My lord's grandmother went into the cold ground last spring with no more than a cloth and a hole, and here the box alone is finer than any bed I have slept in.
Good wood. Smoothed and darkened and rubbed with oil until it shines like a lord's table. Iron handles a smith labored a week over, and they will bury it. Bury the handles. Bury the good wood in the wet earth to rot where no man will ever set eyes on it again. My hand aches only to think of the work in it, wasted on the worms.
And the flowers. Flowers cut in their prime, whole armfuls, laid on the box to wither. In spring, when the bees need them. When a man might feast his eyes on a living meadow for nothing at all. They have paid coin for cut flowers to die a second death upon a dead man.
The mourners come in black cloth, clean cloth, no patch on it, no mud to the knee, and they do not weep so much as I feared. They stand very still. Some look at the small glowing stones in their hands. None of them are hungry. I can see it. Not one is hungry.
They put a good strong man beneath a fine stone with his name carved deep, and they will feed him nothing and ask nothing of him ever again.
The good Lord keep me. These people bury their dead richer than they let their poor live.