The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  “Very occasionally, after a cold and strenuous day, I welcome a scone with Devonshire cream.”

  “Or two.”

  “Or two,” he agreed. “Are you satisfied to stop the night here? I could arrange for a motor to take us to Lew Trenchard, if you would prefer, as our set tasks on the moor are, for the moment, more or less complete. I ought to consult with Gould before we determine our next actions.” So saying, he stretched his legs out to the fire, rested his cup and saucer on the buttons of his waistcoat, and half closed his eyes. Somehow, he did not look overanxious to hurry off.

  “Is there any need to return tonight?”

  “None. And on the contrary,” he said, lowering his voice, “the public bar might make for an informative evening.”

  “Grilling the locals while they’re in their cups. Have you no shame?”

  The corner of his mouth twitched and he allowed his eyes to shut. I ate my scones and poured out the last of the tea, refused the offered refill of both solid and liquid, and sat staring contentedly into the fire. When my cup was empty, I sighed, and glanced over at the relaxed figure in the next chair.

  “Holmes, if that cup isn’t empty, you’re about to have an unfortunate stain.”

  It was not empty, but he drained it, replaced the cup on the tray, and we adjourned to the stronger refreshment and heartier companionship of the public bar.

  THE COMPANIONSHIP WE found went some distance beyond hearty, nearing raucous, and I slept late the following morning in the cloud-soft bed. I woke eventually, and lay staring through one eye at the teacup on the table beside the bed. I could smell the tea, could nearly taste the clean, acrid heat of it scouring the fur off my tongue, but I did not care much for the movement required in transporting cup to lips.

  “God,” I said, and then: “Do I remember dancing last night?”

  “Briefly,” said Holmes from somewhere across the room.

  “God,” I said again, and carefully pulled the bedclothes back up around my head.

  WE DID NOT make an early start that morning. I am not certain it was even still morning when we left the Saracen’s Head behind. I half wished I could leave my own head there, too. “But I only drank cider, Holmes,” I protested, when a mile of fresh air lay between us and the inn.

  “Powerful stuff, Devonshire zyder.” I had thought him untouched by our night of carousing with the natives, but on closer examination I decided that he, too, was moving with a degree more care and deliberation than was normal.

  “Did we extract any information from the local inhabitants, though?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Holmes.”

  “One of the lads told me an interesting tale about his wife’s granny, who was alone in her house one night when the rest of the family had not yet returned from a wedding in Lydford, who heard a dog scratching at the door. She is, the boy admitted, very deaf, but her own dog raised such a noise trying to get out of the door it attracted her attention.”

  “Now there’s a piece of hard evidence,” I said. Sarcasm is a ready companion to a sore head.

  “When did you learn to play the tin whistle?” Holmes asked innocently. “This is a talent you’ve kept well hidden from me.”

  “Oh Lord, I didn’t play the tin whistle, did I? Yes, I suppose I did. I was going to surprise you with it someday; I thought it might prove a useful skill the next time we found ourselves disguised as gipsies or something.”

  “You did surprise me, and it did come in useful.”

  “Did it? I’m glad. How?”

  “Do you recall the old smith-turned-motor-mechanic, Jacob Drew? With the full white beard and the red braces?”

  “Er, vaguely.” I remembered him not in the least, but I thought I would not admit it.

  “He took quite a fancy to you, and came over to tell me while I was trying to tune that wretched excuse for a fiddle that we were not like all the summer trippers, and proceeded to recount some of their madder antics. Such as the pair of Londoners who stopped the night atop Gibbet Hill back in July and came down swearing they’d seen Lady Howard’s coach of bones travelling across the moor.”

  “You don’t say. Well, having met Dartmoor in all its forms, I can well believe in Lady Howard’s coach, and in any number of black and ghostly huntsmen and their dogs as well. Where is the delightfully named Gibbet Hill?”

  “The other side of Mary Tavy from here. We have to go near it in any case; I thought we might take a look.”

  “Sounds a charming place. Are we required to pass the night on its summit?”

