Slight Mourning

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Slight Mourning

A C. D. Sloan Mystery

Catherine Aird

For Margaret Shorthouse (but for whom, etc.)

with love.

“Slight mourning will be worn during the visit …”

Postscript to a letter written by an equerry in 1889 inviting a guest to Sandringham House for the weekend.

ONE

Miss Cynthia Paterson considered herself something of a
connaisseuse
of a good funeral.

This had been born of long practice. She was the only child of a country rector and attendance at village funerals large and small had been part of her lot in life for as long as she could remember.

She was at one now, sitting in her usual pew in the great empty church of St. Leonard in the parish of Constance Parva in the county of Calleshire. High above her, in the church tower (late Norman, with Victorian embellishments), the funeral bell tolled at regular intervals. That was the tenor bell (cast in 1622), which was her favourite.

It had the words “Alfred bade me be wrought” inscribed on the metal, and when she was small—she'd been a ringer ever since she had been strong enough to handle a rope—she used to wonder who Alfred had been. There was something else carved on the bell too: something which she had never forgotten, although it was a good many years now since she'd been right up to the top of the bell tower.

I to the Church the Living call

Too the grave do summons al.

In those days, of course, bell-ringing had been important. They'd rung the death knell when anyone in the parish died, accompanied by the “tellers” which gave the age and sex of whoever had passed away. There was nothing like that these days. Ringing wasn't what it had been when she was young—and that wasn't yesterday, either, as Cynthia herself would have been the first to admit. They didn't even always have the funeral bell at a funeral any more now.

This funeral was different, of course.

Gregory Fitch would have stopped whatever he was doing up at the timber yard half an hour ago. Then he'd have come down to the church and taken off his jacket in the same purposeful manner as he did everything else in life. She could visualize him now as clearly as if she'd been standing in the bell tower beside him: a sturdy countryman, with muscles thickened by the saw and the axe, to whom bell-ringing was effortless.

He'd have one eye on the clock, that was certain. A minute bell was a minute bell when Greg Fitch rang it. There was something else that was certain too, and that was that there would always be a funeral bell when one of the Fent family was buried.

Miss Cynthia Paterson turned her attention back to the church. She wasn't the only one sitting there even though she had been early. Being early for church was something else born of long experience. It had been one of the few things her father had insisted on, and old habits die hard. For forty years he had ministered to the parish of Constance Parva and read and re-read his books—and got to the church in good time.

She aligned her hassock with a deft hook of her right foot. Perhaps if her mother had lived he would have taken preferment when the opportunity came his way—but her mother hadn't lived and her father had stayed on at the rectory of Constance Parva while Cynthia herself had grown up and passed almost without noticing it into middle age. At the same time, with her father, middle age had slipped equally imperceptibly into old age and a Christian life had ended with a Christian death.

Which was more than could be said for him whom they had come to bury today. A Christian life, perhaps, but nobody could call it a Christian death. That didn't mean that the Book of Common Prayer didn't provide for it. The Prayer Book provided for almost everything you could think of—most of it in the Litany. If she closed her eyes now she could conjure up a vision of her old father intoning, “From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death …”

She didn't mind being early. It was pleasantly cool in the church even though the hot summer sun was shining outside. The stained-glass windows on the south side of the church glowed warmly, splashing their colours all over the chancel. It was August. August, which the ancients called the death month, though she didn't know why. She would have to look it up. She still had all her father's books.

Her own much-thumbed, most-used book—her gardening text-book—decreed that in August the gardener could go on holiday with no worries provided that he has “mown the lawn, watered thoroughly, and asked a friend to pick the fruit and vegetables.” Cynthia Paterson couldn't afford holidays but she did ease up a little from the professional gardening she did the rest of the year round.

Her various employers up and down the village didn't seem to mind. She had noticed before now that they themselves had slackened their interest in their own gardens by the middle of August—except those with the church flowers on their minds. They remained perpetually anxious; but not the others. April was the only month in the year when all her garden owners were uniformly troublesome—wanting, to a woman, horticultural wonders done by June.

