The Moor (12 page)

Holmes did not catch me up until I was in the bathroom with the hot tap full on.

"You will come back down?" he asked, although it sounded more like an order than a question.

"Holmes, I'd rather starve to death."

He seemed honestly puzzled, whether because he had missed the amusement in the two men or because he could not see why I should object, I could not decide. He might even have been putting on an act of obtuseness for some reason, but I decided it did not matter, that in any case my reaction would be the same.

"Enjoy yourself, Holmes, while I enjoy my bath." I pushed him out and closed the door.

A long, hot, drowsy time later I became aware of a sound outside the door. I raised my ears clear of the cooling water, and listened for a moment. "Holmes?"

"Sorry, mum," said a young female voice. "Mrs Elliott thought you might like a bowl of soup. I'll just leave the cover on it to keep it hot, shall I?"

"That would be fine," I said. "Thank you. And thank Mrs Elliott for me, please."

"Yes mum." I heard the gentle rattle of a tray being put down, and then the door to the bedroom closed.

After a final sluice to rid myself of the last of the mud that had lodged itself in skin and hair and nails, I wrapped my hair in a towel and myself in a dressing gown, and went to investigate the tray. The soup was still warm, and immeasurably better than the nearly rancid, gruel-like mixture served us the first night. There were also freshly baked rolls, a large slab of crumbling orange cheddar, a slice of lemon tart, and an apple. I finished everything.

My hair was nearly dry by the time Holmes came upstairs. He had paused to change more than his muddy boots, and looked very appealing, tall and slim in his jet suit and snowy shirtfront. One thing led to another, as is the wont in a marriage, and we did not get around to speaking about Ketteridge until after the housemaid had fetched up the morning tea.

I settled myself up against the pillows while Holmes perched in his dressing gown on the seat beneath the mullioned windows.

"Tell me, Holmes, who is Richard Ketteridge and what is a Californian mulatto with the scars of frostbite on his face and fingers doing in Lew Trenchard, Devonshire?"

"Interesting chap, isn't he?" he said. "Gould sees a great deal of him." I squinted against the pallid morning light, moved my teacup from my stomach to the bedside table, found my glasses and put them on, raised myself to sit more vertically against the pillows, and looked at him.

"Would you care to elaborate?"

"No," he said, studying the burning end of the cigarette he held between his fingers. "No, I don't think that I would. I should prefer to have your unsullied reaction after you have met him properly. Which will be this evening," he added. "We are dining at his house."

"Dining! Holmes, I don't have a gown suitable for evening."

"Of course you don't."

"You go. Have a nice time with the other gents over your cigars."

"I told him we were not kitted up for formal dress, and he assured me black tie was not required. A simple frock. You did bring a frock."

"And the shoes to go with it." It was a very nice frock, too, and unless I tripped going out of the door and went sprawling, I should not be disgraced in wearing it. I acquiesced. I was more than a little curious about Mr Richard Ketteridge, even without Holmes' enigmatic refusal to discuss the man. A man with the scarred skin and abused hands of a labourer wearing the clothing of a West End dandy, who could demonstrate his intimate familiarity with the prickly squire of Lew Trenchard by acting as drinks host, was no simple character.

***

First, however, was the good Mrs Elliott's breakfast table. I took with me a pen and paper, and as we sat I sketched in the dates we had accumulated thus far:

Tuesday 25 or Wednesday 26 July—Johnny Trelawny sees coach, dog

Friday 27 July—London ramblers on Gibbet Hill see coach

Friday 24 August—courting couple sees coach, dog

Saturday 15 September—Josiah Gorton last seen in northwest quadrant

Monday 17 September—Gorton found in southeast

I passed the paper over to Holmes, who glanced at it, took my pen, and added,

Monday 20 August—plate falls off shelf

Sunday 26 August—Granny hears dog

"Holmes!" I said in some irritation. "You needn't mock me."

"I am not mocking your calendar, Russell," he protested. "I am merely contributing to it."

He seemed sincere, but I couldn't think what a broken plate or a lonely granny who heard noises in the night might have to do with Lady Howard's coach. Rather than arguing, however, I let it stand.

