The Moor (23 page)

"It's a pity you haven't been to the house in daylight, Mrs Holmes. It's quite a sight—these windows here look up onto the moor, and there are six tors sitting there, looking like you could reach out and touch them. On a clear day, that is. You must try to come back during the day—you and your husband, of course."

"I'd like that, thank you. I was so enjoying my ride out on the moor today, I hadn't realised how late it had got. I do apologise for keeping you up."

"This isn't late, Mrs Holmes, by no means, and I was charmed to have you drop in on me, for whatever reason. Were you just out for a ride, then?"

I had offered him that ride in case he wondered what on earth the good Mrs Holmes might have been doing in his deserted stretch of countryside. Whatever he was hiding from me, whomever he had spirited out from under my nose, might be as simple as a socially unacceptable buyer for Baskerville Hall or as embarrassing as an improper visitor of the female persuasion. In any case he could hardly suspect me of arranging the mishap that had delivered Red and myself here in such a state. I merely thought to divert his curiosity before it took hold in his mind.

"Yes, and what a place for it! I rode down to look at the Fox Tor mires and Childe's Tomb, and Wistman's Wood, and then the stone row near Merrivale, and I was aiming for Fur Tor, to get around the river, you see, when Red spooked and fell."

He seemed imperceptibly to relax, whether because of my list of sights or due to the breezy conversational style I had gradually come to assume, I could not tell.

"It is an interesting slice of landscape, isn't it?" he commented.

"Oh yes. Sitting on a tor and eating a picnic lunch with a stone row on one side and a tin-mining works on the other is not an everyday sort of experience."

"I think my favourite is Bowerman's Nose, not far from Hound Tor. Do you know it?"

"Over near Widdecombe? No, I haven't been there yet."

"Looks like a great stone man, staring defiantly up into the sky."

"But it actually has a nose, does it? I rode completely around Fox Tor looking for some resemblance to a fox. I couldn't find one."

"A bit like the constellations, aren't they? You'd have to have a good imagination, or bad eyesight, to see what they're named after."

"Actually," I said, "the tor where I took lunch today resembled nothing so much as what one finds in the road after a herd of cattle has passed by."

The earthy humour was to Ketteridge's liking. When he stopped laughing he swung his cup dangerously in the direction of the curtains and said, "There's a tor just out those windows that I think I'll rename Horse-Dropping Tor, in your honour, Mrs Holmes. Looks just like one we had over our house when I was young, only it's cold, wet, and grey instead of hot, dry, and red." His face, which when relaxed had been less handsome but more likeable, abruptly tightened. He put his cup into its saucer with a sharp rattle and began to pat his pockets in the semaphore of the tobacco smoker. The distant past, it would seem, was out of bounds in a way that his youth in Alaska had not been.

"If I were you, I shouldn't mention to Baring-Gould that you are giving his tors impolite names."

He instantly relaxed again and stopped his search for tobacco. "You're right. He wouldn't take to it kindly."

Baring-Gould was a safer topic of conversation. I permitted him to retreat into it, and we talked about the squire of Lew Trenchard for a while. I did not think Ketteridge fully realised the precarious state of the old man's health, but I was not about to be the one to tell him.

In the middle of a sentence, Ketteridge paused and said, "I hear the car." He resumed what he had been saying, and appeared quite content to sit in front of the fire and talk until midnight, but I decided that investigation or no, I had had enough. My rib and hip throbbed, my forehead and the bridge of my nose hurt sharply, and I was not in top condition anywhere, even mentally. I rose to my feet.

"Mr Ketteridge, I have taken up far too much of your time. I am very grateful for the rescue and your company, but I cannot keep you any longer."

As it transpired, however, I was not finished with him yet. When my (neatly repacked) bags were brought, Tuptree was carrying a man's overcoat and hat as well. Ketteridge was motoring down to Lew with me, "Just to make sure you arrive without problem," as he put it. Expecting that we would be attacked by highwaymen, perhaps? Or that I might be molested by his driver? It seemed, though, that this being the first pleasant evening in some time, he wanted to take a drive.

