The Silkworm

They walked together through the swirling snow beneath black umbrellas, up the gentle hill Robin had climbed every day of her primary school years and across the wide square that was the ancient heart of her tiny hometown, their backs to the giant chimney of the local brewery. The Saturday market had been canceled. Deep channels had been made in the snow by those few brave souls who had crossed the square that morning, footprints converging near the church where Robin could see a crowd of black-coated mourners. The roofs of the pale gold Georgian houses lining the square wore mantels of bright, frozen icing, and still the snow kept coming. A rising sea of white was steadily burying the large square tombstones in the cemetery.

Robin shivered as the family edged towards the doors of St. Mary the Virgin, past the remnant of a ninth-century round-shafted cross that had a curiously pagan appearance, and then, at last, she saw Matthew, standing in the porch with his father and sister, pale and heart-stoppingly handsome in his black suit. As Robin watched, trying to catch his eye over the queue, a young woman reached up and embraced him. Robin recognized Sarah Shadlock, Matthew’s old friend from university. Her greeting was a little more lascivious, perhaps, than was appropriate in the circumstances, but Robin’s guilt about having come within ten seconds of missing the overnight train, about not having seen Matthew in nearly a week, made her feel she had no right to resent it.

“Robin,” he said urgently when he saw her and he forgot to shake three people’s hands as he held out his arms to her. As they hugged she felt tears prickle beneath her eyelids. This was real life, after all, Matthew and home…

“Go and sit at the front,” he told her and she obeyed, leaving her family at the back of the church to sit in the front pew with Matthew’s brother-in-law, who was dandling his baby daughter on his knee and greeted Robin with a morose nod.

It was a beautiful old church and Robin knew it well from the Christmas, Easter and harvest services she had attended all her life with her primary school and family. Her eyes traveled slowly from familiar object to familiar object. High above her over the chancel arch was a painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds (or, at the very least, the school of Joshua Reynolds) and she fixed upon it, trying to compose her mind. A misty, mystical image, the boy-angel contemplating the distant vision of a cross emitting golden rays…Who had really done it, she wondered, Reynolds or some studio acolyte? And then she felt guilty that she was indulging her perennial curiosity instead of feeling sad about Mrs. Cunliffe…

She had thought that she would be marrying here in a few weeks’ time. Her wedding dress was hanging ready in the spare room’s wardrobe, but instead, here was Mrs. Cunliffe’s coffin coming up the aisle, shining black with silver handles, Owen Quine still in the morgue…no shiny coffin for his disemboweled body yet, rotted and burned…

Don’t think about that, she told herself sternly as Matthew sat down beside her, the length of his leg warm against hers.

The last twenty-four hours had been so packed with incident that it was hard for Robin to believe she was here, at home. She and Strike might have been in hospital, they had come close to slamming head first into that overturned lorry…the driver covered in blood…Mrs. Cunliffe was probably unscathed in her silk-lined box…Don’t think about that…

It was as though her eyes were being stripped of a comfortable soft focus. Maybe seeing things like bound and disemboweled bodies did something to you, changed the way you saw the world.

She knelt a little late for prayer, the cross-stitched hassock rough beneath her freezing knees. Poor Mrs. Cunliffe…except that Matthew’s mother had never much liked her. Be kind, Robin implored herself, even though it was true. Mrs. Cunliffe had not liked the idea of Matthew being tied to the same girlfriend for so long. She had mentioned, within Robin’s hearing, how good it was for young men to play the field, sow their wild oats…The way in which Robin had left university had tainted her, she knew, in Mrs. Cunliffe’s eyes.