"Does the list tell you anything?" he asked offhandedly, reaching for the coffee.

"The moon was full around the twenty-sixth of July and the twenty-seventh of August," I said, "and that could explain why the coach was visible then."

"Or rather, why the coach was out then, so as to be visible."

"Precisely. However, that does not explain the timing of Josiah Gorton's death, which was a full eight or ten days before September's full moon."

"Nor does it explain the broken plate."

I was already tired of the broken plate, and decided he was merely using it to annoy me. I was grateful when Mrs Elliott chose that moment to bring us our breakfasts.

After we had eaten, Holmes arranged with Mrs Elliott for a troop of rural Irregulars to quarter the Mary Tavy inns, public houses, hostelries, and farmhouses in search of two Londoners who had seen a ghostly carriage. He then spent the day closeted with Baring-Gould, going over our time on the moor. I, too, spent the day with the man, though not in his physical presence. I uncovered a cache of his books and settled in with a stack of them beside my chair.

It was a singular experience. Odd, in fact. I had to admit that the man was brilliant, although I drew the line at "genius." He held an opinion on everything—European cliff dwellings, Devonshire folk songs, comparative mythology, architecture, English saints, werewolfs, archaeology, philology, anthropology, theology—and seemed possessed of a vast impatience with those who disagreed with him. Inevitably, though, the breadth of his scope meant a lack of depth, which he may have gotten away with in his novels and the werewolf book, but which rendered, for example, the works on theology quite useless. Theology is, after all, my field of expertise, and the best I could say for Baring-Gould and his conclusions (for example, that Christianity was proven to be true by the simple fact that it worked) was that he showed himself to be an enthusiastic amateur who might have made some real contribution to the world of scholarship had he possessed a more focussed sense of discipline.

However, there was a strong pulse of life in even the more abstruse tomes, a bounce and vigour one would not have predicted. His occasional references to Devon, and particularly Dartmoor, sang with life and humour, and if he was sometimes pompous and often paternalistic, the passion he felt for the land made up for it.

The novels were embarrassingly melodramatic, but intriguing. There seemed to me a deep vein of cruelty, almost brutality, running through his stories, a distinct lack of tenderness and compassion towards his characters, particularly those living in poverty, that seemed odd in a man dedicated to God's service, and moreover an interest in savage, almost pagan emotions that was surely unusual in an otherwise calm and responsible squire. I began to understand his fascination with the moor, and also to wonder about the man's blunt dismissal of his children on that first night, describing them merely as "scattered."

I was in the final throes of a furious potboiler called
Mahalah
when Holmes came into the room. He said something; I grunted in reply and turned the page, and after a minute another page.

Ten minutes later I had finished the book and sat back, feeling equal parts exasperation and the sense of romantic tragedy that Baring-Gould had been trying to evoke. I looked at Holmes, then looked at him more attentively.

"Why are you dressing, Holmes?"

He glanced up from his task of threading one gold cuff link into his cuff. "Dinner, Russell. At Richard Ketteridge's? I did inform you."

"Oh Lord!" I threw myself at the wardrobe and snatched up my frock. "How long do I have?"

"The car is already here. Five minutes will make us only fashionably late."

I flung my clothes on the floor and dropped the frock over my head, succeeded in hoisting my silk stockings without putting a ladder into either of them, and turned to the mirror to subdue my hair into some kind of order.

"Is it still raining?" I asked.

"It is."

"I must have an umbrella. Go and find me one. Please."

As always happens when I am in a hurry, my hair went up lopsided and had to be taken down and arranged again. Still, in the end I was presentable. I caught up a thin woollen wrap and hurried downstairs.

Baring-Gould was passing through the hallway downstairs, and he wished me a pleasant evening without, I thought, actually seeing me. Holmes was in the porch, and as soon as he heard me coming he stepped out onto the drive and opened a huge, bright green umbrella over our heads, and escorted me the few feet to the sleek closed touring car that awaited us. A liveried chauffeur was one step ahead of him, holding the door. I climbed in, followed by Holmes. The chauffeur claimed the umbrella, closed it, and drew it after him into the front, and drove us away from Lew House.

