a hand free to pinch her nose.

  Over her shoulder, I saw that the little boy’d found his father. Aaron Ellis was striding towards us along the road, a billhook in his hand. From a movement of Harry’s head I knew he’d seen him too.

  Did Rachel see us both looking past her at her husband? I don’t know but she started speaking quickly, her voice low. ‘You should give this up, Harry Gwyn. There’s no good can come of what you’re doing. Not for you.’

  Harry Gwyn?

  We could hear Aaron’s boots clumping now, and Rachel half-turned towards him.

  ‘Why, Rachel?’ Harry took a step towards her and she backed off, shaking her head. ‘Who thinks I should give it up?’ he asked. ‘Not you, surely?’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything about Margaret’s baby, Mr Probert-Lloyd,’ Rachel said, loud enough for her husband to hear.

  ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd!’ Aaron Ellis had reached us. ‘Good day to you, sir.’ He put a hand on his wife’s arm. It looked like reassurance but perhaps it was a warning, too.

  As Harry gave him his ‘Good day’ back, Aaron’s eyes were on me. ‘And Mr John Davies from Schofield the solicitor’s, is it?’

  I inclined my head, never taking my eyes off him. I wasn’t going to let him stare me down. He wasn’t a handsome man, Aaron Ellis – his face was narrow and thin and his top teeth stuck out. To be truthful, there wasn’t much to recommend husband or wife as far as looks went.

  ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd, if you’re here to ask my wife questions about Margaret Jones, I’m sorry but you’ve had a wasted journey. She doesn’t know anything.’ Aaron was speaking Welsh. He’d probably come to the end of his English with ‘Good day’. ‘She told Mr Bowen everything she knew at the inquest and that’s all there is. She doesn’t know anything else.’

  ‘If I could just speak to her for a minute—’

  ‘I’m sorry. She doesn’t know anything more.’ He turned to Rachel and spoke with a gentleness that surprised me. ‘Give me those.’ He held his hands out for Harry’s calling-gifts, ‘and go in the house now. I’ll speak to Mr Probert-Lloyd.’

  His wife turned to go, but Harry stepped forward, put out a hand. ‘But Rachel and I are old friends, aren’t we, Rachel? I’m sure she won’t mind—’

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Probert-Lloyd,’ Aaron Ellis kept his tone the right side of courtesy. ‘I know you were acquainted with my wife, years ago, but there can’t have been a friendship. Not between the squire’s son and an outdoor servant. Go on, Rachel, go in, now.’

  Harry was good at hiding his feelings, I understood that by now. Came from being a barrister, I suppose. But I was looking for a reaction to Aaron Ellis’s flat contradiction so I saw it. The little muscles around Harry’s eyes tightened, his jaw muscles bunched up under his short beard. He didn’t lose control like he had when he nearly hit Ezra Lloyd, but he was still angry at being defied.

  ‘Why?’ I asked for him. ‘Why don’t you want us speaking to your wife, Aaron Ellis?’

  Aaron pulled his lips over his teeth and swallowed, his Adam’s apple stretching his scrawny throat. ‘You see my house, John Davies?’ His finger pointed at the cottage his wife was making her way towards, his eyes never leaving mine. ‘I built that house with my own two hands. I rent this land fair and square. I put food on the table because I work hard…’

  ‘But you don’t own any of it,’ I finished for him. ‘It’s William Williams’s land and he could have you off it in a blink if he wanted.’

  Aaron said nothing, but the look on his face told me I’d got it right.

  Harry was there too. ‘He’s told you not to speak to me, hasn’t he? What’s Williams afraid of? The truth coming out, or Beca’s threats?’

  Aaron stuck out his chin. ‘I’m sorry Mr Probert-Lloyd but there’s nothing I can tell you.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Very well.’

  Aaron held out the parcels he’d taken from his wife. ‘You must take these, too. We haven’t earned them.’

  Harry shook his head. ‘Nobody was meant to earn them. They were a visiting-gift.’

  ‘You know every sip of that tea will stick in Aaron Ellis’s gullet?’

  Harry turned to me in surprise. ‘Why should it?’

  I turned my eyes back where they belonged – on the road between my horse’s ears. I couldn’t ride without thinking about it, not like Harry. ‘Because he knows he’s made his wife keep things from you. He’ll already feel less of a man for standing there and lying to you, without you leaving him decent grocer’s food.’

