Finders and Keepers (59 page)

‘Penny for them?' Toby asked after Harry had sat toying with his meal in silence for ten minutes.

Harry pushed his plate aside. ‘I lost my temper in the workhouse today. I shouldn't have.'

‘Did you lose it before or after you saw David Ellis?' Toby sprinkled more salt on to his roast potatoes.

‘After.'

‘Alf only helped to carry the boy out of the ambulance and into the cottage, but from what he said to me when he came back here, you had every right to be angry.'

‘My losing my temper is hardly going to help the Ellises.'

‘You paying all their bills and writing off their debts until they can get back on their feet is,' Toby observed wryly, having been taken into Harry's confidence about his inheritance and E and G Estates.

‘It's the least I can do.'

Toby pushed his own plate aside. ‘As I'm not in the mood for Mrs Edwards's afters -'

‘You never are.'

‘Fancy a drink in the bar?'

Harry shook his head. ‘The children have nothing except those damned workhouse smocks.' He glanced at his wristwatch. ‘It's nine o'clock. The younger ones were sleeping on their feet earlier. Betty should have got them into bed by now. I'll have to buy them some essentials tomorrow in Pontardawe but I asked Betty to check their sizes so I can order most of what they need with my mother to be sent down from Gwilym James. I won't be long.'

‘Now where have I heard that before?' Toby enquired sceptically.

‘I'm sorry I've not been good company lately.'

‘You can say that again.'

‘I'm sorry I've not been good company -'

‘You're getting more like me every day. Do you realize that I came back here to spend a week and I've been here three?'

‘But you're painting,' Harry reminded him. ‘And producing work well within your deadline.'

‘Next thing you'll be telling me is that this is as good a place as any in the world to paint.'

‘Isn't it?' Harry asked.

‘I suppose so, as I'm in no hurry to go anywhere else,' Toby said philosophically. ‘If you think that I can help with the Ellises -'

‘I'll come and find you in the bar.'

Chapter Twenty-five

Betty Morgan was sitting at the kitchen table – pencil in hand, a teacup and notebook in front of her – when Harry knocked on the open door.

‘Harry, I was hoping I'd see you again this evening. Tea?' She left her chair and lifted down another cup from the dresser.

‘Please, if there's one in the pot.' Like the doctor, Harry would have preferred brandy after the day he'd had. He made a mental note to have one when he joined Toby in the bar later. ‘How's David?'

‘Still asleep. He didn't even wake when the doctor examined him, or when I helped his poor sister to change his dressings afterwards. She cried like a baby when she saw his injuries. I'd like to take the birch to the man who flayed the skin from his back.' She poured milk into the cup and added tea.

‘You and me both, Betty. It was Megan's father.'

‘Was it?' She set the tea in front of him.

‘You don't seem surprised.'

‘I met him once. He was an evil man. What he tried to do to your poor Uncle Victor and his own daughter beggared belief.'

‘Dad told me that he tried to stop them from marrying.' Harry sat at the table and spooned sugar into his tea.

‘He practically sold Megan to an asylum in North Wales as a maid. It took your mother months to find out where she was. But you know Sali Evans: as soon as she discovered where Megan was, she went there and, somehow or other, got her out of the place, even though they'd paid Megan's father her year's salary in advance. But then,' she shook her head, ‘it's water long gone down the Taff now. Your Aunty Megan and Uncle Victor are healthy and happy, and so are their boys; that's what counts. All we should be thinking about at the moment are those poor mites upstairs. You're a proper Evans, Harry, for all that your real father was crache.'

‘A proper Evans?' Harry repeated quizzically.

‘Champion of the underdog, just like Lloyd and Billy, God rest and bless his soul.'

His grandfather's death was still too painful for him to want to talk about it. ‘You've checked the children's sizes?'

‘Yes, and I've made a list of what they need. Do you know they don't even have a set of underclothes between them?'

