The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  I took the envelope and told her, “I’d be happy to take lunch with Mr Baring-Gould.”

  “Twenty minutes,” she said.

  I tore open the thin paper, but it was only from the laboratory in London where Holmes had left the gold with its soil sample. Wordier than it needed to be and sprinkled with technical terms that either the sender had misspelt or the telegraphist had found troublesome, it for the most part confirmed what Holmes had already found: a pinch of the purest gold in a dessert-spoonful of humus and sand. It did not tell me what the mixture meant.

  I allowed my eyes to rest on the lively carving above the fireplace, the high-tailed hounds and goose-stealing fox that Baring-Gould had said belonged to the Elizabethan period. It occurred to me, to my amusement, that he was quite strictly correct: It did, by style and setting, belong there, even if it had come into actual existence in a century far removed from those of Elizabeth’s reign. I dropped my book on the chair, stroked the sleeping cat and the carved fox with equal affection, and went upstairs to make myself look presentable for the nearly blind and infinitely sly old squire of Lew Trenchard.

  “MARY,” HE GREETED me, in a stronger voice than I had expected. “Come in, my dear, and keep me company as I eat the good Mrs Elliott’s fare.” He was sitting nearly upright in the carved bed, propped against half a dozen pillows, and a wide, solid table with very short legs had been arranged over his lap and laid with a linen cloth, silver, and a crystal water glass. A smaller, considerably taller table had been laid for me and set facing him at the side of the bed. I began to take my place, and then paused, and stepped around to the head of the bed and briefly kissed his smooth, aged cheek before taking my seat.

  He looked both flustered and pleased, but did not comment. “How are you keeping, Mary?” he asked. “And how did you find poor Miss Baskerville?”

  “I am well, thank you, and Miss Baskerville seems a good deal happier in the bright lights of Plymouth than I believe she would have been in Baskerville Hall.”

  “A great sadness, though, that she had to give up her family’s home.”

  “Sadness that her parents and brothers died, I agree, but I personally am not convinced of the need to yoke oneself for life to the service of a mere building.”

  “I have spent my life making Lew House.”

  “And you have created a place of great dignity and serenity, but I cannot see you demanding that your son and grandson enter penury in order to keep it standing.” I do not know why I was so certain of this. One might have thought the immense investment the house represented, not only in pounds sterling but in painstaking thought and emotional commitment, would have caused its creator to demand an equal passion on the part of his descendants, but somehow I did not think that to be true of him. And indeed, after a long moment, he nodded, reluctantly.

  “True. But it is hard, living so long and seeing so many old families forced to abandon their heritage and move away from the roots planted by their forefathers. Although I will say that the idea of opening up the central hall and the picture gallery to charabancs of lemonade-swilling families is almost more abhorrent. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be better to return to the Viking way, and burn each man’s riches with him when he is gone. You are laughing at me, Mary.”

  “I’m not,” I protested, but seeing the lift of his eyebrow, I admitted, “Well, perhaps a little. But in this case it would be a great pity; to put Lew House to the torch.”

  “You like it, then?”

  “Very much.”

  “‘The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground; I have a goodly heritage,’” he said with a small sigh that I took to be of satisfaction, and then Mrs Elliott and Rosemary came in with the meal.

  As I had noticed before, for a man staring death in the face he had a healthy appetite, and ate the simple fare with gusto. He asked me if I had ever tasted mutton from a sheep raised on the herb-rich traditional pasturage of my own Sussex, and I could tell him that yes, one of my neighbours had a small and undisturbed field that had been saved from the plough during the grain-hungry years of the Napoleonic War. He expressed his envy, and proceeded to talk about food, of his lifelong lust for roast goose with sage-and-onion stuffing, which his wife had indulged as often as she could, of the superiority of spit-roasted beef over the pale, half-steamed modern version, of the cheeses of France and the shock of tasting an egg from a hen fed cheaply on fish meal and the wartime blessing of living in a community that produced its own butter. It ended with a small story about the portion of his honeymoon spent in London, when he had subjected his poor young bride to a pantechnicon with its improving display of knowledge through a variety of semiscientific machines and lectures, and the dry sandwiches they had eaten on that occasion. The sandwiches, he said with a note of reminiscence in his voice, had seemed to Grace more than appropriate to the setting.

