The Moor

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The Moor

by Laurie R. King

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Copyright © 1998 by Laurie R. King

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Other Mystery Novels by Laurie R. King

Mary Russell Novels

A Letter of Mary

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

The Beekeeper's Apprentice

Kate Martinelli Novels

With Child

To Play the Fool

A Grave Talent

For Ruth Cavin,

editor extraordinaire,

with undying thanks and affection.

A blessing on you and your house.

WITH THANKS TO

Dr. Merriol Baring-Gould Almond and the Reverend David Shacklock, for correcting as many of my missteps as I would allow

The Reverend Geoffrey Ball, rector of Lew Trenchard Church

Mr. Bill Crum, a mine of information

Ms. Kate De Groot, for bringing Brother Adam to my attention

Mr. Dave German and the other helpful shepherds of Princetown's High Moorland Visitor Information Centre

Mr. James and Ms. Sue Murray, whose conversion of Lew House into Lewtrenchard Manor Hotel has been done with the same grace and warmth they show their visitors (and to Holly and Duma, who together do a very effective nocturnal imitation of the Hound)

Ms. Jo Pitesky, for the lost Russelism on page 28

Mr. David Scheiman (the real one), one of the good people

Ms. Mary Schnitzer, and to all of the readers.

They are not to be held responsible for any factual errors that may, either through misunderstanding or with malice afterthought, have stubbornly persisted into the final work. There are times, after all, when a writer must twist the truth in order to tell it.

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.

ONE

When I obtained a holiday from my books, I mounted my pony and made for the moor.

—A Book of Dartmoor

The telegram 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 longtime 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 southwestern 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 hundredweight 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 stone wall. He paused, looking thoughtfully at the telltale 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 torch-light."

"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 spilled 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 guarantied 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 good-bye 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 fireplace. 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."

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 froufrou 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 featherbed 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 windowpanes underscored the physical comfort of the room. If the company inside the cozy room made my feminist hackles rise, well, I was always free to slog back to the train tomorrow.

"I must apologise for the nonfunctional 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 gat 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 out-stretched 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 régime."

"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 installments to reach us. Although I will admit that Nicholas Nickelby 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 endeavors, 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 bahr-ghests 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 'newtakes' 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 ranges 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 streambeds 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.

THREE

Oh! these architects! how I detest them for the mischief they have done. I should like to cut off their hands.

—Further Reminiscences

It rained all that night, a quiet, steady rhythm that soothed me into a sleep so sound that, although I woke briefly in the early morning to the click and murmur of hot water pushing its way through cold radiator pipes, I went back to sleep, and did not wake fully until nearly eight o'clock. Finding to my satisfaction that the dawn noises had not been an hallucination, I bathed and dressed—in trousers, despite my host's sensibilities—and put up my hair, before making my way downstairs.

At the foot of the stairs I paused and listened. The old house was content in its restored warmth but utterly silent; I could not even hear the rain. I took the opportunity to explore the various rooms we had bypassed the night before, finding, among other things, an airy, light-blue-and-white ballroom of wedding-cake splendour, lacking only a cobwebbed dinner service and Miss Haversham to complete the picture of merriment and life abruptly suspended by the years. I did no more than stand inside the door, feeling no wish to examine the intricate plasterwork more closely, and I could not help wondering if Baring-Gould ever came into this room. I backed out, closing the door silently.

Back in the hall, I paused to examine the fireplace carving that Baring-Gould had commended to me the night before. It depicted a hunt, a parade of hounds with their tails curled energetically over their backs, pursuing a fox, who had abandoned bits and pieces of the goose he had stolen and was now making for what looked like a pineapple. I puzzled over it for a while, and then went back towards the stairway and then into the dining room, where I discovered a pot of coffee bubbling gently into sludge over a warming flame, a mound of leathery eggs similarly kept warm, some cold toast, and three strips of flabby bacon. I poured a tiny amount of boiled coffee essence and a large amount of lovely yellow milk into a cup and walked over to the window.

Outside lay a small paved courtyard, deserted of life and leaves and with an arched walkway along the opposite side that looked like either a cloister or a row of almshouses. I went through a doorway and found the back stairway, and another doorway that opened into the kitchen, at the moment deserted although I could hear a woman's voice raised in harangue at a distance. I retreated, retracing my steps past the staircase to another door, and there I found host and husband in a large, cluttered room lined with bookshelves and brightened by a number of tall windows that gathered in the light even on a grey day like this. The two of them were standing with their heads together and their elbows resting on top of a small, high, sloping writing table, across which had been draped an Ordnance Survey map.

My first impression on seeing the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould by light of day was that schoolboys and sinners alike must have found him terrifying. Even now at the edges of his tenth decade, with his thin white hair brushed over a mottled scalp, his back bent, and his face carved into deep lines, he struck one as a powerful source of disapproval and judgement, searching out wearily the misdeeds that a long lifetime had proven to him must invariably lie before him. He was a man who had seen a great deal in his eighty-nine years, and approved of little of it.

Oddly, he was wearing two pairs of spectacles, one of them pushed up into his hair, the other on his nose. Seeing me at the door, he shoved the second pair up to join the first and straightened his back. He took in my trousers, and his face went even more sour.

