Chapter 13 The Exhumation

They went to Sallowfield Cemetery on the Sunday night, at the hour when the last chapel-goers had turned their faces home and the fog had come down off the moors to lie against the graves. Sneed came first, with his nephew Jarvis, a silent young man with a gravedigger's shoulders and nine pounds of debt, and a lantern hooded with a black cloth. Ephraim Cope came last, with a satchel of clean jars and a written note of the whole proceeding, because he said, and said rightly, that a thing done in the dark is worth nothing in a witness box unless somebody writes it down while it is happening. The gate of the cemetery was unlocked, because the cemetery keeper was an old man who slept by the fire and trusted the dead to keep their own counsel. They walked along the path between the stones and the fog, and Prudence counted the turns and did not look at the names, because a chemist needs a steady hand and it does not come from reading the stones. Jonas Figgis lay in the poor ground at the eastern wall, where the chalk came up close and the graves were shallow and the yew hung low. Sneed stopped and put down his lantern and looked at the mound for a moment, and took off his hat. "He was a good cooper," he said, to nobody in particular. "He kept the staves tight. I bought two barrels off him once." Then he put his hat back on and took up the spade. "Jarvis. Soft now, and cut the turf clean and keep it whole. We put it back exactly as we found it and the ground will never know." They worked by the hooded lantern, and the sound of the spades was the sound of a heartbeat, and Prudence stood at the head of the grave and watched the fog and listened for the keeper, who did not come. It took the two of them a quarter of an hour, because the poor ground was shallow and the ground was soft with the week's rain, and then the spade rang on the lid, and Sneed got down on his knees in the clay and cleared the earth with his hands, the way a man clears snow off a doorstep, and the plain deal coffin showed pale in the lantern light. "It is not nailed," he said. "It is screwed, and I know the screws I put in it, and I have brought the same sort." He took a turn-screw from his coat and worked out the four screws, one after another, slowly, and lifted the lid a hand's width and stopped. There was no smell. That was the first thing Prudence noticed, and it was the thing that made her certain, before she had looked at anything at all: the air that came out of the coffin was clean and cold, and cold air out of a grave in the sixth week is not clean, and she had learned the smell of a fever with her father in this room years before she had ever weighed a powder. "Look at him," Sneed said, and lifted the lid another inch, and did not look away, which she thought afterwards was the bravest thing she saw that winter. Jonas Figgis had been a strong man and was still a strong man, six weeks down, and the grey that Sneed had spoken of was in the hands and the jaw, a flat even grey like slate in the rain, and the body had not gone the way a body goes. Prudence opened her satchel and took out the clean jars and the little horn spoon and a folded paper of clean linen, and she took, carefully and with a steady hand, a portion of what the stomach held, and a portion of the liver, and she put each into its own jar and stoppered it and sealed it with wax and wrote on the label the name and the date and the hour and the fact that she had taken it herself in the presence of two witnesses, and she made Ephraim put his name to one of the labels too, and Sneed to the other. Then she said, "Close it," and Sneed closed it and screwed it and Jarvis filled the grave and Jarvis and Sneed stamped the clay and laid the turf back, and it was done in an hour and a quarter and it looked like the grave of a man who had been left in peace. As they came up the path, a light moved at the far end of the cemetery, by the keeper's cottage, and they stood still among the stones and let it move and pass and go out, and the fog swallowed it, and nobody had seen them, and Prudence let out a breath she had not known she was holding and found that her hands were shaking, which they had not done while she was working and would do now, because that, too, was the way of the trade. They parted at the gate. Sneed would not take the money she offered him; he took, instead, the half-bottle of porter she had brought for afterward, and stood in the fog and drank it, and said, as he handed back the cup, "If I am asked, I say I was in bed. If they make me swear in court, I say I was in bed and I saw nothing, and then I will look at the magistrate, and the magistrate will know I am lying, and that is what I have to give you. I hope it is enough." "It is more than enough," Prudence said. She did the test at dawn, in the weighing room, with the door locked and the shutters closed and Ephraim at her elbow with the written note, and the copper went soot-black in the stomach jar before she had finished warming it, and stayed black, and would not wipe off, and the liver jar did the same, and the control, which was a jar of her own boiled water, did not. She sat down slowly on the stool and looked at the row of them under the lamp. "There is no doubt in it now," Ephraim said, quietly. "You have the man, if you can reach him. How do we reach him?" "Not through the coroner, who has already refused. Not through the guardians, who have already written the cordial onto the orders." She was still looking at the jars. "We reach him through the one door that nobody in Cinderthorpe can keep shut once it has been knocked on, which is the door of his own grave-breaking. I have opened a grave, Ephraim. I have broken the law in a way that cannot be talked away, and they will have to charge me with it, and a charge means a court, and a court means the jars come with me and a chemist swears to them in the box where a doctor's word is only a doctor's word, and no friend of the society's can reach into a court of assize and take a jar out of it." Ephraim was silent a moment. "You are going to walk into a charge in order to put your evidence on the record." "I am going to walk into a charge because it is the only way into the record," she said. "The law will not open a grave for a woman's hunch. It will open a case against a woman for opening one, and once the case is open, the jar is a fact in it, and a fact in a case is a thing no man in this town can bury." ---