Lud-in-the-Mist (13 page)

“Why, Master Ambrose,” he gurgled, “it was such a grisly question that it gave me quite a turn. Owing to the deplorable ignorance of this country I’m used to my patients asking me rather queer things … but that beats anything I’ve yet heard. ‘Do the dead bleed?’ Do pigs fly? Ha, ha, ha, ha!”

Then, seeing that Master Ambrose was beginning to look stiff and offended, he controlled his mirth, and added, “Well, well, a man as sorely tried as you have been today, Master Ambrose, is to be excused if he has hallucinations … it is wonderful what queer things we imagine we see when we are unhinged by strong emotion. And now I must be going. Birth and death, Master Ambrose, they wait for no man — not even for Senators. So I must be off and help the little Ludites into the world, and the old ones out of it. And in the meantime don’t give up hope. At any moment one of Mumchance’s good Yeomen may come galloping up with the little lady at his saddle-bow. And then — even if she should have eaten what you fear she has — I shall be much surprised if a Honeysuckle isn’t able with time and care to throw off all effects of that foul fodder and grow up into as sensible a woman — as her mother.”

And, with these characteristic words of comfort, Endymion Leer bustled off on his business.

Master Ambrose spent a most painful evening, his ears, on the one hand, alert for every sound of a horse’s hoof, for every knock at the front door, in case they might herald news of Moonlove; and, at the same time, doing their best not to hear Dame Jessamine’s ceaseless prattle.

“Ambrose, I wish you’d remind the clerks to wipe their shoes before they come in. Have you forgotten you promised me we should have a separate door for the warehouse? I’ve got it on paper.

“How nice it is to know that there’s nothing serious the matter with Moonlove, isn’t it? But I don’t know what I should have done this afternoon if that kind Doctor Leer hadn’t explained it all to me. How
could
you run away a second time, Ambrose, and leave me in that state without even fetching my hartshorn? I do think men are so heartless.

“What a naughty girl Moonlove is to run away like this! I wonder when they’ll find her and bring her back? But it will be nice having her at home this winter, won’t it? What a pity Ranulph Chanticleer isn’t older, he’d do so nicely for her, wouldn’t he? But I suppose Florian Baldbreeches will be just as rich, and he’s nearer her age.

“Do you think Marigold and Dreamsweet and the rest of them will be shocked by Moonlove’s rushing off in this wild way? However, as Dr. Leer said, in his quaint way, girls
will
be girls.

“Oh, Ambrose, do you remember my deer-colored tuftaffity, embroidered with forget-me-nots and stars? I had it in my bridal chest. Well, I think I shall have it made up for Moonlove. There’s nothing like the old silks, or the old dyes either — there were no galls or gum-syrups used in
them
. You remember my deer-colored tuftaffity, don’t you?”

But Master Ambrose could stand it no longer. He sprang to his feet, and cried roughly, “I’ll give you a handful of Yeses and Noes, Jessamine, and it’ll keep you amused for the rest of the evening sorting them out, and sticking them on to your questions. I’m going out.”

He would go across to Nat’s … Nat might not be a very efficient Mayor, but he was his oldest friend, and he felt he needed his sympathy.

“If … if any news comes about Moonlove, I’ll be over at the Chanticleers. Let me know at once,” he called over his shoulder, as he hurried from the room.

Yes, he was longing for a talk with Nat. Not that he had any belief in Nat’s judgment; but he himself could provide all that was needed.

And, apart from everything else, it would be comforting to talk to a man who was in the same boat as himself — if, that is to say, the gossip retailed by Endymion Leer were true. But whether it were true or not Leer was a vulgar fellow, and had had no right to divulge a professional secret.

So huge did the events of the day loom in his own mind, that he felt sure of finding their shadow lying over the Chanticleers; and he was prepared to be magnanimous and assure the conscience-stricken Master Nathaniel that though, as Mayor, he may have been a little remiss and slack, nevertheless, he could not, in fairness, be held responsible for the terrible thing that had happened.

But he had forgotten the gulf that lay between the Magistrates and the rest of the town. Though probably the only topics of conversation that evening in every kitchen, in every tavern, in every tradesman’s parlor, were the good run for his money little Miss Honeysuckle had given her revered father that afternoon, and the search parties of Yeomen that were scouring the country for her — not to mention the terrible suspicions as to the cause of her flight he had confided to Mumchance; nevertheless not a word of it all had reached the ears of the other Magistrates.

So, when the front-door of the Chanticleers was opened for him, he was greeted by sounds of uproarious laughter proceeding from the parlor.

