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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes
- Sprache: Englisch
In the eerie wasteland of Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes summons his devoted wife and partner, Mary Russell, from her studies at Oxford to aid the investigation of a death and some disturbing phenomena of a decidedly supernatural origin. Through the mists of the moor there have been sightings of a spectral coach made of bones carrying a woman long-ago accused of murdering her husband--and of a hound with a single glowing eye. Returning to the scene of one of his most celebrated cases, The Hound of the Baskervilles, Holmes and Russell investigate a mystery darker and more unforgiving than the moors themselves.
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Seitenzahl: 499
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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PRAISE FOR LAURIE R. KING
‘The Mary Russell series is the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today, and this is the best instalment yet’
Lee Child
‘These … are bestselling books because Laurie R. King captures the voice and character of Holmes as well as any of the thousand and more pastiches that have been written in imitation of Conan Doyle. But this is more than a mere copy. The narrative … is completely absorbing and motivates the reader to want to read the rest of the series’
Historical Novels Review
‘Excellent … King never forgets the true spirit of Conan Doyle’
Chicago Tribune
‘Outstanding examples of the Sherlock Holmes pastiche … the depiction of Holmes and the addition of his partner, Mary, is superbly done’
Mystery Women
‘All [Laurie R. King books] without exception, leave me with a feeling of immense satisfaction at the quality of the story and the writing’
It’s a Crime Blog
THE MOOR
LAURIE R. KING
For Ruth Cavin, editor extraordinaire, with undying thanks and affection. A blessing on you and your house
Contents
EDITOR’S PREFACE
THIS IS THE FOURTH manuscript to be recovered from a trunk full of whatnot that was dropped on my doorstep some years ago. The various odds and ends clothing, a pipe, bits of string, a few rocks, some old books, and one valuable necklace might have been taken for some eccentric’s grab bag or (but for the necklace) a clearing-out of attic rubbish intended for the dump, except that at the bottom lay the manuscripts.
I thought that they had been sent to me because the author was dead, and for some unknown reason chose to send me the memorabilia of her past. However, since the publication of the first Mary Russell book, I have received a handful of communications as ill assorted as the original contents of the trunk, and I have begun to suspect that the author herself is behind them.
It should be noted that in the course of her story, Ms Russell tends to combine the actual names of people and places with other names that are unknown. Some of these thinly disguise true identities; others are impenetrable. Similarly, she seems to have taken some pains to conceal actual sites on the moor while at the same time referring to others, by name or description, that are easily identifiable. A walker on Dartmoor, therefore, will not find Baskerville Hall in the area given, and the characteristics of the Okemont River do not correspond precisely with those in the manuscript. I can only assume she did it deliberately, for her own purposes.
The chapter headings are taken from several of Sabine Baring-Gould’s books, with the sources cited at each.
CHAPTER ONE
When I obtained a holiday from my books, I mounted my pony and made for the moor.
– A BOOK OF DARTMOOR
THETELEGRAM IN MY hand read:
RUSSELL NEED YOU IN DEVONSHIRE. IF FREE TAKE EARLIEST TRAIN CORYTON. IF NOT FREE COME ANYWAY. BRING COMPASS. HOLMES
To say I was irritated would be an understatement. We had only just pulled ourselves from the mire of a difficult and emotionally draining case and now, less than a month later, with my mind firmly turned to the work awaiting me in this, my spiritual home, Oxford, my husband and long-time partner Sherlock Holmes proposed with this peremptory telegram to haul me away into his world once more. With an effort, I gave my landlady’s housemaid a smile, told her there was no reply (Holmes had neglected to send the address for a response – no accident on his part), and shut the door. I refused to speculate on why he wanted me, what purpose a compass would serve, or indeed what he was doing in Devon at all, since when last I had heard he was setting off to look into an interesting little case of burglary from an impregnable vault in Berlin. I squelched all impulse to curiosity, and returned to my desk.
Two hours later the girl interrupted my reading again, with another flimsy envelope. This one read:
ALSO SIX INCH MAPS EXETER TAVISTOCK OKEHAMPTON, CLOSE YOUR BOOKS. LEAVE NOW.
HOLMES
Damn the man, he knew me far too well.
I found my heavy brass pocket compass in the back of a drawer. It had never been quite the same since being first cracked and then drenched in an aqueduct beneath Jerusalem some four years before, but it was an old friend and it seemed still to work reasonably well. I dropped it into a similarly well-travelled rucksack, packed on top of it a variety of clothing to cover the spectrum of possibilities that lay between arctic expedition and tiara-topped dinner with royalty (neither of which, admittedly, were beyond Holmes’ reach), added the book on Judaism in mediaeval Spain that I had been reading, and went out to buy the requested stack of highly detailed six-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps of the south-western portion of England.
At Coryton, in Devon, many hours later, I found the station deserted and dusk fast closing in. I stood there with my rucksack over my shoulder, boots on feet, and hair in cap, listening to the train chuff away towards the next minuscule stop. An elderly married couple had also got off here, climbed laboriously into the sagging farm cart that awaited them, and been driven away. I was alone. It was raining. It was cold.
There was a certain inevitability to the situation, I reflected, and dropped my rucksack to the ground to remove my gloves, my waterproof, and a warmer hat. Straightening up, I happened to turn slightly and noticed a small, light-coloured square tacked up to the post by which I had walked. Had I not turned, or had it been half an hour darker, I should have missed it entirely.
Russell it said on the front. Unfolded, it proved to be a torn-off scrap of paper on which I could just make out the words, in Holmes’ writing:
Lew House is two miles north.
Do you know the words to ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ or ‘Widdecombe Fair’?
– H.
I dug back into the rucksack, this time for a torch. When I had confirmed that the words did indeed say what I had thought, I tucked the note away, excavated clear to the bottom of the rucksack for the compass to check which branch of the track fading into the murk was pointing north, and set out.
I hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant by that note. I had heard the two songs, one a thumping hymn and the other one of those overly precious folk songs, but I did not know their words other than one song’s decidedly ominous (to a Jew) introductory image of Christian soldiers marching behind their ‘cross of Jesus’ and the other’s endless and drearily jolly chorus of ‘Uncle Tom Cobbley and all’. In the first place, when I took my infidel self into a Christian church it was not usually of the sort wherein such hymns were standard fare, and as for the second, well, thus far none of my friends had succumbed to the artsy allure of sandals, folk songs, and Morris dancing. I had not seen Holmes in nearly three weeks, and it did occur to me that perhaps in the interval my husband had lost his mind.
Two miles is no distance at all on a smooth road on a sunny morning, but in the wet and moonless dark in which I soon found myself, picking my way down a slick, rutted track, following the course of a small river which I could not see, but could hear, smell, and occasionally step in, two miles was a fair trek. And there was something else as well: I felt as if I were being followed, or watched. I am not normally of a nervous disposition, and when I have such feelings I tend to assume that they have some basis in reality, but I could hear nothing more solid than the rain and the wind, and when I stopped there were no echoing splashes of feet behind me. It was simply a sense of Presence in the night; I pushed on, trying to ignore it.
I stayed to the left when the track divided, and was grateful to find, when time came to cross the stream, that a bridge had been erected across it. Not that wading through the water would have made me much wetter, and admittedly it would have cleared my lower extremities of half a hundred weight of mud, but the bridge as a solid reminder of Civilisation in the form of county councils I found encouraging.
Having crossed the stream, I now left its burble behind me, exchanging the hiss of rain on water for the thicker noises of rain on mud and vegetation, and I was just telling myself that it couldn’t be more than another half mile when I heard a faint thread of sound. Another hundred yards and I could hear it above the suck and plop of my boots; fifty more and I was on top of it.
It was a violin, playing a sweet, plaintive melody, light and slow and shot through with a profound and permanent sadness. I had never, to my knowledge, heard the tune before, although it had the bone-deep familiarity possessed by all things that are very old. I did, however, know the hands that wielded the bow.
‘Holmes?’ I said into the dark.
He finished the verse, drawing out the long final note, before he allowed the instrument to fall silent.
‘Hello, Russell. You took your time.’
‘Holmes, I hope there is a good reason for this.’
He did not answer, but I heard the familiar sounds of violin and bow being put into a case. The latches snapped, followed by the vigorous rustle of a waterproof being donned. I turned on the torch in time to see Holmes stepping out of the small shelter of a roofed gate set into a stonewall. He paused, looking thoughtfully at the tell-tale inundation of mud up my right side to the elbow, the result of a misstep into a pothole.
‘Why did you not use the torch, coming up the road?’ he asked.
‘I, er …’ I was embarrassed. ‘I thought there was someone following me. I didn’t want to give him the advantage of a torchlight.’
‘Following you?’ he said sharply, half turning to squint down the road.
‘Watching me. That back-of-the-neck feeling.’
I saw his face clearly by the light of the torch. ‘Ah yes. Watching you. That’ll be the moor.’
‘The Moor?’ I said in astonishment. I knew where I was, of course, but for an instant the book I had been reading on the train was closer to mind than my sense of geography, and I was confronted by the brief mental image of a dark-skinned scimitar-bearing Saracen lurking along a Devonshire country lane.
‘Dartmoor. It’s just there.’ He nodded over his shoulder. ‘It rises up in a great wall, four or five miles away, and although you can’t see it from here, it casts a definite presence over the surrounding countryside. You’ll meet it tomorrow. Come,’ he said, turning up the road. ‘Let us take to the warm and dry.’
I left the torch on now. It played across the hedgerow on one side and a stone wall on the other, illuminating for a moment a French road sign (some soldier’s wartime souvenir, no doubt), giving us a brief glimpse of headstones in a churchyard just before we turned off into a smaller drive. A thick layer of rotting leaves from the row of half-bare elms and copper beeches over our heads gave way to a cultivated garden – looking more neglected than even the season and the rain would explain, but nonetheless clearly intended to be a garden – and finally one corner of a two-storey stone house, the small pieced panes of its tall windows reflecting the torch’s beam. The near corner was dark, but farther along, some of the windows glowed behind curtains, and the light from a covered porch spilt its welcome out across the weedy drive and onto a round fountain. We ducked inside the small space, and had begun to divest ourselves of the wettest of our outer garments when the door opened in front of us.
In the first instant I thought it was a butler standing there, the sort of lugubrious aged retainer a manor house of this size would have, as seedy and tired as the house itself, and as faithful and long-serving. It was his face, however, more than the old-fashioned clerical collar and high-buttoned frock coat he wore, that straightened my spine. Stooped with age he might be, but this was no servant.
The tall old man leant on his two walking sticks and took his time looking me over through the wire spectacles he wore. He examined the tendrils of escaped hair that straggled wetly down my face, the slime of mud up my clothing, the muck-encrusted boot I held in my hand, and the sodden stocking on the foot from which I had just removed the boot. Eventually he shifted his gaze to that of my lawfully wedded husband.
‘We have been waiting for this person?’ he asked.
Holmes turned to look at me, and his long mouth twitched – minutely, but enough. Had it not been that going back into the night would have meant a close flirtation with pneumonia, I should immediately have laced my boot back on and left those two sardonic males to their own company. Instead, I let the boot drop to the stone floor, sending small clots of mud slopping about the porch (some of which, I was pleased to see, ended up on Holmes’ trouser leg), and bent to my rucksack. It was more or less dry, as I had been wearing it underneath the waterproof (a procedure which made me resemble a hunchback and left the coat gaping open in the front, but at least guaranteed that I should have a dry change of clothing when I reached my destination). I snatched at the buckles with half-frozen fingers, jerked out the fat bundle of cloth-mounted, large-scale maps, and threw it in the direction of Holmes. He caught it.
