Lud-in-the-Mist (17 page)

Mother Tibbs laughed gleefully at their surprise, and then, placing one finger on her lips, she beckoned them to follow her; and they tiptoed after her out into the moonlit Fields of Grammary, where she signed to them to hide themselves from view behind the big trunk of a sycamore.

The dew, like lunar daisies, lay thickly on the grassy graves. The marble statues of the departed seemed to flicker into smiles under the rays of the full moon; and, not far from the sycamore, two men were digging up a newly-made grave. One of them was a brawny fellow with the gold rings in his ears worn by sailors, the other was — Endymion Leer.

Master Nathaniel shot a look of triumph at Master Ambrose, and whispered, “A cask of flower-in-amber, Brosie!”

For some time the two men dug on in silence, and then they pulled out three large coffins and laid them on the grass.

“We’d better have a peep, Sebastian,” said Endymion Leer, “to see that the goods have been delivered all right. We’re dealing with tricky customers.”

The young man, addressed as Sebastian, grinned, and taking a clasp knife from his belt, began to prise open one of the coffins.

As he inserted the blade into the lid, our two friends behind the sycamore could not help shuddering; nor was their horror lessened by the demeanor of Mother Tibbs, for she half closed her eyes, and drew the air in sharply through her nostrils, as if in expectation of some delicious perfume.

But when the lid was finally opened and the contents of the coffin exposed to view, they proved not to be cere cloths and hideousness, but — closely packed fairy fruit.

“Toasted Cheese!” muttered Master Ambrose; “Busty Bridget!” muttered Master Nathaniel.

“Yes, that’s the goods all right,” said Endymion Leer, “and we’ll take the other two on trust. Shut it up again, and help to hoist it on to my shoulder, and do you follow with the other two — we’ll take them right away to the tapestry-room. We’re having a council there at midnight, and it’s getting on for that now.”

Choosing a moment when the backs of the two smugglers were turned, Mother Tibbs darted out from behind the sycamore, and shot back into the chapel, evidently afraid of not being found at her post. And she was shortly followed by Endymion Leer and his companion.

At first, the sensations of Master Nathaniel and Master Ambrose were too complicated to be expressed in words, and they merely stared at each other, with round eyes. Then a slow smile broke over Master Nathaniel’s face, “No Moongrass cheese for you this time, Brosie,” he said. “Who was right, you or me?”

“By the Milky Way, it was you, Nat!” cried Master Ambrose, for once, in a voice of real excitement. “The rascal! The unmitigated rogue! So it’s him, is it, we parents have to thank for what has happened! But he’ll hang for it, he’ll hang for it — though we have to change the whole constitution of Dorimare! The
blackguard!”

“Into the town probably as a hearse,” Master Nathaniel was saying thoughtfully, “then buried here, then down through my chapel into the secret room in the Guildhall, whence, I suppose, they distribute it by degrees. It’s quite clear now how the stuff gets into Lud. All that remains to clear up is how is gets past our Yeomen on the border … but what’s taken you, Ambrose?”

For Master Ambrose was simply shaking with laughter; and he did not laugh easily.

“Do the dead bleed?” he was repeating between his guffaws; “why, Nat, it’s the best joke I’ve heard these twenty years!”

And when he had sufficiently recovered he told Master Nathaniel about the red juice oozing out of the coffin, which he had taken for blood, and how he had frightened Endymion Leer out of his wits by asking him about it.

“When, of course, it was a bogus funeral, and what I had seen was the juice of that damned fruit!” and again he was seized with paroxysms of laughter.

But Master Nathaniel merely gave an absent smile; there was something vaguely reminiscent in that idea of the dead bleeding — something he had recently read or heard; but, for the moment, he could not remember where.

In the meantime, Master Ambrose had recovered his gravity. “Come, come,” he cried briskly, “we’ve not a moment to lose. We must be off at once to Mumchance, rouse him and a couple of his men, and be back in a twinkling to that tapestry-room, to take them red-handed.”

“You’re right, Ambrose! You’re right!” cried Master Nathaniel. And off they went at a sharp jog trot, out at the gate, down the hill, and into the sleeping town.

