Beggars and Choosers

by Catrin Collier

  Rhian didn’t opened her hand until she reached Taff Street, then she saw that Mrs Hughes had given her three shillings.

  Bless me, child, what are you doing here at this hour with the baby?’ Mari glanced anxiously around the yard of Danygraig House before opening the back door wider. ‘Quick.’ She took one of Rhian’s bundles and ushered her into the passage that linked the pantries with the preparation kitchens. ‘Down here.’ She led the way to the butler’s pantry and knocked on the door. ‘It’s me, Tomas, let us in.’

  ‘Good God!’ Tomas opened the door and stepped back when he saw Rhian and the baby.

  ‘I can’t allow her in the kitchen, you know how Mr Morgan prowls round every inch of the house as soon as he gets up.’ Mari dropped the bundle she was carrying inside the door and took the child from Rhian. ‘Sit down, girl, you must be worn out after carrying those through town. Has Sali sent you here?’

  ‘Sali couldn’t send me anywhere.’ Fighting tears and sheer weariness, Rhian proceeded to tell them about the traumatic events of the night. They listened in an attentive tight-lipped silence that Sali would have recognised as the beginning of slow anger, but it unnerved Rhian. ‘I know I shouldn’t have come here,’ she apologised. ‘But I didn’t know where else to go with the baby and he’s not well, you only have to look at him to see that. If it was just me I’d try to get a place somewhere, but I couldn’t leave the baby. My brother hates him and without Sali and Iestyn ...’ She finally shed tears for the simple-minded brother she had loved.

  ‘It’s right you came here.’ Mari glanced at the clock. ‘Tomas and I have to go, but you’ll be safe here and I’ll bring you food and milk for the baby as soon as I can. The beautiful little lamb.’ Mari dropped a kiss on the top of his head. ‘Considering what he’s been through, he’s ever so good.’

  ‘He’s wonderful. But where am I to go?’

  ‘You leave that to me. I have to see to the breakfasts but I’ll be back.’

  ‘Why don’t you and the baby curl up in my bed?’ Tomas offered. ‘You both look as though you could do with some sleep.’

  ‘I have to change him first.’

  ‘There’s clean water in the jug on the washstand. Everything else is where you’d expect to find it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Rhian took the boy from Mari.

  Tomas reached for the bottle he kept hidden under his mattress and poured her a small glass of sherry. ‘Drink this.’

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ Mari warned. ‘Mr Morgan has never come down here but that’s not to say that he won’t take it into his head to do so.’

  ‘We’ll lock you in. Don’t answer to anyone, no matter what they say. We have the only key to the room. So long as you remain quiet, no one will know that you are here.’ Tomas patted her arm, stroked the child, checked his tie was straight and followed Mari into the corridor.

  ‘If Morgan Davies sees her or that child in this house, we’ll both be on the streets,’ he cautioned as they scurried towards the kitchens.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Have you any idea where they can go?’

  ‘My sister is housekeeper to a big house in the Rhondda. Her master’s a bit of a soft touch.’

  ‘Unlike ours,’ he commented dryly.

  ‘Ours is in his grave,’ she countered sharply. ‘And my sister could probably use another kitchen maid.’

  ‘The girl’s not trained. She has no character.’

  ‘The girl’s been keeping house for Owen Bull since she was eight years old. She’s trained and I’ll give her character enough for my sister.’

  ‘And the boy?’

  Mari pursed her lips. ‘There are always women willing to look after a child for a few shillings a week.’

  ‘What kind of women?’ he enquired warily.

  ‘Hopefully, good-hearted ones,’ she replied unconvincingly.

  ‘While Mr Morgan eats his breakfast, send the stable boy to the station yard. If a cab comes into the back yard from Crossbrook Street at ten past eight Mr Morgan won’t see it. The cab can take her ...’

  ‘Not to the station, she’ll be seen. And if Owen Bull is released this morning he’ll be looking for them.’

  ‘Not at Trehafod station he won’t.’

  ‘And who is going to pay for a cab to take her and the child to Trehafod and their train tickets to the Rhondda? And she’ll need more if your sister can’t find a place for her, or a woman to look after the child. It’s not often I disagree with you, Mrs Williams,’ he lowered his voice as they approached the kitchens, ‘but I think we should send her and the child to Mrs James.’