‘If you give it to me I'll go into Pontardawe in the morning and buy enough to tide them over for a day or two. But I'll telephone my mother tonight and ask her to send down most of what they need from Gwilym James.' He looked around the kitchen. Apart from one plate covered with a lid set on top of a saucepan on the stove, the room was immaculate. ‘As a housekeeper you amaze me, Betty. You'd never think that there were three children and a baby in the house.'

‘Poor mites don't have any toys or books to leave lying around. And it's just as well I bought those nappies last week in Pontardawe. I should have thought and bought a couple of babies' nightgowns as well. I never realized that they'd put a poor scrap of a toddler into a workhouse smock.'

‘Are they all sleeping?' Harry asked.

‘Except Mary. She's sitting with her brother. She won't leave him.'

‘You have everything you need?'

‘And more, Harry. The things you've bought for this place –'

‘Will come in handy for the next one.' He pulled out his cigarette case, and lit one. ‘Has Mary eaten?'

Betty shook her head and pointed to the plate on the saucepan. ‘I tried to get her to eat. She wouldn't even listen to the doctor when he told her that her brother won't wake before morning. He advised her to get some rest while she can but he might as well have saved his breath. She's a stubborn girl.'

‘She is when it comes to her family,' Harry agreed.

‘You sweet on her?' Betty fished.

‘Please, would you go up and see her? Tell her that I need to talk to her for ten minutes. If she still won't leave David, offer to sit with him.'

‘It would be easier to change coal into diamonds than get a straight answer to a personal question put to an Evans.' Betty eased her bulk out of the chair. ‘I'll ask her, but don't hold out too much hope. If by some miracle she should come down, try to get her to do more than look at that dinner, will you? I doubt she's seen a square meal in months. And don't forget this.' She tore the list from the book and handed it to him.

Harry pocketed the sheet of paper and, anticipating that Betty would succeed, he opened a hotplate on the stove and moved the saucepan of water that held the dinner on to it. The walls were thick but the floorboards weren't insulated, and he could hear Betty's voice, muted, muffled but unmistakably pleading.

A few minutes later Mary walked barefoot down the staircase that led directly into the kitchen. Betty had loaned her one of her flowered work overalls and she had tied it on over her workhouse smock.

‘Mrs Morgan said you wanted to talk to me.' She still refused to look at him and he wondered if the wild spirit that he had loved so much had been extinguished for ever.

‘Yes, I do.' He pulled a chair out from the table. ‘Please sit down. I'm heating up your dinner and Betty's not long made tea.'

‘I'm not hungry.'

‘You don't want to help your brothers and sister?' he asked.

‘You know I'd do anything for them,' she cried out in anguish.

He hated himself for hurting her more than she already had been. ‘Then eat so you can be strong enough to take care of them. Because if you don't, they are going to be the ones taking care of you.'

‘David's not in a fit state to take care of anyone.' She sat at the table and stared down at her hands.

‘But he will be.'

‘The doctor said he'll get better, but have you seen his back?'

‘He's young, strong and pig-headed enough to make a full recovery just to spite Ianto Williams.'

‘I hope you're right.'

‘You know I am.' He sat beside her and took her hands into his. ‘Mary, they're feeling every bit as wretched as you are,' he murmured in a softer tone. ‘They all need you, especially David. I'll do what I can, but they are your family, and if you are going to help them, you have to look after yourself. Your first priority has to be getting your own strength back.'

The water in the saucepan started bubbling. He went to the stove and placed his finger on the edge of the plate. It wasn't quite hot enough. He took a cork placemat from a shelf on the dresser, and a knife and fork from the drawer, and laid them on the table in front of her. She continued to sit, so still and desolate that he felt guilty for lecturing her.

‘I know you've had a terrible time -'

‘You haven't any idea what's happened to me since I last saw you.'

‘If you want to talk about it, I'll try to understand.'

‘Will you, Mr Evans?' She finally looked at him.

‘You used to call me Harry.'

