Company Of Spears

Punctually, a few minutes before the midday (for he would never have been late on parade), Daniel Coates’s mortal remains were borne to St Mary’s on Drove Farm’s best hay waggon. The men about the churchyard removed their hats, the women curtsied, and the Wiltshire Yeomanry stood to attention, resting on their swords, heads lowered. At the lych gate Coates’s foreman, in black Melton coat, and his six longest-serving shepherds, in starched smocks, took charge of the fine oak coffin and began bearing their late, respected employer to his final entrance to the church in which for more than twenty years he had worshipped unfailingly. As they reached the porch at the west end, the Venerable Thomas Hervey, in surplice and stole – as Daniel Coates would have approved, if not so many of the archdeacon’s clerical brethren in the diocese – took the head of the procession, and with open Prayer Book preceded his erstwhile parishioner and friend to the chancel steps.

‘“‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ saith the Lord. ‘He that believeth in me though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’”’

The congregation, standing, listened as the comforting yet chill words recalled them to their own mortality, and to the leveller that was the grave, each of them nodding some respect or other as the coffin passed.

‘“I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another. We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”’

The foreman saw to the lowering of the coffin onto two trestles in front of the chancel steps, and then placed on top of it Daniel Coates’s old sabre and trumpet, and the shepherd’s crook and shears which had long since taken their place as the tools of his trade.

Archdeacon Hervey bowed to the congregation, and they sat. He began to read, as the Order for the Burial of the Dead required, Psalm 39, Dixi, Custodiam. He had chosen this rather than the alternative since immediately before the doxology was a verse upon which he wished to reflect in his homily: ‘O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.’

Hervey himself now rose and walked to the fine-carved lectern to read the Lesson, the words of which had become all too familiar during his two decades’ sojourn in regimentals. ‘“Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive…”’

Yet even as he read he found himself doubting the promises. Daniel Coates would no more be seen; was that not the essence? He would never again be there to give counsel. He, Hervey, was quite alone in this world now that Daniel Coates had followed the only other person who had truly known his mind. Now he must fend entirely for himself. But not selfishly; that time was over.

It was a long lesson, and he read the words deliberately, with the emphases in the places he would once have judged imperative, and which now he did but from habit. ‘“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.”’

He glanced at Lord Bath as he left the lectern. The marquess seemed to nod his approval. The day before, Hervey had gone to Longleat to pay his customary respects to his late wife’s guardian, and to Lady Bath, finding them both welcoming, though it was not long before the open wound of their son and heir’s elopement was rubbed in some way, so that Lady Bath had to turn her face to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief. ‘Of all the things I might have feared for Weymouth,’ Lord Bath had said, ‘an imprudent marriage never occurred to me. Mark you well, Hervey, the unhappiness when a son chooses such a way. I thank God there’s no issue.’

Hervey had been of the opinion for some time that there must be a reconciliation, for the elopement was evidently no whim of the moment regretted almost as quick and to be ‘dealt with’ by money and the usual arrangements. No, Lord Weymouth and Harriet Robbins were evidently happy in their unusual match, and he saw no reason for Lord Bath to pursue his design to disinherit his son of title and land. He did not know Weymouth well – hardly at all (he knew his younger brother better) – but he ventured to believe that he was a rational man, of sound mind; should prudence in the marriage stakes be so narrowly defined as Lord Bath had it? But he had said nothing, for his own circumstances were far from exemplary. Except that he had resolved to put them into perfect order.