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

  In the end, I stayed with my book, deciding that the pull of the telephone was only the urge to be doing something (anything!) and meekly removed myself upstairs at an appropriate hour.

  By one o’clock in the morning, I had given up the attempt to read and sat watching my thoughts chase one another around by the low flicker of the fire. By two I had ceased feeding the coals and climbed under the bedclothes, but I did not even attempt to douse the light. I knew that the pathetic back of the dead man’s head would be waiting for me in the dark, so I let my mind poke and prod at the restrictions that ignorance had laid, trying with a complete lack of success to put together a puzzle missing half its pieces.

  At three o’clock a stealthy sound from downstairs jerked me up into instant alarm: heart pounding, mouth open, I strained for a repetition. It came, and I instantly swung my feet off the bed and was reaching for a heavy object when my brain succeeded in asserting itself against the adrenaline. It was unlikely that a burglar or would-be murderer would have a key to the front door.

  Sure enough, in less than two minutes my bedroom door opened quietly but surely, and Holmes came in, wearing the dark suit of London with an inexplicable quantity of mud and grass clinging to the ankles. He closed the door, turned, and stopped dead.

  “Good Lord, Russell, what have you been up to?”

  I had almost forgotten the state of my face, but whatever he saw behind the bruises and contusions had him by my side in a few rapid steps.

  “What?” he demanded. “What is it?”

  I did not give him his answer until some time later, but then, I did not need to. Holmes was always very satisfactory at determining, with a minimum of clues, what in a given situation was the required course of action.

  THERE ARE TIMES when verbal communication, vital as it may be in a partnership, is insufficient; this was one of those times. I clung to him, and even slept for a while towards morning before finally, reluctantly, stirring.

  “Pethering is dead,” I told him. He jerked and I felt him looking at my forehead. “No, there is no relationship to my injuries—I got those in a fall up on the moor.” I gave him a brief sketch of my trip across Dartmoor and a slightly more detailed description of my impromptu visit to Baskerville Hall, then went on to the previous day’s sequence of events, starting with theology at dawn and ending with meaningless words on a page at midnight. Once, I might have been too ashamed to tell him about my exaggerated response to the death of a scarcely known nuisance, but we had been through too much together for my overreaction to cause more than a pang of embarrassment in the telling. Or perhaps I was just too tired to care.

  “They will do an autopsy?” he asked.

  “Fyfe said they would do.”

  “And he’s preserved the marks on the ramp?”

  “They had a tarpaulin over it.”

  “Better than nothing at all, I suppose. Plaster casts of the heel marks?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “I shall have to insist.”

  I laughed shortly. “I don’t know how much influence you’ll have down here. Certainly the name of Sherlock Holmes’ wife is nothing to conjure with.”

  “Ah, poor Russell, forced to ride along in her husband’s turn-ups. It is a backward area, with no respect for women’s brains. Never mind; we’ll both have to resort to Gould’s influence before we’re through.”

  “It is very impressive, that influence. He had a law-abiding dairyman assaulting a police constable, just for the asking.”

  “I told you it was a backwoods. They probably still practice corn sacrifice. Tell me about Ketteridge.”

  I told him everything I could remember about my hours in Baskerville Hall. He listened intently, asking no questions, and when I had finished he rose and, wrapping his dressing-gown around him, went to stir the fire into life. Having done so, he took up his pipe and lit it, puffing thoughtfully down at the newly crackling flames.

  “You handled it well,” he said unexpectedly.

  “At least I didn’t fall apart until I was alone.”

  “That is all one may ask of oneself.”

  “I suppose. I feel stupid.”

  “Human,” he corrected me.

  “God, who would be a human being?” I said, although I was beginning to feel somewhat better about the episode and its effect on me.

  “I’ve often thought the same,” he commented drily, and then returned to business. “You have no idea who Ketteridge might have been escorting so anxiously off the premises?”

  “None.”

  “No smell of perfume, for example, or of cigarettes? The night he was here, Ketteridge mentioned that he smokes only cigars, and his fingers did not give lie to it.”

  “No perfume. Cigarettes, yes, but I think Scheiman smokes them.”

  “I believe you are right. Do you know, that entire ménage interests me strangely. Tell me: When Ketteridge allowed you the brief tour of the banqueting hall, did you notice a portrait of a Cavalier in black velvet, lace collar, and a plumed hat?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “A variety of uniforms, one blue velvet jacket, and an assortment of wigs, but no Cavalier.”

  “As I thought, the portrait of old Sir Hugo Baskerville, the scoundrel whose sins led to the Baskerville curse in the first place, has been taken down from the gallery. I should be very interested to know when.”

  “And why?”

  “When might tell us why.” Having delivered his epigram, he tossed the barely drawing pipe onto the mantelpiece and began to pull clothing from drawers and wardrobe.

  “Holmes, tell me what you found in London.”

  “Breakfast first, Russell; the morning is half gone and I, for one, have not eaten since lunchtime yesterday.”

  I forbore to look pointedly at the first pale light at the window curtains, merely removed my recovering body from the bed and proceeded to clothe it. Holmes was not the only one who could follow nonverbal commands.