"Good morning, Miss Russell. My friend here tells me that you prefer that peculiar form of address over the 'Mrs' to which you are entitled."

"Er, yes, I do. Thank you. Good morning, Mr Baring-Gould. Good morning, Holmes."

"I see you found Mrs Elliott's breakfast," Baring-Gould stated, seeing the cup I still held.

"I found it, yes."

His old eyes beneath their remarkably rounded brows sharpened. "Inedible?" he asked.

"It's all right," I hastened to say. "I often just take coffee in the morning."

"Ask Mrs Elliott if you want something. I did tell her," he said in an aside to Holmes. "The only time the woman uses those chafing dishes is when there are twenty eggs to keep warm and a gallon of coffee. Was the coffee boiled away?" he shot at me.

"Almost, yes. I snuffed out the flame as I came through."

"Never mind, she'll be making more shortly. When there are guests in the house she produces meals eighteen hours a day, and she'll be anxious to make up for the first impression you had of her household. Women are quite mad when it comes to hospitality."

I bit down hard on my tongue, though truth to tell I wouldn't have known quite where to start. Holmes made a noise deep in his throat that was not quite a cough, and hastily returned to the map. I took a swallow of my coffee-flavoured milk and turned my back on the two men to peruse the books on the walls, stopping to remove one from time to time and glance into it.

"So, judging by this," Holmes said, continuing the conversation that had broken off with my entrance, "Josiah Gorton might readily have been brought from the place where he was last seen down to where he was found, without a soul seeing it."

"Oh yes, easily, by anyone who knows the moor."

"How intimate a knowledge would be required?"

"I should have thought a week or two of wandering might do it. That and a good map."

"It's a great pity, Gould, that I could not come at the time. The body might have told many tales."

The old man made no polite effort to excuse Holmes his preoccupation, although he admitted, "I was not informed myself until after he had been prepared for burial. If you wish to speak with the women who laid his body out, I can give you their names."

"I may do, later. Now tell me, where was this dog-and-carriage apparition seen? This is another reference to a local folktale, Russell," he explained. I looked up from the encyclopaedia article on pineapples that I was reading. "A particularly difficult local noblewoman—"

"Noble by marriage only," inserted Baring-Gould.

"A woman who married a local lord," Holmes corrected himself, "lost him, along with three other husbands, under circumstances the local populace thought suspicious, with some justification. She was never officially accused and tried, but for her sins she is said to be condemned to riding in a coach made of the bones of her dead husbands, driven by a headless horseman and led by a black hound with a single eye in the centre of his forehead. The carriage drives at midnight from the ancestral house near Tavistock up to Okehampton castle for Lady Howard to pluck one blade of grass—"

"The hound plucks it," Baring-Gould sternly corrected him.

"How could a hound pluck a blade of grass?" objected Holmes.

"I merely tell you what the story says."

"But a hound—"

"Holmes," I interrupted.

"Oh very well, the hound plucks the grass, and not until every blade is plucked—or bitten—can Lady Howard be free to take her rest. It's a popular story, with songs and such, that by the way probably gave Stapleton the idea for his personal variation on the so-called Baskerville hound—which does not, in the legend, actually glow. It is said, I should mention, to be highly unlucky to be offered a ride in the coach, and certain death actually to enter in with Lady Howard."

"So I should imagine," I murmured.

"At any rate, Russell, the point is that Lady Howard and her hound have been seen on the moor."

During Holmes' recitation, Baring-Gould, pausing occasionally to correct Holmes, had gone to a cupboard in the corner and returned with a very large, heavily worn, rolled-up map, which he now spread out across the worktable on top of the other. This one was of a smaller scale, the Ordnance Survey's one-inch map—although I saw, looking more closely at it, that it actually comprised portions of four or five adjoining maps, carefully trimmed and fastened together so as to encompass the entire moor and its surrounding towns. Corrections had been made in a number of places, roads crossed out and redrawn and the names of tors and hamlets rewritten: Laughter Tor had become Lough Tor, Haytor Rocks changed to Hey Tor, Crazywell Pool was corrected to Clakeywell. The writing was cramped and sloping, undoubtedly that of Baring-Gould.

Before Baring-Gould could begin, the door at the end of the room opened and a woman with iron-grey hair and an iron-hard face put her head inside.

"Pardon me, Rector," she said, "but you wanted me to tell you when the Harpers came in."

"The Harpers? Oh yes. Would you feed them, Mrs Elliott, and get them settled in? I'll not be much longer here."

The housekeeper nodded and began to draw back, then stopped and addressed Holmes. "You're not tiring him, I trust," she said, sounding threatening.

"We are trying not to do so," Holmes said.

She studied her master for a minute, then withdrew.

"Another sign of the unrest on the moor," Baring-Gould said with a sigh. "Longtime residents, people with roots deep into the peat, pulling up and moving away. Like Josiah Gorton, Sally Harper's father was one of my songmen. I collected two ballads and three tunes from the man, oh, it must be nearly thirty years ago. He gave me an alternative verse to 'Green Broom,' as I recall, as well as a sprightly tune, set with most unseemly words that I had to rewrite before it could be published. Sally was a blooming young thing then, and now she and her husband have had to sell off their farm up near Black Tor, a very old place with several generations of newtakes added to the original. Never had children, and although they have a bit of money from the farm sale, the house they have their eyes on near Milton Abbot isn't ready yet. I felt I ought to help out, and it'll only be for a few days. Hard to believe it was that many years ago. Where were we? Yes, Josiah Gorton."