  “I think not.”

  “Good.”

  The rest of that trek across Dartmoor was uneventful, other than finding me wet, cold, hungry, and plagued with a headache. I also discovered what a kistvaen is by the simple process of falling into one (a burial hole ill-covered by a cracked and unbalanced slab of stone), and we met a herd of immensely shaggy, long-horned highland cattle, looking very much like prehistoric creatures recently risen from some weedgrown swamp. They did not much like the looks of us, either, and as a group took exception to our presence; fortunately, there was a wall nearby. Unfortunately, there was a small mire on the other side of the wall. When we came to Mary Tavy, it was with difficulty that we persuaded an innkeeper to allow us in, and then we were banished to the kitchen for our luncheon.

  By afternoon, the clouds were high enough that Holmes thought it worthwhile to look and see what the two mad Londoners might have witnessed, so we trudged up the slippery sides of Gibbet Hill. This was not, as I had both assumed and hoped, so named because of some fancied resemblance of a rock formation, but because there had been an actual gibbet on the top of this prominent hill, employed on highwaymen captured on the busy road below, their bodies left high as an admonishment to their colleagues. It was an appropriately cheerless sort of place, gouged about with the remains of mines around its base and topped now not by a gibbet, but by a water-filled quarry, green with scum.

  The view, however, was not without interest, and did indeed stretch for miles—or would have, given a clearer day. Holmes squatted down with the map, now in its final stages of returning to the state of pulp but still legible in the rectangles between the fold lines. He found a flat rock and aligned the map to the view in front of us, then began to tick off the landmarks: Brat, Doe, and Ger Tors, which I could see; Great Links and Fur Tors, which Holmes claimed he could see; all the sweep of the moor, emerging green and russet from the mist.

  Placing his two index fingers on the map, one at each sighting of the ghostly coach, he compared the map and the land in front of us, his head bobbing up and down, up and down, until I began to feel a return of my earlier queasiness and went off to contemplate the waterlogged quarry.

  I returned when I heard Holmes rising and trying to fold the map into a manageable size.

  “Anything?”

  “Not conclusive. We don’t even know which way the coach was going when they saw it. We must try to find those two.”

  “Two stray Londoners on holiday in the middle of summer?” I exclaimed. “How do you propose to do that?”

  “They may have spent one night shivering up here, but you can be certain they’d not repeat the experience. They will have made for the nearest kitchen and hot bath, and once there, they will have signed the guest register.”

  Holmes had a tremendous knack for sounding certain of himself, usually on the flimsiest of evidence. I took a deep breath and let it slowly out, and was just opening my mouth to agree to this scouring of all nearby inns, public houses, farmhouses, and cottages when Holmes interrupted me.

  “However, that is not for tonight, and probably not the most efficient use of resources to do it ourselves. Gould can muster a troop of Irregulars for us, men who know the ground.”

  Immensely relieved, I swung my heavy knapsack back onto my shoulders, tightened my slack bootlaces to protect my toes against the downhill journey, and lightheartedly followed my husband down from Gibbet Hi
ll.

  7

  Towards evening I was startled to see a most

  extraordinary object approach me—a man in a draggled,

  dingy, and disconsolate condition, hardly able to crawl along.

  —A BOOK OF DARTMOOR

  DARKNESS OVERTOOK US on the road back towards Lew Trenchard. As I stumbled in Holmes’ wake, barely conscious of the vegetation and the people and the rich odours of dung and grass and rotting leaves, I reflected that I had been wet, bedraggled, and exhausted before—generally in Holmes’ company—and after two years of marriage to the man I had come to accept this as a common state of affairs. I should have been somewhat happier about it if only he, too, might show the same results, but Holmes had always possessed the extraordinary ability to avoid grime. Given two puddles, identical on the surface, Holmes would invariably choose the one with the shallow, neatly gravelled bottom, whereas I, just as invariably, would put my foot into the other and be in muck past the ankle. Or go over a wall fleeing from a herd of horned Scottish cows and land respectively on green turf and churned-up mud.

