In Two Minds

by Alis Hawkins

  I tried to frame the next question as delicately as I could. ‘Benjamin Matthias indicated that there had been rumours about the child’s death – that her father had, perhaps, ended her suffering himself?’

  ‘What?’ Williams sounded genuinely outraged. ‘Who’s saying that? Who would suggest such a thing?’

  ‘No names were mentioned,’ I said. ‘Matthias just presented that as the reason for his coming to us. People were aware that Abel wanted to emigrate and there’d been speculation that he feared that the child’s illness would keep the family here.’

  ‘It’s quite ridiculous,’ Williams insisted. ‘I cannot believe that anybody who knew David Abel would suggest such a thing. Quite apart from the monstrosity of the allegation, look at its timing if you want to see the fallacy of it. The emigrant ship isn’t scheduled to sail until April. Why on earth would he–’ He seemed unwilling even to repeat the allegation. ‘Why would there be any need to do such a terrible thing now?’

  ‘I’m afraid you put your finger on the problem yourself, Reverend,’ I said. ‘Because he wanted the money that would otherwise go on medicine for Lizzie in order to buy an emigration bond.’

  With the mares happily grazing further up the road, John and I made our way down the hill to David Abel’s workshop. We’d learned from the Reverend Williams that Abel was a cabinet maker and I wondered whether, just as his child’s grave had been hastily dug, he had made the coffin himself for speed’s sake.

  We were met at the workshop’s door by an aproned apprentice.

  ‘I’m sorry, sirs,’ he said, with a glance over his shoulder, ‘the master can’t see anybody at the moment – he’s veneering. Got to work quickly, you see, before the glue sets.’

  I longed to share a raised eyebrow with John at this outlandishly plausible excuse. ‘How long will he be?’ I asked instead, pitching my voice loud enough for the man inside to hear.

  ‘If you come back in an hour,’ the response came from within, ‘I’ll be able to speak to you.’

  With an hour to wait, there seemed little to do but find some refreshment. John spotted an inn’s sign further down the street and, soon, we were sitting in the White Hart before a huge fireplace where a small cauldron hung on a chain over the embers.

  At my suggestion John went to sniff its contents and, given his enthusiastic verdict, I procured us a bowl each.

  ‘I hope David Abel’s not halfway to Pembroke by now,’ I said, dipping the wooden spoon I’d been given into the broth.

  ‘Not unless he and his apprentice are the best liars in the world,’ John replied, taking me seriously. ‘I think it’s exactly what he said, there are some jobs you can’t break off in the middle. Like killing a pig.’

  We ate for a while but the silence between us was not entirely companionable and I felt compelled to break it with something more than a makeweight remark.

  ‘I’ve decided that I’m still going to stand as coroner,’ I told him. ‘I’ve had all the time I need to think while I’ve been sitting at my father’s bedside and I know that I can’t go face sitting on the bench.’

  ‘Why not? You’d be a damn sight better than most magistrates. At least you know how people live. The kind of people who find themselves in court, I mean.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m afraid that’d make it worse. I can’t change the law and, if the other magistrates saw me bending over backwards to be lenient, they’d be more severe in their own cases to make a point. I might be able to do some good for the people whose cases I heard but I’d just make it worse for everybody else.’

  John made no audible response.

  ‘Whereas, if I’m coroner,’ I went on, ‘I can make sure that what’s happened to Teff Harris doesn’t happen to other men. I can keep a watch on Billy Go-About and his officers, make sure that they’re not just arresting the first person who comes to hand. Or that they’re not writing off bodies that get fished out of the sea as victims of accidental drowning – like Bellis wanted to with Hughes.’ I took another spoonful of stew. ‘What do you think?’ I asked.

  Wooden spoon scraped wooden bowl with a solid sound as John finished the last of his meal. ‘I think you’d be an excellent coroner. But the question is do the electors want somebody who’ll be thorough, like that, or would they prefer somebody who’s going to cost them less?’

