The Moor (19 page)

It did, however, help me begin to understand the people I was dealing with, isolated individuals who were nonetheless bound tightly together by the land on which they dwelt. When I spoke to a woman feeding the chickens in her yard or a family squeezed together for a meal, I was speaking not just with solitary, hard-pressed people, but with members of the community that was Dartmoor.

And not a damn one of them had seen anything that sounded the least bit important.

Holmes and I had agreed to meet back at Lew House on Wednesday night. I could actually have made it back there, but it would have meant a job incomplete (even a futile job) and ten wasted miles to return in order to finish it. Instead, I rode down to Mary Tavy and placed a call from the post office there to the postmistress in Lew Down, asking her to have someone take a message to Baring-Gould saying that Mary Russell had been delayed and would not return until the following evening. I waited as the woman on the other end of the line wrote the message, and thanked her.

"Oh, that's quite all right, Mrs Holmes," she said cheerfully. "I'll have my boy run right down with it. However, I think Mr Holmes is still away as well. In London, you know."

It was news to me, but I was not about to admit it. I rang off, shaking my head at a bush telegraph system that surpassed anything I had ever met in rural Sussex.

I found a room in a pleasant old inn in Mary Tavy (not, incidentally, the same inn where Holmes and I had lunched following our encounter with the Scottish cattle) and fell into bed for three or four hours when I first arrived. I woke hungry and went down for some dinner and what proved to be a very interesting evening with the locals—interesting not for the information received, which was nil, but for the insight.

It took me a little while to realise, in the course of conversing about local politics and the fiends in Whitehall, that there were two very separate groups of men in the pub: those who lived in the village, and the men who lived up on the moor. Slowly, through glances and silences and the sorts of tiny smiles that may as well be winks, I came to see that as far as the moor men were concerned, the villagers were a separate and, regrettably, slightly inferior race.

My first inkling of this attitude came when, to my surprise, I was not greeted by name, or even with the stance of familiarity that had been characteristic of the last few days. At first, I assumed with pleasure that I had found a roomful of natives who had not heard of me; then I began to notice the covert glances and secret smiles of the quieter, more roughly dressed members of the drinking community. One by one these half dozen men would catch my eye, touch his hat brim briefly or raise his glass in my direction, and turn back to his conversation.

It was a very peculiar and strangely warming sensation, being part of a secret society. Somehow, the fact that my fellow conspirators were impoverished, unwashed, and possibly illiterate farmers and shepherds was more amusing than anything else. Certainly they seemed to find it so, judging by the twinkle in a number of eyes.

Halfway through my second pint, one of the young men I had been talking with reached into a pocket and stretched out his arm to set something on the table beside my glass: a tin whistle. I looked at it, and then looked up into his weathered young face with the secret smile in the back of his eyes.

"I heerd tell you play'n," he said.

I shook my head and moved the slim instrument back onto his side of the table.

"The noises I make with it couldn't be called playing, I'm afraid."

"Baint what us hears." He might as well have winked and nudged me in the ribs with his elbow, but I refused to blush at the memory of the evening in Two Bridges to which he was no doubt referring. He picked up his small flute, flipped it over and caught it, put it to his mouth, and started to play. When the first sprightly notes hit the smoke-filled air, the moor men glanced at one another, and then at the town dwellers, and one by one they cleared their throats and began to sing.

What I heard that night was a last vestige of the dying art of the Dartmoor songmen. They began with a cheerful tune and the story of a monstrously lazy young man whose father, a cutter of green broom, threatens to burn the house down around his son's ears if the lad doesn't go out and work. The young man hauls himself out to the woods, succeeds in cutting a respectable bundle of the broom, and on his way home is spotted by a wealthy widow. She is smitten, and instantly proposes marriage. He reluctantly agrees to sacrifice his career and leave off his labours for her sake, and the song ends with the sly observation:

"Now in market and fair, the folk all declare,

There's nothing like cutting down broom, green broom."