The Polydore Vigils were spending the evening there, and the whole party was engaged in trying to catch a moth — flicking at it with their pocket handkerchiefs, stumbling over the furniture, emulating each other to further efforts in the ancient terms of stag-hunting.

“Come and join the fun, Ambrose,” shouted Master Nathaniel, crimson with exertion and laughter.

But Master Ambrose began to see red.

“You … you … heartless, gibbering idiots!” he roared.

The moth-hunters paused in amazement.

“Suffering Cats! What’s taken you, Ambrose?” cried Master Nathaniel. “Stag-hunting, they say, was a royal sport. Even the Honeysuckles might stoop to it!”

“Don’t the Honeysuckles consider a moth a stag, Ambrose?” laughed Master Polydore Vigil.

But that evening the old joke seemed to have lost its savor.

“Nathaniel,” said Master Ambrose solemnly, “the curse of our country has fallen upon you and me … and you are hunting moths!”

Now, “curse” happened to be one of the words that had always frightened Master Nathaniel. So much did he dislike it that he even avoided the words that resembled it in sound, and had made Dame Marigold dismiss a scullery-maid, merely because her name happened to be Kirstie.

Hence, Master Ambrose’s words sent him into a frenzy of nervous irritation.

“Take that back, Ambrose! Take that back!” he roared. “Speak for yourself. The … the … the cur … nothing of that sort is on
me!”

“That is not true, Nathaniel,” said Master Ambrose sternly. “I have only too good reason to fear that Moonlove is stricken by the same sickness as Ranulph, and …”

“You lie!” shouted Master Nathaniel.

“And in both cases,” continued Master Ambrose, relentlessly, “the cause of the sickness was … fairy fruit.”

Dame Dreamsweet Vigil gave a smothered scream, Dame Marigold blushed crimson, and Master Polydore exclaimed, in a deeply shocked voice, “By the Milky Way, Ambrose, you are going a little too far — even if there were not ladies present.”

“No, Polydore. There come times when even ladies must face facts. You see before you two dishonored men — Nathaniel and myself. One of our statutes says that in the country of Dorimare each member of a family shall be the master of his own possessions, and that nothing shall be held in common but disgrace. And before you are many days older, Polydore, your family, too, may be sharing that possession. Each one of us is threatened in what is nearest to us, and our chief citizen — hunts moths!”

“No, no, Nathaniel,” he went on in a louder and angrier voice, “you needn’t glare and growl! I consider that you, as Mayor of this town, are responsible for what has happened today, and …”

“By the Sun, Moon and Stars!” bellowed Master Nathaniel, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean by ‘what has happened today,’ but whatever it is, I know very well I’m not responsible. Were you responsible last year when old Mother Pyepowders’s yapping little bitch chewed up old Matt’s pet garters embroidered by his first sweetheart, and when …”

“You poor, sniveling, feeble-minded buffoon! You criminal nincompoop! Yes,
criminal
, I say,” and at each word Master Ambrose’s voice grew louder. “Who was it that knew of the spread of this evil thing and took no steps to stop it? Whose own son has eaten it? By the Harvest of Souls you may have eaten it yourself for all I know …”

“Silence, you foul-mouthed, pompous, brainless, wind-bag! You … you … foul, gibbering Son of a Fairy!” sputtered Master Nathaniel.

And so they went at it, hammer and tongs, doing the best to destroy in a few minutes the fabric built up by years of fellowship and mutual trust.

And the end of it was that Master Nathaniel pointed to the door, and in a voice trembling with fury, told Master Ambrose to leave his house, and never to enter it again.

T
he following morning Captain Mumchance rode off to search Miss Primrose Crabapple’s Academy for fairy fruit. And in his pocket was a warrant for the arrest of that lady should his search prove successful.

But when he reached the Academy he found that the birds had flown. The old rambling house was empty and silent. No light feet tripped down its corridors, no light laughter wakened its echoes. Some fierce wind had scattered the Crabapple Blossoms. Miss Primrose, too, had disappeared.

A nameless dread seized Captain Mumchance as he searched through the empty silent rooms.

He found the bedrooms in disorder — drawers half opened, delicately tinted clothing heaped on the floor — indicating that the flitting had been a hurried one.

Beneath each bed, too, he found a little pair of shoes, very down at heel, with almost worn-out soles, looking as if the feet that had worn them must have been very busy.

He continued his search down to the kitchen premises, where he found Mother Tibbs sitting smiling to herself, and crooning.