He bent closely over the fine lines of the map, squinting for a moment until he had his bearings, and his long, gnarled finger came down in the upper left quadrant of the map, tracing an uneven line down to the lower right.

"This is the most likely route for Gorton to have been taken," he said, which, I realised to my surprise, was for my sake, not that of Holmes, who had already been over the route. He then drew his hand back and put it down a short distance from where he had started. "And here is the place Lady Howard's coach was seen, on the night Gorton disappeared." This was, judging by the few roads and fewer dwellings, one of the most deserted areas of the entire moor, a place thick with the Gothic script mapmakers use to indicate antiquities: hut circles, stone rows, stone avenues, tumuli, and ancient trackways, as well as an ominous scattering of those grass-tuft symbols that indicate marshland. There were no orange roads for miles, or even the hollow lines of minor roads, only densely gathered contour lines, numerous streams, and the markings for "rough pasture." A howling wilderness indeed.

What was a kistvaen? I wondered, seeing the word on the map, but Holmes spoke before I could ask.

"Who on earth was out in that wasteland to see a spectral coach?" he demanded.

"It is not a wasteland, Holmes," Baring-Gould corrected him sharply. "Merely sparsely populated. A farmworker saw it. He was benighted on his way home from a wedding."

"Why does that say 'Artillery Range'?" I interrupted without thinking.

I felt two sets of disapproving male eyes boring into me, and did not look up from the map.

"Because," said Baring-Gould, addressing me as if I were a regrettably slow child, "the army uses it to practice with their guns. A fair portion of the moor is given over to them during the summer months, and is therefore off limits to the rambler and antiquarian. They do post the firing schedules at various places around the moor, and they are scrupulous about mounting the red warning flags, but it is really most inconvenient of them."

I sympathised, but privately I could see why the army should want to make use of Dartmoor: There was probably less life to disturb in that hand's-breadth of the map than on any other English ground south of Hadrian's Wall. Even the mapmakers seemed to have tired of the exercise before they penetrated to the middle, for most of the Gothic markings were along the edges. Or perhaps primitive man found the centre of the place too daunting even for him, I reflected. I suppressed a shiver.

"A farmworker on his way home from a celebration might not be considered the best of witnesses," Holmes noted drily, returning to the subject at hand. "How much had he drunk?"

"Quite a bit," Baring-Gould had to admit.

Holmes' only comment was with his eyebrows, but that was enough. He bent to study the map for a moment, then turned to a familiar packet, selected a map, and spread it with a flourish over the top of Baring-Gould's marked-up old sheet. He then withdrew a fountain pen from his breast pocket.

"The sighting of the coach around the time Gorton was last seen was here, would you say?"

Baring-Gould patted around his pockets until he remembered where he had put his spectacles, and pulled down one of the two pairs on his head and adjusted them on his nose. He peered at the crisp new map briefly, then pointed to a spot on the left side of the moor. Holmes put a neat circle on the place indicated, and then moved the pen over until it hovered near a Gothic-lettered notice of "hut circles."

"Gorton was last seen here?"

Baring-Gould seized the pen from Holmes impatiently and automatically extended it out as if to dip into a well before he caught himself, shook the thing hesitantly, and then wrote a firm X a bare fraction of an inch from where Holmes had held the nib. He then moved his hand the width of the moor to place another X near the hamlet of Buckfastleigh.

"He was found here," he said. "And these are where the coach was seen. The first sighting, as near as I can find, was in the middle of July, somewhere in this area here. That I know only through hearsay, but on August the twenty-fourth, two people saw it, and I spoke with them both. The third time was the fifteenth of September; that was the farmworker."

"And the dog?"

"What of the dog?"

It was now Holmes' turn for impatience. "When was he seen, Gould? Only with the carriage, or has he also appeared by himself?"

Baring-Gould slapped down the pen, sending out a gout of ink that obliterated half the countryside between Bovey Tracey and Doddiscombesleigh. "It is so irritating," he declared querulously. "One has the impression that a hundred people have seen both hound and coach, but all I can lay hands on is rumour. This is precisely why I need you, Holmes. I cannot go up and find the truth for myself. I know for certain that the couple who saw the coach in August specifically mentioned seeing the dog; does it matter if the hound was at times alone or invariably with the coach?"

"I do not know what matters until I have more data," Holmes retorted. "What certainly matters is ensuring that what information is available be both accurate and complete."

"Well, I simply do not know."

Holmes pulled out his handkerchief and began dabbing at the map in disapproval.

"Then we shall have to enquire," he said heavily. "And the farmer and his son who found Gorton's body? Their house is here?"

"Slightly below that." Baring-Gould's finger touched briefly on a spot half an inch south of the X where Gorton had lain, and then suddenly he seemed to tense, and draw in a sharp breath. I looked quickly at his face, but what I had taken for a jolt of revelation was obviously something much more immediate and physical. The man was in pain.