  I knew what he meant: the more painstaking an investigation, the greater the costs incurred. And the householders who paid county rates were the ones who elected the coroner. Justice for the dead was a noble aspiration, but could it compete with lower rates?

  David Abel proved to be a small, wiry man. What remained of his hair was iron-grey but even I could see that most of his head was bare pate.

  He seemed neither surprised nor unduly alarmed by our visit.

  ‘You’ll be here because Maggie didn’t register Lizzie’s death properly,’ he said when I had introduced myself and John and expressed our condolences.

  I nodded. ‘If you wouldn’t mind explaining the circumstances of your daughter’s death and burial.’

  Abel waved us to a settle at the side of the workshop while he sank on to a stool as if he had the joints of a man twenty years younger. The workshop smelled strongly of bone glue but, beneath that, there were the pleasanter smells of seasoned wood and linseed oil.

  ‘You have to understand, sirs – all this has meant that my poor wife is not quite herself. Lizzie was ill for months and months.’ His voice stopped abruptly as if his throat had closed up.

  Months and months of watching your only child sink towards death. What could be worse? What could be more calculated to make a mother no longer herself? I imagined that having a steel bar rip its way through her head would have been infinitely preferable to Maggie Abel.

  ‘At the beginning it didn’t seem too bad. Lizzie complained of being a bit dizzy and she had headaches where she’d never had them before. Children don’t, do they, as a rule? But then she started with the fits. Maggie was worried she’d burn herself falling into the fire or she’d set light to the house if she fell over with a candle in her hand. There are any number of ways a child can hurt themselves when they fall into the kind of fit Lizzie was having. That was when we first went to see Dr Reckitt over in Cilgerran.’

  I did not need to ask why he had chosen Reckitt. Being unfashionable, Reckitt’s fees would be modest.

  ‘Did he know what was wrong with your daughter?’ I asked.

  ‘Not at the beginning, no. He said he needed to watch how things went on for a while but he made up laudanum for us to give her if the headaches got bad. We were glad of that. There’s nothing worse than seeing your child in pain.’

  Nothing? Not even the notion that he might end his daughter’s suffering by his own hand? I shifted uncomfortably on the settle and tried to breathe in through my mouth against the animal stink of the wood glue.

  ‘Over the weeks, as she got worse, she needed more and more laudanum. We noticed that she had less of the fits when she took it, so we didn’t deny it to her. Then she started to go blind.’ His voice cracked. ‘Couldn’t walk far without falling over. It was then Dr Reckitt said about a growth inside her head. Said it would grow and kill her and there was nothing he could do about it.’

  Abel’s voice broke again. I drew breath to speak but it seemed that the cabinet maker had only wished to master himself, for he went on. ‘All we could do was give her laudanum for the pain. And for the fear. It’s frightening for a child to feel her body fail her, sirs. Very frightening. And the laudanum took the fear away.’

  This time, neither John nor I were eager to break the silence. We heard Abel’s apprentice moving around in the room next door and I wondered whether he lived in. If so, it might be worth speaking to him, too.

  ‘That must have become expensive,’ I said, eventually, regretting immediately how crass and materialistic the words sounded when ranged against the suffering of his child.

  ‘Dr Reckitt was very good to us,’ Abel said. ‘He
made up the laudanum himself – it was cheaper than going to the chemist in town. But, by the time Lizzie went blind, Maggie was taking laudanum, as well, to help her sleep. Otherwise she was up all night, beside herself with grief about what was happening. And praying.’ His tone was bitter. ‘For all the good that did.’

  ‘I gather,’ I began, ‘that you were planning to emigrate – with the Cardigan-Ohio Emigration Company?’

  ‘Yes. Before Lizzie fell ill it was a chance to give her a different life. After…’ He sighed. ‘After she died, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay here. I tried that before and every day – every day – I saw my poor dead wife in my house, in the chapel, even here. I knew I couldn’t do it a second time. I knew we had to get away else I’d be as bad as Maggie. Or worse.’