  ‘Mr Bull knows Mr Mansel is the father of Miss Sali’s baby and that Mrs James is fond of Miss Sali. It’s the first place he’ll look for them.’

  ‘Let him look.’

  ‘The girl is his under-age sister. He is the legal father of that baby. If he wanted them back, the law would be on his side. And once they are under his roof, who knows what he’ll do to them?’ Red-faced with suppressed anger at the thought of Sali’s injuries; Mari heaved for breath. ‘I have some money in my box.’ She wished she hadn’t put quite so much of her savings in the bank. The last time she had looked she had only two pounds and no one would look after a child for less than five shillings a week.

  ‘I have five pounds.’ Tomas held up his hand as if to ward off Mari’s thanks. ‘Let’s just hope that your sister can find the girl a job and knows someone who can care for the child. If she can’t, we’ll all be in trouble.’

  As Sali awoke to a painful consciousness she sensed she was in a strange place. She could hear the soft squeak of rubber-soled shoes moving over hard floors. The distant rattle of enamelware banging and the clink of cutlery and china provided a musical accompaniment to whispers delivered in the muted tones of a sick room. She struggled to open her eyelids. They felt heavy and gritty as if sand were trapped beneath them. She attempted to focus, looked and looked again, wondering if she were dreaming.

  Her Aunt Edyth was sitting in a chair next to her bed, thinner and older than she remembered.

  ‘How are you feeling, darling?’ Edyth reached out and took her hand.

  Before Sali could answer, a nurse appeared. Taking her wrist, she lifted it and checked her pulse rate against the watch pinned to the top corner of her apron.

  Edyth tried to smile. Sali didn’t attempt to because her face felt as though it were on fire. She remembered a doctor telling her that he was going to send her to the Graig Infirmary. She remembered waking afterwards, but she had lost count of the number of times and she could recall being given injections whenever she opened her eyes, numbing, sleep-inducing injections that deadened the sharp throbbing in her head.

  ‘My son ...’ Her voice was hoarse, rusty from disuse.

  ‘Is well, happy and being looked after, Sali,’ Aunt Edyth murmured.

  ‘Owen ...’

  ‘He is not with Owen and neither is Rhian.’

  ‘Iestyn ... he tried to help me ...’

  ‘Iestyn fell down the stairs and broke his neck, Sali. He is dead.’ Edyth said the words as gently as she knew how, but she could not cushion their devastating effect. The nurse nodded to someone standing behind her. A second nurse stepped into view carrying an enamel tray that held a glass phial and a syringe. The first nurse helped her aunt from the chair as the second turned back her bedclothes.

  ‘I have to leave now, Sali, but I will be back to see you soon.’ Edyth dropped a kiss that didn’t quite reach Sali’s bruised forehead, picked up her cane and tottered unsteadily from the room.

  ‘The man deserves to be horsewhipped,’ Edyth declared to the doctor when he joined her in the corridor.

  ‘I don’t disagree with you, Mrs James, but his punishment is for the police and the law to decide.’ He opened the door for her and offered her his arm.

  ‘I can’t understand how they could let him walk free from the police station the morning after he did this to my niece.’

  ‘Without any
witnesses or evidence ...’

  ‘Evidence!’ Putting her full weight on his arm, she turned and shook her stick in the direction of the ward. ‘Isn’t that evidence enough?’

  ‘Mr Bull said his wife tripped, fell and hit her face on the range,’ he reminded her.

  ‘As well as the back of her head?’ Edyth enquired sceptically. ‘And his brother fell downstairs? Isn’t that rather too much falling in one house in one night?’

  ‘Put yourself in the position of the police, Mrs James,’ he remonstrated. ‘The only witness was his sister who has vanished. Mrs Bull was too ill to give a statement –’

  ‘And the police will not interfere between a man and his wife,’ she broke in acidly, quoting the sergeant she had summoned to visit her.

  ‘I’ll grant you Mrs Bull looks dreadful now, but she will make a full recovery.’

  ‘And the scars?’

  ‘Will fade in time.’

  ‘I can see her next week?’