Holmes' hand shot out, but stopped as Baring-Gould straightened his back slowly and shook his head briefly in self-disgust. He removed himself from the worktable and hobbled on his sticks over to an ancient armchair in front of the fire, lowering himself into it. He sat very still for a long moment, let out a pent-up breath, and went on. His voice was slightly constricted, but otherwise he showed no sign that anything untoward had taken place.

"The August sighting, as I said, was by a courting couple. The girl, when I had them brought here a week after, was still quite incoherent with terror, although I had the distinct impression that she might have been somewhat more sensible had her beau not been present. Still, she was rather stupid, and surprisingly high-strung, considering the peasant stock she comes from. The man was stolid and unimaginative, which makes me rather more willing to credit his story."

"That story being?"

"They were seated on a stone wall that night (lying in the lee of the wall, more likely) when they heard a faint noise approaching, a rush and a jangle and a muffled beat of running hoofs. They peered over the wall in time to see it pass by: a faintly glowing carriage pulled by one or two horses invisible but for the gleam of moonlight off their harness trimmings, with a woman clearly visible inside. They heard the crack of a whip, and as the carriage was passing another dark shape appeared behind it. The shape turned and looked straight at them, and it whined. They were both clear that they had heard the whine. At that point in her story the girl broke down into hysterics, because when the beast turned to look at them, they could clearly see that it was possessed of a single eye, large and glowing, in the centre of its head. The driver of the carriage whistled, and the hound—or whatever it was—loped off, leaving the two lovers to collect what wits they might have, and their clothing, and race for the girl's cottage as if, as the saying goes, all the hounds of hell were after them."

Baring-Gould allowed his eyes to close, and his mouth opened slightly. He was exhausted by his lengthy narrative, but Holmes continued to pore over the map, and I felt sure that if his old friend would benefit by a doctor's attention, Holmes would summon one. Not knowing quite what was called for, I thought I ought at least to comment on what the old man had so laboriously given us.

"I thought the hound was supposed to be leading the carriage, not following," I said weakly.

Holmes replied, "I don't think the displacement of the animal would negate the experience in the minds of the couple, Russell."

I was surprised to see a tiny smile twitch at the corner of Baring-Gould's ancient blue lips, and then astonished when they opened and the old man began to sing, in a baritone that quavered a bit but was true enough, to give forth a tune that was simple, yet eerie.

"My Lady hath a sable coach, with horses two and four,

My Lady hath a black blood-hound, that runneth on before.

My Lady's coach hath nodding plumes, the coachman hath no head,

My Lady is an ashen white, as one who is long dead."

He sat with his head resting on the back of the chair, a reminiscent smile softening his face. "My old nurse Mary Bicknell used to sing that song to me when I was small."

Personally, I thought that a woman who would sing something like that to a young child ought to be barred from her post, but I did not voice the idea. Baring-Gould, however, either read my thoughts or had a mind that ran in the same direction, because he opened one eye, looked straight at me, and said, "She did hasten to reassure me that Lady Howard was only on the road after midnight."

"Which ensured that you would not venture out of your window at night," I commented. He closed his eyes again, looking ever so faintly amused.

"Come, Russell," said Holmes. "We will see you this evening, Gould." His only answer was one aged forefinger, tipped up from the arm of the chair in farewell.

It was still miserably wet outside, looking as if it intended to rain steadily for days, but I was not surprised when Holmes suggested that we go out.

"I neglected to bring monsoon gear with me, Holmes."

"I'm sure the good Mrs Elliott could supply an adequate garment," he said. "Any house overseen by Gould is bound to have enough raiment for a small army."

So it proved, although one might have wished for modern gum boots rather than the stiff gaiters made of oiled leather, grey with hastily scrubbed-off mildew. In fact, everything smelt as musty as a cavern. Still, aside from one or two places, the rain sheeted off us as we set off across the drive past the round fountain, which in daylight I could see featured the bronze figure of a goose-herd. I paused to look back at the house, this combination of white and grey stone, leaded windows, and slate, a family home both idiosyncratic and comfortable. My eye was caught by the stone carvings over the porch, with an indistinguishable coat of arms and the date 1620.

"Part of the house is original, anyway," I noted.

Holmes followed my gaze. "Original, yes, but not to Lew Trenchard. I believe the porch came from a family holding in Staverton, although that particular stone was once a sundial in Pridhamsleigh. Various other pieces came from Orchard, a house approximately five miles to the north of here."

I laughed. "Baring-Gould's Elizabethan house, composed of old pieces patched together, like the new ceiling upstairs."

"The upstairs actually is old," Holmes said, "though Gould brought it here from a building in Exeter. It's the downstairs that's new."

"Well, have you looked closely at the carving over the fireplace in the hall? It's quite nice, but the fox appears to be making for a pinery. The pineapple wasn't even introduced until the reign of Charles II, and wasn't cultivated until the early eighteenth century. I looked it up in his Britannica," I added.

"True, although I believe the stone fireplace itself is considerably earlier than the carving surrounding it."

I gave up.

