Not One of Us Read online

  Not One Of Us

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Glossary

  Harry Glanteifi, August 1851

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  Epilogue

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  Historical notes Courting in bed

  The Teifi Valley Woollen Industry

  Deep Water Port of Refuge in Cardigan

  The Carmarthen and Cardigan Railway

  Cilgerran slate

  Contemporary Medicine

  Meigan Fair

  Buildings

  Acknowledgements

  The Teifi Valley Coroner Series

  About the Author

  Also by Alis Hawkins

  Copyright

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  For Sam and Nancy

  with all my love

  Glossary

  (terms appear in the order in which they occur in the book)

  betgwn – the outer garment of most Cardiganshire working women in the nineteenth century. It featured a tight, low cut bodice and a long back, sometimes gathered up into a ‘tail’. It would have been worn over a blouse and petticoats with an apron over the top.

  Mic y Porthmon – Mike the drover

  ’machgen i – my boy (affectionate)

  swci lamb – an orphan lamb reared by hand

  caseg pen fedi – literally ‘the mare at the end of harvest’. The name given to the last sheaf to be tied

  merched y gerddi – the garden girls

  ’ngwas i – (colloquially) my lad

  Llwyo – an English equivalent would be something like ‘Spoonsy’ or ‘the Spoonster’

  dyn hysbys – cunning man, hedge wizard, white witch, healer

  dewin – wizard

  fach/bach – term of endearment, literally ‘little’

  coron fedw – birch crown

  Deio’r Gwahoddwr – Deio the Inviter/Bidder-to-come

  Wil y Gwahoddwr – Wil the Inviter/Bidder-to-come

  crachach – gentry or upper classes (slightly derogatory)

  hiraeth – a longing for times or places past

  gwas bach – literally ‘little servant’ – generally reserved for the youngest or most junior servants

  caru yn y gwelu – courting in bed, ‘bundling’ (see historical note)

  twpsyn – idiot, stupid person

  Harry

  Glanteifi, August 1851

  When the library door opened and Benton Reckitt was announced, I knew that somebody must be dead. Dr Reckitt did not make spontaneous social calls.

  ‘Probert-Lloyd, I’ve just— Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you had company.’

  My private secretary, Lydia Howell, turned to face him. ‘Not company, Dr Reckitt, only me. I take it you need to see Harry urgently?’

  It was a reasonable assumption, given the energy with which Reckitt had steamed into the room.

  ‘Somebody’s just brought me the most interesting sudden death.’

  To most people, sudden death is shocking, troubling, even disturbing, but to Benton Reckitt it was invariably interesting. My spirits, very much lowered by a letter from the county magistrates that still lay open on the table next to Lydia, were suddenly lifted.

  Lydia rose from her chair. ‘Then I shall leave you to it.’ She picked up the offending missive and folded it away. If only the magistrates’ latest attempt to bring me to heel could be put aside so easily.

  ‘No,’ I said, standing to forestall her withdrawal, ‘please stay. Another pair of ears can only help.’ And eyes, I might have said. Central blindness meant that I saw Reckitt as nothing more than a large figure in riding clothes. The minutiae of his dress, visible only in my peripheral vision, were lost to me, as were his facial expressions.

  Lydia sat down again without comment.

  I waved Reckitt to a chair and resumed my seat. ‘Do go on.’

  ‘I’ve just received a visit from a farmer’s wife from the other side of Eglwyswrw – towards Brynberian. She was away working for a few days when her husband sent somebody to tell her that her eldest daughter was dead.’

  Sent somebody. It must say something about relations between man and wife that he had not gone to break the news himself.

  ‘And the interesting cause?’ I asked.

  ‘Sudden natural death.’

  ‘Natural?’

  ‘Those were the exact words written on the death certificate by the quack who was called to the house.’

  I stifled a grin. In Reckitt’s opinion, any medical practitioner who did not adhere to his own rigorous scientific standards was unworthy of the title ‘doctor’. ‘So had she been ill?’ I asked. ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Pertinent questions. The young woman concerned was nineteen years old, and until she was, apparently, found dead in her bed yesterday morning was in perfect health but for a slight cold a few days ago.’

  ‘Does her mother suspect foul play?’ Lydia asked.

  Reckitt turned to her. ‘She doesn’t know what to think. But she is convinced that her husband is keeping something from her.’

  ‘She thinks he might have had a hand in his daughter’s death?’ Lydia persisted.

  ‘What she suspects, Miss Howell, is neither here nor there,’ Reckitt said. ‘The fact is that no satisfactory cause has been given for this apparently healthy young woman’s death.’

  Unexplained death was a constant affront to Reckitt, and he would do anything in his power to render it explicable.

  ‘I take it that this lady would like me to give my opinion, as coroner?’

  ‘Yours and mine both. She’d heard of my particular expertise in these matters.’

  ‘She’s not asked you to perform a post-mortem examination, surely?’

