I studied him in all innocence, and saw a look of astonishment cross his face, followed by a great roar of laughter.
“Oh my,” he sputtered. “Mrs Holmes, I never thought of that. Maybe I’d better start wearing garlic or something.”
“A pistol seems to have been effective the last time,” I noted.
His laughter faded, but the humour remained in his eyes. “But the last time it was an actual dog, painted with—phosphorus, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course you’re right. How silly of me.”
“Have you ever worked with your husband, Mrs Holmes?”
“On a case?”
“Yes.”
I spread some butter on a piece of roll and ate it thoughtfully. “We did collaborate on a case, once, involving a stolen ham.”
The absurdity of the thing delighted him, as I thought it might do, and he insisted I tell him about it. I did so, emphasising the ridiculous parts until the story verged on the burlesque—not, I admit, a difficult task. When we had put that story to bed and been served the next course, I played the polite guest and asked about his life.
“What about you, Mr Ketteridge? You must have had some fascinating adventures in Alaska.”
“It was quite a time.”
“What was your most exciting moment?”
“Exciting good or exciting terrifying?”
“Either. Both.”
“Exciting good was the first time I looked into my pan and saw gold.”
“On your claim?”
“Yes. Fifty feet of mud and rock and ice—when I first staked it the stream was frozen. I had to thaw out the ground with a fire before I could get at the mud. But there was gold in it. Amazing stuff, gold,” he mused, looking down at the ring on his finger and rubbing it thoughtfully. “Soft and useless, but its sparkle gets right into a man’s bones. ‘Gold fever’ is a good name, because that’s what it’s like, burning you and eating you up.”
“And the exciting bad?”
“The sheer terror. Had a handful of those, like pieces of peppercorn scattered through a plate of tasteless stew. Most of the work in the fields was dull slog—you were uncomfortable all the time, awake or asleep, always hungry, never clean, never warm except in summer when the mosquitos ate you alive, your feet and hands were always wet and bruised. Lord, the boredom. And then a charge you’d set wouldn’t go off and you’d get the thrill of going up to it, knowing it might decide to explode in your face. Or a tunnel you’d poked into the hillside would start to collapse, between you and daylight. But the most exciting moment ? Let’s see. That would either be when the dogsled went over a ledge into Soda Creek, or the avalanche at the Scales.”
The last name tickled a vague memory. “I’ve heard of the Scales. Wasn’t that the name for a hill?”
“A hill,” he said with a pitying smile. “A hell more like it if you’ll pardon my French. Chilkoot Pass, four miles straight up. Seemed like it anyway, even in summer when you could go back and forth, but in the winter, twelve hundred steps cut into the ice, the last mile was like climbing a ladder. And you had a year’s worth of supplies to shift to the top—the Mounties checked to make sure; they didn’t want a countryside of starving men—so you couldn’t just climb it once unless you could afford to pay the freight cable to take your load up for you. There you were, in a mile-long line of freezing, exhausted men so tight packed it was left, right, left, together all the way, your lungs aching and your head pounding in the altitude, and just when you think you can’t lift your foot one more time, that you’re going to drop in your tracks and die, you’re at the top, falling into the snow with the crate on your back. And when you’ve got your breath back you take the ropes off that crate, sit on your shovel, and slide down the iced track to the bottom, where you put another crate on your shoulders and line up to start again. After twenty, twenty-five times you have your supplies at the top of the hill, and you’re ready to start on your way to the fields. Lot of men stood in Sheep Camp at the bottom of the Scales, saw what they were up against, and their hearts just gave up on them. Sold their supplies for ten cents on the dollar and went home.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Didn’t have the sense to, no. It was winter, but the weather was still uncertain, and I’d only shifted half my load when the snow turned warm. Six, eight feet of wet snow in a couple of days. The Indians were smart—they cleared out back to town—but stubborn us.
“I knew it was going to get dangerous, so I started climbing early, still night in fact. I nearly made it, had my last load on my back and was halfway up when the cliffs gave way. The whole hill, a mile of snow and ice, just moved out from under our feet, a mile-long line of hundreds of men, their equipment, their dogs, everything just bundled up and swept down into Sheep Camp in a heap of snow. Seventy, eighty men died, my partner one of them. I was locked in, upside down, though I didn’t know it—couldn’t tell, it was dark and I couldn’t move anything but my right hand. It was like being caught in set cement. My boot was sticking out, and that’s what saved me, when they found it and dug me out.”
“Good … heavens,” I said weakly. I did not have to manufacture a response; the claustrophobic horror of his experience made me feel a bit lightheaded.
Ketteridge put down the glass that he had been nursing all during his narrative and looked at me with concern. “I’m so sorry, Mrs Holmes, have I upset you?”
“No no, just the idea of that sort of suffocation. It’s pretty horrific.”
“At the time, you know, I wasn’t even frightened. Angry at first, if you can credit it—the thought that I’d have to carry everything up all over again just made me furious. I know, funny that should be the first thing on my mind. And then I was worried about my partner, who’d been just behind me, and then I was uncomfortable, all squashed and cold. But then that passed, and I began to feel warm; my wrenched leg didn’t even hurt. Running out of air, I suppose, but it wouldn’t have been a bad way to die, you know. Compared to some.”
