None So Blind

by Alis Hawkins

  ‘Who are you?’ she peered at me, one hand gripped on to the doorjamb. ‘Do I know you?’

  I had to stop myself staring. I’d never seen a living person so thin, right to the flesh of her face which had shrunk back onto the bones. I swallowed. ‘My name’s John Davies. I’m a solicitor’s clerk.’ I stopped. If she went to the shops or the market, she’d have heard about Harry’s investigation. But perhaps her illness kept her to herself because she just stood there, waiting for me to explain what I was doing on her doorstep.

  ‘I’m working for Mr Henry Probert-Lloyd,’ I said.

  ‘Well, you can go from here now, then,’ she stepped back to close the door on me. ‘I’ve got nothing to say to Harry Gwyn or any friend of his.’

  I put a hand on the door. ‘I’m no friend of his, Mrs Thomas. That’s why I’m here.’ The lie – and calling him Henry not Harry, as if he was nothing to me – made me feel ashamed, disloyal. But it was the only way to get into her house. I put my hand into my pocket and took out the quarter of tea I’d been back to my lodgings for. ‘I brought some tea for you. Can we drink a cup together?’

  She narrowed her eyes at me as if she was trying to bring my motives into focus. ‘What do you want, John Davies?’ I got a whiff of her breath as she spoke. It was so foul I had to stop myself taking a step backwards.

  ‘Just a little chat. That’s all.’

  Inside, the house was small but well-furnished. You could tell money’d been spent on it. There was a proper siment floor, not beaten earth like I’d expected, and the room was divided in two unequal halves by a good-sized dresser – table and chairs on the larger side, bed and press on the smaller. The table was decent – polished not scrubbed – and it had proper chairs tucked under it. No stools or benches for Mari Thomas. The rocking chair by the fire had cushions and there was a bit of a carpet in front of it. Not bad for a woman who’d never married and who’d been living on a pension for six or seven years.

  ‘Sit down.’ Mari Thomas nodded at one of the chairs by the table. ‘I’ll make the tea.’

  She shuffled over to a narrow door at the back of the room. A little pantry, north-facing and cool. Any minute now, she’d open another door and I’d see a water closet.

  Mari brought a jug and put it on the table. Living where she did, she wouldn’t have to go into town for her milk – one of the Newcastle Emlyn milk sellers’d be bound to pass by her door every morning.

  I looked around for her teapot. It was on the hearth, waiting for the tea. I’d been half expecting something fancy, but the pot was a serviceable blue-and-white just like we’d had at home. Perhaps she had a fancy one for best in the small cupboard under the window.

  I wouldn’t get best, that was for certain. Not somebody who worked with Harry Gwyn.

  She made the tea, stirred it and poured. Then, after she’d given me my cup, she lowered her bones painfully into the rocking chair and glared at me.

  ‘Well?’

  Edward Philips hadn’t exaggerated Mari Thomas’s sourness. Caustic as lye he’d called her and I didn’t want that lye taking my skin off. I was going to have to go carefully.

  ‘I expect you heard about the inquest that happened in town, a couple of weeks ago?’

  ‘You can see I’m not deaf, can’t you? Of course I heard about it.’

  ‘So you’ll know the verdict caused a bit of a stir.’

  Mari pulled a face which poured scorn on the whole inquest – jury and coroner and all. Or, then again, perhaps it was me she was pouring scorn onto.

  ‘Henry Probert-Lloyd didn’t like the verdict,’ I said, watching her.

  She sipped some cooled tea from her saucer. That wasn’t a habit she’d learned at Glanteifi.

  ‘So he’s looking into the whole thing,’ I pressed on. ‘He persuaded my employer – Mr Schofield – to loan him my services.’

  She was watching me over the saucer, wary as a yard cat.