  ‘Not in so many words. But she came to me for my opinion on how her daughter died. It comes to the same thing.’

  I put that blatantly self-serving suggestion aside for the time being. ‘And where is this lady now?’

  ‘On her way home. If we’re quick about it, we’ll find her still on the road.’

  It was some time since I had heard the hall clock strike three. We would have to hurry if we were to have decent daylight in which to view this unfortunate young woman’s body. ‘Very well. I’ll go and change.’

  ‘Shall I send for Mr Davies?’

  I turned back to him, sc
hooling my features into blandness; I did not want Reckitt to think that John Davies’s absence represented anything other than a well-deserved holiday. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to stand in as my assistant on this occasion, Reckitt – John’s not here. He’s in London. At the Great Exhibition.’

  John

  If I’m honest, I hadn’t been that fussed on seeing the Great Exhibition. I felt as if I knew everything about it already. Ever since the Queen had opened the Crystal Palace to the public, the illustrated magazines had gone on and on about nothing else. Lavish pictures and gushing descriptions. Endless praise and admiration. The whole thing’d soured on me a bit. And then Lydia Howell had dissected it all for us in minute detail after she’d been up to see it with her friend, Miss Phoebe Gwatkyn. The pair of them’d come back full of it.

  But in the end, I went because I needed to get away. Away from Glanteifi. Away from Harry. Away from my boss, Glanteifi’s estate steward, Mr Ormiston. And away from myself, too – from the coward I’d turned into since taking on the under-steward’s job.

  So here I was. Surrounded by the arts and industry and manufacturing and inventions of half the world in a glasshouse that enclosed eighteen acres of Hyde Park. Eighteen acres! That’d be a whole farm at home. The size of it made the two elm trees that’d been left standing inside look like toys.

  But it wasn’t just the size of the Crystal Palace that took your breath away – it was the colourfulness of it all. I hadn’t been expecting that – not in a glasshouse. But the glass was the only colourless thing in the whole place. Even the iron framework was painted, every inch of it, in blue, yellow and red.

  That morning, I was standing in front of the ‘Trophy Telescope’, one of the illustrated magazines’ favourite exhibits.

  ‘Does it work?’ the boy at my side asked. ‘Or is it just a giant model?’

  I turned to look at him. Daniel Williams, hall boy to Miss Phoebe Gwatkyn, lady of Alltybela, fancifully known as Lleu after a character in Welsh mythology, was looking quite the young toff. He had a new suit of clothes, and his fair hair was barbered and oiled.

  Miss Gwatkyn had asked if I’d mind bringing him with me, and I’d said yes because he was a sparky lad, Lleu. Good company. Then I’d discovered that I was bringing half a dozen other servants with him – the ones who’d been left in charge when Miss Gwatkyn’d taken the rest of her household up to the Exhibition with Lydia Howell.

  ‘You know London, John,’ she’d said. ‘You know how things work. They won’t get lost or come to harm with you.’

  That was an exaggeration. I didn’t really know London at all. I’d been to the city twice before, but at least that meant I knew it enough to get the Alltybela lot to their boarding house without breaking a sweat. And find a hansom cab to take me to the grand house off Ladbroke Street where Harry’s friend Gus Gelyot was putting me up.

  As it happened, Mr Gelyot’d walked us over to Hyde Park that morning and was standing in front of the Trophy Telescope with us.

  ‘Oh, it’s perfectly functional,’ he said, in answer to Lleu’s question. ‘That’s the whole point of this vast carnival of industry. That it all works.’ He flung out a hand. ‘Behold, the wonders of the modern world, courtesy of His Royal Highness Prince Albert, de facto king-emperor of half the globe.’

  I caught Lleu’s eye and gave him a look. Don’t worry, it’s not you, he’s always like this.

  ‘Anyway, gentlemen, delightful as this has been,’ Mr Gelyot said, ‘I must leave you. I have a luncheon engagement.’

  If I’d known him better, I might’ve teased him, asked if he was meeting a young lady. As it was, I didn’t dare. It was less than a year since I’d first stayed at the Gelyots’ house when Harry and I’d been working on our first investigation together. On that visit, Mr Gelyot’d tried to put me in the servants’ quarters. Granted, I’d been a solicitor’s clerk then, not Harry’s under-steward, but I still didn’t know Gus Gelyot well enough to risk any kind of familiarity.

  I watched him saunter off, swinging his silver-topped cane, immaculate in a dark-blue jacket and trousers, with a sky-blue-and-gold waistcoat. He always dressed like a dandy, but I still thought he was off to meet a woman.

  ‘Shall we have something to eat as well?’ I asked Lleu.

  He grinned and slapped his pocket. ‘Got enough in here to keep me going for now. Not everyone wanted their breakfast.’ Which probably meant that the older servants’d been drinking the previous night and had ended up with sore heads this morning after trying London’s India pale ales and porters.

