by Alis Hawkins
When she heard me, Seren’s ears went up and she gave me her throaty greeting. I stroked her neck. I was going to be sad to take the little mare back to the stables at Glanteifi when this was all over.
‘We’re going out to Moylegrove, old girl,’ I told her. ‘Not that I know how to get there.’
It was all right when I was with Harry – he knew his way around because of hobnobbing around the county with the rest of the crachach when he was a boy – but I hadn’t even been over Cardigan bridge before that week. I knew Moylegrove was in the direction of the sea, roughly west from St Dogmaels, but other than that I was just going to have to ask.
And that’s what I did. Went up the hill out of St Dogmaels and asked where next. Keep going I was told.
So, I kept going past bent little trees and worn-out pastures, farms crouching with their backs to the wind, and gorse bushes half the size of the ones in the valley. I kept going and got enough rough-handling by the wind to make me glad of my overcoat till I saw the next person.
Left the next time you get to a bigger road, then the first right you come to.
The sky looked as if somebody was working it with a handle, and I hoped we were going to get to the Jones’s farm, Penlanmeurig, before it started to rain.
We came to a little cluster of houses, and even though we hadn’t got to the right hand turn yet, I decided to ask about the way again. Just to be sure.
There was a woman standing outside her house, beating the living daylights out of a mat with the handle of her broom. Something told me she had something – or someone – other than the mat on her mind. I called a good morning and got a curtsy when she saw me there on my horse. Hah! What would my mother’ve said if she could’ve seen that? Me getting a curtsy!
‘Good morning, sir.’
I told her where I was looking for.
‘When you get to a bend in the road like this’– she made an L-shape with her thumb and first finger– ‘don’t go this way.’ She traced the long arm of the L. ‘Just keep going over the hill. Penlanmeurig’s on the other side, looking towards the sea.’
I told Seren to walk on and left her to her proxy beating.
Now I was nearly there, I didn’t know whether to be glad Harry wasn’t with me or worried about it. So far, nobody’d refused to speak to me. I’m working for the acting coroner had done the trick every time. And talking to somebody like David Daniels, James Philips’s clerk, had been easier without Harry in tow. Daniels would never’ve told Harry everything he’d told me.
But the ‘just one clerk to another’ game wasn’t going to work with Shoni Jones. At Penlanmeurig, what the family’d see was a man in a gentleman’s overcoat, riding a gentleman’s horse. I’d have to work a lot harder to convince them that, behind what they saw, I was just like them.
How big a farm was Penlanmeurig, I wondered? Within half a mile of where I’d grown up there’d been farms that were no more than a few scrappy fields held together with sweat and stone, and others that were a hundred acres and more of lush, green, fertile land. Farmers who held the most acres were always bidding for more, looking to take over tenancies where a lease was up.
Money makes money, as my father was fond of saying.
Mind, looking at the hard, stony ground on either side of me, it wasn’t making much here. Even the hedge banks between fields seemed beaten low.
I shouldn’t’ve started thinking about money. It just got me worrying. Because I shouldn’t be here, should I? Not if I wanted to stay employed. I should be at the office on Adpar hill, doing everything I could to make myself necessary to Mr Schofield.
It all came from letting myself think I could be a lawyer. Which was as bad as thinking you could find the end of a rainbow and dig the gold up. Nothing more than a silly dream. I should just be grateful that I wasn’t a labourer or a tenant farmer struggling to make a living like the poor bastards here.
Like my father.
My father. He’d been dead eight years and, sometimes, I couldn’t remember what his face looked like. But I remembered his dream. And the hope of it had clung to me like my own shadow ever since Gwyn Puw and Dai’r Bardd brought us those coins.
America. A new life.
An old, cracked pot used to sit on the mantelpiece when I was a little boy. It was where my father used to put the ‘America-money’. Every week the coppers’d go in and, when the pot was full, my mother’d go round the shops and exchange farthings, ha’pence and pennies for shillings and half crowns.
After my parents died, one of our neighbours held on to that pot for me. Presented it to me when I went back, and told me to count it, I’d find it all there. Didn’t have the heart to tell him I had no idea how much we’d saved.
That money had all gone to Mr Davies, the Adpar schoolmaster who’d taken me in and educated me. I wished I had it still, it could pay for my ticket. Or for articles.
Did they make you pay for articles in America? Perhaps there was such a need for lawyers over there that they trained you for nothing. Especially in a completely new town like the one Jenkyn Hughes’s emigrants were going to in Ohio.
Ohio. The name had a strange ring to it. Not even English. Foreign. What was it like, there?
We reached the top of the hill and the wind almost knocked the breath out of me. It was coming straight off the sea. From where I sat, on Seren’s back, I could see wave furrows going all the way to the horizon. Grey and cold-looking, with white flecks where the wind was whipping them on.
I leaned forward in the saddle. Down the slope, a house had just come into view. Low and sunk into the ground, it was – as if it’d spent years cowering beneath the wind.
