Twenty months later Mary was dead. She died from
influenza on March 5th, 1854,
and was buried next day in the churchyard that already held five of her
children and two of her grandchildren. Four years later a third, Louise
Margaret, was to join her.
To have lost Mary, the woman with whom he had shared
over half a century of their lives, must have been as shocking as losing a
limb; but both Richard and Mary were resigned to Death. To live or to die – it
was God’s will; and Richard did not, therefore, mope.
He was now alone in the School House, for it was
many years since the Lowers had had a pauper girl “put out” to them as a
servant; but Mary Ann must have found time frequently to come down the lane
from The White House, not just because she was Simon Peter’s wife but also
because she was Joshua Quaife’s sister. The Lowers and the Quaifes were very
close. Louise Margaret must have also called in to help her grandfather keep
house and, after her death, Mary Feists’s eldest daughter – also Mary and aged
20 in 1861 – moved from Maresfield to Muddles Green. She was there on Census
Day 1861. So were two of Matthew Henry’s daughters: Isabella, now aged 14 and
little Katharine, aged 4.
A year earlier Richard had signed a 12-month
contract with the Vestry to rent a parish-owned cottage at Whitesmith, which
suggests that he had contemplated moving into a smaller house; but as he was
still at Muddles Green in 1861, it seems he was reluctant to leave familiar
surroundings, especially as he was engaged in completing his third, and last,
book.
Over the years he kept a strong, hard-covered
notebook in which to record all those poems he judged worthy of preservation.
Significantly, this included nothing written in dialect. Now he was making a
retrospective selection to leave to posterity as evidence of what, in his own
opinion, was his best work.
