Beggars and Choosers

by Catrin Collier

  ‘Considering I have none in college, one is more than enough.’

  ‘You will need more when the grey hairs and wrinkles start appearing,’ he joked.

  ‘By then you will be bald and toothless, so you won’t mind having a grey-haired, wrinkled wife.’

  ‘You’ll never be old.’ He drew his horse closer to hers and laid his leather-gloved hand over hers. ‘I looked around the house yesterday.’

  ‘What house?’ she asked in confusion.

  ‘Ynysangharad House.’

  ‘Mansel, you’ve lived there since you were six years old. If you don’t know it by now, you never will.’

  ‘Sometimes, you need to take a fresh look at your surroundings. Do you realise there’s a whole wing closed off with eight large rooms that are never used?’

  ‘I thought there’d be more.’

  ‘And they aren’t small. One would make a superb drawing room, another a dining room that could comfortably seat twelve. Upstairs, there’s a room large enough for a master bedroom with two dressing rooms attached. And three other full-sized bedrooms besides. One of which would make a cosy nursery,’ he added, with a significant look.

  ‘You’d like us to set up home in Ynysangharad House?’ she questioned, colouring at the mention of children.

  ‘Would you mind very much if we lived with Aunt Edyth?’ he asked seriously. ‘Not because I’m her heir and due to inherit Ynysangharad House, but because I can’t bear the thought of leaving her alone at her time of life.’

  ‘Have you asked Aunt Edyth if we can live with her?’

  ‘No. I thought I’d better ask you first, as you are soon to become my lady and mistress.’

  ‘You know I adore Aunt Edyth.’

  ‘There’s a difference between adoring an aunt and living with her.’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone I’d rather live with, apart from you.’ She smiled and then just as she’d hoped, he kissed her.

  ‘Goodbye, Mother.’ The three-week Christmas holiday, to which Sali had looked forward for the entire autumn term, had begun in a whirl of balls and parties, and passed in a flash with too few private moments between her and Mansel for her liking. She had difficulty believing that she was already saying goodbye to her family.

  Gwyneth raised her head from the pillows on her chaise longue and offered her cheek to her daughter. ‘I still don’t see why you have to return to college when you are marrying Mansel James in the summer.’

  ‘Because education is never wasted, Gwyneth,’ Harry said firmly. ‘Sali is only six months away from qualifying as a teacher and that will be an achievement for her to be proud of.’

  Gwyneth fell back on to the pillows. ‘You will write, Sali?’ she murmured.

  ‘Yes, Mother.’ Sali kissed Gwyneth’s pale cheek. ‘And I will be back at Easter.’

  ‘I hope that holiday won’t prove as exhausting as this one. All these parties ...’

  ‘If you rest now, Gwyneth, you might be up to dining downstairs this evening for once,’ Harry said irritably. ‘The carriage is waiting, Sali, and your boxes are loaded.’ He looked his daughter up and down. In her plain black walking suit, white blouse and boots, she looked a very different woman from the exotic creature in white lace who had graced the ball the night before Christmas Eve.

  Geraint, Gareth, Llinos and the servants were waiting at the foot of the stairs. Sali shook hands with the servants, hugged Mari, embraced her brothers and sister, and followed her father to the carriage.

  ‘A little extra in case you need it.’ Harry removed two five-pound notes from his wallet as the coachman set off up Taff Street.

  ‘It’s very good of you, Father, but I don’t need it.’

  ‘You might, keep it safe.’ He pressed it into her hand. ‘I want you to know the whole family are happy with your engagement to Mansel. Even your mother, although she doesn’t show it, and I think Edyth has been planning the match since the day you were born.’

  ‘I’m very lucky.’

  ‘Mansel is luckier. And I’ll be on hand to make sure that he’ll do everything he can to make you happy.’ The carriage drew to a halt in the station yard and Harry waited for the coachman to open the door and fold down the steps. ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘And you.’ Sali flung her arms around her father’s neck. ‘I’ll work hard to make you proud of me.’

  ‘I couldn’t be any prouder of you than I am now, darling.’ He kissed her. ‘Well, well, look who’s here.’ His dark eyes shone with mischief as Mansel charged up to the carriage window. ‘Aunt Edyth said you had business in Cardiff.’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘Then you’ll make sure that Sali changes trains safely without losing her luggage.’

