Mark Dunn - Under the Harrow

Sir Dabber lowered himself carefully upon the hard cot, and took up his son’s bony hand. He held it as he, no doubt, had held it on each of his former visits. A cockroach skittered aross the floor, stopping at Bevan’s unshod right foot, and then making bold to traverse it. Bevan did not acknowledge the prickly passage of the verminous creature. The young man’s begrimed face gave nothing but a blank stare, a look no different from that which greeted us when first we had stepped into the cell.

One of the other men cawed. It was a single shout, which sounded very much like that of a crow, and then there was silence in the small dark room — a room that smelt of unwashed flesh and unlaundered linens and mouldering food and dank water. I could not tell which of the room’s two buckets was used for what, and I had no desire to investigate.

“These conditions are appalling,” said Sir Dabber with an atrabilious shake of the head. “I don’t care that the lodgings are only temporary until the rooms are finished upstairs. It is medieval. Barbaric! This is a hospital, for Christ’s sake! A place for hospitable healing.”

I nodded. I was equally repulsed.

“I intend to find out exactly how much longer these men will be made to live here in this veritable dungeon!” proclaimed Dabber, his brow knitted in consternation.

Dabber’s raised voice had unsettled one of the other young men who looked up with a frightful expression.

“Contain yourself,” I admonished my exercised companion.

Dabber nodded. He turned to behold his son, fresh tears forming in his eyes. “What a life you have led, my child. And how cruelly have I disparaged you. I should never have thought so little of you. You were always a burden, but from this day forward I vow to do better by you. I will be a far kinder and far more loving father to you, mark me, my dear boy.”

I turned my own gaze to Bevan Dabber and witnessed thereupon a most amazing thing: the young man had also begun to cry. A tear was trickling at that very moment — one errant tear only — down his left cheek. But in its tiny rivulet upon that dirty face, it brought both Dabber and me to an even greater state of emotional affliction. The tear served as a simple but stark reminder that the young man was still human. And then came something else that made the same point in an even stronger, more dramatic way: Bevan Dabber spoke!

“Hear me, Papa. Give me leave to say a thing or two.” (Sir Seth Dabber could not have found his voice at that moment even if he had wished to, his son’s words having put him into a sudden, nearly apoplectic, stupor!) “I have been healed, Papa. There is a nurse here who has done it. Miss Wolf. You know Miss Wolf, I believe, as the child who lay abed with withering lungs and a crippled heart in Hungerford village — a child whom no one ever saw. No one saw her because she is a fabrication. Miss Wolf is a Beyonder who needed the means by which to pretend that she had always been one of us. Two years ago she came hither and two months ago she began to heal me, and now I am well and the rigoritis is gone.”

So now I had come to know some of the truth about the mysterious Miss Wolf, and to receive answers to a few of those puzzling questions I had had about her early life and that sudden and miraculous recovery coincident to her supposititious parents’ death. But one question led to another, and then another. Did Mr. and Mrs. Wolf participate in preparations for their “daughter’s” integration into the Dell, or did their deaths merely open a convenient portal for Ruth’s entry under the guise of being their daughter? (I was later to learn that it was the latter, Ruth being absolved, moreover, of my suspicions that she had been somehow complicit in effecting the exigent death of her “parents.”)

I did not betray to the young man that I knew her. Instead, I prepared myself to listen to this most earnest and commendatory invocation of her with feigned ignorance of any knowledge of the subject at hand.

Bevan took a long breath. I seised this opportunity to say that it was extraordinary, nearly beyond belief, to think that he had been healed of a disease that had never before known a cure. But one thing at a time: why was he pretending otherwise?

“For the time being, I must counterfeit myself in the way that you saw me when first you entered this cell. Miss Wolf was brought here for a sinister purpose that she has not disclosed to me — a purpose that plagues her soul. She is working to divest herself of those duties one-by-one. But she also redeems herself by performing good deeds where she can, and in ways that will not disclose her true identity here in Dingley Dell. She has healed me, Papa. She is secretly healing others as well; she has the drugs to do this — drugs procured from the Outland.

“Papa, I love you. And if you love me half as much as I do you, you will keep what I have told you to yourself. I shouldn’t be speaking to you. I should be keeping up the pretense of my illness. Yet your tears have compelled me to give balm to your suffering, to tell you in confidentiality that I am well. I am trapped within this place for a short time longer and must continue the counterfeit for the sake of Ruth Wolf, so that no harm will come to her for what she has done to help me and some of the others, but I had to tell you, to lift the heavy burden I have placed upon your heart and which you have carried about for lo, these last ten years.”

“I was so very cruelhearted in my thoughts of you until only a few moments ago,” said the father, his choked voice aching with remorse.

“Yet you must acquit yourself, Papa. I was become no longer a son to you. I was a cross to be borne — a ragged, splintered, broken thing. Think no more of it, Papa. Now you must promise me — the both of you — that you won’t communicate a word of what I’ve told you to anybody.”

Sir Dabber threw his arms about his son and did not release him. The last of the interchange was spoken in voices muffled by the close embrace of the two men — father and son, not only reunited (for many years had passed since Bevan had been a happy, healthy boy) but also newly born in each other’s arms.

“Your revelation raises a very large number of questions,” I said, keeping my voice to a whisper.

“Very few of which I’m able to answer,” said the young man.

“Cannot or will not?”

“Cannot. I have told you almost all that I know. There is only one thing more, and it will frighten you, so you must be stout.”

Bevan withdrew his head from his father’s shoulder. Sir Dabber eponymously dabbed at his wet eyes with his expansive handkerchief.

“Papa, and you who are his friend—”

“The name is Trimmers.”

“Yes, I will in time learn all the names of those who presently live in this valley, which I have for so long occupied in imbecility and ignorance and darkness. Here is the thing that must be said; I have no reason not to believe Miss Wolf, and so you must believe her, too: the world moves forward. The world outside of Dingley Dell moves ever onward. It has always moved thusly. It is we who have remained trapped in a time gone by. It is an oppressively complicated business. There are dangers in this new world that must be addressed. Dangers to us. In time, Miss Wolf will tell us how we are to confront them. But all must be done with great care and caution. We are fragile, she says. We are the china and porcelain that sit protected upon a shelf but once withdrawn may break in a thousand different ways. She says that we are beautiful to behold but it is inevitable that some day we shall be pulled down from that shelf, for we have gathered too much dust there, have draped ourselves too much in the cobwebs of our suspended lives.”