Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“I would fire that officious red-topped turd in an instant, Trimmers, but I should have every member of the Petit-Parliament gathered on my doorstep at my Inn-of-Justice lodgings within the hour demanding his reinstatement. What a low and contemptible cabal holds dominion over this tight little valley! There you have it, Freddie. I am now on record as despising each and every one of these overreaching, obstructionist oligarchs.”

“ And their offspring, my alliterative friend,” I added with a smirk.

“Oho to that,” agreed Muntle. “Now what is the time again that I am to listen to this tattered woman?”

— NOTES—

THE ALL SOULS CHURCH OF THE DELL, despite its pastorally provincial name, is the largest and tallest structure to be found in the valley, its seven-storey campanile towering over every other building in Milltown.

It had been the life aim of Bishop Richard Tollimglower to see a cathedral of historically massive proportions constructed within the Dell. When the Petit-Parliament refused to allocate the funds necessary for its erection, a more modest church building was proposed but with a compensatory concession: it should have a bell tower of rather impressive size and height such as to dwarf every structure, both natural and man-crafted, within the whole of Dingley Dell. “If I cannot have flying buttresses and imposing gargoyles for my seat of ecclesiastical authority,” said the bishop, philosophically, “give me at the very least a lofty campanile with a carillon of bells that will be heard in every nook and cranny of our dale to remind its listeners that God watches in ceaseless attendance from his own Heavenly watchtower above.”

So it was done, and it was the Bishop himself who oversaw the construction of Dingley Dell’s most ambitious architectural venture and who applauded it and who said it was good and then promptly dropt dead in his raiments within hours of its completion, and was subsequently offered nothing like the funereal pomp and ceremony that had been his testamentary wish.

Tollimglower’s successor, the low-church Puritan Vicar Tupman, banished pomp and ceremony not only from the obsequies and exequies attendant upon his predecessor’s passage but from every other aspect and office of the All Souls Church. “God loves and watches over us all, this is true, but He does so whether we exalt him with frippery and architectural excess or no. I therefore ring in with our mellifluous and only slightly clanging carillon of bells the ‘Era of Simplicity,’ and should my flock give objection, I shall be inclined to turn us all into Methodists and have done with it.” These words were spoken by the vicar upon the first day of his ascension to that office, which should have been denominated High Bishop, but was reduced by way of ecclesiastical simplification to Humble Vicar, and to the above pulpital peroration was added the injunction that at some point the campanile, which offended Tupman’s eye as an unintended tribute to the iniquitous Tower of Babel, should surely come down, brick by brick and stone by stone.

Dinglians, however, would hear of no such a thing, and so the bell tower stood for the next five decades, and the denizens of the Dell became ever the more attached to the tintinnabulation that gave from it, and he who was willing to pay half a florin could climb its ninety-eight steps to look down upon Milltown and to take in the equally commanding prospect of the surrounding valley. So were the coffers of the church filled even on those Sunday mornings in which congregants were feeling more niggardly than usual.

QUOITS, a popular traditional lawn game played by Dinglian boys and men, and more increasingly by members of the softer sex. It involves the throwing of a metal ring over a prescribed distance with the purpose of landing it over a pin (called a hob) set in the centre of a box-like frame filled with clay. A successful throw, called a “ringer,” gives a player two points, with twenty-one points being necessary to win the game. Quoits is especially popular amongst public servants as a midday diversion — notably sheriff ’s deputies, firemen, and government clerks. There is a tournament, which takes place in Milltown each autumn, and which has been most recently won (in impressive annual succession) by a team comprised of Water Rate Collectors, called informally the “Jolly Soakers.” The game is played in the United States of the Outland using horseshoes and is called, appropriately, “horseshoes.”

attycoram was a girl of eighteen with bright blue eyes, a radiant smile, and a complexion darkened, no doubt, by years of having lived within that haze of coal dust and carbonated grime that permanently besooted all who claimed the village of Blackheath for their home. I expected a shy and overly propitiatory young woman and got quite the opposite. Tattycoram was voluble and animated and eager to tell her story in her thick coal-town dialect.

Muntle was last to climb the stairs to Antonia’s unlet rooms and was offered a cup of chicory coffeebefore he’d even had the chance to sit down. Antonia Bocker possessed a fondness for chicory that far surpassed her affinity for tea or chocolate or even the unadulterated version of that nonchicorous half of chicory coffee, which was drunk in its pure form only by the wealthiest citizens of the Dell, given its preciousness. “I drink chicory,” she explained, “because it was all that there was for me to drink back in the days in which my circumstances were so severely diminished. I grew to tolerate and finally to crave the taste, and because it has less caffeine than does its richer beverageal cousin, it allows me to sleep a bit better. But if you would prefer tea instead, I’ll ask Harriet to put a pot on. It is no trouble.”

The three of us declined the alternative and endured the chicory, which has little smell but isn’t entirely insipid.

The room was spare. There was not much more therein but a few old deal chairs and a moulting sofa upon which to sit and a Pembroke table carved and turned not by the best of Dinglian furniture-makers but perhaps by one of their journeymen progeny. “I will have you know that I don’t usually put out my rooms to let in such a sparse state. My last lodger, you see, purchased a few pieces from me upon taking his leave. But enough empty talk. Tattycoram, my dear girl, you must tell us exactly what you heard whilst standing outside the door to your mistress’ apartments. It is most important for us to know.”

“It was not wot I heerd, aye, but den wot I didna hear.”

“What do you mean, dear girl?”

“Dey was feetin’ wit da words — hollerin’ one t’nother. Den, in da meedle of all of da fussin’ and da feetin’, I heerd da glass, it break loud on my ears and I heerd her cryin’ out of da winder as she fall. For meself, I backed away from da door so’s da master Mr. Peegrove, woo-na see me when he coom out.”

“And did he see you?” asked Muntle writing upon his pad.

“No, he di-na. But here be da ting dat I want you to know bout-tit: his good wife, she fall out da winder, but he di-na leave da room. He in dere all quiet-like and do not go down to find out just how she be. It was like dis, Mr. Sherf — it was like he wos waitin’ for her to be dead on da street afore he go. Now a minute or two, dey pass, and dere is a lot of clatter and commotion on dere street below, and so finally he coom out da door and go down da passage and down to da street and I go into da room and I meself look out da broken winder to see him down below a’weepin’ and a’wailin’ like he know’d noten bout da deed till dat very moment.”