Jemmy nodded.
“You’ll consent to my questions, then?”
Jemmy nodded again. “But I’ll tell you right up front that I don’t know nothin’ about what happened to poor Mrs. Pyegrave. We was friends and friends was all there was to it, I swear upon my mother’s grave.”
“If your mother had a grave, Jemmy. I know for a fact that she isn’t dead. Nor would it be my guess that she’s already purchased her final resting plot, now has she?”
“No, sir. I was pulling one on you. My mum told me never to lie outright, but she said that a man can stretch the truth now and again like India rubber if there’s a good reason for it and it don’t do no harm to nobody.”
“What’s the good reason for wanting to lie to me about Mrs. Pyegrave, Jemmy?”
“What do you think, Mr. Trimmers? I ain’t a child no more. And I ain’t rich. And if there be ladies what come hither with a few coin to give me and if there ain’t no harm to be done, I’ll do a thing or two for them for a few florin, I will. I got to eat, Mr. Trimmers, and they pay poorly for what I do here as a stableboy and I got no other prospects right now that I can see in the offning. I do things for the ladies what have money and everybody walks away with a smile on they faces, even the horses, ‘cuz I’m a little kinder to ‘em and brush ‘em a little more gentle-like knowin’ I got money for my mama and enough left over to buy a pint or two for meself of a Saturday night.”
“So you were never in love with Mrs. Pyegrave. There was never any sort of romance budding betwixt the two of you.”
“I don’t mean to sound like an odious, um, ogre or nothin’, gov’ner, but I ain’t ever been in love with any of ‘em. Love got nothin’ to do with what I do with these women. They know it, I’m right sure they know it.”
“All of them, Jemmy? Did Mrs. Pyegrave know it?”
Jemmy got himself up from the cot and took a sprig of hay and chewed upon it for a moment. “Come to think of it, maybe she didn’t.”
“Perhaps she actually thought that you had true and sincere feelings for her.”
Jemmy nodded. “Could rightly be.”
“And of course you never thought to disabuse her of this notion.”
“No, sir. I suppose I didn’t.” Then earnestly: “But how could I, Mr. Trimmers, even if I wanted to, ‘cuz she paid me the most of all them ladies. And it warn’t even like I was being paid, come to think of it, which made
it all the more better. It was like we was friends, it was. And she saw where I lived and the rags I got to wear for clothes, and then I tell her about how sick my mama is, and it breaks her heart it does, and she decides what she’s going to do is she’s going to give me some money to help me out, be my patroness, is what she calls it. And it’s a lot of money, Mr. T. And maybe in getting that much money, maybe I did put on a little bit. No, I put on a lot; I’ll admit it. Turned my gratitude into something she thought was a lot stronger than what it really was.”
I nodded and considered in silence what Jemmy had just said. Then I asked, “Did she ever happen to mention something called the ‘Tya-dya-dya Project’?”
“The what?”
“The Tya-dya-dya Project, or anything that might have sounded like that.”
“No, I don’t believe she ever did. We didn’t talk about much that didn’t have to do with me or the horses or the stables or them fellows what I work
with or my supposed-to-be-sick mama. She liked hearing me talk about myself. She said there was nothing much about her hoity-toity life — them were her words — that a person would care to hear about. And so no, I don’t
believe she ever mentioned whatever it was you just said.”
“But you would tell me if she had?”
Jemmy nodded. “What’s the reason I shouldn’t want to tell you? What is it anyways?”
“I don’t know, Jemmy. I don’t know anything about it. I thought you might know.”
Jemmy shrugged.
“Thank you for sitting down with me.”
I stood to shake Jemmy’s hand.“Mrs. Pyegrave was a nice lady,” he said
“She might have been a Patricia, but she was still the best lady what ever came to ride here.”
“A Patricia? I don’t understand. Her Christian name was Janet.” Jemmy shook his head. “Patricia’s what the grooms and hostlers all call the lady patricians.”
“Patricias. Yes, I see. And was Mrs. Pyegrave, the Patricia, nicer to you than even my friend Mrs. Lumbey has been?” We could both at that moment see Estella through the window standing by her Mister Jip and singing softly into the quadruped’s ear.
Jemmy nodded and then delivered in a confidential whisper, “Mrs. Lumbey ain’t one to ask from a stableboy more than is normally required. And she don’t even tip all that good. But I grant you she’s a decent woman. I’m sorry her daughter got so sick and died. And your nevvie, Mr. Trimmers. I was sorry to hear about him, too.”
In Dingley Dell, as I may have mentioned, it was hard to keep things from being known by all — unless it was a very big thing, something that put all the little pieces of intelligence to shame — something so large as to shape the very future of the Dell.
But Jemmy the stableboy, it now appeared, hadn’t been let in on the secret.
— NOTES—
THE ACADEMIC AND LENDING LIBRARY OF DINGLEY DELL, est. 1922. Dingley Dell’s only public library holds over 2,400 indigenous volumes in both published and manuscript formats. Its Special Collections Room maintains the “Outland Fruit Cellar Library” containing all of the Outland volumes discovered in August 1890, with the exception of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, whose highly acidic textual pages have disintegrated over the years.
All volumes of the Encyclopædia or “Ensyke” have been transcribed and bound into booklets that comprise each of its thousands of subjects, although several booklets were noted missing in an inventory undertaken in 1953, the loss constituting a great setback to Dinglian scholarship, as no multiple safety copies had been transcribed at the time. Relevant lost booklets pertain to the following subjects: EDWARD BULWER LYTTON, SEA SERPENTS, LEGERDEMAIN, JENGHIZ KHAN, INFINITESIMAL CALCULUS, HYPOCHONDRIASIS, and BÉZIQUE (the card game, not the exotic dancer by that name). The booklet on the subject MERMAIDS AND MERMEN, lost for thirty-five years, was discovered in the cupboard of a recently-deceased Tavistocker in 1977, its reappearance gaining a great deal of attention for the Library and inspiring, a year later, the first of Milltown’s popular “Mermaid Balls.”
The walls of the Library have for many years been graced by the work of local artists, colour plates of illustrations and maps preserved from the Ensyke, and the Anastasia Jarndyce Collection of World Painting, which includes reproductions of Ensyke reproductions of works such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Lippi’s The Annunciation, Velasquez’s Portrait of Philip IV of Spain, and Reynolds’ Portrait of Dr. Johnson.