“Six nights after a bad death, two at a time, at the churchyard wall, with a lamp and a bell. My mother did it, I have done it eleven times, and my daughter did it last winter. We have never seen anything. That is not an argument against it and I am tired of being asked whether it is.”
As the fen tells it at the staithe
It was a hard winter on the fen, and the holm at Crowdyke lost eleven of its people. Four of the eleven were buried late. The fen says no more about the burying than that. It says that when the trouble came, four parishes turned out together, which they did only that once in the century, and that it took three nights.
The ferrylords rowed the men over on all three nights and would take nothing for it, and they lost one of their own. Here the fen lowers its voice, and here the tellings stop agreeing. The numbers change with the teller, and so do the names. What every telling keeps is the last word of it, which is the word the books use too: finished.
The holm was not given up. Its neighbours worked its cut until it could work its own again, and the priory had the burial ground reconsecrated inside a season. The ferrylords, who had once watched a drowned body for a night at the staithe and nothing more, agreed among themselves to watch every body that crosses, and they have kept to it. Up and down the march Crowdyke is used now as a date.
What is known
No district of its size in the realm is as troubled by its dead as the march, and its clergy give four reasons: distance, with eleven parishes and three burial islands across two hundred square miles; season, with the upland shut four months; water, since the fen buries by boat; and money, since every parish book records burials at the parish’s charge. Of the four things the march calls grave trouble, uneasy ground is commonest, and eleven haunts are reported. Eleven bodies that left their graves are in the parish books for the century, each settled by the parish after dark, no priest present. Crowdyke is in five books that agree on little but the date, the place and the word finished.
Against a bad death the march sets a grave-watch: two people at the churchyard for six nights with a lamp and a bell, unpaid and never refused. Four of the eleven had been watched. In the settled shires a parish may go a lifetime without one.