“I hope that you appreciate the irony of it, Trimmers: that Dingley Dell exists to-day, forever reverential to the written word, because a female writer left behind the means to literary expression in that hollowed-out fruit cellar.”
Ruth Wolf lowered her voice. “Ask the vicar to pray for us, Trimmers. For Bevan and Sir Dabber and I have agreed amongst ourselves that we are not going into hiding. We have decided to advocate on behalf of the Dell— to find someone in a position of power who will listen to us, who will join hands in helping us to rescue this valley.”
“Always the rescuing angel,” said I, and then after I had said it, I could not be certain if it was spoken aloud or merely expressed within my head.
Ruth Wolf and her lover Bevan Dabber and his father Sir Seth Dabber climbed the Southern Coal Ridge for two reasons: it presented a much more difficult ascent than the Northern Ridge, and so, it was hoped, would be less carefully guarded by Tiadaghton sentries, and Ruth Wolf hoped, as well, to make good on her efforts to keep her partner Phillips apprised through the course of her exodus from the Dell of Dingley through application of her small portable telephone. The climb would be a difficult one for Sir Dabber, whose lungs were often taxed simply by walking too quickly across a room, but he was nonetheless determined to accompany his son and the young man’s devoted fiancée wherever their travels should take them.
Sir Dabber’s lifeless body was discovered by two romping collier’s children the very next morning, not very far up the ridge. However, it wasn’t respiratory difficulties or coronary arrest that had brought an end to the man’s life; it was the loss of blood to the brain pursuant to the severing of that gentlemen’s right carotid artery. One of his two climbing companions had died similarly; Miss Wolf had also suffered a terminal attack upon the neck — both through a slicing open of that selfsame artery and the jugular vein that coursed next to it. Dabber’s other companion, however, did not die through a slit throat at all; there was evidence, instead, of a rather violent struggle, which produced multiple stabbings into Bevan’s chest and back. All three bodies had been left where they fell in an obvious attempt to forewarn any other Dinglian with escape on his mind against making such a foolhardy attempt. The bodies were a gruesome find, and the children who first discovered them were put into a greatly unsettled state for the remainder of the day.
There was no sense from any of the members of the mining families who viewed the bodies nor from the sheriff ’s deputies dispatched to collect them nor even from Dr. Fibbetson who was detailed to serve as coroner over them (such responsibility requiring no more than a simple pronouncement that the three corpses were indeed dead), that two of the three individuals had been most deeply in love, the two having fallen several yards asunder, and having not even been afforded the consolation of dying in one another’s arms.
Chapter the Forty-second. Tuesday, July 8, 2003
he two girls often strolled together of a morning, but most especially upon those recent mornings following ejection from the emporium run by the older girl’s father and from the family’s finely-appointed apartments above. This particular morning the two had not even been given leave by the father to take a little breakfast, being sent, instead, to Chuffey Bakery for that very purpose. The reason was this: the father sought that neither his daughter nor the friend whom he was coming to regard as a daughter should be present for rather important conferences and preparations related to the large undertaking that loomed in the near offing. The undertaking was, of course, the somewhat elaborate removal of the “Eighty-three Elect” to the Summit of Exchange upon the Ides of July (July being one of the four calendar months whose Ides fall on the 15th), the M.P.P.’s, and all those within their closest orbits to be immediately thereafter spirited off and away from their ill-fated ancestral valley home, and out and abroad into the Outland — a worldwide tract that promised the most wondrous post-Victorian perquisites of privileged life.
It had only been two days since Cecilia Pupker and her best-of-allpossible-friends Miss Alice Trimmers had received a bit of rather important information from Cecilia’s father. That illustrious worthy, who had been placed in charge of the Fête champêtre and who was responsible for every detail of its incumbent arrangements, decided only then to tell his daughter the true reason behind the recent flurry of activity engendered by the exclusive celebratory event. With this revelation came the father’s injunction to his daughter to gather in due course a few items of clothing and a few items of sentimental attachment, for she was leaving Dingley Dell with only a little luggage and would never be coming back. The disclosure was received at first with quite a measure of filial displeasure on the part of Miss Pupker (and with great observational fascination on the part of Cecilia’s best-of-all-possible-friends Alice Trimmers). The younger of the two Pupker daughters was so displeased, in fact, that she made a show of baulking and bridling and stamping her foot in a most unbecoming manner. Remaining in this place in which she had been largely sheltered and pampered and made relatively happy was far preferable, said she, to being cast to the winds like the peripatetic children of Israel.
“And what will you do, Papa,” speculated Cecilia in her closing argument, “if I choose not to go with you and Mama? Whatever will you do then?”
“Why, I know exactly what I should do, my obstinate daughter. Your mother and I will simply depart this vale without you. You are free to stay behind. You are free, should you wish it, to keep company with your lunatic sister in Bedlam for that matter. But I must caution you that Dingley Dell in our absence will be a not very hospitable place, and will little resemble the familiar Dingley Dell of this day.”
Cecilia Pupker was seated upon a cushioned all-weather settee as her father paced up and down the terrace. Her look was one of clear concern and anxiety (attended by manufactured petulance), such a look being one that rarely visited the girl’s face, it generally being carelessly languid, bearing hardly a lineament of worry. “Whatever do you mean, Papa?”
“I’ll not say it with your friend Alice present.”
Alice patted down the plaits in her skirts to give her hands something to do so that they should not betray too strong an investment of interest in the discussion at hand.
“And what do you mean by that, Papa? For Alice cares not a straw about those whose names have been left off the invitation list. Who are they to her, for she is one of us now,” said Cecilia, turning to her friend Alice.
“One of you, yes,” said a blushing Alice, who allowed her cheek to be delicately kissed by Cecilia to punctuate the sentiment with demonstrative affection.
Montague Pupker suspended his pacing and stopt before the chair occupied by Alice Trimmers, late of the Trimmers family and greatly glad, as just noted, to be done with them. “Is there truth, Miss Alice Trimmers, to what my daughter has just said? Is it true that you care not a fig what is to happen to your family or to any of those countrymen of yours, for that matter, who are to be left behind after our departure?”
“I care nothing whatsoever,” said Alice boldly. “They bore me to tears. My own family drives me so mad that you could put me directly into Bedlam alongside your other daughter, and I should like it better than having to a take another meal with Mama and Papa when even upon their very best behaviour.”