Not the house of a well-off man. No second storey. No range of barns and outbuildings. Just a longhouse that’d been added to and added to again at one end, each new room with its own window. At the other end was the holding’s only byre with an open-sided cart shed going off at right angles.
The place was decently whitewashed, and I could see glass in at least one of the windows but, still, the buildings matched the land. Bare, starved, needing money spent if they were going to look anything much at all.
There seemed to be nobody about, so I dismounted and picked my way over the half-frozen mud to the house.
When I knocked, a head came round the door. A young woman.
‘Shut the door!’ I heard from inside. ‘The chimney’s smoking enough as it is!’
The girl blushed as she shut the door behind her and looked at me. She was pretty – hair the colour of a blackbird’s wing, and big brown eyes.
‘Good morning. Is this Penlanmeurig?’
‘It is.’ Then she added ‘sir’ just in case I was somebody important despite speaking her own language to her.
‘I’m looking for Shoni Jones,’ I said. ‘Is he here?’
‘Shoni? No, sir, he’s not.’
‘Do you know where I can find him?’
She went as if to look over her shoulder at whoever was listening, then realised that the door was shut. ‘He’s gone about all over the place,’ she said. ‘There’s a meeting and he needs to tell people.’
‘Can I speak to your father?’
‘He’s down at the forge in the village.’
Damn. That meant going all the way to Moylegrove and having to separate Shoni Jones’s father from all the other men who’d be gathered round the blacksmith’s fire, swapping news and gossip while they waited for tools to be sharpened or mended.
I thanked her and turned away. At least the wind’d be at my back for a minute or two.
I hadn’t gone more than twenty yards from the house when I heard the door slam shut behind me and boots thudding.
‘Please, sir, wait!’
It was going to be difficult to go back to being plain John Davies after all this sir-ing and curtsying. I pulled Seren up and turned in the saddle to see who was coming after me.
A man stumbled up, buttoning his jacket as he came. He didn’t look much older th
an me – probably the girl’s brother. His hair was shaved off so severely at the back and sides that, even with his hat on, I shivered looking at him.
‘You don’t need to go and find Dad, sir. He’ll only tell you Johnny’s not here – none of us knows where he is. He went off yesterday.’
‘To tell people about the emigration meeting on Friday?’
He looked surprised. ‘Yes.’
I dismounted. Couldn’t talk to him man to man while I was looking down on him. ‘You don’t have to call me sir,’ I said, pulling Seren’s reins over her head so I could hold her more easily. ‘I’m only a solicitor’s clerk and this is a borrowed horse. But, for the time being, I’m the coroner’s officer and I need to find your brother to speak to him on the coroner’s business.’
‘In trouble, is he?’
He wouldn’t be sorry, that much was clear.
‘That depends.’
‘On what?’
‘What d’you know about his involvement with Jenkyn Hughes and the American emigration scheme?’
He grunted and looked away. ‘More than I bloody want to know. It’s all he ever talks about.’ Then he looked back at me, a sly look on his face. ‘Going to come crashing down on him now, though, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘The whole thing!’ He put on an American accent. ‘The Cardigan-Ohio Emigration Company.’
‘Why’s it coming crashing down?’ I moved slightly so as to put Seren between me and the wind.
He shook his head. ‘Don’t play stupid with me. You’re the coroner’s boy.’ That was that, then. ‘Sir’ to ‘boy’ in half a minute. Still, he’d dropped the guard he’d’ve had up if he thought I was a gent.
‘You’ll know better than I do what’s going on down there.’ He jerked his head in the direction of Cardigan. ‘Jenkyn Hughes, our so-called cousin, was a gambler. And not a very good one by all accounts. Now he’s turned up dead and half the money for the scheme’s been gambled away. More, if you believe some people.’
He was fishing for information so, in a spirit of give before you get, I obliged. ‘No, it’s not that bad. He only had a third stake in the company and he hadn’t gambled away all of his share.’
That got me another grunt but I wasn’t sure what it meant. I shivered. The frame of my specs was icy cold in the wind and it was making my head ache.
‘Can we just walk over the hill?’ I asked. ‘We’ll be out of the wind, then.’
He nodded and we stumped up the stony path until the wind stopped trying to blow the hair off our heads.
I pulled Seren up and faced him. ‘If Shoni’s invested in the scheme, I think his money’s safe.’
He pulled a face. ‘Invested? Shoni-boy’s done more than invest. He owns the scheme now. Part of it, anyway. Got himself made heir to Jenkyn Hughes, didn’t he? Did you know that?’
I nodded. ‘Yes. We knew that.’ Just as well to remind him that I wasn’t working alone.
‘All right then, I’m betting you don’t know how he managed it? How he persuaded cousin Jenkyn to sign his share away if he should unfortunately die?’
I let that hint of an accusation hang there for a moment or two. ‘Go on then. Tell me.’
He shivered. ‘He bought it.’
‘Bought it? How?’
‘Buy me a pint and I’ll tell you.’
It looked as if he was afraid of being seen with me in Moylegrove because he led the way to St Dogmaels. We clopped down the high street to the White Hart where Harry and I’d eaten pot-stew the day before.