‘The maps you asked for,’ I said coldly. ‘When is the next train out of Coryton?’
Holmes had the grace to look discomfited, if briefly, but the old man in the doorway simply continued to look as if he were smelling something considerably more unpleasant than sodden wool. Neither of them answered me, but Holmes’ next words were in a voice that verged on gentle, tantamount to an apology.
‘Come, Russell. There’s a fire and hot soup. You’ll take your death out here.’
Somewhat mollified, I removed my other boot, picked up my rucksack, and followed him into the house, stepping past the cleric, who shut the door behind us. When I was inside and facing the man, Holmes made his tardy introductions.
‘Gould, may I present my partner and, er, wife, Mary Russell. Russell, this is the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould.’
One would think, I reflected as I shook the old man’s large hand, that with two and a half years of marriage behind him the idea of having a wife would come more easily, at least to his tongue. However, I had to admit that we both normally referred to the other as partner rather than spouse, and the form of our married life was in truth more that of two individuals than that of a bound couple. Aside, of course, from certain activities rendered legal by a bit of paper.
The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould made the minimum polite response and suggested that Holmes show me upstairs. I wondered if I was to be allowed back down afterwards, or if I ought to say goodbye to him now. Holmes caught up a candlestick and lit its taper from a lamp on the table, and I followed him out of the warmth, through a dark-panelled passageway (my stockings squelching on the thin patches in the carpeting), and up what by the wavering light appeared a very nicely proportioned staircase lined with eighteenth-century faces.
‘Holmes,’ I hissed. ‘Who on earth is that old goat? And when are you going to tell me what you dragged me down here for?’
‘That “old goat” is the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, squire of Lew Trenchard, antiquarian, self-educated expert in half a dozen fields, and author of more books than any other man listed in the British Museum. Hymnist, collector of country music—’
A small light went on in my mind. ‘“Onward Christian Soldiers”? “Widdecombe Fair”?’
‘He wrote the one and collected the other. Rural parson,’ he continued, ‘novelist, theologian’ – Yes, I thought, I had heard of him somewhere, connected with dusty tomes of archaic ideas – ‘amateur architect, amateur archaeologist, amateur of many things. He is one of the foremost living experts on the history and life of Dartmoor. He is a client with a case. He is also,’ he added, ‘a friend.’
While we were talking I had followed the candle up the stairway with its requisite portraits of dim and disapproving ancestors and through a small gallery with a magnificent plaster ceiling, but at this final statement I stopped dead. Fortunately, he did not go much farther, but opened a door and stepped into a room. After a moment, I followed, and found him turning up the lights in a nice-sized bedroom with rose-strewn paper on the walls (peeling up slightly at the seams) and a once-good, rose-strewn carpet on the floor. I put the rucksack on a chair that looked as if it had seen worse usage and sat gingerly on the edge of the room’s soft, high bed.
‘Holmes,’ I said. ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever heard you describe anyone other than Watson as a friend.’
‘No?’ He bent to set a match to the careful arrangement of sticks and logs that had been laid in the fire place. There was a large radiator in the room, but like all the others we had passed, it stood sullen and cold in its corner. ‘Well, it is true. I do not have many.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘Oh, I’ve known Baring-Gould for a long time. I used him on the Baskerville case, of course. I needed a local informant into the life of the natives and his was the name that turned up, a man who knew everything and went everywhere. We correspond on occasion, he came to see me in Baker Street two or three times, and once in Sussex.’
I couldn’t see how this sparse contact qualified the man for friendship, but I didn’t press him.
‘I shouldn’t imagine he “goes everywhere” now.’
‘No. Time is catching up with him.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Nearly ninety, I believe. Five years ago you’d have thought him a hearty seventy. Now there are days when he does not get out of bed.’
I studied him closely, hearing a trace of sorrow beneath his matter-of-fact words. Totally unexpected and, having met the object of this affection, quite inexplicable.
‘You said he had a case for us?’
‘He will review the facts after we’ve eaten. There’s a bath next door, although I don’t know that I would recommend it; there seems to be no hot water at the moment.’
CHAPTER TWO
There existed formerly a belief on Dartmoor that it was hunted over at night in storm by a black sportsman, with black fire-breathing hounds, called ‘Wish Hounds.’
They could be heard in full cry, and occasionally the blast of the hunter’s horn on stormy nights.
– A BOOK OF THE WEST: DEVON
HOLMES LEFT, AND I hurriedly bundled my wet, muddy clothes into a heap, scrubbed with limited success at my face and arms in the frigid water of the corner basin, and pinned my hair into a tight, damp knot. I hesitated briefly before deciding on the woollen frock – perhaps I had better not test the old man’s sensibilities by continuing to appear in trousers. Ninety-year-old men probably didn’t believe that women had legs above the ankle.
The frou-frou of women’s clothing takes longer to don than simple trousers, but I did my best and in a few minutes carried the candlestick back out into the gallery under that intriguing ceiling, which had struck me as not quite right somehow. I allowed myself to be distracted by the paintings (some of them very bad) and the bric-a-brac (some of it belonging in a museum), and stood for a long moment in front of a startling African-style wood carving that formed part of a door surround leading to one of the bedrooms. The proud, dark, nude female torso looked more like a fertility shrine than the decoration to a Victorian bedroom; I know it would have given me pause to have passed that lady each time I was going to my bed.
I continued my slow perusal, meeting a few Baring-Goulds whose faces were more interesting than their artists’ techniques, and then made my way down the handsome stairs again in pursuit of the voices. When I came within earshot, Baring-Gould was speaking, sounding sternly critical.
‘—only two miles, for pity’s sake. I’ve done it in sleet at the age of fifty, and she can’t be more than twenty-five.’
‘I believe you’ll find she has more than ample stamina,’ Holmes replied easily. ‘That was irritation you saw, not exhaustion.’
‘But still, to fling the maps in your face in that manner—’
‘As I remember, you yourself had a very quick temper, even when you were considerably older than Russell.’
