Master Nathaniel, still grinning a little sheepishly, stuck out his hand. Master Ambrose frowned, blew his nose, tried to look severe, and then grasped the hand. And they stood there fully two minutes, wringing each other’s hand, and laughing and blinking to keep away the tears.
And then Master Ambrose said, “Come into the pipe-room, Nat, and try a glass of my new flower-in-amber. You old rascal, I believe it was that that brought you!”
A little later when Master Ambrose was conducting Master Nathaniel back to his house, his arm linked in his, they happened to pass Endymion Leer.
For a few seconds he stood staring after them as they glimmered down the lane beneath the faint moonlight. And he did not look overjoyed.
That night was filled to the brim for Master Nathaniel with sweet, dreamless sleep. As soon as he laid his head on the pillow he seemed to dive into some pleasant unknown element — fresher than air, more caressing than water; an element in which he had not bathed since he first heard the Note, thirty years ago. And he woke up the next morning light-hearted and eager; so fine a medicine was the will to action.
He had been confirmed in it by his talk the previous evening with Master Ambrose. He had found his old friend by no means crushed by his grief. In fact, his attitude to the loss of Moonlove rather shocked Master Nathaniel, for he had remarked grimly that to have vanished forever over the hills was perhaps, considering the vice to which she had succumbed, the best thing that could have happened to her. There had always been something rather brutal about Ambrose’s common sense.
But he was as anxious as Master Nathaniel himself that drastic measures should immediately be taken for stopping the illicit trade and arresting the smugglers. They had decided what these measures ought to be, and the following days were spent in getting them approved and passed by the Senate.
Though the name of Master Nathaniel stank in the nostrils of his colleagues, their respect for the constitution was too deep seated to permit their opposing the Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of Dorimare; besides, Master Ambrose Honeysuckle was a man of considerable weight in their councils, and they were not uninfluenced by the fact that he was the seconder of all the Mayor’s proposals.
So a couple of Yeomen were placed at each of the gates of Lud, with orders to examine not only the baggage of everyone entering the town, but, as well, to rummage through every wagon of hay, every sack of flour, every frail of fruit or vegetables. As well, the West road was patrolled from Lud to the confines of the Elfin Marches, where a consignment of Yeomanry were sent to camp out, with orders day and night to watch the hills. And the clerk to the Senate was ordered to compile a dossier of every inhabitant of Lud.
The energy displayed by Master Nathaniel in getting these measures past did a good deal towards restoring his reputation among the townsfolk. Nevertheless that social barometer, Ebeneezor Prim, continued to send his new apprentice, instead of coming himself, to wind his clocks. And the grandfather clock, it would seem, was protesting against the slight. For according to the servants, it would suddenly move its hands rapidly up and down its dial, which made it look like a face, alternating between a smirk and an expression of woe. And one morning Pimple, the little indigo page, ran screaming with terror into the kitchen, for, he vowed, from the orifice at the bottom of the dial, there had suddenly come shooting out a green tongue like a lizard’s tail.
As none of Master Nathaniel measures brought to light a single smuggler or a single consignment of fairy fruit, the Senate were beginning to congratulate themselves on having at last destroyed the evil that for centuries had menaced their country, when Mumchance discovered in one day three people clearly under the influence of the mysterious drug and with their mouth and hands stained with strangely colored juices.
One of them was a pigmy peddler from the North, and as he scarcely knew a word of Dorimarite no information could be extracted from him as to how he had procured the fruit. Another was a little street urchin who had found some sherds in a dustbin, but was in too dazed a state to remember exactly where. The third was the deaf-mute known as Bawdy Bess. And, of course, no information could be got from a deaf-mute.
Clearly, then, there was some leakage in the admirable system of the Senate.
As a result, rebellious lampoons against the inefficient Mayor were found nailed to the doors of the Guildhall, and Master Nathaniel received several anonymous letters of a vaguely threatening nature, bidding him to cease to meddle with matters that did not concern him, lest they should prove to concern him but too much.
