James McGee - The Reckoning

The mud and the layer of dead leaves made it hard to distinguish details but then, gradually, as his eyes grew accustomed to the lumpy contours at the bottom of the trench he saw what had captured the sexton’s and, as a consequence, the constable’s attention. Sticking out of the ooze was the torn edge of a piece of sacking. Poking out from beneath the sacking was not a stone, as he had first thought, but the back of a human hand. Close to it was what appeared to be a scrap of folded parchment. Concentrating his gaze further, he saw that it wasn’t parchment at all, but the edge of a cheekbone which had been washed by the rain. Following the line of the bone, the ridge of an eye socket came into view.

A child, he thought, straightening. Someone had placed a child’s body in a sack and tossed it into the trench. He gazed up at the Foundling Hospital’s wall and considered the permutations offered by its proximity. He turned back to the pit. Suddenly, the sack and the shape of the contents contained within it became more pronounced. Clumps of what he had thought were clotted leaves had materialized into what were clearly thick strands of long matted hair.

A female.

He addressed the sexton. “You’re sure it’s recent?”

The sexton, whose name was Stubbs, nodded grimly. “’T’weren’t there yesterday.”

A spare, slim-built man and not that old, despite a receding hairline, the sexton was using a stick to support his left leg. The stick probably explained the gravediggers’ presence. Traditionally, the sexton was the one who more often than not did the digging.

And they would have noticed a body in a sack, Hawkwood thought. Otherwise they’d have trodden all over it.

He turned to the two gravediggers, who confirmed the sexton’s words with one sullen and one nervous nod. Their names, Hawkwood had learned, were Gulley and Dobbs. Gulley, round-shouldered with a moody cast to his features, was the older of the two. Dobbs, his apprentice, looked sixteen going on sixty. Hawkwood assumed the premature ageing was due to him having seen the contents of the trench.

Not the most promising start to a career, Hawkwood mused. Then again, it was one way of preparing the lad for what the job was likely to entail, assuming he managed to see out the rest of the day. Not that he was the only one present who’d lost colour. Constable Hopkins was looking a bit pale about the gills, too.

“Why?” Hawkwood asked.

The sexton, realizing he was the one being addressed, frowned.

“You could have got them to cover it up,” Hawkwood said. “No one would have known.”

“ I’d know. Seen enough poor beggars tossed in pits without it ’appenin’ on my own bloody doorstep. It ain’t right. It ain’t bloody Christian.”

Eyeing the cane, Hawkwood took an educated guess. “What regiment?”

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.