The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor

by Laurie R. King

  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’LOCK 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.”

  “I have finished it, in fact. The first draft, that is—I sent it to the publisher just before I came down here. There will be a fair amount of work before it’s actually ready to publish, of course, but it is very nice to make it to the end of the first time through.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “I never was much of one for second drafts. It always seemed to me that if my publisher did not like it to begin with, no amount of tinkering would set it right. Best to start on something new.”

  “So you would just scrap it?” I asked, astonished.

  “Not invariably, but generally, yes. Who is your publisher?”

  I told him, and he asked about the editor, and we talked about the mechanics of publishing for a few minutes. Then he asked, “And the subject? You never did answer me.”

  “Sophia,” I said. “Wisdom.”

  “Hochmah,” he said in rejoinder. “You are Jewish, I think?”

  “I am. My father was a member of the Anglican Communion but my mother was Jewish, which under rabbinic law makes me Jewish as well.”

  “Have you seen our church here in Lew?”

  “On Sunday. It’s very lovely.”

  “Paravi lucenum Christo meo,” he said. I have prepared a lamp for my Christ.

  I ventured a tiny joke from the same Psalm: “‘For the Lord has chosen Lew Down, he has desired it for his dwelling place.’”

  He smiled. “‘This is my resting place forever, here I will dwell for I have desired it.’ Truly,” he mused, “I have both desired and chosen. I had thought to have my daughter Margaret paint a picture in the church of the mother of God as Sophia, but we haven’t got to it yet. It was my mother’s name, Sophia.”

  “That is a portrait of you with her upstairs, isn’t it? She was very pretty.”

  “Do you think so? Prettier than her anaemic-looking son, at any rate. The painter took against me, didn’t like my asking so many questions about mixing paint and the techniques of perspective, so he made me look even more priggish than I think I actually did.”

  “It’s a sweet picture,” I protested.

  He snorted. “You ought to see the thing I just sat for. Makes me look like an old boat.”

  “Is it here?”

  “Oh no, hanging in London. What do you have to say about Sophia, then, Mary?”

  So, at five in the morning in the echoing old house, we talked about theology. He was an interesting partner in conversation—as inquisitive as a child, but intractable and opinionated on the things he considered he knew; impatient with extraneous detail but insistent about the detail he thought important; utterly imperious yet innately gracious at the same time.

  Curiously like another enthusiastic amateur I knew, in fact; two members of a dying breed.

  When we had finished with that topic to his satisfaction, he turned to another. “Tell me what you make of Dartmoor, Mary.”

  To help myself think of an answer, I dribbled the last of the tea into my cup, milked it and sipped it and nearly choked on it—I had not noticed that we had been there long enough for the pot to stew cold and bitter. I hastily put down the cup.

  “I don’t know where to start. I did not care much for it at first.”

  “You hated it.”

  “I hated it, yes. You must admit, it’s one of the least hospitable places in the country.”

  “A good place to be alone with one’s thoughts,” he said.

  Perhaps with fourteen children in the house, I reflected, solitude in any form was beyond the price of rubies. “After a couple of days up there, though, it came to me that the moor is in many ways like the desert. Did your travels ever take you to Palestine?”

/>   “Alas, no. I should have liked to visit the Holy Land.”

  “Yes, it is a powerful experience. And I think you would have felt at home there. The harshness of the desert shapes the people and keeps them materially poor, but it also gives an immensely strong sense of identity and belonging.”

  The old man was smiling into the fire and nodding gently. I went on.

  “In truth, I found the sense of community here … daunting.” I told him how, beginning with the girl near Postbridge pointing me towards Elizabeth Chase, everyone I met knew an irritating amount about me and my business. “Except for the villagers. They didn’t know me, and when the moor men were with the village dwellers, they seemed almost to treasure the secret of who I was.” I began to tell him about the night in the Mary Tavy inn.

