“I can’t,” said Dr. Mortimer. “I must get home to my wife. I cannot imagine the terror she must have undergone this past week, alone in the house with George Selden on the loose.”
“But I thought you lived in Grimpen,” said Baskerville. “He won’t dare go near towns.”
“Women are delicate creatures,” said Dr. Mortimer. “I only hope the strain has not made her ill. But I shall walk over tomorrow. Good night!” And he and Jernigan rattled away into the dark, leaving Baskerville and me to face Baskerville Hall.
“I thought better of Mortimer,” Baskerville said, only half joking.
“He loves his wife,” I said. “I cannot fault a man for love.”
“No, I suppose not,” Baskerville said, and sighed heavily. “Let’s go in.”
The main hall was very Elizabethan, with the enormous rafters, the stained glass, the coats of arms on the walls. We huddled by the fireplace, which was built on the same scale as the rest of the room, and tried to restore feeling to our cold hands.
Barrymore had returned from taking our luggage to our rooms. He stood now at the edge of our circle of light and said, “Would you wish dinner to be served at once, sir?”
“I would,” Baskerville said frankly. “Is it ready?”
“In a very few minutes. You will find hot water in your rooms.” He hesitated. “My wife and I…” He hesitated again, and I got the impression that whatever he was going to say was painful to him. “My wife and I will be happy to stay with you until you have made your fresh arrangements, but you will understand that under the new conditions, the house will require a considerable staff.”
“What new conditions?” said Baskerville.
Barrymore looked acutely uncomfortable. “Only that Sir Charles led a very retired life, and we were able to look after his needs. You will naturally wish to do more entertaining, and thus you will need changes in your household.”
“But that doesn’t mean … Barrymore, are you saying you wish to leave?”
There was a considerable pause before Barrymore said, “Only when it is quite convenient to you, sir,” which I noted was not an answer to the question asked. Besides, it was quite obvious that Barrymore did not wish to leave.
“But your family has been with us for several generations, haven’t they? I should hate to begin my tenure here by breaking such an old family connection. What is the problem? It can’t be me—I haven’t been here five minutes.”
Barrymore now looked acutely unhappy. “I feel that also, sir, and so does my wife. But, to tell the truth, sir, we were both very much attached to Sir Charles, and his death has made being at Baskerville Hall very painful to us.”
“But what on Earth will you do?”
“I have no doubt, sir, that we shall succeed in establishing ourselves in some business. Sir Charles’s generosity has given us the means to do so, and now, sir, perhaps I had best show you to your rooms.”
We followed Barrymore up a magnificent staircase, around a balustraded gallery, and down a long hallway to the very end. Barrymore said, “These are considered the best rooms of the house. Sir Henry, you are in the east room, and I have put Dr. Doyle to the west.”
“I’ve gotten completely turned around,” I said, not entirely untruthfully. “Are we on the north end of the house or the south end?”
“This is the north wing, sir,” said Barrymore. “Most of the rooms in the south wing are closed up these days.”
I decided this was not the time to ask about footprints in the flower beds. Instead, I went into the west room and found it to be unexpectedly modern and cheerful, complete with electric lights and a delicately patterned wallpaper. It was like being in a different house, and I was thankful for it. I made use of the hot water, and then went across the hall and tapped on Baskerville’s door.
“Come in,” he called.
I found him still staring about in considerable bemusement. “This still all seems like a dream,” said he. “I keep expecting to wake up and be back in Alberta, having fallen asleep while darning a sock or something, and this house! We jumped three centuries in as many steps!”
“Sir Charles seems to have put his money to excellent, if rather eccentric, use,” I agreed.
“I must find out if anyone knows more of his plans than Dr. Mortimer,” said Baskerville. “For if he had some grand design, I should like to feel that I was honoring it.”
“Barrymore might be the best person to ask,” I said. “He would at least know who visited most frequently.”
“It’s a place to start,” said Baskerville. “I would rather find a friend than a lawyer. And it’s a better topic of conversation than the family fetch.”