EIGHT

With every wish to promote the well-being and emancipation of the working classes, I should be sorry to see—what is approaching—the extinction of the old squirearchy, or rather being supplanted by the
nouveaux riches.

—Early Reminiscences

As we began to thread our way through the narrow, deep-cut lanes that led upwards onto the moor itself, I became aware of something odd in the attitude of the man at my side. The light outside was fading, but it was still bright enough in the car for me to study him. He was slumped down into the comfortable seat, his arms crossed over his chest, and his face had a sour look on it that I had seen any number of times before.

"Holmes, what is it?"

"What is what, Russell?" he said irritably, not taking his eyes from the passing stone walls crowned with hedgerows. "I do wish you would refrain from asking me questions that contain no grammatical antecedent."

"An antecedent is unnecessary if both parties are aware of the topic under consideration, and you know full well what I'm talking about. Your physical language is positively shouting your displeasure, but since this evening's social event was not
my
idea, I cannot assume that you are resenting my coercion. You are peeved at something; what is it?"

"Am I not to be allowed the privacy of my own thoughts without being subjected to an analysis of my 'physical language'?"

"Not if you insist on indulging in those thoughts around me, no. If you wanted privacy, Holmes, you should not have married me."

Bridling, he removed his gaze from the limited view outside the car windows and glared at me for a long moment before his good sense reasserted itself. His arms unknotted themselves and dropped to his lap, and he looked, if anything, almost sheepish. He lowered his voice, although the glass between us and the driver was thick and the whine of the climbing engine loud.

"I discovered only this evening that Ketteridge's house is Baskerville Hall," he said.

I saw immediately what he dreaded: not, as I had feared, the feeling of a case taking a disastrously wrong turn, but rather the sort of fulsome praise he loathed. Holmes was fond enough of applause for those of his actions that he himself considered deserving, but he abhorred the popular notoriety that Watson's narratives had spawned.

"Holmes, it's been, what? Twenty years since that story was published. Surely—"

"Ketteridge's secretary was reciting whole swaths of it last night, to his master's amusement. And Gould was playing along, curse him."

"We could turn back to Lew Trenchard," I suggested. "I could take ill, if you like." One of the unexpected benefits of marriage, I had found, was that it gave a convenient scapegoat upon which public blame could be heaped.

"Generous of you to offer, Russell, but no. Tribulation is good for the soul, or so I hear. Although I admit that had I known last night, I might have avoided the invitation to dinner. Which may be why neither Ketteridge nor Gould happened to mention it."

"Well, I shall reserve the option of a ladylike attack of the vapours if the reminiscences become too nauseating."

"Thank you."

"Think nothing of it. How did Ketteridge come to own Baskerville Hall? If he inherited, why didn't he take the name?"

"He bought the place—lock, stock, and family portraits. Two years ago, according to Gould, he was on the final stages of a world tour when he passed through England and happened to hear about it from an acquaintance in a weekend shooting party up in Scotland. It appealed to him, he came out to look at it, and he ended up buying it from the sole surviving Baskerville, the daughter of the Sir Henry I knew."

"Sir Henry had no sons?"

"He had two. They were both killed during the war, one in the Somme, the other somewhere in the Mediterranean, probably lost to a German submarine boat. Sir Henry died before the war, his widow in the influenza epidemic of 1919. With death duties, the daughter, who was only twenty-two or -three and unmarried, hadn't enough left to maintain the hall. It's one of those great stone sinkholes, a gold-hungry mire sucking down pounds and pence without a trace. As you can see," he said, extending one long finger to point at the view through the window ahead.

The land beneath our tyres had climbed through the wooded fringe along the outer slopes of the moor and out into the tiny fields and walled pastures that occupy the edges of the moor itself. It had continued to rise until the low and homely cottages had fallen away, leaving only the bleak, boulder-strewn expanse of the interior. Unexpectedly, a dip in the barren ground fell away and grew trees. I caught a brief glimpse of what looked like a pair of thin towers rising above the branches, and then we dropped down into the trees.