  John Philipps Williams had been wrong. Abel hadn’t been looking for a new life in America. He had simply been trying to escape the grief of his old one.

  ‘Are you still planning to go to Ohio, Mr Abel? Do you have an emigration bond?’

  ‘I do. But it was–’ Again, he stopped abruptly but not, this time, I felt, because of his grief. He began again.

  ‘I’d met Mr Jenkyn Hughes before Lizzie fell ill. He approached me about making some furniture for him to take back to America and we got talking. I’d been thinking of America for a long time and Maggie was agreeable. Before Lizzie was ill, anyway. We had some savings so I thought buying the bond would be no trouble. I didn’t do it right at the beginning because I was hoping to come to an arrangement with Mr Hughes to accept the furniture as part-payment for the bond, so that we’d have more money to set ourselves up over in America. But it never came to that.’

  I realised that Abel was no longer simply answering our questions, he was reliving the whole sorry history. People do that when a great tragedy has overtaken them; they feel compelled to speak of it, to dull the agonising edge of new grief.

  ‘The weeks went by and we were spending more and more money on laudanum. And Maggie wasn’t able to work as she had before. She’s a seamstress,’ he explained. ‘She’s always taken in fine work but with Lizzie being so unwell she couldn’t do it. So the arguments started. She couldn’t think about America with Lizzie so ill. All she could think about was getting enough laudanum to ease Lizzie’s suffering while she waited for God to grant a miracle.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Mr Probert-Lloyd. I didn’t begrudge Lizzie the laudanum. Nor Maggie, come to that, poor soul. Not at all. I’d’ve spent every last penny we had on it, if I’d had to. But it was America, you see. Maggie started saying that she couldn’t go. Not now and not ever. If the worst happens and I lose her, she’d say, I can’t leave her here on her own. I can’t abandon my baby and go to America.’ He paused, to meet my eye, I supposed. ‘She wasn’t in her right mind, you see, sirs. ‘

  I nodded, unable to think what to say to him.

  ‘I thought she’d change her mind after – well, after a while.’

  I said nothing, shifting slightly on the settle and plucking a curl of wood-shaving from my breeches, waiting for whatever he would say next. The doors to the workshop were closed, presumably to keep our conversation private but I wished he would open them and ventilate the place. I was beginning to feel sick from the thick smell of the glue. It was in my lungs, and I knew I would be tasting it on my tongue for hours.

  ‘As the weeks wore on,’ Abel continued, ‘almost all our money was gone. Never mind a bond, soon I was afraid I’d have to insist on Mr Hughes giving me some money for the furniture before it was finished so that I could buy laudanum.’ He took an unsteady breath. ‘Dr Reckitt was here one day, seeing to Lizzie, and I told him how things stood. He said something terrible then – something that made me fear for Maggie’s sanity if I had to tell her. He said that he didn’t think Mr Hughes had the money to buy as much as a cabinet door or a chair leg, he was in so much debt.

  ‘The thought of not being able to buy laudanum was terrible, sir, I can’t tell you … The doctor could see what a state the thought of it had sent me into and he said we could strike a bargain that would give Lizzie all the laudanum she needed and see me and Maggie on the ship in April.’

  ‘What sort of bargain?’ John asked. From the sharpness of his tone I knew that his suspicions had gone in the direction which mine, too, had taken.

  I saw Abel’s hands move and had the impression that he had laid his palms flat on his thighs, as if he was about to push himself up and run away.

  ‘He said he’d buy a bond for me and Maggie and see to it that we had laudanum for Lizzie. All he wanted, in return, was the chance to–’ He faltered and when he continued, his voice wavered. ‘To see what had made Lizzie so ill.’

  Despite having anticipated as much, I still felt a chill go down my back, as if an icy feather had been drawn along the length of my spine. ‘He wanted to perform an autopsy examination on your daughter?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I did my best to ignore the images which had sprung to mind, unbidden; images informed by my visits to Gray’s dissection room before my sight had failed. The sawn edges of a skull, the tiny tears in the skin around the wound, the oddly-grey brain, the absolute wrongness of seeing a cranium bisected above the eyes so that what lay within could be seen and removed for examination.