This meant that he actually did the driving, with Scheiman in the backseat alongside my saddlebags. Ketteridge held my door for me, then got in behind the wheel.

He was not a bad driver, although a touch aggressive and more apt to haul at the wheel than slip in and out between obstacles as his driver had. We flew down the tree-lined avenue and accelerated out through the open gate in a spray of gravel, and were very soon pulling into the drive at Lew House.

Somewhat to my surprise, he did not accept my invitation to enter.

"Paperwork to do, I'm sure you understand. But you'll let me know if Mr Holmes is interested in investigating the Hound sightings, won't you? We can talk about rates at the time."

Hah, I thought. The days when Sherlock Holmes worried about how much to charge for his services was long in the past.

"I shall speak to him about it," I said politely.

He stood next to the car until I had gone into the porch, and then I heard the car door close. The car circled the fountain with the bronze goose-boy, and drove away.

FIFTEEN

Hard by is Clakeywell Pool, by some called Crazywell. It is an old mine-work, now filled with water. It covers nearly an acre, and the banks are in part a hundred feet high. According to popular belief, at certain times at night a loud voice is heard calling from the water in inarticulate tones, naming the next person who is to die in the parish.

—A Book of Dartmoor

I paused in the Lew House porch for a long moment after the noise of the car had faded down the drive, pondering the curious etiquette required for entering a house in which one has been a guest in the very recent past, yet has been away for some days, and returns solitary when previously one had been an adjunct to a husband. It would have been simple had there been a butler, but I was not about to rouse the master of the house to open the door for me. I reached out to try the door handle and found it unlocked, but instead of letting myself in, I dropped my bags and walked back into the drive and past the fountain until I was in the rose garden, where I turned to take a long look at the house.

It was a puzzle. This house, this square block rising up in front of me against the night, was in a sense a fraud, an artificial product of one man's enthusiasms. Stuck-together bits and pieces stolen from other structures, held in place by nothing more substantial than the vision of an infirm and lonely old man, its cool and formal facade nestled incongruously into a tree-lined fold of English river valley; a run-down, ill-heated, understaffed, echoing pile of a place studded with anomalies like the opulent gallery ceiling upstairs and the faded but still glorious ballroom—the place ought to have seemed ridiculous, out of place, and easily abandoned to the brambles and oaks. Instead it stood, confident and unapologetic, as self-contained and idiosyncratic as the man who had created it.

Baskerville Hall, on the other hand, was the real thing. A structure grown slowly over the centuries and dramatically situated, it was filled with beautiful, cared-for things, well heated, adequately staffed, more than adequately lit (one could even get used to the electric lights, I knew), and mastered by a man in his physical and mental prime. It should have been an oasis of warmth and colour, an assertion of life and humanity shining out in the stony wilderness of the moor.

Why then did the substantial Baskerville Hall linger in the mind as somehow ethereal, unreal, and slightly "off ?" Was it merely the foreign influence on the Hall over the last three owners: Ketteridge, the Canadian Sir Henry, and old Sir Charles before him with his influx of South African gold? Could it even be as recent a change as Ketteridge and his exotic sense of design?

If so, then why was it that Lew House, which had undergone changes considerably more radical than modern lighting and a few Moorish cushions, felt the more solid on its foundations? Why did Lew House, that toy of its over-imaginative squire, still settle into its Devonshire home as if it had grown up from the very stone beneath its feet? Why was it Lew, run down though it was, that impressed a visitor with the secure knowledge that this house would stand, would still be here and sheltering its inhabitants long after the owls and foxes had moved into the windswept ruins of Baskerville Hall?

I decided I did not know. I also decided that champagne was too conducive to fancies, and it was time I took to my bed.

It was not even ten o'clock, but the house was silent. I thought it more than likely that the lights had been left burning for my sake, so I shut them down and locked the door. (As my room was in the front, if another visitor came it would only be I who was disturbed.)

I was thirsty, with the wine and coffee I had drunk, so I went through to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then climbed stiffly up the back stairway, feeling all the aches I had accumulated.