We set off through a low, weedy rose garden and by a gate into the long meadow stretching out towards the small river that had so plagued me the night before. The grass was ankle-deep and sodden, and we kept a close eye on our feet, lest we meet the sign of a cow's passing.

"Where did you go on the moor?" I asked after a bit. "Not to where Lady Howard's coach was seen?"

"Actually, it was more or less the same area, although with a different goal. I was looking at the artillery ranges."

I allowed quite a number of steps to pass before I finally asked, "Are you going to tell me why you were looking at the artillery ranges?"

"Are you interested?"

"As I told you last night, I am here, Holmes," I said heavily. "I have not yet packed my bags and sloped off to Oxford."

"I suppose that answers my question."

"It damn well ought to."

"Mycroft."

He spoke the name as if that, too, were answer enough, and to some extent, it was. Mycroft Holmes (who was, I still had to remind myself, my brother-in-law) had been the instigator of many of Holmes' more, shall we say, official investigations. Mycroft worked for a governmental agency that it amused him to call the accounting office, although the accounts tallied (and occasionally settled) often had very little connexion with pounds, shillings, and pence.

"The army this time?"

"A weapon they're testing. They wish to keep it secret and are not having much success."

I stopped. "Oh God. Doesn't the world have enough weapons? Have they learnt nothing from four years of war, millions dead, and whole countries brought to the edge of destruction?"

"They have learnt that the next war will be won by technology."

"The next war." The idea was physically revolting.

"There will be one, Russell. There always is."

"I will not participate in an army spy-search. I absolutely refuse. I'd rather talk to drunken farmhands about spectral coaches."

"It is peripheral, Russell," he said soothingly. "I made the mistake of letting Mycroft know where I was going, and he asked me to do this while I was here. We are in Devon because of Gould's case, and any work for Mycroft is strictly secondary. Although I don't believe we need stoop to interviewing rural inebriates, particularly those who have had three weeks to build up a story."

I wrenched my boots up from the muddy pasture and started walking again. We were mounting a rise, approaching a raw patch of ground with a few small trees trying weakly for a foothold. It seemed to be a wide, oval depression in the earth, but that impression did not prepare me for what in a moment lay at our feet. I was so startled I took a step back from it.

It was a pit, an enormous water-filled crater with nearly vertical sides gouged straight into the green pasture barely a stone's throw from Baring-Gould's front door. A gush of water shot out from the bank on the far side and plummeted down into the lake, looking more like a furious storm drain than a debouching stream. A ramshackle boathouse, incongruously resembling a Swiss chalet, clung to the bank across from the waterfall.

"What on earth—?"

"Astonishing, isn't it?" Holmes was staring morosely at the water that lay a good forty feet below us. It was impossible to tell how deep the water was beneath that leaden surface, but it had a definite feeling of profundity. "Gould's father had the brilliant idea of establishing a quarry here, as a source of income. You see the two ramps cut to haul it out? Nearly overgrown now. When Gould took over in the 1880s he diverted a stream to fill it. He claims it is pleasantly cool on a hot day, to paddle about in a boat."

I looked at the gaping maw of the almost subterranean lake with distaste. "It's monstrous. What could his father have been thinking of? Do you suppose Baring-Gould allowed his children down there?"

"Oh, indeed," he said with a smile of what appeared to be reminiscence on his face. "They were a rowdy lot, encouraged by their father. Even the girls. One of them nearly drowned during a race of leaky hip-baths—Mary, I think it was."

I could well believe that the sinister little lake might hold any number of drowned bodies. "By the looks of the place, she was lucky not to have been swallowed up by one of Jules Verne's lurking sea monsters. May we go?"

We circled the foreboding pit cautiously and found on the other side a small house and a drive and eventually a road. I recognised the sheltered wall where Holmes had sat with his violin the night before, and we walked past it, past the churchyard, through the village and the wet, autumnal woods of Lew Trenchard, and out into the surrounding countryside, not saying much, but working ourselves back into the rhythms of easy intimacy. My feet grew numb but my chest expanded, drawing in the rich air as my eyes rejoiced in the lush green landscape.

We stopped to take lunch at a small public house, where they gave us a rich leek soup and a thick wedge of game pie washed down with a lively dark beer. Rather to my surprise, Holmes asked after my academic work in Oxford. I told him what I had been doing, and over his postprandial pipe he in turn brought me up to date on the progress of our previous case, the legal proceedings against the man whose arrest we had been instrumental in achieving the month before.

Nothing earth-shaking, but when we resumed our rain gear, we had resumed our sense of partnership as well.

Greatly content, we turned back to Lew Trenchard. The rain had let up slightly and the heavy clouds had lifted, so that when we came to the top of a small rise Holmes stopped and pointed out across the stone wall that bordered the road, over the small fields with their half-bare hedgerows, past a scattering of snug farmhouses with gently smoking chimneys, and beyond to where the ground rose, and rose.

From here it looked like a huge wall, placed there to keep the gentle Devonshire countryside at bay. Green slopes around the base gave way to extrusions of dark rock, and the ridge, perhaps four miles away, seemed to tower over our heads.

"Dartmoor," said Holmes unnecessarily.