And indeed, when asked over supper, Barrymore proved very willing to help—suggesting that his reasons for leaving had nothing to do with distaste for the new baronet. He said, as had Dr. Mortimer, that Sir Charles lived a retired life, seeing very few people socially. “He said it tired him,” said Barrymore. “Indeed, I believe Dr. Mortimer was his only truly close friend, although he was certainly not on unfriendly terms with anyone, and I know he enjoyed his conversations with Mr. Stapleton.”
“Stapleton?” said Baskerville.
“The naturalist,” I said, remembering Dr. Mortimer’s rather disorganized remarks. “Living at Merripit House.”
“With his sister, yes, sir,” said Barrymore. “Sir Charles said he had a lively and well-informed mind. They worked together a great deal on Sir Charles’s charitable efforts.”
“Oh Jehoshaphat,” said Baskerville. “I didn’t even think … What kind of charitable work did Sir Charles do?”
Barrymore pondered for a moment. “He liked to help individuals in need, and he liked to do so anonymously.”
“Thank goodness,” said Baskerville with great sincerity. “How did he find these individuals?”
“Mostly through the churches. The curate of St. Michael on the Rock and the Methodist minister in Grimpen and the Presbyterian minister in Coombe Tracey all knew to come to him, and then there was Mr. Frankland’s daughter, but that was a bit different.”
“Mr. Frankland’s daughter. You mean Dr. Mortimer’s wife?”
“No, sir. Mr. Frankland’s other daughter. Dr. Mortimer married Miss Lydia. It was Miss Laura who made a bad marriage and found herself in trouble.”
“And she couldn’t go to her father?”
“Her father never spent a cent he didn’t have to on those girls,” said Barrymore with sudden venom. “And besides which, he’d disowned her when she married that Lyons fellow. There were a number of gentlemen, not just Sir Charles, who combined to help her start a typewriting business in Coombe Tracey.”
We were silent for some time as Barrymore cleared the plates and brought out the port. “I don’t know,” Baskerville said. “All these ancestors disapproving of me. Barrymore, the Hall isn’t haunted, is it?”
The question clearly took Barrymore by surprise. “No, Sir Henry. Unless you mean … you do know about the Hound?”
“Yes. I didn’t mean him,” Baskerville said. “I meant all these Baskervilles. Which one is the wicked Hugo?”
“That would be this Sir Hugo,” said Barrymore, indicating a cavalier with a thin, rather stern face and fanatical eyes.
Sir Henry said, “He certainly doesn’t look like a man you’d want to cross. I’m glad he got what was coming to him.”
I asked Barrymore, “Does anyone but the Baskervilles ever see the Hound?”
“That’s hard to say, sir. There are stories about people seeing the Baskerville fetch, but never anything reliable. But that’s all they are. Just stories.” He bowed sharply and stalked out of our little circle of light.
“Note,” Baskerville said after a moment. “Barrymore does not like talking about the Hound.”
* * *
I went to bed that night feeling both weary and alert, which is a dreadful combination. I tossed and turned, dozed and woke. Finally, at one o’clock, I got up, pulled on
my dressing gown, and went down the long north hall to the lav, which had been wedged into an oddly shaped space between the main building and the north wing. I was just grateful Sir Charles had included a W.C.
I washed my face and hands, and had my hand on the doorknob to start the trek back to my room, when I heard a noise. I would not have heard it at all if it had not been for the odd acoustical properties created by Sir Charles’s renovations, and as it was, I had to listen carefully for quite some time before I could be confident in my identification: a woman, crying softly but heartbrokenly, somewhere in the Hall.
The question was whether she was living or dead.
I opened the door and immediately ran into Baskerville. We both started back as if the other were the Hound. “What are you doing?” he whispered.
There was no one in the north wing to disturb, but I whispered, too, “Lav. You?”
“Can’t sleep,” he said, and held up a book. “Went to raid the library.”
“Did you hear her?”
And I knew the answer before he said, “Yes.”
I went back to bed, but it was a long time before I was able to sleep.
