Not One of Us Read online

  I turned towards a smaller machine for mowing corn or grass and was just asking Lleu whether he thought it would work in the little fields at home when a voice behind us said, in Welsh, ‘Well I never! Who’d have thought I’d hear the language of heaven here?’

  The accent was like my own and I looked around expecting to see somebody I knew.

  But as it turned out, I didn’t know him. Not yet, at any rate.

  Harry

  Making the most of the turnpike road, Reckitt and I cantered up the first half-mile to the junction that would take us south to Cenarth. Then, swinging sharply downhill, we slowed our horses to a walk down the sudden gradient. I had become ever more reliant on my little mare’s ability to pick her own way along the sometimes rough and ready parish roads of the Teifi Valley, and now I let her have her head.

  The day was sultry, though I knew it might be a different story on the slopes of the Frenni and had brought a coat, which was rolled up with my other things behind my saddle. It was odd not having John at my side as I rode out to a sudden death, and I could almost hear him complaining about the conditions. Close, isn’t it?

  Close was a better word than sultry; the warm air did feel as if it was pressing in about you, like a damp sheet. There was not a breath of wind, and I was glad of the movement of air past my face as the lane flattened out and our horses extended into a trot once more.

  I wondered what John’s response to the Great Exhibition – the government’s hubristic expression of Britain’s international significance – would prove to be. Perhaps a spell in London would put him in a better humour than he had been recently, take him out of himself. He had developed something of a fascination for the city and its many faces, and I knew from my own experience that to a man of twenty, London held attractions that provincial life simply could not offer.

  At my side, Reckitt seemed uncomfortable. He did not rise to the trot like a man at ease in the saddle but bumped up and down like a green stable boy riding bareback. ‘Tell me about the woman who came to fetch you,’ I said. ‘What was she like?’

  He turned towards me. ‘What do you mean, what was she like?’

  Reckitt despised vagueness, but he generally managed to infer the meaning behind such questions well enough; clearly, I had underestimated how onerous he found horsemanship. His usual habit was to hire a trap for his travels, and it was an indication of his haste today that he had chosen to ride instead.

  ‘Age?’ I offered as an example. ‘General demeanour, level of education or intelligence, ability to take in information offered to her…’

  ‘About forty, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Aged by hard work, but strong.’

  ‘Physically?’

  ‘And in terms of her character, I should say. As is so often the case in women. One almost never sees a physically large woman who is also meek and biddable.’

  Though I had never considered it before, he was right. Men might be described as gentle giants, but large women were always formidable.

  ‘I should say she was intelligent rather than educated,’ he continued. ‘Though we did speak in English.’

  The fact that this woman’s command of the language was better than Reckitt’s Welsh did not necessarily indicate any great fluency on her part. Being physician to the Cardigan Union workhouse, Reckitt had mastered sufficient Welsh to hold a conversation about symptoms and illnesses, but he would not be comfortable holding a long conversation in the language.

  ‘And she told you her husband was hiding something? Did you get the impression that the two of them were at odds? In general, I mean, rather than in this particular case.’

  A brief pause ensued. ‘How would one tell? She simply told me what had happened and asked me to come and give my opinion as to the cause of her daughter’s death.’

  Until that point, I had assumed that this lady had knocked at Reckitt’s door rather than my own simply because his house, in Cilgerran, was nearer to her own farm than Glanteifi by several miles. However, now it seemed that perhaps it had been his idea, and not hers, to involve me. In which case, my arrival might not be entirely welcome.

  ‘Was there anybody else at home with her husband and the deceased daughter while she was away?’ I asked.

  ‘No. Her other two daughters had gone with her.’

  ‘And the reason for the eldest’s staying at home?’

  ‘The head cold I mentioned. Didn’t fancy half a day’s walk and a lot of hard work into the bargain.’

  We reached the point where the road was forced steeply up onto the lip of Cenarth gorge and our horses slowed to a strenuous walk.

