DECEMBER BRIDE
Chapter One
RAVARA MEETING-HOUSE MOULDERED among its gravestones like a mother
surrounded by her spinster children. Today the winter wind poured
across the fields. It flung a handful of starlings over the church and
plucked the caps and skirts of the men and women sheltering behind the
gravestones. A man, with a billhook in his hand, broke through the
hedge that surrounded the churchyard and hurried towards the gravelled
path, Along the hedge bordering the road the weak sun glinted on curves
and ellipses of bicycle wheels.
In the church, with his back to the communion rail, and the book
in his hand open at the marriage service, stood the reverend Isaac
Sorleyson. The man and woman before him, Hamilton Echlin and Sarah
Gomartin, were elderly, stooped, huddled together as if for protection.
The whimpering wind and the breathless silence of the churoh heightened
the loneliness of the two and gave an impression absurd and pathetic
to the ceremony. Behind the bridegroom stood a youth of about nineteen
years of age. Throughout the service he had strained to follow the
minister’s words, only relaxing to glance back into the glimmering
church or to reassure himself that the wedding ring was still embedded
in his sweating palm.
"Do you, Hamilton, take this woman, Sarah, to be your lawfuily
wedded wife ...” The responses were given, and at a sign from
Sorleyson, the young man dropped the ring into the dark cupped hand
of the bridegroom. Echlin took his bride’s hand, and with her
