They knelt for the prayers. The stone was bitterly cold through his breeches. Beside him she bowed her head, and he saw a single tear run down from under the crape and drop off her chin onto the black glove, where it lay for a moment, round and bright, before the kid drank it. She made no sound at all.
Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.
They signed the register in the vestry at four minutes to noon. Ivo wrote Ellerholt for the first time in his life, and found that his hand made the E much too large, like the old man's. She wrote Rosamund Quarrie in a small, upright, legible hand, and then stood looking at the name as if it belonged to someone she had known once, and laid down the pen.
The witnesses were Quintin Lusk and Cordelia Rendell. Cordelia signed with her face still wet and then, to everyone's surprise, leaned across the register and kissed the bride on the cheek, a quick frightened kiss like a bird's peck, and went out without a word.
When they came out into the church again the nave was emptying. At the west door the rector caught Ivo's sleeve.
"The ringers," Mr. Furnival said. "They were told to ring the wedding peal. I have sent up to tell them otherwise. I hope I did right. I did not know what else—"
Above them, in the tower, the tenor bell spoke.
It was not a peal. It was a single stroke, deep and slow, that went out over the churchyard and the roofs and the flat land beyond, and died; and then another; and then a third. A pause. Three more. A pause. Three more. Nine strokes, the nine tellers that tell the parish a man has died. Then, after a longer pause, it began to count his years.
Ivo and his wife walked out under it into the grey noon. The crowd in the churchyard had gone silent as the church, the gentry standing about their carriages in uncertain knots, unsure whether to congratulate or condole and so doing neither. But along the churchyard wall, where the fen people stood—men in smocks and gaiters, women in shawls, children held up to see—the caps came off. They came off one by one and then all together, the length of the wall, and stayed off. A big, slow, red-bearded man at the end of the line, with coal-black in the creases of his hands, held his hat against his chest and looked at the woman in black with an expression Ivo could not interpret, something between grief and shame.
Seventy-one, said the bell. Seventy-two.
"Jethro Scarth," said Rosamund, very low, without turning her head. "From the engine."