“I’ve no objection if you want to go along, Boldwig. You needn’t have even asked me.”
“I interrupt, as well, to enquire with regard to the matter being discussed betwixt the two of you — if there be some small office or service I may render to be of assistance.” Boldwig pursed his lips and squinted his eyes in a buffoonish show of earnest sincerity.
“I have no idea what you mean, Boldwig. This is a private conference that has nothing to do with my duties as sheriff.”
Billy Boldwig took a couple of self-abasing steps in retreat. “Begging your pardon then. I had it in my head that you were discussing poor Mrs. Pyegrave’s death upon her hospital bed this morning — that Mr. Trimmers here was gathering information to put it into the Crier.”
I answered for myself: “I don’t write for the Crier, Boldwig.” It was time now for a little blatant prevarication: “And there was mention of Mrs. Pyegrave’s tragic demise between us, but only briefly and in passing.”
“Because…” pursued Boldwig, “I know that Lord Mayor Feenix would prefer that the family be allowed to grieve and bury their dear loved one without prying trespass by the papers or any other sort of meddling for that matter. I know this family quite well, sir, and feel tacitly empowered by the connexion to speak on their behalf.”
Muntle brought his eyes to bear on Boldwig without speaking. I knew the hard and penetrating look, having seen it upon my friend’s face on previous occasions: the kettle nearly ready to blow its lid but kept in place by a most strongly-applied hand. After taking a breath to rein in his temper, he replied, “First of all, Deputy Boldwig, what is said between Lord Mayor Feenix in his capacity as Minister of Justice and me, in my capacity as Sheriff of Dingley Dell, should be of concern to my deputies if and only if I choose to make it their concern — and this goes treble for he who is the most recent addition to my constabulary. Secondly, you have no business knowing how the Lord Mayor feels about the Pyegraves, unless you have been obtrusive and prying yourself. Have you been obtrusive and prying, Deputy Boldwig?”
Boldwig gave immediate offence (or at least he coloured in such a way as to lead one to this conclusion). “I most certainly have not, Sheriff. My father, as you must know, is close friend to the Lord Mayor and they are both close friends to Pyegrave. Whatever intelligence has come to me I have absorbed merely through inevitable proximity to those amicable attachments. Begging your pardon again, sir, I shall be on my way.”
With that, the obtrusive and prying Mr. Billy Boldwig turned to go to that place where he could draw himself a pint, although his withdrawal from our society was by no means tidily executed, for it was accompanied by a series of studious glances over the shoulder, each of which seemed evidential of further opinion and speculation about what his employer might do that a Feenix or a Boldwig or most certainly a Pyegrave should not approve.
“I would fire that officious red-topped turd in an instant, Trimmers, but I should have every member of the Petit-Parliament gathered on my doorstep at my Inn-of-Justice lodgings within the hour demanding his reinstatement. What a low and contemptible cabal holds dominion over this tight little valley! There you have it, Freddie. I am now on record as despising each and every one of these overreaching, obstructionist oligarchs.”
“And their offspring, my alliterative friend,” I added with a smirk.
“Oho to that,” agreed Muntle. “Now what is the time again that I am to listen to this tattered woman?”
— NOTES—
THE ALL SOULS CHURCH OF THE DELL, despite its pastorally provincial name, is the largest and tallest structure to be found in the valley, its seven-storey campanile towering over every other building in Milltown.
It had been the life aim of Bishop Richard Tollimglower to see a cathedral of historically massive proportions constructed within the Dell. When the Petit-Parliament refused to allocate the funds necessary for its erection, a more modest church building was proposed but with a compensatory concession: it should have a bell tower of rather impressive size and height such as to dwarf every structure, both natural and man-crafted, within the whole of Dingley Dell. “If I cannot have flying buttresses and imposing gargoyles for my seat of ecclesiastical authority,” said the bishop, philosophically, “give me at the very least a lofty campanile with a carillon of bells that will be heard in every nook and cranny of our dale to remind its listeners that God watches in ceaseless attendance from his own Heavenly watchtower above.”
So it was done, and it was the Bishop himself who oversaw the construction of Dingley Dell’s most ambitious architectural venture and who applauded it and who said it was good and then promptly dropt dead in his raiments within hours of its completion, and was subsequently offered nothing like the funereal pomp and ceremony that had been his testamentary wish.
Tollimglower’s successor, the low-church Puritan Vicar Tupman, banished pomp and ceremony not only from the obsequies and exequies attendant upon his predecessor’s passage but from every other aspect and office of the All Souls Church. “God loves and watches over us all, this is true, but He does so whether we exalt him with frippery and architectural excess or no. I therefore ring in with our mellifluous and only slightly clanging carillon of bells the ‘Era of Simplicity,’ and should my flock give objection, I shall be inclined to turn us all into Methodists and have done with it.” These words were spoken by the vicar upon the first day of his ascension to that office, which should have been denominated High Bishop, but was reduced by way of ecclesiastical simplification to Humble Vicar, and to the above pulpital peroration was added the injunction that at some point the campanile, which offended Tupman’s eye as an unintended tribute to the iniquitous Tower of Babel, should surely come down, brick by brick and stone by stone.
Dinglians, however, would hear of no such a thing, and so the bell tower stood for the next five decades, and the denizens of the Dell became ever the more attached to the tintinnabulation that gave from it, and he who was willing to pay half a florin could climb its ninety-eight steps to look down upon Milltown and to take in the equally commanding prospect of the surrounding valley. So were the coffers of the church filled even on those Sunday mornings in which congregants were feeling more niggardly than usual.
QUOITS, a popular traditional lawn game played by Dinglian boys and men, and more increasingly by members of the softer sex. It involves the throwing of a metal ring over a prescribed distance with the purpose of landing it over a pin (called a hob) set in the centre of a box-like frame filled with clay. A successful throw, called a “ringer,” gives a player two points, with twenty-one points being necessary to win the game. Quoits is especially popular amongst public servants as a midday diversion — notably sheriff ’s deputies, firemen, and government clerks. There is a tournament, which takes place in Milltown each autumn, and which has been most recently won (in impressive annual succession) by a team comprised of Water Rate Collectors, called informally the “Jolly Soakers.” The game is played in the United States of the Outland using horseshoes and is called, appropriately, “horseshoes.”
Chapter the Sixth. Sunday, June 15, 2003