  The few details Reckitt had been able to give me about the dead girl’s family were intriguing. The fact that her mother and sisters had been working away from home suggested that the family did not hold much land; it would be beneath the dignity of a substantial farmer’s wife, however impecunious, to take up work elsewhere. However, the bereaved woman’s apparent demeanour and command of English made it unlikely that she was a labourer’s wife.

  ‘I assume the family are smallholders?’

  Reckitt seemed to be having some trouble staying upright in the saddle on the steep incline. ‘I didn’t ask.’

  Feeling that it might be both prudent and kind to let him concentrate on keeping his seat, I kept further questions to myself and considered my own position. If Reckitt were to find injuries that had been overlooked by whoever had signed the death certificate, then I would be obliged to have a jury assembled to view the body. If, on the other hand, he found no obvious indications of foul play, or, indeed, an unreported accident, I would have an uncomfortable decision to make. He would, without doubt, want to perform a post-mortem examination so as to be able to rule definitively on cause of death. However, given that a forensic dissection cost two guineas, the county magistrates were not enthusiastic about the procedure being carried out without good reason. And describing exactly what kind of natural death a young woman had succumbed to was not, in their eyes, nearly good enough. Given that I had just received a letter detailing new procedures designed to limit the scope of the coroner’s powers, it would be unwise of me to spend public money in a way they would see as profligate.

  * * *

  At Cenarth, we rode over the Teifi into Pembrokeshire and trotted up into the Cych valley, crossing the little river then climbing up and heading towards Cilwendeg. I remembered a visit to the mansion there one summer when I was a small boy; somebody had taken me to see a shell grotto in the grounds. Being only four or five and never having been to the seaside, I had not encountered shells before, and the fact that little animals had once lived in what looked like hollow stones had had to be explained to me. Such a thing, I recalled, had seemed scarcely more reasonable than the existence of unicorns.

  The memory disturbed me slightly because I had forgotten the visit until now; I had become used to the notion that my widowed father had neither made nor received social calls during my childhood.

  I tried to put thoughts of my father aside. Every time I thought of him, I heard again the words of one of our older neighbours at his funeral. ‘He had great hopes of you, Henry. I trust you’re not going to let him down.’ But the fact of the matter was that my father and I had never seen eye to eye and the hopes he had had of me were not those I had nurtured for myself.

  As we came to the drovers’ road to Cardigan, I stared straight ahead, so that the whirlpool – my name for the patch of grey blindness at the centre of my vision – rested on the ears of my little mare, Sara. Below the blind nothingness, I could see Sara’s mane, above it the rounded tops of the Preseli Hills rose in the distance ahead of us.

  Would I have known the mountains were there if I had not previously been able to see the vista in front of me? I could not be sure. The eye specialist I had consulted had told me that I must make as much use as I could of what he called the memory of seeing, so that I might train myself to interpret what now remained visible to me. But, memory being such a tricks
y beast, I sometimes wondered whether I only imagined what I saw, rather than actually seeing it.

  After a few minutes, we turned uphill, and I looked about me as the high ground opened out on either side of us. The air smelled different here, the earth more peaty, lacking the undernotes of clay that were ever present down in the valley. Above us, the sky was a vastness of blue and scudding white that stretched out over the whole of the Preselis, and the landscape, visible for miles in every direction, was so different from the confined vistas of the Teifi’s tributary valleys that it felt as if I was in a different country.

  I had never been to this corner of the Teifi Valley Coroner’s purview before; though we were in one of the parishes of the Cardigan Workhouse Union, which marked the southern limit of my jurisdiction, we were well into Pembrokeshire.

  At a crossroads where an inn stood ready to greet travellers from every direction, Reckitt chose a road that would take us still further up onto the hilly slopes.

  After a few minutes, he pulled up and, standing in his stirrups, called, ‘Good day, to you! We’re looking for Rhosdywarch.’

  On the other side of the hedge, a man straightened from whatever he was doing. ‘About Lizzie Rees, is it?’

