“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.”
“And the dog?”
“What of the dog?”
It was now Holmes’ turn for impatience. “When was he seen, Gould? Only with the carriage, or has he also appeared by himself?”
Baring-Gould slapped down the pen, sending out a gout of ink that obliterated half the countryside between Bovey Tracey and Doddiscombesleigh. “It is so irritating,” he declared querulously. “One has the impression that a hundred people have seen both hound and coach, but all I can lay hands on is rumour. This is precisely why I need you, Holmes. I cannot go up and find the truth for myself. I know for certain that the couple who saw the coach in August specifically mentioned seeing the dog; does it matter if the hound was at times alone or invariably with the coach?”
“I do not know what matters until I have more data,” Holmes retorted. “What certainly matters is ensuring that what information is available be both accurate and complete.”
“Well, I simply do not know.”
Holmes pulled out his handkerchief and began dabbing at the map in disapproval.
“Then we shall have to enquire,” he said heavily. “And the farmer and his son who found Gorton’s body? Their house is here?”
“Slightly below that.” Baring-Gould’s finger touched briefly on a spot half an inch south of the X where Gorton had lain, and then suddenly he seemed to tense, and draw in a sharp breath. I looked quickly at his face, but what I had taken for a jolt of revelation was obviously something much more immediate and physical. The man was in pain.
Holmes’ hand shot out, but stopped as Baring-Gould straightened his back slowly and shook his head briefly in self-disgust. He removed himself from the worktable and hobbled on his sticks over to an ancient armchair in front of the fire, lowering himself into it. He sat very still for a long moment, let out a pent-up breath, and went on. His voice was slightly constricted, but otherwise he showed no sign that anything untoward had taken place.
“The August sighting, as I said, was by a courting couple. The girl, when I had them brought here a week after, was still quite incoherent with terror, although I had the distinct impression that she might have been somewhat more sensible had her beau not been present. Still, she was rather stupid, and surprisingly high-strung, considering the peasant stock she comes from. The man was stolid and unimaginative, which makes me rather more willing to credit his story.”
“That story being?”
“They were seated on a stone wall that night (lying in the lee of the wall, more likely) when they heard a faint noise approaching, a rush and a jangle and a muffled beat of running hoofs. They peered over the wall in time to see it pass by: a faintly glowing carriage pulled by one or two horses invisible but for the gleam of moonlight off their harness trimmings, with a woman clearly visible inside. They heard the crack of a whip, and as the carriage was passing another dark shape appeared behind it. The shape turned and looked straight at them, and it whined. They were both clear that they had heard the whine. At that point in her story the girl broke down into hysterics, because when the beast turned to look at them, they could clearly see that it was possessed of a single eye, large and glowing, in the centre of its head. The driver of the carriage whistled, and the hound—or whatever it was—loped off, leaving the two lovers to collect what wits they might have, and their clothing, and race for the girl’s cottage as if, as the saying goes, all the hounds of hell were after them.”
Baring-Gould allowed his eyes to close, and his mouth opened slightly. He was exhausted by his lengthy narrative, but Holmes continued to pore over the map, and I felt sure that if his old friend would benefit by a doctor’s attention, Holmes would summon one. Not knowing quite what was called for, I thought I ought at least to comment on what the old man had so laboriously given us.
“I thought the hound was supposed to be leading the carriage, not following,” I said weakly.
Holmes replied, “I don’t think the displacement of the animal would negate the experience in the minds of the couple, Russell.”
I was surprised to see a tiny smile twitch at the corner of Baring-Gould’s ancient blue lips, and then astonished when they opened and the old man began to sing, in a baritone that quavered a bit but was true enough, to give forth a tune that was simple, yet eerie.
“My Lady hath a sable coach, with horses two and four,
My Lady hath a black blood-hound, that runneth on before.
My Lady’s coach hath nodding plumes, the coachman hath no head,
My Lady is an ashen white, as one who is long dead.”
He sat with his head resting on the back of the chair, a reminiscent smile softening his face. “My old nurse Mary Bicknell used to sing that song to me when I was small.”
Personally, I thought that a woman who would sing something like that to a young child ought to be barred from her post, but I did not voice the idea. Baring-Gould, however, either read my thoughts or had a mind that ran in the same direction, because he opened one eye, looked straight at me, and said, “She did hasten to reassure me that Lady Howard was only on the road after midnight.”
“Which ensured that you would not venture out of your window at night,” I commented. He closed his eyes again, looking ever so faintly amused.
“Come, Russell,” said Holmes. “We will see you this evening, Gould.” His only answer was one aged forefinger, tipped up from the arm of the chair in farewell.
It was still miserably wet outside, looking as if it intended to rain steadily for days, but I was not surprised when Holmes suggested that we go out.
“I neglected to bring monsoon gear with me, Holmes.”
“I’m sure the good Mrs Elliott could supply an adequate garment,” he said. “Any house overseen by Gould is bound to have enough raiment for a small army.”
