I’ve just sent The Lyon, the Lady and a Fine Pair of Boots to the publishers. It’s a book that starts with a funeral and ends with two weddings, and here’s the funeral.
***
A village in Oxfordshire, 1816
The old bag was really dead.
Katherine Fivepence had spent the last few days expecting Lady Miller to sit up, grab her favorite cane, and start laying about her while berating them all for actual and imagined deficiencies.
Even after the coffin lid went on. Even during the funeral service in the little church. It was just hard to believe that the menace who had overshadowed Kat’s life for so many years had finally gone the way of all humankind.
Now Kat stood in the graveyard, ignoring the drizzle and the small cluster of menservants and villagers, watching the first clods of earth going into the grave on top of the coffin. None of the other maids. Miss Miller had decreed that females did not attend funerals. She and her sisters were seated in the ladies’ parlor at home saying prayers, and the female servants had all been sent to the servants’ hall or their rooms to also pray for the soul of their dead mistress.
Kat wasn’t with the other maids because they scorned and envied Kat in equal measures. Envied, for Lady Ellen had taken her as her personal attendant. Scorned for several reasons, not least because she was an indentured orphan and because Lady Ellen was the unwanted daughter and sister of the house.
As for praying for Lady Miller’s soul, Kat figured her prayers would not make a blind scrap of difference to Lady Miller’s destination. In fact, if God was a just God, like the vicar always said, then Lady Miller was even now roasting away in the hottest pit of hell.
Anyway, Kat hadn’t wanted to miss the funeral and burial. To her, it was a celebration, and if English maids were permitted to dance on graves, she would have done so, as soon as the grave was filled, a mound of raw earth in the center of a neat row of cemetery plots, each with a carefully tended garden, rails or neat hedges to demarcate its borders, and a tombstone of praises for the dead or pious wishes for their eternity or both.
These were the former dignitaries of the village, whose descendants made it a point of pride to ensure their ancestors could compete with their neighbors in death, as they had in life. Elsewhere in the graveyard, other plots were also devotedly tended, but with less attention to impressing others, living and dead. And the entire graveyard was neat. The sexton made sure that even the graves of those whose descendants had long moved away to the village were regularly scythed, the tombstones weeded.
Kat had a favorite corner, where she lingered after church on Sunday, slipping away from under the housekeeper’s eye while the other maids chattered and flirted. A willow tree hung over a family grave, where six generations of Simpsons had been committed to their final rest—the last more than two centuries ago.
Kat, who had never had a family, enjoyed reading the tombstones and imaging their lives. Simpsons no longer lived in the village, and Kat sometimes indulged herself in speculations about where they might have gone.
But wait. The committal was over. The vicar was strolling off toward the vicarage, and the sexton was ordering the grave filled in. She had better hustle to return to the manor and join the other servants in the parlor. The solicitor, who was strolling alongside the vicar all dressed in black, was heading to the same destination, and when he arrived, he would be reading Lady Miller’s last will and testament.
Miss Miller had ordered the whole household to be present for that solemn event. Miss Clara Miller was cut from the same cloth as Lady Miller, though she had had limited scope as a dictator while that tyrant was alive. Even so, everyone in the household knew that crossing her was almost as stupid as angering her mother.