  ‘Yes. This is Mr Probert-Lloyd, the coroner.’

  The figure moved closer to us. ‘Sad news, young girl like that, whole life ahead of her—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Reckitt interrupted. ‘Are we near?’

  His tone earned him a few seconds’ reproachful silence before the man provided directions. ‘Rhosdywarch’s on your right as you’re going back up the hill after the ford,’ he concluded. ‘You’ll know it by the apple trees on the south side.’

  We continued, and not five minutes later, after we had splashed through the shallow water of the ford, Reckitt called out once more.

  ‘Mrs Rees!’

  As the woman turned in the road at the sound of her name, I could see from the movement of her hands that she was knitting as she walked. I could not see it clearly but I knew that the ball of wool she was using would be hung on a hook from her belt.

  ‘Another minute and I’d have been home before you,’ she called, in English, hands still moving as we trotted towards her. ‘That’s our place up there.’

  So this was the dead girl’s mother. She would not know it, but Reckitt’s remembering her name was an indication of the intensity of his interest in her daughter’s death. Obscure Latin terms for fragments of human anatomy tripped lightly off his tongue, but, in general, personal names seemed unable to find a foothold in his capacious memory.

  We dismounted and, introductions having been made and condolences offered, walked with Mrs Rees the last fifty yards or so to a small cluster of whitewashed buildings. The hands holding her needles moved backwards and forwards in a movement as rhythmic as her footfall, and I wondered what portion of a stocking – or pair – she had knitted on her journey to and from Reckitt’s house. When I was a boy, it had been many a young woman’s proud boast that she could make a pair of stockings in a day, given enough time with her needles.

  As we turned aside to her house, Mrs Rees pushed her knitting into the bodice of her betgwn. ‘Welcome to my home, gentlemen. Please, come and tell me what happened to my Lizzie.’

  John

  The owner of the Welsh voice behind us turned out to be a youngish man called Jem Harborne. And like me and Lleu, he’d come up from the Teifi Valley.

  ‘I’m here for the textile machines,’ he told us. ‘Want to come and have a look?’

  I’d had enough of looking at horse-drawn mowers and steam threshers, so we let him drag us off with him for company.

  I never knew there were so many machines involved in making cloth. My understanding of how it was done by hand, from watching my mother spin and sell her yarn, was pretty simple – you carded the wool so the fibres were all straight instead of tangled up, then you spun it and sold it to a weaver, who made cloth out of it. But here, there were rows and rows of machines involved in manufacturing cotton and silk and wool and linen and every one of them looked incredibly complicated.

  Mr Harborne used words like ‘slubbing’ and ‘roving’ and ‘willowing’. He pointed out lace machines that I didn’t understand at all, and a machine for printing calicoes that claimed to be able to print eight colours at once and then dry the cloth before rolling it into a bolt. We even walked past one that he called a ‘gassing machine’. Apparently it singed away the loose fibre from lace and muslins.

  ‘It’s similar to what shearers do when they cut the nap on woollen cloth really fine,’ he said. I didn’t like to tell him I didn’t have a clue what he meant, but he must’ve seen it in my face. ‘It’s a skilled job. Makes the cloth finer, smoother.’

  A skilled job. So how would a brute-force machine do it? How would it know when to stop singeing? But we’d moved on.

  ‘This is the kind of thing I’m interested in,’ Mr Harborne said, stopping alongside a gleaming machine with tightly stretched fabric on it. ‘Made in Blackburn – this one here’s for weaving very fine woollens, and that one there is for the heavier cloths.’

  I looked at the machines. They weren’t any bigger than the hand looms I’d seen weavers using at home – smaller, if anything, more compact – but they seemed to have a lot more moving parts. And they were made of iron that gleamed with greasing oil, whereas the looms I was used to were all made of wood.

  Because Lleu was a child, he asked the question I’d been too polite to ask. ‘Why are you interested in these machines, Mr Harborne? We don’t use them at home.’