There was a pause, and then Baring-Gould began to chuckle. ‘You’re right there, Holmes. Do you remember the time that fool of an innkeeper outside of Tavistock tried to throw us out?’
‘I remember feeling grateful you weren’t wearing your collar.’
‘Good heavens, yes. I’d have been dubbed the Brawling Parson forevermore. But the look on the man’s face when you—’
Although I was certain that the reason Holmes had distracted his companion into this bout of masculine reminiscences was that he had heard my approach, I nevertheless counted slowly to thirty so as to allow the changed topic to establish itself before opening the door.
The stone fireplace was giving off more smoke than warmth, and the dank air was thick and cold. The long refectory table had been laid with three lonely places, with Baring-Gould in the middle with his back to the fire, and Holmes across from him. I came forward and sat in the chair to Holmes’ right. Our host made a brief obeisance to manners by raising his backside a fraction of an inch from the seat of the chair as I sat down, then he reached forward and removed the lid from the tureen of promised soup. No steam came out. By the time he had pronounced a grace and served us, the soup had cooled even more, and to top it off, when I tasted the tepid mixture, it was obvious that it had been made a day or several before.
Still, I ate it, and the fish course and the stewed rabbit that came after. The rabbit was bland and chewy, as was the custard that followed.
There was very little conversation during the meal, which suited me. I was pleased, too, at the lack of toothless slurping noises that old people so often succumb to when their hearing goes. If one discounted the actual food, it was a pleasant enough, if quiet, meal, and I was looking forward to an early entrance into the feather-bed and thick eiderdown I had felt on the bed upstairs.
This was not to be. Baring-Gould folded his table napkin and climbed stiffly to his feet, gathering his sticks from the side of his chair.
‘We will take coffee in the sitting room. That fire seems to be drawing better than this one. Probably a nest in the chimney.’
As we obediently trooped – slowly – behind him, I had the leisure to study his back. I realised that he was smaller than I had thought, probably barely an inch taller than my five feet eleven inches even when he was young. Now, stooped over his canes, he was considerably shorter than Holmes, but despite his obvious infirmity, his frame still gave the impression of strength, and he had eaten the tasteless food with the appetite of a young man.
He led us through to the adjoining room, which was indeed both warmer and less smoky. The curtains were drawn against the night, and the steady slap of rain against the window-panes underscored the physical comfort of the room. If the company inside the cosy room made my feminist hackles rise, well, I was always free to slog back to the train tomorrow.
‘I must apologise for the non-functional state of my radiators,’ Baring-Gould said over his shoulder to me. ‘They are normally quite efficient – I had them installed when my wife’s rheumatism became bad – but yesterday we awoke to discover that the boiler gave no heat, and I am afraid the only person competent to quell the demons is my temporarily absent housekeeper. Like its master, my house is becoming tired.’ I reassured my host that I was quite comfortable, and, although I did not think he believed me, he allowed my reassurances to stand.
When we reached the sitting room, Baring-Gould made for a well-worn armchair and addressed himself to Holmes. ‘I received a gift today that I think might interest you. That small jug on the sideboard. Metheglin. Ever tasted it?’ While he spoke, he propped his sticks against the side of an armchair and lowered himself into it, then reached to the side of the fireplace and picked up a meerschaum pipe with a stem nearly a yard long, which he proceeded to fill.
‘Not in some time,’ said Holmes. I looked at him sharply, but his face showed none of the humorous resignation I thought I had heard in his voice.
‘A powerful substance – I would suggest a small dose if you’re not accustomed to it. Distilled from heather honey. This batch is seven years old – I should warn you, never drink it if it’s less than three. Yes, I’ll have a drop. It helps to keep out the cold,’ he said, in answer to Holmes’ gesture. I took my husband’s unintentional hint and demurred, reassuring my host that coffee would be sufficient to warm me. While they discussed the merits of the contents of their glasses, I examined my surroundings.
The room was panelled in oak and had a decorative plaster roof similar to that in the gallery upstairs. Up to head height the panelling was simple oak, but above that the wood was carved in ornate arches framing dimly seen, painted figures that marched around the entire room, all of them, as far as I could tell, posturing ladies in billowing draperies. I took up a lamp from the table and held it to the figure there, a woman with dogs held straining against their leads: Persuasio it said in a caption above her. Above the fire I found portraits of Gloria and next to her, Laetitia; between all the figures alternated the phrases Gold bydeth ever bright and what was, very roughly, the French equivalent, Toujours sans tache.
‘The one over there might be of interest to you,’ Baring-Gould suggested, and tipped his head at the inner wall.
‘Gaudium Vitae?’ I asked doubtfully, looking at the figure in her gold tunic, its gold ties blowing dramatically behind her and a massive gold chalice held nonchalantly in slim fingertips at the end of an outstretched arm.
‘I think he means the next one,’ Holmes said.
In the panel to the left was a woman clothed in orange garments flecked with a design of black splotches that looked alarmingly like huge ants. She had wings sprouting from her temples, and her right hand pointed at a flying white bird that might have been a dove, although it looked more like a goose. At her feet a small white pug-faced dog, tail erect, had its nose to the ground, snuffling busily. Above the wings the caption read, Investigatio. I turned to look at Baring-Gould, suspecting a breath of humour, but he was no longer paying attention to anything but his yard-long pipe. I ran the lamplight over a few more: Valor (this figure was a man, wearing a short tunic), Harmonia with a cello, Vigilantia, Ars, Scientia – a room of virtues.
‘Daisy painted them. My daughter Margaret,’ he explained.
‘Really? What was here before?’ There must have been something, as the upper portion of wall was obviously designed for decorations. I wondered what Elizabethan treasure had been lost in this slightly clumsy restoration.
‘Nothing. They are new. Not new, of course, but the walls were built since I came here, to my design.’
I examined the walls more closely. They did look considerably fresher than the seventeenth century.