He smiled. “Shall we take coffee in the library, Tuptree? The car ought to be back soon.”
This last was to me, and I folded my table napkin and stood up.
“May we walk through the dining hall?” I asked, gently reminding him of his promise.
“Certainly, if you like. The lighting in there isn’t very good, I’m afraid. For some reason Baskerville never had that room wired for electricity. It’s better during the day.”
Ketteridge took up a candelabra and lit the tapers with the cigar lighter he carried in his pocket, and we went through into the great dim banqueting hall. It was like walking into a cavern, empty and full of shadows—although in times past the entire manor had gathered here for meals, the family on its raised dais, the servants at long tables in the rest of the room. A minstrel’s gallery looked down from the far end, silent and abandoned by all except the painted Baskervilles, a cheerless substitute indeed for the music the spot was intended to house. We strolled in near complete silence ourselves, down one side and up the end. He held the light up for me to see the portraits.
“The Baskervilles seem a varied lot,” I commented.
“The last owner took all the good ones with her,” he said ruefully. “She did leave these tapestries, though,” he added, and carried the candles over to the interior wall to show me the dusty, faded figures that had once blazed with colour and movement. We examined them critically. “They’re prettier in the daylight,” he said, and I allowed him to escort me out of the room and down a long and infinitely more cheery corridor.
As a working library the room we entered left something to be desired, but as a masculine retreat that used books as a decorative backdrop for deep leather chairs and a square card table, it was more comfortable than the draughty reaches of the hall or dining room. Heavy draperies covered the windows and Tuptree, bearing a tray of coffee, followed us in the door.
“It’s a pity you haven’t been to the house in daylight, Mrs Ho
lmes. It’s quite a sight—these windows here look up onto the moor, and there are six tors sitting there, looking like you could reach out and touch them. On a clear day, that is. You must try to come back during the day—you and your husband, of course.”
“I’d like that, thank you. I was so enjoying my ride out on the moor today, I hadn’t realised how late it had got. I do apologise for keeping you up.”
“This isn’t late, Mrs Holmes, by no means, and I was charmed to have you drop in on me, for whatever reason. Were you just out for a ride then?”
I had offered him that ride in case he wondered what on earth the good Mrs Holmes might have been doing in his deserted stretch of countryside. Whatever he was hiding from me, whomever he had spirited out from under my nose, might be as simple as a socially unacceptable buyer for Baskerville Hall or as embarrassing as an improper visitor of the female persuasion. In any case he could hardly suspect me of arranging the mishap that had delivered Red and myself here in such a state. I merely thought to divert his curiosity before it took hold in his mind.
“Yes, and what a place for it! I rode down to look at the Fox Tor mires and Childe’s Tomb, and Wistman’s Wood, and then the stone row near Merrivale, and I was aiming for Fur Tor, to get around the river, you see, when Red spooked and fell.”
He seemed imperceptibly to relax, whether because of my list of sights or due to the breezy conversational style I had gradually come to assume, I could not tell.
“It is an interesting slice of landscape, isn’t it?” he commenced.
“Oh yes. Sitting on a tor and eating a picnic lunch with a stone row on one side and a tin-mining works on the other is not an everyday sort of experience.”
“I think my favourite is Bowerman’s Nose, not far from Hound Tor. Do you know it?”
“Over near Widdecombe? No, I haven’t been there yet.”
“Looks like a great stone man, staring defiantly up into the sky.”
“But it actually has a nose, does it? I rode completely around Fox Tor looking for some resemblance to a fox. I couldn’t find one.”
“A bit like the constellations, aren’t they? You’d have to have a good imagination, or bad eyesight, to see what they’re named after.”
“Actually,” I said, “the tor where I took lunch today resembled nothing so much as what one finds in the road after a herd of cattle has passed by.”
The earthy humour was to Ketteridge’s liking. When he stopped laughing he swung his cup dangerously in the direction of the curtains and said, “There’s a tor just out those windows that I think I’ll rename Horse-Dropping Tor, in your honour, Mrs Holmes. Looks just like one we had over our house when I was young, only it’s cold, wet, and grey instead of hot, dry, and red.” His face, which when relaxed had been less handsome but more likeable, abruptly tightened. He put his cup into its saucer with a sharp rattle and began to pat his pockets in the semaphore of the tobacco smoker. The distant past, it would seem, was out of bounds in a way that his youth in Alaska had not been.
“If I were you, I shouldn’t mention to Baring-Gould that you are giving his tors impolite names.”
He instantly relaxed again and stopped his search for tobacco. “You’re right. He wouldn’t take to it kindly.”
Baring-Gould was a safer topic of conversation. I permitted him to retreat into it, and we talked about the squire of Lew Trenchard for a while. I did not think Ketteridge fully realised the precarious state of the old man’s health, but I was not about to be the one to tell him.
