None So Blind

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We know now, for certain, that there were two opposing Beca groups dealing with girls in trouble. Howell’s and the one made up of men he’d kicked out. And we know that Beca must be involved in Margaret’s death somehow. Beca didn’t want the inquest. She doesn’t want us investigating.’

  I nodded. ‘True.’

  ‘What if Margaret Jones was killed for some other reason? Nothing to do with the baby?’

  ‘What sort of reason?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But I think we should speak to one of the men who discovered Lydia was a woman and ask.’

  ‘Why should they tell us anything? Nobody’s been prepared to give us the time of day so far, why should they suddenly start giving us information that could see them prosecuted?’

  ‘Because, in return for their information, we guarantee that they won’t be prosecuted.’

  ‘We can’t do that. How will we know we’re not offering immunity to the murderer himself?’

  John was silent. Obviously, he had failed to think of that.

  Part 5: Unravelling

  John

  All the long way back home from Ipswich, I kept hearing the words I’d heard in the Alltddu. Kept hearing the killer’s voice. Kept seeing him bending over her, knee in her back.

  ‘This is your fault, Margaret – you’ve brought this on yourself… All you had to do was one thing. One simple thing. You said you’d do it. You said you had done it. But you were lying, weren’t you? Lying!’

  I was sure those words held the reason for Margaret Jones’s death. But I couldn’t tell Harry. Not without admitting that I’d been there.

  It was clear to me that Margaret Jones had been involved in some kind of Beca plan. That she’d been given something to do and had failed to do it. Worse, that she’d lied and said she had done it. Beca was no lover of liars.

  Beca had ordered her death, and that’s why the inquest jury had been told not to find for murder. The Lady wanted no more questions to be asked.

  But what had the plan been? And how had Margaret Jones been involved?

  I thought I knew how I could find out. But, first, I had someone to talk to.

  ‘Daniel!’

  Daniel James looked around at me as he came out of his employer’s office door. ‘Oh, it’s you.’

  Harry and I had come in with the mail early that morning. He’d ridden straight out to Glanteifi and a confrontation with his father and I’d gone to my lodgings for a couple of hours’ kip before coming to lie in wait for Daniel.

  Jervis and Evans were more modern than Mr Schofield – they shut up shop at midday on a Saturday.

  Daniel set off down the street as if he hoped I’d go away. No chance. I fell into step with him. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

  ‘Too right you will. And something to eat. You owe me. It wasn’t easy getting that name you wanted. Not easy at all.’

  By two o’clock I had the name of a retired groom and an address to go with it. Trouble was, the address was in Rhydyfuwch, just outside Cardigan, a good three hours’ walk away. I could do it and be back in time for my landlady’s curfew at nine but it would be a stretch. Or I could do what Harry’d do and hire a horse. Not a cheap option, especially when I was already out of pocket after feeding Daniel James.

  In the end, it came down to this: I’d spent the last four days travelling in style and I didn’t fancy going back to tramping the countryside. I decided that, while I worked for Harry Probert-Lloyd, I was going to play the part. Even if I was still riding about in my clerk’s clothes.

  By that time, I’d got the hang of controlling a horse and I quite enjoyed the ride to Rhydyfuwch. Not that my arse wasn’t sore when I got there, mind, but it was less sore than my feet would’ve been.

  I dismounted outside a little row of cottages and knocked on the first one. A youngish woman opened the door.

  ‘Good afternoon. I’m looking for Edward Philips. Does he live here?’

  The look on her face told me she didn’t generally get callers with a horse. She didn’t know whether to be flustered or afraid. ‘Yes, he’s inside.’

  ‘I need a few words with him, if he can spare the time.’

  ‘You can have your words and welcome, but I’ll warn you – his mind’s not what it was. Can’t be relied on to remember so much as to take the kettle off the fire and make tea when it’s boiling.’

  I went cold. I’d just spent all the money I had until Mr Schofield paid me again and this woman was telling me that the man I’d come to see wasn’t all there. ‘What about his life at Glanteifi,’ I asked, ‘does he remember that?’

  ‘Oh yes. Can’t get him to shut up about that.’

  I reached into the small pocket of my waistcoat and pulled out the penny I’d put there earlier. ‘Is there somebody who can make sure my horse doesn’t wander?’

  The old man and I took a short walk to Cardigan common. ‘You can’t have a private conversation in this house,’ Edward Philips had said. ‘Too many children.’

  I could’ve wished for somewhere more comfortable. On the common there was no cover against the sly little wind that got between your buttons and I was already cold from the ride over. If I was going to make a habit of riding, I needed a topcoat and riding breeches, not to mention long boots.

  Edward Philips settled himself on an old tree stump as if it was a regular sitting place for him. I stood with my hands in my pockets. I wasn’t going to sit on the ground and get a wet arse.

  ‘Did my niece tell you I was going soft in the head?’

  I didn’t want to start off on a sour note. ‘Well… not really. She just said your memory wasn’t what it used to be.’

