The wet dirt clung to Thomas’s black, polished shoes and the rain plastered his long, fair hair to his head. He wiped it from his eyes and wondered why he wasn’t crying. Aunt Jane wasn’t either. The old lady bit her lip and stared angrily up at the overcast sky, looking like a veteran about to go into battle. Thomas loved the old housekeeper; now that his mother was gone, she was the only person he really trusted in the whole wide world.
Thomas kept his face turned away from his father and tried not to look down into the obscene hole in the ground into which the undertaker’s men had lowered his mother’s body. He could hear the rain pattering on the wooden coffin lid and the vicar’s voice louder than it had been before, straining to be heard above the rumblings of thunder in the sky.
“Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower…”
Yes, thought Thomas. The words were right. His mother had never been happy. How could she be when his father had deserted her? And she had not lived long enough. She had been cut down like one of her roses when she was the most beautiful, the most vital, the best of women in the world.
Thomas suddenly began to weep not just for himself but for his mother too. For what had been taken away from her. She would never see another summer; she would never know what he might become.
“O holy and most merciful Savior, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death,” asked the vicar, but the grand words felt hollow to Thomas. His mother’s death was eternal. That was what this funeral meant. She would never be again. He would never again see the smile that lit up her face when he came into the room; never feel her hand as it brushed his long hair back away from his forehead in a gesture of affection that had lived on past his childhood. Thomas did not know why he was still in the world when she was not. How could he live when she didn’t?
“O holy and merciful Savior, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”
Thomas thought of his mother’s last hour, and the memory came to him as it had so often in recent days of their last moment together at the top of the stairs. He’d pushed the books and the hiding place had opened. He’d heard the voices at the bottom of the stairs and sensed the light of the flashlights. He’d stepped forward, stumbling into the darkness of the priest hole, and lost hold of the side of his mother’s white nightgown. He’d replayed it in his mind so many times, but still he couldn’t say whether he had let go or his mother had pulled away. All he knew was that as he turned back to her in the darkness, he felt the bookcase close behind him. She must have stood with her back to the books pushing the shelves back into place until the first shot took her and she fell to the ground. But by then she had succeeded in her purpose. She died knowing that he was hidden.
Her last act was to preserve his life, and suddenly Thomas realized what this meant. He had to continue living because she had saved him. He was not cut off from her because he knew precisely what she wanted. She was not shut up in that dark brown box in the ground on which his father was at that moment throwing his farewell flowers. She lived on in him. It was not “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” He would see that it was not.
Thomas looked around him. The graves of generations of Sackvilles and their retainers stretched back toward the old gray stone church, past the trunk of the great chestnut tree that had blown down in the storm of 1989. Some of the moss-covered graves had sunk into the ground so far that it was not now possible to read the name of the Sackville whose bones lay under the turf.
The church and the graveyard had not changed in 350 years. Buried here were the same men and women who had screamed lustily in the font at their baptism and glowed with the promise of life as they signed their names in the leather-bound Register of Marriages that was now gathering dust in the church vestry. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vicars had walked down this same gravel path between the graves and read the same words from the Book of Common Prayer.
Thomas suddenly had a profound sense of the significance of the dead who lay all around him. People who had walked the old narrow streets of Flyte and fought against the same cruel sea. Sackvilles who had inherited the House of the Four Winds and passed it on intact to the next generation. Thomas’s father was alien to all of this, but he, Thomas, was inseparable from what had gone before and what was still to come. He looked up at the friendly, sympathetic faces of his neighbors; men and women whom he had known all his life, and he smiled at them through his tears. He was not alone, and as if in answer to his thought, the rain slowed and then stopped and the sun came out weakly overhead.
Chapter 17
After the funeral, Peter stood beneath the portrait of his father-in-law in the dining room of the House of the Four Winds, talking in turn to each of the friends, neighbors, and distant relatives who had come to pay their respects.
His training in politics had made him skillful at this type of event. He remembered almost everybody’s name and spoke to each of them for just the right amount of time, accepting their sympathy with just the right amount of gratitude.
All the time that he was talking, however, he was also looking for his son. Thomas had disappeared after the funeral, and no one, not even Jane Martin, seemed to know where he had gone. Peter had been very conscious of how the boy had shrunk from his side in the graveyard, and he wanted to try to bridge the gap between them before he had to go back to London.
Not a day passed that Peter did not regret hitting his son, although he knew himself well enough to realize that it was not something that he could have chosen not to do. Thomas had provoked him too far when he said those terrible things.
Most of the guests had gone when Jane Martin told Peter that Greta wanted him on the phone. He extricated himself politely from a conversation with the Flyte harbormaster and took his glass of red wine into the study where he stood looking out through the newly repaired window as he picked up the phone.
“Hullo, Greta,” he said, but there was no response. Just a hubbub of voices above which he could hear a drunken man shouting that he wanted to go home.
“Greta!” he shouted into the phone. He could feel something was wrong, although he didn’t know what it was.
He heard her voice just before he was about to hang up and try to call back.
“Peter, thank God you’re there. They’ve arrested me.”
Peter dropped his glass of wine on the floor. It did not smash, but the red wine spread out over the pale carpet and Peter turned away. It looked too much like blood.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m in Ipswich with this Hearns man. They brought me here from London.”
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. There’s a lawyer here. He says that Thomas has made a statement saying it was me that sent those men to kill Anne. I don’t understand how he could say that to them, Peter. Not after all the time that we’ve spent together.”
“Greta, I’m coming. I’ll get you out. I promise.”
“Make it quick, Peter. Please.”
As he put down the phone, Peter saw his son come through the north gate and walk toward the house across the lawn. Peter ran outside to intercept him. They met under an old elm tree, and Peter pulled his son behind it so that they wouldn’t be visible from the dining room window.
“What is it, Dad?” Thomas was alarmed. His father was breathless and had still not let go of the lapel of his suit jacket.
“Where’ve you been?” It was not the question Peter wanted to ask but he needed time to find the right words.