Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“You will not give the boy up?” barked Billy. “None of you? You’ll not give up the boy who scuffed my boot — give him up in the name of the law? Then I say to every one of you low gutter vermin, that you had this coming to you. It was right that this place should burn down and I’m happy that you were positioned in such a spot as to require it.”

The headmaster gave the sheriff a quizzical look. “Whatever do you mean, sir? ‘Positioned to require it.’ I don’t understand.”

“I’ll not tell you. You’re not amongst those who should know. Let me say only this: that I find it quite a laugh — and quite telling, really — that all who occupy the periphery of this valley, which must be cleared of all occupancy and habitation, are those which rank the lowest upon that scale of human worth: the vagabond Scadgers, the filthy coal extractors of Blackheath, and this school of delinquents. Quite telling. I’ll not weep for the loss of this school or for any of the rest of you. I’ll not drop a single tear.”

And with that, the sheriff bent low to dust off his boot with his riding glove, then mounted his horse and galloped away without looking back.

“What does he mean?” asked Diggory of Chowser. “About those places that must be cleared of all occupancy and habitation.”

Alphonse Chowser clapped his hand upon the shoulder of his gardener and said in a soft but fearful tone, “That those of us on the outskirts are being moved in one fashion or another into the centre of the Dell.”

“But why?”

“I plan to ask Muntle that very thing when I visit him in the gaol on the morrow.”

In the distance Boldwig could now be seen meeting up with the fire engine, which had been summoned from Milltown. Chowser and the others watched as the Boy Sheriff exchanged a few words with the fire chief and then as the fire chief addressed the driver, who quickly turned his team of horses round and steered them back into town.

“Having come this far, why would the chief not complete his call?” queried Diggory of his colleague Smangle, the former scratching his head in befuddlement.

“Because Boldwig’s told him everything he needs to know,” answered Mr. Smangle. “No doubt, to-morrow that most helpful fledgling of the law will be sitting down with the insurance claims man and we’ll not see a penny. A life-long investment, no recompense, every cinder and ash to be hauled away and dropt into the iron pit. Not that we should ever have seen any insurance money anyway. Because I don’t think we’re long for this place.”

“Is that what you believe, Smangle? Because I am inclined to agree,” said Chowser to his school’s bookkeeper.

Alphonse Chowser, Esq., had spoken in a voice made so low that it should reach Smangle and Diggory and Maggy’s ears only. He presumed that none of the boys was near enough to hear such a bleak interpretation of recent events. However, one of the boys who did not hear had no need to. It was young Jack Snicks who had, of late, taken to chucking rocks at Tiadaghton Bashaws (not because they were Bashaws but because they were soulless blackguards). He had caught every word, each delivered from the lips of the two men, and the words would trouble him from that moment forward.

After the fire had burnt itself down and there was a glimmer of morning light over the dark Eastern Ridge, Alphonse Chowser wandered amongst his pupils and amongst those men and women in his employ, rousing those who had fallen into uneasy slumbers upon the ground and pulling the others from their pensive reveries. “Come,” he said. “Wake. Rise. There’s much work for us to do this morning. We must gather what little things we have left, which were saved from the fire, and return you boys to your families and guardians.”

This injunction was received with a great wail of disappointment, peppered with recalcitrant grumblings and oaths from each of the boys, who most decidedly did not wish to be returned to their families and their guardians. They wanted to be here — here now being, unfortunately, a place of incinerated hopes and dreams — a place that had the misfortune of standing too close to the edge of the valley, and which, as now was slowly coming to the ken of Chowser and Smangle and the others, had been specifically marked for expeditious obliteration.

Alphonse Chowser, Esq., placed a trembling hand into the pocket of his sleeping gown and found nothing there but flue and lint. He had sought to rescue his grandfather’s watch from the gathering flames, had dug his hand into the drawer beside his bed in search of it, but then remembered that it had been missing from that drawer (and from every other place he’d looked) for several days. It had disappeared, in fact, on the very day of Newman Trimmers’s departure. Chowser could not believe that the boy had taken it, but coincidence often gives an answer where none other can be found. It was a gold Geneva hunting watch, engine-turned, capped, and jewelled in four holes. It had the uncommon ability to tinkle a fairy’s chime every quarter of an hour, and it was the one thing that Alphonse Chowser, Esq., had said he would take from his room should he ever find it engulfed in flames and the opportunity given him to rescue only one item of value or sentiment.

Chowser only hoped that Newman had gotten a good price for it.

The Chowser School wasn’t the only building in Dingley Dell set aflame on that flagrant night. Blackheath, that small colony of humble huts occupied by the men who worked the coal mine and by their families — set at the farthest point south within the Dell — was burning as well, even though every man, woman, and child in the little miners’ outpost was out with buckets and pails and everything that would hold water to quench the flames.

But all efforts came to naught. In less than an hour all of the huts had burnt themselves to the ground, and what was once a slightly dingy but pleasant labouring village had been reduced to nothing more than a collection of jagged and smoking heaps of black ruin.

“Did anyones get a look at dose what did it?” asked a grey-bearded man named Joper, who was assistant to the foreman and the closest thing this group had to a leader.

“Dem wore hoods and capes, best as I could tell,” said another man — a veritable eyewitness to the crime — who could scarcely be heard over the blubbering of his wife and six cubs.

“Where be da sherf?” enquired a different man over the keening of his own family. “Ain’t he comin’?”

“Sherf ain’t Muntle no more,” answered the man standing next to this man who held a little Tiny Tim-like boy upon his ash-dusted shoulders. “’Tis dat Deputy Boldwig wit da Pa what sits in da Parlmength — da one what ain’t got nothink between his ears but fart-wind.”

“I bet it’s his own men what burnt our village down,” said another man named Stryver, the barrel-chested father of the late Mrs. Pyegrave’s lady’s maid, Tattycoram. “Or mebe it was dem M.P.P.P’s demselves what did it.”

“And why would you say dat?” asked Joper.

“To move us oot and put all us in da Workhoose. Dint you know dis day would coom? Da way we always complainin’ aboot da low wages and da long hours. Dey plan to move us oot and move some others in who’ll be doing less of da complaining. Watch and see if what I say don’t coom true.”

Tattycoram, who stood next to her father, spoke now, the avatar of authority on Milltown, “’Tis death to live in dat Milltown. I seen it. ’Tis death dat awaits us all.”

Then she said no more.