by Alis Hawkins
Until that moment I had believed that it was my mother’s Welsh blood, calling out along my veins and in my tongue, that had fed my affinity with the people who were Glanteifi’s tenants. But it seemed that the truth was a good deal less romantic, that I had been led by the nose to my own most cherished opinions.
I looked about me, now, as well as I was able, at the fields and woods and meadows that I had loved so dearly as a boy. Despite my early attachment to the place, an attachment I had considered unbreakable, I had returned to my father’s house infrequently in the years after Davy had left for America. I am sure my father attributed this estrangement to his handling of my association with Margaret Jones and I did not know how to disabuse him of that belief without telling him the truth – that I had no idea how I might find the peace of mind to live at Glanteifi after her disappearance.
John
Harry was waiting for me outside the main entrance to the Salutation. I saw him, sitting there on his little mare, as I came down Bridge Street.
Shit! Now he’d know I hadn’t been to Schofield’s. The solicitor’s office was in the other direction entirely.
‘Been for something to eat?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘I’ll just nip in and fetch Seren, then we can be off.’ I just hoped he hadn’t been up to the office to look for me.
Harry was quiet as we trotted out of town. I was glad, I couldn’t stop thinking about that picture of David Thomas. The man in Williams’s yard. The man in Sunday best who’d read Beca’s note. The man who’d strangled Margaret Jones with his bare hands.
Tell your uncle all right he’d said. But what had he meant?
In the light of what I’d witnessed, I’d assumed he must’ve meant all right I’ll do it, I’ll kill her if that’s what Beca wants. But was that what he’d meant? What if it meant all right, I’ll pass the message on? What if killing Margaret had nothing to do with Beca?
Mari Thomas and Harry could believe what they liked but it still seemed to me that if Margaret Jones had told Nathaniel Howell – or Lydia Howell, rather – that David was the father of her child, then he probably was. Had Margaret threatened to go to Elias Jenkins and tell him what kind of man David Thomas was? That would’ve been the end of his plans to marry well and have a farm to rival William Williams’s. That could be a motive.
But no. That couldn’t be right, could it? Elias Jenkins knew about David Thomas being the child’s father, anyway, because of the anonymous letter.
But then it came to me. When did he know?
When had the anonymous letter reached Elias Jenkins – before or after Margaret had disappeared?
There was only one way to find out. I took a deep breath and clutched the reins hard to stop my hands shaking.
‘That anonymous letter you asked Lydia Howell about,’ I said.
Harry moved his head in my direction. ‘What about it?’
‘Did it arrive before or after Margaret Jones went missing?’ I could feel myself placing one word after another, like a man on a circus tightrope does with his feet.
He was silent for a few moments. ‘A few days after. Why?’
I hesitated. ‘Because the threat of Elias Jenkins finding out about David Thomas being the father of Margaret’s child might’ve been a motive for murder.’
Harry pulled Sara up. The sound of rushing water suddenly made me want to piss very badly. We’d passed the workhouse and were riding up the hill towards the common land on the top. On our right-hand side the road dropped away into a steep-sided little valley, covered in stunted oak trees. I could hear the little stream at the bottom. The sound of it seemed to fill my bladder and I squirmed in the saddle, waiting for Harry to speak.
‘Who have you been talking to?’
I could’ve lied. I was a good liar, a practised one. But that wasn’t going to help. We had to have this out. ‘I went to see Mari Thomas. Just now.’
‘You went to see Mari?’He didn’t say Without me?but it was there in his voice.
‘I didn’t think she’d speak to you,’ I blurted.
‘Why not?’ his voice was flat, cold. ‘Why on earth would you think that Mari wouldn’t speak to me?’
‘I heard she blamed you for her son going to America,’ I said.
‘You heard?’I felt myself tighten with fear. I’d given myself away. It was Edward Philips who’d told me Mari blamed Harry for David emigrating. I wouldn’t have known anything if I hadn’t been to see him. ‘And who exactly did you hear it from?’
I made myself look at him. The knowledge that he couldn’t see me made me braver. ‘People kept mentioning David Thomas’s name, but all you’d say about him was that he couldn’t be the father of Margaret’s child,’ I said. ‘I thought I should make up my own mind.’
‘Who did you hear it from?’
The way he asked it seemed to pull the truth out of me. ‘A groom who used to work for your father. Edward Philips.’
‘Old Mr Philips?’ He sounded disbelieving. ‘He’s been retired for years – he lives in Cardigan with his niece – where did you bump into him?’
I took a deep breath. I was so far in now, there was no point stopping. ‘I didn’t bump into him. I went looking for him.’
‘How dare you? I’ve trusted you—’ He broke off, brought himself under control. ‘I’ve put my life in your hands,’ his voice was rough, as if he had something in his throat, ‘and this is how you repay me? How dare you go around behind my back asking about me—’
‘I wasn’t asking about you! I was trying to find out who and what David Thomas was.’
‘And what did you find out, may I ask?’
