The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  I took the tray from her and followed her with some difficulty out the door and to the rough-hewn bench in the sun. She lifted the somnolent cats down to the ground and told me to put the tray onto the bench, as the table that normally stood in front of the seat had collapsed the week before when a visiting cow had decided to use it for a scratching post, and it was now down at the neighbour’s for repair.

  She poured the tea and sweetened her cup with what looked like treacle but she told me was honey, brought her by a friend on the other side of the moor in exchange for a cracked hoof she’d managed to repair.

  “You do a lot of animal doctoring,” I commented.

  “Yes dear, I’m the local witch.” I blinked, and she began to giggle, a sound so high-pitched it had the sleeping dogs twitching their ears. “I’m not a witch of course, child, though surely there are many here who would tell you I am. Just an old woman who knows her herbs and has the time to spend babying hurt creatures.” She closed her eyes and sat for a while, basking like a turtle in the faint warmth of the autumnal sun. I drank my tea and enjoyed that same warmth on my back.

  “Now tell me, dear,” she said after a while (startling me, as my mind had wandered far away to Holmes and London), “which do you wish to hear about first? My hedgehog or Samuel’s dog?”

  “Dog?” I sat up sharply. “What do you know about a dog?”

  “Oh, it was the son of Daniel down the road who saw it, last summer.”

  “Why didn’t I hear about this?” I demanded suspiciously. With the entire moor seemingly living in one another’s pockets, why had no one thought to mention an actual sighting of the Hound?

  “Daniel is very good at keeping things to himself. His Samuel was embarrassed, so he promised to say nothing, and he didn’t, except to me. Perhaps you’d like to hear about the Hound first, then. Make yourself comfortable, child. It’s a long story.

  “As I said, it was the son of Daniel down the road that saw the Hound. A fine young lad is Samuel, in school now of course, but then he was home on his summer holiday, and a good help to his parents he is, too. It isn’t easy for them to be without him, but I told Daniel that his son’s mind was too good to waste, and with a little help from me he won a place at the school in Exeter.

  “But you’re not interested in the maunderings of an old schoolteacher, are you, dear? You want the Hound, and although I might not tell it you if night was drawing in, on a sunny morning, I shall give it you.

  “Samuel is a blessing and a help to his parents, and it so happened that his mother’s sister up near Bridestowe had a baby the end of July, and though it all went well, thanks be to God, a month later she still was needing a bit of help with the heavy things. So Samuel was sent up every few days to take some fresh-baked bread or a dish of some kind that his mother had made, and help his aunty with the chores, and then walk back the next day. It’s only five miles or so, and perfectly safe for a strapping young boy who knows to look out for mists and mires. Not like the city, which can be dangerous even for a full-grown man.

  “Well, towards the end of August Samuel stayed later than usual. He was coming to the end of his holiday and, good boy that he is, he wanted to leave his aunty with a big pile of firewood and then finish the repairs to her henhouse that he’d begun. Of course, his uncle could’ve done those, but you know how boys need to feel they’re indispensable.

  “Between the firewood and the chicken run, then, he didn’t leave until after tea. His aunty wanted him to stop another night and walk back in the morning, but it was a soft, clear evening and the moon was near full, and the little cot she had for him to sleep in was really too short for his growing legs, and his father liked him back of a Sunday morning to go to church, and aside from all that, his mother’s breakfasts were better than his aunty’s. Too, I think, knowing Samuel, it was an adventure, to cross the moor at night all by himself, when he’d only ever done it with an adult.

  “You see, this was before all the stories got around about the strange happenings on the moor, although it was after I found Tiggy, which I’ll tell you about in a minute.

  “Samuel waited until the moon was up in the sky and then he kissed his aunty good-bye and left. He’d got in the habit of following the roads as far as Watervale, just this side of Lydford, because he sometimes found one of the neighbours driving home and he could take a ride in the back of their wagon or cart. That night, though, he didn’t, so he left the road on Black Down and set off up the moor track.

  “It’s a goodly climb up the side of the moor, so Samuel used to go until he’d crossed the Tavy and then have a bit of a rest before the last bit. Sometimes his aunty’d give him a little something to keep him from starvation in the two hours it took him to get home, and that’s when he would eat it, sitting on a stone over the river, waiting for his feet to dry before pulling his stockings and boots back on.

  “That night it was a fruit scone with some preserves inside—a little stale, but Samuel didn’t mind. He unwrapped it, and was sitting there eating it and watching the stream in the moonlight when something made him look up.

  “At that place, the moor rises sharply, so it’s quite a climb—too much for an old thing like me, but ideal for a boy like Samuel, just getting his muscles and proud of them. So when he looked up, the moor was over him, and outlined against the moonlit sky he saw a figure of hellish terror. At first he thought it a pony, it was so big, but then he saw how its tail raised up, and then he saw the light coming from the middle of its great, dark head.

  “It was a dog, my dear, a dog such as hasn’t been seen since Mr Holmes settled the Baskerville problem, a dog to bring a young boy nightmares and keep him locked inside when the sun is down.

