Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Having no other dell with which to compare our beloved Dingley (our ninth — and apparently the final — edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica offering illustrations of flamingos, and coal cutting machines and Vatican marble sculpture, but not a single, solitary view of an exemplary rusticated valley), we were forever at a loss to know just how our vale might appear to an outsider, the tradesmen, for their own part, taking care not to offer commentary on anything supplementary to their transactions — not even to note the clemency or inclemency of the day’s weather!

In silence my brother and I marched past gardens in full blow, serenaded by the happy chirrup of birds that knew nothing of fractured hearts and human loss. In that early season of our journey through dim daybreak, it was easy to forget that Augustus and I were anywhere but the most felicitous place on earth, for quickly does one enter that part of the valley where the hand of man is in slim evidence save for an old, dilapidated cow house, the surviving architectural remnant of a long abandoned farm, where in better light one might read vestiges of the paint-peeling advertisement on its side: “Limbkins Lard — Delectably pure — never goes rancid.”

With the cresting of the morning sun over the treetops of the eastern wood, I snuffed out the lantern that had kindled our early steps, inhaled the fresh air of dewy dawn into my lungs and sighed. Here was paradise qualified.

As Gus and I gained that place at which the ridge began its steep ascent, where the foot-and-barrow trail came down to meet the terminus of the Ridge Spur off the Riparian Road, we heard behind us the sound of hoof and wooden wheel upon damp, clodded earth. A gig was approaching, instantly recognisable by its fringed covering and the dappled bay mare that pulled it as belonging to my friend Sheriff Vincent Muntle.

Muntle was as breathless as if he had run all the way, and upon reaching us gave a light tug upon the reins and alighted without taking even a moment to collect himself or to pat down his wind-frowzed hair, standing out from both sides of his head like fuzzy, pronged blinders. If my friend had worn a hat, it had flown off at some point along the way, and he had not halted himself to retrieve it.

“I caught you! Capital!” said he, with a smile less of greeting than of relief.

“Are you coming along?” sought Augustus of our unanticipated companion.

“I’m climbing the ridge to be sure, but alas for you, Augustus, I’ll be doing so alone.”

“Alone?”

Muntle nodded and turned to me. “This is why I’ve come so quickly. To tell you that it’s no longer possible for you to meet with the tradesmen.”

As Augustus stared in puzzlement at the sheriff of Dingley Dell, I solicited an explanation. “What’s happened, Muntle? Why has permission for my ascent been rescinded?”

“Because it was foolish of me to have granted you leave for the têteà-tête in the first place. I hadn’t the authority to do so and should have known better.” The large man who stood before us, drest differently than when I’d last seen him — with a more formal equipage in the manner of official lawman: all frogs and buttons and soldier-like drab — heaved a heavy sigh, the dreaded thing having now been said and his duty of interception and interdiction duly performed. He took out a pocket-comb, and began to apply it to his retreating bear-grease-pomaded hair, as if to make himself look more presentable to the Beyonders, kemptness and hygiene apparently being key to any successful interchange with an Outlander.

“Do you expect Gus and me to believe what you’ve just told us?” I asked. “Whatever your reservations about our meeting with the tradesman weren’t newly born this morning. Why in truth have you changed your mind?” My expression of bewilderment at that moment must surely have replicated the confused look of my brother.

“My answer is my answer, and that’s all there is to it. Now whither could my hat have gone?” Muntle peered down the long, dusty road from which he had just come, as if the hat might suddenly make itself known and then fly obligingly back onto its owner’s head. There passed a rigid silence, broken only by a cleared throat or two, and the sound of the sole of my shoe tapping an impatient tattoo upon a stone. Augustus and I would not simply accept this insufficient answer and have done with it.

In that reign of hard silence, the sheriff ’s will to withhold was whittled down and finally broken in two. It was with a small guilty voice that he finally confessed the fact that there was indeed more to the thing than he had indicated.“It’s Pawkins, the Minister of Trade, who won’t have it, if you must know. He got wind of your plan — I know not how — and invoked the rule respecting contact with Outlanders. Under no circumstances is that rule to be suspended for those without the requisite license.”

“But you’re unlicensed yourself, Muntle,” I protested.

“Unlicensed to trade, yes, but not to perform my offices as keeper of the peace, wherever those offices may send me. And in that capacity I am suffered to go, should my investigation into the disappearance of the boy require it, and it does.”

Augustus’ mood had suddenly turned dark and ireful: “I cannot accept it, Muntle! I simply cannot!” My brother’s sudden change in disposition was quite understandable. He and I were being deliberately thwarted in our mission to reunite ourselves with Gus’s lost son. It was pure Dinglian Draconianism that stood in the way, unless there be something far more insidious afoot.

Muntle lowered his eyes. His compunctious stance told me that, of course, he agreed with my brother and me: the law that confined all contact with the Beyonders to a small group of privileged brokers and their accommodating porters made sense upon every occasion save those in which it made no sense at all, this particular instance being a very good example of the latter. Yet… “Gentlemen, my hands are tied. It is my charge to execute the laws of the Dell exactly as they are written and passed by the PetitParliament.”

“Petty indeed!” pronounced Augustus. “We’ll see that damned law changed, and I’ll climb that damned ridge any damned fortnight of my own damned choosing. Who are the brokers to dictate through their cohorts in the Petit-Parliament what the rest of us should and should not do?”

In a quiet voice I interposed, “You know the reasons, Gus — for keeping intercourse with the Outlanders under strict regulation.”

“I seek only to ask the men if they’ve seen my boy,” Augustus pursued. “Perhaps they caught sight of him shivering behind a rock in the cold morning mist. Perhaps he fell from some height and was glimpsed crawling broken-limbed upon the ground in need of medical attention. If so, did anybody descend to help? How will I know if there be answers to these questions if I’m not given leave to ask them?”

“You will know,” replied the sheriff, “because I’ll ask for you. Put down on this paper every question you wish answered and I’ll do the best that I’m able.”

Augustus did not take the paper. Instead, he sat himself down upon the hard ground. He drew his knees to his chest and rested his head upon the knobs. After a moment he looked up to say, “I would like to believe that the Outlander’s heart is as large as our own, and yet our circumambient neighbours have demonstrated nothing about themselves beyond a ravenous interest in our apricots, our bedsteads, and our tortoise-shell bracelets. What is it about the Terra Incognita that makes its people so incurious otherwise?”

The sheriff spoke in a soft, subdued tone that betokened his concern: “Some day, perhaps, we will know the answer to that question. For the nonce, it certainly gives the feeling that we have been abandoned by God or fate or whatever is that metaphysical force that superintends this world. And yet wasn’t it abandonment itself that brought our forebears to this valley in our earliest days? Was not every child of that founding, foundling generation cast off either by the death of a mother or father or by some form of parental dereliction? A parent’s deliberate aberrant wish to push a child away — curiously, the very opposite of your desire, Gus, to see your own child restored to your love and care! These are queer things, gentlemen: the ways of the Outlander, as unfathomable to me as any other perplexing mystery of our vast universe, each of which we accept for now simply because we can do nothing else.