She stood panting for a moment, then her lips set hard. She thought she heard Dic sob as he heaved the chair into the mire and the dark water bubbled up around the wheels.
The chair didn't sink. It wouldn't sink. It wouldn't be easy to get out, even with only poor, wasted Matt in there, but it wouldn't sink.
Maybe Matt was hoping they wouldn't have to get it out. That he'd be carried away, leaving the chair behind, suspended skeletally in the Moss, slowly corroding into the peat or maybe preserved there for thousands of years, like the Bogman.
'Fine,' Matt said. 'That's ... fine. Thanks.'
The chair was only a foot or so from the path, embedded up to its footplate in Bridelow Moss. Dic stood there, tense, arms spread, ready to snatch at the chair if it moved.
'Go away, lad,' Matt said quietly. He always spoke quietly now. So calm. Never lost his temper, never - as Lottie would have done - railed at the heavens, screaming at the blinding injustice of it.
Stoical Matt. Dying so well.
Sometimes she wished she could hate him.
It was Sunday morning.
As they'd lifted Matt's chair from the van, a scrap of a hymn from the church had been washed up by the wind-powered rain, tossed at them like an empty crisp-packet then blown away again.
They'd moved well out of earshot, Lottie looking around.
Thinking that on a Sunday there were always ramblers, up from Macclesfield and Glossop, Manchester and Sheffield, relishing the dirty weather, the way ramblers did. If it belonged to anybody, Bridelow Moss belonged to the ramblers, and they made sure everybody knew it.
But this morning there were none.
The bog, treacle-black under surface rust, fading to a mouldering green where it joined the mist. And not a glimmer of anorak-orange.
As if, somehow, they knew. As if word had been passed round, silently, like chocolate, before the ramble: avoid the bog, avoid Bridelow Moss.
So it was just the three of them, shadows in the filth of the morning.
'Go on, then,' Matt was saying, trying to pump humour into his voice. 'Bugger off, the pair of you.'
Lottie put out a hand to squeeze his shoulder, then drew back because it would hurt him. Even a peck on the cheek hurt him these days.
It had all happened too quickly, a series of savage punches coming one after the other, faster and faster, until your body was numbed and your mind was concussed.
I don't think I need to tell you, do I, Mrs Castle.
That he's going to die? No. There were signs ... Oh, small signs, but ... I wanted him to come and tell you weeks ... months ago. He wouldn't. He has this ... what can I call it ... ? Fanatical exuberance? If he felt anything himself, he just overrode it. If there's something he wants to do, get out of his system, everything else becomes irrelevant. I did try, doctor, but he wouldn't come.
Please - don't blame yourself. I doubt if we'd have been able to do much, even if we'd found out two or three months before we did. However, this business of refusing medication . . Drugs.
It's not a dirty word, Mrs Castle. If you could persuade him, I think ...
He's angry, doctor. He won't take anything that he thinks will dull his perceptions. He's ... this is not anything you'd understand ... he's reaching out for something.
'Go on,' Matt said. 'Get in the van, in the dry. You'll know when to come back.'
And what did he mean by that?
As they walked away, the son and the widow-in-waiting, she saw him pull something from under the rug and tumble it out into his lap. It looked, in this light, like a big dead crow enfurled in its own limp wings.
The rain plummeted into Mart's blue denim cap, the one he wore on stage.
Dic said, 'He'll catch his dea—'
Stared, suddenly stricken, into his mother's eyes.
'I don't understand any more,' he said, panicked. 'Where he is ... I've lost him. Is that ... I mean, is it any place to be? In his state?'
'Move.' Lottie speaking in harsh monosyllables. 'Go.' The only way she could speak at all. Turning him round and prodding him towards the van.
'Is it the drugs? Mum, is it the drugs responsible for this?'
Lottie climbed into the van, behind the wheel. Slammed the door with both hands. Wound the window down, keeping the rain on her face. She said nothing.
Dic clambered in the other side. He looked more like her than Matt, the way his dark red hair curled, defying the flattening rain. Matt didn't have hair any more, under his blue denim cap.
'Mum?'
'No,' Lottie said. 'There's no drugs. Listen.'
It was beginning.
Faint and fractured, remote and eerie as the call of a marsh bird, familiar but alien - alien, now, to her.
But not, she was sure, to the Moss.
She saw that Dic was crying, helpless, shoulders quaking.
An aggressive thing, like little kids put on: I can't cope with this, I refuse to cope ... take it away, take it off me.
She couldn't. She turned away, stared hard at the scratched metal dashboard, blobbed with rain from the open window.
Because she didn't understand it either. Nor, she was sure, was she meant to. Which hurt. The sound which still pierced her heart, which had been filtered through her husband, like the blood in his veins, for as long as she'd known him and some years before that.
It had begun. For the last time?
Please, God.
She looked out of the window-space, unblinking, cheeks awash.
Fifty yards away, hunched in the peat, bound in cold winding-sheets of rain, the black bag under his arm like a third lung ...
... Matt Castle playing on his pipes.
Eerie as a marsh bird, and all the birds were silent in the rain.
The tune forming on the wind and falling with the water, the notes pure as tears and thin with illness.
Dic rubbed his eyes with his fingers. 'I don't know it,' he said. 'I don't know this tune.' Petulant. As if this was some sort of betrayal.
'He only wrote it ... a week or so ago,' Lottie said. 'When you were away. He said ...' Trying to smile. 'Said it just came to him. Actually, it came hard. He'd been working at it for weeks.'
Lament for the Man, he'd called it. She'd thought at first that that was partly a reference simply to their pub, The Man I'th Moss, adrift on the edge of the village, cut off after all these years from the brewery.
But no. It was another call to him, wherever he was. As if Matt was summoning his spirit home.