But so well had the antidote of action been agreeing with his constitution that he merely flung them into the fire with a grim laugh and a vow to redouble his efforts.
Chapter XII
Dame Marigold Hears the Tap of a Woodpecker
Miss Primrose Crabapple’s trial was still dragging on, clogged by all the foolish complications arising from the legal fiction that had permitted her arrest. If you remember, in the eye of the law fairy fruit was regarded as woven silk, and many days were wasted in a learned discussion of the various characteristics of gold tissues, stick tuftaffities, figured satins, wrought grograines, silk mohair and ferret ribbons.
Urged partly by curiosity and, perhaps, also by a subconscious hope that in the comic light of Miss Primrose’s personality recent events might lose something of their sinister horror, one morning Dame Marigold set out to visit her old schoolmistress in her captivity.
It was the first time she had left the house since the tragedy, and, as she walked down the High Street she held her head high and smiled a little scornful smile — just to show the vulgar herd that even the worst disgrace could not break the spirit of a Vigil.
Now, Dame Marigold had very acute senses. Many a time she had astonished Master Nathaniel by her quickness in detecting the faintest whiff of any of the odors she disliked — shag, for instance, or onions.
She was equally quick in psychological matters, and would detect the existence of a quarrel or love affair long before they were known to anyone except the parties concerned. And as she made her way that morning to the Guildhall she became conscious in everything that was going on round her of what one can only call a change of key.
She could have sworn that the baker’s boy with the tray of loaves on his head was not whistling, that the maid-servant, leaning out of a window to tend her mistress’s pot-flowers, was not humming the same tune that they would have been some months ago.
This, perhaps, was natural enough. Tunes, like fruit, have their seasons, and are, besides, ever forming new species. But even the voices of the hawkers chanting “Yellow Sand!” or “Knives and Scissors!” sounded disconcertingly different.
Instinctively, Dame Marigold’s delicate nostrils expanded, and the corners of her mouth turned down in an expression of disgust, as if she had caught a whiff of a disagreeable smell.
On reaching the Guildhall, she carried matters with a high hand; No, no there was no need whatever to disturb his Worship. He had given her permission to visit the prisoner, so would the guardian take her up immediately to her room.
Dame Marigold was one of those women who, though they walk blindfold through the fields and woods, if you place them between four walls have eyes as sharp as a naturalist’s for the objects that surround them. So, in spite of her depression, her eyes were very busy as she followed the guardian up the splendid spiral staircase, and along the paneled corridors, hung, here and there, with beautiful bits of tapestry. She made a mental note to tell Master Nathaniel that the caretaker had not swept the staircase, and that some of the paneling was worm-eaten and should be attended to. And she would pause to finger a corner of the tapestry and wonder if she could find some silk just that powder blue, or just that old rose, for her own embroidery.
“Why, I do declare, this panel is beginning to go too!” she murmured, pausing to tap on the wall.
Then she cried in a voice of surprise, “I do believe it’s hollow here!”
The g
uardian smiled indulgently — “You are just like the doctor, ma’am — Doctor Leer. We used to call him the Woodpecker, when he was studying the Guildhall for his book, for he was forever hopping about and tapping on the walls. It was almost as if he were looking for something, we used to say. And I’d never be surprised myself to come on a sliding panel. They do say as what those old Dukes were a wild crew, and it might have suited their book very well to have a secret way out of their place!” and he gave a knowing wink.
“Yes, yes, it certainly might,” said Dame Marigold, thoughtfully.
They had now come to a door padlocked and bolted. “This is where we have put the prisoner, ma’am,” said the guardian, unlocking it. And then he ushered her into the presence of her old schoolmistress.
Miss Primrose was sitting bolt upright in a straight backed old fashioned chair, against a background of fine old tapestries, faded to the softest loveliest pastel tints — as incongruous with her grotesque ugliness as had been the fresh prettiness of the Crabapple Blossoms.