  ‘You think she did know something?’

  ‘I’d put money on it. If I had any. But I’d bet even more that Williams has told them to say nothing.’

  Harry looked away from me. I knew it was just so he could see me better but it looked as if he was staring at the mill, down on the meadow by the little stream. ‘You told me everybody knows Williams’s father-in-law is giving him money to keep the farm going?’

  ‘Yes. Common knowledge in town.’

  He chewed his lip a bit. ‘Well then, what if Esme’s father has told Williams that if he hears one more piece of scandal about him and a young woman that he’ll cut off his financia
l support?’

  A picture of Esme Williams’s father appeared in my mind’s eye. Thomas Owens. Didn’t look like a successful man. Thin as a vagrant, he was. And he had a beard that was almost white when most of the hair on his head was still dark. It was like looking at a skinny badger. But still, looks can be deceptive. He’d made a lot of money through shrewd investments. He might still be known as Owens the grocer but most of his money came from elsewhere, now.

  ‘Do you think he’d do that to his daughter?’ I asked. ‘Make her husband bankrupt?’

  Harry chewed the inside of his lip. ‘I don’t know. Maybe Esme’s sick of trying to be a lady when Williams isn’t up to the job of being a gentleman. Maybe she’d rather face a few weeks of being the talk of the town if she could go back to queening it in her father’s house. You’re too young to remember, but her mother died when Esme was a girl and she grew up as the lady of the house. I’m sure she thought marrying into land would raise her father’s social standing as well as her own but she miscalculated with Williams.’ He stopped, half-turned towards me. ‘Is Esme Williams using me?’

  ‘Using you?’

  His teeth pulled at his lip. ‘Yes. She says she wants to clear her husband’s name but what if what she really wants is to find out how far he’s implicated in all of this so she can use his involvement as a reason for going back to her father’s house?’

  I looked up at the cold, pointing fingers of the winter trees in the hedge. A little wind found its way in around my collar and made me shiver.

  At first glance, the idea was ridiculous. Women in Esme’s position didn’t just abandon their husbands. Too much to lose. But then, I wondered. Harry was right – Esme would know she’d be the subject of gossip either way, so she might well choose to be the wife who wouldn’t put up with her husband’s waywardness any more. Better than being the put-upon woman who’d been married for her money and been made a fool of by a lout dressed as a gentleman.

  ‘Do you think she knows he was involved,’ I asked, ‘and just wants to find out how far?’

  Harry shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But Williams wants me to stop, so, at the very least, there’s something he doesn’t want us to find out, isn’t there?’

  Harry

  That evening, after dining and making arrangements for the following morning, I fell into bed and quickly succumbed to a deep sleep. But it was not to last. I woke, suddenly and completely, to the vast silence that presses in upon the world in the small hours and knew that I had been dreaming about the last time I saw Margaret.

  After enduring Davy’s rendition of Nathaniel Howell’s sermon, I had realised that I had no choice but to go and see her. I knew from Davy that, fearful of being judged, she no longer attended chapel so I had decided to visit Waungilfach on Sunday morning, when Williams and his wife would be at church.

  I found Margaret Jones much changed.

  She saw the shock on my face as she turned from the butter churn at my greeting; I tried to hide it but I saw from her reaction that I had failed. Some women blossom when they are carrying a child and I suppose I had expected buxom Margaret to be one of them. But I could not have been more wrong. The young woman before me had shrunk and withered. Her eyes had lost their sparkle, her cheeks were pallid and thin. Even her arms, previously plump and strong from carrying buckets of milk, were thinner. It seemed to me that the child in her womb was sucking the life out of her.

  She crouched over her work, hiding her face from me. She said nothing and, standing there in the chill of the sunless dairy, I found myself at a complete loss as to how to proceed.

  Had I really expected that she would throw herself on my neck, weep with contrition and beg my forgiveness? I was appalled at my own self-delusion.

  I watched her shoulders heaving the churning-handle and tried to summon up some appropriate words for her. Contrary to the impression Davy had given me, Margaret clearly had no desire to see me; her back said that she wished only for me to be gone. And the cowardly part of me felt the same, it wanted nothing more than to flee, to ride back to Glanteifi and never see her again. But something, some glimmer of a nobler impulse kept me there, my eyes on what had become of her.

  As if my gaze were controlling her movements, the churning slowed; finally, it stopped.