So it proved, although one might have wished for modern gum boots rather than the stiff gaiters made of oiled leather, grey with hastily scrubbed-off mildew. In fact, everything smelt as musty as a cavern. Still, aside from one or two places, the rain sheeted off us as we set off across the drive past the round fountain, which in daylight I could see featured the bronze figure of a goose-herd. I paused to look back at the house, this combination of white and grey stone, leaded windows, and slate, a family home both idiosyncratic and comfortable. My eye was caught by the stone carvings over the porch, with an indistinguishable coat of arms and the date 1620.
“Part of the house is original, anyway,” I noted.
Holmes followed my gaze. “Original, yes, but not to Lew Trenchard. I believe the porch came from a family holding in Staverton, although that particular stone was once a sundial in Pridhamsleigh. Various other pieces came from Orchard, a house approximately five miles to the north of here.”
I laughed. “Baring-Gould’s Elizabethan house, composed of old pieces patched together, like the new ceiling upstairs.”
“The upstairs actually is old,” Holmes said, “though Gould brought it here from a building in Exeter. It’s the downstairs that’s new.”
“Well, have you looked closely at the carving over the fireplace in the hall? It’s quite nice, but the fox appears to be making for a pinery. The pineapple wasn’t even introduced until the reign of Charles II, and wasn’t cultivated until the early eighteenth century. I looked
it up in his Britannica,” I added.
“True, although I believe the stone fireplace itself is considerably earlier than the carving surrounding it.”
I gave up.
We set off through a low, weedy rose garden and by a gate into the long meadow stretching out towards the small river that had so plagued me the night before. The grass was ankle-deep and sodden, and we kept a close eye on our feet, lest we meet the sign of a cow’s passing.
“Where did you go on the moor?” I asked after a bit. “Not to where Lady Howard’s coach was seen?”
“Actually, it was more or less the same area, although with a different goal. I was looking at the artillery ranges.”
I allowed quite a number of steps to pass before I finally asked, “Are you going to tell me why you were looking at the artillery ranges?”
“Are you interested?”
“As I told you last night, I am here, Holmes,” I said heavily. “I have not yet packed my bags and sloped off to Oxford.”
“I suppose that answers my question.”
“It damn well ought to.”
“Mycroft.”
He spoke the name as if that, too, were answer enough, and to some extent, it was. Mycroft Holmes (who was, I still had to remind myself, my brother-in-law) had been the instigator of many of Holmes’ more, shall we say, official investigations. Mycroft worked for a governmental agency that it amused him to call the accounting office, although the accounts tallied (and occasionally settled) often had very little connexion with pounds, shillings, and pence.
“The army this time?”
“A weapon they’re testing. They wish to keep it secret and are not having much success.”
I stopped. “Oh God. Doesn’t the world have enough weapons? Have they learnt nothing from four years of war, millions dead, and whole countries brought to the edge of destruction?”
“They have learnt that the next war will be won by technology.”
“The next war.” The idea was physically revolting.
“There will be one, Russell. There always is.”
“I will not participate in an army spy-search. I absolutely refuse. I’d rather talk to drunken farmhands about spectral coaches.”
“It is peripheral, Russell,” he said soothingly. “I made the mistake of letting Mycroft know where I was going, and he asked me to do this while I was here. We are in Devon because of Gould’s case, and any work for Mycroft is strictly secondary. Although I don’t believe we need stoop to interviewing rural inebriates, particularly those who have had three weeks to build up a story.”
I wrenched my boots up from the muddy pasture and started walking again. We were mounting a rise, approaching a raw patch of ground with a few small trees trying weakly for a foothold. It seemed to be a wide oval depression in the earth, but that impression did not prepare me for what in a moment lay at our feet. I was so startled I took a step back from it.
It was a pit, an enormous water-filled crater with nearly vertical sides gouged straight into the green pasture barely a stone’s throw from Baring-Gould’s front door. A gush of water shot out from the bank on the far side and plummeted down into the lake, looking more like a furious storm drain than a debouching stream. A ramshackle boathouse, incongruously resembling a Swiss chalet, clung to the bank across from the waterfall.
“What on earth—?”
“Astonishing, isn’t it?” Holmes was staring morosely at the water that lay a good forty feet below us. It was impossible to tell how deep the water was beneath that leaden surface, but it had a definite feeling of profundity. “Gould’s father had the brilliant idea of establishing a quarry here, as a source of income. You see the two ramps cut to haul it out? Nearly overgrown now. When Gould took over in the 1880s he diverted a stream to fill it. He claims it is pleasantly cool on a hot day, to paddle about in a boat.”
I looked at the gaping maw of the almost subterranean lake with distaste. “It’s monstrous. What could his father have been thinking of? Do you suppose Baring-Gould allowed his children down there?”
“Oh, indeed,” he said with a smile of what appeared to be reminiscence on his face. “They were a rowdy lot, encouraged by their father. Even the girls. One of them nearly drowned during a race of leaky hipbaths—Mary, I think it was.”