27
Letters
From Dr. J. H. Doyle to Mr. Crow
Baskerville Hall, October 11th
My dear Crow,
Pursuant to your fiat, I have been doing my best to meet all of Sir Henry’s neighbors. Mr. Stapleton made it easy; he came over the first morning and introduced himself, begged us to consider him a guide as needed, and took us out to the spot where the wicked Sir Hugo met his end.
It is a dreadfully grim little coombe—or goyal, which is the local word—with two great stones in it, sharpened at the upper end, where you can make out the marks of the tools that sharpened them, and then worn by time until they look like the fangs of some monstrous creature just beneath the earth. Sir Henry was most interested and asked Mr. Stapleton a number of questions, both about the goyal and about the story, and they got into an almost heated discussion about whether Constance Burry had been a hell-hound before Sir Hugo got his hands on her or if Sir Hugo, having sold his soul to the Devil, did in fact carry enough metaphysicum morbi to contaminate the girl. Mr. Stapleton held that Constance Burry’s extremely watchful and protective family must have been guarding her secret as much as her honor while Sir Henry seems convinced, having seen Sir Hugo’s portrait, that he did indeed make a deal with the powers of darkness, and Constance Burry was merely his day of reckoning made manifest.
When we returned from that expedition, two carters from Coombe Tracey were in the stable yard unloading the straw-stuffed crate in which the cerberus had traveled to Baskerville Hall. It is not the same model as McMurdo, being designed specifically for bodyguard work and thus having a somewhat lighter chassis. The three heads are designed to look like an Alsatian’s rather than a mastiff’s. Its name is Wiggins. It ate Sir Henry’s American penny and has followed him faithfully ever since. (It is easily able to keep up with a horse.) Sir Henry worries about what the locals will make of it, but I know he is safe in that regard; the announcement that the Baskerville coursing pack is returning to Baskerville Hall is rapidly making Sir Henry the most popular man in Devonshire.
And no one is happier than Mr. Ralph Tenby, a stick-thin and jauntily active man in his sixties who says the hounds were eating him out of hearth and home—“but you couldn’t ask Sir Charles to take them back. I’ve never seen a man so sincerely terrified of anything as that poor man was of dogs.”
“Did he ever give a reason?” I asked curiously.
Tenby said, “No. And it was all dogs, not just hounds, although I know the fetch preyed on his mind a good deal.”
“Do we know the fetch is a hound?” said Baskerville. “Has anyone but a Baskerville ever seen it to know?”
“Only the family can see a fetch,” Mr. Tenby said, scandalized.
“Yes, but I’ve heard there’s another theory,” said Baskerville.
“That it’s the ghost of that poor girl? Hardly likely, is it? Hell-hounds don’t haunt. They don’t have souls.”
It is a common opinion, and I did not make the foolish mistake of arguing. Sir Henry said, “Do you know of any local traditions about Constance Burry?”
“Oh, they all say it was Sir Hugo, that he was some sort of walking miasma of evil.”
Sir Henry changed the subject and got Mr. Tenby’s opinion on a number of other things, for he is the sort of person who has an opinion on everything, whether he knows anything about it or not. But he has kept the coursing pack in excellent condition, so that I try not to think too harshly of him.
Our other near neighbor, Mr. Frankland, he of the two daughters and the litigious ways, also came to inspect the new baronet. He is elderly, energetic, red-faced with choler, and completely devoid of any true human feeling. He cares only for points of law, and I no longer wonder at his treatment of his daughters. They can only barely have impinged on his consciousness to begin with.
We have also met one of the daughters, Dr. Mortimer’s wife Lydia, for he had us over to dinner as he had promised. She is a tall lady, startlingly beautiful in a Burne-Jones fashion, with eyes that are not at all dreamy, but are always looking at something in the far distance that only she can see. Sir Henry found her unnerving; I rather like her.
She knows more about the Burry family than anyone I have yet encountered. They lived in the tiny village of Firley, where Constance’s father was the blacksmith, with the help of his four sons. Constance’s mother had died when her only daughter was still an infant. Mrs. Mortimer thinks Constance’s spinster aunt must have moved in to help raise Constance and her four older brothers.
