Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Lord Mayor Feenix stopt himself, but Uriah Graham, taking sudden and uncharacteristic courage, finished the thought for him: “Until all Bashaws should be gone from this valley — swept away, Lord Mayor, by their fear and by their cupidity and by their contempt for those who would in similar circumstances have never sold their own souls to the Devil the way that you have. We await that day, Lord Mayor — we await it most eagerly— the day that you and your ilk shall be gone from Dingley Dell forever.”

Lord Mayor Feenix muttered something in response that was received only by the ears of the Boy Sheriff. Yet the two men who stood behind the door, having won a small victory largely through intellectual ingenuity, could easily guess its apostrophising gist: “Enjoy your short-lived freedom such as it is, gentlemen. Enjoy it well.”

And this imagining sent a chill down the spines of both of the partnered stalwarts — a most frigid chill indeed.

ith a number of those Dinglians most familiar to the reader either incarcerated in the gaol, committed to the Bedlam Asylum, or selfimmured behind the solid stone walls of the All Souls Church, I now turn your attention to that other set of Dinglians who remained at liberty during what would become the final hours in the life of this cursed dale, each of whom would play a contributory role in bringing this story to its close.

Let us begin with Harry Scadger, still at large and still fretful about the declining health of his consumptive daughter Florence. She had received some of the doses of the Outland medicine that was put to work to heal her, but was now coughing without respite and with a frighteningly sanguinary product. Abbey Hexam who, in the absence of her now imprisoned employeress, was working alone in the stationer’s shop below the rooms offered to the Scadgers by Antonia, could not help hearing the rasping, unrelenting cough. When the last customer of the day had departed, she quickly shut and latched the door to the street and climbed the stairs to ask if there be anything that she could do for the afflicted girl.

“You are most kind to ask,” said Matilda Scadger from the bedside of her daughter. “But Mr. Scadger left only a little while ago down the back stairs to fetch Dr. Timberry. The doctor was to come yesterday but did not.”

Miss Hexam gave Mrs. Scadger a curious look. “But do you not know that Dr. Timberry has been arrested with Miss Bocker and the others? He now sits in the Dingley Gaol.”

“Bless and save the man, I did not know it!” exclaimed Mrs. Scadger. “Are they to arrest every last one of us before we have done with this terrible season?”

“’Tis my fear, Mrs. Scadger. Only this morning Mr. Meagles told me that Judge Fitz-Marshall has already signed so many warrants that his hand was seised by a cramp and his clerk was sent to procure a bag of ice from the ice house.”

“Would that the magistrate’s hand fell completely from his wrist,” said Matilda Scadger with composed contempt. “For it was Judge Fitz-Marshall who had me whipped in the workhouse when I was a girl for failing to sweep up the ashes from his clumsy pipe when he paid his governor’s visit. And now he has put our rescuing angels Frederick Trimmers and Antonia Bocker into the gaol, and I should wish further that the judge’s other hand and both of his feet drop off as well and that he should bleed to death from all his limbs!”

“ Mama !” cried Florence in roopy-voiced awe.

At nearly that same moment, Harry Scadger stood rapping upon the door to Dr. Timberry’s cottage. “Dr. Timberry!” he called. “It is Harry Scadger. Are you within?”

“You won’t find him in there,” said Timberry’s next-door neighbour. The man was quite old and wore a broad-brimmed slouched hat and sat upon a low campstool in his cutting garden. He pointed his clipping shears in the direction of Milltown (for Timberry’s home was in the workingclass village of Tavistock not far removed from Fingerpost).

“What do you mean, sir?” asked Harry.

“That they come for him yesterdee. That they find him at his Pa and Ma’s place down the road ’chere. That they take all three of them on to the clinker, the Ma, she a ‘hollerin’ and a squealin’ like a whipped pig all the live-long way.”

Harry Scadger thanked the neighbour for the informative, yet disheartening, intelligence and seated himself upon the front step of the doctor’s house, tears of hopelessness welling in his eyes.

“You have a sick young one at home do you now?” asked the old man, tipping back his brim for a better view of the weeping young man.

Harry nodded.

“Might be of interest to you to know that he didn’t take his medical bag with him.”

Harry raised his head to look at the old man who had now risen from his stool and was approaching the low paling that separated the two properties. “You’re sure that the medical bag didn’t go with him?” asked my half-brother.

“The lawmen don’t let a prisoner take nothin’, generly speaking. No, the medical bag warn’t with him.”

Harry stood. “If I go into the house and look for it, will you report me to the sheriff as a housebreaker?”

“Are you a friend of the doctor’s?”

“I believe that over the last few days we have become friends of a sort, yes.”

“Then it ain’t no business of mine if you want to enter your friend’s house. I’m turnin’ my back on you, sir, and it’s no more a concern to me. Good luck and good health to your sick child.” The old man did, indeed, turn his back on Harry and then disappeared altogether into his little stone cottage.

Harry tried the front door and found it unlocked. Inside was a most unexpected picture: the front parlour had been thoroughly ransacked. Furniture lay overturned, drawers had been yanked entirely from their cabinets, their contents spilt about. Piles of books and papers lay strewn round in remarkable dishevelment.

As Harry stood in the doorway, surveying the room’s troubling state of disarrangement, he heard a woman’s voice calling from the lane.

“You there! What are you doing there?”

The one who had called to him was Rose Fagin. She was accompanied by her daughter Susan. The two were going to each of their properties in an effort to raise enough money from their renters, in exchange for future concessions, so that they should have sufficient funds to bargain for the release of Mr. Fagin from the gaol. Whether such bargaining constituted a bribe or no, Rose Fagin did not care. She only wanted her husband home. “Answer me, young man. Are you breaking into my house?”

Harry Scadger knew not how to answer the question except to say that he wasn’t aware that this was her house.

“It most certainly is. I am the owner along with my husband, and Dr. Timberry is our tenant. Are you with the Apricot Clan? You have no business here, young man. Get along now before I summon the sheriff.”

“Do not summon the sheriff, Mama,” said Susan, her face screwed up into a look of strong repugnance. “He is an ogre — a pustular eruption in the shape of a man for what he has done to Papa. Simply let this man go upon his way. He is, no doubt, hungry, having only apricots to eat.”

“Begging your pardon,” said Harry, who had overheard Susan’s entreaty to her mother, “but in spite of the fact that I do hail from that tribe, I no longer reside with them. I live in Milltown and I am not here for the purpose of obtaining victuals, but to fetch Dr. Timberry. Having just been informed of his arrestment, I am now interested in discovering if the doctor’s medical bag is kept within, for my consumptive daughter must have her medicine.”