“And how is it you’re sure of the credibility of what Traddles wrote? Given the grievous austerity of his circumstances, how could you even be certain of his sanity?”
Antonia laughed. “I should think that he probably wasn’t sane. But there was something about his methods — the way he had of talking to the old ones, taking one hoary account and putting it next to another. There was machinery of some sort working in that strange head of his, even if the brain be somewhat out of kilter. I’ll shew you the notes he left me someday. But I suspect that you’ll use none of it. His history is quite at odds with the standard, established version. Radically so.”
Antonia Bocker became for that ensuing moment altogether lost in her thoughts — thoughts, I had no doubt, pertaining to her friendship with perhaps the only person who had uplifted her during her early-life travails. She smiled to herself. “He saved my life, the old obsessitor did, there’s no doubt about that.”
Alas, we had hardly reached the hospital when I was collared by a ticket porter, dispatched by my brother, who had first knocked upon the door of Mrs. Potterson’s cottage and then received word that I was to be found upon the High Road to Milltown Respectable Hospital (easily distinguishable from Milltown Indigent Hospital, to which a woman of Mrs. Pyegrave’s station would never have been relegated). The gentleman was breathless in his report, having run nearly the entire way from Mrs. Potterson’s, but told me enough about my nephew’s disappearance that I was given ready leave by Antonia to go immediately to my brother’s home in Fingerpost and offer whatever succour I was able.
“I’ll stay here and make enquiries about Janet Pyegrave,” said Antonia with a look of determination and resolve (marked by pursed lips) overlaid by lineaments of concern for my nephew Newman (largely evinced by the furrowed brow).
“And will report back to you on the morrow,” she called to me as we parted. I nodded and waved, and then turned my hand to hail a hackney coach and with minimal negociation arrived upon a fair price to hasten me to the outlying village of Fingerpost.
In less than fifteen minutes I was seated upon my brother and sisterin-law’s sofa and listening to the disturbing details of my nephew’s disappearance, those details pushing aside, at least for the nonce, all thoughts of the unfortunate and dying Mrs. Pyegrave.
— NOTES—
THE SUPPOSITIVE POSTULATIONS, three passionately held views on why Dingley Dell has been quarantined from the rest of the world. All attempts to reconcile these positions or to bring one theory to ascendance above the others have been for naught. The sole source of outside information which should have proven most efficacious in determining which of the three postulations to be the correct one has been the historic contact afforded Dinglian brokers of trade and their Outlander counterparts through the fortnightly transactions that take place at the Summit of Exchange upon the Northern Ridge. Over the many decades, which span the long epoch of Summit trade, Dinglian brokers have reported absolute, near monastic silence from the Outlanders except when intercourse requires communication of a strictly transactional and commercial nature. Ned Crupp addresses this curious consistency in his 1990 memoir The Honest Broker: Sixty-five Years upon the Summit:
“These men wore cloaks and cowls, and everything about them was shrouded in mystery. They confined their speech without exception to the business of our business dealings with them. Dingley Dell bartered her crops and the articles of jewellry and furniture she made (and which she fashioned and turned extraordinarily well) for those goods that she could not grow or build herself, and all was bliss, except when it wasn’t, which was every moment in which we were given to wonder about our whereabouts and if we were destined to spend the remainder of eternity here in this rusticated valley without any useful and current knowledge of the world that lay beyond our border. And this is why, dear reader, not being able to help myself, I asked them upon the eve of my retirement that question which has become the most posited within the Delclass="underline" “Which of the three Suppositive Postulations is the correct one?” To which they responded (as I always suspected that they would) with a negatory shake of the head and a concerted return to the business at hand. For this is how rigorously they had been trained, that there should be no departure whatsoever from the automatonic response, no matter how much I wished it to be so.”
The Suppositive Postulations are as follows:
1.) That life abroad is a life not to be desired, and the Outlander tradesmen are forbidden to speak of the tribulations of their battered world lest they do injury to our tender ears and delicate hearts. And its corollary: that the last physiologically and psychologically pure and unadulterated strain of humanity remains the denizens of Dingley Dell. Their existence is preserved as living reminder of the anteapocalyptic era in the continuum of the human survival on the planet.
2.) That the plague which overspread the globe in the year 1890, yet spared the Dell in its geographically-segregated isolation, continued to ravage the world over the course of the succeeding years, and although it was eventually vanquished, suffered only a few hardy souls to survive and fructify. Subsistence resources in the Terra Incognita being scarce, it has traditionally been thought best for Dinglians to remain segregated, and for commercial interchange to be closely regulated for the husbanding benefit of both transacting parties.
3.) That a good many Outlanders did live to prosper beyond the bounds of Dingley Dell, but the valley’s citizens, in much the same way as farmers who have not been vaccinated against the pox, would submit themselves to certain death should they venture abroad without previous exposure to the earlier pandemic. It is premised that this is the reason that so many who ventured from the Dell did not return, and that those who did come back did so in a grievous lunatic state, bearing evidence of some deleterious agent to which Dinglians are susceptible — an agent which implants a savage and vicious affliction upon the brain.
It is the last of the three postulations which claims the greatest number of advocates, and which explains the decision by most of the denizens of Dingley Dell to remain safely within its confines until such time as, perhaps, a vaccine could be devised that would permit them a disease-free reunion with their human cousins in the Terra Incognita. Venturing precipitously without preventive inoculation, so goes the thinking, would be tantamount to playing cards with fate, their collective hand lacking in trumps.
EARLY HISTORY OF DINGLEY DELL.
An Historical Millennial Essay by Daniel Gamp, Esq.
There are a great many things in the early years of this third millennium of our Christian age that we do not know in addition to the overarching enigma of our geographical location. But there is much that we do: the product of over 110 years of meticulous documentation of life within the Dell. We know, for example, that an orphanage was established in the year of our Lord 1882 in the village of Hungerford, into which parentless children from points throughout the world were placed, to be nutured and raised in the spirit of Christian beneficence. It was there in the Magnanimity House Orphanage that each youthful inmate of a certain educable age was taught a practical trade, and it was there on the morning of April 2, 1890, that this society of children — the first generation of Dingley Dell— woke to make a most astounding discovery — a discovery that would dramatically alter their lives and the lives of their descendents from that critical moment forward.
All the adults had disappeared.