  His grin was full of gaps. ‘That’ll do.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘It’s like this, boy. She’s a nice enough woman and she’s more than happy to have my pension coming into the house but she’s always after me to do things around the place – make the tea, mind the children, kill the pig. Well, I’ve had enough of work, haven’t I? I want a rest before they put me in the ground. So I let her believe my memory’s going – that I can’t be trusted – and then I’m free to do what I like.’

  Cunning old bastard. I told him about Harry’s investigation.

  ‘Duw, yes. I remember when the girl went. Talk of the parish.’

  I decided to take a risk. ‘I’ll be honest with you, Mr Philips. Harry Probert-Lloyd doesn’t know I’m here.’

  His eye was almost as beady as Mr Schofield’s. ‘What is it you want to know, boy?’

  Two could be blunt. ‘I want to know who David Thomas is.’

  His eyebrows shot up. ‘David Thomas! There’s a name I haven’t heard in a month of Sundays!’

  The small wind swirling around the common pushed cold air down the back of my neck. I looked down towards the town but couldn’t see it clearly. It was a dull day and I wondered if the wetness in the air was hanging on to the smoke from everybody’s fires. A tiny version of the London Particular. I hunched further down into my jacket. ‘So who is he?’ I asked. ‘Does he work at Glanteifi?’

  Edward Philips narrowed his eyes at me. ‘If you’re working with young Mr Harry, why don’t you ask him who David Thomas is?’

  ‘Because every time the name’s mentioned, he changes the subject. He doesn’t want to talk about him.’

  ‘So you’re asking me to tell you what Mr Harry wants to keep to himself?’

  I looked him in the eye. ‘Yes.’

  The old man gave a bark of laughter. ‘Damn me, you’re a cheeky one, aren’t you?’

  I risked a worried-feeling grin. ‘The truth is, Mr Philips, I think we should be talking to this David Thomas. If Harry’s protecting him, I want to know why.’

  ‘He’s not protecting him.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because David Thomas isn’t here to speak to, boy. He left for America seven years ago.’

  ‘You’re young,’ Edward Ph
ilips began when he’d relented and agreed to tell me what I wanted to know, ‘so perhaps you don’t know but Harry Probert-Lloyd never knew his mother – she died in childbirth.’ I nodded. Mr Schofield had told me that much. Philips pulled his scarf up around the back of his neck. There was an edge to the wind, now, that felt like rain coming.

  ‘Well, by rights, Henry should have died with her. Came before his time, see. There was no wet nurse waiting, so there was a panic, then, to find a girl who could feed him.’ He sniffed and ran his palm up his nose to wipe a drip. ‘Well, it happened that a maid had just been turned out of the house for having a child. Had it there, in the servants’ attic, she did, and nobody’d’ve been any the wiser if the child hadn’t cried the second he was born. I daresay she was going to do away with the baby and get on with her work as usual. Well, she couldn’t, then, could she, not once he’d been seen? So, out she went. But then, when Harry came, they fetched her back, took her on as the wet nurse.’

  I stared at him. A disgraced maid brought back to wet nurse the squire’s heir? ‘There must have been a proper wet nurse available, surely?’

  The old man looked at me. ‘Maybe, maybe not. But there was more to it, you see, with this girl.’

  ‘What sort of more?’

  Edward Philips coughed and spat, as if he was clearing his wind for a long story. ‘You know Probert-Lloyd the magistrate was married before?’ He took a pipe out of his pocket and knocked it on the heel of his boot. I should have brought him some tobacco. ‘Well,’ he said, eyes on the pipe, ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd had a son with his first wife. George, he was called.’

  George the father of Margaret…

  Philips hesitated. ‘Like I said, you’re young, you won’t have heard all the scandal about young George but he was—’ the old man stopped, like a dog that’d reached the end of its chain. ‘Put it like this, he had an eye for the ladies.’

  ‘An eye?’ I asked, shifting my cold toes in my boots, ‘Or some other part of him?’

  He gave me his gap-toothed grin again. ‘Quite right, boy! Well, one of the girls he’d taken a fancy to was this girl who’d just had the baby. Mari her name was.’

  I frowned as I sifted through the implications of what he’d just said. Edward Philips knew what I was thinking.

  ‘No, George wasn’t the father of Mari’s child. He’d been dead two or three years by the time she was thrown out. Plenty of time for other men to take an interest since he’d been gone. But… Probert-Lloyd the magistrate knew that George had taken her virginity. He might’ve had her sent home when she had the child but she made sure we all knew she wasn’t being sent away without money. Ruin money, it was. Guilt money.’

  ‘So,’ I felt my way, ‘Mr Probert-Lloyd fetched this Mari back to wet nurse Harry because he felt the family owed her something – because George had seduced her?’

  The old man pushed his bottom lip out. ‘That’s what she told people, at any rate. Then again, p’raps she was the only wet nurse they could find at a minute’s notice. But she always said that making her Harry’s nurse was the least Mr Probert-Lloyd could do.’ Philips looked me in the eye. ‘She was fond of telling anybody who’d listen that young George had promised her marriage before he’d gone and broken his neck.’