They had no difficulty in rousing Mumchance and in firing him with their own enthusiasm. As they told him in a few hurried words what they had discovered, his respect for the Senate went up in leaps and bounds — though he could scarcely credit his ears when he learned of the part played in the evening’s transactions by Endymion Leer.

“To think of that! To think of that!” he kept repeating, “and me who’s always been so friendly with the Doctor, too!”

As a matter of fact, Endymion Leer had for some months been the recipient of Mumchance’s complaints with regard to the slackness and inefficiency of the Senate; and, in his turn, had succeeded in infecting the good Captain’s mind with sinister suspicions against Master Nathaniel. And there was a twinge of conscience for disloyalty to his master, the Mayor, behind the respectful heartiness of his tones as he cried, “Very good, your Worship. It’s Green and Juniper what are on duty tonight. I’ll go and fetch them from the guard-room, and we should be able to settle the rascals nicely.”

As the clocks in Lud-in-the-Mist were striking midnight the five of them were stepping cautiously along the corridors of the Guildhall. They had no difficulty in finding the hollow panel, and having pressed the spring, they made their way along the secret passage.

“Ambrose!” whispered Master Nathaniel flurriedly, “what was it exactly that I said that turned out to be the pass-word? What with the excitement and all I’ve clean forgotten it.”

Master Ambrose shook his head. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he whispered back. “To tell you the truth, I couldn’t make out what she meant about your having used a password. All I can remember your saying was ‘Toasted Cheese!’ or ‘Busty Bridget!’ — or something equally elegant.”

Now they had got to the door, locked from the inside as before.

“Look here, Mumchance,” said Master Nathaniel, ruefully, “we can’t remember the pass-word, and they won’t open without it.”

Mumchance smiled indulgently, “Your Worship need not worry about the pass-word,” he said. “I expect we’ll be able to find another that will do as well … eh, Green and Juniper? But perhaps first — just to be in order — your Worship would knock and command them to open.”

Master Nathaniel felt absurdly disappointed. For one thing, it shocked his sense of dramatic economy that they should have to resort to violence when the same result could have been obtained by a minimum expenditure of energy. Besides, he had so looked forward to showing off his new little trick!

So it was with a rueful sigh that he gave a loud rat-a-tat-tat on the door, calling out, “Open in the name of the Law!”

These words, of course, produced no response, and Mumchance, with the help of the other four, proceeded to put into effect his own pass-word, which was to shove with all their might against the door, two of the hinges of which he had noticed looked rusty.

It began to creak, and then to crack, and finally they burst into … an empty room. No strange fruit lay heaped on the floor; nothing hung on the walls but a few pieces of faded moth-eaten tapestry. It looked like a room that had not been entered for centuries.

When they had recovered from their first surprise, Master Nathaniel cried fiercely, “They must have got wind that we were after them, and given us the slip, taking their loads of filthy fruits with them, I’ll …”

“There’s been no fruit here, your Worship,” said Mumchance in a voice that he was trying hard to keep respectful; “it always leaves stains, and there ain’t any stains here.”

And he couldn’t resist adding, with a wink to Juniper and Green, “I daresay it’s your Worship’s having forgotten the pass-word that’s done it!” And Juniper and Green grinned from ear to ear.

Master Nathaniel was too chagrined to heed this insolence; but Master Ambrose — ever the champion of dignity in distress — gave Mumchance such a look that he hung his head and humbly hoped that his Worship would forgive his little joke.

T
he following morning Master Nathaniel woke late, and got up on the wrong side of his bed, which, in view of the humiliation and disappointment of the previous night, was, perhaps, pardonable.

His temper was not improved by Dame Marigold’s coming in while he was dressing to complain of his having smoked green shag elsewhere than in the pipe-room: “And you
know
how it always upsets me, Nat. I’m feeling quite squeamish this morning, the whole house reeks of it … Nat! you know you
are
an old blackguard!” and she dimpled and shook her finger at him, as an emollient to the slight shrewishness of her tone.

“Well, you’re wrong for once,” snapped Master Nathaniel; “I haven’t smoked shag even in the pipe-room for at least a week — so
there!
Upon my word, Marigold, your nose is a nuisance — you should keep it in a bag, like a horse!”

But though Master Nathaniel might be in a bad temper he was far from being daunted by what had happened the night before.

