Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

“Oh dear child! For so long you have carried about this terrible burden!” This from the mother.

Then from the father to be helpful: “We have broiled fowl and mushrooms left over from last night’s supper. I will take you upstairs to it, and there is a cold meat pie, and your mother would be happy to make you anchovy toast.”

“Hush now, Herbert. She can fall to, as soon as she has said what she came hither to say. Proceed, my darling daughter. What do you wish us to know?”

Susan nodded and rose to her feet and took a step or two and turned back to face her most enrapt parents. “There is a society of men and women,” she began, “here in the Dell. Men and women of a certain high station — owners of our largest firms, members of the Petit-Parliament and their wives and a few of their children — those who have reached their majority — they form a special, secret society which deals with the Beyonders in ways that far exceed the prescribed intercourse between our brokers and their tradesmen counterparts at the Summit of Exchange.”

“In what excessive ways would those be?” asked Mr. Fagin. “Did Mrs. Pyegrave say?”

“Ways that give them advantage and profit over all the rest of us.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rose Fagin, gathering the plaits of her work blouse into her fist in unconscious agitation.

“Each has sworn a vow never to divulge the workings of the society upon penalty of—” Here Susan Fagin stopt and swallowed before finishing her sentence: “Upon penalty of death.”

The three Fagins sat for a moment in hard silence, the operative word “death” commanding the room.

“The woman was obviously delirious,” said Mr. Fagin with a casual shrugging of the shoulders that seemed deliberately effected to put his wife and daughter at ease. “Out of her head. Those beleaguered, fevered dreams failing to recede even in her brief wakeful moments. Do you not see it? Though awake, the woman clearly remained in the thrall of her nonsensical nightmares.”

“Then, Herbert, you do not believe there to be such a society as the one described to Susan by Mrs. Pyegrave.”

“Do you , my dear ?”

“I am more inclined to believe it than not.”

“How so?”

“Ponder this , husband: is it really such a far-fetched thing — a secret society — when one considers that to which present circumstances subjects us in a slightly less cabalistic and fantastical fashion? Has there ever been a collier or ploughman to serve in the Petit-Parliament or even a barber or schoolteacher? With the exception of my friend Antonia, can you name a single person in the history of the Dell who rose up from attenuated beginnings to build several thriving businesses?”

Rose Fagin turned back to meet the worried gaze of her daughter. “What else? Tell your father and me everything that was imparted to you by this dying woman.”

“There was a little more. She loved a stableboy who worked at Regents Park but the husband would not have it. She defied him. She threatened to tell everything she knew about the secret society if he didn’t leave her to the boy who gave her far more happiness than Pyegrave himself ever did — a society which stood in service to something called ‘The Tia-daction Project.’ This is why he pitched her from the window. And she was prepared to tell it all to me so long as she remained conscious and relatively lucid. But this is all that was said for she quickly lapsed back into the sleep that delivered her a few hours later to her death.”

“Still—” remonstrated the father, his receptive expression conversely giving no hint that he didn’t believe every syllable his daughter had just uttered. “Still — they could merely have been the narcotic ravings of a woman possessed of anything but a clear head.”

“Yet consider the specificity of it, my darling Herbert,” reasoned Rose. “Janet Pyegrave didn’t paint it with a broad brush. Delirious ravings are rarely so cogently pointed and particularised, now are they?”

Susan Fagin knitted her fingers in worry until her mother pulled the hands apart and patted them to calm and soothe her. “So that is all?” asked the mother, having regained her own composure.

The daughter nodded and said, “And you must not tell another soul.”

“And we shan’t,” said the father. “We will keep it here only amongst the three of us.”

“We cannot tell the sheriff?” asked Mrs. Fagin of her husband.

“No one,” interposed Susan with a quavering voice. “If there be truth to it, and if anyone finds out — anyone who could do me harm, we’ll regret that even a single syllable ever left this room.”

Mrs. Rose Fagin nodded. It was hard to keep such a thing to oneself, but for the sake of her daughter’s safety and peace of mind, it could not be disclosed further. Privately Mrs. Fagin cursed the late Mrs. Pyegrave for revealing the existence of this secret society in the first place. What manner of society punishes a disobedient member by so drastically abbreviating her life? It frightened Mrs. Fagin to think that constituent members of such a dangerous and evil fraternity might reside so near — as near, in fact, as the General Agency Office next door, whose owner and master agent, one William Boldwig (father of the previously-introduced Billy Boldwig, neophyte deputy sheriff of Dingley Dell) was in close league with Richard Pyegrave. In fact, wasn’t Mr. Pyegrave on the most intimate terms with every scion of wealth and high station in Dingley Dell, both those Bashaws who owned large houses in Milltown and those who had fine family estates throughout the Dinglian countryside? (As well as the most highly-advantaged who boasted one of each?)

Mrs. Fagin entreated her daughter and husband to drop the subject, and the three fell to the leavings of broiled fowl and mushrooms and a meat pie, and Susan was given three slices of anchovy toast, their savoury goodness making her smile and pout at the same time (from the salt), and this dirty business that had long plagued her was to be put forever behind them, for it would do no good to speak of something so vague — to address so cloudy a charge, and so shadowy an accusation.

Susan had said all that she knew.

Or had she?

In truth, as it would later be revealed to me along with all the other details of this story, which came to my ken at various points in the offing, Susan, in fact, hadn’t told her parents everything there was to tell about Mrs. Pyegrave’s deathbed disclosure. There was one thing more — something that she chose to wait and share with her friend Hannah Pupker, oldest daughter of Montague Pupker, one of the richest Bashaws in Dingley Dell and owner of a great deal of real property, including both buildings and unimproved land, and, most notably, owner and chief proprietor of the Pupker Emporium, the largest dry goods and sundries establishment in the valley. Susan wanted Hannah, her best friend, to know what Janet Pyegrave knew about a certain room: a hidden room beneath the cellar of the Emporium — a sub cellar, if you will, and how it would prove the truth behind Mrs. Pyegrave’s dying disclosure.

Tangible proof. A whole room full of it.

he sun was setting and I could find no candles. I knew not where my brother and his wife stored them within their house. At any other time I would chuckle over the fact that the village of Fingerpost was most decidedly not the West End of Milltown, which had put in a great number of gas lines, so that I was able, on occasion, to sit up late into the night by the generous light of gas-burning desk lamp (until such time as Mrs. Lumbey came to apply her knuckles to my door and demand that I put out the light and spare her another exorbitant monthly payment to the gas-rate collector).