Finders and Keepers (46 page)

‘I'll take a cottage for them. Hire any woman you approve of who is willing to look after them.'

‘You won't be in a position to do any such thing, Harry Evans.' The constable snapped his notebook shut. ‘On your own admittance you assaulted Mr Pritchard -'

‘In self-defence,' Harry reiterated.

‘Harry Evans, I am arresting you …'

The men standing behind Harry caught his upper and lower arms in an iron grip while the constable read him his rights. Harry could see the constable's lips moving but he couldn't hear a word the man was saying for Matthew, Martha and Luke's wails and David's curses, as all four were bundled unceremoniously into the workhouse van.

David stuck his head out of the back and, for the first time, Harry saw real fear in the boy's eyes. ‘Do what you can to get the little ones out, Harry. I won't be in the workhouse long enough to take care of them. Any farmer in need of an unpaid servant can take Martha and me, and then Matthew and Luke won't have anyone. Please …' A cuff from one of the bailiffs sent him hurling back.

Harry heard a bang and hoped it wasn't David's head.

‘I'll get you all out, David. I promise,' he shouted, hoping the boy could still hear him.

‘No, he won't, Ellis,' the agent taunted. ‘The sooner you get used to the workhouse, the better it will go for you.'

‘This is ridiculous,' Toby protested. ‘Harry wouldn't assault anyone.'

‘And who might you be?' The constable opened his book again.

‘Ross, Toby Ross.'

‘Address?'

‘I'm staying at the inn in Abercrave with Mr Evans.'

Matthew, Luke and Martha's cries escalated. The bailiffs slammed the doors on the van and locked them on the outside. The woman who had lifted Luke into the back climbed into the cab beside the driver, and he drove the van out of the yard.

The workhouse master beckoned to the three waiting carts. The horses pulled them over the cobbles close to the door.

‘Please, allow me to take care of this family.' Even as Harry begged, he knew he was wasting his breath.

The workhouse master opened the back of the second closed cart. He looked Mary up and down. ‘Put her in.'

The men holding Mary hoisted her into the iron cage that filled the back of the cart, one of the men deliberately hitching her skirt up.

‘Damn you!' Harry shouted.

‘There's no need for that,' the constable said to the man.

‘She's too skinny for my liking, anyway.' He laughed, slammed the door shut and locked the door.

Once again, Harry had no choice but to stand back and watch. There wasn't even a window in the back of the cart, and he imagined how Mary must be feeling.

‘Put your hands out.'

Harry looked blankly at the constable.

‘Hands out!'

The bailiffs grabbed Harry's wrists and held out his hands. The constable snapped a pair of handcuffs on to him.

‘I want you to press charges and I want to see him in court.' The agent was speaking to the constable but he was watching Harry.

‘Toby,' Harry shouted to his friend as the police van was driven into the yard, ‘drive to the inn and telephone my father as soon as you get there. The number is in my diary in my room. Tell him what's happened.' He turned to the constable. ‘Where are you taking me?'

‘Brecon.'

‘You heard that, Toby?'

‘Brecon,' Toby repeated.

‘Ask him to do whatever it takes to get me out.'

Something fell from one of the windows. Harry ducked, before he realized it was a bundle of sheets. Pillows, blankets and hand-stitched quilted bedspreads followed, and landed on the muck-stained cobbles.

‘How would you like someone to treat your family's belongings this way?' Harry asked a bailiff who was making lewd comments as he threw out Mary's underclothes.

Ianto Williams walked through the bottom gate of the yard that led to the cow pastures. He stared at Harry. ‘I know you. You're Mary Ellis's fancy man.'

‘We've established that, Ianto,' Bob Pritchard replied.

Ignoring Harry, Ianto turned to the agent. ‘There's no need to go to the expense of carting all the livestock to market, Bob. I'll take the lot off your hands, same price as before.'

‘And that makes you, as well as Robert Pritchard, a thief and a fraudster,' Harry pronounced angrily.

‘Get him out of my sight, Constable,' Bob Pritchard ordered.