  ‘Well,’ I let myself sound just a bit aggrieved, ‘I don’t like being loaned out like some gwas bach. I wanted to know why Henry Probert-Lloyd was so interested in some servant girl’s death. But he won’t tell me – I’m just a servant, he’s not going to tell me anything, is he? But I keep my ear to the ground.’ I gave her a look – we servants can be sly when we have to, can’t we? ‘I heard there was something between him and the dead girl – Margaret Jones.’

  She carried on staring at me. My mouth had gone dry, and it wasn’t from talking.

  ‘Well…’ I took a sip of my own tea. ‘I thought you’d know the truth. You brought him up, didn’t you? And, from what I’ve heard, his closest friend was your son, Davy.’

  She put her cup on the empty saucer, eyes on it the whole time as if she didn’t trust her hand to get it there safely. ‘Yes. I do know the truth. And you won’t get it from Harry Gwyn.’

  I leaned forward. The very picture of eagerness, I was. ‘So was he involved with her? With Margaret Jones?’

  Mari grunted as she put her cup on the floor. She was in pain and trying to hide it. ‘That girl was always going to come to a bad end.’

  I raised my eyebrows. Tell me more.

  ‘No good, she was. Very free with her favours.’

  Rich, I thought, coming from a woman who’d warmed the bed of her employer’s son and given birth to another man’s bastard.

  ‘Set her sights on Henry Probert-Lloyd,’ she sneered, ‘and he was too silly to know what she was about. Got her with child, he did, and then panicked and—’

  Her mouth shut with a snap. And what?

  ‘That’s what I wanted to ask you, really,’ I said, treading carefully. ‘Henry says we need to find out who the father of Margaret Jones’s child was – says that’s who must’ve killed her. That makes me think he wasn’t the child’s father—’

  ‘He can say what he likes. He was the father. My son told me. Came home one day full of it. Harry Gwyn’s done it now, he said. He’s got a girl with child and his father’s packing him off to Oxford early. And he was right. The boy was gone the following morning. Davy said not to tell anybody that was the reason. Harry’d told him, of course, but his father didn’t want the servants to know.’

  She couldn’t help herself. She didn’t really want to talk to me but she wanted me to know that she knew these things. Wanted me to understand that the reason she had privileged information, as Mr Schofield would’ve called it, was because her son had been like a brother to Glanteifi’s heir.

  ‘So there’s no question? Henry was definitely the father?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  I nodded as if that was an end to it. ‘Is there another cup in the pot?’ I asked.

  She shuffled to the hearth and bent to pour me a cup.

  This time it actually tasted like tea. She’d put so little in the pot that the first cup had tasted like watered milk. I couldn’t see the point in her scrimping. From the look of her she’d be lucky to last longer than the quarter of tea I’d brought.

  As I sipped away, I made sure she saw me looking around the cottage. ‘George Probert-Lloyd must have been very grateful to you,’ I said.

  ‘So he should be. Without me he wouldn’t have a living son. I reared that boy from hours old. They all thought he’d die without his mother, but I reared him.’

  From the way she said it, you’d’ve thought she’d stood at the side of Harry’s cradle and fought off death’s scythe with her bare hands.

  ‘I see. No wonder the squire sees you so well provided for.’

  ‘This?’ her eyes went round the room. ‘This isn’t George Probert-Lloyd’s doing. My son, this is, sending me money from America.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘So he’s doing well there, then?’

  ‘Yes, no thanks to anybody here.’

  ‘Why’s that? I thought Henry gave him the money for his ticket.’ It was what Edward Philips believed and I had no reason to question it.

  Her death’s-head snapped up. ‘What? Is that what he told you – that he p
aid for Davy’s ticket?’ I couldn’t get my mouth open to answer her before she was blackening Harry’s name. ‘Henry Probert- Lloyd’s a liar! I didn’t bring him up to lie but his father sent him off to that fancy school and when he came back he was a different boy. He wasn’t ours any more. But that’s what his father wanted, of course, to make him one of them, one of the crachach.’

  ‘To be fair to Henry,’ I said, hoping for more about Harry’s supposed dishonesty, ‘it wasn’t him who said he’d paid for David’s ticket. It was an old servant from Glanteifi.’

