What-Greta-Buried
He did not dig the new well. He went, instead, to Old Greta.
She lived in the last cottage on the mill lane, the oldest soul in Edderton, so old that the elders had been children when she was already grey. She kept bees and kept counsel and kept, the village said fondly, every secret anyone had ever been foolish enough to tell her. Tomas had mended her garden gate in the spring and she had given him honey and a long, measuring look, the kind of look his grandmother used to give, and he had wondered then whether she was one of the ones who heard things too. Now he sat at her table and told her what was under the green behind the church, and she did not pretend not to understand.
"You'd be the digger's grandson," she said at last. Not a question. "She had the same trick. I wondered if it ran in the blood." She turned her cup slowly on the wood. "I always thought, if anyone ever came who could hear that corner, it would be one of hers."
"Who is it," Tomas said. "Under the green."
Greta was quiet for a long time. Outside, the bees went home. When she spoke, her voice had the worn evenness of a thing rehearsed across forty silent years.
"His name was Wenn. He was the priest here before the one before this one, and he was a bad man in the particular way that priests can be, which is that he could stand in front of the whole village on a Sunday and make them believe he was good."