Son of Heaven Read Free Page B

other.
    He walked down the sloping lane towards them, his booted feet crunching on the gravel. Hearing it, their hands fell apart. Snatching up her bucket, Meg hurried away, giving Jake a smile as she
went.
    Embarrassed, Peter jumped down. He lifted his own bucket and began to walk towards his father, Boy jumping up to follow.
    Jake smiled. ‘It’s okay, you know… holding hands. You can hold hands. It is allowed.’
    Peter didn’t look at him. He was blushing now. But Jake, studying his son, saw how tall he’d grown, how close he was to being a man.
    How his mother would have loved to have seen that.
    They were at the gate now. Jake watched as Peter expertly nudged the old latch and pushed through, the heavy bucket swaying in his hand.
    ‘You know what, lad?’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I thought we’d go see your mum, later. Once everything’s done.’
    The young boy turned, meeting his eyes. ‘You all right, Dad?’
    Jake looked away. It was his turn to be embarrassed. ‘I’m fine…’
    ‘Yeah…?’
    ‘Yeah…’ Only he didn’t have to say. Peter was watching him now, a perfect understanding in his eyes.
    ‘I’ll cut some flowers for her.’
    ‘That’d be nice.’
    Only what he felt at that moment couldn’t be contained in words. To have been so lucky and unlucky. To have found her at all and then to have lost her. No. Sometimes words – even
whole hallways full of words – were not enough.
    St. Peter’s Church stood on a mound at the turn of the road, as it had since the early fourteenth century, a neat, solid-looking building of grey stone. Old as it was,
it was merely a replacement for the old Saxon church after which the village – Church Knowle – had first been named. Priests had read the ancient services in Latin long before the great
castle had been built a mile or so to the west, and there had been a rector resident since 1327. It was here that the locals gathered every week, not to sing hymns or say prayers like their
ancestors, but simply to talk – to air grievances, seek help, to raise any problems they might have, and generally to keep things ‘ticking over’, as they liked to call it. Few
among them were religious in any special way, yet they shared a feeling of connection to the land that was almost pagan in its intensity – a sense of belonging .
    It was over there, on the far side of that lushly grassed space, near the back wall, that they had buried those who had died six years back. And it was there, now, that Jake and his son came, to
put flowers down on the neatly-kept mound that was Anne’s grave.
    Jake had carved the headstone himself from a solid slab of oak, fashioning it in the shape of a tree. It had taken him all of three months, but it was a fine piece of work, one of which he was
immensely proud. Back in the old days he would have struggled to have finished such a task – things were so easy, so ‘throwaway’ back then – but this was something
different. This was something meant , his own small monument against Time, and he had poured all of his feelings for her into the simple design. As for the words…
    Jake gave the smallest shake of his head, thinking about it. He had never found anything quite so hard as choosing what to carve into that smoothly varnished surface. After all, what did you
say? ‘Passed in her sleep’? No, because she hadn’t. She had been in torment until the last. It had been agony – sheer hell – to see her suffer all of that. So what
then? How to express the utter totality of his loss, his grief? And there were Peter’s feelings to consider, too, for it was his mother who had been snatched from him so brutally.
Jake had felt honour bound to make sure his son had his say. Because this mattered. How you honoured the dead, how you remembered them after they were gone, that mattered. He understood that
now.
    And so, between them, they had honed it down to the simplest of words. Words which might somehow prove a vessel into