Yet this strange day was far from done. As miraculous as was the calculating device, and as tragic as was the intelligence pertaining to Walter Skewton and the unfortunate Mr. Gamfield (who hadn’t even ventured from the valley with adventurous intent, but in coincidental pursuit of his runaway Newfoundland pup), even far greater peculiarities of this day lay only a few steps and a few moments away, and in meeting them, two more pieces of this rather large puzzle, which was being offered to us both intentionally and inadvertently, would be put directly into our hands and heavy would they weigh, though there be some modicum of hope affiliated with them both.
Chapter the Thirtieth. Wednesday, July 2, 2003
here was no reason to creep into the dark cell that held Sir Dabber’s son Bevan and three other victims of Rokesmith’s rigoritis, but creep we did nonetheless in respectful silence. The attendant who unlocked the door, a roughly-hewn young man from the village of Tavistock whom I knew only as Oscar, informed us prior to shutting us in, “You rap upon this here door, when you got to go. I’ll come set you free.”
“Must we visit with him here?” asked Dabber of the attendant. “Can he not be taken up to the garden? There are benches there beneath the trees.”
“And light and air,” I added.
Oscar shook his head and rubbed an itch upon his pocked nose. “The ‘rigors’ don’t get the grounds. They stay put where we puts ‘em.”
The door closed with a loud clang and in that jolting instant we joined the company of Bevan and three other men, each of whom was rocking back and forth upon his own cot, seemingly oblivious to our presence.
“My heart breaks for each one of them,” said Sir Dabber, touching the corner of his eye with his oversized pocket-handkerchief. “And to think that there is no cure. It’s most difficult to abide.”
I touched Dabber upon the arm and pointed to his son. “Go and sit with him. Take his hand. Deep within him he must know that it’s you come to visit.”
The large man sighed and nodded and moved to sit next to the young man who bore his surname and a bit of his look. “You should sit on his other side,” Dabber entreated me. “He may like it that there are two who are come to be with him.”
I did not wish to sit next to Bevan. He stank. It had been a while since he had been bathed. There were crumbs clinging to his chin stubble and encrusted morsels lodging within the corners of his mouth. Bevan’s long, matted brown hair remained in an upward sweep as if he had been standing in the wind. I imagined the pitiful young man running his hands upward through his locks over and over again as some of the “rigors” were wont to do.
Sir Dabber lowered himself carefully upon the hard cot, and took up his son’s bony hand. He held it as he, no doubt, had held it on each of his former visits. A cockroach skittered aross the floor, stopping at Bevan’s unshod right foot, and then making bold to traverse it. Bevan did not acknowledge the prickly passage of the verminous creature. The young man’s begrimed face gave nothing but a blank stare, a look no different from that which greeted us when first we had stepped into the cell.
One of the other men cawed. It was a single shout, which sounded very much like that of a crow, and then there was silence in the small dark room — a room that smelt of unwashed flesh and unlaundered linens and mouldering food and dank water. I could not tell which of the room’s two buckets was used for what, and I had no desire to investigate.
“These conditions are appalling,” said Sir Dabber with an atrabilious shake of the head. “I don’t care that the lodgings are only temporary until the rooms are finished upstairs. It is medieval. Barbaric! This is a hospital, for Christ’s sake! A place for hospitable healing.”
I nodded. I was equally repulsed.
“I intend to find out exactly how much longer these men will be made to live here in this veritable dungeon!” proclaimed Dabber, his brow knitted in consternation.
Dabber’s raised voice had unsettled one of the other young men who looked up with a frightful expression.
“Contain yourself,” I admonished my exercised companion.
Dabber nodded. He turned to behold his son, fresh tears forming in his eyes. “What a life you have led, my child. And how cruelly have I disparaged you. I should never have thought so little of you. You were always a burden, but from this day forward I vow to do better by you. I will be a far kinder and far more loving father to you, mark me, my dear boy.”
I turned my own gaze to Bevan Dabber and witnessed thereupon a most amazing thing: the young man had also begun to cry. A tear was trickling at that very moment — one errant tear only — down his left cheek. But in its tiny rivulet upon that dirty face, it brought both Dabber and me to an even greater state of emotional affliction. The tear served as a simple but stark reminder that the young man was still human. And then came something else that made the same point in an even stronger, more dramatic way: Bevan Dabber spoke!
“Hear me, Papa. Give me leave to say a thing or two.” (Sir Seth Dabber could not have found his voice at that moment even if he had wished to, his son’s words having put him into a sudden, nearly apoplectic, stupor!) “I have been healed, Papa. There is a nurse here who has done it. Miss Wolf. You know Miss Wolf, I believe, as the child who lay abed with withering lungs and a crippled heart in Hungerford village — a child whom no one ever saw. No one saw her because she is a fabrication. Miss Wolf is a Beyonder who needed the means by which to pretend that she had always been one of us. Two years ago she came hither and two months ago she began to heal me, and now I am well and the rigoritis is gone.”
So now I had come to know some of the truth about the mysterious Miss Wolf, and to receive answers to a few of those puzzling questions I had had about her early life and that sudden and miraculous recovery coincident to her supposititious parents’ death. But one question led to another, and then another. Did Mr. and Mrs. Wolf participate in preparations for their “daughter’s” integration into the Dell, or did their deaths merely open a convenient portal for Ruth’s entry under the guise of being their daughter? (I was later to learn that it was the latter, Ruth being absolved, moreover, of my suspicions that she had been somehow complicit in effecting the exigent death of her “parents.”)
I did not betray to the young man that I knew her. Instead, I prepared myself to listen to this most earnest and commendatory invocation of her with feigned ignorance of any knowledge of the subject at hand.
Bevan took a long breath. I seised this opportunity to say that it was extraordinary, nearly beyond belief, to think that he had been healed of a disease that had never before known a cure. But one thing at a time: why was he pretending otherwise?
“For the time being, I must counterfeit myself in the way that you saw me when first you entered this cell. Miss Wolf was brought here for a sinister purpose that she has not disclosed to me — a purpose that plagues her soul. She is working to divest herself of those duties one-by-one. But she also redeems herself by performing good deeds where she can, and in ways that will not disclose her true identity here in Dingley Dell. She has healed me, Papa. She is secretly healing others as well; she has the drugs to do this — drugs procured from the Outland.