Fallen Grace - Mary Hooper [39]
The woman looked at her, wondering at what she’d said, and nodded very formally. ‘Then may I wish you good morning.’
‘Good morning,’ said Mrs Robinson. She was already regretting the tone she’d used with the woman, but people went on so much about appearances and whether Baby looked like her or Stanley, and really, it was none of their business. She knew what Stanley would say – that they didn’t mean anything and were only being friendly. She really must try to remember that and not get upset . . .
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Chapter Fifteen
Four weeks later, Grace, standing outside an imposing church in central London, shivered in her black crêpe gown and cloak. The weather was growing colder now and crêpe, although the most fashionable fabric for both the bereaved and the funeral mute, was not comfortable to wear, for it didn’t keep out the wind and, at the faintest hint of damp in the air, would attach itself clammily to one’s limbs.
Grace and the girl she was partnered with, Jane, were positioned each side of the church porch, twin harbingers of doom in their black hoods and veiling, holding staffs with trailing ribbons. They had been booked by the bereaved family to stand in front of the door maintaining expressions of poignant and awful grief for six hours, until the main funeral party arrived and the interment commenced, so had been there since seven o’clock that morning.
It was to be a grand and lavish funeral. The family of Cedric Welland-Scropes, the dead man, owned a large mausoleum in the church grounds where up to twenty family members could be entombed, so there would be two ceremonies: one in the church and one at the corpse’s final resting place on the far side of the churchyard. A feather-bearer was to lead the procession of mourners from the deceased’s home to the church, the horses would have newly-dyed black plumes, a richly fringed velvet pall would cover the oak coffin in its glass carriage and there would be at least twelve funeral carriages behind this. For all those attending there would be gifts of black silk scarves, hatbands and gloves.
Grace had tried several times to begin a conversation with her matching mute in order to make the time go more quickly, but Jane had lived and worked at the funeral parlour for ten years now, since a child of nine, and took her role extremely seriously. She had no difficulty in maintaining a tragic face at all times and sometimes actually managed to shed tears by convincing herself that she, personally, had suffered a death. Anxious and apologetic, she spoke little when off duty, and not at all when on, for Mrs Unwin had impressed upon her that a mute should be just that – mute – and she believed that what Mrs Unwin said was law. Grace, therefore, after trying to persuade her to speak, fell to silence and passed the time watching preparations for a pauper burial not thirty feet from where they were standing.
St Jude’s was one of the few old churches in London to still have space for new bodies and here, in an unkempt and uncared-for part of the churchyard, two gravediggers were breaking up the earth in a rough space about ten feet across. As they dug, they came across a selection of human remains which had been lurking near the surface from previous burials: here a femur, there a collar bone and once an entire skull pulled from a great clod of earth. Unmoved by their macabre finds, they whistled as they dug, swore merrily at each other and exchanged witticisms. They could work as they pleased that morning, for, it being paupers from the workhouse to be buried, there were no relatives or friends of the deceased to be considered and no need for any attempt at piety.
To one side of the pit stood a donkey and cart. This held three ragged, clumsily rolled bundles, for none of the paupers had been afforded even the most basic of coffins, but were carelessly wrapped in mean pieces of cloth provided by the Parish. A hank of human hair and an unwrapped leg protruded from one of these bundles, and Grace, noticing