The Reckoning

The sexton’s chin lifted. “Thirty-sixth.” The reply came quickly, proudly.

“You served under Burne?” Hawkwood said.

The sexton looked surprised and drew himself up further. “That I did.” He threw Hawkwood a speculative glance, as if taking in the greatcoat for the first time. Though it had a military cut, it was American, not British made. “You?”

“The ninety-fifth.”

A new understanding showed in the sexton’s eyes. He studied Hawkwood’s face and the scars that were upon it. “Then you know what it was like. You’ll have seen it, too.”

Hawkwood nodded. “I have.”

The sexton brandished his stick. “Got this at Corunna. So, like I said, seen a lot of folk die before their time.” He stared down into the trench. “That ain’t how it’s supposed to be. She didn’t deserve this.”

“No,” Hawkwood said heavily. “She didn’t.”

The sexton fell silent. Then he enquired softly, “So?”

Hawkwood studied the lay of the body and took a calming breath.

Don’t think about it; just do it.

As if reading his mind, Constable Hopkins took a tentative pace forward.

Hawkwood stopped him with a look. “Any idea what you plan to do when you’re down there?”

Hopkins flushed and shook his head. “Er, no, s—, er, Captain,” the constable amended hurriedly, clearly remembering their previous association when he’d been warned by Hawkwood not to address him as “sir”.

“Me neither. So there’s no need for us both to get our boots wet, is there? We’re officers of the law. One of us should still look presentable.” As he spoke, Hawkwood removed his coat and held it out.

Managing to look chastened and yet relieved at the same time, the constable took the garment and stepped back.

The trench was around eight feet in length and wasn’t that deep, as Hawkwood found out when he landed at the bottom and felt the surface give slightly beneath him. The height of the trench should have been the giveaway. Most graves were close to six or seven feet deep. This one was shallower than that, which meant there was, in all probability, an earlier burial in the plot. And if there was one, the chances were there had been others before that.

The burial ground had been in use for at least a century and there wasn’t much acreage. That meant a lot of bodies had been buried in an ever-diminishing space. A vision of putting his boot through a rotting coffin lid or, worse, long-fermented remains, flashed through his mind, dispelled when he reasoned that Gulley – or more likely his apprentice – wouldn’t have been able to dig the later grave as the ground wouldn’t have supported his weight while he worked. Even so, it was a precarious sensation. As it was, the mud was already pulling at his boots as if it wanted to drag him under.

Planting his feet close to the corners of the trench, still not entirely sure what he expected to find, he bent down. The smell was worse at the bottom, a lot worse. He could feel the sickly-sweet scent clogging his nostrils and reaching into the back of his throat. Trapped by the earthen walls, the smell was impossible to ignore and would have been impossible to describe. Holding his breath wasn’t a viable option. Instead, he tried not to swallow. He looked up and saw four faces staring back at him. Bowing his head and adjusting his feet for balance, he eased the edge of the sacking away from the skull and used his fingers to scrape mud from the face. As more waxen flesh came to light the gender of the corpse was confirmed.

And it was a woman, not a child.

Plastered to the face, the original hair colour was hard to determine. Lifting it away from the cold, damp flesh was like trying to remove seaweed from a stone. The smell around him was growing more rank. He tried not to think of the fluids and other substances which, over the years, must have been leaching into the soil from the surrounding graves.

Lying on her left side, mouth partly open, it was as if she were asleep. The position of the hand added to the illusion. Unsettlingly, as he brushed another strand of hair from her brow, he saw that her right eye was staring blankly back at him. It reminded Hawkwood of a fish on a slab, though fish eyes were usually brighter. Removing the mud from her face had left dark streaks, like greasy tear tracks. There was a tight look to the skin but as his fingers wiped more slime away from the exposed flesh he felt it give beneath his fingertips.

Hawkwood was familiar with the effect of death on the human body. He’d seen it often enough on battlefields and in hospital tents and mortuary rooms. There was a period, he knew, beginning shortly after life had been extinguished, during which a corpse went through a transformation. It began with the contraction of the smaller muscles, around the eyes and the mouth, before spreading through the rest of the body, into the neck and shoulders and through into the extremities. Thereafter, as the body stiffened, feet started to curl inwards and fingers formed into talons. With time, however, the stiffness left the body, returning it to a relaxed state. From the texture of the skin, Hawkwood had the feeling that latter process was already well advanced. She had been dead for a while.