  I moved so that I could see her in profile. The size of her swollen belly was a surprise even though I had been expecting it.

  ‘When will it be born?’ I despised myself for sounding so querulous. She must think I was afraid she might deliver her child there and then, on the damp flagstones.

  ‘Midsummer,’ she said not moving her gaze from the churn. She made to start turning the handle again but I put a hand on her arm.

  ‘No!’ She shrugged me off. ‘Don’t look at me.’

  ‘I only want to—’

  ‘Go away! I don’t want you to see me like this.’

  At her words, all the kind and conciliatory things I had wanted to say, the forgiving and gentlemanly tone I had practised, vanished, and the hurt and bewilderment that had collected inside me found voice. ‘Carrying another man’s child, you mean?’

  She did not turn around, but she spoke softly. ‘I wish it was yours. I wanted it to be yours. You know I did – you know I wanted you.’

  ‘Yes, so that you could have a cottage and a cow and a pig off me.’ She turned then, eyes wide, mouth open but I gave her no time to deny it. ‘That’s what you were after, wasn’t it? Right from the beginning? You thought that if you could have my bastard, I’d set you up in a little cottage and take care of you. You virtually said so – all I can ever be is your mistress, you said, so let’s make the best of it. Well, you were certainly hoping to make the best of it, weren’t you?’

  Her eyes on me, her face seemed to collapse in on itself and she dropped her head and wept.

  ‘Don’t think you’ll get round me like that, madam,’ I said. ‘Your tears are as false as your affection was.’

  She looked up at that, and, for the first time, her eyes held something of their old passion. ‘I never said a false word to you, Harry. Never.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It was you that came after me!’

  I remembered Davy’s words. That’s what they want you to think. ‘Was it?’ I asked. ‘Whether it was or not, you saw straight away that you could get something out of me.’

  ‘Do you blame me? I have no family. No prospects of a comfortable marriage—’

  ‘So you admit it? You played me for a fool?’

  ‘It was me that was the fool! I let myself believe you. I let myself fall in love with you. Even though I knew it would bring me nothing but pain—’

  ‘You fell out of love with me damn quickly! The very day I left for Oxford by the look of you!’

  As if I had threatened the child, her hands went to her belly.

  ‘You left without a word,’ she was sobbing now, and it would have been clear to a harder heart than mine that her tears were genuine. Snot flowed from her nose and spittle from her mouth as she flung words at me. ‘You left without telling me you were going or when you’d be back. You abandoned me!’

  I felt sick. What she said was true. I had been so wrapped up in my own wretchedness that it had not occurred to me to ask myself how she might be feeling. Had I really believed that she would simply go back to being Margaret the dairymaid when she had, briefly, been Margaret the beloved?

  Feebly, I tried to defend myself. ‘I couldn’t write to you, could I?’

  ‘You could have written to David Thomas! Could have asked him to bring me news. But no. Not a word.’

  She was right. I could have done as she said. I should have. But I had been so ashamed of being sent away in that summary fashion that I had said nothing to Davy. I had not even written to him from Oxford; not until Christmas when I had felt the need to tell him that I would not be coming home.

  ‘I waited and waited. I thought you’d be home at Christmas, that you’d come and s
ee me, but there was nothing. Not a word…’ Her sobbing seemed to consume her and I became concerned that she would collapse.

  Taking a bucket I upturned it and put it next to her. ‘Sit for a moment. Calm yourself.’

  She put her apron to her face and did as I bid her.

  ‘Didn’t Davy tell you that my father had forbidden me to come home at Christmas?’ I asked. ‘That he’d forbidden me to come home at all during my first year?’ She said nothing, her face still hidden in the striped wool of her apron. I remember thinking, with horrible triviality, how little the wool would absorb her tears and snot compared to the handkerchief in my pocket. I still regret, to this day, that I did not give it to her. It would have been such a small thing and the kindness might have induced her to confide in me.

  I squatted down on my haunches next to her. ‘Margaret, I want to help you. If you tell me who the father of your child is—’

  She shook her head and wept harder. ‘I can’t. I can’t tell you.’ So. Davy had been telling the truth.

  Everybody knew about you and her, you must know that. And everybody assumed you’d— When Margaret’s pregnancy started to show, everybody assumed it was my child. Howell clearly had. As had Davy. And Williams?