  Then, as if I might take advantage of this slight opening and insert a jemmy under the edge of his personal history, he said quickly, “Tell me what you think about Richard Ketteridge.”

  I knew instantly that I could not tell him what I feared concerning Ketteridge; Baring-Gould had brought us here to solve the mysterious happenings on his moor, but I prayed it could be done cleanly, without leaving a trail of mistrust, uncertainty, and tension along the way. Holmes might decide to the contrary, but as far as I was concerned, last Friday’s discovery of the body in his lake was quite enough involvement for a sickly ninety-year-old man.

  “He must have had an extraordinary time up in the Yukon,” I said instead. “Has he told you about being buried in the avalanche?”

  We talked about that for a while, and I told him about the improvements being made to Baskerville Hall (carefully omitting any reference to a future transfer of ownership) and the secretary’s fascination for Hound stories. By that time he seemed to be tiring, so I helped Mrs Elliott lift the heavy little table from the bed and prepared to leave him.

  At the door, however, his voice stopped me.

  “Mary, I would not want you to think that I failed to notice that you did not actually answer my question about Richard Ketteridge.” I looked back at him, dismayed, but I could see no anger in his face, only a mild and humorous regret. “I am ill, true, but I am not easily misled.” He closed his eyes and allowed Mrs Elliott to tug and shift his pillow, and I left and went back down the stairs.

  However, my peaceful immersion in the prose of Sabine Baring-Gould was not, it seemed, destined immediately to continue. I sat down with Devon and the bell rang, and although Rosemary reached the door before I could, the doctor who came in insisted on talking with me. It took ten minutes to convince him of my complete ignorance about any aspect of Baring-Gould’s condition save his appetite and his ability to maintain a conversation. Perhaps the man just enjoyed talking with someone who had no physical complaints, I speculated, and returned to my book.

  Five minutes later a disturbance in the kitchen first distracted me, then drew me. I stood tentatively inside the door to ask if I might be of help in quelling what had sounded like a minor revolution but on closer inspection appeared to be a family with five children under the age of eight. They all had running noses and hoarse coughs, and this seemed to be the focus of Mrs Elliott’s wrath.

  “You cannot stay here; Mr Baring-Gould needs his rest, and I can’t be risking him taking on that affliction.” The husband of the family seemed resigned to an immediate departure, but the wife was sticking to her guns.

  “The Squire, he told us, if we needed anything, to come, and we’ve come.”

  “Keep your voice down,” hissed Mrs Elliott, to little effect. On one hip the woman had a thin baby with a disgusting nose and wearing an extraordinary hotchpotch of clothes; the other children were seated in a row on a kitchen bench eating bread and butter and watching the exchange with interest. The contest between the two women seemed destined to drag on to evening without resolution, until it was interrupted by the furious entrance of Andrew Budd, assistant gar
dener and my boatman from Friday.

  “Who put the bloody cow in the garden?” he demanded loudly.

  Mrs Elliott made haste to shush him, the husband responded by getting quickly to his feet, but his wife only claimed this for her own sorrows, having been evicted with five babies and a cow. Without taking his eyes from her, the husband began to sidle towards the door and, between one moment and the next, he clapped his hat to his head and faded out of it, followed by the still-irate Budd.

  With that exit accomplished, the other door opened and the doctor entered; I began to feel as if I had walked into a pantomime production. The medical man, however, possessed an authority recognised by all, as well as the means of cutting through the Gordian knot. He hustled the children into their garments and clogs (the two who had them) and sent them out, pulled the wife out as well by the simple statement that he had a house they could use for a week until things were settled, and pushed her out of the kitchen door with the parting over-the-shoulder shot that he would return in two days to check on his patient, but that Mrs Elliott was doing everything perfectly.

