Lud-in-the-Mist (19 page)

“W
ell,” said Master Ambrose, as he laid down the volume, “the woman was clearly as innocent as you are. And I should very much like to know what bearing the case has upon the present crisis.”

Master Nathaniel drew up his chair close to his friend’s and said in a low voice, as if he feared an invisible listener, “Ambrose, do you remember how you startled Leer with your question as to whether the dead could bleed?”

“I’m not likely to forget it,” said Master Ambrose, with an angry laugh. “That was all explained the night before last in the Fields of Grammary.”

“Yes, but supposing he had been thinking of something else — not of fairy fruit. What if Endymion Leer and Christopher Pugwalker were one and the same?”

“Well, I don’t see the slightest reason for thinking so. But even if they were — what good would it do us?”

“Because I have an instinct that hidden in that old case is a good honest hempen rope, too strong for all the gossamer threads of Fairie.”

“You mean that we can get the rascal hanged? By the Harvest of Souls, you’re an optimist, Nat. If ever a fellow died quietly in his bed from natural causes, it was that fellow Gibberty. But, for all that, there’s no reason to lie down under the outrageous practical joke that was played off on you yesterday. By my Great-aunt’s Rump, I thought Polydore and the rest of them had more sense than to be taken in by such tomfoolery. But the truth of it is that that villain Leer can make them believe what he chooses.”

“Exactly!” cried Master Nathaniel eagerly. “The original meaning of Fairie is supposed to be delusion. They can juggle with appearances — we have seen them at it in that tapestry room. How are we to make any stand against an enemy with such powers behind him?”

“You don’t mean that you are going to lie down under it, Nat?” cried Master Ambrose indignantly.

“Not ultimately — but for a time I must be like the mole and work in secret. And now I want you to listen to me, Ambrose, and not scold me for what you call wandering from the point and being prosy. Will you listen to me?”

“Well, yes, if you’ve got anything sensible to say,” said Master Ambrose grudgingly.

“Here goes, then! What do you suppose the Law was invented for, Ambrose?”

“What was the Law invented for? What
are
you driving at, Nat? I suppose it was invented to prevent rapine, and robbery, and murder, and all that sort of thing.”

“But you remember what my father said about the Law being man’s substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats — delusion. But man can’t live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion — the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart’s content, and says, ‘If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I choose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.’ And he creates a monster to inhabit it — the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies.”

For the life of him, Master Ambrose could not suppress a grunt of impatience. But he was a man of his word, so he refrained from further interruption.

“Beyond the borders of the world-in-law,” continued Master Nathaniel, “that is to say, the world as we choose for our convenience that it should appear, there is delusion — or reality. And the people who live there are as safe from our clutches as if they lived on another planet. No, Ambrose, you needn’t purse up your lips like that … everything I’ve been saying is to be found more or less in my father’s writings, and nobody ever thought
him
fantastic — probably because they never took the trouble to read his books. I must confess I never did myself till just the other day.”

As he spoke he glanced up at the portrait of the late Master Josiah, taken in the very armchair he, Nathaniel, was at that very moment sitting in, and following his son’s every movement with a sly, legal smile. No, there had certainly been nothing fantastic about Master Josiah.

And yet … there was something not altogether human about these bright bird-like eyes and that very pointed chin. Had Master Josiah also heard the Note … and fled from it to the world-in-law?

Then he went on: “But what I’m going to say now is my own idea. Supposing that everything that happens on the one planet, the planet that we call Delusion, reacts on the other planet; that is to say, the world as we choose to see it, the world-in-law? No, no, Ambrose! You promised to hear me out!” (For it was clear that Master Ambrose was getting restive.) “Supposing then, that one planet reacts on the other, but that these reactions are translated, as it were, into the terms of the other? To take an example, supposing that what on one planet is a spiritual sin should turn on the other into a felony? That what in the world of delusion are hands stained with fairy fruit should, in the world-in-law, turn into hands stained with human blood? In short, that Endymion Leer should turn into Christopher Pugwalker?”

Master Ambrose’s impatience had changed to real alarm. He greatly feared that Nathaniel’s brain had been unhinged by his recent misfortunes. Master Nathaniel burst out laughing: “I believe you think I’ve gone off my head, Brosie — but I’ve not, I promise you. In plain language, unless we can find that this fellow Leer has been guilty of something in the eye of the Law he’ll go on triumphing over us and laughing at us in his sleeve and ruining our country for our children till, finally, all the Senate, except you and me, follows his funeral procession, with weeping and wailing, to the Fields of Grammary. It’s our one hope of getting even with him, Brosie. Otherwise, we might as soon hope to catch a dream and put it in a cage.”

