The Moor (4 page)

"I have seen the Yorkshire moors," I said.

"Then you've a very rough idea of the ground here, but not of Dartmoor's special character. It is much more of a
hortus conclusus,
although this walled garden is no warm and fruitful paradise, but a rocky place of gorse and bracken. As Gould said, it does not generously part with its wealth. It is a land of great strength—men have broken their health and their fortunes trying to beat it down and shape it to their ends, but the moor wins out in the end. The men who chose to build a prison here set great value on breaking the spirits of the men they were guarding. The moor will not be farmed, nor made to grow any but the simplest crops. Tin miners have been the only men to draw much money from the place, and even they had to work hard for it. On a basic level, however, it has provided spare sustenance to its inhabitants for thousands of years: One finds mediaeval stone crosses mingling with neolithic ruins and early Victorian engine houses.

"Most of the moor is a chase or forest, which as I'm sure you know does not necessarily mean trees, and here most emphatically does not. In this sense, a forest denotes a wild reserve for the crown to hunt, although I imagine the Prince of Wales must find the game somewhat limited on the moor itself, unless he is fond of rabbits. Much of it is a common, grazed by the adjoining parishes with fees collected at a yearly gathering up of the animals, called the 'drift.' Other parts of it are privately held, with an interesting legal right of a holder's survivors to claim an additional eight acres upon the death of each subsequent holder. These 'newtakes' at one time ate into the duchy's holdings, but are not often claimed now, because the traditional moor men are dying off, and their sons are moving to the cities. Do you know, when I was here thirty years ago it was not impossible to find a child of the moor who had never seen a coin of the realm? Now—" He gave out a brief cough of laughter. "The other day in the Saracen's Head pub, right out in the middle of the moor, one of the natives was singing an Al Jolson song."

"You've been up on the moor, then? Recently?" I asked.

"I travelled across it from Exeter, yes."

A hike like that might account for his heavier use of brandy than normal, I thought, as well as his position in front of the hottest part of the fire. He went on before I could ask after his rheumatism.

"The people of the moor are what one might expect: hard as granite, with low expectations of what life has to give, often nearly illiterate but with a superb verbal memory and possessed of the occasional flare of poetry and imagination. They are, in fact, like the tors they live among, those odd piles of fantastically weathered granite that grace the tops of a number of hills: rock hard, well worn, and decidedly quirky."

"A description which could also apply to our host," I murmured, and took a sip of the surprisingly good and undoubtedly old brandy in my glass.

"Indeed. He may not have been born on the moor itself, but it is in him now. It is not paternalism speaking in him—or not only paternalism. He is truly and deeply concerned about the stirs and currents abroad on the moor. I wouldn't be surprised if he can feel them from here."

"So you agree there's something wrong up there?" I heard the last two words come out of my mouth with a definite emphasis, and thought with irritation that this habit of referring to a deserted bit of landscape as if it were another planet seemed to be contagious.

"There's certainly something stirring, though truth to tell I cannot read the currents well enough to see if it be for ill or not. I will say I received a faint impression that the moor was readying itself for a convulsion of some sort, though whether an eruption or a sudden flowering I couldn't say."

He stopped abruptly and looked askance at the empty glass balanced on the arm of his chair, and I had to agree, it was very unusual to hear him wax quite so poetic. He picked up the glass and put it firmly away from him onto the nearby table, then settled back with his pipe, not meeting my eyes.

"As with any isolated setting, the moor seethes with stories of the supernatural. Unsophisticated minds are apt to see corpse lights or 'jacky-twoads' where the scientist would see swamp gas, and long and lonely nights encourage the mind to wander down paths poorly illuminated by the light of reason. The people firmly believe in ghostly dogs and wraiths of the dying, in omen-bearing ravens and standing stones that walk in the dark of the moon. And pixies—the pixies, or pygsies, are everywhere, waiting to lead the unsuspecting traveller astray. The author of a respectable guidebook, published just a few years ago, recommends that the lost walker turn his coat out so as to avoid being 'pygsie-led'—and he's only half joking."