In the middle of a sentence, Ketteridge paused and said, “I hear the car.” He resumed what he had been saying, and appeared quite content to sit in front of the fire and talk until midnight, but I decided that investigation or no, I had had enough. My rib and hip throbbed, my forehead and the bridge of my nose hurt sharply, and I was not in top condition anywhere, even mentally. I rose to my feet.
“Mr Ketteridge, I have taken up far too much of your time. I am very grateful for the rescue and your company, but I cannot keep you any longer.”
As it transpired, however, I was not finished with him yet. When my (neatly repacked) bags were brought, Tuptree was carrying a man’s overcoat and hat as well. Ketteridge was motoring down to Lew with me, “Just to make sure you arrive without problem,” as he put it. Expecting that we would be attacked by highwaymen, perhaps? Or that I might be molested by his driver? It seemed, though, that this being the first pleasant evening in some time, he wanted to take a drive.
This meant that he actually did the driving, with Scheiman in the backseat alongside my saddlebags. Ketteridge held my door for me, then got in behind the wheel.
He was not a bad driver, although a touch aggressive and more apt to haul at the wheel than slip in and out between obstacles as his driver had. We flew down the tree-lined avenue and accelerated out through the open gate in a spray of gravel, and were very soon pulling into the drive at Lew House.
Somewhat to my surprise, he did not accept my invitation to enter.
“Paperwork to do, I’m sure you understand. But you’ll let me know if Mr Holmes is interested in investigating the Hound sightings, won’t you? We can talk about rates at the time.”
Hah, I thought. The days when Sherlock Holmes worried about how much to charge for his services was long in the past.
“I shall speak to him about it,” I said politely.
He stood next to the car until I had gone into the porch, and then I heard the car door close. The car circled the fountain with the bronze goose-boy, and drove away.
15
Hard by is Clakeywell Pool, by some called Crazywell.
It is an old mine-work, now filled with water. It covers
nearly an acre, and the banks are in part a hundred feet high.
According to popular belief, at certain times at night a
loud voice is heard calling from the water in inarticulate
tones, naming the next person who is to die in the parish.
—A BOOK OF DARTMOOR
I PAUSED IN the Lew House porch for a long moment after the noise of the car had faded down the drive, pondering the curious etiquette required for entering a house in which one has been a guest in the very recent past, yet has been away for some days, and returns solitary when previously one had been an adjunct to a husband. It would have been simple had there been a butler, but I was not about to rouse the master of the house to open the door for me. I reached out to try the door handle and found it unlocked, but instead of letting myself in, I dropped my bags and walked back into the drive and past the fountain until I was in the rose garden, where I turned to take a long look at the house.
It was a puzzle. This house, this square block rising up in front of me against the night, was in a sense a fraud, an artificial product of one man’s enthusiasms. Stuck-together bits and pieces stolen from other structures, held in place by nothing more substantial than the vision of an infirm and lonely old man, its cool and formal facade nestled incongruously into a tree-lined fold of English river valley; a run-down, ill-heated, understaffed, echoing pile of a place studded with anomalies like the opulent gallery ceiling upstairs and the faded but still glorious ballroom—the place ought to have seemed ridiculous, out of place, and easily abandoned to the brambles and oaks. Instead it stood, confident and unapologetic, as self-contained and idiosyncratic as the man who had created it.
Baskerville Hall, on the other hand, was the real thing. A structure grown slowly over the centuries and dramatically situated, it was filled with beautiful, cared-for things, well heated, adequately staffed, more than adequately lit (one could even get used to the electric lights, I knew), and mastered by a man in his physical and mental prime. It should have been an oasis of warmth and colour, an assertion of life and humanity shining out in the stony wilderness of the moor.
Why then did the substantial Baskerville Hall linger in the mind as somehow ethereal, unreal, and slightly “off”? Was it merely the foreign influence on the Hall o
ver the last three owners: Ketteridge, the Canadian Sir Henry, and old Sir Charles before him with his influx of South African gold? Could it even be as recent a change as Ketteridge and his exotic sense of design?
If so, then why was it that Lew House, which had undergone changes considerably more radical than modern lighting and a few Moorish cushions, felt the more solid on its foundations? Why did Lew House, that toy of its over-imaginative squire, still settle into its Devonshire home as if it had grown up from the very stone beneath its feet? Why was it Lew, run down though it was, that impressed a visitor with the secure knowledge that this house would stand, would still be here and sheltering its inhabitants long after the owls and foxes had moved into the windswept ruins of Baskerville Hall?
I decided I did not know. I also decided that champagne was too conducive to fancies, and it was time I took to my bed.
It was not even ten o’clock, but the house was silent. I thought it more than likely that the lights had been left burning for my sake, so shut them down and locked the door. (As my room was in the front, if another visitor came it would only be I who was disturbed.)
I was thirsty, with the wine and coffee I had drunk, so I went through to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then climbed stiffly up the back stairway, feeling all the aches I had accumulated.
At the top of the stairs I noticed a shaft of light coming from a partially opened door down the corridor. I thought it was from Baring-Gould’s room, and I paused, not wishing to disturb him, yet not willing to walk away in case the old man might have been taken ill. In the end I went quietly up the hallway and, tapping gently, allowed the door to drift open under my knuckles.
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.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4 Page 105