At the top of the stairs I noticed a shaft of light coming from a partially opened door down the corridor. I thought it was from Baring-Gould's room, and I paused, not wishing to disturb him, yet not willing to walk away in case the old man might have been taken ill. In the end I went quietly up the hallway and, tapping gently, allowed the door to drift open under my knuckles.

The squire of Lew Trenchard lay propped on his pillows, his hands folded together on top of the bedclothes. A faded red glasses-case lay on the table beside the bed, along with a worn white leather New Testament, looking oddly feminine, a lamp, a glass of water, and a small tray with at least ten bottles of pills and potions. The pocket of his striped pyjamas had torn and been carefully mended, I noticed, and this touch of everyday pathos made me suddenly aware of how shockingly vulnerable this fierce, daunting old man looked. I stepped backward to the door, but one eye glittered from a lowered lid.

"Is that you, Miss Russell? I cannot see you."

I stepped forward into the light. "Yes, Mr Baring-Gould. Is there anything I can get for you?"

He did not answer my question, if indeed he had heard it. His eye drifted shut and his breathing slowed. I eased back towards the door, and to my astonishment I heard him say, "I am relieved to see you home again safely. The storm the other night would have been ferocious on the open moor. I dreamt…" There was a pause, so long a pause that I began to think he had fallen asleep. "I dreamt I was a child by the seashore. The trees, you know. The Scotch pines and the oaks above the house sound remarkably like the surf on the coast of Cornwall, when the wind is blowing through them."

I waited, but that seemed to be all, so I wished him a good night and went to my room. There was no sign of Holmes, and one of his bags was missing, so I went quietly to bed, and to sleep.

***

At five o'clock in the morning I lay open-eyed, staring at the ceiling. The portions of my body that didn't ache gently hurt actively, with the occasional shooting pain from my ribs for variety.

This is ridiculous, I decided, and began the laborious process of oozing out from under the bedclothes. Surely I can make it down the stairs without waking Baring-Gould, and make myself a pot of tea without disturbing Mrs Elliott. I wrapped myself in Holmes' dressing gown, pushed my feet into his bedroom slippers, and tottered downstairs, considerably less spry than Elizabeth Chase.

I need not have bothered with silence: Baring-Gould was sitting before the drawing-room fire, a half-full cup of tea with the cold skin of age on it by his side. He held a book on his lap, a small green volume with gilt letters, mostly obscured by his hands but having something to do with Devon. He was not reading it, only holding it while he gazed into the fire. By the looks of the coals, he had been there for some hours.

"Good morning, Miss Russell," he said without turning his head. "Do come in."

"Good morning. I thought I might have some tea. Would you like another cup yourself?"

"That would be most kind of you. Although truthfully I can scarcely be said to have had the first one."

I removed the cup and returned with a tray holding pot, cups, and paraphernalia. I poured his cup, milked and sugared it to his instructions, and hesitated.

"Please do sit down, Miss Russell. Unless, of course, you have work to do."

"No," I said quickly, stung by the faint, so very faint, note of request in the proud voice. "No, I am between projects at the moment." Oh dear, that didn't sound very good. "You know how it is, one thing finished and the next still coming together in the back of the mind."

"I envy you. I never had the leisure to think in advance about the next, as you call it, project." He raised his tea to his lips to give me time to absorb the gentle scorn. This was not going well.

"What are you reading?" I asked him.

"Nothing, actually. My eyes are too bad. I do like to hold a book from time to time, though. Rather like conducting a telephone conversation with an old friend: unsatisfactory, but better than nothing at all."

"Would you…shall I read to you?"

"That is a kind offer, Miss Russell, but not perhaps at the moment."

Each time he said my name, it sounded as though he had it in italics. This unorthodox form of address was obviously more than he could swallow. I relented.

"Please, Rector, call me Mary."

"Very well, Mary. One of my daughters is named Mary, and she too has a lovely voice. No, I think that, rather than read to me from books in my library that I already know, I should prefer to hear about your own efforts. My friend Holmes tells me you are in the final stages of writing a book of your own. Tell me about it."