“I’ll look in the barn.”
Edgar went back out into the rain. Ma was not in the barn. He had a bad feeling.
He looked over the field. In this weather he could not see as faras the hamlet—but she had not gone in that direction, and if she had changed her mind, she would have had to pass her three sons.
So where had she gone?
Edgar fought down a feeling of panic. He went to the edge of the forest. Why would she go into the woods in this weather? He walked downhill to the river. She could not have crossed over: she could not swim. He scanned the near bank.
He thought he saw something a few hundred yards downstream, and his heart faltered. It looked like a wet bundle of rags, but when he peered more closely he saw, protruding from the bundle, something that seemed horribly like a hand.
He hurried along the bank, impatiently shoving aside bushes and low branches. As he got closer his heart filled with dread. The bundle was human. It was half in the water. The worn brown clothes were female. The face was down, but the shape of the body was frighteningly familiar.
It did not move.
He knelt beside it. Gently, he turned the head. As he feared, the face was Ma’s.
She was not breathing. He felt her chest. There was no heartbeat.
Edgar bowed his head in the rain, with his hand on the still body, and wept.
After a while he began to think. She had drowned—but why? She had no reason to go to the river. Unless...
Unless her death had been intentional. Had she killed herself so that her sons would have enough to eat? Edgar felt sick.
There was a weight inside him like a cold lump of lead in his heart. Ma was gone. He could imagine her reasoning: she was ill, she could no longer work, she had little time left on this earth, and allshe was doing was eating food her family needed. She had sacrificed herself for their sakes, perhaps especially for the grandchild. If she had said all that to Edgar he would have argued fiercely; but she had only thought it, and then taken the terrible, logical step.
He made up his mind that he would lie about this. If suicide was suspected she might be denied a Christian burial. To avoid that, Edgar would say he had found her in the forest. Her wet clothes would be explained by the rain. She had been ill, perhaps she was losing her mind, she had wandered off, and the rain had acted on her already weakened body with fatal effect. He would even tell his brothers that story. Then she could lie in the graveyard alongside the church.
Water came from her mouth when he picked her up. She was light: she had got thinner during their time at Dreng’s Ferry. Her body was still warm to the touch.
He kissed her forehead.
Then he carried her home.
The three brothers dug the grave in the wet churchyard and they buried Ma the next day. Everyone in the hamlet came except Dreng. Ma’s wisdom and determination had won people’s respect.
The brothers had lost father and mother in just over a year. Erman said: “As the eldest son, I’m head of the family now.” No one believed that. Edgar was the smart one, the resourceful one, the brother who came up with solutions to problems. He might never say so, but he was in practice head of the family. And that included the tiresome Cwenburg and her baby.
The rain stopped the day after the funeral, and Edgar started onthe ditch. He did not know whether his plan would work. Was it an idea that would fail in practice, like the stone tiles for the roof of the brewhouse? He could only try it and see.
He used a wooden spade with a rusty iron tip. He did not want the ditch to have high banks—that would have defeated the purpose—so he had to carry the soil down to the river. He used it to raise the riverbank.
Life at the farmhouse was barely tolerable without Ma. Erman watched Edgar eat, following every morsel from the bowl to Edgar’s mouth. Cwenburg continued her campaign to make Edgar regret that he had not married her. Eadbald complained of backache from weeding. Only little Winnie was pleasant.
The ditch took two weeks. There was water in it from the start, a streamlet running slowly downhill; a hopeful sign, Edgar thought. He opened a gap in the riverbank to let the water out. A pond formed behind the bank, its surface at the same height as that of the river, and Edgar realized there was a law of nature that made all water seek the same level.
He was barefoot in the pond, reinforcing the bank with stones, when he felt something move under his toes. There were fish in this pond, he realized. He was treading on eels. How had that happened?
He looked at what he had created, imagining the life of underwater creatures. They seemed to swim more or less randomly, and clearly some would pass from the river to the pond through the gap he had made in the bank. But how would they find their way out again? They would be ensnared, at least for a while.
He began to glimpse a solution to the food problem.
Fishing with a hook and line was a slow and unreliable way to get food. The fishermen of Combe made large nets and sailed in bigships to locations where fish swam in schools of a thousand or more. But there was another way.
Edgar had seen basketwork fish traps and he thought he could make one. He went into the forest and collected long, pliable green twigs from bushes and saplings. Then he sat on the ground outside the farmhouse and began to twist the twigs into the shape he remembered.
Erman saw him and said: “When you’ve finished playing, you could help us in the fields.”