He shut himself into the pipe-room and wrote busily for about a quarter of an hour; then he paced up and down committing what he had written to memory. Then he set out for the daily meeting of the Senate. And so absorbed was he with the speech he had been preparing that he was impervious, in the Senators’ tiring-room, to the peculiar glances cast at him by his colleagues.

Once the Senators had donned their robes of office and taken their places in the magnificent room reserved for their councils, their whole personality was wont suddenly to alter, and they would cease to be genial, easy-going merchants who had known each other all their lives and become grave, formal — even hierophantic, in manner; while abandoning the careless colloquial diction of every day, they would adopt the language of their forefathers, forged in more strenuous and poetic days than the present.

In consequence, the stern look in Master Nathaniel’s eye that morning, when he rose to address his colleagues, the stern tone in which he said “Senators of Dorimare!” might have heralded nothing more serious than a suggestion that they should, that year, have geese instead of turkeys at their public dinner.

But his opening words showed that this was to be no usual speech.

“Senators of Dorimare!” he began, “I am going to ask you this morning to awake. We have been asleep for many centuries, and the Law has sung us lullabies. But many of us here have received the accolade of a very heavy affliction. Has that wakened us? I fear not. The time has come when it behooves us to look facts in the face — even if those facts bear a strange likeness to dreams and fancies.

“My friends, the ancient foes of our country are abroad. Tradition says that the Fairies” (he brought out boldly the horrid word) “fear iron; and we, the descendants of the merchant-heroes, must still have left in us some veins of that metal. The time has come to prove it. We stand to lose everything that makes life pleasant and secure — laughter, sound sleep, the merriment of fire-sides, the peacefulness of gardens. And if we cannot bequeath the certainty of these things to our children, what will boot them their inheritance? It is for us, then, as fathers as well as citizens, once and for all to uproot this menace, the roots of which are in the past, the branches of which cast their shadow on the future.

“I and another of your colleagues have discovered at last who it was that brought this recent grief and shame upon so many of us. It will be hard, I fear, to prove his guilt, for he is subtle, stealthy, and mocking, and, like his invisible allies, his chief weapon is delusion. I ask you all, then, to parry that weapon with faith and loyalty, which will make you take the word of old and trusty friends as the only touchstone of truth. And, after that — I have sometimes thought that less blame attaches to deluding others than to deluding oneself. Away, then, with flimsy legal fictions! Let us call things by their names — not grograine or tuftaffity, but
fairy fruit
. And if it be proved that any man has brought such merchandise into Dorimare, let him hang by his neck till he be dead.”

Then Master Nathaniel sat down.

But where was the storm of applause he had expected would greet his words? Where were the tears, the eager questions, the tokens of deeply stirred feelings?

Except for Master Ambrose’s defiant “Bravos!” his speech was received in profound silence. The faces all round him were grim and frigid, with compressed lips and frowning brows — except the portrait of Duke Aubrey — he, as usual, was faintly smiling.

Then Master Polydore Vigil rose to his feet, and broke the grim silence.

“Senators of Dorimare!” he began, “the eloquent words we have just listened to from his Worship the Mayor can, strangely enough, serve as a prelude — a golden prelude to my poor, leaden words. I, too, came here this morning resolved to bring your attention to legal fictions — which, sometimes, it may be, have their uses. But perhaps before I say my say, his Worship will allow the clerk to read us the oldest legal fiction in our Code. It is to be found in the first volume of the Acts of the twenty-fifth year of the Republic, Statute 5, chapter 9.”

Master Polydore Vigil sat down, and a slow grim smile circulated round the hall, and then seemed to vanish and subside in the mocking eyes of Duke Aubrey’s portrait.

Master Nathaniel exchanged puzzled glances with Master Ambrose; but there was nothing for it but to order the clerk to comply with the wishes of Master Polydore.

So, in a small, high, expressionless voice, which might have been the voice of the Law herself, the clerk read as follows:

“Further, we ordain that nothing but death alone shall have power to dismiss the Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of Dorimare before the five years of his term of office shall fully have expired. But, the dead, being dumb, feeble, treacherous and given to vanities, if any Mayor at a time of menace to the safety of the Dorimarites be held by his colleagues to be any of these things, then let him be accounted dead in the eye of the Law, and let another be elected in his stead.”