She looked round to remind herself of who had done the church flowers this week. Marjorie Marchmont, she decided without difficulty. She would have known even if she hadn't been keeping an eye on Marjorie's garden all the year round herself, fending off her vigorous forays into the flower border and making up for her equally taxing periods of total neglect, when something or someone diverted her attention from her plants.

No two people arranged flowers in the same way—Cynthia had a theory that flower arrangements were as individual as finger-prints—and the definiteness of Marjorie Marchmont shone through the firm reds and bright blues and the manner in which they were packed stiffly into the church vases.

The church door creaked and another mourner came in. Herbert Kelway, village grocer and unctuous with it. Half-currant Kelway was what he was called behind his back—his scales never went down too heavily on the customer's side—and he'd been known to chop a currant in two. He always came to his customers' funerals—and he liked to be known as a provision merchant rather than as a grocer. Cynthia Paterson, who didn't like him, didn't think he would be either for very many more years—he was losing trade steadily to the big self-service stores in Berebury and Calleford.

Peter Miller came in hard on the grocer's heels. He was a farmer and not losing out to anyone. On the contrary, thought Cynthia dryly. Peter Miller's land, Fallow Farm, marched alongside the Fent property and Fallow Farm had prospered mightily under his go-ahead new management. She wouldn't be at all surprised if Peter Miller were thinking of buying an acre or two of Strontfield Park if he got the chance. He'd be lucky, she thought. Nobody had had a chance to buy any Fent land for generations—and it wasn't likely that Peter Miller would be any luckier than anyone else.

The bell tolled again and at the same time old Nellie Roberts came in. No funeral in Constance Parva was complete without Nellie Roberts. Her place in the church was strategic and her office that of messenger—the Greeks, Cynthia was sure, would have had a word for it. From Nellie's pew both the lich-gate and the approaching
cortège
were in full view. At the same time Nellie herself could be seen clearly by clergy and organist. Both were obedient to cues in the form of a nod of Nellie's time-battered straw hat.

At much the same time as Nellie Roberts took up her look-out station, so to speak, Cynthia saw Richard Renville and his wife, Ursula, enter. They joined Cynthia in her pew, Richard placing himself next to her, his wife on his other side.

“A bad business,” he hissed in her ear.

She nodded, and whispered back, “Poor Helen …”

Richard Renville pulled down the corners of his mouth in a quick grimace. “And poor Bill …”

“And poor Bill,” agreed Cynthia Paterson
sotto voce
.

Bill Fent of Strontfield Park who had gone to join his fathers.

Almost unconciously Cynthia Paterson tilted her head until she was looking at the Fent family tablets on the north wall. The thought, she decided defensively, wasn't as pagan as it first seemed. There on the church wall were memorials to his ancestors—there had been Fents at Strontfield Park long before anyone could remember—and now Bill's name would join those of his father and grandfather and all the other William Fents of Strontfield.

Her eye wandered over toward Bill's grandfather's name. He had died of pneumonia in the days when you did die of pneumonia. Cynthia could remember her own father praying in church that old William Fent would live through his pneumonia crisis—and he hadn't. Any more than Bill's father had lived to come back from Dunkirk in spite of all the prayers there were. Not, of course, that modern medicine—or peace—would have saved Bill Fent. He was dead before the ambulance got anywhere near him.

Everyone said so.

The other driver was still alive, though. The ambulance had rushed him hell-for-leather to Berebury Hospital. That would be a simile left over from the horse, decided Cynthia, her mind drifting away from the vision of Bill Fent, dead, to that of a man lying unconscious in a hospital bed.

And like to die too, they said, though on what authority she didn't know.

Her mind's eye could take in the intensive care unit at the hospital because she had been there on its opening day. She'd been invited because she'd been a collector for the hospital in the old days when two pence a week and an annual fête seemed able to cover all the running costs—and now she collected for the Friends of the Hospital for patients' comforts above and beyond the call of the Health Service.