"What does Baring-Gould make of all that? He's an educated man, after all."

"Gould?" Holmes laughed. "He's the most gullible of the lot, full of the most awful balderdash. He'll tell you how a neighbour's horse panicked one night at the precise spot where a man would be killed some hours later, how another man carried on a conversation with his wife who was dying ten miles away, how—. Revelations, visitations, spooks, you name it—he's worse than Conan Doyle, with his fairies and his spiritualism."

All this made the purported friendship sound less and less likely. Sherlock Holmes was not one to suffer fools even under coercion, yet he was apparently here under his own free will, and without resentment. There was undoubtedly something in the situation that I had thus far failed to grasp.

"I was here for some weeks during the Stapleton case," he was saying, "and since then once or twice for shorter periods of time, so I have a basic working knowledge of the moor dweller and his sense of the universe. The stories he tells are a rich mixture that ranges from the humorous to the macabre. They may be violent and occasionally, shall I say, earthy, but they are rarely brutal and have thus far appeared free of those terrors of the urban dweller, the two-legged monster and the plagues of foreign diseases.

"This time it is different. In two days, nursing my beer in the corners of three moorland public houses, the stories I heard could as easily have come from Whitechapel or Limehouse. Oh, there are the standard stories too, the everyday fare of the moor dwellers, although the recent preoccupation with ghostly carriages and spectral dogs that has Gould worried does, I agree, seem unusually vivid and worth investigating. Still, they are a far way from the other stories I heard, which were along the lines of a dark man with a razor-sharp blade sacrificing a ram on top of a tor and drinking its blood, and a young girl found ravished and dismembered, and an old woman drowned in a stream."

"Have these things happened?" I asked sharply.

"They have not."

"None of them?"

"As far as I can discover, they are not even patched-together exaggerations of actual incidents. They seem to be rumours made up of whole cloth."

I could think of no proper response, but as I took another swallow from my glass, I was aware for the first time of a feeling of uneasiness.

"Yes," I said. "I see."

"Except," he added, "for one."

"Ah."

"Ah indeed. The death of Josiah Gorton is both undeniable and mysterious. It happened three weeks ago, just after I left for Berlin. Gould's letter took a week to find me, and by the time I got here the trail was both cold and confused."

"A common enough state of affairs for your cases," I commented.

"True, but regrettable nonetheless. Josiah Gorton was a tin miner—although that may be a deceptive description. Tin seeker might be more accurate, one of a breed who wanders the moor, putting their noses into every rivulet and valley, poring over every stone pile in hopes of discovering small nuggets of tin that the more energetic miners of the past left behind. He spent his days fossicking through the deep-cut streambeds and his nights in caves or shelters or the barns of farmers.

"I met Gorton once, in fact, many years ago, and thought him a harmless enough character even then. He affected the dress of a gipsy, with a red kerchief around his throat, although when I met him he looked more like a pirate, with dark, oiled locks and a heavy frock coat too large for him. He was a colourful figure, proud of his freedom, and he had a goodly store of traditional songs tucked into the back of his head, which he would happily bring forth for the cost of a pint or a meal. He was a last relic of the old moor 'songmen,' although his voice was giving way, and with more than three pints under his belt he tended to forget the words to some of the longer ballads. Still, he was tolerated with affection by the innkeepers and farmers, as a part of the scenery, and in particular by Gould, for whom Gorton had a special significance.

"You need to understand that with all the work he has done in a wide variety of fields, Gould regards his greatest achievement in life to have been the collecting of west country songs and melodies, a task begun more than thirty years ago and only reluctantly dropped when he became too old to take to the moor for days at a time. Josiah Gorton was one of his more important songmen. I suppose it could be said, by those of a psychologically analytical bent, that Gorton represents to Gould the fate of the moor, overcome by progress and forgotten in the shiny, shallow attractions of modernity." Holmes' fastidious expression served to make it clear that he was merely acknowledging the possible explanation given by another discipline. He continued, "Whatever the explanation, there is no doubt that Gould is deeply troubled not only by the fact of Gorton's death, but by the manner it came about.