  ‘All right then,’ I said. ‘Now it’s just us, let’s go and look at the farming machines.’

  I wasn’t that keen on gawping at mechanical mowers and crop-sowing machines, to be honest, but I knew Harry’d be interested, and telling him about the new machinery would give me an excuse to talk to him – again – about improvements on the estate.

  Ever since I’d started working under Mr Ormiston, I’d been trying to work out why Harry didn’t get more involved in things, why he never seemed to discuss the business of the estate with his steward. Because it needed discussing – as far as I could see, the whole estate was in danger of going to rack and ruin.

  As the summer’d gone on and I’d got more and more worried about the way things were shaping up, I’d dropped I don’t know how many hints about the three of us having a discussion about the estate’s management. But Harry’d brushed them all off. In the end, I’d decided the only thing for it was to come right out with it and tell him he was going to have to step in and do something. Specifically, to go back to some of his late father’s plans for the estate. But he’d just point-blank refused.

  ‘I’ve told Ormiston what I need from him,’ he’d said to me in a tone of voice that wasn’t going to be argued with, ‘and I’m doing him the courtesy I wish others would allow me. I’m letting him get on with his job without interference.’

  So I’d tried – as diplomatically as I could – to raise a few things with Mr Ormiston, but I’d got short shrift from him, too. ‘You may feel you know better than me, Mr Davies, because your father was a tenant farmer. But let me tell you, things look very different on the other side of the ledger. You barely knew Mr Probert-Lloyd senior, but I can tell you that though he was a thoroughgoing gentleman of the old school and an exemplary magistrate, he did not have the instincts of a true squire. He was too lax with the tenants. Mr Harry Probert-Lloyd is cut from a different cloth. He understands financial realities.’

  That’d made me even more worried. Because as far as I could see, Harry didn’t have a clue about financial realities. Not when it came to running an estate. Glanteifi was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and tenant’s son or not, I could see that if Mr Ormiston carried on the way he was going, we’d be over the edge and ruined before a twelvemonth was out.

  Lleu and I made our way to the south-western edge of the Crystal Palace, where the floor plan told us we’d find the agricultural machines. The boy was looking about him in a fashion fit to crick his neck, but still, he was right to try and take it all in, wasn’t he? No point being there otherwise.

  The trouble was, a lot of the exhibits didn’t interest me at all – the kind of decorative items that seemed to be everywhere you looked – and I was so busy trying not to worry about what was going on at home that it was a big effort to pay attention to the more interesting stuff.

  I knew everybody else was saying how astonishing it was that such a huge structure could be built out of glass, but the thing that really struck me was the sheer acreage of cloth everywhere. Quite apart from the undyed canvas that covered all the flat bits of roof to stop the sun cooking everybody inside, in the central two storeys of the glasshouse every interior surface seemed to be draped or hung with material. Display stands were covered in red cloth. Vast national flags hung from the upper galleries. Colourful hangings divided different sections of the Exhibition.

  Mind, I’m not saying that such an enormous amou
nt of glass wasn’t astonishing – it was, of course. My job at Glanteifi was educating me in how much it cost to put up even small buildings, so I was in a position to be more impressed than most people by the Crystal Palace. Quite apart from the glass and steel that’d been needed to build it, I didn’t know where to start working out what acreage of woodland must’ve been felled to make the floorboards we were walking on.

  Like everything else at the Great Exhibition, the floors’d been designed by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. There were wide gaps – maybe as much as a third of an inch – between each floorboard on the ground floor so that all the dust and bits that people dropped were just brushed down the cracks by the ladies’ dresses whisking over them. No labour needed to sweep the floor clean, so costs were kept down. Of course, on the upper storey, things were different. Up there, the boards’d been fitted closely together, otherwise we’d all have been standing in a gentle rain of dirt.

  Lleu and I stepped aside as three young women, arm in arm, came towards us as if we weren’t there. I watched them as they swept past. Dainty. Neat. Pretty. Waists nipped in by their ridiculously full-skirted dresses, hair shining and uncovered. They looked totally different from the practically dressed girls at home. From another world.

  ‘Look at that!’ Lleu was pointing at a huge steam-powered engine.

  ‘It’s one of those new threshing machines,’ I said.

  ‘You’d never get that in a threshing barn!’

  ‘You’re not supposed to. This is what you have instead of a threshing barn.’ And instead of all the men whose winter work it was to wield the threshing flails. This kind of machine had caused riots twenty years ago in England for exactly that reason – men out of work, families with no food. So far, I only knew of one steam thresher at home. And that one didn’t belong to a farmer, it belonged to a miller.

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ I told Lleu. ‘Not one in ten of the gentry back home would be able to afford one of those. Not in a month of Sundays.’

  Besides, you’d only want one if you needed all your corn threshed at once, to sell on the open market. And Glanteifi wasn’t in that league. Not by a long shot. If we’d had that much corn to sell, we wouldn’t’ve been in the financial situation we found ourselves in.