Dame Marigold stood staring at her for a few seconds in silent indignation. Then she sank slowly on to a chair, and said sternly, “Well, Miss Primrose? I wonder how you dare sit there so calmly after the appalling thing you have brought about.”
But Miss Primrose was in one of her most exalted moods — “On her high hobby-horse,” as the Crabapple Blossoms used to call it. So she merely glittered at Dame Marigold contemptuously out of her little eyes, and, with a lordly wave of her hand, as if to sweep away from her all mundane trivialities, she exclaimed pityingly, “My poor blind Marigold! Perhaps of all the pupils who have passed through my hands you are the one who are the least worthy of your noble birthright.”
Dame Marigold bit her lip, raised her eyebrows, and said in a low voice of intense irritation, “What do you mean, Miss Primrose?”
Miss Primrose cast her eyes up to the ceiling, and, in her most treacly voice she answered, “The great privilege of having been born a woooman!”
Her pupils always maintained that “woman,” as pronounced by Miss Primrose, was the most indecent word in the language.
Dame Marigold’s eyes flashed: “I may not be a woman, but, at any rate, I am a mother — which is more than you are!” she retorted.
Then, in a voice that at each word grew more indignant, she said, “And, Miss Primrose, do you consider that you yourself have been ‘worthy of your noble birthright’ in betraying the trust that has been placed in you? Are vice and horror and disgrace and breaking the hearts of parents ‘true womanliness’ I should like to know? You are worse than a murderer — ten times worse. And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor — as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats! I do really believe …”
But Miss Primrose’s shrillness screamed down her low-toned indignation: “Shake me! Stick pins in me! Fling me into the Dapple!” she shrieked. “I will bear it all with a smile, and wear my shame like a flower given by him!”
Dame Marigold groaned in exasperation: “Who, on earth, do you mean by ‘him’, Miss Primrose?”
Then her irrepressible sense of humor broke out in a dimple, and she added: “Duke Aubrey or Endymion Leer?”
For, of course, Prunella had told her all the jokes about the goose and the sage.
At this question Miss Primrose gave an unmistakable start; “Duke Aubrey, of course!” she answered, but the look in her eyes was sly, suspicious, and distinctly scared.
None of this was lost upon Dame Marigold. She looked her slowly up and down with a little mocking smile; and Miss Primrose began to writhe and to gibber.
“Hum!” said Dame Marigold, meditatively.
She had never liked the smell of Endymion Leer’s personality.
The recent crisis had certainly done him no harm. It had doubled his practice, and trebled his influence.
Besides, it cannot have been Miss Primrose’s beauty and charms that had caused him to pay her recently such marked attentions.
At any rate, it could do no harm to draw a bow at a venture.
“I am beginning to understand, Miss Primrose,” she said slowly. “Two … outsiders, have put their heads together to see if they could find a plan for humiliating the stupid, stuck-up, ‘so-called old families of Lud!’ Oh! don’t protest, Miss Primrose. You have never taken any pains to hide your contempt for us. And I have always realized that yours was not a forgiving nature. Nor do I blame you. We have laughed at you unmercifully for years — and you have resented it. All the same I think your revenge has been an unnecessarily violent one; though, I suppose, to ‘a true woooman,’ nothing is too mean, too spiteful, too base, if it serves the interests of ‘him’!”
But Miss Primrose had gone as green as grass, and was gibbering with terror: “Marigold! Marigold!” she cried, wringing her hands, “How can you think such things? The dear, devoted Doctor! The best and kindest man in Lud-in-the-Mist! Nobody was angrier with me over what he called my ‘criminal carelessness’ in allowing that horrible stuff to be smuggled into my loft, I assure you he is quite rabid on the subject of … er … fruit. Why, when he was a young man at the time of the great drought he was working day and night trying to stop it, he …”
But not for nothing was Dame Marigold descended from generations of judges. Quick as lightning, she turned on her: “The great drought? But that must be forty years ago … long before Endymion Leer came to Dorimare.”