  ‘I most certainly will, sir.’

  The coachman appeared with a porter. Sali’s trunk, hatbox and bags were loaded on to a trolley, and she, Mansel and her father were swept up with the crowds on to the platform. The train was in and a few minutes later she found herself leaning out of the window waving her handkerchief to her father who grew into a smaller, more solitary figure as the train drew out of the station.

  ‘This business in Cardiff?’ Sali asked. Mansel had bribed the guard to keep their carriage clear of other passengers.

  ‘Is very urgent.’ He sat next to her on the bench seat.

  ‘How urgent?’

  ‘Urgent enough to make me want to hold your hand all the way to Cardiff. But your father warned me that we have to part like cousins. We don’t want to make any of your fellow students on the Swansea platform suspicious.’

  ‘My fellow students won’t be, but it might be a little difficult with certain other people,’ Sali murmured, as the door to the corridor opened. ‘Harriet, how nice of you to join us.’

  ‘Yes, how nice.’ Mansel gritted his teeth and forced a smile.

  ‘The stupid guard told me that this carriage was reserved. It’s quite a coincidence seeing you both on the train. You going to Swansea as well, Mansel?’ Harriet took the seat opposite them.

  ‘Cardiff on business. I timed the train so I could help Sali with her luggage.’

  ‘How considerate. But then, if you are only going to Cardiff, what time train are you getting back?’

  ‘The ten o’clock.’ He beamed as her face fell. ‘I have a gentleman-only dinner in my club.’

  ‘I was hoping to have another chat with you about my Bible Circle.’

  ‘I am afraid it will have to wait until some other time, Miss Hopkins. I promised to help Miss Watkin Jones revise her knowledge of mathematics for her forthcoming examinations.’ He turned to Sali. ‘Now, what can you tell me about Pythagoras?’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Please, Mari, I need to know how Father died.’ Sali turned her dry-eyed, anguished face to the housekeeper. ‘All Aunt Edyth could tell me when she brought me home from college was that he had been killed in an accident in the pit. Mother bursts into tears or faints every time I go into her room. Geraint, Gareth and Llinos don’t know any more than I do and Uncle Morgan tells me to be quiet every time I try to ask him about it.’

  Afraid to look her young mistress in the eye lest her own grief surface yet again, Mari brushed an imaginary speck of dust from the back of one of the oak-framed, upholstered, dining chairs. ‘Mr James told Tomas it was down to one of the new compressed-air, disc coal-cutters the master had brought in.’ She dabbed a tear from her eye with a sodden black cotton handkerchief, before returning it to her skirt pocket. ‘Not that any of the miners are blaming your father, mind; there aren’t many pit owners concerned enough about the men to put in machines to lessen their load.’

  ‘Did the engine break down?’ Sali pressed.

  ‘Mr James said the engineer thought a bearing failed, sparking the engine and setting off a pocket of firedamp. A new seam cut only last week was destroyed in the explosion and nine miners, four of them firemen, were taken with the master. When Mr James called yesterday –’

  ‘Mr James
called?’ Sali broke in urgently.

  ‘Mr James and Mrs James have been to the house every day, along with most of the town.’

  ‘Then why haven’t we seen them?’ Sali questioned in bewilderment.

  ‘Your Uncle Morgan gave Tomas, Robert and the parlour maids, strict instructions not to admit anyone, only to take in visiting cards, condolence letters and flowers. They were told to say that the family were too upset to receive anyone.’ The housekeeper’s disapproval of Morgan Davies’s edict was evident from her pursed lips.

  ‘But you saw Mr James.’

  ‘You know Mr James. He could see that Tomas was in a state, so he went around to the kitchen door to ask if there was anything he could do to help. He said he had a letter for you, but your uncle walked in on us before he could give it to me. I told Mr Davies that Mr James had called because Mrs James had offered to lend us her cook for the funeral tea but –’

  ‘Uncle Morgan has taken a lot upon himself,’ Sali interrupted bitterly.

  ‘I thought you knew about his orders, Miss Sali.’