  As I progressed, he grew more and more animated, sitting upright in his chair, then leaning forward that he might see my face more clearly. He made me describe the songs and the singers in detail, and hummed the tunes that I might confirm which ones the singers had used. His eyes positively sparkled when I told him about the authoritative claim the moor men laid on Lady Howard’s song. When he had milked every drop of information from me about the music (he even made me hum the tune I had played on the tin whistle) he sat back in his chair, tired but pleased.

  “‘Green Broom’ I collected from John Woodrich, in Thrushtleton,” he said, “and the tune your singers used for ‘Unquiet Grave’ was a melody I noted down for another song. Magnificent music, that. You like it?”

  “It’s very … human,” I said after a minute.

  “People now lack patience, have no taste for a song that is not finished in three minutes. Modern music puts me in mind of a man I knew in Cambridge who had a mechanism into which one could put musical notes. It would then combine them to render a so-called tune, although to my ear they more closely resembled random cacophonies. Whenever I have the misfortune to hear a modern piece of music, such as when my American daughter-in-law assaults the piano, I begin to suspect that his machine is being put to considerable use.”

  I laughed politely, and then returned to a previous thought which still occupied me greatly.

  “I thought it odd that although the moor dwellers seemed well acquainted with me and my mission, the villagers didn’t know me, not even in Postbridge, which is a tiny place. And I don’t believe anyone in Ketteridge’s establishment recognised what I was doing there, either.”

  “The moor men keep themselves to themselves, and Ketteridge employs foreigners.”

  “Foreigners?” I asked doubtfully. Other than Scheiman and the hidden chef, they all had sounded British.

  “French, American, Scots, and even Londoners, even a Welshman, but not from here.”

  “I see. How odd. That explains how, even though he lives on the edges of the moor, he’s apart from the moor life. Isolated from the Dartmoor … would it be too much of an exaggeration to call it an ‘organism’?” I asked. He did not answer, only smiled to himself, his eyes closed now. Very soon, he was asleep in his chair. I fed the fire to keep him warm, and crept stiffly upstairs to see if I could coax a hot bath from the pipes.

  BARING-GOULD WAS AWAKE again when I came down an hour later, drawn by the smells of yeast bread and coffee and much restored by the plentiful hot soak. Mrs Elliott swept in and out of the kitchen doors with hot plates and cups and dainties to tempt her old charge’s failing palate. One of these was a small crystal bowl of wortleberry jam, a relative of the bilberry, but from a far richer branch of the family. I exclaimed my praise, and Baring-Gould told me about “gatherin’ hurts” on the moor, an annual holiday spree akin to that of London’s East End inhabitants who spilled out from the city every year to pick hops in the clean sun of Kent. I did have a question whose urgency had been growing over the last two days, but I waited politely for him to finish before I asked it.

  “Do you know where Holmes is?”

  “He is in London, of course.”

  “Does that mean someone came up with the names of the two people who saw the coach from the top of Gibbet Hill?”

  “How stupid of me, I was forgetting that you weren’t here. Yes, Mrs Elliott’s nephew found the farmhouse they stayed in, although as there was no guest register the finding of them won’t be easy. Still, Holmes seemed to think he could do it,” he said complacently.

  “Did he say when he expected to be back?”

  “I thought to see him yesterday evening. I imagine he will be on today’s train.”

  “How long have you known Holmes?” I heard myself asking. I had not intended to ask it: If Holmes wanted me to know, he would tell me, and it was possibly impolitic to let Baring-Gould know how little Holmes had mentioned him.

  “Forever,” he said. “His forever, that is, not mine. I’m his godfather.”

  I was completely staggered by this calm statement. By this time, of course, I knew something about Holmes’ people (I was, after all, his wife) but somehow other than Mycroft they had never seemed very real or three-dimensional. It was like meeting Queen Victoria’s wet nurse. One knew she must have had one, but her existence seemed rather unlikely.

  “His godfather,” I repeated weakly.