  He spat very accurately at the damp brown stalk of a dock. ‘Easy to say when the boy was dead and gone, wasn’t it? Lies it was, though. Young George wouldn’t’ve promised marriage to a housemaid any more than he’d have promised it to one of his dogs.’ He looked into his cold pipe again. ‘Not that he mightn’t’ve said things to lead her on – always had a flattering tongue on him, George Probert did.’ He sniffed again and put the pipe away. ‘But she couldn’t say he’d forced her – everybody in the place knew she’d set her cap at him.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What was in it for her?’

  ‘Being the favourite. Being the only maid in his bed. He was a good-looking boy, George Probert was. All the maids had an eye for him but the rest were cowed by the housekeeper. If they so much as looked at the men in the family they’d feel the lash of her tongue – and probably more than that, too. Known to be free with a nasty little cane she kept in her sitting room, the old housekeeper was.’ His eyes looked past me and I knew he was looking into that time before Harry was born. He could probably see that better than he could see me, if the milkiness of his eyes was anything to go by.

  ‘Of course, she went when Mari was brought in as nursemaid – the old housekeeper I’m talking about. Made the mistake of going to Mr Probert-Lloyd and saying she couldn’t be in charge of the household when Mari was defying her and mocking her at every turn. Thought he’d send Mari packing. But it was her that went, in the end.

  ‘Don’t look at me with your mouth open like a dead fish, boy! It’s the truth – not six months after Harry was born, the old housekeeper was gone and Isabel Griffiths had arrived. Still there, she is.’

  I shook my head. Perhaps the old man was going soft, after all. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘Mari would have it that he’d given her his word – Mr Justice Probert-Lloyd. And, fair play, I don’t know that it wasn’t the truth. She said he’d promised her that if she could rear young Harry to his first birthday, she’d have a place for life at Glanteifi. For her and her son.’

  ‘Her son?’ Momentarily, I had forgotten her illegitimate child.

  Then light dawned ‘So that would be—’

  ‘David. Yes. David Thomas was Mari’s boy.’

  The way Edward Philips told the story, Mari and David became Harry’s family. She’d insisted on having her son with her in the nursery while Mr Probert-Lloyd rattled around the rest of the house by himself, in the cold.

  ‘The squire was still mourning his poor wife, see,’ the old man said. ‘Hadn’t been married a year when she died, they hadn’t, and he was so sick with grief that he didn’t see what Mari was doing. By the time he gathered his wits and took notice of his son, the boy was walking and talking. And he was talking in Welsh, not in English. As far as Harry was concerned Mari was his mother and Davy – they always called him Davy – was his brother.

  ‘And Mari encouraged that. She never made any distinction between the two of them. She made all their clothes so she could dress them just the same. She used to bring them out into the stableyard for Harry’s riding lessons and she’d say, ‘look at them – if you didn’t know better, you’d think Davy was the gentleman, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And would you?’ I interrupted.

  Edward Thomas gave me a sharp look. ‘You might’ve, as it happens. Mari’s boy was tall for his age, and strong. She never said who his father was but there’d been a sailor about the place at one time, wanting harvest work. Well, you know how it is when the weather’s right and the barley’s got to come in – everybody’s out there, even the housemaids if they know how to tie a stook. I always thought Davy had a look of that sailor – tall and dark. Had a tongue on him, too, the sailor did – knew how to talk his way round things – and Davy was just the same.’

  ‘What about Harry?’ I asked. I had to bring him back from his reminiscences before I lost him.

  ‘Oh, quiet little scrap, he was. If Davy was the stableyard cat, Harry was the mouse. Mind, he was the sweetest-natured child you’ll ever meet, Harry. Mari called him Harry Gwyn – we all did – and he loved that, never took it as disrespect. I am Harry Gwyn, he’d say to any visitors we had in the yard. And he’d give a little bow, as if the people were gentry, like him.’

  ‘So he was always in the stableyard with you?’

  ‘Often as not. He loved it – helping us with the tack and rubbing the horses down and even shovelling shit and straw. Never once said “I’m not doing that.” The other one did, mind.’

  ‘David Thomas?’

  ‘Yes. To be fair, that was when they were older. When they were little, they were tight as peas in a pod.’ His eyes glazed. He was back there again. I wished he’d get to the point, if there was one. I was stiff with cold and my
teeth were clenched together to stop them chattering. It was all right for the old man, he had a scarf and a coat he’d got from somewhere. An old soldier, from the look of it.

  ‘Mis-matched peas, mind,’ he went on. ‘Harry was a sunny child, always smiling. But the other one—’ He broke off, coughed up a sigh. ‘Davy Thomas was a watcher. He’d watch young Harry, as if he was trying to catch the trick of being a gentleman.’

  I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘Did he manage it?’

  ‘No. Couldn’t, could he? Has to be in the blood.’

  I wasn’t sure Harry’d agree but I nodded anyway. ‘What did Davy do when Harry went away to school? Was that when he started working in the stables?’

  Edward Philips rolled his eyes. ‘No. Young Davy got an education. Harry wanted him to go away to school with him, said he wasn’t going unless Davy went as well. We got all this from Mari,’ he added, ‘always preened herself like a she-cat on heat, she did, when Harry stuck up for Davy. Never stopped telling us all that Harry looked on him like a brother.’