“And what day was this, Harry? Try to remember the exact day.”
“It was a Wednesday. I should like to say that it was the first Wednesday of last month.”
I drew out my pocketbook, which carried a small calendar card within it. “June 4. Two weeks later Chivery was removed to Bedlam. I happen to know a little something about those intervening days. He spent a good many of them neither eating nor sleeping, but writing his equations in a mad fury upon the board in his classroom. Those who observed him said that he was carried away, in a most wild and obsessed state.”
“Surely it must have been something upon those papers that put him into such a frenzy,” said Harry.
I nodded. “And here is something more: I saw the continuation of those ravings upon the wall of a cell at the asylum when Sir Dabber and I visited that place just yesterday. I wager he’s writing still, in whatever new room they have put him. What happened to the valise?”
“We kept it, David and me.”
“And what else was in it?”
“Small personal items as a rule. All from the Outland: a very colourful photograph set into a shiny metallic frame: photographic likenesses of a young man and woman wearing the same odd clothing as the dead woman was wearing — spare and indecorous, though the colours be bright. There were these things as welclass="underline" empty folders and transparent packages of tissue paper, and a most remarkable pen, which writes from ink held inside. I know that there were mechanical pens of this sort in the earliest days of our valley history, but it is rather astonishing to think of how sophisticated this pen is by comparison, for it does the job of releasing its ink so efficiently. Oh, and a little ceramic doll now in the possession of my youngest girl, Louisa — it is the figure of a little boy, perhaps eight or ten inches high, standing with a grin. He wears a uniform of some sort, and holds a stick. It is too narrow to be a cricket bat, so David and I have deduced that it must be suggestive of an American baseball bat. Oh yes, and his head sits detached upon a spring and bounces when you touch it.”
“I should like to see it.”
“I’ll shew you each of these things when we return to the mews. These and the mechanical objects which also lived within the case — objects for which I could not readily glean a purpose, except for the one that seemed to be some sort of small calculating device.”
I nodded my head with great interest. “Yes, yes. I’ve recently seen such a device as this myself, and have even had the opportunity of making an arithmetical calculation upon it.”
Harry Scadger ran his hand through his thinning, blond hair, and leant back a little in his chair. “I should like to know what was on those papers— the ones that put Dr. Chivery into such a state of agitation, and which in the end resulted in his being committed to Bedlam.”
“As would I. For the time being, though, there is no getting to him. He is sealed away in much the same manner as are others who have important things to tell, should they only be given leave to speak.”
“Others?”
“Yes. Returnees from the Outland, deliberately cordoned off from the rest of us.”
“But they are sick.”
I shook my head. “I strongly suspect now that the sickness is a fabrication, a pretext for their incarceration. Do you know the dead woman’s name? Does it appear on anything in the valise?”
Harry nodded. “Michelena Martin. I’m glad that I told you of her, Frederick. You are the right man to know. But there is something else as well — something having nothing to do with her, that I must discuss with you.”
“Yes?” I drew back. I took a pull on the gin drink. It tasted fœtid in my mouth and I could hardly bring myself to swallow the vile liquid. It was the sort of concoction one put upon a wound to heal it faster. I could not believe that it shouldn’t burn its way through my tract like lye or acid.
“I had been wanting to speak to you about this other important matter for quite some time, but Matilda wouldn’t let me. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ said she. ‘But,’ said I, ‘Frederick Trimmers isn’t a dog, or at least not the sort of dog to bare the gums and make things unpleasant for us. Nor do I think that what I have to convey should do anything but bind us stronger in our society with one another.’”
“Then by all means, you must tell me.”
My companion nodded. He took a deep breath, and then in a soft voice he began: “There is a great secret that has been kept from you and your brother. I have known it for some time.”
“Yes?”
Suddenly the drink didn’t taste so vile. I drank it heartily to quell the feeling of unease rising up within my breast.
I could count perhaps upon the fingers of a single hand the number of times that Harry Scadger and I had sat and spoken thoughtfully and earnestly with one another. Society and circumstances didn’t generally permit it. Yet I had always enjoyed my exchanges with this unique man. He was perspicacious and quite bright, and our encounters had always left me with a better sense of things, my understanding having been illuminated by the fresh, articulate perspective of his simplified station.
If one hadn’t been told that Harry Scadger was amongst the poorest men in the Dell, one should think him to be nothing short of scholar, teacher, or even erudite member of the Petit-Parliament. Soon I would learn the reasons why.
For in addition to his intuitive intellect and common sense, Harry had been favoured, when just a boy, by the kindness of a mysterious benefactor. “The man had sent word to the apricot grove,” Harry revealed, “that my brothers and I would be provided a tutor, whose services would be paid in full by the benefactor. Thus, each of the six sons of Solomon Scadger would be afforded an education, through the learned offices of Dr. Chivery, that elseways would have been denied us by our impoverished and societally estranged circumstances. In spite of the generosity of the offer, my brothers turned it down, preferring to continue as their father had, illiterate and uneducated. I, the second oldest offspring of that family, proved the only exception. For a good many months, I received a singular education from, inarguably, the most brilliant man in Dingley Dell. I received my schooling in the face of the taunts and ridicules of my brothers, my youngest brother save one — Melchisedech (or Mel for short) — even succeeding in dropping, from an overarching limb, a Dinglian grammar upon my head as I took a nap between my studies, and nearly putting me into a state of irreversible insentience.
“Over the years, I’d nurtured this early taste for books that set me apart from my proudly-unread brothers, and this fact drew rancor from them, though Papa remained supportive of my efforts to uplift myself. In point of fact, my father was more than merely supportive, eventually encouraging me to leave the grove and seek my fortune in Milltown. But I refused to go and turn my back on my brothers, who had taken wives and started families and were forever being gulled by every tradesman with whom “Scadger and Sons” (the name facetiously applied to my under-enterprising family by our many betters) did business. Devolved to me was the responsibility of keeping the books, such as they were, on behalf of this collection of knife-sharpeners and basket weavers who seemed to all the valley little more than idiots with industrious fingers. But in staying behind to help my family eke out an existence that kept them all from dropping dead of everything imaginable that could befall a family of pastoral innocents, I put my light under a bushel and pushed all my grand life plans to the back of the hearth shelf. And in Solomon Scadger’s last lingering hours before succumbing to a kick in the head by a passing mule when the driver failed to see a sleeping man lying too close to the road, my expiring father nonetheless found voice enough to thank me for overseeing the family business — and this acknowledgement warmed my heart more than anything else that he could have said in those expiring moments — and reminded me that all of my services to the clan had not been for naught. And there was something else that was said to me by my father in those final pre-mortem breaths. Something really quite extraordinary.