A SOGMARSH WEDDING

A Tale of Sogmarsh — the vow over the bucket, and the blessing that comes out as a curse.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

In the boggy hollows of Sogmarsh, where the weather has only ever offered two opinions — damp and more so — there was a wedding. There is always a wedding; the realm is sinking, but it is not, whatever the Cartographic Committee hopes, dying. People go on falling in love in it, which is either very brave or a symptom of the fumes off the Slough; the parish has never settled which.

The couple were young Hob, who cut peat, and young Bryony, who minded the eels, and they had wanted each other since they were small enough to be left in the same dripping doorway. The trouble, as ever, was money — by which Sogmarsh means potatoes. Bryony's people asked nine sacks of King Edwards for her hand; Hob's people had four sacks and a cousin who could be persuaded to count loudly; and the haggling took an entire winter, conducted at full volume across the green, until both families had thoroughly insulted each other's spuds — which, if you know the realm, is not the obstacle to a Sogmarsh wedding.

It is the rehearsal for it.

Because you should understand, before we go a step further, what a Sogmarsh wedding actually is, and it is not the soft business you are picturing. The vow is quiet, and it comes later, and I will get to it. But the part the whole parish comes for — the part the children practise all year, the part that decides whether a marriage is blessed — happens at the chapel door, and it is this:

When the bride comes out, the parish curses her.

Loudly. Lovingly. At the very top of its lungs.

The parish calls it the kistomary, and could not tell you why, and does it anyway, and to skip it would doom the harvest, or so they will swear — being, in the way of this realm, entirely wrong and entirely right at once. What they know is the doing of it, and they do it magnificently.

The champions were already massed outside the chapel when Hob and Bryony went in — a dozen of the loudest souls in the parish, in full ceremonial dress, which in Sogmarsh means potato-sack capes and rusted bucket-lids worn as breastplates, and one man (there is always one man) with a colander on his head, taking the whole thing more seriously than anyone has ever taken anything. They had spent, by their own proud account, a fortnight composing. A Sogmarsh insult is not thrown together. It is crafted.

And when the chapel door opened and Bryony stepped out into the drizzle on Hob's arm, the parish drew one enormous breath — and let her have it.

"MAY YOUR CABBAGES ALWAYS SMELL OF OLD BOOTS!" "MAY YOUR CHIMNEY SMOKE INWARD, AND ONLY ON FEAST DAYS!" "MAY EVERY EEL YOU CATCH HAVE READ THE LEDGER AND FOUND YOU WANTING!" "MAY YOUR THATCH HOUSE BIRDS OF STRONG AND PUBLIC OPINION!" "MAY YOUR WELL RUN DEEP AND YOUR ROPE RUN EVER ONE HAND SHORT!"

— each delivered with the anguished intensity of a tragedian on his final night, hands flung to the grey heavens, voice breaking on the vowels, two of the champions moved nearly to tears by the sheer quality of their own artistry.

And here is the thing the dry countries could never be made to understand: it is a blessing. The fonder the parish is of a bride, the fouler her send-off. A girl the village did not care for would be waved away in polite, wounding silence — and would know herself unloved to the end of her days. Bryony was cursed for a full four minutes without one repetition. It was among the great send-offs of the decade. Grown women wept at the craftsmanship.

And Bryony did not flinch, or blush, or hurry — because a Sogmarsh bride who cowers at her own cussing has no business at the altar, and she knew it in her bones.

She had come prepared.

From beneath the train of her good grey dress she drew the club — the heavy wooden frying-pan every bride of the parish carries down the aisle for exactly this moment, seasoned black by generations, swung by her own mother before her — and she waded into the barrage, laying about her with a will. She caught the colander-man a ringing blow across his bucket-lid breastplate that sat him down in the mud mid-couplet. She gave back everything she got, and better:

"MAY YOUR BEST PIG LEARN YOUR NAME — AND USE IT!" she bellowed at her own uncle, and felled him where he stood. "MAY YOU DISCOVER, AT SEVENTY, THAT YOU HAVE MARRIED YOUR MOTHER!" she roared at the champion who had come for her cabbages — and he clutched his heart and went over backward like a dropped plank, delighted.

The parish adored her for it. That is the whole tell of a good match in Sogmarsh: not that the bride is gentle, but that she gives back. A woman who can stand in the rain and out-curse an entire village, her mother's frying-pan swinging, is a woman who will still be talking to her husband in fifty years — because she will still have things to say to him, and the breath to say them, and the wit to make them land where they hurt least and mean most.

Hob, for the record, stood through the whole of it beaming like a lamp, and when a cousin cursed his marrow he only nodded, because a man is not cursed on his wedding day. A man just has to watch the woman he loves being told, by everyone who loves her, exactly how magnificent she is — in the only language the parish trusts, which is abuse.

Only after — bruised, hoarse, radiant, the colander-man helped up and forgiven and stood the first drink — did they do the quiet part.

They were married over the bucket. The curate set the parish bucket between them — the one that stands under the worst of the leak — and the pair took the handle together, one hand each, and swore not the soft southern nonsense about sunshine and forever, but the true local vow: to mind the drip together, and to keep holding the handle when it is full. Hob said it. Bryony said it, still catching her breath from the door. The bucket, by long tradition, said nothing, and dripped.

Then the reception, held — as the best ones are — on the firm-ish margin of the moat, in the green shallows the castle still calls, with no evidence whatsoever, the love-lagoon. There was eel. There was peat-smoked everything. There was a cake, three tiers of it, which Old Mother Stilton had been persuaded to bless and which sank, with enormous dignity, four inches into the mire before the speeches were done, so that the happy couple cut the top tier at chest height and pretended this was deliberate.

And then, of course, it rained. It rained the way it rains in Sogmarsh — straight down and sideways at once, with intent — and the cake went under, and the eel jelly slid off the trestle, and the fiddler's fiddle made a noise like a duck being audited. And nobody ran for cover, because there is no cover; there never has been. So the whole parish simply stood where it was, in the rain, in the bog, up to the knees in the love-lagoon, and stayed, because the weather does not improve in Sogmarsh — the weather is the test — and they got soaked to the soul and called it the best wedding in years.

It was, too. Hob got fifty-one years out of it. He said, near the end, that the cussing at the chapel door had been the happiest he had ever been in his life — right up until the fifty years that came after it, every single one of which was better, and louder, and ruder, and kinder.

The moral, from the chapel path: anyone can love in the sunshine, and promise a garden, and mean it in the easy way. A Sogmarsh marriage promises something harder and truer — not a garden but a bog, not sunshine but fifty years of weather — and it is sworn twice: once quietly, over a bucket that will never stop dripping, and once at the top of the lungs, in a hail of magnificent abuse, with a frying-pan. Both vows say the same thing, and it is this: a happy marriage is two miserable people who never once run out of ways to cheer each other up — chiefly by being deafeningly, tenderly, creatively rude to one another, in the rain, for as long as they both shall live. The fonder you are, the worse you are, and you mean every word of it kindly. Mind the drip. Mind the club. And may your best pig learn your name.