  She sneered. ‘That’s as maybe but he lied about plenty of other things. And the worst kind of lies – ones that got other people into trouble so that he wouldn’t be blamed.’

  The trick had worked once, so I defended Harry some more. ‘Like I said, I’m no friend of Henry Probert-Lloyd’s but I haven’t heard him—’

  She didn’t want to hear it. Her rage against Harry was boiling over like a too-full kettle. ‘You’ve been talking about his biggest lie already – that girl’s child!’

  ‘Margaret Jones?’

  ‘Yes! He tried to persuade my boy to marry her, to make himself feel better. Well, Davy was looking for a better marriage than that – he’d been brought up as a gentleman, he wasn’t going to marry a dairymaid who was no better than she should be!’

  ‘No. Of course. Henry’d promised him he’d be steward to Glanteifi, hadn’t he?’

  ‘And that’s the other thing!’ Mari was beside herself now. Her sunken face was alive with malice. ‘When Davy wouldn’t let Henry father his bastard on him, he told Davy could forget being steward. Said their friendship was at an end.’

  I arranged my face into an expression which was supposed to tell her I was shocked but not entirely surprised. ‘That must’ve been a terrible blow – to lose the prospect of being steward.’

  She held up a bony, listen-to-me finger. ‘No. And I’ll tell you why. Because my David didn’t need the Probert-Lloyds to give him a place in the world. He was courting a girl whose father was looking to take another farm on so they’d have enough land for them all. They’d have been married, for sure, if it wasn’t for Henry and his lies. Do you know what he did? No, of course you don’t, who’d tell you? He wrote a letter to the girl’s father, telling him that David had fathered Margaret Jones’s bastard and that he was refusing to do the right thing and marry her. Well, of course, a tenant would believe Henry Probert-Lloyd wouldn’t he? Whatever Davy said only made things worse. So the engagement was off.’

  ‘Is that why your son decided to go and try his luck in America?’ Her eyes were fixed on mine. I could almost feel her hatred for Harry being transferred to me. ‘Luck?It wasn’t luck that made him his fortune. Davy’s got a good business head on his shoulders. That’s why he’s made his fortune in New York. Nothing to do with luck.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I stammered, ‘I didn’t mean – it’s just a turn of phrase, isn’t it? I didn’t mean that he didn’t know what he was doing.’ She stared at me. I could feel her contempt for my nervous babbling but I wasn’t sure whether she really believed in it. ‘He’s obviously doing very well,’ I let my words tumble eagerly over each other, every inch the boy trying to make amends. ‘What line is he in?’

  She unbent a notch. ‘He owns a livery stable. But that’s not all. He’s started buying and selling commodities.’ She used the English word which made me wonder whether she knew what it meant. Did she think ‘commodities’ was a specific type of goods? I wondered what David Thomas was trading in. And how legal it was.

  ‘He must be quite the successful man of business these days then.’

  ‘He is. You can see if you like.’ Without waiting for an answer, she forced herself out of her rocking chair and pulled a drawer from the dresser.

  ‘It’s one of those new image-maker pictures,’ she said, as she unfolded the letter. ‘It’s not painted – this is what the box did. This is my Davy.’

  With great pride, she handed over the first photographic portrait I’d ever seen. It was a seated picture of a dark-haired man in a high-buttoned coat, a dark necktie around his white collar. He had a neat beard and moustache and deep-set eyes.

  The beard and moustache were new but the eyes I had last seen looking at me in Waungilfach’s yard.

  Tell your uncle all right.

  Harry

  As I rode slowly into Newcastle Emlyn after enduring a solitary lunch (Isabel Griffiths having refused to countenance my eating in the servants’ hall) my thoughts were drawn back, inexorably, to my suspicions. I could not reconcile myself to the thought that Davy might be a murderer. Everything in me protested that he could not have done such a thing; and yet… Unwelcome recollections of our last encounter were a bitter reminder that I had not known him nearly so well as I had always believed. In my mind’s eye, I saw him standing over me, shouting.