  Before we left the bedroom, however, there was something I had to know. “Holmes, why did you tell me you’d met Baring-Gould during the Baskerville case?”

  “I did not. I merely said that I had used him during the case.”

  “You deliberately misled me. Why didn’t you want me to know he was your godfather?”

  He paused in the act of brushing his hair and looked over at me, startled. “Good heavens, he is, isn’t he? I had completely forgotten.” He turned back to the mirror slowly. “Extraordinary thought, is it not?”

  With that, I had to agree.

  MRS ELLIOTT WAS up and ready for us, although Baring-Gould was not. I had not expected he would be, after the rigours of the day before; I could only hope he had not suffered from the unwonted expenditure of his limited energies.

  The chimney in the dining room was still not functioning satisfactorily, so we had been served in the drawing room with the painted Virtues looking down at us, and there we remained for our council. I had to wait until Holmes had tamped and lit and puffed at his pipe, a delaying nuisance that had not grown any easier to bear over the years. I swear he did it deliberately to irritate me.

  “Holmes,” I growled after several long minutes, “I am going to take up knitting, and make you sit and wait while I count the row of stitches.”

  “Nonsense,” he said with a final dig and puff. “You are quite capable of talking and counting at the same time. Am I to understand that you wish to hear the results of my sojourn?”

  “Holmes, when I left you on Monday, you were going to northern Dartmoor and returning here two days later. It is now Saturday, and the only word I have had were secondhand rumours of a hasty trip to London. I’ve told you about Pethering’s death and my visit to Baskerville Hall; I see no reason to go into my trip over the moor and my conversation about hedgehogs with the witch of Mary Tavy parish until you’ve given me something in return.”

  “Ah, I see you’ve met Elizabeth Chase.”

  Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a h
usband whom I might astonish.

  “Holmes,” I said sternly.

  “Oh very well. Yes, I went onto the moor, and no, I was not blown to bits; I was not even lightly shelled. I even missed the worst of the storm on the Tuesday. I asked farmwifes, shepherds, three stonemasons, two thatchers, a goose girl, and the village idiot whether or not they had seen a ghostly carriage or a black dog, had heard anything peculiar, noticed anything out of the ordinary. All but the village idiot gave me nothing but nonsense, and he gave me nothing but a smile.

  “The testing ground for Mycroft’s secret weapon (which, by the way, is a sort of amphibious tank) is to the east of Yes Tor, down to Blacka-ven Brook. It’s a pocket of ground difficult to overlook except from the army’s own observation huts, but I did find a patch of hillside outside the artillery range with an adit showing signs of recent use.”

  “An adit being a horizontal mine shaft,” I said tentatively, dredging up the word from somewhere in my recent reading. Holmes nodded. “Not an active mine, I take it?”

  “By no means. Its entrance was heavily overgrown and nearly obscured by a rockfall.”

  “How did you find it?”

  “I smelt it.”

  “You smelt … ?”

  “Coffee. Whoever spent time in there brewed coffee, and threw the grounds at the roots of the whortleberry bushes growing near the entrance.”

  “Good heavens.”

  “Extraordinary oversight, I agree,” he said, which was not quite what I was exclaiming about, but I let it pass. “The rest of his débris he simply threw back into the shaft—eggshells, greasy paper, tins, apple cores—but the coffee dregs went out in front. Presumably he was in the habit of drinking it at his front door, as it were, and dashing out the thick remnants in the bottom of his cup where he stood. As you are aware, Russell, habit is the snare by which many a criminal is caught.”

  “How recently was he there?”

  “Two or three weeks, I should say. Not more. And to anticipate your question, the new tank was last tested seventeen days ago.”

  “Suggestive,” I agreed. “But that does not explain five days and a trip to London.”

  “Patience,” counselled my husband, one of the least patient individuals I have ever met. “I returned here late on Tuesday, spent a pleasant evening with Gould, and on Wednesday a lad arrived with the name of the people we were looking for.”

  “The London hikers?”

  “Not quite, although he had found the farmhouse where they stayed. Unfortunately, being an informal hostelry, they do not keep records of their guests, and as the two Londoners had not made advance arrangements, there was little evidence as to whence they came. However, they were a memorable pair, even without the tale of the ghostly carriage they brought with them down the hill: young, the man perhaps twenty-eight, the woman a year or two younger, who impressed the farmwife as being a ‘proper lady,’ or in other words, wealthy. The man, on the other hand, had a heavier accent, and seemed much more shaken by the idea of seeing a ghostly carriage on the moor than his wife was. He also had a bad limp and one ‘special shoe,’ and at some point during the stay told the farmer that he was studying to become a doctor.”

  The limp, the nerves, and the student’s advanced age gave him away as a wounded soldier. I asked drily, “You mean to say you didn’t get his regiment?”

  “But of course. Not from the farmer, although he did give me the name of the village where the future doctor was injured during Second Ypres, and the War Office could have told me his regiment and thence his identity. However, I thought it simpler to phone around the teaching hospitals and enquire after a young man missing part of his foot. I found him straight off, at Bart’s.”