  “He ran, did Samuel, leaving his boots, his satchel, and his scone there by the river.

  “Daniel never even considered that it might be his son’s idea of a clever joke—one look at the state of the lad’s feet and a person could tell that.

  “Daniel wanted to take up his shotgun and go right back out, even if it meant carrying Samuel on his back, but the thought of going out into the night scared that brave little boy rigid. The next morning Daniel talked him into putting on a pair of old bedroom slippers and going back to the place by the river. The boy’s boots and stockings were on the rock, right where he’d left them, but the scone was gone and the stone where Samuel had dropped it was licked clean, and the satchel he used for carrying his mother’s cooking up to Bridestowe they found some distance off, torn to shreds.

  “And a dog’s footprints. Plenty of those, oh my, yes. Now, would you like to have another cup of tea before you hear about my little hedgehog ?” the old woman asked brightly.

  “Just a moment,” I said, thinking furiously and trying hard to assimilate this abrupt development, the fleshing out of a hound of ghostly rumours into a thing of flesh and bone, interested in the consumption of sweet scones. “This was towards the end of August, around the full moon, and on a Saturday night?”

  “That’s right, dear.”

  Which put it the twenty-fifth of August, the day before the full moon and the day after the courting couple had seen the dog with the carriage.

  “And neither of them said anything about it?”

  “Daniel loves his son. The boy shakes whenever anyone brings it up, so Daniel thought it best not to tell anyone. I only found out because I asked him what was wrong with the boy.”

  “How old is Samuel?”

  “Twelve, dear. A good, responsible age. Now I’ll tell you about my Tiggy, shall I?”

  I rubbed my brow, feeling a bit stunned, but said weakly, “Do, please.”

  “I was crossing the moor one day, back in the middle of summer,” she began.

  “Do you know the date?” I interrupted, although by that time I knew enough to expect the answer I received.

  “No my love, I’m sorry, but I haven’t much need any longer for numbers on a page. I can tell you,” she continued, forestalling the second part of the
question, “that it was in July, and near enough the full moon as makes no difference, and it was a Saturday too, because I went to church services with my friend in Widdecombe the next day.” Even if she had been a schoolteacher, her answer was typical of those I had become accustomed to receiving, and in the end more precise than the answer of a calendar-user to whom days were easily forgotten dates instead of skies and seasons. She was describing the twenty-eighth of July, three days after Johnny Trelawny, and one day after the ramblers from London, had each seen Lady Howard’s coach. I set my cup down on the bench and prepared to listen closely.

  “I often go across the moor, you know. I have friends in Moreton-hampstead and Widdecombe, and there’s roots and things growing on that side and not this. So on a nice day when I don’t have too many animals needing my eye—my ‘patients,’ as Daniel calls them—I’ll take a sandwich and a bottle of tea and pay a call on my friends.”

  Both of the places she had named were a good fifteen or twenty miles across some fairly rough countryside. “Do you do the trip in a day?” I asked in surprise. Having seen her totter about, I doubted that she could cover more than two miles in an hour, and that on even ground.

  “Oh, I stop the night there, dear,” she reassured me. “Sometimes two nights, and come back the third day. One of Daniel’s children feeds the beasties.” As if that was all that might concern me. “But as I was saying, I was on the moor one day last summer when I heard the saddest little cry, it’d make your heart break to hear it. It was such a tiny noise, I had a time finding what was making it, until finally I found the poor wee thing in the shade of a standing stone. It’d been trying to dig a hole in the ground to hide itself in, but it hadn’t a chance, even if it had been whole and strong.” She seemed not far from tears at the pathos of the thing.

  “A hedgehog,” I said.

  “That it was, a young Tiggy, would fit into your hand. I thought for sure it would die, it was that sorely treated. I decided all I could do was make it comfortable and sing to it until it passed on. So I popped it into my coat pocket and sang while I walked, and I took it out when I got to Widdecombe, fully expecting to have to borrow a spade and bury it.

  “Only, don’t you know, the little face looked up at me, so trusting, I just knew it would pull through. We gave it some milk with a drop of brandy in it, set its little leg—the back one, on the left—and wrapped it with a splint made from a nice smooth corset stay cut down to size, and I pulled together the great tear in its back with a piece of silk embroidery floss—green, it was; quite striking—and put it into a little box with some cotton wool near the fire.

  “And in the morning it wrinkled its little nose at me, asking clear as it could, ‘Where’s my breakfast?’”

  “Was it all right, then?” I asked. Not perhaps the most professional of investigative enquiries, and certainly not the question Holmes would have had at that point, but I did want to know.

  “Not very good, you understand, but it lived. I did have to take off its little foot with a pair of sewing scissors, I’m afraid. It was too badly crushed to save, and the infection would have killed it.”

  I winced at the picture of two ancient ladies bent over the kitchen table doing an amputation with a pair of scissors, and moved quickly on to the proper questions. “What had caused its injuries, do you know?”

  “Now that’s just it, dear,” she said, sounding approving. “It was something moving fast—a cart-wheel, maybe, or a boot—that squashed the poor thing’s leg, but a dog had at it, too.”