  ‘What gives you the right to ruin my life, Henry Probert-Lloyd?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I lurched up from the ground where his fist had put me.

  ‘You stopping me from marrying Elizabeth and taking over Jenkins’s tenancy! You’re still holding on to that childish idea of yours about me being steward – you think if you can stop me marrying Elizabeth I’ll have no choice!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve always wanted to be in charge of me. Read this, write that, learn the other. Be my steward. Marry Margaret Jones.’

  His words pulled me up short. ‘What?When have I ever told you to marry Margaret?’

  ‘In that bloody letter you wrote to Elias Jenkins! Telling him to go to the Treforgan elders and get them to force me to marry her because I’d made her pregnant!’

  Perhaps it was the effect of his fist but I could make no sense of what he was saying. ‘I didn’t write any letter to Elias Jenkins!’

  ‘Don’t lie to me!Who else would write it? Who else would believe that I was the father of her bastard?’

  ‘Why should I believe that? She never said you were.’

  ‘Of course she did! And you believed her, didn’t you? You believe anything that lying little hussy says.’

  I stared at him, striving for a calm I did not remotely feel. ‘She isn’t a lying hussy, Davy. And she didn’t tell me that you were the father of her child.’

  He chose to hear only part of what I had said. ‘Not a lying hussy? You don’t know her like I do. But then you couldn’t, could you? She’s just a servant, isn’t she?’

  He was on the floor before the pain registered in my knuckles. He put a hand to the ground to push himself up, but I forced him back down with a boot on his shoulder.

  ‘You take that back, David Thomas! You know she was never just a servant to me! I was in love with her.’

  He took hold of my boot and wrenched it aside, throwing me off balance.

  ‘You weren’t in love with her! If you had been, you’d’ve fucked her like a man. But you were too prim to put your cock in her, weren’t you? Didn’t want to dirty yourself. Wanted to save yourself for a lady.’

  I leaped at him, pushed him backwards with both hands. ‘I was saving myself for my wife. I wanted to marry Margaret.’

  He threw back his head and laughed without mirth. ‘Marry her?’

  I thrust my face at him, breath seething through my teeth. ‘Why not? I was in love with her, she was in love with me—’

  ‘Margaret Jones was never in love with you.’

  He spoke the words with such assurance that they stripped me to the bone. Davy must have seen the confusion in my face for he carried on, his expression set as if he was doing something distasteful but necessary.

  ‘Margaret Jones was in the same case as me – neither one of us was in a position to say no to you. You think I wanted to trail round after you all the time when I was a boy? You think I wouldn’t’ve preferred to be with the other lads out here?’ he motioned at the outbuildings and stables behind us.

  ‘My mother was always pushing me to be with you. Stick
to him like glue, she used to say, or we’ll be put out of our place. Be his friend, or we’ll have no home to go to.’

  ‘That’s not true! My father would never have put you out of Glanteifi!’

  ‘He tried to get my mother and me out of the nursery when you were weaned – brought in some English nursery maid!’

  I could not deny that, it was part of Glanteifi lore – how I had cried and cried for Mari and would not be consoled until she was reinstated in the nursery. ‘But you weren’t sent away – Mari was just given other duties.’

  ‘And had to farm me out!’

  We stared at each other, he choking with resentment at a childhood full of obnoxious obligation, I struggling to reconcile his words with my memories.

  ‘After we were brought back, she said to me We’re never leaving here again – you are going to be his friend from now on. His only friend. You’re going to be like a brother to him. And that’s what she did, Harry Gwyn, she made you into a little brother for me. You should have heard her going on about it – Look at the little gentleman going around speaking Welsh. His father won’t like that, will he? And she made you mind your manners with all the servants in the house and the yard – made you be polite to them, say please and thank you and excuse me to them as if they were crachach like you. She used to laugh at the way you spoke to the maids and the grooms. She’d made you into one of us!’