  So it was that we approached Lew House, with me limping and slurping in my boots while beside me walked my partner and husband, his only dishevelment after three days of moor-crawling the day’s light stubble on his jaw and a high-tide mark of mud around the lower half of his otherwise clean boots. He looked as if he were returning from a gentle day’s shooting; I seemed to have spent the day wrestling a herd of escaped pigs through a bog.

  The smell of wood smoke grew stronger as we came up the drive to Lew House, and I could see lights pouring from the windows, making the cold mausoleum seem almost warm and beckoning. Considering the late hour, in fact, the house seemed fairly blazing with lights. Nice of Baring-Gould to make the effort, I thought, and was aware of a faint feeling of warmth towards the man. Only when we were actually within the porch and I heard the voices within did I realise my mistake and by then it was too late to bolt for the servants’ entrance.

  Again, our host himself opened the door. This time, at his back and peering curiously around the cleric’s high shoulder, stood another man, a wide, swarthy face topped with thick, greying, heavily pomaded hair. The man’s liquid brown eyes blinked at the sight of us, and shifted from their initial astonishment to a politely, if inadequately, concealed amusement.

  “Miss Russell,” our host said, “you look a bit the worse for wear. Shall I ask Mrs Elliott—”

  “No thank you,” I said, stung into asperity by the amusement in his voice that matched that of the stranger’s eyes. “It is predominantly external.” I sat on the bench and tugged at my bootlaces, praying fervently that they would not knot on me. I was saved from this small but final humiliation when the ties slid loose, allowing me to prise the boots from my feet. The sodden condition of the stockings I should simply ignore, along with the rest of my state. Pretend you’ve just come from the hairdresser’s, Russell, I commanded myself. Imagine you’ve arrived at the home of a poor relation whose misbehaviours you have come to chastise. Put your chin up and cut them off without a farthing.

  When my coat and hat had been peeled away and joined the sodden gloves on the bench, I turned towards the door and put my chin up and my hand out.

  “Good evening, Mr Baring-Gould. I trust you are keeping well?”

  “What? Oh, yes. Yes, thank you.” He stepped back so I could enter the house, where after a moment, recalled to himself by my attitude and my heavily applied accent of immaculate breeding, he took another step backwards and motioned to the man who was now at his shoulder rather than behind it.

  “Miss Russell, this is a friend and neighbour, Mr Richard Ketteridge. Richard, Miss Mary Russell. And her husband, Mr Sherlock Holmes.”

  The warm hand of the stranger gripped my own frigid palm solidly. His hand was as broad and muscular as the rest of him, at one with his almost swarthy skin and the pale patches of old scars on his face but contrasting oddly with his exquisitely tailored evening suit. On his right hand he wore a wide band of a strikingly deep orange-coloured gold, set with a small diamond. His eyes were dark, his nose was broad, and the tip of the small finger on his left hand was missing. Greeting me, the laughter in his eyes did not fade; if anything it grew, even when he turned to my tidy husband and took his hand as well.

  “Evening, good to meet you. I was glad to hear the Reverend has friends to stay; he ought to do it more often, ’specially with his family away. I was dining with friends down the road a piece, just stopped in to see how he was doing.”

  The speech was as vigorous as the handshake had been. It was also delivered in a ringing American accent, much the same accent my California-born father had possessed, and which lay beneath my own English tones (half acquired, half inherited from my London-born mother).

  Baring-Gould shut the door behind Holmes and ushered us into the warmth. The room’s fire was blazing, logs heaped high beneath the carved fox and hounds and warming the backsides of two more strangers. One of them was small, slim, and not much older than I, dressed also in evening wear and possessed of sleek blond hair and a neat beard surrounding a drawn-in mouth and rather stern eyes. The man beside him wore a clerical collar, a remarkably hairy tweed jacket, and an air of sporty bonhomie, and I was surprised when Baring-Gould introduced him as his curate, Gilbert Arundell—it seemed an odd pairing. The fair young man, who seemed much quieter than Ketteridge and whose dinner jacket was of a slightly inferior cut, proved to be the American’s secretary. His name was David Scheiman, and the few words he spoke were also in an American accent, although an America farther east than that of his employer, and with both English and Germanic traces down at its childhood roots. His palm was damp and his grip was brief, and he had to draw himself together to look Holmes in the face (a not uncommon reaction when even the most blameless of individuals first met Holmes, as if they dreaded that he was about to look into their souls and see their inner thoughts and what they did with their private lives).

