The Moor (5 page)

"Yes, Russell."

"I am going to bed."

"A capital idea," he replied.

And so we did.

THREE

Oh! these architects! how I detest them for the mischief they have done. I should like to cut off their hands.

—Further Reminiscences

It rained all that night, a quiet, steady rhythm that soothed me into a sleep so sound that, although I woke briefly in the early morning to the click and murmur of hot water pushing its way through cold radiator pipes, I went back to sleep, and did not wake fully until nearly eight o'clock. Finding to my satisfaction that the dawn noises had not been an hallucination, I bathed and dressed—in trousers, despite my host's sensibilities—and put up my hair, before making my way downstairs.

At the foot of the stairs I paused and listened. The old house was content in its restored warmth but utterly silent; I could not even hear the rain. I took the opportunity to explore the various rooms we had bypassed the night before, finding, among other things, an airy, light-blue-and-white ballroom of wedding-cake splendour, lacking only a cobwebbed dinner service and Miss Haversham to complete the picture of merriment and life abruptly suspended by the years. I did no more than stand inside the door, feeling no wish to examine the intricate plasterwork more closely, and I could not help wondering if Baring-Gould ever came into this room. I backed out, closing the door silently.

Back in the hall, I paused to examine the fireplace carving that Baring-Gould had commended to me the night before. It depicted a hunt, a parade of hounds with their tails curled energetically over their backs, pursuing a fox, who had abandoned bits and pieces of the goose he had stolen and was now making for what looked like a pineapple. I puzzled over it for a while, and then went back towards the stairway and then into the dining room, where I discovered a pot of coffee bubbling gently into sludge over a warming flame, a mound of leathery eggs similarly kept warm, some cold toast, and three strips of flabby bacon. I poured a tiny amount of boiled coffee essence and a large amount of lovely yellow milk into a cup and walked over to the window.

Outside lay a small paved courtyard, deserted of life and leaves and with an arched walkway along the opposite side that looked like either a cloister or a row of almshouses. I went through a doorway and found the back stairway, and another doorway that opened into the kitchen, at the moment deserted although I could hear a woman's voice raised in harangue at a distance. I retreated, retracing my steps past the staircase to another door, and there I found host and husband in a large, cluttered room lined with bookshelves and brightened by a number of tall windows that gathered in the light even on a grey day like this. The two of them were standing with their heads together and their elbows resting on top of a small, high, sloping writing table, across which had been draped an Ordnance Survey map.

My first impression on seeing the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould by light of day was that schoolboys and sinners alike must have found him terrifying. Even now at the edges of his tenth decade, with his thin white hair brushed over a mottled scalp, his back bent, and his face carved into deep lines, he struck one as a powerful source of disapproval and judgement, searching out wearily the misdeeds that a long lifetime had proven to him must invariably lie before him. He was a man who had seen a great deal in his eighty-nine years, and approved of little of it.

Oddly, he was wearing two pairs of spectacles, one of them pushed up into his hair, the other on his nose. Seeing me at the door, he shoved the second pair up to join the first and straightened his back. He took in my trousers, and his face went even more sour.

"Good morning, Miss Russell. My friend here tells me that you prefer that peculiar form of address over the 'Mrs' to which you are entitled."

"Er, yes, I do. Thank you. Good morning, Mr Baring-Gould. Good morning, Holmes."

"I see you found Mrs Elliott's breakfast," Baring-Gould stated, seeing the cup I still held.

"I found it, yes."

His old eyes beneath their remarkably rounded brows sharpened. "Inedible?" he asked.

"It's all right," I hastened to say. "I often just take coffee in the morning."

"Ask Mrs Elliott if you want something. I did tell her," he said in an aside to Holmes. "The only time the woman uses those chafing dishes is when there are twenty eggs to keep warm and a gallon of coffee. Was the coffee boiled away?" he shot at me.

"Almost, yes. I snuffed out the flame as I came through."

"Never mind, she'll be making more shortly. When there are guests in the house she produces meals eighteen hours a day, and she'll be anxious to make up for the first impression you had of her household. Women are quite mad when it comes to hospitality."