  “So simple,” I murmured.

  “Regrettably so. Do you have the maps?”

  “Upstairs. What is left of them.” I trotted up and retrieved the pile, some of them pristine, hardly unfolded. Those for the north quarter had seen hard use, and I pulled open the still-damp sheets with care and laid them across the padded bench that sat in front of the fire. There happened to be an elderly cat upon it, but the animal did not seem to mind being covered up. No doubt, living in the Baring-Gould household, it had seen stranger usage.

  He pored over the maps for a long time, then said, “Do we have the one-inch-to-the-mile here?”

  I dug through and found it. He laid it out, found Mary Tavy and the nearby Gibbet Hill, and then took out a pencil. Using the side of a folded map as a straight edge and pulling the map to one side to find a flat place, he began to draw a series of short lines, fanning out from Gibbet Hill and touching the tops of half a dozen peaks and tors to the northeast of the hill. These were, I understood, the tors and hilltops visible from the peak.

  “It was dark, and their sense of direction was sadly wanting, but they were quite definite that whatever they saw was to the northeast, that it wrapped around a hill, going from right to left, and after a minute or two disappeared behind a tor—probably, they thought, Great Links or Dunna Goat.”

  “And what exactly was it they saw?”

  “A pair of lights, old-style lanterns rather than the new automobile headlamps, mounted on the upper front corners of a light-coloured square frame. They had with them a strong pair of field glasses.”

  “As if two lanterns on a coach built of bones.”

  “As you say.”

  “How would you judge them as witnesses?”

  He shrugged. “Ramblers,” he said dismissively. “The sort of young people who would read up on the more arcane myths and legends of an area and spend a week traipsing about, raising blisters and searching for Local Romance.”

  “Holmes, that sounds perilously close to what I have been doing this last week.”

  He looked startled. “My dear Russell, I was certainly not drawing a comparison between your search for information and the selfindulgent—”

  “Of course not, Holmes. Did they see a dog, or any person either inside or driving?”

  “Not to be certain, no, although they had convinced themselves that they saw a large black shadow moving with the horse.”

  “Of course they did. Was there anything else to be had in London?”

  “There was, but I should like to delay until you’ve read something. Just remain there,” he said, getting to his feet. “I won’t be a moment.”

  He went out and, judging by the sounds of another door opening almost immediately he left the drawing room, I knew he was in Baring-Gould’s study. A certain amount of time passed, and several muffled thuds, before he returned with a slim book in his hand. He tossed it in my lap and picked up his pipe from the ashtray on the table.

  “How long is it since you’ve read that?” he asked.

  “That,” to my amazement, was Conan Doyle’s account of The Hound of the Baskervilles, looking heavily read. “At least three years. I’m not certain,” I replied.

  “More than that, perhaps. I should like to consult with Gould for an hour or two; you have a look at that and see if anything within Baskerville Hall strikes you as it did me.”

  “But Holmes—”

  “When I return, Russell. It won’t take you long, and you might even find it amusing. Though perhaps,” he added as he was going out the door, “not for the reasons Conan Doyle intended.”

  18

  Take my advice. Henceforth possess your mind

  with an idea, when about to preach. Drive it home. Do not

  hammer it till you have struck off the head. A final

  tap and that will suffice.

  —FURTHER REMINISCENCES

  ACTUALLY, ALTHOUGH I would have hesitated to admit it in Holmes’ hearing, I enjoyed Conan Doyle’s stories. They were not the cold, factual depictions of a case that Holmes preferred (indeed, when some years later he found that Conan Doyle had set a pair of stories in the first person, as if Holmes himself were describing the action, Holmes threatened the man with everything from physical violence to lawsuits if he dared
attempt it again), but taken as Romance, they were entertaining, and I have nothing against the occasional dose of simple entertainment.

  In any event, it was no great hardship to settle into my chair with the book and renew my acquaintance with Dr Mortimer, the antiquarian enthusiast who brings Holmes the curse of the Baskervilles, and with the young Canadian Sir Henry Baskerville, come to the moor to claim his title and his heritage. I met again the ex-headmaster Stapleton and the woman introduced as his sister, and the mysterious Barrymores, servants to old Sir Charles. The moor across which I had so recently wandered came alive in all its dour magnificence, and I was very glad this book had not been among my reading the previous weekend, leaving me to ride out on the moor with the image of the hound freshly imprinted on my mind. I could well imagine the terror raised by hearing the rhythm of four huge running paws (or the “thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank” of fog that Dr Watson described), the hoarse panting from between those massive jaws even without the eerie glow of phosphorus on its coat to render it otherworldly:

  A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.

  So engrossed was I that I completely missed the reference Holmes had wanted me to see. Only when the Hound was dead did I recall the point of the exercise, and thumbed back to the previous chapter that described the evening when Holmes first saw the interior of Baskerville Hall. The reference startled me, and I sat deep in thought for twenty minutes or so, contemplating the “straight severe face” which was “prim, hard, and stern, with a firm-set, thin-lipped mouth, and a coldly intolerant eye” until I heard the door behind me open.