"On the night of Saturday, the fifteenth of September, Gorton was seen walking north past Watern Tor. You did study those maps you brought down, I presume?"

"Not studied, no. I glanced at a couple of them."

"You didn't?" He sounded amazed and more than a bit disapproving. "What on earth were you doing all that time on the train?"

"Reading," I said evenly. I actually had deliberately buried myself in the most arcane piece of theological history I could lay my hands upon, as a protest and counterbalance to the forces pulling me to Devonshire. In retrospect, it seemed a bit childish, but I bristled when Holmes gave me that look of his.

"Reading," he repeated in a flat voice. "Wasting your time, Russell, with theological speculation and airy-fairy philosophising when there is work to be done."

"The work is yours, Holmes, not mine—I only agreed to bring you the maps. And the speculation of Jewish philosophers is as empirical as any of your conclusions."

His only reply was a scornful examination of his pipe-bowl.

"Admit it, Holmes," I pressed. "The only reason you so denigrate Talmudic studies is sheer envy over the fact that others perfected the art of deductive reasoning centuries before you were even born."

He did not deign to answer, which meant that the point was irrefutably mine, so I drove home my advantage: "And besides that, Holmes, what I was reading does actually have some bearing on this case—or at least on its setting. Were you aware that in the seventeenth century Moorish raiders came as far as the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, taking slaves? Why, Baring-Gould might have relatives in Spain today."

He did not admit defeat, but merely applied another match to his pipe and resumed the previous topic. "You must study the maps at the earliest opportunity. Watern Tor, since you do not know, is in a remote area in the northern portion of the moor. Gorton was seen there, heading west, on a Saturday evening, yet on the following Monday morning, thirty-six hours later, he was found miles away in the opposite direction, passed out in a drunken stupor in a rain-swollen leat on the southern reaches. He had a great lump on the back of his head and bog weeds in his hair, although there are no bogs in the part of the moor where he was found. He died a few hours later of his injuries and a fever, muttering all the while about his long, silent ride in Lady Howard's carriage. He also said," Holmes added in the driest of voices, "that Lady Howard had a huge black dog."

"Huh," I grunted. "And did the dog have glowing eyes?"

"Gorton neglected to say, and he was in no condition to respond to questions. There was one further and quite singular piece of testimony, however."

I eyed him warily, mistrusting the sudden jauntiness of his manner. "Oh yes?"

"Yes. The farmer who found Gorton, and the farmer's strapping son who helped carry the old miner to the house and fetched a doctor, both swear that in the soft ground beside the body, there were clear marks pressed firmly into the earth." I was hit by a cold jolt of apprehension. "The two men have become fixtures in the Saracen's Head, telling and retelling the story of how they found Gorton's body surrounded by—"

"No! Oh no, Holmes, please." I put up my hand to stop his words, unable to bear what I could hear coming, a thundering evocation of one of the most extravagant phrases Conan Doyle ever employed. "Please, please don't tell me that 'on the ground beside the body, Mr Holmes, there were the footprints of a gigantic hound.' "

He removed his pipe from his mouth and stared at me. "What on earth are you talking about, Russell? I admit that I occasionally indulge in a touch of the dramatic, but surely you can't believe me as melodramatic as that."

I drew a relieved breath and settled back in my chair. "No, I suppose not. Forgive me, Holmes. Do continue."

"No," he continued, putting the stem of his pipe back into place. "I do not believe it would be possible to distinguish a hound's spoor from that of an ordinary dog—not without a stretch of ground showing the animal's loping stride. These were simply a confusion of prints."

"Do you mean to tell me…" I began slowly.

"Yes, Russell. There on the ground beside the body of Josiah Gorton were found"—he paused to hold out his pipe and gaze in at the bowl, which seemed to me to be drawing just fine, before finishing the phrase—"the footprints of a very large dog."

I dropped my head into my hands and left it there for a long time while my husband sucked in quiet satisfaction at his pipe.

"Holmes," I said.