Master Ambrose’s impatience had changed to real alarm. He greatly feared that Nathaniel’s brain had been unhinged by his recent misfortunes. Master Nathaniel burst out laughing: “I believe you think I’ve gone off my head, Brosie—but I’ve not, I promise you. In plain language, unless we can find that this fellow Leer has been guilty of something in the eye of the Law he’ll go on triumphing over us and laughing at us in his sleeve and ruining our country for our children till, finally, all the Senate, except you and me, follows his funeral procession, with weeping and wailing, to the Fields of Grammary. It’s our one hope of getting even with him, Brosie. Otherwise, we might as soon hope to catch a dream and put it in a cage.”
“Well, according to your ideas of the Law, Nat, it shouldn’t be too difficult,” said Master Ambrose drily. “You seem to consider that in what you call the world-in-law one does as one likes with facts—launch a new legal fiction, then, according to which, for your own particular convenience, Endymion Leer is for the future Christopher Pugwalker.”
Master Nathaniel laughed: “I’m in hopes we can prove it without legal fiction,” he said. “The widow Gibberty’s trial took place thirty-six years ago, four years after the great drought, when, as Marigold has discovered, Leer was in Dorimare, though he has always given us to understand that he did not arrive till considerably later … and the reason would be obvious if he left as Pugwalker, and returned as Leer. Also, we know that he is intimate with the widow Gibberty. Pugwalker was a herbalist; so is Leer. And then there is the fright you gave him with your question, ‘Do the dead bleed?’ Nothing will make me believe that that question immediately suggested to him the mock funeral and the coffin with fairy fruit … he might think of that on second thoughts, not right away. No, no, I hope to be able to convince you, and before very long, that I am right in this matter, as I was in the other—it’s our one hope, Ambrose.”
“Well, Nat,” said Master Ambrose, “though you talk more nonsense in half an hour than most people do in a lifetime, I’ve been coming to the conclusion that you’re not such a fool as you look—and, after all, in Hempie’s old story it was the village idiot who put salt on the dragon’s tail.”
Master Nathaniel laughed, quite pleased by this equivocal compliment—it was so rarely that Ambrose paid one a compliment at all.
“Well,” continued Master Ambrose, “and how are you going to set about launching your legal fiction, eh?”
“Oh, I’ll try and get in touch with some of the witnesses in the trial—Diggory Carp himself may turn out to be still alive. At any rate, it will give me something to do, and Lud’s no place for me just now.”
Master Ambrose groaned: “Has it really come to this, Nat, that you have to leave Lud, and that we can do nothing against this … this … this cobweb of lies and buffoonery and … well, delusion, if you like? I can tell you, I haven’t spared Polydore and the rest of them the rough side of my tongue—but it’s as if that fellow Leer had cast a spell on them.”
“But we’ll break the spell, by the Golden Apples of the West, we’ll break it, Ambrose!” cried Master Nathaniel buoyantly; “we’ll dredge the shadows with the net of the Law, and Leer shall end on the gallows, or my name’s not Chanticleer!”
“Well,” said Master Ambrose, “seeing you’ve got this bee in your bonnet about Leer you might like a little souvenir of him; it’s the embroidered slipper I took from that gibbering criminal old woman’s parlour, and now that her affair is settled there’s no more use for it.” (The variety of “silk” found in the Academy had finally been decided to be part “barratine tuftaffity” and part “figured mohair,” and Miss Primrose had been heavily fined and set at liberty.) “I told you how the sight of it made him jump, and though the reason is obvious enough—he thought it was fairy fruit—it seems to take so little to set your brain romancing there’s no telling what you mayn’t discover from it! I’ll have it sent over to you tonight.”
“You’re very kind, Ambrose. I’m sure it will be most valuable,” said Master Nathaniel ironically.
During Miss Primrose’s trial the slipper had from time to time been handed round among the judges, without its helping them in the slightest in the delicate distinctions they were drawing between tuftaffity and mohair. In Master Nathaniel it had aroused a vague sense of boredom and embarrassment, for it suggested a long series of birthday presents from Prunella that had put him to the inconvenience of pumping up adequate expressions of gratitude and admiration. He had little hope of being able to extricate any useful information from that slipper—still, Ambrose must have his joke.
They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Master Nathaniel rose to his feet and said, “This may be a long business, Ambrose, and we may not have an opportunity for another talk. Shall we pledge each other in wild thyme gin?”
“I’m not the man to refuse your
