Death at Dawn - Caro Peacock [12]
A clock struck two. There were roads straggling out of town with more lodging places along them, but they’d have to wait until later. I tried one more hostelry with the sign of a bottle over the door, was given the usual answer, and added another question: could they kindly give me directions to the burial ground? It was on the far side of the town. The sky was blue and the sun warm, seagulls crying, white sails in the Channel, all sizes from small scudding lighters to a great English man-o’-war. My lavender dress and bonnet were hardly funeral wear but my other clothes were on the far side of the Channel. My father wouldn’t mind. Too little care for one’s appearance is an incivility to others: too much is an offence to one’s intelligence.
Reverend Bateman’s expression as he waited for me by the grey chapel in its grove of wind-bent tamarisks showed that my appearance was an offence to him.
‘Are there no other mourners?’
‘None,’ I said.
An ancient carriage stopped at the gates, rectangular and tar-painted like a box for carrying fish, drawn by two raw-boned bays. They had nodding black plumes between the ears, as was fitting, but the plumes must have done service for many funerals in the sea breeze because most of the feathers had worn away and they were stick-like, converting the bays into sad unicorns. Two men in black slid off the box and another two unfolded from inside. The coffin came towards us on their shoulders. The black cloth covering it was so thin and worn that even the slight breeze threatened to blow it away and the bearers had to fight to hold it down.
I refuse even to remember the next half hour. It had nothing to do with my living father. He would have laughed at it. We had our five-pounds-sixteen-and-four-pence-worth of English funeral rites and that is all that can be said. Afterwards the four bearers and two men in gardener’s clothes whom I took to be gravediggers, stood around fidgeting. It seemed that I was required to tip them. As I handed over some coins, and Reverend Bateman studiously looked the other way, I realised that the thinnest of the bearers was the man from the mortuary. I’d been trying to work up the resolution to go back there with some of the questions I’d been too shocked to ask on the first visit. At least this spared me the journey.
‘Were you there when my father’s body was brought in?’
He gave a reluctant nod.
‘I was as well,’ said one of the others, a fat man in a black tricorne hat with a nose like a fistful of crushed mulberries.
‘Who brought him in?’
They looked at each other.
‘Friends,’ said the thin one.
‘Did they leave their names?’
A double headshake.
‘How many?’
‘Two,’ said the fat one.
‘Or three,’ said the thin one.
‘What did they look like?’
An exchange of glances over my head.
‘English gentlemen,’ said the fat one.
‘Young, old, fair, dark?’
‘Not so very young,’ said the fat one.
‘Not old,’ said the thin one. ‘Not particularly dark or fair that we noticed.’
‘Did they say anything?’
‘They said they’d be back soon to make the funeral arrangements.’
‘And did they come back?’
Another double headshake.
‘What day was it that they brought him in?’
‘Three days ago. Saturday,’ the fat one said.
‘Saturday, early in the morning,’ the thin one confirmed.
Behind them, the gravediggers were shovelling the earth over my father’s coffin. It was sandy and slid off their spades with a hissing sound. Reverend Bateman was looking at his watch, annoyed that I should be talking to the men, all the more so because he clearly didn