“Yes, yes, dear … of course … quite so … I was thinking of what another doctor had told me … since all this trouble my poor head gets quite muddled,” gibbered Miss Primrose. And she was shaking from head to foot.
Dame Marigold rose from her chair, and stood looking down on her in silence for a few seconds, under half-closed lids, with a rather cruel little smile.
Then she said, “Good-bye, Miss Primrose. You have provided me with most interesting food for thought.”
And then she left her, sitting there with frightened face against the faded tapestry.
That same day, Master Nathaniel received a letter from Luke Hempen that both perplexed and alarmed him.
It was as follows:
Your Worship, —
I’d be glad if you’d take Master Ranulph away from this farm, because the widow’s up to mischief, I’m sure of that, and some of the folks about here say as what in years gone by she murdered her husband, and she and somebody else, though I don’t know who, seem to have a grudge against Master Ranulph, and, if I might take the liberty, I’ll just tell your Worship what I heard.
It was this way — one night, I don’t know how it was, but I couldn’t get to sleep, and thinking that a bite, may be, of something would send me off, towards midnight I got up from my bed to go and look in the kitchen for a bit of bread. And half-way down the stairs I heard the sound of low voices, and someone said, “I fear the Chanticleers,” so I stood still where I was, and listened. And I peeped down and the kitchen fire was nearly out, but there was enough left for me to see the widow, and a man wrapped up in a cloak, sitting opposite to her with his back to the stairs, so I couldn’t see his face. Their talk was low and at first I could only hear words here and there, but they kept making mention of the Chanticleers, and the man said something like keeping the Chanticleers and Master Ambrose Honeysuckle apart, because Master Ambrose had had a vision of Duke Aubrey. And if I hadn’t known the widow and how she was a deep one and as fly as you make them, I’d have thought they were two poor daft old gossips, whose talk had turned wild and nasty with old age. And then the man laid his hand on her knee, and his voice was low, but this time it was so clear that I could hear it all, and I think I can remember every word of it, so I’ll write it down for your Worship: “I fear counter orders. You know the Chief and his ways — at any moment he might betray his agents. Willy Wisp gave young Chanticleer fruit without my knowledge. And I told you how he and that doitered old weaver of yours have been putting their head
s together, and that’s what has frightened me most.”
And then his voice became too low for me to hear, till he said, “Those who go by the Milky Way often leave footprints. So let him go by the other.”
And then he got up to go, and I crept back to my room. But not a wink of sleep did I get that night for thinking over what I had heard. For though it seemed gibberish, it gave me the shivers, and that’s a fact. And mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones, so I hope your Worship will excuse me writing like this, and that you’ll favor me with an answer by return, and take Master Ranulph away, for I don’t like the look in the widow’s eye when she looks at him, that I don’t.
And hoping this finds your Worship well as it leaves me, — I am, Your Worship’s humble obedient servant,
LUKE HEMPEN
How Master Nathaniel longed to jump on to his horse and ride post-haste to the farm! But that was impossible. Instead, he immediately dispatched a groom with orders to ride day and night and deliver a letter to Luke Hempen, which bade him instantly take Ranulph to the farm near Moongrass (a village that lay some fifteen miles north of Swan-on-the-Dapple) from which for years he had got his cheeses.
Then he sat down and tried to find some meaning in the mysterious conversation Luke had overheard.
Ambrose seeing a vision! An unknown Chief! Footprints on the Milky Way!
Reality was beginning to become very shadowy and menacing.
He must find out something about this widow. Had she not once appeared in the law-courts? He decided he must look her up without a moment’s delay.
He had inherited from his father a fine legal library, and the book-shelves in his pipe-room were packed with volumes bound in vellum and old calf of edicts, codes, and trials. Some of them belonged to the days before printing had been introduced into Dorimare, and were written in the crabbed hand of old town-clerks.