"Good Lord," I said. "How high is it?"

"Perhaps twelve hundred feet or so higher than we are here. It appears more, does it not?"

"It looks like a fortress."

"Over the centuries, it has effectively served as one. It has certainly kept the casual visitor away."

"I can believe that," I said emphatically. The moor loomed up, cold and fierce and daunting and uncomfortable, a geographical personality that seemed very aware of us, yet at the same time scornful of our timidity and weakness. In the distance, one of the hills dimly visible through the clouds was crowned with a shape that seemed too regular to be natural. It looked proud and tiny and out of place, as if trying to convince itself that the hill it rode on could not shrug it off if it wished.

"What is that building?" I asked Holmes.

He followed my gaze. "Brentor Church. Dedicated in the fourteenth century, to Saint Michael, I believe."

I smiled; of course it would be a church, and could only be to St Michael, the choice of missionaries the world around seeking to quell the local spirits by planting a mission on the site of the native holy places and giving it over to St Michael and all his Angels. Somehow, the valiant little outthrust of a building did not appear convinced of the conquest.

I looked back at the rising moor, and decided that I could not blame the Brentor Church; I myself did not relish the idea of breaching those walls and walking out onto the flat expanse of the moorland within, no more than I would have relished a swim in the quarry lake next to Lew House—and for similar reasons.

I became aware of Holmes, studying my face. I shot him a brief smile and pulled my coat more closely together over my chest. "It looks cold," I said, but he was not fooled.

"It is a place that encourages fanciful thoughts," he said indulgently. However, I noticed that even he cast a quick glance at the presence on the horizon before we resumed our path to Lew House.

We arrived back in time for afternoon tea, which we took by ourselves, as Baring-Gould was resting. It was a superb reward for our day's wet outing, and I gathered that Mrs Elliott had taken advantage of the Harpers' presence to create a true Devonshire tea, the pièce de résistance of which was a plate piled high with hot, crumbly scones to rival Mrs Hudson's, a large bowl of thick, yellow clotted cream, and a second bowl containing deep red strawberry jam. When we had finished, I hunted the cook down in her kitchen, where she stood watching while two elderly, time-worn moor dwellers methodically made their way through the plates of food before them, and I thanked her. She simply nodded, but she did so with a faint pinkness around her neck.

At dinner, Baring-Gould did appear, and afterwards regaled us with stories and songs of this, his native land. We went to bed early and slept well, and the next morning we set off for the moor.

FOUR

The interior consists of rolling upland. It has been likened to a sea after a storm suddenly arrested and turned to stone; but a still better resemblance, if not so romantic, is that of a dust-sheet thrown over the dining room chairs.

—A Book of Dartmoor

A brief hour's tramp through wet woods brought us to the village of Lydford, nestled along a river at the very edge of the moor's rising slopes. There we succumbed to the temptations of the flesh and spent a glorious thirty minutes in front of an inn's blazing fireplace, drinking coffee and steaming our boots. When we shouldered our packs and pushed our way back out into the inhospitable day, it was with the clear sensation of leaving all civilisation behind.

The sensation quickly proved itself justified. Lydford was truly the final outpost of comfort and light, and the moor a grim place indeed. The ground rose and the trees and hedgerows fell away, and the ground rose some more, and all the world was grey and wet and closed-in and utterly still. We climbed nearly a thousand feet in the first two miles, but after that the ground began to level out before us.

It was, as Holmes had said, a huge bowl—or at any rate, what I could see of it seemed to be—a shallow, lumpy green bowl carved across by meandering dry-stone walls, dusted with dying vegetation and dead rocks, with many of its rises topped by weathered stones in bizarre shapes: Tors, the stones were called, and many of them had distinctive names given either by a fancied resemblance to their shapes (Hare, Fox, and Little Hound Tors) or by some reference lost in language (at least, to me) or in time (such as Lough, Ger, and Brat). There were nearly two hundred of the things, Holmes said, their fantastic shapes perched atop the rocky clitter around their disintegrating feet, and below that the low green turf, spongy with the water it held.

In a place where the hand of humankind had so little visible impact, where a person could walk for an hour and see neither person nor dwelling, it seemed only proper that the very stones had names.

We could see perhaps half a mile in any direction, but there was no sky, merely a cloud that brushed the tops of our hats, and the grey-green spongy turf beneath our boots merged imperceptibly into the light grey overhead, the dark grey of the stones that lay scattered about, and the brown grey of the autumnal bracken fern. It was the sort of light that renders vision untrustworthy, where the eyes cannot accept the continual lack of stimulus and begin to invent faint wraiths and twisting shadows. Holmes' pixies, waiting to tease the unwary traveller into a mire, no longer seemed so ludicrous, and had it not been for Holmes, I might very well have heard the soft pad of the Baskerville hound behind me and felt its warm breath on the back of my neck.

However, with Holmes beside me as a talisman, the spooks kept their distance, and what might have been a place of animosity and danger was rendered merely desolate to the point of being grim. I thought that Holmes' term wasteland was not inappropriate. Godforsaken might also be applied.