I hesitated, thinking how to put it. ‘That he had a grudge against you – or his mother did, at any rate. She blames you for everything that’s happened to her son. She’s convinced that you wanted to force him to marry Margaret because you wouldn’t marry her yourself.’
That stopped him in his tracks. ‘Mari thought I should be marrying Margaret? She thought I was the father of her child?’
‘Yes. According to her, as soon as your father sent you away to Oxford, David told her that you’d made Margaret pregnant.’
‘But she wasn’t even pregnant then!’ He stopped abruptly. It didn’t take a mindreader to see that he was asking himself whether that was true.
I remembered what the midwife’d said at the inquest. About when the baby was supposed to come. Margaret had disappeared at the beginning of May and her baby’d been due a week or two later. I worked backwards nine months from the middle of May, surreptitiously counting on my fingers so Harry wouldn’t notice. August.
‘When did you go off to Oxford?’ I asked. ‘The middle of September.’
So. She had been pregnant, then. When Harry’d been sent away to Oxford to stop his dalliance with Margaret, she’d already been carrying another man’s child. I was still trying to work out what that meant when Harry pulled Sara’s head round and kicked her into a canter back down the hill.
Seren turned to follow without any instructions from me. ‘Where are you going?’ I shouted.
He didn’t even turn in the saddle. ‘Go back to Mr Schofield’s. He’ll be expecting you, now.’
So he had been to Schofield’s to find me. My guts were like jelly. I felt like I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. ‘What about tonight?’ I called, kicking Seren after him.
He spurred Sara on, trying to outride me. ‘It’s me they want.’
True or not, I couldn’t use that as an excuse, keep out of harm’s way like a weanling hiding behind his mam’s skirts. I pulled up to let him go. ‘I’ll come anyway,’ I shouted after him.
If he heard me, he didn’t turn.
Harry
Even as I urged Sara into something that was recklessly near a gallop, I knew I was behaving like a petulant child. But I could not help myself. I felt compelled to put as much distance as I could between me and what John had said.
Later, I would appreciate the courage i
t had taken to admit that he had sought out Edward Philips and Mari Thomas but, at that moment, all I could feel was the need to be nowhere near him.
As I came into Newcastle Emlyn and pulled Sara into a walk, I strained my ears into the air behind me but could hear no hoofbeats. John had not followed on my heels.
Unable to bear the thought of riding down the main street, I skirted the top of town and rode on towards Cenarth. I had no clear aim in mind, I just did not wish to be seen or forced to speak to anybody. I was scarcely able to tolerate my own company and could not abide the thought of anybody else’s.
By the time the sun began to set, hunger had driven me back to the Salutation. The gnawing in my stomach had become more and more insistent, amplifying the bite of the cold air, magnifying my self-loathing. Though I had little hope that a hot meal would restore me, I gave Sara to one of the ostlers and went inside to ask whether there might be a private room where I could eat an early dinner. When my account with the hotel came to be settled, I would pay dearly for avoiding my fellow lodgers but that could not be helped. I did not have it in me, at that moment, to be civil.
Boiled mutton is not, I believe, generally recommended as a restorative but when combined with a bottle of claret, it made me feel a little more like myself. Sated, I sat back and stretched my legs towards the small grate.
Was I going to keep my rendezvous with Rebecca, as I had implied to John?
I had begun this investigation partly in order to establish to what extent, if at all, I was responsible for Margaret Jones’s death. If David Thomas had killed her – whatever his motive – I had my answer. David was a creature of my family’s making. He and I had been raised as brothers; I could not disavow an obligation to bring his crimes to light, if crimes there were.
I shivered, despite the heat of the little fire. What else might a meeting with Rebecca uncover that might better be left undisturbed?
At half past six, as I had arranged, one of the Salutation’s stableboys came to tell me that Sara was saddled and waiting and I went out into the chill of the yard.
A boy handed me the reins. ‘Has John Davies been for the other Glanteifi mare?’ I asked.
‘No, sir.’
So. He was not coming. At least now I knew.
I walked Sara quietly out onto the street, hoping that my own apprehensiveness would not communicate itself to her and make her skittish. As a lantern would not materially help me, I was relying on the little mare’s sight and my knowledge of the road to guide us. I was almost truly blind once night fell.
While Sara picked her way along the silent road, I kept nerves at bay by considering the ease with which we could have remained ignorant of Beca’s recruitment of Margaret. I might dislike John’s tendency to go behind my back but, had he not taken it upon himself to go and question Matthew Evans, Rebecca’s plan – and David Thomas’s role in it, whatever that might prove to have been – was unlikely ever to have come to light.
Given the speed with which John had received the summons to tonight’s meeting, Evans must have gone straight from their encounter at the church to his Rebecca confederates. Or had he simply ridden to confer with Isaac Morgan, alone? Lydia Howell had trusted Morgan as a moderating influence but he seemed, at best, to have had divided loyalties. Had he been the instigator of the plan Evans had unwittingly revealed?