I could well believe that the sinister little lake might hold any number of drowned bodies. “By the looks of the place, she was lucky not to have been swallowed up by one of Jules Verne’s lurking sea monsters. May we go?”
We circled the foreboding pit cautiously and found on the other side a small house and a drive and eventually a road. I recognised the sheltered wall where Holmes had sat with his violin the night before, and we walked past it, past the churchyard, through the village and the wet, autumnal woods of Lew Trenchard, and out into the surrounding countryside, not saying much, but working ourselves back into the rhythms of easy intimacy. My feet grew numb but my chest expanded, drawing in the rich air as my eyes rejoiced in the lush green landscape.
We stopped to take lunch at a small public house, where they gave us a rich leek soup and a thick wedge of game pie washed down with a lively dark beer. Rather to my surprise, Holmes asked after my academic work in Oxford. I told him what I had been doing, and over his postprandial pipe he in turn brought me up to date on the progress of our previous case, the legal proceedings against the man whose arrest we had been instrumental in achieving the month before.
Nothing earth-shaking, but when we resumed our rain gear, we had resumed our sense of partnership as well.
Greatly content, we turned back to Lew Trenchard. The rain had let up slightly and the heavy clouds had lifted, so that when we came to the top of a small rise Holmes stopped and pointed out across the stone wall that bordered the road, over the small fields with their half-bare hedgerows, past a scattering of snug farmhouses with gently smoking chimneys, and beyond to where the ground rose, and rose.
From here it looked like a huge wall, placed there to keep the gentle Devonshire countryside at bay. Green slopes around the base gave way to extrusions of dark rock, and the ridge, perhaps four miles away, seemed to tower over our heads.
“Dartmoor,” said Holmes unnecessarily.
“Good Lord,” I said. “How high is it?”
“Perhaps twelve hundred feet or so higher than we are here. It appears more, does it not?”
“It looks like a fortress.”
“Over the centuries, it has effectively served as one. It has certainly kept the casual visitor away.”
“I can believe that,” I said emphatically. The moor loomed up, cold and fierce and daunting and uncomfortable, a geographical personality that seemed very aware of us, yet at the same time scornful of our timidity and weakness. In the distance, one of the hills dimly visible through the clouds was crowned with a shape that seemed too regular to be natural. It looked proud and tiny and out of place, as if trying to convince itself that the hill it rode on could not shrug it off if it wished.
“What is that building?” I asked Holmes.
He followed my gaze. “Brentor Church. Dedicated in the fourteenth century, to Saint Michael, I believe.”
I smiled; of course it would be a church, and could only be to St Michael, the choice of missionaries the world around seeking to quell the local spirits by planting a mission on the site of the native holy places and giving it over to St Michael and all his Angels. Somehow, the valiant little outthrust of a building did not appear convinced of the conquest.
I looked back at the rising moor, and decided that I could not blame the Brentor Church; I myself did not relish the idea of breaching those walls and walking out onto the flat expanse of the moorland within, no more than I would have relished a swim in the quarry lake next to Lew House—and for similar reasons.
I became aware of Holmes, studying my face. I shot him a brief smile and pulled my coat more closely together over my chest. “It looks cold,” I said, but he was not fooled.
“
It is a place that encourages fanciful thoughts,” he said indulgently. However, I noticed that even he cast a quick glance at the presence on the horizon before we resumed our path to Lew House.
We arrived back in time for afternoon tea, which we took by ourselves, as Baring-Gould was resting. It was a superb reward for our day’s wet outing, and I gathered that Mrs Elliott had taken advantage of the Harpers’ presence to create a true Devonshire tea, the piece de resistance of which was a plate piled high with hot, crumbly scones to rival Mrs Hudson’s, a large bowl of thick, yellow clotted cream, and a second bowl containing deep red strawberry jam. When we had finished, I hunted the cook down in her kitchen, where she stood watching while two elderly, time-worn moor dwellers methodically made their way through the plates of food before them, and I thanked her. She simply nodded, but she did so with a faint pinkness around her neck.
At dinner, Baring-Gould did appear, and afterwards regaled us with stories and songs of this, his native land. We went to bed early and slept well, and the next morning we set off for the moor.
4
The interior consists of rolling upland. It has been likened
to a sea after a storm suddenly arrested and turned to
stone; but a still better resemblance, if not so romantic, is
that of a dust-sheet thrown over the dining room chairs.
—A BOOK OF DARTMOOR
A BRIEF HOUR’S tramp through wet woods brought us to the village of Lydford, nestled along a river at the very edge of the moor’s rising slopes. There we succumbed to the temptations of the flesh and spent a glorious thirty minutes in front of an inn’s blazing fireplace, drinking coffee and steaming our boots. When we shouldered our packs and pushed our way back out into the inhospitable day, it was with the clear sensation of leaving all civilisation behind.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 92