“My answer is my answer, and that’s all there is to it. Now whither could my hat have gone?” Muntle peered down the long, dusty road from which he had just come, as if the hat might suddenly make itself known and then fly obligingly back onto its owner’s head. There passed a rigid silence, broken only by a cleared throat or two, and the sound of the sole of my shoe tapping an impatient tattoo upon a stone. Augustus and I would not simply accept this insufficient answer and have done with it.
In that reign of hard silence, the sheriff ’s will to withhold was whittled down and finally broken in two. It was with a small guilty voice that he finally confessed the fact that there was indeed more to the thing than he had indicated.“It’s Pawkins, the Minister of Trade, who won’t have it, if you must know. He got wind of your plan — I know not how — and invoked the rule respecting contact with Outlanders. Under no circumstances is that rule to be suspended for those without the requisite license.”
“But you’re unlicensed yourself, Muntle,” I protested.
“Unlicensed to trade, yes, but not to perform my offices as keeper of the peace, wherever those offices may send me. And in that capacity I am suffered to go, should my investigation into the disappearance of the boy require it, and it does.”
Augustus’ mood had suddenly turned dark and irefuclass="underline" “I cannot accept it, Muntle! I simply cannot!” My brother’s sudden change in disposition was quite understandable. He and I were being deliberately thwarted in our mission to reunite ourselves with Gus’s lost son. It was pure Dinglian Draconianism that stood in the way, unless there be something far more insidious afoot.
Muntle lowered his eyes. His compunctious stance told me that, of course, he agreed with my brother and me: the law that confined all contact with the Beyonders to a small group of privileged brokers and their accommodating porters made sense upon every occasion save those in which it made no sense at all, this particular instance being a very good example of the latter. Yet… “Gentlemen, my hands are tied. It is my charge to execute the laws of the Dell exactly as they are written and passed by the PetitParliament.”
“Petty indeed!” pronounced Augustus. “We’ll see that damned law changed, and I’ll climb that damned ridge any damned fortnight of my own damned choosing. Who are the brokers to dictate through their cohorts in the Petit-Parliament what the rest of us should and should not do?”
In a quiet voice I interposed, “You know the reasons, Gus — for keeping intercourse with the Outlanders under strict regulation.”
“I seek only to ask the men if they’ve seen my boy,” Augustus pursued. “Perhaps they caught sight of him shivering behind a rock in the cold morning mist. Perhaps he fell from some height and was glimpsed crawling broken-limbed upon the ground in need of medical attention. If so, did anybody descend to help? How will I know if there be answers to these questions if I’m not given leave to ask them?”
“You will know,” replied the sheriff, “because I’ll ask for you. Put down on this paper every question you wish answered and I’ll do the best that I’m able.”
Augustus did not take the paper. Instead, he sat himself down upon the hard ground. He drew his knees to his chest and rested his head upon the knobs. After a moment he looked up to say, “I would like to believe that the Outlander’s heart is as large as our own, and yet our circumambient neighbours have demonstrated nothing about themselves beyond a ravenous interest in our apricots, our bedsteads, and our tortoise-shell bracelets. What is it about the Terra Incognita that makes its people so incurious otherwise?”
The sheriff spoke in a soft, subdued tone that betokened his concern: “Some day, perhaps, we will know the answer to that question. For the nonce, it certainly gives the feeling that we have been abandoned by God or fate or whatever is that metaphysical force that superintends this world. And yet wasn’t it abandonment itself that brought our forebears to this valley in our earliest days? Was not every child of that founding, foundling generation cast off either by the death of a mother or father or by some form of parental dereliction? A parent’s deliberate aberrant wish to push a child away — curiously, the very opposite of your desire, Gus, to see your own child restored to your love and care! These are queer things, gentlemen: the ways of the Outlander, as unfathomable to me as any other perplexing mystery of our vast universe, each of which we accept for now simply because we can do nothing else.
“Now, I will climb that ridge and I will ask all the questions that you provide me pertaining to the boy. Perhaps I’ll learn something. Or I won’t. But for every angry thought that rages within your head against the brokers and against the M.P.P.’s who have put these men into their current position of exclusive authority, let it be mitigated by the knowledge that you have a friend and advocate in me.”
Sheriff Muntle reached down to shake the hand of my brother, who in taking the proffered paw of my bear-like friend used the clasp to pull himself to his feet. Brushing himself off in the seat, Augustus asked the lawman, “Do you ever wonder what became of your brother?”
“Every day,” replied the sheriff gazing off into the distance. “Though in my heart I know that he must be dead. It could be very different, though, with your son. Perhaps there is something different that happens to every man and woman and child who ventures beyond this ridge. I have always wished to know, and I confess to you gentlemen that there was a time in my youth when I considered doing the same thing as your Newman has done. It is devilish difficult to keep emboldened, adventuresome young men such as your son and my younger self confined within this valley — to say to a bright-eyed, inquisitive young lad: ‘Here is everything that you may know and now you must not pursue another thing.’ It’s the reason, I warrant, that 250 of our beloved kinsmen and women have left us. It’s the reason that we weep for that fraction who have returned with gruel for brains — those who dare to go and learn of the world beyond the ridges, only to be so cruelly punished for taking up the quest. The sadness of it all is sometimes difficult to bear. Well, I’ve said enough, haven’t I?”
Muntle took out his handkerchief and placed it to his eyes. In Dingley Dell in the year of our blessed Lord 2003, the shedding of tears was not a demerit in the measure of a man, but merely an unqualified aspect of his character.
“So give me your questions, gentlemen,” said the sheriff through a sniffle, “and let us find out what we’re able.”
For a long interval my brother and I walked along, exchanging not a word with one another until we reached the village of Fingerpost. Augustus and Charlotte had always lived here, in first one rented cottage and then another. Gus had tried his best to put food on his family’s table, whilst scheming and dreaming of ways to earn a better income through his own creative (and sometimes not so creative) initiative. Alas, not a single one of Augustus’ schemes and dreams had ever come to lucrative gain, and in the meanwhile my brother had been forced to make ends meet by working in a succession of disparate occupations. He had been a plasterer, a furniture maker, a dustman, a waiter, an old-clothes man, a ticket porter, a venison packer, and a wheelwright’s sawyer. He had earned wages as a fruitier’s assistant, a ginger-beer man, a coal-deliveryman, a shoe vamper, a church warden, an office clerk, a sexton, and a fire agency policy copier. His latest job was keeping inventory in a dried fish warehouse; it was a vocation he did not at all relish, and he had already started casting about for some new line of work.