  The hair on the back of my neck stirred. “How do you know that?” I demanded.

  “Which, the cart or the dog?”

  “Both.”

  “Well, dear, I know that whatever it was squashed Tiggy had to be moving quickly, because if poor little Tiggy’d had a minute’s warning he’d have curled up tight and been flattened right across, not just one stray leg. And the dog I know because any wild creature would’ve had more sense, and once tearing at Tiggy that way he’d either have stayed to finish him off or taken him home to feed his babies.”

  Unlikely as it seemed, this was a witness after Holmes’ own heart, and I took my hat off to her. Literally.

  “What pretty hair you have, my dear,” she exclaimed, and reached out to pat it lightly. “I had a cousin once who had strawberry blond hair just like yours, and she was bright as her hair, too.”

  I had to admit that I was not feeling particularly bright, and asked her if she had seen any hoof marks or cart tracks.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t, dear. The ground was dry, you know, and it takes something pretty heavy to make a dent.”

  I found it hard to imagine the turf of the moor dry and hard, but I had to defer to her greater knowledge of the place. I then asked her about the precise location of the hedgehog’s unfortunate accident. I offered her my map, but she waved it away, saying that her eyes found such fine work a difficulty, so instead she described her route subjectively—the hills and flats, a tor gone by, a stream crossed, the morning sun in her eyes—and I eventually decided on a stone circle below a rise that seemed to coincide with her description. I folded up the map and replaced it in the breast pocket of my coat. She seemed not to have finished with me, however, and sat with her head at an angle and an expectant look on her face. I thought perhaps she was waiting for my final judgement, which I did not think I could give her.

  “I have to admit, I don’t know enough about the habits of hedgehogs to say if I agree with your ideas,” I began. Her face instantly cleared and she began to nod in understanding.

  “Then you won’t know the real question here, and that is, ‘What was Tiggy doing there?’”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll have to explain that.”

  “Tiggy doesn’t live out on the moor, dear. Tiggy likes the woods and the soft places.”

  “And there aren’t any?”

  “Not in two or three miles of where I found him.”

  “What if some animal had carried it? Whatever gave it the bite, for example, or a big hawk?”

  “Well, that’s possible, I suppose, dear,” she said, sounding very dubious. “But I was wondering if it wasn’t more likely that Tiggy was accidentally taking a ride on whatever it was run him down.”

  13

  … The reader is tripping over uncertain ground, not

  knowing what is to be accepted and what rejected.

  —A BOOK OF DARTMOOR

  WHEN I TOOK my leave from Elizabeth Chase, the good witch of Mary Tavy, my mind, to borrow a phrase from Baring-Gould’s memoirs, was in a ferment. It was still only midday, and Lew House little more than two hours away; I decided to take a look at the place where she had found the injured Tiggy.

  I found it without difficulty—there are not so many stone circles on the moor to make for a confusion—but I was not quite sure what to make of it. The site was typical of its kind, upright hunks of granite arranged in a rough circle on a piece of relatively flat ground and surrounded by the moor’s low turf, broken here and there by stones and bracken. A double row of stones (one of Randolph Pethering’s “Druid ceremonial passages”) lay in the near distance, and a moorland track (the Abbot’s Way?) ran alongside.

  As Elizabeth Chase had indicated, the most curious part of the hedgehog affair was why the animal should have been out here in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I had to agree: The little beasts are lovers of woods and the resultant soft leaf mould under which to take cover, a far cry from this blasted heath, which even a badger would have been hard put to carve into a home.

  I pulled from Red’s saddlebag the cheese and pickle sandwich and bottle of ale that I had asked for that morning at the Mary Tavy inn, and carried them over to a stone that had once, by the looks of the hollow in the ground at one end, been upright. I laid out my sandwich and opened the bottle with the bottle-opening blade of my pocket knife, and ate my lunch, enjoying the sun and my prehistoric surroundings, and most especially the delightful imag
e of a hitchhiking hedgehog.

  An almost lighthearted air of holiday had set in. After all, I had more or less completed my assignment, with an unlikely but glittering gem to carry back to Lew Trenchard and a mere handful of houses between here and the edge of the moor at which to carry out the formalities of my enquiries. My sense of taste had returned, I could very nearly breathe the air, and the sun was actually shining. I stretched out with my head on one stone and my boots on another, and rested for ten minutes before gathering my luncheon débris and swinging back up into the saddle.

  “Home, Red,” I said to him, and endured a few hundred yards of his trot before pulling him back to his usual amble.

  This time when he shied, I was ready for him. Unfortunately.

  Given a negative stimulus of sufficient strength, one can train even the most stubborn animal to avoid a given activity. Red had trained me quite effectively: No sooner did my mind begin to drift away into its own world than it snapped back to apprehensive attention. Twice, this was unnecessary. The third time my quick reversion to full awareness came at the precise moment that Red jumped. I clung like a burr, knowing that he would calm the moment his feet set down again on solid ground. However, this time, with me on his back, he did not; instead he panicked.