  In the silence that followed, Mrs Elliott gave herself a vigorous shake to settle her ruffled feathers back into place, snapped at Rosemary to scrub down the table at which the children had been sitting, threw the tea towel she held onto the sideboard, and began snatching up the plates from which her invaders had been eating. Before her eyes could fall on me, I made my exit, and went back to my book.

  Peace returned to Lew Trenchard, and peace reigned uninterrupted over the cat, the fire, and me for a good twenty minutes, until I found myself reading a story about a gold fraud on Dartmoor, and the afternoon was no longer a peaceful thing.

  22

  Gold bydeth ever bright.

  —GOULD FAMILY MOTTO

  IT CAME IN a chapter on Okehampton, buried between a lengthy discussion of a white-breasted bird credited with being a harbinger of death and a song, given in the vernacular, about a young man who, vexed because his sheep had run away, “knacked” his old “vayther” on the head and was condemned to hang.

  The gold story was given as follows:

  Some years ago a great fraud was committed in the neighbourhood. It was rumoured that gold was to be found in the gozen—the refuse from the mines. All who had old mines on their land sent up specimens to London, and received reports that there was a specified amount of gold in what was forwarded. Some, to be sure that there was no deception, went up with their specimens and saw them ground, washed, and analysed, and the gold extracted. So large orders were sent up for gozen-crushing machines. These came down, were set to work, and no gold was then found. The maker of the machines had introduced gold-dust into the water that was used in the washing of the crushed stone.

  Gold fraud.

  All my nerves tingled. This was not precisely what I had been looking for to make the pieces fall into place—gozen laundering and the sale of a large number of machines did not go far enough—but by God I knew that something about the concept of gold fraud was the key.

  What, I did not know.

  I devoured the rest of the book, but again, Baring-Gould had finished playing with that shiny idea and did not return to it, not within those covers. He did mention using the idea in a novel, but I doubted the usefulness of a fictional development of gozen laundering. I felt like throwing the volume across the room.

  I did not. Instead, I dutifully went back and picked my way over Pethering’s remarks, the myriad tiny scratchings of his own mania. He knew nothing about gold, nothing about the moor, nothing about scholarship at all, I soon decided. Nearly every remark reverted to Druidical evidence, and whenever Baring-Gould wrote a criticism of the doctrine, it set off a tirade so intense that Pethering had taken to writing between the lines of print to fit it all in.

  Long before I reached the end of the book, my nerve broke, and I did end up throwing the book against the wall, upsetting the cat and bending the book’s cover irreparably. I put on my coat and went for a long walk in the freezing air, and in the course of the walk I came to a reluctant decision: Despite the fragile state of his health, Baring-Gould should have to be asked about gold fraud.

  I went to see Mrs Elliott when I returned, finding her as usual in the kitchen.

  “I need to talk to Mr Baring-Gould, Mrs Elliott, just for a few minutes. Could you please let me know when he’s awake?”

  “I’ll not have you upsetting him,” she declared, the unerring mother hen, obviously still feeling the effects of the invasion of snotty-nosed children.

  “I didn’t do so before,” I pointed out, “and I shall try my best not to do so now, but it concerns what he brought us here to do. Ultimately, it is in his own interest.”

  She seemed to find this argument specious, for which I could not blame her. It was clearly self-serving. However, grudgingly she allowed that when he had eaten his supper (which he would do upstairs and alone) she would ask if he could see me briefly. I thanked her, and told her I would be in his study.

  There I worked, pulling books from the shelves, thumbing methodically through them looking for further tales of auric crime and finding nothing more than dust. Rosemary came to tell me my own dinner was ready, and I ate it with a book in front of me, scanning each page, unaware of its contents aside from a lack of the word gold. It was a tedious and no doubt pointless way of doing research, and it would take a very long time to go through the ninety or more books of his that I had not yet read, but it gave me something to do while I waited.