Harry was pushed into the back of the police van. Caged like an animal, the last thing he saw through the wire-mesh window in the back door was the farmhouse receding slowly behind him and a man climbing a ladder that had been propped against the front wall of the house, a sheet of board under his arm ready to cover the windows.

Toby tried to appear nonchalant as he left the farmyard and walked to Harry's car. After checking that the police van was a diminutive dot on the road to Brecon, he looked over the door on the driver's side and breathed a sigh of relief. Harry had left his keys on the seat. He wished Harry had also left a handbook on how to drive the Crossley. He had seen his friend hit the ignition button enough times to know how to start the engine but he had never driven a car in his life and he was aware that the agent, who was ostensibly supervising the men boarding up the house, was watching him.

He believed Harry's story that he had hit the man in self-defence, but the fact that the constable had summarily arrested Harry without further investigation suggested that Robert Pritchard had rather more authority than his position as a rent collector warranted. And he suspected that the man would have absolutely no compunction in getting him arrested by informing the police that he wasn't fit to drive.

He waited. His chance came when a bailiff called the agent back into the farmyard. As soon as he disappeared through the arch, Toby jumped into the front seat and started the car. It leapt forward, hitting the back of the trap in front. The horse whinnied and bolted.

‘Hey, here, boy! Here, boy.' A young man jumped off a waiting cart and grabbed the pony's head, wrestling it to a standstill.

‘Sorry, didn't mean to spook the horse,' Toby apologized.

‘Not used to the car?' the boy asked, still holding the pony.

‘It's my friend's.'

‘You should always check the engine's out of gear before pressing the ignition. That's what my dad says.'

‘You know how to drive?' Toby asked hopefully.

‘Tractors. The farmer my father works for has one.'

Toby thrust his hand into his pocket. ‘I'll give you half a crown to turn this car around, point it in the other direction and show me what I have to do to get it to Abercrave.'

The young man glanced over his shoulder. There was no sign of the agent. He held out his hand. ‘You have a deal, sir.'

‘That's right, Mr Evans.' Toby raised his voice in the hope that Lloyd could hear him above the irritating drone on the line. ‘Harry has been arrested … He is in the police station in Brecon. He asked me to telephone you … No, of course he hasn't done anything wrong … All he was trying to do was help a family who were being evicted … The man who put the bruises on Harry's face that you saw today told the police Harry attacked him … Harry said it was self-defence …' The line went dead. Toby hit the receiver and when it remained dead hung up.

‘Two and a half minutes is all we're allowed, Mr Ross. There's only one line and the sanatorium takes precedence,' Mrs Edwards reminded him from the doorway.

‘That is stupid. Especially as it took me three hours to get through.' He glanced at the clock above the bar. It was after nine and he doubted that Harry's father would be able to do anything to help him immediately, which probably meant Harry would be spending at least one night behind bars.

‘Your dinner is ready. Shall I ask Enfys to put it on the table?'

It seemed wrong to eat when Harry was incarcerated in a cell, but Toby reflected that starving himself wouldn't help. ‘Please, Mrs Edwards.' He walked past her and went into the dining room.

‘Enfys, Mr Ross is waiting for his dinner,' Mrs Edwards called into the kitchen as she carried Toby's customary pint of beer and whisky chaser from the bar. She set them in front of him. ‘Poor Mr Evans, I do hope someone will give him dinner in the police station.'

‘I don't think the police are allowed to starve their prisoners,' Toby commented grimly.

‘Such a nice, polite young man. Thoughtful too, but I warned him not to get mixed up with the Ellises when he was talking to their old shepherd, Dic, in the bar the other night. The family's bad news, Mr Ross,' she declared emphatically. ‘They don't mean to be and can't help it, bless them, but it's like people say: the Ellises are cursed and have been ever since David Ellis hung himself. The Lord doesn't forgive murderers. And he was a self-murderer. It's not right to take a life.'

‘It was their father, not them, who took the life, Mrs Edwards. And if you could have seen them being carted off to the workhouse today, I'm sure you would have tried to help them.'

‘I would have cried my eyes out, not that it would have done them any good,' she qualified. ‘But I wouldn't have done anything to get myself arrested. There's no quarrelling with the law of the land and Mr Evans shouldn't have tried, however upset the Ellises were.'