Once we’d sat down with our beer, I looked at him. ‘I don’t know your name, friend. I’m John Davies.’
He nodded. ‘William Jones. But everybody calls me Wil Camlaw.
Camlaw. Wrong handed.
‘You’re left handed?’
‘They tried to make me use this one.’ He raised the fingers of his right hand. ‘You know, in the Sunday school, to write with. But I couldn’t get used to it. Felt like I was trying to write with my toes. They grumbled and called me dull but, in the end, they let me do it with this one.’ He mimed writing with his left hand.
Left handed. What had Reckitt said? If he was hit from the front, the killer was right handed. From behind, left handed.
‘Right then. Tell me how your brother managed to buy his way into being Jenkyn Hughes’s heir.’
He looked at me over his pint pot. ‘Hughes needed money, didn’t he? So when Shoni went to him and said he could help him out, our cousin was like a dog with a bitch on heat.’
‘Where did Shoni get the money?’
The look Wil Camlaw gave me as he swallowed his beer was pretty sour. ‘You mean how did a small tenant without two shillings in his pocket find the sort of money that’d interest somebody like Jenkyn Hughes?’
That was exactly what I’d meant. ‘No, I mean–’
‘It’s all right. We’re not as poor as you’d think from looking at the place. Or, rather, we weren’t.’
I waited. He took another long pull at his pint then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and told me what I wanted to know.
It was a common enough story. His grandfather’d been a shrewd man who’d never spent a penny he didn’t have to, so that his children and grandchildren could have a better chance than he’d had. And, at the end of his long life, he’d managed to put enough by to afford some land that had come up for sale quite near Penlanmeurig.
‘He bought it for Shoni, on the understanding that our father would pass Penlanmeurig’s lease on to me.’
Sounded like a sensible course of action. As far as I could see, their grandfather’d done the brothers a huge favour.
‘I was happy with that,’ Wil Camlaw said. ‘It meant I had the bigger farm and I wouldn’t have to work with Johnny.’
‘You don’t get on?’
‘Never have, right from boys.’
‘But your brother sold the land on, is that it?’
Will nodded.
‘Did he give Jenkyn Hughes all the money?’ I asked.
Wil’s bark of a laugh had a grudging kind of admiration to it. ‘Not him! Always known exactly what he’s got to spend to get what he wants, Shoni has. How much effort, how much sucking up, how much work, how much money. Never spends an ounce more effort or a penny more in price than he has to.’
Sounded to me as if Shoni’d inherited their grandfather’s shrewdness but I kept that thought to myself.
‘So,’ I said, ‘he parted with some of the money he’d got for the land, and Jenkyn Hughes re-wrote his will making him his heir. Is that the sum of it?’
‘Not quite. Johnny wanted to be part of the scheme.’
‘The emigration scheme? He wanted to emigrate?’
Wil shook his head, swallowed a mouthful of beer. ‘Wanted to be an agent, like our cousin. Wanted to be the big man, going around the countryside persuading people to leave their homes and their families and run off to America.’
Wil, evidently, was not friends with the idea of emigration.
‘Had he been to America?’
‘No. But Hughes came to stay with us when he first came over – must be nearly ten years ago, now – and then again last year, when he was nosing about for business partners. Filled Shoni’s head with big ideas about life in America, he did. When he came over this time, Shoni wouldn’t leave him alone – stuck to him like a tick every time he went out to talk to people about the scheme. Clever about it, mind. Said to Jenkyn that he knew who’d be most likely to want to go. Said they should talk to people he knew first, then go to people they knew and so on. Ended up halfway to Aberystwyth. And all the time, Shoni-boy was taking in every word our cousin said.’
Wil took a swift swallow of his beer. I could tell he had more to say.
‘Came home with a book of notes this thick, he did.’ He held his fingers an inch apart. Even if he was doubling the book’s thickness for effect, that was a lot of notes.
‘Reckoned he could do the agent’s job no
w. Said he knew everything Jenkyn Hughes knew. Everything. He’d listened to the questions people asked and the answers they got and he knew what to say. All he needed was to go there, once – see Ohio and this town they were planning – and he could do Jenkyn’s job for him. Better than him. He’s always thought he could do a better job than everybody else, Shoni has.’
‘Was that part of the deal he made with Hughes?’ I asked. ‘As well as being his heir, was he going to go out and see the new town in Ohio?’
‘That’s it. Got a ticket and everything. Wasn’t going to trust Jenkyn’s word, was he? He wanted the ticket in his hand. To be sure he was going.’
So. Shoni Jones had made it his business to find out how Jenkyn Hughes conducted the scheme. He’d planned to learn more by going to Ohio. And he’d made sure that, in the event of Hughes’s death, he’d be able to take over, nice and neatly, where the American had left off. Had he decided that instead of setting himself up as an agent later, he’d just get rid of Hughes and take over his role in the American scheme, now? Then again, it wasn’t quite that simple, was it? There were Hughes’s gambling debts to consider. Shoni Jones would inherit them too.
A suspicion suddenly tapped me on the shoulder.