The morning stretched on, not without incident, although the time between incidents seemed to be very long indeed. Once, my dulled eyes were surprised to see one of the boulders we were passing turn and look at us—a Dartmoor pony, as shaggy as a winter sheep and only marginally taller. Its eyes peered out from behind its plastered-down forelock, watching us pass before it resumed its head-down stance of stolid endurance, hunkered up against the wind, belly and nose dripping steadily. Holmes said it was most likely a hybrid, crossed with Shetland ponies brought in during the war in an attempt to breed animals suited for the Welsh mines. This particular beast did not seem well pleased with its adopted home.

Once, we came across a weathered, lichen-covered stone cross, erected centuries before to mark the way for pilgrims, now proud in its solitude but starting to lean. One of its arms was missing and the other had been broken to a stump, and its feet were standing in a pool of water.

Once, we saw a fox, picking its delicate way through a sweep of bracken fern, and shortly after that we glimpsed a buzzard making disconsolate circles against the clouds. The high point of the morning was when a startled woodcock burst from beneath our boots and flew from us in terror. The excitement of that encounter, however, did not last long, and soon we were back in the melancholy embrace of the brooding moor.

Up a rise and down the other side, across a rivulet with sharply cut sides and a scurry of clear, peat-stained water in the bottom. Up again, avoiding a piece of granite the size of a bathtub thrusting out of the rough grass. A meandering ridge on an approaching hill, resembling the work of some huge, prehistoric mole, became on closer examination an ancient stone wall nearly subsumed by the slow encroachment of the turf. A distant sweep of russet across a hillside, a scurf of furze and dying bracken fern, was cut by the dark of another ancient wall drawn along its side.

It was, I supposed, picturesque enough, given the limited palette of drab colours, but as a piece of Impressionist art it served to evoke only the disagreeable feelings of restlessness, melancholia, and a faint thread of menace.

After an hour or so Holmes attempted to smoke, but he could not get his pipe to stay lit. We trudged on, speech and camaraderie left behind us in Lydford, as stolid and enduring as the pony, placing one foot in front of the other on the sparse grass covering the deep sodden peat beds that passed for soil.

By midday I was as grey and silent as anything else in that bleak place, edgy with an unidentifiable sense of waiting and aching for a spot of colour. Had I known, I might have worn a red pullover, but all my clothes were warm and masculine and dull, and there was no relief from the monotony until Holmes stopped and I walked straight into him. The shock of change nearly caused me to fall, but my irritation died the instant I saw what had caught his interest: a shelter.

It was a rough stone hut, used by shepherds, perhaps—short shepherds, we found, as once inside we both had to keep our heads well tucked down, but it had the better part of a roof, and even a cracked leather flap to cover most of the doorway. We had no fire other than the glowing bowl of Holmes' pipe, but at least our sandwiches remained dry as we ate them, and the now-tepid coffee in the flask that Mrs Elliott had given us seemed positively festive as it touched my chilled lips. The demons retreated out into the fog, and with their absence, humour crept back in.

"Well, Holmes," I said, "I can certainly see why a person would fall in love with Dartmoor."

"It is said to be quite pleasant in the summer," he said gloomily.

"By comparison, I'm sure it is. How much farther do we have?"

We did actually have a destination in this trackless waste. We had taken on the rôle of eyes and legs for Baring-Gould, but even Holmes, who had covered much of this same ground thirty years before, did not have the man's intimate knowledge of the place from which judgements could be drawn. The old man back in Lew Trenchard might instantly visualise the lie of the land at any given spot on the map, but his representatives needed to walk it first. Hence our expedition, and if the weather was not as we might wish, it did not appear that waiting for a clear day was a practical option. For all I knew this was a clear day, for Dartmoor.

Our trip was to be a large circle, putting up at a public house for the night halfway along. We were looking now for the place where the dead tin miner had last been seen, and after that would try to find the spot where in July a benighted farmhand had been terrified by a ghostly coach and a dog with a glowing eye, and the other place, two miles away and a month further on, where the courting couple had been rudely interrupted by the same coach.

I finished my apple, Holmes knocked out his pipe and stowed it, and we both settled our hats more firmly over our noses and ducked out of the leather doorway.

"Holmes," I said, raising my collar and resuming the hunched-over walking position that was necessary in order to keep the rain off my spectacles. "If Lady Howard stops her ghostly carriage to offer us a ride, I for one will accept. With pleasure."

***

Josiah Gorton's last known path told us nothing whatsoever. Other than being one remote area among 350 square miles of remote countryside, there was nothing to distinguish it. According to Baring-Gould, the farm labourer who stopped to talk with Gorton lived over the hill and often travelled that way of a Saturday night, on his way to the inn where Gorton had spent the afternoon.

"Why, if he'd been snug inside all afternoon, did Gorton leave?" I asked. "I'd have thought Saturday evening the high point of the week, particularly for someone accustomed to cadging drinks."

"According to the publican when I was through here the other day, Gorton said he had business to attend to, unlikely as that might sound. No need to enquire further at the inn." And so saying he turned, not in the direction of the inn, but towards the remote farm over the hill. Stifling a sigh, I followed.

It was a small farmstead, mossy and pinched and cowering down into the hillside away from the elements.

