It did not move.

He knelt beside it. Gently, he turned the head. As he feared, the face was Ma’s.

She was not breathing. He felt her chest. There was no heartbeat.

Edgar bowed his head in the rain, with his hand on the still body, and wept.

After a while he began to think. She had drowned—but why? She had no reason to go to the river. Unless . . .

Unless her death had been intentional. Had she killed herself so that her sons would have enough to eat? Edgar felt sick.

There was a weight inside him like a cold lump of lead in his heart. Ma was gone. He could imagine her reasoning: she was ill, she could no longer work, she had little time left on this earth, and all she was doing was eating food her family needed. She had sacrificed herself for their sakes, perhaps especially for the grandchild. If she had said all that to Edgar he would have argued fiercely; but she had only thought it, and then taken the terrible, logical step.

He made up his mind that he would lie about this. If suicide was suspected she might be denied a Christian burial. To avoid that, Edgar would say he had found her in the forest. Her wet clothes would be explained by the rain. She had been ill, perhaps she was losing her mind, she had wandered off, and the rain had acted on her already weakened body with fatal effect. He would even tell his brothers that story. Then she could lie in the graveyard alongside the church.

Water came from her mouth when he picked her up. She was light: she had got thinner during their time at Dreng’s Ferry. Her body was still warm to the touch.

He kissed her forehead.

Then he carried her home.

The three brothers dug the grave in the wet churchyard and they buried Ma the next day. Everyone in the hamlet came except Dreng. Ma’s wisdom and determination had won people’s respect.

The brothers had lost father and mother in just over a year. Erman said: “As the eldest son, I’m head of the family now.” No one believed that. Edgar was the smart one, the resourceful one, the brother who came up with solutions to problems. He might never say so, but he was in practice head of the family. And that included the tiresome Cwenburg and her baby.

The rain stopped the day after the funeral, and Edgar started on the ditch. He did not know whether his plan would work. Was it an idea that would fail in practice, like the stone tiles for the roof of the brewhouse? He could only try it and see.

He used a wooden spade with a rusty iron tip. He did not want the ditch to have high banks—that would have defeated the purpose—so he had to carry the soil down to the river. He used it to raise the riverbank.