  ‘Visiting is every Sunday, two until three o’clock.’ The doctor escorted her to the front door of the infirmary where her carriage was waiting. ‘Goodbye, Mrs James, and don’t worry about your niece. We will take good care of her.’ The doctor handed her over to Jenkins who opened the door of the carriage. The butler settled her on one of the seats, spread a travelling rug over her legs, closed the door and joined the coachman on the box.

  Edyth stared blindly through the window, as they passed through the gates set in the high walls that surrounded the workhouse, infirmary and fever hospital complex. They reached the bottom of High Street and drove under the railway bridge into Tumble Square. She rapped her cane on the roof in Taff Street and shouted, ‘Drive home via Mill Street, Catherine Street, Gelliwastad Road and Bridge Street, and drive slowly in Mill Street.’

  ‘Yes, Mrs James,’ came the coachman’s muffled reply.

  Edyth removed a lavender-scented handkerchief from her handbag and held it over her nose and mouth as she studied the dilapidated terrace that backed on to the river. The heat of August had abated, the evenings were growing shorter, and people were taking their coats out of mothballs to prepare for the winter, but the stench of sewage, rot and decay was still overwhelming. She saw the sign over Owen Bull’s shop and imagined Sali and her child living within those mouldering walls, breathing in the foul air day after day.

  ‘No more!’ she promised herself fervently. No matter what the police said, or what ‘rights’ Owen Bull claimed as Sali’s husband, there was no way that she was going to allow her niece, or Mansel’s son to return to that slum to live in those foul conditions with a man she regarded as a murderer, even if the police didn’t. Not while she still drew breath.

  ‘He was banging the front door and shouting, Mr Jenkins. He wouldn’t listen to anything we tried to tell him, so I sent for the police. Did I do right?’ Robert, the footman who had once worked for Harry Watkin Jones, looked apprehensively at the elderly butler who was busy opening the door of the carriage and folding down the iron steps.

  ‘You did right, Robert,’ Jenkins replied gravely. He helped Edyth alight from the carriage and they watched two burly policemen and Sergeant Davies bundle Owen Bull from the porch of Ynysangharad House into the back of a Black Maria.

  ‘I came for my sister!’ Owen Bull shouted, struggling to free himself.

  ‘Your sister isn’t here, Mr Bull,’ Edyth said calmly.

  ‘The child.’

  ‘The child isn’t here either, Mr Bull.’

  Her cool assertions only served to infuriate Owen all the more. ‘They are my family, and they should be living with me ...’ He kicked out, losing his temper as the sergeant closed and fastened the back doors of the van in his face.

  ‘We’ll charge him with disorderly behaviour and breaching the peace, Mrs James.’ The sergeant signalled to the driver to move off. ‘The magistrates will most probably sentence him to be bound over to be of good behaviour. Then, if he comes back here or tries to bother you again, we can re-arrest him and he’ll lose his bond or be sent to prison. I think it’s safe to say that a man of previously good character like Owen Bull won’t risk that, or forfeiting his bond, which should be set at quite a considerable sum. I doubt you’ll be seeing him again.’

  ‘I sincerely hope so, Sergeant Davies.’ She laid a hand on his arm to delay him. ‘I have just come from visiting Mrs Bull in the infirmary.’

  The sergeant ran his finger inside his collar as if he were suddenly too warm. ‘How is Mrs Bull?’

  ‘As well as anyone can be two weeks after she has been beaten half to death.’

  ‘We’ve no proof that she was beaten, Mrs James,’ he retorted defensively. ‘Her husband says she fell.’

  ‘Forgive my cynicism, Sergeant,’ she interrupted, ‘but how many other people have you known to cut and bruise every inch of their face, as well as fracture the crown of their skull and burn the hair from the back of their head from a single fall? My niece is also right-handed. Don’t you think it more likely that she would have dislocated her right, not left arm, if she were trying to save herself from a fall?’

  He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. ‘That is not for me to say, Mrs James. And we’ve no evidence that contradicts Mr Bull’s side of the story.’

  ‘So when you charge him with breaching the peace, you couldn’t also charge him with assault?’

  ‘Not on his own wife, Mrs James.’ The sergeant evinced a sudden interest in the geraniums that filled the flowerbeds either side of the front door. ‘In my experience, wives will never give evidence in open court against their husbands.’