‘Local craftsmen, my pattern based on a house nearby, my daughter’s painting – I restored an Elizabethan house out of a small and frankly decrepit base.’
‘The ceilings too?’
‘Nearly everything. I am particularly proud of the fireplace in the hall. It belongs to the reign of Elizabeth, without a doubt.’
The idea of a heavily restored and adapted original explained the very slightly odd feel to the gallery ceiling upstairs – far too ornate for a country house, and much too new and strong for the age of its design.
‘The ceilings are very beautiful,’ I said. ‘Does your daughter still live here with you?’
‘No. Most of my children have scattered, making their way as far afield as Sarawak, where one of my sons is with the white rajah. Although one of my daughters lives just up the road in Dunsland, and my eldest son and his American wife have lived in this house for the last few years. I think they thought me too feeble to be alone.’ His glare dared me to argue. ‘At present they are in America, where Marion’s mother is ill. I admit, I am enjoying my respite from the American regime.’
‘How many children have you?’
‘I had fifteen. Thirteen still living. Twelve,’ he corrected himself, without elaboration.
His response brought me up short – not the numbers, which were common enough, so much as the vivid contrast it evoked, of this solitary house with its silent rooms compared to the vital place it must have been, a busy household, throbbing with life, ringing with footsteps and voices and movement. I put the lamp back on the sideboard and took up the chair Holmes had pulled over to the fire for me. I accepted coffee, declined brandy, and waited with little patience while pipes were got going. Finally, Baring-Gould cleared his throat and began to speak, in the manner of a carefully thought out speech.
‘My family has lived on this land since 1626. My name combines two families: the Crusader John Gold, or Gould, who in 1220 was granted an estate in Somerset for his part in the siege of Damietta, and that of the Baring family, whom you may know from their interests in banking. My grandfather brought the two names together at the end of the eighteenth century when he, a Baring, inherited Lew. After my birth we lived a few miles north of here, in Bratton Clovelly, but my father, who was an Indian Army officer invalided home, did not like living in one place for long, so when I was three years old he packed us and the family silver into a carriage and left for Europe. My entire childhood was spent moving from one city to another, pausing only long enough for the post to catch us up. My father was very fond of Dickens,’ he explained. ‘When his stories came out, I used occasionally to wish it might be a long one, so that we might be tied down for a longer period while we waited for the instalments to reach us. Although I will admit that Nicholas Nickleby was a mixed blessing, as it found us in winter, in Cologne, living in tents.
‘Still, it was an interesting childhood, and I scraped together enough education to enable me to hold my own at Clare in Cambridge. I took holy orders in 1864, and spent the next years doing parish work in Yorkshire and East Mersea.
‘My father was the eldest son. His younger brother, as was the custom, had taken holy orders, and was the rector here at Lew Trenchard. It wasn’t until he died in 1881 that I could come and take up the post, as squire as well as parson, for which I had been preparing myself.
‘You see, when I was fifteen years old I came here, and my roots found their proper soil. I had known the moor before, of course, but on that visit I saw it, saw this house and the church, with the eyes of a young adult, and I knew what my future life was to be: I would restore the church, restore this house, and restore the spiritual life of my parish.
‘It has taken me forty years, but I like to think that I have succeeded in two of those endeavours, and perhaps made inroads into the third.
‘What I had not envisioned, at that tender age, was the extent to which Dartmoor would lay its hands on me, heart and mind and body. It is a singular place, wild and harsh in its beauty, but with air so clear and pure one can taste it, so filled with goodness that illness has no hold there, and ailing young men are cured of their infirmities. It is odd, but although no part of it falls within the bounds of my parish, nonetheless I feel a responsibility that goes beyond legal boundaries.’ He stopped and leant forward, looking first at Holmes and then, for a longer time, at me, to see if we understood, and indeed, there was no mistaking the man’s passion for the moor. He eased himself back, not entirely satisfied but trusting to some degree in our goodwill. He shut his eyes for a moment, rallying his strength following the long speech, then opened them again with a sharp, accusing glance worthy of Holmes himself.
‘There is something wrong on the moor,’ he said bluntly. ‘I want you to discover what it is, and stop it.’
I looked sideways at Holmes, in time to see his automatic twitch of impatience slide into an expression of quiet amusement.
‘Details, Gould,’ he murmured. The old man scowled at him, and then, to my surprise, there was a brief twinkle in the back of his keen eyes before he dropped his gaze to the fire, assembling his thoughts.
‘You remember the problem we had with Stapleton and the hound? Perhaps I should explain,’ he interrupted himself, recalling my presence, and proceeded to retell the story known to most of the English-speaking world, and probably most of the non-English-speaking world as well.
‘Some thirty years ago a young Canadian inherited a title and its manor up on the edge of the moor. The previous holder, old Sir Charles, had died of apparently natural causes (he had a bad heart) but under odd circumstances, circumstances that gave rise to a lot of rumours concerning an old family curse that involved a spectral black dog.’
‘The Hound of the Baskervilles.’
‘Yes, that’s it, although the family name is not actually Baskerville. As I remember, Baskerville was the driver your friend Doyle used when he came up here, was it not?’ he asked Holmes.
‘I believe so,’ said Holmes drily, although friend was not the word I might have chosen to describe his relationship with Dr Watson’s literary agent and collaborator. Baring-Gould went on.
‘The moor is poor ground agriculturally, but rich in songs and stories and haunts aplenty: the jacky-twoad with his glowing head and the long-legged Old Stripe, the church grims and bahrghests that creep over the moor, seeking out the lone traveller, the troublesome pixies that lead one astray, and the dogs: the solitary black animals with glowing eyes or the pack of coal-black, fire-breathing hounds leading the dark huntsman and his silent mount. Of course, any student of folklore could tell you of a hundred sources of devil dogs, with or without glowing eyes. Heavens, I could fill a volume on spectral hounds alone – the dark huntsman, the Pad-foot, the wisht-hounds. In fact, in my youth I came across a particularly interesting Icelandic variation—’
‘Perhaps another time, Gould,’ Holmes suggested firmly.
