Death of an Old Master

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The old man walked slowly across the fields. A fine rain was falling on his bare head. He let himself into the little church and walked to the position he knew so well after forty-five years as the bell ringer of St Peter’s Church. He slipped through the faded red curtain and unhooked the rope from its place on the wall. High above him in the tower the bell still carried the inscription from its maker. ‘Thomas Wilson made mee, 1714.’ The old man began to pull, his arms rising regularly above his shoulders like the swell on the sea.

The bell tolled for a funeral, the funeral of one who would have been the lord of the manor had he still lived there before his God called him home. Charles Edward Windham Fitzmaurice de Courcy was in the church already, his coffin resting beneath the inscriptions to earlier de Courcys on the walls. It was a quarter past ten in the morning, the service scheduled for eleven o’clock.

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