Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“Then how did you receive special dispensation to go and talk to them about Newman?”

“Muntle.”

“And just how were you able to persuade our ‘shire reeve’ to permit this circumvention of the law?”

“Don’t you recall that the man’s own brother left the valley when he was a boy and never returned? If anyone were able to compassionate your loss, it should be he.”

Augustus nodded.“It was so long ago that I had forgotten. The ones who leave us — we mourn them and then over time the memory of them fades.”

“Muntle’s memory of his brother hasn’t faded. The same way that— well, I shan’t say it. The upshot is that Muntle understands what you and Charlotte are feeling. But he still won’t permit either of us to tread upon our sacred privilege of contact with these Beyonders and would, no doubt, be seised by apoplexy should he learn what you are presently scheming to do.”

Gus sighed and lowered his eyes. “I confess that I did not believe you’d purchase even a small portion of the plan. It was born within a father’s desperate heart and there it will die.”

I placed a comforting hand upon Augustus’ shoulder. “I know that desperation and despair will make a man think and say things that aren’t his wont. And I know as well that sane and sensible men will check themselves.”

Here I told the truth. A part of me did know that Augustus would never have carried out such a dangerous plot — no matter how tormented his state of mind. Augustus wasn’t one to weep, and he remained true to form here, although I would easily have acquitted a deluge of tears from my older brother if he had been at that moment so disposed. These were terribly rough waters that Augustus and Charlotte now found themselves attempting to pilot, and there was no passage in their journey that would not rock and buffet the soul. Charlotte, for the time being, lay deep in slumber upstairs (for I could now hear her stertorous snoring). I guessed that it was probably laudanum she had taken for her nerves, and that it was now doing its quick business. (I didn’t remind my brother that a cessation of contact with the tradesmen carried with it — over time— depletion of all of our medicinal stores, for well nigh all of our drugs came from outside the Dell, including laudanum and every other opiate derivative which had served as effective anodyne to suffering Dinglians for decades.)

The room grew quiet, the Dutch clock, insensitive to all that had previously been bawled and exclaimed and remonstrated, ticking away in automatonic fashion without care or investment. Breaking this interlude of relative silence, Augustus turned to me and said, “Have I permission, Freddie, to come with you on Monday?”

“Muntle presumes that it is only I who will be climbing the ridge for the purpose of colloquy with the tradesmen.”

“But would he raise objection to my joining you?”

“Perhaps I would raise objection. You’re still liable to do something in your present discomposed state that would not be wise.” I did not believe this for a second, but it was important to keep Augustus in league with the narrow purpose of my anticipated meeting.

Augustus shook his head with more force than was his habit.“I promise to let you ask the questions. I will recede. But being allowed to come with you will leastways give me the feeling that I am doing something that may ultimately bring my boy home.”

I agreed to let my brother Augustus enlist in this dubitable cause, and accompany me to the crest of the ridge, the place where Beyonders came fortnightly to give us things.

Would that someone could give us information on Newman. Would that we could learn what had become of him.

hat I did not know was this: my nephew Newman was indeed in the Outland — quite alive and quite well. Turn the hour hand of the clock back to eight o’clock that same morning and one gifted with accurate divination would find him in a queer bedroom in a queer Outland house, sitting a bit uneasily upon a queer and unfamiliar bed.

It was a simply constructed bed bereft of all of the detail work that distinguished even the plainest of Dingley bedsteads. Newman noticed that there were no finials atop the head and foot posts; indeed, there were no posts at all. Nor did he — the grandson, on his mother’s side, of a topsawyer artisan of the Folkstone Furniture Works — behold a palmette upon the headboard, or a rinceau carving gracing the footboard. The bed’s oddly patterned counterpane assaulted the eye with swirls of brash colour that suggested nothing in the design but formless paint puddles. Every other piece of furniture in the room was strangely-shaped, yet dull and simple in makeup: a dull writing table (and upon it the most curious metallic box with a glass window and an even curiouser board of buttons imprinted with numbers and letters and various forms of punctuation), a dull chair with nothing to commend it in the way of ornamentation upon its legs— not even the simplest suggestion of acanthus leaf or scroll or cockleshell— a low chest-of-drawers without an apron, and a dull wooden nightstand without a cloth. There was no cheval glass to be found anywhere within the room, nor a clotheshorse, nor even a chiffonier or press in which to put clothing. (There was a small closet, and Newman surmised that clothes went there which didn’t go into the chest-of-drawers, but it was all a very peculiar and haphazard, and still rather dull, sort of way to put a bedroom together.)

Newman’s rambling eyes could not help but settle (as they had been settling since he was inducted into the room the previous evening) upon the walls. These were plastered with colourful photographic broadsheets of young ladies so scantily-clad that even the most Bohemian Dinglian soul should blush, and frizzy-haired, bushy-faced young men holding oddlyshaped stringed musical instruments somewhat akin to guitars.

Newman had slept soundly (being quite comfortably cushioned and pillowed) throughout the night, and woke early to dress himself and to study his surroundings with a welter of curiosity, but with, nonetheless, the decided, early-attained opinion that those things in the Terra Incognita that were not prurient or starkly-hued were still inordinately plain and really quite drab.

He had come to the house hungry and bedraggled, wet and somewhat cold; for even though it be June, the night had a sharp, frosty bite to it. He had thought the house a farmstead, and would have been quite satisfied to billet himself within its barn where he might curl up within a warm bed of hay. At break of day Newman would have taken a squirt of two from a cow teat and then perhaps filched himself an egg from the chicken coop. Then he would be on his way. Oliver Twist had made his way to London in just such a manner. Or was it David Copperfield? (Newman often confused the two boys, for he was not a terribly retentive reader.) But Newman Trimmers had no such opportunity to play the tramping vagabond here, for the house was not a farmstead and his hosts, at all events, would not have permitted him to sleep in a barn and steal milk from a cow teat.

It had been a full week since Newman’s gleeful embarkation upon his grand tour of the Terra Incognita. He had providently (and greedily) filled his large leathern knapsack with pilfered food from the Chowser larder, and had sufficiently sustained himself from those stores for nearly the entire length of his time abroad. There had been no opportunities for Newman to hunt or fish for his supper since the boy had spent most of this interval held up in an empty house, which he chanced upon in the wood. The house had apparently been long vacated (there was no food in its pantry save a few stray crumbs upon a shelf) and was visited by no one during his occupancy save a woman whom Newman glimpsed through the peeping crack between the door and its jamb as he secreted himself in a closet to avoid detection.