Ellis Peters - George Felse 04 - A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs by Ellis Peters

darkness along the near edge of the coffin as the overhanging lip drew clear.
    “It’s coming! Right, together—heave!” The hair-line of blackness became a pencil, an ebony ruler. Out of it came a breath of cold and the odour of the sea and of dust. Strange, the two together, as though the inimical elements had settled down together in the grave. “Again, heave!”
    “Child’s play!” said Sam cheerfully, and shifted his large feet to brace himself for the next hoist.
    “Once more—heave!” The stone slid with their persuasion, and again settled, and this time as they relaxed their efforts it swung in delicate counter-balance, ready at a touch to tilt gently and ponderously, and come to rest against the felt padding on the lady’s tomb. Nine inches of uncovered dark gaped below George’s face, and the odour, faint but persistent, made his nostrils dilate and quiver. A more precisely defined odour now, not just the vague salt tang of the sea. Something more homely, and extraordinarily elusive—he thought, in a sequence of kaleidoscopic images, of sheep in salt pastures, of wire-haired terriers in the rain, of washing Dominic’s woollies sometimes, long years ago, when Bunty had been ill.
Damp cloth
!
Woollen cloth
!
    “Once more, and let her down gently. Ready—heave!”
    Over slid the stone, and nested snugly on top of Morwenna’s coffin, only its edge still propped upon the side of Treverra’s own uncovered grave. The light of the two lamps fell obliquely into the stony space, and they all loosed their hold of the stone and leaned forward eagerly, craning to see what they had unveiled.
    Only George, though with equal alacrity and a gasp as sharp as any, lunged back instead of forward. For that last strenuous lift and thrust had brought him up lying across the open coffin, almost face to face with the man who occupied it, as the stone slid from between them. The long, gaunt bony pallor of a lantern face gaped at him open-eyed from the dark, heavy jaw sagging towards a broad, barrel-staved chest in a dark grey pullover. Large, raw-boned hands jutted from the slightly short sleeves of an old black jacket, and lay half-curled against long black-clad thighs. And the smell of damp cloth and damp wool and damp human hair gushed up into their faces and sent them all into recoil after George.
    Amazed and aghast, they stared and swallowed.
    “If that’s Treverra,” said George with conviction, “I’m a Dutchman!”
    The Vicar said: “Lord, have mercy on us all when the day comes! It isn’t Treverra, but it is Trethuan.”
    “You know him?” George looked round at them all and saw by their appalled faces that he was, indeed, the only person present who did not know the incumbent of the coffin.
    “I should. He’s—he was—my verger at St. Mary’s.”
    George stared down at the long, lank body that lay so strangely shallowly in the stone pit, and his mind went back some hours, after an evasive memory, and recaptured it, and was confounded. It seemed Miss Rachel had complained unjustly of the unreliability of the young. Her truant gardener, even if he had not been able to communicate it, had had the best of all reasons for not turning up yesterday. He had picked his last apricot, and scythed his last churchyard. He lay, minus one shoe and sock, and reeking of the clammy, harsh damp of sea-water from feet to hair, stone dead in Jan Treverra’s coffin.
     
    “Lift him out,” said Sam urgently, starting out of his daze. “He may not be dead.”
    “He’s dead. Whoever he is, however he got here, he’s dead enough. Don’t touch him.” George looked at Simon, looked at the Vicar across the coffin. Four intent, strained faces stared back at him with stunned eyes. “I’m sorry, but it looks as if this has got out of hand. Out of our hands, anyhow. We’ve got a body here that was apparently alive a couple of days ago, and is very dead now. I’ve got no official standing here. Do you mind if I take