‘What? Oh yes. The family curse of the Baskervilles. At any rate, old Sir Charles died, young Sir Henry came, and the mysterious happenings escalated. Holmes came out here to look things over, and he soon discovered that one of the Baskerville neighbours on the moor was an illegitimate descendant who had his eye on inheriting, and made use of the ghost stories, frightening the old man to death and attempting to harass the young baronet into a fatal accident. Stapleton was his name, a real throwback to the wicked seventeenth-century Baskerville who was the original source of the curse, for his maltreatment of a young girl. Stapleton even resembled the painting of old Baskerville, didn’t he, Holmes? In fact, I meant to send you a chapter of my Old Country Life where I discuss inherited characteristics and atavistic traits.’
‘You did.’
‘Did I? Oh good.’
‘So what has the Stapleton case to do with Dartmoor now?’ Holmes prodded.
‘I do not know except—’ He dropped his voice, as if someone, or, something, might be listening at the window. ‘They tell me the Hound has been seen again, running free on the moor.’
I cannot deny that the old man’s words brought a finger of primitive ice down my spine. A loose dog chasing sheep is a problem, but hardly reason for superstitious fears. However, the night, my fatigue, and the stark fact that this apparently sensible and undeniably intelligent old man was himself frightened, all came together to walk a goose over my grave. I shivered.
Fortunately, Holmes did not notice, because the words also had an effect on the man who had uttered them. He slumped into his chair, suddenly grey and exhausted, his eyes closed, his purplish lips slack. I stood in alarm, fearing he had suffered an attack of some kind, but Holmes went briskly out of the door, returning in a minute with the cheerful, rather stupid-looking woman who had brought our dinner. She laid a strong hand on Baring-Gould’s arm, and he opened his eyes and smiled weakly.
‘I’ll be fine in a moment, Mrs Moore. Too much excitement.’
‘On top of everything else, the cold and the worry an’ all. Mrs Elliott will never forgive me if I let you take ill. Best you go to bed now, Rector. I’ve laid a nice fire in your room, and tomorrow Mrs Elliott will be back and the heat’ll be on.’ He began to protest, but she already had him on his feet and moving towards the door.
‘Time enough tomorrow, Gould,’ Holmes called. We followed the sounds as the woman half-carried her easily bullied charge upstairs to his bed. A far-off door closed, and Holmes dropped back into his chair and took up his pipe.
‘Twenty years ago that man could walk me into the ground,’ he said.
I took some split logs from the basket and tossed them onto the fire before returning to my own chair. ‘So I came all the way here to help you look for a dog,’ I said flatly.
‘Don’t be obtuse, Russell,’ he snapped. ‘I thought you of all people would see past the infirmities.’
‘To what? A superstitious old parson? A busybody who thinks the world is his parish – or rather, his manor?’
Holmes suddenly took his pipe out of his mouth, and said in pure East-End Cockney, ‘’E didn’t ’alf ruffle yer feathers, didn’e, missus?’
After a minute, reluctantly, I grinned back at him. ‘Very well, I admit I was peeved to begin with, and he didn’t exactly endear himself.’
‘He never has been much of one for the politic untruth, and you did appear very bedraggled.’
‘I promise I’ll behave myself when I meet him again. But only if you tell me why you brought me down here.’
‘Because I needed you.’
Of all the clever, manipulative answers I had been braced to meet, I had not expected one of such complete simplicity. His transparent honesty made me deeply suspicious, but the real possibility that he was telling the unadorned truth swept the feet out from under my resolve to stand firm against him. My suspicions and thoughts chased each other around for a while, until eventually I simply burst out laughing.
‘All right, Holmes, you win. I’m here. What do you want me to do?’
He rose and went to the sideboard to replenish his glass (not, I noticed, from the small stoneware jug that held the metheglin) and returned with a glass in his other hand as well, which he placed on the table next to my chair before moving over to stand in front of the fire. He took a deep draught from his drink, put it down on the floor beside his foot (as there was no mantelpiece), and took up his pipe. I sank down into the arms of the chair, growing more apprehensive by the minute: All of this delay meant either that he was trying to decide how best to get around the defences that I thought I had already let down, or that he was uncertain in his own mind about how to proceed. Either way, it was not a good sign.
He succeeded in getting his pipe to draw cleanly, retrieved his glass, and settled down in his chair, stretching his long legs towards the fire. Another slow draught half emptied the glass, and with his chin on his chest and his pipe in his hand, he looked into the fresh flames and began to speak.
‘As Gould intimated, Dartmoor is a most peculiar place,’ he began. ‘Physically it comprises a high, wide bowl of granite, some three hundred and fifty square miles covered with a thin, peaty soil and scattered with outcrops of stone. It functions as a huge sponge, the peat storing its rain all winter to feed the Teign, the Dart, the Tavy, and all the other streams and rivers that are born here. The floor of the moor is a thousand feet above the surrounding Devonshire countryside, from which it rises abruptly. It is a thing apart, a place unconnected with the rest of the world, and it is not inappropriate that a very harsh prison was set in its midst. Indeed, to many, Dartmoor is synonymous with the prison, although that facility is but a bump on the broad face of the moor.’
‘I have seen the Yorkshire moors,’ I said.
‘Then you’ve a very rough idea of the ground here, but not of Dartmoor’s special character. It is much more of a hortus conclusus, although this walled garden is no warm and fruitful paradise, but a rocky place of gorse and bracken. As Gould said, it does not generously part with its wealth. It is a land of great strength – men have broken their health and their fortunes trying to beat it down and shape it to their ends, but the moor wins out in the end. The men who chose to build a prison here set great value on breaking the spirits of the men they were guarding. The moor will not be farmed, nor made to grow any but the simplest crops. Tin miners have been the only men to draw much money from the place, and even they had to work hard for it. On a basic level, however, it has provided spare sustenance to its inhabitants for thousands of years: One finds mediaeval stone crosses mingling with Neolithic ruins and early Victorian engine houses.