“Well, according to your ideas of the Law, Nat, it shouldn’t be too difficult,” said Master Ambrose dryly. “You seem to consider that in what you call the world-in-law one does as one likes with facts — launch a new legal fiction, then, according to which, for your own particular convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher Pugwalker.”

Master Nathaniel laughed: “I’m in hopes we can prove it without legal fiction,” he said. “The widow Gibberty’s trial took place thirty-six years ago, four years after the great drought, when, as Marigold has discovered, Leer was in Dorimare, though he has always given us to understand that he did not arrive till considerably later … and the reason would be obvious if he left as Pugwalker, and returned as Leer. Also, we know that he is intimate with the widow Gibberty. Pugwalker was a herbalist; so is Leer. And then there is the fright you gave him with your question, ‘Do the dead bleed?’ Nothing will make me believe that that question immediately suggested to him the mock funeral and the coffin with fairy fruit … he might think of that on second thoughts, not right away. No, no, I hope to be able to convince you, and before very long, that I am right in this matter, as I was in the other — it’s our one hope, Ambrose.”

“Well, Nat,” said Master Ambrose, “though you talk more nonsense in half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that you’re not such a fool as you look — and, after all, in Hempie’s old story it was the village idiot who put salt on the dragon’s tail.”

Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal compliment — it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a compliment at all.

“Well,” continued Master Ambrose, “and how are you going to set about launching your legal fiction, eh?”

“Oh, I’ll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses in the trial — Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be still alive. At any rate, it will give me something to do, and Lud’s no place for me just now.”

Master Ambrose groaned: “Has it really come to this, Nat, that you have to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing against this … this … this cobweb of lies and buffoonery and … well,
delusion
, if you like? I can tell you, I haven’t spared Polydore and the rest of them the rough side of my tongue — but it’s as if that fellow Leer had cast a spell on them.”

“But we’ll
break
the spell, by the Golden Apples of the West, we’ll break it, Ambrose!” cried Master Nathaniel buoyantly; “we’ll dredge the shadows with the net of the Law, and Leer shall end on the gallows, or my name’s not Chanticleer!”

“Well,” said Master Ambrose, “seeing you’ve got this bee in your bonnet about Leer you might like a little souvenir of him; it’s the embroidered slipper I took from that gibbering criminal old woman’s parlor, and now that her affair is settled there’s no more use for it.” (The variety of “silk” found in the Academy had finally been decided to be part “barratine tuftaffity” and part “figured mohair,” and Miss Primrose had been heavily fined and set at liberty.) “I told you how the sight of it made him jump, and though the reason is obvious enough — he thought it was fairy fruit — it seems to take so little to set your brain romancing there’s no telling what you mayn’t discover from it! I’ll have it sent over to you tonight.”

“You’re very kind, Ambrose. I’m sure it will be most valuable,” said Master Nathaniel ironically.

During Miss Primrose’s trial the slipper had from time to time been handed round among the judges, without its helping them in the slightest in the delicate distinctions they were drawing between tuftaffity and mohair. In Master Nathaniel it had aroused a vague sense of boredom and embarrassment, for it suggested a long series of birthday presents from Prunella that had put him to the inconvenience of pumping up adequate expressions of gratitude and admiration. He had little hope of being able to extricate any useful information from that slipper — still, Ambrose must have his joke.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Master Nathaniel rose to his feet and said, “This may be a long business, Ambrose, and we may not have an opportunity for another talk. Shall we pledge each other in wild thyme gin?”

“I’m not the man to refuse your wild thyme gin, Nat. And you don’t often give one a chance of tasting it, you old miser,” said Master Ambrose, trying to mask his emotion with facetiousness. When he had been given a glass filled with the perfumed grass-green syrup, he raised it, and smiling at Master Nathaniel, began, “Well, Nat …”

“Stop a minute, Ambrose!” interrupted Master Nathaniel. “I’ve got a sudden silly whim that we must should take an oath I must have read when I was a youngster in some old book … the words have suddenly come back to me. They go like this: ‘We’ (and then we say our own names), ‘Nathaniel Chanticleer and Ambrose Honeysuckle, swear by the Living and the Dead, by the Past and the Future, by Memories and Hopes, that if a Vision comes begging at our door we will take it in and warm it at our hearth, and that we will not be wiser than the foolish nor more cunning than the simple, and that we will remember that he who rides the Wind needs must go where his Steed carries him.’ Say it after me, Ambrose.”