  Unfortunately, the waiting was prolonged by Baring-Gould falling asleep over his supper. Mrs Elliott refused to wake him, telling me firmly that he was sure to awaken refreshed in two or three hours, or perhaps four, and he would surely speak to me then.

  In an agony of frustration I returned to the endless shelves, feeling like Hercules faced with his task in the stables. Rosemary silently brought me coffee at nine, and again before she went to bed at eleven. Jittering, unkempt, and black-handed from the books, I waited.

  At midnight I heard footsteps in the silent house. Mrs Elliott’s tread sounded on the stairway outside the study door, and faded, going into the kitchen. When she came out, I was at the study door, waiting.

  “Come, dear,” she said cheerfully, and then, “Oh my, you do look a little the worse for wear. Never mind, two minutes with the rector and then you can have a nice wash and into bed.”

  Grimly, I followed her up the stairs and to Baring-Gould’s bedroom, and there I waited while she gave him his hot drink and medicine and plumped his pillows and chattered cheerfully until my hands tingled with wanting to pitch her out the window.

  In the end it was Baring-Gould who broke the impasse. The light from the single candle was not strong enough for his old eyes to pick me out, but I must have moved, for he craned his head forward and squinted at where I stood.

  “Who is that?” he asked sharply.

  “It is I, sir,” I said, and stepped into the candle’s glow.

  “Mary, it’s very late. Surely you’re too young to begin this habit of broken nights.”

  “She has a question to ask you, Rector,” put in Mrs Elliott, and to my relief took herself out of the door with the hot-water bottle.

  “Come, then, Mary. Sit down where I can see you, and ask. It must be important, not to wait until the morning.” I sat down as indicated, on the bed beside him.

  “I don’t know how important it is, just vexatious, because I can’t find any more information. In your book on Dartmoor you mention that gold may be found in the gravel streams of the moor.”

  “Did I? How very irresponsible of me,” he said with a complete lack of either interest or concern.

  “Has it ever been found?” I persisted.

  “Never. Ridiculous thought. I did use it in the Guavas novel, for the romance of it, but I don’t believe anyone has ever actually filled so much as a single goose-quill from the soil of the moor. The closest to gold I have ever seen in a lifetime of wandering
Dartmoor is the moss Schistostega osmundacea, which gleams with sparks of gold when seen in a certain light.”

  “I see. But, in your book on Devon, the first volume of A Book of the West, you describe a gold fraud, which involved washing gold into samples of the gozen from old tin mines in order to sell great numbers of the crushing machines.”

  He got a faraway look on his face, which after several seconds relaxed into one of delight. “I had forgotten about that. Oh yes. Very clever, that.” He chuckled. “Of necessarily limited duration, however.”

  “Most frauds are. But what I need to know is, are there any other references to gold on the moor in your books, either speculations as to its presence or descriptions of fraud?”

  A long minute ticked past as the old man put his head down and thought. When he raised it, my heart fell.

  “I cannot think of any. Why do you need to know?”

  “Rector, I’d really prefer not to go into that just now.”

  “Does it have to do with Richard Ketteridge?”

  “It may,” I said reluctantly. To my surprise, he reached forward and patted my hand.

  “Don’t worry, Mary, I won’t press you. I’ll hear about it when the story is complete. Much better that way.”

  “Er … if Ketteridge comes to visit, do you wish me to have Mrs Elliott say you are not receiving visitors?”

  “Heavens no. I certainly possess enough duplicity for that degree of deception.”

  I got up from the bed. “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night, Mary. I wish you luck.”

  “Thank you.” I turned to go.

  “There was,” he said thoughtfully, “another sort of fraud.”

  I stopped and waited.

  “It involved tin, though,” he said.

  I came back to his side and sat down again. “What happened?”