‘Most of the moor is a chase or forest, which as I’m sure you know does not necessarily mean trees, and here most emphatically does not. In this sense, a forest denotes a wild reserve for the crown to hunt, although I imagine the Prince of Wales must find the game somewhat limited on the moor itself, unless he is fond of rabbits. Much of it is a common, grazed by the adjoining parishes with fees collected at a yearly gathering up of the animals, called the ‘drift’. Other parts of it are privately held, with an interesting legal right of a holder’s survivors to claim an additional eight acres upon the death of each subsequent holder. These ‘new-takes’ at one time ate into the duchy’s holdings, but are not often claimed now, because the traditional moor men are dying off, and their sons are moving to the cities. Do you know, when I was here thirty years ago it was not impossible to find a child of the moor who had never seen a coin of the realm? Now—’ He gave out a brief cough of laughter. ‘The other day in the Saracen’s Head pub, right out in the middle of the moor, one of the natives was singing an Al Jolson song.’
‘You’ve been up on the moor, then? Recently?’ I asked.
‘I travelled across it from Exeter, yes.’
A hike like that might account for his heavier use of brandy than normal, I thought, as well as his position in front of the hottest part of the fire. He went on before I could ask after his rheumatism.
‘The people of the moor are what one might expect: hard as granite, with low expectations of what life has to give, often nearly illiterate but with a superb verbal memory and possessed of the occasional flare of poetry and imagination. They are, in fact, like the tors they live among, those odd piles of fantastically weathered granite that grace the tops of a number of hills: rock hard, well worn and decidedly quirky.’
‘A description which could also apply to our host,’ I murmured, and took a sip of the surprisingly good and undoubtedly old brandy in my glass.
‘Indeed. He may not have been born on the moor itself, but it is in him now. It is not paternalism speaking in him – or not only paternalism. He is truly and deeply concerned about the stirs and currents abroad on the moor. I wouldn’t be surprised if he can feel them from here.’
‘So you agree there’s something wrong up there?’ I heard the last two words come out of my mouth with a definite emphasis, and thought with irritation that this habit of referring to a deserted bit of landscape as if it were another planet seemed to be contagious.
‘There’s certainly something stirring, though truth to tell I cannot read the currents well enough to see if it be for ill or not. I will say I received a faint impression that the moor was readying itself for a convulsion of some sort, though whether an eruption or a sudden flowering I couldn’t say.’
He stopped abruptly and looked askance at the empty glass balanced on the arm of his chair, and I had to agree, it was very unusual to hear him wax quite so poetic. He picked up the glass and put it firmly away from him onto the nearby table, then settled back with his pipe, not meeting my eyes.
‘As with any isolated setting, the moor seethes with stories of the supernatural. Unsophisticated minds are apt to see corpse lights or ‘jacky-twoads’ where the scientist would see swamp gas, and long and lonely nights encourage the mind to wander down paths poorly illuminated by the light of reason. The people firmly believe in ghostly dogs and wraiths of the dying, in omen-bearing ravens and standing stones that walk in the dark of the moon. And pixies – the pixies, or pygsies, are everywhere, waiting to lead the unsuspecting traveller astray. The author of a respectable guidebook, published just a few years ago, recommends that the lost walker turn his coat out so as to avoid being “pygsie-led” – and he’s only half joking.’
‘What does Baring-Gould make of all that? He’s an educated man, after all.’
‘Gould?’ Holmes laughed. ‘He’s the most gullible of the lot, full of the most awful balderdash. He’ll tell you how a neighbour’s horse panicked one night at the precise spot where a man would be killed some hours later, how another man carried on a conversation with his wife who was dying ten miles away, how – Revelations, visitations, spooks, you name it – he’s worse than Conan Doyle, with his fairies and his spiritualism.’
All this made the purported friendship sound less and less likely. Sherlock Holmes was not one to suffer fools even under coercion, yet he was apparently here under his own free will, and without resentment. There was undoubtedly something in the situation that I had thus far failed to grasp.
‘I was here for some weeks during the Stapleton case,’ he was saying, ‘and since then once or twice for shorter periods of time, so I have a basic working knowledge of the moor dweller and his sense of the universe. The stories he tells are a rich mixture that range from the humorous to the macabre. They may be violent and occasionally, shall I say, earthy, but they are rarely brutal and have thus far appeared free of those terrors of the urban dweller, the two-legged monster and the plagues of foreign diseases.
‘This time it is different. In two days, nursing my beer in the corners of three moorland public houses, the stories I heard could as easily have come from Whitechapel or Limehouse. Oh, there are the standard stories too, the everyday fare of the moor dwellers, although the recent preoccupation with ghostly carriages and spectral dogs that has Gould worried does, I agree, seem unusually vivid and worth investigating. Still, they are a far way from the other stories I heard, which were along the lines of a dark man with a razor-sharp blade sacrificing a ram on top of a tor and drinking its blood, and a young girl found ravished and dismembered, and an old woman drowned in a stream.’
‘Have these things happened?’ I asked sharply.
‘They have not.’
‘None of them?’
‘As far as I can discover, they are not even patched-together exaggerations of actual incidents. They seem to be rumours made up of whole cloth.’
I could think of no proper response, but as I took another swallow from my glass, I was aware for the first time of a feeling of uneasiness.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’
‘Except,’ he added, ‘for one.’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah indeed. The death of Josiah Gorton is both undeniable and mysterious. It happened three weeks ago, just after I left for Berlin. Gould’s letter took a week to find me, and by the time I got here the trail was both cold and confused.’
‘A common enough state of affairs for your cases,’ I commented.