I bit down hard on my tongue, though truth to tell I wouldn't have known quite where to start. Holmes made a noise deep in his throat that was not quite a cough, and hastily returned to the map. I took a swallow of my coffee-flavoured milk and turned my back on the two men to peruse the books on the walls, stopping to remove one from time to time and glance into it.

"So, judging by this," Holmes said, continuing the conversation that had broken off with my entrance, "Josiah Gorton might readily have been brought from the place where he was last seen down to where he was found, without a soul seeing it."

"Oh yes, easily, by anyone who knows the moor."

"How intimate a knowledge would be required?"

"I should have thought a week or two of wandering might do it. That and a good map."

"It's a great pity, Gould, that I could not come at the time. The body might have told many tales."

The old man made no polite effort to excuse Holmes his preoccupation, although he admitted, "I was not informed myself until after he had been prepared for burial. If you wish to speak with the women who laid his body out, I can give you their names."

"I may do, later. Now tell me, where was this dog-and-carriage apparition seen? This is another reference to a local folktale, Russell," he explained. I looked up from the encyclopaedia article on pineapples that I was reading. "A particularly difficult local noblewoman—"

"Noble by marriage only," inserted Baring-Gould.

"A woman who married a local lord," Holmes corrected himself, "lost him, along with three other husbands, under circumstances the local populace thought suspicious, with some justification. She was never officially accused and tried, but for her sins she is said to be condemned to riding in a coach made of the bones of her dead husbands, driven by a headless horseman and led by a black hound with a single eye in the centre of his forehead. The carriage drives at midnight from the ancestral house near Tavistock up to Okehampton castle for Lady Howard to pluck one blade of grass—"

"The hound plucks it," Baring-Gould sternly corrected him.

"How could a hound pluck a blade of grass?" objected Holmes.

"I merely tell you what the story says."

"But a hound—"

"Holmes," I interrupted.

"Oh very well, the hound plucks the grass, and not until every blade is plucked—or bitten—can Lady Howard be free to take her rest. It's a popular story, with songs and such, that by the way probably gave Stapleton the idea for his personal variation on the so-called Baskerville hound—which does not, in the legend, actually glow. It is said, I should mention, to be highly unlucky to be offered a ride in the coach, and certain death actually to enter in with Lady Howard."

"So I should imagine," I murmured.

"At any rate, Russell, the point is that Lady Howard and her hound have been seen on the moor."

During Holmes' recitation, Baring-Gould, pausing occasionally to correct Holmes, had gone to a cupboard in the corner and returned with a very large, heavily worn, rolled-up map, which he now spread out across the worktable on top of the other. This one was of a smaller scale, the Ordnance Survey's one-inch map—although I saw, looking more closely at it, that it actually comprised portions of four or five adjoining maps, carefully trimmed and fastened together so as to encompass the entire moor and its surrounding towns. Corrections had been made in a number of places, roads crossed out and redrawn and the names of tors and hamlets rewritten: Laughter Tor had become Lough Tor, Haytor Rocks changed to Hey Tor, Crazywell Pool was corrected to Clakeywell. The writing was cramped and sloping, undoubtedly that of Baring-Gould.

Before Baring-Gould could begin, the door at the end of the room opened and a woman with iron-grey hair and an iron-hard face put her head inside.

"Pardon me, Rector," she said, "but you wanted me to tell you when the Harpers came in."

"The Harpers? Oh yes. Would you feed them, Mrs Elliott, and get them settled in? I'll not be much longer here."

The housekeeper nodded and began to draw back, then stopped and addressed Holmes. "You're not tiring him, I trust," she said, sounding threatening.

"We are trying not to do so," Holmes said.

She studied her master for a minute, then withdrew.