“By the White Ladies of the Fields, never in my life have I heard such fustian!” grumbled Master Ambrose.

But Nat seemed to have set his heart on this absurd ceremony, and Master Ambrose felt that the least he could do was to humor him, for who could say what the future held in store and when they might meet again. So, in a protesting and excessively matter-of-fact voice, he repeated after him the words of the oath.

When, and in what book had Master Nathaniel found it? For it was the vow taken by the candidates for initiation into the first degree of the ancient Mysteries of Dorimare.

Do not forget that, in the eye of the Law, Master Nathaniel was a dead man.

The tasks assigned to the clerks in Master Nathaniel’s counting-house did not always concern cargoes and tonnage. For instance, once for two whole days they had not opened a ledger, but had been kept busy, under their employer’s supervision, in cutting out and pinning together fantastic paper costumes to be worn at Ranulph’s birthday party. And they were quite accustomed to his shutting himself into his private office, with strict injunctions that he was not to be disturbed, while he wrote, say, a comic valentine to old Dame Polly Pyepowders, popping his head frequently round the door to demand their help in finding a rhyme. So they were not surprised that morning when told to close their books and to devote their talents to discovering, by whatever means they chose, whether there were any relations living in Lud of a west country farmer called Gibberty who had died nearly forty years ago.

Great was Master Nathaniel’s satisfaction when one of them returned from his quest with the information that the late farmer’s widowed daughter, Mistress Ivy Peppercorn, had recently bought a small grocer’s shop in Mothgreen, a village that lay a couple of miles beyond the north gate.

There was no time to be lost, so Master Nathaniel ordered his horse, put on the suit of fustian he wore for fishing, pulled his hat well down over his eyes, and set off for Mothgreen.

Once there, he had no difficulty in finding Mistress Ivy’s little ship, and she herself was sitting behind the counter.

She was a comely, apple-cheeked woman of middle age, who looked as if she would be more in her element among cows and meadows than in a stuffy little ship, redolent of the various necessities and luxuries of a village community.

She seemed of a cheerful, chatty disposition, and Master Nathaniel punctuated his various purchases with quips and cranks and friendly questions.

By the time she had weighed him out two ounces of snuff and done them up in a neat little paper poke she had told him that her maiden name had been Gibberty, and that her late husband had been a ship’s captain, and she had lived till his death in the seaport town. By the time she had provided him with a quarter of lollipops, he knew that she much preferred a country life to trade. And by the time a woolen muffler had been admired, purchased and done up in a parcel, she had informed him that she would have liked to have settled in the neighborhood of her old home, but —
there were reasons
.

What these reasons were took time, tact and patience to discover. But never had Master Nathaniel’s wistful inquisitiveness, masquerading as warm-hearted sympathy, stood him in better stead. And she finally admitted that she had a stepmother whom she detested, and whom, moreover, she had good reason to distrust.

At this point Master Nathaniel considered he might begin to show his hand. He gave her a meaning glance; and asked her if she would like to see justice done and rascals getting their deserts, adding, “There’s no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of the chief uses of the Law.”

Mistress Ivy looked a little scared. “Who may you be, sir, please?” she asked timidly.

“I’m the nephew of a farmer who once employed a laborer called Diggory Carp,” he answered promptly.

A smile of enlightenment broke over her face.

“Well, who would have thought it!” she murmured. “And what may your uncle’s name have been? I used to know all the farmers and their families round our part.”

There was a twinkle in Master Nathaniel’s candid hazel eyes: “I doubt I’ve been too sharp and cut myself!” he laughed. “You see, I’ve worked for the magistrates, and that gets one into the habit of setting traps for folk … the Law’s a wily lady. I’ve no uncle in the West, and I never knew Diggory Carp. But I’ve always taken an interest in crime and enjoyed reading the old trials. So when you said your name had been Gibberty my mind at once flew back to a certain trial that had always puzzled me, and I thought perhaps, the name Diggory Carp might unlock your tongue. I’ve always felt there was more behind that trial than met the eye.”

“Did you indeed?” said Mistress Ivy evasively. “You seem mighty interested in other folks’ affairs,” and she looked at him rather suspiciously.

This put Master Nathaniel on his mettle. “Now, hark’ee, Mistress Ivy, I’m sure your father took a pleasure in looking at a fine crop, even if it was in another man’s field, and that your husband liked good seamanship …”

And here he had to break off his dissertation and listen, which he did very patiently, to a series of reminiscences about the tastes and habits of her late husband.