  Ketteridge went to the cupboard and offered us a drink. Holmes accepted, saying he would merely go up and put on a pair of shoes first, but I smiled and demurred politely, and took my leave with as much dignity as I could muster. As I left, the conversation around the fireplace resumed : It seemed to have something to do with cricket.

  Holmes did not catch me up until I was in the bathroom with the hot tap full on.

  “You will come back down?” he asked, although it sounded more like an order than a question.

  “Holmes, I’d rather starve to death.”

  He seemed honestly puzzled, whether because he had missed the amusement in the two men or because he could not see why I should object, I could not decide. He might even have been putting on an act of obtuseness for some reason, but I decided it did not matter, that in any case my reaction would be the same.

  “Enjoy yourself, Holmes, while I enjoy my bath.” I pushed him out and closed the door.

  A long, hot, drowsy time later I became aware of a sound outside the door. I raised my ears clear of the cooling water, and listened for a moment. “Holmes?”

  “Sorry, mum,” said a young female voice. “Mrs Elliott thought you might like a bowl of soup. I’ll just leave the cover on it to keep it hot, shall I?”

  “That would be fine,” I said. “Thank you. And thank Mrs Elliott for me, please.”

  “Yes mum.” I heard the gentle rattle of a tray being put down, and then the door to the bedroom closed.

  After a final sluice to rid myself of the last of the mud that had lodged itself in skin and hair and nails, I wrapped my hair in a towel and myself in a dressing gown, and went to investigate the tray. The soup was still warm, and immeasurably better than the nearly rancid, gruellike mixture served us the first night. There were also freshly baked rolls, a large slab of crumbling orange cheddar, a slice of lemon tart, and an apple. I finished everything.

  My hair was nearly dry by the time Holmes came upstairs. He had paused to change more than his muddy boots,
and looked very appealing, tall and slim in his jet suit and snowy shirtfront. One thing led to another, as is the wont in a marriage, and we did not get around to speaking about Ketteridge until after the housemaid had fetched up the morning tea.

  I settled myself up against the pillows while Holmes perched in his dressing gown on the seat beneath the mullioned windows.

  “Tell me, Holmes, who is Richard Ketteridge and what is a Californian mulatto with the scars of frostbite on his face and fingers doing in Lew Trenchard, Devonshire?”

  “Interesting chap, isn’t he?” he said. “Gould sees a great deal of him.” I squinted against the pallid morning light, moved my teacup from my stomach to the bedside table, found my glasses and put them on, raised myself to sit more vertically against the pillows, and looked at him.

  “Would you care to elaborate?”

  “No,” he said, studying the burning end of the cigarette he held between his fingers. “No, I don’t think that I would. I should prefer to have your unsullied reaction after you have met him properly. Which will be this evening,” he added. “We are dining at his house.”

  “Dining! Holmes, I don’t have a gown suitable for evening.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “You go. Have a nice time with the other gents over your cigars.”

  “I told him we were not kitted up for formal dress, and he assured me black tie was not required. A simple frock. You did bring a frock.”

  “And the shoes to go with it.” It was a very nice frock, too, and unless I tripped going out of the door and went sprawling, I should not be disgraced in wearing it. I acquiesced. I was more than a little curious about Mr Richard Ketteridge, even without Holmes’ enigmatic refusal to discuss the man. A man with the scarred skin and abused hands of a labourer wearing the clothing of a West End dandy, who could demonstrate his intimate familiarity with the prickly squire of Lew Trenchard by acting as drinks host, was no simple character.