Chapter Text
The funeral of Elizabeth Edgeware was not a grand affair, even though the turn out was somewhat spectacular by Piffling standards. The village’s librarian had been a beloved figure. When her husband died thirty-some-odd years ago in a freak cycling accident, Elizabeth had been left to raise a precocious son and run the Piffling Vale Library alone and had done so with an admirable stiff upper lip, while installing herself as a motherly figure to any and all voracious readers and inquiring minds on Piffling. Many came to pay their respects to the late Mrs. Edgeware; others came to offer their condolences to her son. Henry Edgeware had been, in his youth, a studious boy, destined for great things. He had been the first in a long while to leave Piffling for his higher education and in the years he had been away, he’d grown into his sharp nose and his other, angular features that had, in childhood, been deemed “gangly” seemed to suit him. Not all who offered their condolences did so in earnest. Rumor had it that Henry, who had gotten a first in medicine on the mainland, was back to stay on Piffling to assist the aging Dr. Ridley. Had he really been away from Piffling long enough to earn his medical license? Time certainly flew by.
For his part, Dr. Henry Edgeware remained very quiet and withdrawn during the ceremony. He’d forgotten what it was like to attend a Funn Funeral in his time away and now, listening to Reverend Wavering quote famous literary figures on God and watching Rudyard Funn check his watch in an irascible way that Henry recalled him doing whenever he was the first to finish an exam in class and he wanted everyone else to get on with it, Henry wished he’d saved a little more for his mother’s funeral and buried her off the island of Piffling. Though she certainly had never been anywhere else nor had ever expressed a desire to go elsewhere, Henry felt sure that she would be as confused as he was to hear C.S. Lewis and Oscar Wilde cited in the same eulogy. He took no comfort in words of great writers who had not lost their mothers and who had not, in an incredible lack of foresight, assumed there would always be more time. Funerals were times to regret and Henry regretted two things. First, he regretted thinking that his mother had more time left in this world so that he could excuse his rare visits in the last few years. Second, he regretted thinking that his mother had more time left in this world and so a parrot would be a worthy companion for her in his absence. At home, the bloody bird, a macaw of some sort, Esther, waited, and she would not understand that, as per his mother’s will, she and the house and everything else in it now belonged to him, a practical stranger, who was about to be far too busy as one of Piffling’s only two doctors to dote on a bloody bird.
As the service drew to a close and mourners were invited to speak and view the corpse, Henry said a few words about his mother’s passion for learning and devoted care as his mother, the same sort of maudlin stuff you’d expect at any funeral, before taking a good look at the body. Henry had been his mother’s attending physician upon her deathbed. A strange and uncomfortable position for anyone, but especially as Henry watched a woman he scarcely recognized need assistance for things she’d always been so fiercely independent about when he last saw her. In her final days, Henry hadn’t recognized his mother. Now, standing before her open casket, seeing her laid out in her favorite green dress and the pearls his grandmother had gifted her as a wedding present, Henry recognized his mother. Her graying-brown hair was drawn back neatly, as she had always done in life. The color of her skin no longer appeared sickly and some color had been rubbed back into her cheeks. Even her lipstick and nail polish were exactly the colors she would have chosen for herself in the fastidious way she chose everything. Tears filled his eyes and as Henry bent to kiss her farewell, he caught a whiff of ink and paper and coffee and that vanilla-spice perfume of hers that reminded him of Christmas. He bid her a quiet, teary goodbye before joining his place with the other pallbearers. Shoulder-to-shoulder with Rudyard Funn at the lead and followed up by her successor at the library and Piffling School’s longest-serving English teacher who had played bridge with Elizabeth in life, Henry bore his mother to her final resting place and helped to pour dirt over the casket. When the mourners dispersed, a few grumbling that the library ought to auction off the books instead of appointing a replacement, Henry grabbed Rudyard by the shoulder.
“Now, look here,” Rudyard snapped, “it was a good, clean funeral. I’m afraid you have no grounds for a refund, Mr. Edgeware.”
“Doctor Edgeware.”
“My point still stands.”
“I don’t want a refund,” Henry said. “I want to thank you.”
“All in a day’s work Doctor Edgeware. We get the body in the coffin in the ground on time,” Rudyard said. “I’m just pleased there wasn’t any violent brawling over the vicar’s passages. Some of them were a bit risky, I think…”
“No, not about the service,” Henry said. “Though, yes, thank you for that, too. I meant for the preservation of the body. You did an excellent job, making her look - and even smell - like she did in life instead of…”
“Oh, that will be Antigone’s doing,” Rudyard said. “I won’t pass along your compliments, though. She has quite the complex about bespoke embalming fluids.”
“Antigone?” Henry’s mouth dropped open. “You mean… your sister’s still alive? Since I’ve been back, anyone who’s ever mentioned her has said she passed ages ago.”
“Well, I don’t exactly advertise that she’s alive,” Rudyard said. “People will believe what they want to anyway. You should know. You used to live here.”
“I live here now,” Henry said. “NHS has assigned-”
“I’ll see you around, doctor ,” Rudyard said as if they hadn’t known each other for most of their lives. “I have to be at a will reading in half an hour. Death waits for no man.”
Henry watched his former classmate leave the graveyard and resolved to write a letter to Antigone Funn, thanking her for her dedicated and thoughtful work on his mother’s funeral.
If he had known that Dr. Ridley would drop dead of a heart attack before suppertime and leave him as Piffling Vale’s only doctor, maybe he would have written that letter sooner. It was, hopefully, the last time Dr. Henry Edgeware would make the mistake of believing that there was always more time.