“Well, as I was saying,” he went on, when she paused for a moment to sigh, and smile and wipe her eyes with the corner of her apron, “what the sight of a field filled to the brim with golden wheat was to your father, and that of a ship skillfully piloted into harbor was to your husband, the sight of Justice crouching and springing on her prey is to me. I’m a bachelor, and I’ve managed to put by a comfortable little nest-egg, and there’s nothing I’d like to spend it on better than in preventing Justice being baulked of her lawful prey, not to mention helping to avenge a fine fellow like your father. We old bachelors, you know, have our hobbies … they’re quieter about the house than a crowd of brats, but they’re sometimes quite as expensive,” and he chuckled and rubbed his hands.

He was thoroughly enjoying himself, and seemed actually to have become the shrewd, honest, and somewhat bloodthirsty old fellow he had created. His eyes shone with the light of fanaticism when he spoke of Justice, the tiger; and he could picture the snug little house he lived in in Lud — it had a little garden gay with flowers, and a tiny lawn, and espalier fruit trees, to the care of which he dedicated his leisure hours. And he had a dog, and a canary, and an old housekeeper.

Probably, when he got home tonight, he would sit down to a supper of sausages and mashed, followed by a toasted cheese. And then, when he had finished his supper, he would get out his collection of patibulary treasures, and over a bowl of negus finger lovingly the various bits of gallows rope, the blood-stained glove of a murdered strumpet, the piece of amber worn as a charm by a notorious brigand chief, and gloat over the stealthy steps of his pet tiger, the Law. Yes, his obscure little life was as gay with hobbies as his garden was with flowers. How comfortable were other men’s shoes!

“Well, if what you mean,” said Mistress Ivy, “is that you’d like to help punish wicked people, why, I wouldn’t mind lending a hand myself. All the same,” and again she looked at him suspiciously, “what makes you think my father didn’t come by a natural death?”

“My nose, good lady, my nose!” and, as he spoke, he laid a knowing finger alongside the said organ. “I smelt blood. Didn’t it say in the trial that the corpse bled?”

She bridled, and cried scornfully, “And you, to be town-bred, too, and an educated man from the look of you, to go believing that vulgar talk! You know what country people are, setting everything that happens to the tunes of old songs. It was two drops of blood when the story was told in the tavern at Swan, and by the time it had reached Moongrass it was a gallon. I walked past the corpse with the others, and I can’t say I noticed any blood — but, then, my eyes were all swelled with crying. All the same, it’s what made Pugwalker leave the country.”

“Indeed?” cried Master Nathaniel, and his voice was very eager.

“Yes. My stepmother was never the kind to be saucy with — though I had no cause to love her, I must say she looked like a queen, but he was a foreigner and a little bit of a chap, and the boys in the village and all round gave him no peace, jumping out at him from behind hedges and chasing him down the street, shouting, ‘Who made the corpse of Farmer Gibberty bleed?’ and such like. And he just couldn’t stand it, and slipped off one night, and I never thought to see him again. But I’ve seen him in the streets of Lud, and not long ago too — though he didn’t see me.”

Master Nathaniel’s heart was thumping with excitement. “What is he like?” he asked breathlessly.

“Oh! very like what he was as a young man. They say there’s nothing keeps you young like a good conscience!” and she laughed dryly. “Not that he was ever much to look at — squat and tubby and freckled, and such saucy prying eyes!”

Master Nathaniel could contain himself no longer, and in a voice hoarse with excitement he cried, “Was it … do you mean the Lud doctor, Endymion Leer?”

Mistress Ivy pursed up her mouth and nodded meaningfully.

“Yes, that’s what he calls himself now … and many folks set such store by him as a doctor, that, to hear them talk, one would think a baby wasn’t properly born unless he’d brought it into the world, nor a man properly dead unless he’d closed his eyes.”

“Yes, yes. But are you
sure
he is the same as Christopher Pugwalker? Could you swear to him in court?” cried Master Nathaniel eagerly.

Mistress Ivy looked puzzled. “What good would it do to swear at him?” she asked doubtfully. “I must say I never held with foul language in a woman’s mouth, nor did my poor Peppercorn — for all that he was a sailor.”

“No, no!” cried Master Nathaniel impatiently, and proceeded to explain to her the meaning of the expression.

She dimpled a little at her own blunder, and then said guardedly, “And what would bring me into the law courts, I should like to know? The past is over and done with, and what is done can’t be undone.”

Master Nathaniel fixed her with a searching gaze, and, forgetting his assumed character, spoke as himself.