  “I haven’t done a terribly good job of it, have I?” He seemed amused at his failure, not troubled. I could think of no suitable response, so I remained silent. “Still, he seems to have turned out all right. Been a good husband to you, has he?” If I’d had trouble before finding an answer, now my mouth was hanging open. “He loves you, of course; that helps. Foolishly, perhaps, but men love like that, in flames compared to the warm steady love of women. I hope—”

  I never found out what his hopes were, praise be to God. The ruckus outside must have been approaching for some time without us hearing—Baring-Gould because his hearing was so poor and me because of the astonishment pounding in my ears. The first intimation of a problem came with a huge crash in the kitchen and voices raised enough for even my host to stop what he was about to say and turn to the door.

  “I say, Mrs—” he started to call. With that the door burst open and what looked like half the population of Lew Down spilled into the room, all of them gabbling at once.

  Baring-Gould rose majestically to his feet and glared at them all. “Stop this at once,” he thundered. Instant silence resulted. “Thomas, what is the meaning of this?”

  The man automatically tugged off his cap, polite even in the extremity of his emotional upheaval. “A body, Rector,” the man stammered.

  “There’s a dead man in the lake.”

  16

  The care for the tenants, the obligation of setting an

  example of justice, integrity, kindliness, religious

  observance, has been bred in him, and enforced by parental

  warning through three centuries at the least, on his infant

  mind. What is born in the bone comes out in the flesh.

  —EARLY REMINISCENCES

  IT WAS FORTUNATE that I was already dressed and wearing my shoes, because a pair of bedroom slippers would surely have been torn to shreds, or left behind, long before I reached the quarry lake. I was out of my chair before Baring-Gould could articulate a response to the man’s statement, out of the front door without pausing to catch up a coat, across the drive, through the meadow, and on the edge of the watery chasm before anyone else had even emerged from the house on my trail.

  I was not, however, before any others at the lake. Gathering a great breath, I cupped my hands and shouted at the full strength of my lungs, “Stop where you are! Don’t touch him!”

  Even over the constant splash of the waterfall my unladylike bellow bounced off the stone walls with sufficient force to startle the would-be rescuers. One of them slipped and fell backwards from the rowboat into the lake, which distracted the others long enough for me to race around the lake’s rim and plunge down the closer of the one-time quarry’s two access ramps, now a steep hillside heavily overgrown with fern and bramble, and sli
ppery with fallen leaves. I caught my breath at the water’s edge and waited for the boat to reach the shore.

  Two other men had been picking their way around the precipitous south wall of the lake, and now stood eyeing me disapprovingly.

  “Please,” I called to them. “You must leave him there until the police have seen him. I know it doesn’t seem respectful of the dead. But it’s necessary, believe me. And try to walk back in the same place you went over.”

  I suppose that had it been summer, I might not have been so quick to think of the possibility of what the police blotters call foul play. On a long summer’s night I could well imagine the lure this cool, slightly ominous spot might be for a group of young men on their way home from the pub. But in October, and with the awareness of wrongdoing on the moor, it was the first thing that came to mind, and I did not want heavy boots destroying any evidence we might unearth.

  The five men gathered around me, one of them dripping wet, none of them showing much inclination to leave. I suggested mildly that the wet one might be better off dry, and thus rid myself of him and an escort, but the three remaining men, one of whom I had seen working around Lew House, planted themselves like trees and looked suspicious.

  “Do you know who it is?” I asked them. They did not, only that it was a man, and he was not from around here, both of which facts I had already determined by a brief glance from the quarry rim. (That, and the sure knowledge that it was not Holmes. Not that for a moment I actually thought it was: My mad dash from the house was set off by professional concerns, not wifely imaginings. Truly.) The trousers on those reassuringly short legs had never belonged to a Devonshire working man. “Has anyone gone for the police and a doctor?”

  “Don’t need doctor for that’n, missus.”

  “A doctor needs to declare him dead. It’s a legal requirement. Did you send for them?”

  “Mr Arundell went to fetch’n.” Baring-Gould’s curate lived in the house overlooking the lake.