  ‘And if I guarantee that Mrs Bull will?’

  ‘Mr Bull could plead provocation or any number of things in his defence. There are bound to be things that have happened in private between Mr and Mrs Bull that Mrs Bull wouldn’t want aired in public court. You do know that the Pontypridd Observer sends representatives to the courts?’

  ‘I read the local paper, Sergeant.’

  ‘In my book, whatever goes on between husband and wife behind closed doors shouldn’t become the subject of gossip.’ He gave her a tight smile.

  ‘I think everyone in Pontypridd is aware of what went on behind Mr Bull’s doors two weeks ago, Sergeant.’ She nodded to the coachman who dismounted and led the horses around the house to the stables at the back.

  ‘Let’s say for argument’s sake that the court does find Mr Bull guilty of assaulting Mrs Bull, not that they will because there’s no evidence,’ the sergeant amended hastily, ‘Mr Bull wouldn’t get a long sentence, not for a domestic altercation. A few months, a year at the most and he’d be free again. And then where would Mrs Bull be? I dare say homeless and penniless without a man to run Mr Bull’s business.’

  ‘Mrs Bull would be safe with me.’

  ‘Every minute of every day?’ The sergeant lifted his eyebrows.

  ‘Are you saying that Owen Bull is free to murder his wife when she leaves hospital, Sergeant?’ she enquired with a detachment that belied her rage.

  ‘Not murder, Mrs James. If he does that, we’ll arrest him.’

  ‘And apologise to Mrs Bull at her funeral?’ Edyth didn’t wait for the sergeant to answer. She leaned on her cane and hobbled in through her front door.

  Sali washed her face and patted it gently dry with a towel marked ‘Property of Pontypridd Union’. She felt weak, faint and her left arm, newly freed from the restricting bandages that had been wound in place to help her torn muscles and tendons heal, ached dreadfully, but she was elated. She had been allowed to walk unaided from her cubicle to the bathroom, and after four weeks spent in bed and another week of being escorted to the bathroom by a nurse, the independence felt wonderful. Soon, very soon, she would be reunited with her son.

  She set the towel aside and studied her face in the blotched mirror above the washbasin. It didn’t even look like hers. Misshapen and swollen over her left cheekbone, it was pockmarked by scabs and discoloured by bruises that had
lightened during the past six weeks from black, through purple to a dark then lighter yellow which lent the impression she was suffering from jaundice.

  She lifted her right hand and felt her head. The paralysing, nauseous headaches of the past few weeks had lessened until they were just about tolerable. Her hair was half an inch long, soft, silky and, to her amazement, curly. She had been upset when the sister had said that they’d had to shave her head in order to stitch three deep wounds on her scalp. But she had also told her that it had been just as well, as the hair on the back of her head had burned away when she had fallen against the stove.

  She pulled out a tiny curl and watched it spring back into a corkscrew. Mari had described her hair as ‘poker straight’ when she had been a child, and said it was a sin that Geraint should have curls and she none, because boys didn’t need them. But then it had been Mari’s job to wind her hair in rags every night so it could be curled into ringlets the following day. She wondered if it would remain curly, then reflected it didn’t matter how her hair, or indeed she looked any longer because with Mansel gone there was no one left to notice, let alone admire her.

  She left the bathroom and walked slowly down the corridor. Nurses were moving swiftly between the twin lines of beds in the general ward, straightening bedclothes, removing cups from lockers and stacking them on a trolley. The staff nurse looked up from the duty desk where she was making entries in a ledger, set aside her pen and went to her. ‘Are you all right, Mrs Bull?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  ‘It is good to see you up and about, Mrs Bull.’ The nurse walked alongside her as she returned to her room.

  ‘It feels good,’ Sali tried a smile. Whether it was her imagination or not, it seemed to hurt less than it had done the day before.

  ‘Is Mrs James visiting you today?’

  ‘She promised she would.’

  ‘We’ll miss her fruit baskets, fresh eggs and cakes, when you are discharged next week.’

  ‘Knowing my aunt she’ll keep sending them.’ Sali sat on the bed. ‘Do I have to get into bed for visiting? My aunt said she might bring ... a friend and I’d like both of them to think that I’m better.’