“Mistress Peppercorn,” he said solemnly, “have you no pity for the dead, the dumb, helpless dead? You loved your father, I am sure. When a word from you might help to avenge him, are you going to leave that word unsaid? Who can say that the dead are not grateful for the loving thoughts of the living, and that they do not rest more quietly in their graves when they have been avenged? Have you no time or pity left for your dead father?”

During this speech Mistress Ivy’s face had begun working, and at the last words she burst into sobs. “Don’t think that, sir,” she gasped; “don’t think that! I remember well how my poor father used to sit looking at her of an evening, not a word passing his lips, but his eyes saying as clearly as if it had been his tongue, ‘No, Clem,’ (for my stepmother’s name was Clementine), ‘I don’t trust you no further than I see you, but, for all that, you can turn me round your little finger, because I’m a silly, besotted old fool, and we both know it.’ Oh! I’ve always said that my poor father had both his eyes wide open, in spite of him being the slave of her pretty face. It was not that he didn’t see, or couldn’t see — what he lacked was the heart to speak out.”

“Poor fellow! And now, Mistress Ivy, I think you should tell me all you know and what it is that makes you think that, in spite of the medical evidence to the contrary, your father was murdered,” and he planted his elbows on the counter and looked at her squarely in the face.

But Mistress Ivy trimmed. “I didn’t say that poor father was poisoned with osiers. He died quiet and peaceful, father did.”

“All the same, you think there was foul play. I am not entirely disinterested in this matter, now that I know Dr. Leer is connected with it. I happen to bear him a grudge.”

First Mistress Ivy shut the door on to the street, and then leant over the counter, so that her face was close to his, and said in a low voice: “Why, yes, I always did think there had been foul play, and I’ll tell you why. Just before my father died we’d been making jam. And one of poor father’s funny little ways was to like the scum of jam or jelly, and we used to keep some of every boiling in a saucer for him. Well, my own little brother Robin, and
her
little girl — a little tot of three — were buzzing round the fruit and sugar like a pair of little wasps, whining for this, sticking their fingers into that, and thinking they were helping with the jam-making. And suddenly my stepmother turned round and caught little Polly with her mouth all black with mulberry juice. And oh, the taking she was in! She caught her and shook her, and ordered her to spit out anything she might have in her mouth; and then, when she found out it was mulberries, she cooled down all of a sudden and told Polly she must be a good girl and never put anything in her mouth without asking first.

“Now, the jam was boiled in great copper cauldrons, and I noticed a little pipkin simmering on the heath, and I asked my stepmother what it was. And she answered carelessly, ‘Oh, it’s some mulberry jelly, sweetened with honey instead of sugar, for my old grandfather at home.’ And at the time I didn’t give the matter another thought. But the evening before my father died … and I’ve never mentioned this to a soul except my poor Peppercorn … after supper he went and sat out in the porch to smoke his pipe, leaving her and him to their own doings in the kitchen; for she’d been brazenfaced enough, and my father weak enough, actually to have the fellow living there in the house. And my father was a queer man in that way — too proud to sit where he wasn’t wanted, even in his own kitchen. And I’d come out, too, but I was hid from him by the corner of the house, for I had been waiting for the sun to go down to pick flowers, to take to a sick neighbor the next day. But I could hear him talking to his spaniel, Ginger, who was like his shadow and followed him wherever he went. I remember his words as clearly as if it had been yesterday: ‘Poor old Ginger!’ he said, ‘I thought it would be me who would dig your grave. But it seems not, Ginger, it seems not. Poor old lady, by this time tomorrow I’ll be as dumb as you are … and you’ll miss our talks, poor Ginger.’ And then Ginger gave a howl that made my blood curdle, and I came running round the corner of the house and asked father if he was ailing, and if I could fetch him anything. And he laughed, but it was as different as chalk from cheese from the way he laughed as a rule. For poor father was a frank-hearted, open-handed man, and not one to hoard up bitterness any more than he would hoard up money; but that laugh — the last I heard him give — was as bitter as gall. And he said, ‘Well, Ivy, my girl, would you like to fetch me some peonies and marigolds and shepherd’s thyme from a hill where the Silent People have danced, and make me a salad from them?’ And seeing me looking surprised, he laughed again, and said, ‘No, no. I doubt there are no flowers growing this side of the hills that could help your poor father. Come, give me a kiss — you’ve always been a good girl.’ Now, these are flowers that old wives use in love potions, as I knew from my granny, who was very wise about herbs and charms, but father had always laughed at her for it, and I supposed he was fretting over my stepmother and Pugwalker, and wondering if he could win her heart back to him.