"Another sign of the unrest on the moor," Baring-Gould said with a sigh. "Longtime residents, people with roots deep into the peat, pulling up and moving away. Like Josiah Gorton, Sally Harper's father was one of my songmen. I collected two ballads and three tunes from the man, oh, it must be nearly thirty years ago. He gave me an alternative verse to 'Green Broom,' as I recall, as well as a sprightly tune, set with most unseemly words that I had to rewrite before it could be published. Sally was a blooming young thing then, and now she and her husband have had to sell off their farm up near Black Tor, a very old place with several generations of newtakes added to the original. Never had children, and although they have a bit of money from the farm sale, the house they have their eyes on near Milton Abbot isn't ready yet. I felt I ought to help out, and it'll only be for a few days. Hard to believe it was that many years ago. Where were we? Yes, Josiah Gorton."

He bent closely over the fine lines of the map, squinting for a moment until he had his bearings, and his long, gnarled finger came down in the upper left quadrant of the map, tracing an uneven line down to the lower right.

"This is the most likely route for Gorton to have been taken," he said, which, I realised to my surprise, was for my sake, not that of Holmes, who had already been over the route. He then drew his hand back and put it down a short distance from where he had started. "And here is the place Lady Howard's coach was seen, on the night Gorton disappeared." This was, judging by the few roads and fewer dwellings, one of the most deserted areas of the entire moor, a place thick with the Gothic script mapmakers use to indicate antiquities: hut circles, stone rows, stone avenues, tumuli, and ancient trackways, as well as an ominous scattering of those grass-tuft symbols that indicate marshland. There were no orange roads for miles, or even the hollow lines of minor roads, only densely gathered contour lines, numerous streams, and the markings for "rough pasture." A howling wilderness indeed.

What was a
kistvaen
? I wondered, seeing the word on the map, but Holmes spoke before I could ask.

"Who on earth was out in that wasteland to see a spectral coach?" he demanded.

"It is not a wasteland, Holmes," Baring-Gould corrected him sharply. "Merely sparsely populated. A farmworker saw it. He was benighted on his way home from a wedding."

"Why does that say 'Artillery Range'?" I interrupted without thinking.

I felt two sets of disapproving male eyes boring into me, and did not look up from the map.

"Because," said Baring-Gould, addressing me as if I were a regrettably slow child, "the army uses it to practice with their guns. A fair portion of the moor is given over to them during the summer months, and is therefore off limits to the rambler and antiquarian. They do post the firing schedules at various places around the moor, and they are scrupulous about mounting the red warning flags, but it is really most inconvenient of them."

I sympathised, but privately I could see why the army should want to make use of Dartmoor: There was probably less life to disturb in that hand's-breadth of the map than on any other English ground south of Hadrian's Wall. Even the mapmakers seemed to have tired of the exercise before they penetrated to the middle, for most of the Gothic markings were along the edges. Or perhaps primitive man found the centre of the place too daunting even for him, I reflected. I suppressed a shiver.

"A farmworker on his way home from a celebration might not be considered the best of witnesses," Holmes noted drily, returning to the subject at hand. "How much had he drunk?"

"Quite a bit," Baring-Gould had to admit.

Holmes' only comment was with his eyebrows, but that was enough. He bent to study the map for a moment, then turned to a familiar packet, selected a map, and spread it with a flourish over the top of Baring-Gould's marked-up old sheet. He then withdrew a fountain pen from his breast pocket.

"The sighting of the coach around the time Gorton was last seen was here, would you say?"

Baring-Gould patted around his pockets until he remembered where he had put his spectacles, and pulled down one of the two pairs on his head and adjusted them on his nose. He peered at the crisp new map briefly, then pointed to a spot on the left side of the moor. Holmes put a neat circle on the place indicated, and then moved the pen over until it hovered near a Gothic-lettered notice of "hut circles."

"Gorton was last seen here?"

Baring-Gould seized the pen from Holmes impatiently and automatically extended it out as if to dip into a well before he caught himself, shook the thing hesitantly, and then wrote a firm X a bare fraction of an inch from where Holmes had held the nib. He then moved his hand the width of the moor to place another X near the hamlet of Buckfastleigh.

"He was found here," he said. "And these are where the coach was seen. The first sighting, as near as I can find, was in the middle of July, somewhere in this area here. That I know only through hearsay, but on August the twenty-fourth, two people saw it, and I spoke with them both. The third time was the fifteenth of September; that was the farmworker."