The singers correctly read my broad grin as a request for more, and they launched into another song, this one about two star-crossed lovers, and then another about, of all things, a bell-ringing competition, set to a gorgeous tune that wound the strong voices around one another like the ring of bells they evoked, ending precisely as a ring of bells would, with a low, final note, sustained and then hushed.

We sat in silence, united momentarily in beauty, but as I stirred to thank them, one of the villagers decided it was time to keep up their side. He opened his mouth, and as the words "Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me your grey mare" rang out in the room, my heart cringed. Uncle Tom Cobbley rode off to Widdecombe Fair with his companions—accompanied, I was interested to note, solely by the Mary Tavy contingent. The moor men sat back, listening politely, but as soon as Tom and the rest had finally joined the old mare's ghostly, rattling bones, the whistle piped up again and set us on the road to another fair, one with considerably more risqué goings-on. (Two of the moor men glanced at me first before they joined in, reassuring themselves that I would be too innocent to grasp the underlying meaning of the references to locks, locksmiths, and the young lady's "wares.")

They sang for more than two hours, during which time they collected what must have been half the town, who stood watching from the doors and the nether reaches of the dim, ancient rooms. The village singers occasionally pushed a song in edgeways; when they did, the half dozen moor dwellers sat attentively waiting for them to finish, although I had the feeling that they knew the village songs, even if the villagers might not know those of the moor.

At long last, and sounding reluctant, the pub owner called for last orders. The young man who had begun the whole affair began carefully to clean his whistle on the tail of his shirt, but to my surprise, instead of putting it away when he had finished, he held it out to me. To my greater surprise, I took it.

I thought for a moment, turning the simple instrument over in my hands, until I decided on a tune, a song I had learnt to play on the tin whistle's wooden brother a long, long time before, at my mother's knee. It was a sad, repetitive Jewish song that came from the heart; judging from the hush in the room, it went straight there, too.

I finished, having played blessedly free of mistakes, and gave my companion back his whistle. He took it without comment, but I thought, on the whole, that he approved.

"Time for one more," he said, and raised his eyebrows to ask if I might have any suggestions.

"The song about Lady Howard's coach?" I asked tentatively. He repeated the little consultation ritual with which he had begun the evening's entertainment, glancing first at his fellows to assess their agreement and then at the villagers to make certain they were in their places. He then put the flute to his lips and began the restless, eerie tune that Baring-Gould had sung. Two of the villagers started to join in, but one dropped out after a sharp glance from one of the moor singers, and the other stopped when he was kicked by a companion. The six members of my secret conspiracy were left singing, their voices harmonising easily in what was obviously a well-known song, one of them gently thumping the table in front of him to underscore the driving cadence. Unlike the other songs they had sung, however, this one was serious business. They seemed to be listening to the words as they sang, and stared in blank concentration at fire or glass, their only contact with one another, and with me, their intended audience, through throat and ear.

It was an odd song, and my first reaction was confirmed, that this was no bedside carol for a small child. I had to wonder how one particular small child, the imaginative eldest son of a landholding family, felt about the verse that refers to Lady Howard drawing the squire into her coach.

The pub was still for a good ten seconds when they had finished. With a general sigh and murmur, the audience, including the village men who had themselves sung, expressed its appreciation and began to move away into the night.

The moor men, too, drained their glasses and got to their feet. With a nod of the head or a brief tug at the cap they each bade me their farewells. The pub was soon empty but for the girl collecting glasses on a tray; I went upstairs and left her to it.

TWELVE

The old woman was not regarded as a witch, but she was accredited with a profound acquaintance with herbs and their virtues.

—Further Reminiscences

My first task for the new day was to hunt down the woman whose name I had been given (what seemed a remarkably long time before) by the girl speaking to me over the wall near Postbridge. Elizabeth Chase, the girl had said, near Wheal Betsy, wanted to see me about a hedgehog. It sounded unlikely enough to be true.