Her eyes were dark, anguished and so deeply shadowed they appeared to be bruised. ‘Have you the faintest idea what it's like to live – no, not live, you can't call what goes on in the workhouse living – to try to exist, day in day out, within those grim walls? To be given slops to eat, to be forced to do endless, meaningless scrubbing because the floor you've been ordered to clean was cleaned only ten minutes before by another inmate?' She plucked at her smock. ‘To be given filthy rags to wear, but worse of all, to have to get through every day not knowing what is happening to your family or even where they are?'

‘No,' he replied evenly, ‘I have no idea. And, as I'm not as brave as you, I hope I never find out. But courtesy of Robert Pritchard I do know what it's like to spend the best part of two days and a night in the police cells.'

‘Then they did arrest you for trying to help us?'

‘Yes.' The meal was finally warm enough. He took an oven cloth, lifted it from the saucepan, carried it to the table and set it in front of her. ‘Careful, the plate is hot.'

‘But they let you out,' she said. ‘They must have, you're here now.'

‘Yes, they let me out, or rather my father came with a solicitor who made them release me.' He sat beside her. ‘Eat, and I'll tell you what's happened since you were evicted.'

Mary barely ate a third of her meal but he knew from his childhood illnesses that it wasn't easy to start eating again after a period of fasting so he didn't try to force her to eat more. And while she picked at the food, he told her about Robert Pritchard's arrest, the ongoing police investigation, his suspicions that the agent had defrauded not only them but all the tenants of E&G Estates, but, uncertain how she'd take the news, he kept the fact that he owned E&G Estates until last. When he finished speaking, a silence settled over the kitchen, stifling the atmosphere until he felt he could no longer draw breath.

‘Haven't you anything to say?' he said.

When she spoke her voice was flat, devoid of expression. ‘So you own the Ellis Estate?'

‘Not morally, it was built by your family and they – or rather you, David and the others as their direct descendants – are the rightful owners. But as I explained, like everything else I will inherit, it's being held in trust and I won't be in possession of it until I'm thirty. But I promise you that I will give you and your family the Estate as soon as I am able to.'

‘Then it's like David and Martha always said, you are very rich?' She turned and finally looked at him but he couldn't decipher the expression in her eyes.

‘I will be, yes.'

She left her chair and headed for the stairs.

‘Mary?'

She stopped and turned back. ‘You said that you would help us, and you kept your word. Thank you, Mr Evans.'

‘I'm only sorry that I couldn't do it sooner, Mary. I might have saved David from a thrashing and the rest of you time in the workhouse.'

‘The women there told me that I would never get out. That being a moral degenerate was as bad as being an unmarried mother. You managed the impossible. You took me out.'

‘You were never a moral degenerate.'

‘No?' she challenged. ‘After what the agent did to me?'

‘He raped you, Mary.'

‘And there was you … you said you liked me. I liked you, and if you'd asked, I would have done what he made me do and willingly – and now …' The tears she'd held in check for so long finally began to flow. ‘I'm bald and ugly and …'

He went to her and held her. She struggled but he tightened his grip. ‘You are none of those things, Mary.'

‘The men, the orderlies in the workhouse, they used to point at us women and laugh. Call us names -'

‘Forget them, Mary, I don't want to hear what they called you, it's not important. I want to talk to you about the future, but there are things that need to be said about the past first. It's not going to be easy, but you must try to forget this awful time, for the sake of your brothers and sister. My solicitor has given me a list of small farms owned by E and G that are empty. I'll drive you around them tomorrow afternoon, if you're up to it and prepared to leave David, so you can choose which one you want. And then I'll furnish and stock it for you. Unfortunately, because you're all underage, the only way I could get you out of the workhouse was to arrange for Mrs Morgan to look after you. They wouldn't have released you otherwise. And I chose Mrs Morgan because I have known her most of my life. She is a kind woman. She was my grandfather's housekeeper for years.'

‘I should have asked,' she murmured distantly. ‘How is your grandfather?'

‘He was buried two weeks ago.'

‘I am sorry.'

‘Mary, you're exhausted and so am I. I'll come back tomorrow morning before I drive down into Pontardawe to buy clothes for you. We'll talk some more and you can give me a list of the other things that you and your brothers and sister need.'