“Now, you cracked harlot,” he cried roughly, “what have you been up to, I’d like to know? I’ve had my eye on you, my beauty, for a very long time. If
I
can’t make you speak, perhaps the judges will. What’s happened to the young ladies? Just you tell me
that!”

But Mother Tibbs was more crazy than usual that day, and her only answer was to trip up and down the kitchen floor, singing snatches of old songs about birds set free, and celestial flowers, and the white fruits that grow on the Milky Way.

Mumchance was holding one of the little shoes, and catching sight of it, she snatched it from him, and tenderly stroked it, as if it had been a wounded dove.

“Dancing, dancing, dancing!” she muttered, “dancing day and night! It’s stony dancing on dreams.”

And with an angry snort Mumchance realized, not for the first time in his life, that it was a waste of time trying to get any sense out of Mother Tibbs.

So he started again to search the house, this time for fairy fruit.

However, not a pip, not a scrap of peel could he find that looked suspicious. But, finally, in the loft he discovered empty sacks with great stains of juice on them, and it could have been no ordinary juice, for some of the stains were colors he had never seen before.

The terrible news of the Crabapple Blossoms’ disappearance spread like wildfire through Lud-in-the-Mist. Business was at a standstill. Half the Senators, and some of the richer tradesmen, had daughters in the Academy, and poor Mumchance was besieged by frantic parents who seemed to think that he was keeping their daughters concealed somewhere on his person. They were all, too, calling down vengeance on the head of Miss Primrose Crabapple, and demanding that she should be found and handed over to justice.

It was Endymion Leer who got the credit for finding her. He brought her, sobbing and screaming, to the guard-room of the Yeomanry. He said he had discovered her wandering about, half frantic, on the wharf, evidently hoping to take refuge in some outward bound vessel.

She denied all knowledge of what had happened to her pupils, and said she had woken up that morning to find the birds flown.

She also denied, with passionate protestations, having given them fairy fruit. In this, Endymion Leer supported her. The smugglers, he said, were men of infinite resource and cunning, and what more likely than that they should have inserted the stuff into a consignment of innocent figs and grapes?

“And school girls being one quarter boy and three quarters bird,” he added with his dry chuckle, “they cannot help being orchard thieves … and if there isn’t an orchard to rob, why, they’ll rob the loft where the apples are kept. And if the apples turn out not to be apples — why, then, no one is to blame!” Nevertheless, Miss Primrose was locked up in the room in the Guildhall reserved for prisoners of the better class, pending her trial on a charge of receiving contraband goods in the form of woven silk — the only charge, owing to the willful blindness of the law, on which she could be tried.

In the meantime a couple of the Yeomen, who had been scouring the country for Moonlove Honeysuckle, returned with the news that they had chased her as far as the Debatable Hills, and had last seen her scrambling like a goat up their sides. And no Dorimarite could be expected to follow her further.

A couple of days later the Yeomen sent to search for the other Crabapple Blossoms returned with similar news. All along the West Road they had heard rumors of a band of melancholy maidens flitting past to the sound of sad wild ditties. And, finally, they had come upon a goatherd who had seen them disappearing, like Moonlove, among the folds of the terrible hills.

So there was nothing further to be done. The Crabapple Blossoms had by now surely perished in the Elfin Marches, or else vanished forever into Fairyland.

These were sad days in Lud-in-the-Mist — all the big houses with their shutters down, the dancing halls and other places of amusement closed, sad, frightened faces in the streets — and, as if in sympathy with human things, the days shortening, the trees yellowing, and beginning to shed their leaves.

Endymion Leer was much in request — especially in the houses that had hitherto been closed to him. Now, he was in and out of them all day long, exhorting, comforting, advising. And wherever he went he managed to leave the impression that somehow or other Master Nathaniel Chanticleer was to blame for the whole business.

There was no doubt about it, Master Nathaniel, these days, was the most unpopular man in Lud-in-the-Mist.

In the Senate he got nothing but sour looks from his colleagues; threats and insults were muttered behind him as he walked down the High Street; and one day, pausing at a street corner where a puppet-show was being exhibited, he found that he himself was the villain of the piece. For when the time-honored climax was reached and the hero was belaboring the villain’s wooden head with his cudgel, the falsetto voice of the concealed showman punctuated the blows with such comments as: “There, Nat Cock o’ the Roost, is a black eye to you for small loaves … and there’s another for sour wine… and there’s a bloody nose to you for being too fond of
papples
and
ares.”

Here the showman changed his voice and said, “Please, sir, what are
papples
and
ares?”
“Ask Nat Cock o’ the Roost,” came the falsetto, “and he’ll tell you they’re apples and pears that come from across the hills!”