Sara and I made our quiet way over the Ceri bridge, up the hill and past Glanteifi’s drive. I thought of my father sitting in his study and wondered whether things might be different between us in the future. Past the forge, down the steep hill to the looming white of Nathaniel Howell’s little chapel. Next to it, sluicegates to the mill-race closed, the cascade of the little stream was tumbling freely at the side of the silent wheel, the sound of falling water loud in the darkness.
I had not come this way since the day Margaret’s remains had been found, and I felt a chill of apprehension. Who was waiting for me at the bottom of the path that had taken us to her makeshift grave?
A great, white shape suddenly swooped through my side-sight and a blood-freezing cry turned my bowels to ice. I let out a quiet oath and took a firmer hold on reins I had almost dropped in an instant of sheer terror. A screech owl. Though I had used to love standing at the rickyard gate watching their pale forms hunting for voles in the twilit field behind the stableyard, once night fell, the owls seemed to take on a different, more sinister form. No wonder old folk regarded them as birds of death; darkness gives a morbid significance to everything.
I was just beginning to recover from the sudden shock when I had another.
‘Harry. I’m here.’
A low voice in front of me and to the right, beneath the hedge. John had come after all.
‘Have you walked?’ It was a stupid question but it seemed to break the ice between us as I heard a low laugh from John.
‘Yes. Nice to know I’ve still got the use of my legs after all this riding around like a gent.’
There would be time for more fence-mending later but, for now, it was enough.
‘Have you seen anybody?’ I asked.
‘No. Only been here a few minutes. If they’ve got any sense, they’ll be waiting for us further up.’
We were keeping our voices down but, now, I lowered mine even more. ‘Let’s hope Twm and the boys were here before them, then, or we’re done for.’
My plan to keep us safe involved the grooms and stableboys of Glanteifi, hidden – all being well – in the meadows to our left.
‘Come on then,’ John said. ‘Let’s go and see if they’re waiting for us.’
As we made our way along the path, I turned my head this way and that, willing perception into the imperfect edges of my vision. Who was there? Were there eyes in the darkness, watching?
‘Harry.’
I jumped at the sound of John’s voice. ‘What?’
‘There’s somebody on the path ahead.’
Try as I might, I could see nothing. ‘One man or more?’
‘Only one that I can see.’
‘Good.’
‘We’re not there yet.’ In a louder voice, he called, ‘Good evening!’
‘Good evening to you, John Davies,’ came a voice. ‘And to you, Henry Probert-Lloyd.’
Bring Henry Probert-Lloyd with you. Why had the letter gone to John and not to me? The question came with a nauseating surge of suspicion. No! I snuffed out the spark of nascent mistrust before it could start a holocaust in my mind. The letter had gone to John’s lodgings as it was easy to put a letter under a door, or hand it to a scullion who would not think to ask who was bringing it.
‘Good evening to you,’ I called back, answering the voice I had not recognised. ‘Who am I speaking to?’
There was no response but, with an abruptness that almost stopped the blood in my veins, figures suddenly crowded in from all directions and I felt hands on me.
I kicked out and reached into my greatcoat pocket for my father’s hunting horn. A single blast would bring the men of Glanteifi to our rescue.
But, as my hand drew the horn out, a voice called, ‘He’s got a pistol!’ and I was pulled from Sara’s back. My right hand still entangled in my coat and my left flailing in the air, I was powerless to prevent myself from being dragged to the ground.
As I fell, I heard a muffled shout from John, as if somebody had a hand partially over his mouth. Then there was a horrible crack and a cry of pain.
From the other side of Sara, I heard movement. Had John been knocked to the ground?
Some other hand now pulled the hunting horn from my pocket.
‘A horn. There’s help waiting somewhere.’ Another voice I did not recognise.
I was manhandled to my feet and held up by my lapels. ‘Shout to whoever’s out there that everything’s fine.’ His voice was harsh from fear or anger. And it came from above my head. He was taller than me by several inches. ‘Tell them you don’t need help.’
When I made no immediate response my captor shoo
k me. ‘Do it, or young Davies’ll get a kicking.’
‘All right, all right.’ I took a breath and turned my head in the direction of our would-be reinforcements. ‘Stay back,’ I shouted. ‘We’re fine.’
‘In the meadow, are they?’ I was turned, roughly, through ninety degrees. Only the hands restraining me kept me upright against the sudden violence of the action. ‘Again, then. Louder.’
I did as I was bid, cursing myself for not having foreseen this and agreed a code. The horn had seemed like such a simple solution; one blast and help would come.
‘Get him on his feet.’
There was a scrabbling which I took to be John being dragged upright.
Things took shape, then, with disconcerting swiftness. Sara was led off, and we were pushed into a circle of black-faced men. As far as I could make out, each man was wearing an apron and shawl. Clearly, they had not come here to talk about what happened to Margaret.
Abruptly, we were pushed to our knees. Water struck through my trousers and ran into my boots.
Eyes fixed on the ground, I detected movement that might be feet coming to stand directly in front of us.
‘John Davies and Henry Probert-Lloyd.’
Did I know that voice? It spoke again. ‘Brothers, why have we brought these men here?’