  Sali shook her head. She should have realised that the absence of callers was down to her uncle. He had taken on the mantle of master of her father’s house before she and her brothers had even reached home.

  ‘Mr James spoke to the rescue party that went down after the explosion, not that there was anyone left for them to rescue.’ Mari sniffed back her tears and straightened the chair in front of her. ‘From the state of the drift, he said the end would have been too quick for any of them to have suffered. Your father, God bless him,’ Mari pulled her handkerchief from her pocket again and clamped it over her reddened nose, ‘wouldn’t have known what hit him any more than the others. And that is why none of the coffins were left open.’

  Sali closed her eyes against an image of her father’s long, lean body blown apart. His clean-cut, classical features scorched beyond recognition. ‘Has anything been done for the men’s families?’

  ‘Not that I’ve heard, Miss Sali.’ As Mari wiped her eyes again she wondered when the young miss was going to shed a tear for the father she had so loved and adored. ‘But your uncle ordered a fire to be lit in the library this morning. Mr Richards will be staying to read the will after the funeral tea so I expect something will be done for the families then.’

  Sali opened her eyes and stared blankly at the under-house parlour maid, who was smoothing creases from a damask cloth she had unfolded over the massive oak table. Turning her back, she walked restlessly to the window and looked right, up Taff Street in the direction of Penuel Chapel. Snow lay over the road and pavements, a thick strip of virginal white where it met the buildings, liquefying to a dirty grey slush, pockmarked with the glossy black imprints of footsteps on the pavements. A criss-cross of narrow lines on the road gleamed dark and icy where cart and carriage wheels had cut through the snow and an old woman draped in shawls slipped, only just regaining her balance as she reached the safety of the pavement.

  Masculine voices raised in song, echoed faintly and sonorously through the closed window and Sali tried not to envisage the scene being played out in the burial ground behind the chapel; her father’s oak coffin being slowly lowered beneath the frozen ground into the family grave alongside that of her grandfather. It wasn’t fair; he should have had so many more years ...

  ‘It’s not right, Miss Sali,’ Mari observed, as if she had read her thoughts. ‘A good man like your father who always put himself out for others, going before his time when there’s those ...’ a momentary hesitation told Sali exactly who Mari meant, ‘who wouldn’t lift a finger to help a soul in need. Living nasty, selfish lives ... Polish that spoon,’ she ordered the under-house parlour maid brusquely, spotting tarnish on the bowl of a silver soup spoon the girl had set out on the cloth.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Williams.’ The maid bobbed a curtsy before scurrying off to the butler’s pantry.

  Mari cast a critical eye over the napkins the maids had folded into fleur-de-lis. ‘Perhaps cockscombs would have been more appropriate for a funeral, after all,’ she murmured, more to herself than Sali.

  ‘I doubt the mourners will notice how the napkins are folded, Mari.’ Sali looked up at the heavy pewter sky as flakes fluttered downwards filling the air. ‘It’s snowing again.’ She turned from the window and surveyed the long table set for twenty. ‘Are the tables laid in the preparation kitchen?’

  ‘Don’t you worry, Miss Sali, I’ve seen to it that there’s plenty of warming cawl, ham sandwiches, Welsh cakes and tea for your father’s tenants and the miners. They’ll need it in this weather.’

  ‘You have rum for the tea?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t go telling your Uncle Morgan that,’ Mari warned. ‘You know his views on strong drink.’

  Sali did, but then she reflected, she knew Morgan Davies’s disapproving views on everything that could be regarded as mildly pleasurable. As her father had often remarked, ‘A benevolent God would never frown on a man who allowed himself a few harmless indulgences after a hard day’s work, only warped and twisted ministers who misinterpreted his Gospels.’ And although her father had never actually said that he counted his wife’s brother as one of God’s misinterpreting, warped and twisted ministers, the inference had been obvious to her.

  ‘Have you made up Mother’s tray?’

  ‘It will be ready before we begin serving here.’ Mari puckered her lips again. ‘Although I’m not the only one who thinks she should receive the mourners, if only for ten minutes. No one will expect her to sit at the table or even come downstairs, but she could at least thank the bearers.’

  ‘You know Mother.’