  ‘What did your wife say about this bargain?’ I asked.

  ‘She didn’t know. Not until a few days before Lizzie died. The doctor had come to warn me that she wouldn’t be with us much longer and to tell me what I had to do when—’

  So hard did David Abel have to swallow down his grief that I heard the straining sound of it.

  ‘Maggie heard what he said. She was beside herself. Absolutely beside herself. She made me give her the bond Dr Reckitt had bought and she went to see Mr Hughes herself. I couldn’t believe that she’d leave Lizzie but she said she wouldn’t take another teaspoon of laudanum from the doctor, we were going to buy our own from now on. She was going to make Mr Hughes buy the bond back and give her a down payment on the furniture. Said she wasn’t going to take no for an answer and that she was going to pay Dr Reckitt back every penny for the bond and for the laudanum we’d had from him.’

  I shifted on the settle. Its seat was narrow and my back was beginning to ache. ‘Did your wife see Mr Hughes? Did she get your money?’

  Abel sighed, ran his fingers over his bare head. ‘No. She couldn’t find him.’

  ‘What about you, did you try?’ John asked.

  Abel did not reply so I repeated the question. After a moment or two, he raised his head. ‘No. God help me, I didn’t. And now it’s too late, isn’t it?’

  There was nothing I could say to ease his guilt. ‘Could we speak to your wife?’ I asked.

  The breath the cabinet maker drew in was long and ragged. ‘I’d be happy for you to speak to her if she was here but she isn’t. Once we’d buried Lizzie, she said she couldn’t live under the same roof as me after what I’d done. She’s demented – convinced Dr Reckitt’ll be out at Blaenywaun digging poor Lizzie up unless she can pay him back.’

  He shook his head. ‘You’ll find her at the chapel. Watching.’

  John

  As we left the village behind, I remembered Harry’s father. ‘I can go and look for her,’ I told him, ‘if you want to get on home.’

  Harry chewed the inside of his lip, thinking. ‘No. I’ll go once we’ve found Margaret Abel. I want to talk to her about Reckitt.’

  ‘You mean about this agreement he’d made with her husband?’

  Harry chewed his lip some more. ‘Not just that.’

  What then? He didn’t say anything more, so I started thinking out loud.

  ‘If Reckitt was prepared to buy the chance to autopsy Elizabeth Abel,’ I said, ‘there’s a chance he might’ve done more than that – is that what you’re thinking?’ Harry’s head turned towards me and I started gabbling, wanting to get it out before he stopped me. ‘I mean Reckitt’s got some kind of mania about this, hasn’
t he – looking inside dead people? He’s not a well-off man, you can see that from his house – he hasn’t got the kind of money you need to go about buying emigration bonds just to give them away. And who ever heard of a doctor giving away medicine?’

  ‘I know.’ The way he said it, I knew Harry suspected what I did but wished he didn’t. Enough laudanum dulls pain and suffering. But too much will kill you.

  We hadn’t seen Maggie Abel when we’d been out to the chapel earlier on, but then we hadn’t been looking for her. We’d been looking for J.P. Williams.

  But I thought I knew where she’d be.

  ‘We should look in the stables,’ I told Harry. ‘You have to go past them to get to the graveyard, don’t you? She could hide there and keep watch on who comes and goes.’

  From the outside, the chapel’s stables were big and impressive-looking. Inside, they were cold and bare. No tack hanging from the beams, no sacks and barrels of food standing about, only a basic manger in each stall for those who’d brought something to feed their horse while they were being preached to.

  Margaret Abel was just sitting there, in one of the mangers. And that was enough to make her look mad, even if there was nowhere else to sit.

  Harry gave me Sara’s reins and walked up to her. ‘Mrs Abel – you must come with us, now. We’ll take you home.’

  She cringed away from him, the way a cat flattens itself in front of an attacker. ‘No! I can’t. Go away.’