Most significant of all, for the first time since Master Nathaniel had been head of the family, Ebeneezor Prim did not come himself to wind the clocks. Ebeneezor was a paragon of dignity and respectability, and it was a joke in Lud society that you could not really be sure of your social status till he came to wind your clocks himself, instead of sending one of his apprentices.

However, the apprentice he sent to Master Nathaniel was almost as respectable looking as he was himself. He wore a neat black wig, and his expression was sanctimonious in the extreme, with the corners of his mouth turned down, like one of his master’s clocks that had stopped at 7:25.

Certainly a very respectable young man, and one who was evidently fully aware of the unsavory rumors that were circulating concerning the house of Chanticleer; for he looked with such horror at the silly moon-face with its absurd revolving mustachios of Master Nathaniel’s grandfather clock, and opened its mahogany body so gingerly, and, when he had adjusted its pendulum, wiped his fingers on his pocket handkerchief with such an expression of disgust, that the innocent timepiece might have been the wicked Mayor’s familiar — a grotesque hobgoblin tabby cat, purring, and licking her whiskers after an obscene orgy of garbage.

But Master Nathaniel was indifferent to these manifestations of unpopularity. Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.

When the news first reached him of the flight of the Crabapple Blossoms he very nearly went off his head. Facts suddenly seemed to be becoming real.

For the first time in his life his secret shadowy fears began to solidify — to find a real focus; and the focus was Ranulph.

His first instinct was to fling municipal obligations to the winds and ride post-haste to the farm. But what would that serve after all? It would be merely playing into the hands of his enemies, and by his flight giving the public reason to think that the things that were said about him were true.

It would be madness, too, to bring Ranulph back to Lud. Surely there was no place in Dorimare more fraught with danger for the boy these days than was the fairy fruit-stained town of Lud. He felt like a rat in a trap.

He continued to receive cheerful letters from Ranulph himself and good accounts of him from Luke Hempen, and gradually his panic turned into a sort of lethargic nightmare of fatalism, which seemed to free him from the necessity of taking action. It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use.

He found no comfort in his own home. Dame Marigold, who had always cared for Prunella much more than for Ranulph, was in a condition of nervous prostration.

Each time the realization swept over her that Prunella had eaten fairy fruit and was either lost in the Elfin Marches or in Fairyland itself, she would be seized by nausea and violent attacks of vomiting.

Indeed, the only moments of relief he knew were in pacing up and down his own pleached alley, or wandering in the Fields of Grammary. For the Fields of Grammary gave him a foretaste of death — the state that will turn one into a sort of object of art (that is to say if one is remembered by posterity) with all one’s deeds and passions simplified, frozen into beauty; an absolutely silent thing that people gaze at, and that cannot in its turn gaze back at them.

And the pleached alley brought him the peace of
still
life — life that neither moves nor suffers, but only grows in silence and slowly matures in secret.

The Silent People! How he would have liked to be one of them!

But sometimes, as he wandered in the late afternoon about the streets of the town, human beings themselves seemed to have found the secret of still life. For at that hour all living things seemed to cease from functioning. The tradesmen would stand at the doors of their shops staring with vacant eyes down the street — as detached from business as the flowers in the gardens, which looked as if they too were resting after their day’s work and peeping idly out from between their green shutters.

And lads who were taking their sweethearts for a row on the Dapple would look at them with unseeing eyes, while the maidens gazed into the distance and trailed their hands absently in the water.

Even the smithy, with its group of loungers at its open door, watching the swing and fall of the smith’s hammer and the lurid red light illuminating his face, might have been no more than a tent at a fair where holiday makers were watching a lion tamer or the feats of a professional strong man; for at that desultory hour the play of muscles, the bending of resisting things to a human will, the taming of fire, a creature more beautiful and dangerous than any lion, seemed merely an entertaining spectacle that served no useful purpose.

The very noises of the street — the rattle of wheels, a lad whistling, a peddler crying his wares — seemed to come from far away, to be as disembodied and remote from the activities of man as is the song of the birds.

And if there was still some bustle in the High Street it was as soothing as that of a farmyard. And the whole street — houses, cobbles, and all — might almost have been fashioned out of growing things cut by man into patterns, as is a formal garden. So that Master Nathaniel would wander, at that hour, between its rows of shops and houses, as if between the thick green walls of a double hedge of castellated box, or down the golden tunnel of his own pleached alley.

If life in Lud-in-the-Mist could always be like that there would be no need to die.