​Jumbles Alehouse. An ulcer, a festering sore on the face of Pobdoc. Sailors milling, prostitutes gathering, foreigners haggling, police hovering while Freda Morgan, a laundry worker, was collecting me from a boardinghouse. Everything she would need for a newborn packed inside a carpetbag.

​

​Never before had I heard of that backdrop, that vague cast of characters. Only now was I learning that my widowed mam, Freda Morgan, hadn’t given birth to me at all. No, in Mam’s words, I was born to a wench, a slattern, a common little strumpet known as Polly Pen Bont.

It was the first time Dr. Morys-Jones, Hilda Bragg, and Maudie Voyle had been acquainted with the facts, too. The three of them sat across from me the other side of Mam’s bed.

​

And Mam’s revelation, so rich in imagery and laced with disgust, after days of her lying weak, and gray-faced, and silent. It was a lot to take in, I was stunned, but I still loved her. Always would. She chose me, raised me, cherished me, didn’t she? Her devotion so deep, so fierce.

​

But good God, Mam, I thought. What possessed you to finally tell all? 

​

Waiting until I turned twenty-five, and in front of the two worst gabbers over there bearing witness. Hilda Bragg’s jaw limp-hinged by now, and Maudie Voyle’s eyes a pair of pop-alley marbles.

​

Rising to his feet, Dr. Morys-Jones pressed a stethoscope against Mam’s chest, her ribs too evident under the yoke of her nightgown. “Not the first patient,” he said, “to exhibit a surge of mental energy before they pass.” He’d seen it all, he said. Terminal restlessness. Terminal agitation. Terminal clarity of speech.

​

When I leaned in closer to Mam, her hand moved to my head and she ran her fingers through my hair in the old way. “I wanted the best for you, Mali,” she whispered. 

​

Which is why she took me to Pentref Idris, I imagined, where she could keep house for Walto Bevan, at Tŷ Paun on Heol Fach.

 

Walto Bevan. Distinguished bachelor, retired solicitor, dubbed Bevan the Brief by the locals.

​

Ah, Pentref Idris, where only a smattering of Welsh was spoken, and where the community was glued together by gossip. Where the simplest of tales would become fevered with scandal and sensation as it spread like some epidemic. With Hilda Bragg and Maudie Voyle forever pushing to be invited to Bevan’s dinner table to weigh up Mam’s situation.

​

Was Freda Morgan a kept woman?

​

There they were now, two chapel ladies visiting the sick. What an opportunity, what a stroke of luck, what a time it was for them to pop in—to catch if Mam shared a bed with Bevan the Brief. And their eyes darting this way and that, searching for clues. Only to be met by chintz curtains and rose-colored rag rugs. With not a pair of Bevan’s gaiters, half hose, or long drawers in sight.

​

Mam let out a groan, the reduced shape of her body cozy in a cocoon of quilts. Then her lips moving without sound, and a look of peace on her face as she drifted away.

​

My eyes ached as fresh tears fell thick and fast. Oh, I’d sensed her death was coming, all right. I had a feeling it would happen that very afternoon, when the daffodils would be nodding their bonnets on the riverbanks.

​

Making a study of his fob watch, “She’s gone,” said Dr. Morys-Jones. 

​

Simple as that. 

​

Hadn’t his remarks and diagnoses always been unembroidered. Factual and businesslike, and him packing up his case already, and making for the bedroom door. Then Hilda Bragg and Maudie Voyle following in his footsteps. Taking their leave with muttered condolences and the gifts they’d arrived with.

​

A tin of Welshcakes. A jar of jam. Mam wouldn’t be needing those now.

​

 

I’d finished with my sobbing by the time Bevan arrived. The skin on my face tight, and my body bone-weary. Poor Mam, she’d lasted a few months longer than Dr. Morys-Jones had predicted, with me tending to her every need.

​

Bevan stood at the foot of Mam’s bed. His jaw, his shoulders, his whole frame as if put together with a weld of steel rods. And his eyes watery when he said he would sorely miss Freda Morgan, the good woman that she was, and his voice, as-ever, a reverberating baritone.

​

“You’ll stay on, won’t you, Mali?” he asked. After all, he did lift me up to a higher social standing—wasn’t that right? Provided Ty Paun for an address. Secured me a respectable position at The Dog-Eared Bookshop. Turned me into a proper chapelgoer.

​

Well, it was obvious now Bevan knew of my origins. Mam must have told him everything from the start. All the particulars she’d shielded from me.

​

Bevan had been accommodating, obliging, and generous to a fault, and he did own the best, the biggest house in Pentref Idris. But as for my elevated status—well, what was the betting I’d soon be brought down a peg or two, now the truth was out? The reality, the sorry fact I didn’t quite fit into the Pentref Idris mold after all. No more than my friend Katto Harries, barmaid at the Red Dragon.

​

“I’ll stay put,” was what I said to Bevan. “Might as well.”

​

“Why don’t you make us a pot of tea,” being his answer to that. 

​

When I walked past him, his smile was slow, his head at an angle.

​

Please God, I’d only imagined that the whole of his attention had been fixed on my backside.