‘And with thy spirit.’ The words echoed off the wall and trees, giving the impression of other mourners grouped behind in the dark. Tom Colwell pressed closer to the others; he was at the back of the group and felt chill mortality laying a hand on his shoulder.
‘Let us pray.’ Steane didn’t need to see the prayer book to say the words. He had been saying them now for thirty years and more and sometimes hardly heard himself speaking them. The circumstances of this burial were not something he was familiar with – churchmen were seldom at the burial of a suicide – but he had offered to do this, and he would do it properly, or not at all. But even so, part of his mind was jumping on ahead. There would be no reading, that much was clear. But he didn’t feel it was a funeral service without a psalm. He needn’t have worried. As he concluded the opening prayer for the dead man, two sweet voices lifted up to his left.
‘Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; O Lord, hear my voice.’ Marlowe and Colwell intoned the words of the one hundred and thirtieth psalm, known as De Profundis.
Old habits die hard and Parker and Bromerick took up the decani response. ‘Oh let thine ears consider well; the voice of my complaint.’
Steane felt a tremor pass through him. These voices, raised to God in this bleak place where no organ wheezed and groaned reminded him of how he had felt when he first entered the Church; before the whole thing had become something to organize and manipulate. He was brought back to the dark present by a shuffling noise over to his left and he remembered why they were here. Two parish paupers, earning a sorely-needed farthing, carried the linen-wrapped body of Ralph Whitingside on a hurdle, the bier stored in the church being beyond the pale for him, and placed it on the ground at the side of the grave. The last verse of the psalm died away into silence and then, loud enough so everyone could hear it, there was the sound of weeping from the trees. Only Marlowe knew for sure who it was and, taking their lead from him, no one moved towards the noise, but let the poor soul mourn alone.
Making the sign of the cross as so few men did these days, Steane bowed his head and spoke the words of committal over the dead man’s body. The paupers, with minimal ceremony, heaved the body into the grave, which, being shallow, took him with hardly a sound. Then, to Marlowe’s surprise, Steane spoke again.
‘O God, whose blessed Son was buried in a Sepulchre in the garden, bless, we pray, this grave and grant that he whose body is to be buried here may dwell with Christ in Paradise, and may come to thy Heavenly Kingdom, through thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.’
There was a muttered ‘amen’ from the small congregation. The paupers, standing off to one side, pushed back their ragged hoods and exchanged puzzled looks in the dark. They had stood here often enough, but had never heard that bit before. Nor had Marlowe.
‘I didn’t know that it was normal to consecrate a suicide’s grave,’ he said quietly to Steane as they walked away from the graveside, trying not to hear the gritty sound of the spades cutting into the pile of earth beside Ralph Whitingside’s last bed.
Steane picked his way in the dark over the tussocky grass and took a moment to reply and to compose his voice. He had been unusually moved by this service, by the voices singing the psalm, by the crying in the trees. He cleared his throat. ‘It seemed the least I could do,’ he said, and forged ahead, to where his horse cropped the grass at the edge of the lane.
Marlowe was thoughtful. So someone else didn’t believe Whitingside was a suicide. He was now more determined than ever to solve this mystery; as friend and First Finder (or near enough) it could almost be said to be his duty. He turned and waited for his friends, who were fiddling with their lanterns, passing the flame from one to the other, trying to banish the dark as Steane’s horse clattered into the distance.
‘Come on, my lads,’ he said, with what sounded for all the world like genuine enthusiasm. ‘Let’s go and see if we can find an inn with a light showing. I think we all need a drink, in Ralph’s memory, don’t you?’
And, arm in arm, the Parker scholars moved off into the dark, taking a little world of flickering light with them.
At the grave, the paupers had done their job, patting down the earth with the flat of their spades and had gone. A pale shape detached itself from the trees and crept close to the churchyard wall. Meg Hawley stood, wrapped in her dusty summer cloak, looking down at the bare earth for a moment then, with a low moan, sank to the ground and lay, as though alongside the man beneath the soil, with her arm outstretched above him as though, too late, to protect him from his enemies.
The Cam winds on for ever. It twists, dark and green, with its clawing weed through the mellow stone of the colleges, gliding past the wherries and fondling the trailing willows that added their tears to the water.
Beyond Magdelene Bridge, where the flat lands to the east gave way to Sturminster Common, it widens and shallows and thick sedge hangs over it, shielding the banks from the noonday sun. It was here that Nicholas Drew dozed that scorching Sunday. He’d never been much of a church goer, but to avoid the recusancy fees, he’d gone along to St Bene’t’s as usual, resenting anew that those stuck up bastards from Corpus Christi College used his church as if it were their own. Along with most of the Town, he despised the poll-shaven scholars with their books and their serious frowns. Most of all, he hated their hypocrisy. The same men who cut him dead in his church of a Sunday morning, shoulder barged him off his pavements on Sunday night and drank in his inn, talking loudly in Latin with some private joke at his expense.
But the cloudless blue consoled him. All his life he’d known this river, making his meagre living by ferrying the University from one side to the other or punting them up stream and down. He knew the river’s moods, the dark waters of winter where the rain pitted the surface, the stagnant hollows where the ice lay under the bitter wind. And this time of year was Drew’s favourite, when the water was warming up and the fish flew slick and silver in the flickering lights and shadows of the shallows.
His line trailed in the water and his rod was wedged in his usual niche on the bank. He lay back on the soft moss, chewing the end of a newly pulled grass stalk, sweet as honey. He tilted his ferryman’s cap over his eyes. No more work today. No more church. You’re nearer to God by a river than anywhere . . .
There was a tug on the line and before Drew could scramble up to haul in his wriggling, terrified catch, the line and rod jerked out of the bank and splashed into the river. Shit! Had old Nick hooked a Leviathan here in the sparkling waters of the Cam?
His line had tangled in something floating by the far bank. Whatever it was had been meandering midstream and now veered away from him. No surprises there. The current did that along this stretch, the river-bit everybody called Paradise. The surprise was the bundle itself. At first, as he scrambled to his feet and followed it, it looked like a pile of rags, waterlogged cloth tossed from a market stall in Petty Cury. But Drew’s line was still caught in it and his rod was floating faster now, out of his reach. He knew the currents here. They were fickle and unpredictable, the river bed uneven and shelved. Men had died here, reaching Paradise twice as their lives came to an end.
Bugger! Nicholas Drew was running now, stumbling over the clods of turf as he raced the bundle. There was no bridge until Anglesey Abbey and that was nearly two miles away. He’d have to risk the water if he wanted to get his rod back and he’d have to do it before the deeps he knew lay downstream. If he got into difficulties there, he’d never get out.
He tried it as best he could, hauling off his pattens and his jerkin, crashing into the river’s turbulence. The water that had felt so warm to his fisherman’s fingers earlier was now, suddenly, very cold and it hit him like a wall. Sheep grazing on the bank, startled by the sudden noise, skitted away, bleating in their fear. Then they stopped to look at him, stupid, passive, unhelpful.