  Harborne looked him in the eye. ‘That’s why I’m interested in them. Because we need to start using them at home.’ He looked from Lleu to me. ‘Why don’t we go and have something to eat, and I can tell you all about it? We Teifi boys should stick together.’

  My pockets weren’t full of food like Lleu’s, so I agreed to go with him. But whatever he said and however much he might sound like us, Jem Harborne didn’t look like a Teifi boy. He had a kind of restless attractiveness to him, a glamour, that I’d only seen in people from away. And then there were his clothes. His shirt and necktie were nothing special – just London fashions – but his suit was a different matter altogether. It was made of a smooth, finely woven fabric that didn’t look like either wool or linen.

  ‘Angola,’ he said when he caught me staring. ‘Silk and wool blend.’ He held his arm out for me to feel it.

  I kept my hands to myself. I wasn’t used to talking about fabrics like a woman, still less feeling one on a stranger. And I’d never heard of a fabric that mixed silk and wool. Angola. Another new idea to take home.

  ‘Have you been to Soyer’s symposium?’ he asked as we walked past displays of fabric towards one of the exits at the western end of the Crystal Palace.

  ‘No, what’s it about?’

  He grinned. ‘It’s not that sort of symposium.’

  Outside, the sunshine felt fresh after the dead-air heat inside, and even though the crowds were still jostling and jabbering around us, their voices didn’t press on your ears the way they did inside the glasshouse. It was a relief to be out in what passed for fresh air in London.

  We followed Mr Harborne through the crowds milling in and out of Hyde Park and crossed the road to a grand house that stood behind a wall with two sets of double gates let into it. Between the gates the words ‘Soyer’s Symposium’ were painted.

  Something Lydia Howell had said came back to me. ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Is this where the biggest dining room in the world is supposed to be?’

  ‘That’s it! Soyer got the firm who built that,’ Jem Harborne jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the Crystal Palace, ‘to put up a huge glasshouse for him behind Gore House. It can sit hundreds, and he’s had the longest tablecloth in the world made for it – over a hundred yards!’ He grinned. ‘Not much of a feat of weaving, but imagine washing it!’

  I smiled, but in truth, I wasn’t thinking about his table
cloth. Just the thought of Lydia Howell had knotted my stomach up.

  What was Harry getting her to do while I was away? Since she’d come to Glanteifi to work for him, back in the spring, she seemed to have influenced every aspect of life in the mansion. With me away, Harry’d be bound to turn to her even more than usual and I dreaded him comparing the two of us. Lydia’s quiet competence made me feel about twelve instead of twenty.

  I’d never been able to understand why she wanted to work for Harry. Why she wanted to come back to the Teifi Valley at all, come to that. During the Rebecca tollgate riots, seven or eight years ago, she’d played a very dangerous game. She’d pretended to be somebody she wasn’t and she’d been found out – something Harry and I had discovered when we first worked together, investigating the murder of his one-time sweetheart, Margaret Jones.

  In Lydia’s shoes, I’d have kept well away from the Teifi Valley. For ever. But after we’d found her in Ipswich, she and Harry’d started writing letters to each other, and before we knew it, she’d turned up with her bizarre idea of coming to work for him.

  As we walked up to the door of Soyer’s Symposium, I hung back, Lleu at my side like an uncertain shadow. We didn’t have enough money to eat in this kind of place.

  ‘Come on!’ Harborne urged.

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think…’

  ‘It’s not just for toffs, if that’s what you’re worried about. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  Whether it was for toffs or not, I still wasn’t sure I wanted to go in. How impressive could a massive glass dining room be anyway, after the Crystal Palace?

  ‘Look.’ Harborne pointed to a notice above the door that read, Say how many you are, and at what cost you wish to dine; you need say nothing more, your dinner is settled.

  All very well, but what if you wished to dine at tuppence ha’penny?

  That was answered when we were asked for a shilling just to get in – as much as we’d paid to see the whole of the Great Exhibition! I shook my head again. ‘Mr Harborne, I don’t think—’