I asked her how Constance could have become a hell-hound. She said, “That’s an interesting question, Dr. Doyle. The most logical answer is that Sir Hugo was a demoniac—he certainly gave every evidence of being either possessed or insane—and he infected her, but it’s also possible that someone in Constance’s family was a demoniac—her mother, for instance, who died young—and she was infected that way. Or it’s possible that Constance wasn’t the hell-hound at all.”
“You think Sir Hugo was the hell-hound?”
“Stories metamorphose,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “A dead hell-hound and a dead girl become a dead hell-hound and a dead baronet. Perhaps it seemed more plausible than that Constance could have actually killed a hell-hound before it finished dismembering her.”
“Is that likely?”
“No more or less likely than Constance Burry being a hell-hound. It is an incredible story, and frankly I would not believe it at all except for the curious location of Constance Burry’s grave.”
“Where is Constance buried?” I said.
“You’ve probably stepped on her” was the disconcerting reply. “She’s buried in the mouth of Sir Hugo’s goyal, which James tells me Mr. Stapleton took you to see.”
“So where is Sir Hugo buried?”
“With all due pomp and circumstance in St. Michael of the Rock with the rest of the Baskervilles. There was no mark of the Devil on him.”
“Therefore not a demoniac.”
“Not according to the story,” said Mrs. Mortimer.
For all her eccentricity—and indeed, she is well matched to Dr. Mortimer, for neither of them will ever mind, or possibly even notice, if the other isn’t paying attention—Mrs. Mortimer proved a good hostess. Sir Henry managed to steer the conversation toward coursing, and she became quite animated, as any true courseman does, in talking about courses she’d followed and horses and hounds, and from hounds to the Baskerville fetch and the supernatural in general. “The moor is full of ghosts,” she said. “Especially around Grimpen Mire.”
“Grimpen Mire?” echoed Sir Henry.
“The Great Grimpen Mire,” said Dr. Mortimer. “You should get Stapleton to show it to you. I doubt anyone knows it better, even men who have lived here their entire lives.”
“That’s because they have more sense than to go ne
ar it,” said Mrs. Mortimer. “Stapleton says he actually goes in it after his butterflies and whatnot.”
“Stapleton is very intrepid,” said Dr. Mortimer, perhaps a shade wistfully.
“Stapleton is reckless,” said Mrs. Mortimer. I got the impression that she does not care for Mr. Stapleton.
Of Mr. Frankland, I find that I hardly know what to say, except that if he had any enmity toward Sir Charles, he would have sued him, and I suspect he understands the entail better than Sir Henry does. Even though I think him ruthless enough for anything, I do not believe he is our man.
I may, of course, be utterly wrong.
Sir Henry spends much of his time in the study, trapped with Sir Charles’s man of business, Arthur Holland. I spend my days walking, learning the grim and austere countryside.
Until I have something further to report, I remain,
Most obediently yours,
J. H. Doyle
* * *
From Dr. J. H. Doyle to Mr. Crow
Baskerville Hall, October 13th
My dear Crow,
I did not expect to have more to report quite so soon, but a couple of very peculiar incidents have occurred in the past two days.
First was my second encounter with Mr. Stapleton. I was out walking, Sir Henry being once again immured with Mr. Holland, when I heard someone calling my name, and turned to find Mr. Stapleton, complete with butterfly net and tin specimen box, bounding toward me.
“Good morning, Dr. Doyle!” he cried upon reaching me, not in the slightest out of breath. “I see you are out taking in the beauties of the moor.”
He was not, as far as I could tell, being at all sarcastic.
“Good morning, Mr. Stapleton,” I said. “It is a happy chance that I should meet you, for Dr. Mortimer said that I should ask you to show me the Grimpen Mire.”
“Of course!” said Stapleton enthusiastically. “It is a most remarkable part of the moor. It looks as innocent as a dove,” and he gestured with his free hand out over a great low-lying plain to our north, “but it is perilously easy to put a foot wrong, and even that small a mistake can kill you. In dry seasons it is merely dangerous to cross, but after the autumn rains, it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive.”
The Angel of the Crows Page 31