  ‘It’s the poor young masters I feel sorriest for.’ Mari set a silver salver in the centre of the cloth. ‘Having to bury their father at their age. And with Mr Davies the only man left in the family for them to turn to, God only knows how they’ll come to terms with such a loss, or for that matter, how any of us will. Your father was the kindest master, the fairest employer, the most generous ...’ As Mari’s voice wavered, Sali turned back to the window.

  Snow was falling thickly and silently now, coating the gleaming strips of black ice on the road and the grey slush on the pavements. After a full week of living behind closed drapes, Sali found even the leaden winter afternoon light startlingly bright. But now that her father’s coffin had left the house, the drapes would be opened every day and the second stage of mourning would begin. Her Uncle Morgan couldn’t shut her into the house, or the town out for ever. Condolence visits would be made. And given her mother’s insistence on abdicating all responsibility, she and her brother would have to receive the callers. There were some people she longed to see and others, like the chapel deacons, who subscribed to her uncle’s view that tragedies were ‘God’s will’, to whom she and Geraint would find it difficult to be civil.

  A solitary, black-coated figure appeared through the misty swirls of white flakes; seconds later a tide of men swelled into sight, filling Taff Street from side to side as they tramped through the thickening snowstorm. When they drew closer, Sali saw a mass of tenants and miners dressed in their Sunday suits and flat caps, following at a respectful distance. As the top-hatted crache made resolutely for the house, the workers headed for the opposite side of the street, where they halted. Doffing their caps, they clutched them to their chests and stood bareheaded, silent, waiting deferentially. Sali knew none of them would venture around the side of the house to the kitchens until the last of the mourners had walked through the front door.

  ‘They are coming,’ she warned, as Mr Richards, her father’s solicitor, opened the gate.

  ‘Tell the cook she can pour the brown soup for the dining room and the cawl for the men into the tureens as soon as she’s ready,’ Mari ordered the maid, who had returned with the newly polished, offending spoon.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Williams.’

  ‘Ready, Miss Sali?’ Mari looked apprehensively at her.

  ‘Yes.’ Sali lifted her chin and held h
er head high as she left the dining room and crossed the hall where the footman, Robert, and two parlour maids were standing, waiting to attend to the mourners’ overcoats and hats. Nodding to Robert, she opened the door to the drawing room where the ladies had congregated to mourn while their men attended the chapel and grave side services.

  ‘Sali.’ Edyth James beckoned her over to a high-backed sofa. When Sali drew closer she saw that the old lady was holding Llinos’s hand under cover of their black crêpe skirts. ‘How are you bearing up, child?’ Edyth asked, making room for Sali to sit the other side of her.

  ‘I won’t be sorry when this day is over, Aunt Edyth,’ Sali confessed guardedly, lowering her voice lest the wives of Pontypridd’s crache overhear her. She sank in a crackle of stiff crêpe on to the sofa.

  ‘Harry was a fine man who understood Christ’s concept of charity. He will be sorely missed in the town, and not only by his tenants and miners.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sali wondered why she found it so easy to accept her aunt’s references to religion when she felt either angered or embarrassed by her Uncle Morgan’s constant biblical allusions.

  ‘Sherry, Mrs James, Miss Sali? Lemonade for you, Miss Llinos.’ Tomos held out a tray.

  ‘Thank you, Tomos.’ Sali took two sherries and handed her aunt a glass.

  The butler lowered his head close to hers. ‘Masters Geraint and Gareth have just walked through the door, Miss Sali.’

  ‘All right Tomos.’

  ‘Llinos is fine with me, aren’t you, dear?’ Edyth handed Llinos her own bordered handkerchief to blot her tears. ‘You see to the others, Sali.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Sali took a glass of sherry from the tray for her brother Geraint and headed for the hall.

  ‘Thank you, Mair.’ Geraint divested himself of his hat and coat and handed them to the maid who had been ordered to look after the family’s outdoor clothes. ‘And thank you, Sali.’ He looked her in the eye and took the sherry she handed him.

  ‘How was it?’ Sali reached out and briefly grasped her younger brother Gareth’s hand as he walked past them to join their aunt and Llinos on the sofa.