‘True, but regrettable nonetheless. Josiah Gorton was a tin miner – although that may be a deceptive description. Tin seeker might be more accurate, one of a breed who wanders the moor, putting their noses into every rivulet and valley, poring over every stone pile in hopes of discovering small nuggets of tin that the more energetic miners of the past left behind. He spent his days fossicking through the deep-cut stream-beds and his nights in caves or shelters or the barns of farmers.
‘I met Gorton once, in fact, many years ago, and thought him a harmless enough character even then. He affected the dress of a gipsy, with a red kerchief around his throat, although when I met him he looked more like a pirate, with dark, oiled locks and a heavy frock coat too large for him. He was a colourful figure, proud of his freedom, and he had a goodly store of traditional songs tucked into the back of his head, which he would happily bring forth for the cost of a pint or a meal. He was a last relic of the old moor ‘songmen’, although his voice was giving way, and with more than three pints under his belt he tended to forget the words to some of the longer ballads. Still, he was tolerated with affection by the innkeepers and farmers, as a part of the scenery, and in particular by Gould, for whom Gorton had a special significance.
‘You need to understand that with all the work he has done in a wide variety of fields, Gould regards his greatest achievement in life to have been the collecting of West Country songs and melodies, a task begun more than thirty years ago and only reluctantly dropped when he became too old to take to the moor for days at a time. Josiah Gorton was one of his more important songmen. I suppose it could be said, by those of a psychologically analytical bent, that Gorton represents to Gould the fate of the moor, overcome by progress and forgotten in the shiny, shallow attractions of modernity.’ Holmes’ fastidious expression served to make it clear that he was merely acknowledging the possible explanation given by another discipline. He continued, ‘Whatever the explanation, there is no doubt that Gould is deeply troubled not only by the fact of Gorton’s death, but by the manner it came about.
‘On the night of Saturday, the fifteenth of September, Gorton was seen walking north past Watern Tor. You did study those maps you brought down, I presume?’
‘Not studied, no. I glanced at a couple of them.’
‘You didn’t?’ He sounded amazed and more than a bit disapproving. ‘What on earth were you doing all that time on the train?’
‘Reading,’ I said evenly. I actually had deliberately buried myself in the most arcane piece of theological history I could lay my hands upon, as a protest and counterbalance to the forces pulling me to Devonshire. In retrospect, it seemed a bit childish, but I bristled when Holmes gave me that look of his.
‘Reading,’ he repeated in a flat voice. ‘Wasting your time, Russell, with theological speculation and airy-fairy philosophising when there is work to be done.’
‘The work is yours, Holmes, not mine – I only agreed to bring you the maps. And the speculation of Jewish philosophers is as empirical as any of your conclusions.’
His only reply was a scornful examination of his pipe-bowl.
‘Admit it, Holmes,’ I pressed. ‘The only reason you so denigrate Talmudic studies is sheer envy over the fact that others perfected the art of deductive reasoning centuries before you were even born.’
He did not deign to answer, which meant that the point was irrefutably mine, so I drove home my advantage: ‘And besides that, Holmes, what I was reading does actually have some bearing on this case – or at least on its setting. Were you aware that in the seventeenth century Moorish raiders came as far as the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, taking slaves? Why, Baring-Gould might have relatives in Spain today.’
He did not admit defeat, but merely applied another match to his pipe and resumed the previous topic. ‘You must study the maps at the earliest opportunity. Watern Tor, since you do not know, is in a remote area in the northern portion of the moor. Gorton was seen there, heading west, on a Saturday evening, yet on the following Monday morning, thirty-six hours later, he was found miles away in the opposite direction, passed out in a drunken stupor in a rain-swollen leat on the southern reaches. He had a great lump on the back of his head and bog weeds in his hair, although there are no bogs in the part of the moor where he was found. He died a few hours later of his injuries and a fever, muttering all the while about his long, silent ride in Lady Howard’s carriage. He also said,’ Holmes added in the driest of voices, ‘that Lady Howard had a huge black dog.’
‘Huh,’ I grunted. ‘And did the dog have glowing eyes?’
‘Gorton neglected to say, and he was in no condition to respond to questions. There was one further and quite singular piece of testimony, however.’
I eyed him warily, mistrusting the sudden jauntiness of his manner. ‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. The farmer who found Gorton, and the farmer’s strapping son who helped carry the old miner to the house and fetched a doctor, both swear that in the soft ground beside the body, there were clear marks pressed firmly into the earth.’ I was hit by a cold jolt of apprehension. ‘The two men have become fixtures in the Saracen’s Head, telling and retelling the story of how they found Gorton’s body surrounded by—’
‘No! Oh no, Holmes, please.’ I put up my hand to stop his words, unable to bear what I could hear coming, a thundering evocation of one of the most extravagant phrases Conan Doyle ever employed. ‘Please, please don’t tell me that on the ground beside the body, Mr Holmes, there were the footprints of a gigantic hound.’
He removed his pipe from his mouth and stared at me. ‘What on earth are you talking about, Russell? I admit that I occasionally indulge in a touch of the dramatic, but surely you can’t believe me as melodramatic as that.’
I drew a relieved breath and settled back in my chair. ‘No, I suppose not. Forgive me, Holmes. Do continue.’
‘No,’ he continued, putting the stem of his pipe back into place. ‘I do not believe it would be possible to distinguish a hound’s spoor from that of an ordinary dog – not without a stretch of ground showing the animal’s loping stride. These were simply a confusion of prints.’
‘Do you mean to tell me …’ I began slowly.
‘Yes, Russell. There on the ground beside the body of Josiah Gorton were found’ – he paused to hold out his pipe and gaze in at the bowl, which seemed to me to be drawing just fine, before finishing the phrase – ‘the footprints of a very large dog.’
I dropped my head into my hands and left it there for a long time while my husband sucked in quiet satisfaction at his pipe.
‘Holmes,’ I said.
‘Yes, Russell.’
‘I am going to bed.’
‘A capital idea,’ he replied.
And so we did.
