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 parlour, 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 to-night."
"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 humour 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.
Chapter XVIII
Mistress Ivy Peppercorn
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 neighbourhood of her old home, but -there were reasons.