“Do you truly mean that, Alice? Do you truly mean that you could actually go off and leave your family here to whatever fate awaits them and feel no compunction whatsoever over the abandonment?”
Alice nodded. Then she shrugged. “They are dead to me, Mr. Pupker, and will always be dead to me. Hand me a shovel, sir, and I shall be first to dig a hole to inhume them.”
“Good God, girl, how forcefully do you renounce your very own family! And may I ask why?”
“Because my mother is a flighty, fluttering, pecking little bird that does nothing but chirp and peep when she isn’t scowling and sputtering and slapping the cheeks of those who incommode her.”
“Your mother strikes you?”
Nodding: “So hard across the face that she sometimes leaves a handprint there. It is most mortifying.”
“And your father—”
“A man of no talent and little ambition who had no business siring a family given his unwillingness to offer us anything but perpetual failure in every office and facet of his being. I will not speak ill of my younger brother, though, for he is probably dead. He has successfully severed his bond, just as I did, and I will commend him for that at least, though my flight to the embracing bosom of my friends the Pupkers—”
Here Alice Trimmers gave a beatific smile to shew affection for her newly adopted family.
“—has proven a far more practical route to sanity and sanguinity.”
“A solid course, my child,” said Pupker, resuming his contemplative pacing. “A most solid course. Now Cecilia, dear daughter, here is what we intend to do, because I know that you have been upon pins and needles over whether Alice will be joining us: we shall have the circumstantiallyorphaned Miss Alice Trimmers…” (With a courtly bow to Alice.) “…come with us to the Summit and emigrate with us to the Outland. There is no reason that she shouldn’t. So let us set your worrying little mind to rest on this count right this very moment.”
Consequently thrilled beyond words, both girls sprang up from their seats to put their loving arms round the neck of their benevolent benefactor. “And perhaps,” continued Pupker as he detached himself with a chuckle from all the clutching, supple young arms, “with Alice’s coming, you will find it in your own troubled heart, Cecilia, to join us now with a renewal of spirit and with a full and happy endorsement of our course, and leave off being morose about departing a place that is soon to become nothing more than a fast-fading memory. Shall we not all together, my dear girls, turn over a new leaf — begin this brand new chapter of our lives with an ebullition of glee and optimism for our well-paved future?”
“Of course we shall!” cried both girls in unison. Then there was a silence, which was shortly broken by a question from Alice: “So your other daughter, then, is to be left behind?”
Pupker nodded. “What else can be done? Hannah has been legally consigned to a madhouse. I doubt that I can gain her release as much as I try. Fate has determined that you, Miss Alice Trimmers, should take her place, and one never argues with fate.”
“I thank you for taking me along, Mr. Pupker. But what if I should see my father out there? How am I to present myself? Whatever should I do?”
Montague Pupker now turned to fully face my inquisitive niece. He threaded his hand through her long brown tresses, allowing the fingers to linger there for a moment so as to better feel the softness of her youthful locks. “Such a chatterbox of questions you are! But you’ll not worry about that one for another moment, fair Alice. Rest assured that your father will come nowhere near us. He’ll no longer bring shame upon you. Nor soon will your mother. You have my word on that. Banish them from your thoughts, my child, just as they have, no doubt, banished you from theirs.”
There was simplicity to the statement but there was little truth to it. For two mornings later Alice Trimmers had her own jolt of displeasure— and a rather consequential one it was at that — when in the course of that quiet forenoon stroll with her new spirit-sister Cecilia — both girls bending their steps to the Chuffey Bakery to break their fast — the two were halted by a sight of a most disturbing character. Through the upstairs window of Alice’s Uncle Frederick’s lodgings above Mrs. Lumbey’s Ladies’ Fine Dress Shop, Alice and Cecilia saw the following: Alice’s erstwhile mother, recently installed therein, and Alice’s erstwhile father, raised by all appearance from the proverbial dead, crossing the room, their arms locked in connubial affection.
“Away from the window, you two!” I called to my brother and sister-inlaw from the other side of the bedchamber in which I had just a moment before disturbed their morning solitude with the presentation of a fully provisioned teaboard. None of us being aware that there were four most critical eyes staring up at us from the street below, I appended rhetorically and a bit mootly, “Do you wish to be detected by a passerby?”
“Not at all. We weren’t thinking,” said Gus, drawing the curtains and throwing the room into temporary darkness. “But it is become a true bother to keep ourselves from the bright light of morning, brother.”
“It beseeches one, morning does — teazes and beseeches,” offered Charlotte, looking blissfully upon her husband, the marital ties between the two strongly restored.
“I sometimes feel, brother,” continued Gus, “as if I am already interred behind the dark walls of the gaol or within the Bedlam mad hospital.”
“Better darkness here than darkness there,” said I, settling myself down into a chair to take my own morning cup from the tray.
I had decided that this was to be the morning in which I would inform Newman’s parents of their son’s present whereabouts, that so much had I said upon the subject of remaining calm and collected and unprecipitant and in the more practical sense of keeping Gus’s own whereabouts scrupulously hidden, that he and Charlotte would surely now take the news about Newman and cherish it in their hearts and give leave to Muntle and Timberry and me to do what needed to be done. What was to be done was this: that we should rescue the boy from Bedlam, just as we strove to rescue three other personages of great worth from that institution: Hannah Pupker, George Muntle, and Professor Jeremiah Chivery, there being great practical value in emancipating the last inmate on that list, for Chivery would finally tell us what all of his calculations had been about and whether they should reveal something in the arithmetic of his obsession that would be useful to our efforts to save Dingley Dell from extinction.
It was time, I thought, to tell everything to Gus and Charlotte, to bring them fully into the circle of those most informed about what was happening here. It was time to reveal those facts that had been kept deliberately from the ken of nearly every other citizen of the Dell who was not a member of the Fortnightly Poetry League (or an adjunct of that esteemed body) nor a constituent member of the Eighty-three Elect.
But once again I could not do it. Here was my brother crossing negligently before an open window, totally unmindful of his safety. Who is to say that he would not be equally neglectful in forcing upon us his own reckless participation in our still-formulating rescue mission?
I laugh. I cannot help myself. Mission. Muntle and Timberry and I: rescuing swashbucklers! The humour lies in this: that there was never opportunity to give the venture more than minor preparatory thought. Because of what was to happen next — something that would constitute quite a troubling turn of events and propel this story into its final tumultuous chapters!
With astonishing speed and devastating consequence, not only for Gus, but for all of us who resided in Mrs. Lumbey’s townhouse, and then for several others who associated with us, Alice and Cecilia’s sighting succeeded in dislodging a rather large boulder from its precipice upon that high hill of early metaphorical mention, thus setting the avalanche into full, tumbling motion. Within two short hours a number of us were put into the Dinglian gaol, whilst Gus was conveyed to Bedlam to be placed under lock and key, his name to be indited into the records of that institution as the most recently quarantined victim of T.T., Terror Tremens.