A Time of Hope (Part Five of The People of this Parish Saga) by Thorne Nicola

Author:Thorne, Nicola [Thorne, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2013-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

July 1934

“Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth, as it were, a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.

“In the midst of life we are in death ...”

A solitary wail eerily broke the stillness as Mary Martyn’s coffin was lowered into the grave beside that of the mother-in-law she had never known.

The churchyard was so full that the wailing mourner was hard to see, but the sound came from the back of the crowd and not from the immediate family who, supporting Alexander, gathered by the side of the grave.

Carson recalled that on the day Nelly had been buried the sun had also shone, giving an awful sense of incongruity to the solemn proceedings. Then it had been spring. Now it was midsummer and the earth was ablaze with the bright colours of flowers and the variegated greens of the trees in the churchyard. The lime tree that had been about to burgeon the day Nelly was buried now had myriads of little pods which fluttered and danced, embodying the very spirit of life, in the soft breeze. It was as though everything in this place of death was vibrantly alive, giving some sense to the belief that the soul of the departed rises from the dead to rejoin the Creator in heaven.

Beside him Alexander stood quite still, his head bent, his face utterly impassive as if he too had no life left in him. Tentatively Carson put a hand on his shoulder and briefly Alexander raised his head flashing him a grateful smile. In that moment an intimacy between father and son was born that made Carson rejoice even amidst the gloom, the awful all-pervasive sense of loss at the cutting off of the life of a young girl of such tender years. Out of such evil good might yet come.

Even the rector, Hubert Turner, veteran of many a funeral, had been hard put to offer consolation to the mourners who flocked into the church. Several times he had faltered in his sermon to blow his nose loudly. There had been a lot of snuffling and coughing among the large congregation that filled the church and overflowed outside. The whole of Wenham had closed its doors and come to the funeral, not so much to honour Mary, who they hardly knew, but to support the Woodville family of which she, by however devious a route, was a member.

The gravediggers finished lowering the coffin, withdrew the straps that had secured it and stood back beside the mound of earth they had dug the previous day. Hesitantly Alexander stepped forward, picked up a lump of soil and threw it on the coffin. He stood for a long time gazing at it and at the simple words inscribed on the brass plate:

Mary Martyn

1917-1934

She was just a few days short of her seventeenth birthday.

He stepped back and then the members of the family approached the grave, each one casting a handful of earth upon the coffin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.