Toby knew the story he had told Mrs Edwards about Harry arguing with a policeman and being arrested for trying to help the Ellises wouldn't hold for long. But he couldn't bear to repeat the foul things the agent had said about Mary Ellis and Harry. He wasn't sure whether Harry was attracted to the girl or not, but he was prepared to swear – and in court, if necessary – that she wasn't a prostitute.

Enfys brought Toby's meal, and Mrs Edwards looked critically at the roast chicken dinner she laid in front of him. ‘Mr Ross doesn't want a dinner as dry as that, Enfys. Bring a jug of gravy.'

‘It's reasonably quiet in the bar, Mrs Edwards, so why don't you sit with me and have a drink. On my account?' Toby said, not wanting to eat alone.

‘Thank you, I will. You can bring me a sherry when you bring Mr Ross's gravy, Enfys.' She sat at the table, avoiding the chair Harry usually occupied.

‘You're from around here, Mrs Edwards, you know the way things work,' Toby said thoughtfully. ‘There has to be something that we can do to help the Ellis family.'

‘Nothing I can think of. They're not the first farming tenants to be evicted and dumped on the parish. And the way things are,' she grimaced, ‘there are plenty more around here headed the same way.'

‘Before he was taken away, David Ellis mentioned that people can take children from the workhouse.'

‘If they need workers for their farms, some families round here take the older ones,' she replied cautiously.

‘And the younger ones?'

‘Some are adopted by people who have no children. But not many.' She passed him the salt cellar. ‘Not in an area like this. Times are hard and people have trouble enough feeding their own.'

‘Will they be kept together as a family in the workhouse?' Toby asked.

‘Bless you, Mr Ross, I can see you've no experience of the poor house. The orphanage wards only take children under sixteen and they separate girls from boys. They won't see one another or the adults, and Mary Ellis will be put in a block with the adults.'

‘Can we get her out?' Toby asked.

‘That depends,' she said dubiously.

‘On what?'

‘On whether someone's prepared to take a girl with her reputation as a maid. Thank you, Enfys. You can go back to the kitchen now. I'll get Mr Ross's afters and anything else he wants.' She took the sherry and gravy jug from the girl and put them on the table.

‘What reputation does Mary Ellis have, Mrs Edwards?' Toby asked bluntly.

‘I've only heard rumours,' she replied guardedly. ‘And I'd soon have no customers if I went round repeating everything I heard.'

‘The agent said Mary Ellis was “a degenerate in need of moral guidance” but she's always behaved impeccably whenever Harry and I have seen her. In my opinion she's simply a nice girl with more problems than anyone her age should have to cope with.'

‘I run an inn, Mr Ross. I can't afford to alienate anyone.'

Toby glanced through the open door. The passage was empty. He left his seat and closed the door. ‘You have my word, Mrs Edwards; nothing you say to me will go any further than this room.'

‘All I will say is that if Mary Ellis has a reputation, it's the same one as all the wives and daughters of the tenants Bob the Gob collects rent from.'

‘If I paid you, would you go to the workhouse and offer Mary a job?'

‘I would, if I thought that it would do any good. But if she's been admitted as a moral degenerate they won't allow anyone to take her out. I've known girls with better reputations than Mary Ellis who went in there forty years ago with that label and haven't been seen in the outside world since.'

The workhouse nurse walked down a long corridor ahead of Mary. The walls were covered to shoulder height with brick-shaped, dark-green tiles. Above them, the plaster was painted a sickly yellow. The floor was wooden-blocked and the nurse's rubber-soled shoes squeaked when she halted outside a door panelled in opaque glass. She opened it.

‘In here,' she ordered sharply.

The first thing that struck Mary when she entered the enormous bathroom was the stench. A nauseating mixture of stale sweat, dirt, carbolic soap, urine and faeces. A row of six sinks filled the long wall opposite the door. Two toilets stood side by side on the short wall to her right, and two baths, also set side by side, filled the remaining space. One was half full, and clumps of dirt, hair and lice floated, black islands on a sea of crusted grey scum.