Wheal Betsy proved to be the still very solid brick engine house of a now-abandoned mine, formerly a rich source of lead and silver. It was also, to my amusement, directly at the foot of Gibbet Hill.

As I rode, I began to feel as if I had the spirit of a young Baring-Gould at my side. It was the invariable result of immersing myself in the man's words and his surroundings for the past week, but it was not a troubling presence. Indeed, I was finding him an amusing companion, this solitary youth with the passion for the moor and a mind as bright, energetic, and indiscriminate as a magpie.

A small shoeless child behind a gate leading to a muddy track pointed me towards the home of Elizabeth Chase. A man leading a horse, its off foreleg neatly bandaged but causing it to limp, confirmed it with a wag of his chin over his shoulder. Half a mile farther on, a woman hanging a heap of men's shirts out in the fitful sunlight directed me back on my steps, to a narrow lane that I had missed at the first pass. It was, un-usually enough, a wooded lane, with actual overhead trees instead of the stunted, sparse shrubs that dominated this half of the moor. I followed it, on foot lest my hat be snatched off by branches, and came out at a scene from a children's story.

The cottage was ancient, tiny, orderly (but for the wayward curves of its walls and the thick lichen on its roof slates), and so clean the very stones seemed to gleam with polish. There seemed to be no one about—or at least no human. Six cats of varying colours and sizes lay distributed among a rough bench, a chopping block, and the rooftop, and three dogs (one of them missing a leg) wandered up to greet me. I could also see four breeds of chicken, a black swan with a crooked wing, two geese in a pen, a goat with a kid, and a shaggy Dartmoor pony with a bandage on its leg very like that on the leg of the draught horse I had seen being led down the lane—except that the pony's was on its near hind leg. I looked down at the grinning black-and-white face of the three-legged sheepdog, which also seemed to be lacking a number of its teeth, and said to it, "Where's your mistress?"

As if it had understood me, it whirled around to look at the house, and when I did the same, I saw Elizabeth Chase in her doorway.

At first glance she seemed a normal size, until I realized that I should have to bend nearly double in order to walk through the doorway, yet she stood easily within its frame. I am accustomed to other women seeming small, but this one could not have been any larger than the average eight-year-old, and when my attention went back from her shape to her face, I knew that I had indeed entered a fairy tale. She was brown and wrinkled and stooped, and the tilt to her head, though undoubtedly a result of the hump in her spine, gave her an air of quizzical humour, as if she looked at the world with a sideways laugh. I was smiling when I introduced myself, and told her I had heard she was waiting to see me.

"Oh goodness yes, my dear," she piped in an incredibly high, reedy little voice with a surprising lack of rural Devon in her accent. "You must be dear Mr Holmes' wife, although I have to say you look more like a son in those clothes. Still, they're warm I'm sure on a cold day—although it's not so very cold this morning, now is it? I think I'll just finish making us a cup of tea and we can take it sitting right out here where we can look at God's good sunlight and pretend it's spring, instead of nearly winter again—goodness, how cold the winters get, my old bones just ache at the thought of another one, and it doesn't seem fair, the summers are getting so very short. Do you want to help me carry the tea things, then? That's very sweet of you, my beauty. No, no, this isn't for you, little thing." The last sentence was directed at a thin grey tabby kitten halfway through adolescence, who had been in hopeful attendance from the moment its mistress stepped back into her cottage and all the time she had worked. The old woman's high voice sounded like ceaseless birdsong—or like the tin whistle the young man had played the night before—as she made the tea, shuffling around the watchful cat to kettle and tea caddy and cupboard and back. I had the strong impression that she talked continuously whether she had an audience or not—or perhaps I should say whether or not she had a human audience.

I took the tray from her and followed her with some difficulty out the door and to the rough-hewn bench in the sun. She lifted the somnolent cats down to the ground and told me to put the tray onto the bench, as the table that normally stood in front of the seat had collapsed the week before when a visiting cow had decided to use it for a scratching post, and it was now down at the neighbour's for repair.