“Like Mary Poppins,” added Will. “Only older.”
Bill emitted a brief but regrettably audible snort of laughter. I elbowed him in the ribs and quelled Will and Rob with a look, but the damage was done. Mr. Barlow snickered, Bree Pym giggled, and soon the only shoulders that weren’t quivering with suppressed mirth belonged to Peggy Taxman, whose gimlet gaze eventually silenced the unseemly tittering.
The good people of Finch weren’t given to giggling at funerals. Finch was a tiny hamlet set amid the rolling hills and the patchwork fields of England’s Cotswolds region. Although Bill and I were Americans, we’d lived in a honey-colored cottage near Finch for a decade. Our sons had never known another home.
Bill’s widowed father completed our family circle. Will and Rob had the run of their grandfather’s splendidly restored Georgian mansion, but the wrought-iron gates guarding his estate kept less welcome visitors—Elspeth Binney, Opal Taylor, Selena Buxton, and Millicent Scroggins, to be precise—at bay.
While Willis, Sr., tended his orchids and courted Amelia Thistle, Bill ran the international branch of his family’s venerable law firm from an office overlooking the village green, the twins attended Morningside School in the nearby market town of Upper Deeping, and I juggled the ever-changing roles of wife, mother, daughter-in-law, friend, neighbor, gossip monitor, and community volunteer. Over the years, Bill, Will, Rob, Willis, Sr., and I had become vital threads in the fabric of our village and we did our best to keep the cloth intact.
We could do little, however, to repair the gaping hole left by a villager’s death. In a tiny place like Finch, the loss of a neighbor usually sent shock waves of grief through every household. As a rule, a death in Finch was regarded as a death in the family, and no one with the faintest sense of decency would laugh during a family funeral.
Mr. Hector Huggins, however, was the exception that proved the rule. His death hadn’t sent so much as a ripple of grief through Finch, not because he’d been disliked, but because he’d lived among us as a stranger. In a village where everyone knew virtually everything about everyone else, Mr. Huggins had managed the miraculous feat of remaining anonymous.
A few useless things were, of course, known about him. He’d been a senior partner in an accounting firm in Upper Deeping. He’d patronized local businesses, attended local events, and never missed a Sunday service at St. George’s, but he’d made neither friends nor enemies in the village. He’d simply made no impression at all. Bill had once described him as a wallpaper man, someone who hovered quietly in the background, unable or unwilling to involve himself in other people’s lives.
Upon his retirement, Mr. Huggins had taken to spending his afternoons sitting silently on the bench near the war memorial and his evenings fishing silently from atop the humpbacked bridge at the south end of the village green. No one knew how he’d spent his mornings, but it seemed likely that he’d spent them in silence.
Mr. Huggins had lived in Ivy Cottage, a modest stone dwelling across the lane from my father-in-law’s estate, but since Ivy Cottage was completely hidden from view by a tall hedgerow, it was possible to drive past it many times without knowing it was there. Neighborly concern had prompted me to call on Mr. Huggins from time to time, but I’d never set foot inside his front gate. He’d always turned me away at the gate with a gentle smile and the soft-spoken assurance that he required no assistance.
Neither I nor my neighbors had known that Mr. Huggins was ailing until an ambulance had arrived at Ivy Cottage to take him on what had proved to be his final journey. He’d died ten days later in the hospital in Upper Deeping. Shortly thereafter, the vicar had received a letter from a London solicitor containing the payment as well as the arrangements for Mr. Huggins’s funeral, but whether the same solicitor would handle the disposal of his late client’s worldly goods, no one could tell.
A faint communal memory suggested that Mr. Huggins had relatives living abroad, but none had shown up to bury him. Mr. Malvern, Dick Peacock, Henry Cook, and Grant Tavistock had volunteered to serve as Mr. Huggins’s pallbearers, but it had been left to the vicar to eulogize him because no one else could think of anything to say.