“Yes, Miss Primrose Crabapple!” boomed Master Ambrose, “nonsensical, foul-minded, obscene old …”
“Yes, yes,” interrupted Endymion Leer with good-humoured impatience, “I daresay she’s all of that and a great deal more, but, all the same, I don’t believe her capable of having given your daughter what you think she has. I admit, when you first showed me that slipper I was frightened. Unlike you, I am a bit of a botanist, and I certainly have never seen a berry like that in Dorimare. But after all that does not prove that it grows … across the hills. There’s many a curious fruit to be found in the Cinnamon Isles, or in the oases of the Amber Desert … why, your own ships, Master Ambrose, sometimes bring such fruit. The ladies of Lud have no lack of exotic fruit and flowers to copy in their embroidery. No, no, you’re a bit unhinged this evening, Master Ambrose, else you would not allow so much as the shadow of foul suspicions like these to cross your mind.”
Master Ambrose groaned.
And then he said a little stiffly, “I am not given, Dr. Leer, to harbouring foul suspicions without cause. But a great deal of mischief is sometimes done by not facing facts. How is one to explain my daughter’s running away, due west, like one possessed? Besides, Prunella Chanticleer as much as told me she had … eaten a certain thing … and … and … I’m old enough to remember the great drought, so I know the smell, so to speak, of evil, and there is something very strange going on in that Academy.”
“Prunella Chanticleer, did you say?” queried Endymion Leer with an emphasis on the last word, and with a rather odd expression in his eyes.
Master Ambrose looked surprised.
“Yes,” he said. “Prunella Chanticleer, her school fellow and intimate friend.”
Endymion Leer gave a short laugh.
“The Chanticleers are … rather curious people,” he said drily, “Are you aware that Ranulph Chanticleer has done the very thing you suspect your daughter of having done?”
Master Ambrose gaped at him.
Ranulph had certainly always been an odd and rather disagreeable boy, and there had been that horrid little incident at the Moongrass cheese supper-party … but that he actually should have eaten fairy fruit!
“Do you mean? Do you mean … ?” he gasped.
Endymion Leer nodded his head significantly: “One of the worst cases I have ever known.”
“And Nathaniel knows?”
Again Endymion Leer nodded.
A wave of righteous indignation swept over Master Ambrose. The Honeysuckles were every bit as ancient and honourable a family as the Chanticleers, and yet here was he, ready to tarnish his escutcheon forever, ready if need be to make the town crier trumpet his disgrace from the marketplace, to sacrifice money, position, family pride, everything, for the good of the community. While the only thought of Nathaniel, and he the Mayor, was to keep his skeleton safely hidden in the cupboard.
“Master Ambrose,” continued Endymion Leer, in a grave impressive voice, “if what you fear about your daughter be true, then it is Master Nathaniel who is to blame. No, no, hear me out,” as Master Ambrose raised a protesting hand. “I happen to know that some months ago Mumchance warned him of the alarming increase there has been recently in Lud in the consumption of … a certain commodity. And I know that this is true from my practice in the less genteel parts of the town. Take it from me, Master Ambrose, you Senators make a great mistake in ignoring what takes place in those low haunts. Nasty things have a way of not always staying at the bottom, you know—stir the pond and they rise to the top. Anyway, Master Nathaniel was warned, yet he took no steps.”
He paused for a few seconds, and then, fixing his eyes searchingly on Master Ambrose, he said, “Did it never strike you that Master Nathaniel Chanticleer was a rather … curious man?”
“Never,” said Master Ambrose coldly. “What are you insinuating, Leer?”
Endymion Leer gave a little shrug: “Well, it is you who have set the example in insinuations. Master Nathaniel is a haunted man, and a bad conscience makes a very good ghost. If a man has once tasted fairy fruit he is never the same again. I have sometimes wondered if perhaps, long ago, when he was a young man …”
“Hold your tongue, Leer!” cried Master Ambrose angrily. “Chanticleer is a very old friend of mine, and, what’s more, he’s my second cousin. There’s nothing wrong about Nathaniel.”
But was this true? A few hours ago he would have laughed to scorn any suggestion to the contrary. But since then, his own daughter … ugh!
Yes, Nathaniel had certainly always been a very queer fellow—touchy, irascible, whimsical.
A swarm of little memories, not noticed at the time, buzzed in Master Ambrose’s head … irrational actions, equivocal remarks. And, in particular, one evening, years and years ago, when they had been boys … Nat’s face at the eerie sound produced by an old lute. The look in his eyes had been like that in Moonlove’s today.
No, no. It would never do to start suspecting everyone—above all his oldest friend.
So he let the subject of Master Nathaniel drop and questioned Endymion Leer as to the effects on the system of fairy fruit, and whether there was really no hope of finding an antidote.
Then Endymion Leer started applying his famous balm—a balm that varied with each patient that required it.
In most cases, certainly, there was no cure. But when the eater was a Honeysuckle, and hence, born with a healthy mind in a healthy body there was every reason to hope that no poison could be powerful enough to undermine such a constitution.
“Yes, but suppose she is already across the border?” said Master Ambrose. Endymion Leer gave a little shrug.
“In that case, of course, there is nothing more one can do,” he replied.
Master Ambrose gave a deep sigh and leant back wearily in his chair, and for a few minutes they sat in silence.
Drearily and hopelessly Master Ambrose’s mind wandered over the events of the day and
