Gathering the Water (20 page)

The mine road was clear for much of its length. Some freak of the valley's configuration meant that the winds which came at it from the west drove the snow uphill
into drifts, leaving the narrow bottom with only a thin covering.

I met a boy who confirmed that the grave-diggers (if such they could still be called) had arrived.

I encountered the men around a fire by the chapel door. I recognized some of the wreckers who had come a month earlier, but Tozer was not among them, and I learned from the man who had taken his place that he had been fired by the Board following the previous visit.

As we spoke, a heavy cart appeared and came slowly along the path leading to the chapel.

A few of the locals came with it, and with them came a preacher I had not before seen. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, with a sash of the brightest scarlet draped over his shoulders. He walked past me without speaking and climbed on to the chapel wall, and there he began a sermon, telling the diggers to wait until he was finished. He made them all uneasy with his words, condemning them for what they were about to do. The locals applauded each of his short, calculated phrases. The man's hot breath formed in plumes around his head, and steam rose from his chest and shoulders to wreathe him further in his overblown piety.

A woman came to stand beside me. ‘You trespass against us, you surely do,' she said to me, her words little more than a cold hiss. Those standing around us nodded in agreement with her.

In the burial ground the diggers gathered more closely together.

‘We will not leave the dead if they are not to be allowed to rest in peace,' the preacher shouted.

The devil in me wanted to call out and ask him
what he expected the dead to do – did he think they might all rise from their coffins and swim to the surface of the coming water like so many silvery fishes?

When his sermon was finished the man dropped his head and clasped his hands in vigorous prayer. I did not hear his exact words for the murmuring of the men and women all around me, and because of the rising claver of the gulls arrived to stake their own noisy claim in the empty future of the place. It occurred to no one to ask whence the birds came, so far from any sea – as in most other things, there is no wonder here, no awe.

The grave-diggers dug quickly, piling the snow into mounds before attacking the hard earth beneath. The few remaining headstones were lifted and carried to the side of the chapel and stacked there.

The first of the rotten coffins soon appeared, but little was done to identify the occupants of the raised boxes. It had been the custom here to open old ground and to bury family members on top of each other. Consequently, the more recent burials rested only a few feet below the surface, and the diggers were surprised and pleased to encounter these so easily.

In some instances the wood of the coffins remained sufficiently intact for them to be lifted whole, but mostly the boxes had succumbed and collapsed, and they and the remains they held were shovelled into sacks before being taken to the waiting cart.

The same woman came back to me as the others dispersed. She said how pleased I must be feeling with myself after all I had achieved there. Again, I made no reply to her. She said that Almighty God, though forgiving, would never forgive me for what I had brought into being
on that day. Had I chosen to speak, I might have agreed with her.

The preacher left his perch on the wall and came to me. He stood beside me for several minutes watching the labouring men. Then he looked out over the lake and traced its outline, dark now against the whiteness of the land. He was clearly impressed by what he saw. I braced myself against the first of his own damning remarks, but instead he held out his hand to me and introduced himself.

‘You are not a well-liked man,' he said, his tone tempered by amusement. ‘They wanted me to say more on the matter.' He nodded to those passing us by. ‘I came overnight. Interminable hours spent in prayer. I don't know what they expected of me, but I don't doubt that I too have disappointed them. They told me the multitude of ways I might condemn you. I wonder that you are not already in flames.' He paused. ‘A short prayer was said for the woman who lost her sister to the asylum. Your name was mentioned in connection with her.'

‘How soon will they take the bodies?' I asked him, refusing to be drawn.

He looked again over the lake. ‘Would it surprise you or dismay you to learn that I am a shareholder in the scheme? This and others like it.'

‘My stocks of surprise and dismay are both long since exhausted where the Board and its works are concerned,' I said.

‘I understand your feelings. Perhaps I should have come here before. An acquaintance of mine said he had encountered you in the autumn.'

‘The historian?'

‘He said even then that you would succeed in your work and that the world here would be changed for ever.'

‘And is he, too, a shareholder?'

‘Of course. These things are wise investments. Men of our limited means must risk what we can. Surely you yourself have some financial commitment in the work.'

I told him it seemed scarcely any risk and he smiled at this and fluttered his hand.

‘I attend all the shareholders' meetings,' he said.

‘And you find no conflict between your profits and the work going on here today?'

‘Why should I? There are plenty of others always ready to stand in the way of progress.'

I turned away from him to watch the diggers. Another fire had been lit, but this one burned with more smoke than flame, fed as it was with the rotten wood and earth of the coffins. I saw where grey bones spilled from the sacks on the cart.

‘Will you bless the remains?' I asked him.

‘It's what they want. They want me to stay the night, but the word is for more snow.'

‘Do you live far away?'

‘Far enough. You could leave with me if you were prepared.'

I shook my head at the empty offer.

The wagon with its load of boxes was brought closer to the chapel.

‘It was never a much-used place,' he said. ‘Whatever they might have told you. A few blue ribbon bands on holidays, visiting fanatics, healers. Did you imagine it to have once been the spiritual centre of the place? No. They are affectionate for it now only because it is the last of what
they have to lose. Had I stayed tonight, my prayers would have been short. Like you, I do what is expected of me and no more. I fit into the expectations of others more than I fulfil my own intentions. It is a commoner path than you might imagine.' He again held out his hand to me, then put on his gloves and left me.

I was alone in the company of the diggers. There was now little method in their work and they left behind them as much as they retrieved.

Beneath us, the gulls settled on the water and drifted there in motionless silence.