Using the edge of his hand, he continued to heel the mud away gently, gradually revealing the rest of the features. The dark blotches were instantly apparent, as were the indentations in the cheekbone, which beneath the mottled skin looked misshapen and, when he ran the ends of his fingers across them, felt uneven to the touch. Tiny specks in the corners of the eye were either tiny grains of dirt or a sign that the first flies had laid their eggs.

Hawkwood let go a quiet curse. There had always been the chance that the body had been left in the grave out of desperation and the worry – probably by a relative – of not being able to afford even the most meagre of funeral expenses. Had that been the likely scenario, Hawkwood would have been willing, if there had been no visible signs of hurt, to have left the corpse in the sexton’s charge with an instruction to place the body in the most convenient poor hole. But the bruising and the obvious fracture of the facial bones prevented him from pursuing that charitable, if unethical, course of action.

He probed the earth at the back of the skull on the off-chance that a rock or a large stone had caused the damage post-mortem but, as he’d suspected, there was nothing save for more mud.

He was on the point of rising when what looked like a small twig jutting from the mud caught his eye. He paused. There was something about it that didn’t look right, but he couldn’t see what it was. Curious, angling his head for a better look, he went to pick it up. And then his hand stilled. It wasn’t a broken twig, he realized. It was the end of a knotted cord. Her wrists had been bound together.

“What is it?” the sexton enquired from above.

Hawkwood sighed and stood. “We’re going to need a cart.”

“A cart?” It was Gulley who spoke. The question was posed without enthusiasm.

“It’s a wooden box on wheels.”

Hawkwood’s response was rewarded with a venomous look. It was clear the gravedigger had been resentful of the sexton’s act of civic duty from the start. Hawkwood’s sarcasm wasn’t helping.

“You do have a cart?” Hawkwood said.

“It’s in the lean-to.” Sexton Stubbs pointed helpfully with his cane towards the cottage and the ramshackle wooden structure set off to one side of it.

“One of you, then,” Hawkwood said, pointedly.

The directive was met with a disgruntled scowl. Mouthing an oath, Gulley turned to his protégé. “All right, you ’eard.”

Looking relieved to have been delegated, the young gravedigger turned to go, anxious to put distance between him and the pit’s contents. His commitment to the job looked to be disappearing by the second.

“Leave the shovel,” Hawkwood said. “You’ll get it back.”

The apprentice hesitated then thrust the tool blade-first into the mound of dirt.

“And bring more sacking,” Hawkwood instructed. “Dry, if you have it.”

He glanced towards the sexton, who nodded and said, “There’s some on a shelf inside the door. You’ll see it.”

With a wary nod the youth about-turned and hurried off through the drizzle and the puddles.

Hawkwood addressed the older man. “You have something to say?”

The gravedigger jerked his chin at the open trench. “Don’t see why we can’t leave the bloody thing down there. We throw in some soil, we can cover it up.”

“Her,” Hawkwood snapped. “Not it. And no, we can’t. Unless you’ve a particular reason you don’t want her brought up?”

The gravedigger’s jaw flexed.

Hawkwood felt his anger rise. “Had the idea you might make a few pounds, maybe? Got an arrangement with the sack-’em-up men for the one on top? Throw in this one and you’d make a bit extra? That it?”

It could also account for the shallowness of the trench, he thought, because it made the task of exhuming the bodies that much easier.

The look on the man’s face told Hawkwood he’d struck a nerve, but he felt no satisfaction, merely increasing repugnance. Gulley wouldn’t be the first graveyard worker who earned extra spending money by passing information on upcoming funerals to the resurrection gangs, to whom freshly buried corpses were regarded as regular income, and he wouldn’t be the last. Interesting, too, that Gulley had referred to the body as the “thing”, which was what the resurrection men called their hauls.

The expression on Hopkins’ face told Hawkwood that he wasn’t the only one recalling the run-in with the carrion hunters. Some of the darker memories from that experience had evidently been awakened in the constable’s brain; images that were best left undisturbed.