Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“And have you an opinion one way or another, Miss Wolf?” Muntle asked. “To attempt to effect a rescue earlier rather than later or to wait and employ caution as the overriding watchword?”

Ruth Wolf spoke without hesitation: “I would go in. As soon as you can. To-morrow night, in fact.”

“You would do it?” I asked, surprised that Miss Wolf should answer so quickly and with such adamancy.

Ruth Wolf nodded. “Whilst I do not believe that Towlinson or any of his minions would take such rash and murderous action as to vacate that attic room through the wholesale slaughter of its occupants, each day that draws nearer to the day of departure for the Moles makes for the possibility of circumstantial, unwonted actions — actions that put certain men and women — yourselves included — into a most precarious state. I would not wish to think that at some point between now and July 15—well, I shall not say it. What I will say is this: there is a particular person who shares that room with Newman and Chivery and several others, whose name should be of interest to you, Sheriff. His last name is Muntle. You see, Vincent, your brother George is there. He is, in fact, the longest held of the Limbo Returnees.”

As we bid our adieus to Ruth Wolf and her lover Bevan Dabber and Bevan’s father Sir Seth Dabber, Muntle sat upon the sofa in Dabber’s library, shaking his head in disbelief over what he had just been told, and asking over and over again of anyone who would hear him, “Could it be true? Is it really possible that George lives? Or is this a dream from which I will soon awake?”

Outside, I stood back and watched as Ruth was being handed into the cabriolet that would take her two companions and her to Road’s End in Black Heath. Suddenly, I was struck by something else that had come up in that most revelatory Thursday night and early Friday morning gathering of the Fortnightly Poetry League. “Miss Wolf,” I said, “would you indulge the curiosity of this scribbling and enquiring amateur historian for one last time?”

Ruth put her head out the window and nodded.

“The books that were found by the First-Generation boys in the fruit cellar — the only books that were left here when all the adults fled in that early epoch of Dingley Dell — you said that you would later tell us if they were left there by accident or were placed there on purpose.”

“On purpose, if we are to believe the story. The perpetrator’s name was Elizabeth Cochran, a young woman from Armstrong County, northeast of Pittsburgh. She is better known by her pen name, for she was a writer like you, Trimmers: Nellie Bly. She had just returned from a seventy-two-day trip around the world — a record-breaking trip — and came hither to live for a while so that she could write about a very special orphanage that she had heard was being been built here — an orphanage that would give a home to children from around the world. During her visit, Miss Bly learnt quite a bit more about the place than she ever expected, and was troubled by what she found out. The Project administrators learnt, in turn, that she intended to write an exposé, something she had gotten quite good at doing, and a serious threat was made against her life. She was quickly escorted from the valley, but not before she was able to secret her travelling library away in a place that she hoped would later be discovered by the children. To protect her identity, she removed all of the identifying bookplates. But if you look in one corner of the frontispiece for Our Mutual Friend , you will find her name written there: “Pink.” For this was her childhood nickname.

“I hope that you appreciate the irony of it, Trimmers: that Dingley Dell exists to-day, forever reverential to the written word, because a female writer left behind the means to literary expression in that hollowed-out fruit cellar.”

Ruth Wolf lowered her voice. “Ask the vicar to pray for us, Trimmers. For Bevan and Sir Dabber and I have agreed amongst ourselves that we are not going into hiding. We have decided to advocate on behalf of the Dell— to find someone in a position of power who will listen to us, who will join hands in helping us to rescue this valley.”

“Always the rescuing angel,” said I, and then after I had said it, I could not be certain if it was spoken aloud or merely expressed within my head.

Ruth Wolf and her lover Bevan Dabber and his father Sir Seth Dabber climbed the Southern Coal Ridge for two reasons: it presented a much more difficult ascent than the Northern Ridge, and so, it was hoped, would be less carefully guarded by Tiadaghton sentries, and Ruth Wolf hoped, as well, to make good on her efforts to keep her partner Phillips apprised through the course of her exodus from the Dell of Dingley through application of her small portable telephone. The climb would be a difficult one for Sir Dabber, whose lungs were often taxed simply by walking too quickly across a room, but he was nonetheless determined to accompany his son and the young man’s devoted fiancée wherever their travels should take them.

Sir Dabber’s lifeless body was discovered by two romping collier’s children the very next morning, not very far up the ridge. However, it wasn’t respiratory difficulties or coronary arrest that had brought an end to the man’s life; it was the loss of blood to the brain pursuant to the severing of that gentlemen’s right carotid artery. One of his two climbing companions had died similarly; Miss Wolf had also suffered a terminal attack upon the neck — both through a slicing open of that selfsame artery and the jugular vein that coursed next to it. Dabber’s other companion, however, did not die through a slit throat at all; there was evidence, instead, of a rather violent struggle, which produced multiple stabbings into Bevan’s chest and back. All three bodies had been left where they fell in an obvious attempt to forewarn any other Dinglian with escape on his mind against making such a foolhardy attempt. The bodies were a gruesome find, and the children who first discovered them were put into a greatly unsettled state for the remainder of the day.

There was no sense from any of the members of the mining families who viewed the bodies nor from the sheriff ’s deputies dispatched to collect them nor even from Dr. Fibbetson who was detailed to serve as coroner over them (such responsibility requiring no more than a simple pronouncement that the three corpses were indeed dead), that two of the three individuals had been most deeply in love, the two having fallen several yards asunder, and having not even been afforded the consolation of dying in one another’s arms.

he two girls often strolled together of a morning, but most especially upon those recent mornings following ejection from the emporium run by the older girl’s father and from the family’s finely-appointed apartments above. This particular morning the two had not even been given leave by the father to take a little breakfast, being sent, instead, to Chuffey Bakery for that very purpose. The reason was this: the father sought that neither his daughter nor the friend whom he was coming to regard as a daughter should be present for rather important conferences and preparations related to the large undertaking that loomed in the near offing. The undertaking was, of course, the somewhat elaborate removal of the “Eighty-three Elect” to the Summit of Exchange upon the Ides of July (July being one of the four calendar months whose Ides fall on the 15th), the M.P.P.’s, and all those within their closest orbits to be immediately thereafter spirited off and away from their ill-fated ancestral valley home, and out and abroad into the Outland — a worldwide tract that promised the most wondrous post-Victorian perquisites of privileged life.