The glow from the fires, and the lanterns and the black shapes of the men moving among them, remained visible to me as I made my way home, and all around the lying snow cast its strange and shifting patterns of metallic glare and shadow in the falling dusk. I need hardly say it, but if ever a vision of Hell existed in the mind of a simple, fearful man, then this was surely it.

There have been times these past days, especially when my eye is caught by something I wrote or mapped during my early weeks here, when I cannot do other than wonder at how much I have lost. I do not say this loss is akin to a loss of faith – for that would be to glorify something far removed from the glorious – but it is as though I have been a sleepwalker, a man who sees the distant cliff edge, the ever-steepening or crumbling slope, and yet who insists on marching boldly forward, knowing full well that after a thousand such bold steps, a single one will take him over the edge and into oblivion.

I am a man between elements, just as this place is, a man who has long since ceased to hug the shore and who has cast himself out into deeper waters to navigate the shoals
and reefs of uncertainty and deception there, to make new landfall and forever afterwards to wander the wrack between all that lies behind him and all that lies ahead.

I know these are over-elaborate and convoluted thoughts, but such, increasingly, is the natural cast of my mind.

There is a stronger draught than usual this evening, and the room will not allow a single good candle to burn without it constantly spitting and guttering, and the result of this – this crop of flattened pearls – lies scattered on my table like windfall fruit around its tree.

Is there a valid distinction to be drawn, I wonder, between a man despising himself for what he is, what he has allowed himself to become, and another man despising himself for the excuses he makes?

These winds and the cold seeping into my bones are once again death to all clear and rational thought.

Mary Latimer's floating corpse was eventually sighted two days later by a man crossing the dam who saw it thirty feet below him on the rising level, face down and close to the wall, and moving slowly back and forth in the sluggish current there.

I was not sent for; a miner I encountered told me what had happened.

Everyone else was already gathered on the dam or on the shore, and had a single one of them possessed a boat or even a skiff, then the retrieval of the body might have been effected in minutes. Some fell silent at my approach, but others, by far the greater number, did nothing to hide their feelings from me.

‘What need would we ever have of boats?' said the man I asked.

At that distance the body was not clearly revealed, merely an uncertain shape in the water. There were no women, only men, on the rim of the dam looking down. The few children on the shore were held at a distance by their mothers.

The men on the dam had ropes, and one, I saw, had made a harness for himself, and his companions were in the process of lowering him as I arrived. I saw how futile the attempt would be. Below them, the body continued to wash back and forth against the dam wall. The man descended only half-way to the water before calling to be pulled back up. He stood breathless, tugging at the ropes which cut into his shoulders, his only real achievement having been to verify that the body was that of Mary Latimer.

As I approached closer this same man repeated everything to me. I was still their official seal, still their blotter rolled in sanction over every fresh event. He stood waiting for my praise, but I said nothing, and went past him to where the others stood rewinding their ropes.

I looked over the rim of the dam at the corpse below.

And where will you go? It is something I prefer not to think about until Martha has gone and I have convinced myself there was nothing I could have done to prevent her going. Have arrangements already been made? Arrangements are always made, you of all people should know that
.

She was still face down. Her legs were spread and only one arm showed. Her head rested closest to the dam and she was sucked gently back and forth by the natural pull of the structure on the water.

The voices faded around me, and I wondered how many of them had expected or hoped to see my own corpse down
there, for I saw only too clearly how much more fitting an ending that would have been in their scheme of things.

The men still holding the ropes stood undecided about what to do next. One of them held an iron hook, and he suggested grappling for the body, snagging it and then pulling it to the shore. Another suggested returning to the shore and throwing the hook from there, but I saw how unlikely this was to succeed. The body lay at least fifty yards from the shallows, and the hook and rope were heavy.

Eventually, the man holding the hook looked to me for advice, and I recommended the first plan. Others nodded in agreement with this, and in the midst of this concurrence the man came to me and handed me the hook.

‘You do it,' he said, making it clear to me that I still had some unavoidable involvement in the matter. It was a small trap and I had entered it.

I took the rope and went back to the edge. The body below had not moved.

My first instinct was to throw the hook into the water further out, let it sink and then draw it towards me until it caught on the corpse, but I saw what damage this might do, and so instead I lowered it down the slope of the dam, letting it slide over the blocks until it swung only a few feet above the body. A woman on the shore started wailing and her voice was echoed by others; several of the children began to cry.

I expected further advice on how best to secure the body, but the men beside me remained silent and watchful.

I unwound several more coils until the hook disappeared beneath the surface of the water. I calculated how many days had passed since Mary Latimer had gone missing. It was at least fifteen, possibly closer to twenty. I tried to
imagine what that length of submersion would do to flesh and bone, and I was grateful, looking down, that she remained partially clothed.

My first attempt to secure her was a failure. I let the hook sink alongside her until the rope rested against her shoulder, but then I lifted it too quickly and it came up out of the water without catching her.

As I made my second attempt, it resumed snowing, a fine, sifting snow which covered us all in its powder and melted into the lake below.

This time I let the hook draw beneath Mary Latimer's outstretched arm, and feeling the drag of the rope against her, I pulled more sharply upwards. I had expected some resistance, and then for the rope to remain taut, but again I had been over-optimistic, and instead of catching in the corpse, the hook came through it, perhaps tearing it in the chest or beneath the arm, before rising out of the water with a piece of cloth attached. The rope felt loose for an instant, and then the hook fell back, striking Mary Latimer on her head and causing the whole of her upper body to sink beneath the surface. There were further cries from the shore, and this time from the men beside me.