Dick was buried next day. Ned, Tom and Ed-me-boy arrived early, laid down the hurdle on which Dick had been brought home and which had been left leaning against the cottage wall, and had carried the body to it, for it was too wide to get in through the door. The candles had burnt to nothing. The men complained in mutters of the more than awful stench of the corpse, and flicked at the flies on the oozing swollen hand. Peter joined them and with one at each corner of the hurdle they carried the corpse across the Common. When they reached the bridge they stopped and carefully, all bending together, put down the hurdle and stretched their shoulders and eased their hands. Hilda bent down and rearranged the blanket which covered the body. All were silent. Marion remembered that moment in sharp detail. It was a cloudy morning, windless, heavy. The path on which the hurdle lay was trodden bare of grass – only a few flat plantains remained on the stony earth. The path’s edges were dry grass mixed with camomile fronds, also trodden flat, and beyond that taller grass, pale with darker seed-heads, all interspersed with points of dock and blue-green thistles with their mauve flowers breaking into fluff. By the stones that made the approach to the bridge a small convolvulus struggled, decorating the dry grass with its pink cones.

Communicating with each other with a few grunts and gestures, Peter took the head of the hurdle and Tom the foot, and they carefully lifted it and carried it over the bridge. The two planks did not allow two to walk abreast across it. On the other side Ned and Ed-me-boy took up their places again and with some shifting of hands, the procession continued to the Green.

The importance of the hay harvest competed with the need to respect the dead. This resulted in all the village women and their small children and some of the men standing about on the Green, subdued and anxious. They gathered and followed the procession, which somewhere Janty and True had joined, and stood silently round the grave, while, as ceremoniously as it is possible to do such a thing, the hurdle was tipped so that Dick’s body rolled into the rooty slot. Father John said his strange words again and rearranged his four rather nervous boy helpers behind him and waved his red freckled hand at them in encouragement. Their four frightened thin voices joined his intoning dirge in a brief funeral song, tune and words, albeit incomprehensible words, familiar to all but the youngest.

The rain had begun while they sang but the yew trees had kept most of it off them. The song ended, a blessing was pronounced, and the crowd broke up. Tom neatly folded the blanket which had covered Dick and handed it to Marion without a word. Ned carried the hurdle away, the two dogs following him uneasily, their hind legs not running in alignment with their front legs, as lost dogs always run. Peter and Tom, taking up the spades which they had left behind a yew, started shovelling in the earth. Hilda stood there, with the little girls each side of her, the drizzle sparkling on their orange curls, and watched the spades in silence. Dame Margaret approached her and took her arm.