"A place this size couldn't have more than one hired man," Holmes observed, heading for the barn. There we found him, a young man with a head like a furry turnip, scratching the broad, flat expanse of it beneath his cap and pursing his lips as he stood staring down at a prostrate cow. He glanced at us incuriously, as if we were oft-seen residents of the place rather than that rarity, the unexpected visitor, and then returned immediately to his perusal of the huge, heaving sides of the animal at his feet.

"I doan s'pose you knaw how ta turn a calf," were his first words to us.

"Er, no," Holmes admitted. "Unless?" He turned to me, and the young man looked up in hope.

"No," I said firmly. "Sorry."

His face fell back into its morose state. "I can't do'n. I tried an' tried, but my hand, she just gets squeezed and dies. Poor ole cow," he said with unexpected affection. "Her'll just have to bide 'til Doctor gets here, that's all. He'll charge me half what the calf be worth," he added. Long, contemplative seconds ticked by before he looked up, realising at last that he was not conversing with family members or two spirits of the moor. He asked, "Be ye lost?"

"I do not believe we are," said Holmes. "Not if you're Harry Cleave."

"That I am." He put out a meaty hand that had all too obviously been but lightly sluiced since its last exploration of the cow's birth canal, and with only the briefest of hesitations, Holmes shook it. I left my own gloved hands firmly in my pockets, and instead smiled widely and nodded like a fool as introductions were made.

"Well," said Cleave, "no sense maundering, baint nothing I can do 'til Doctor comes. I sent the lil maid to vetch 'en," he explained, "when I seed how she lay. Let us go by the house and 'ave a cup."

Paradise and ambrosia were the words he had uttered, and we crowded his heels across the muddy yard to the low stone farmhouse.

It was warm inside, from a peat fire burning low and red in the wide stone fireplace. I removed my glasses and could see little, but my cold-shrivelled skin began tentatively to unfold, and my nose told me of a soup on the fire and fragrant herbs strewn underfoot. I patted my way to a bench near the fireplace and settled in for what I sincerely hoped was to be a long and leisurely visit.

The tea Cleave made for us was fresh and powerful and sweetened as a matter of course by our host; what was more, he had cleansed his hands with soap before making it. I removed a layer of clothing, resumed my warmed spectacles, and examined the room and the young man, wondering if both were typical of the moor.

Cleave was a quiet, self-contained figure, short but heavily muscled. His dark eyes shone with an intelligent interest, and humour lurked ready at their corners. His easy authority over the house and its furnishings spoke more of an owner than a hired man, and I thought the simple room, light and tidy, suited him well.

"So," he said, settling himself at a scrubbed wooden table with his own teacup. "You comed out auver th'moor for ta vine 'Arry Cleave, and naow you've vound'n."

I expected Holmes to follow his standard routine for such investigations, particularly useful in gossipy rural areas, which was to invent some piece of spectacular flimflam behind which he could hide his real purpose. I had even settled back in anticipation to watch the expert, but to my utter astonishment he instead chose to use the simple truth.

"I'm a friend of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould. He asked me to look into Josiah Gorton's death."

At the first name, Cleave's humour bloomed full across his face in surprise and wholehearted approval. It dimmed somewhat at the second name, but he left that for the moment.

"The Squire, by Gar. How is he?"

"Old. Tired, and not very well."

"Yair," Cleave agreed sadly. "That he must be, poor ole beggar. He were old when I'as a child, and used to come across him digging his'oles or writin' down zongs. Fey old fellow. I remember thinking oncet, he looked like God in Paradise, 'walkin' in the garden at the end of the day.' Proud and amused. So, he wants to knaw what happened to ole Josiah, mmm?"

"Yes," said Holmes. "Yes, he does."

"And his legs won't carry him no more, is it? Pity, that. It's been a mort of years since he's been up the moor. Still, he'd be inter'sted, acourse. Wisht I could tell you what you want to knaw, but all I knaw is, Josiah was a-makin' 'is way out along Hew Down on the Sattiday night, we exchanged a word or two, and we both went our ways. I never saw nothin' like this 'ghostly carridge' they be talkin' of. Nothin' 'tall."

"What did Gorton say to you?"

" 'Tweren't nothin' much. Just 'Evening' and a word on the weather, which were thundery and low and lookin' to spit down but wasn't yet, and I offered him the barn if he needed a roof, but he said no, and 'Wish 'ee well' it was."

"Did he say he had a place to stay? I shouldn't think there are many farms in that direction."

" 'Fore dark he'd only have made it to Drake Hill, but he didna'. Drake hisself telled me."

"And after dark?"

" 'Tweren't no moon to speak of, and he wasn't carrying a lantern, but I s'pose I thought he was heading for one of his old mines. There's some still have buildings you could shelter in, if you wasn't too particular. That's right, that's what I figgered, because he said he would'n take my barn, he was lookin' to earn hisself a week's beer money."

"His precise words?"

"Near 'nough. Zomething about buyin' me a pint when next he seed me. Any row, he liked 'is zecrets and his findings, did Josiah, so I leaved 'im to it."

"Did he often buy you a drink?"

"Never in mortal memory."

"Interesting."

" 'E were a good'n, were Josiah. Kept hisself to hisself, 'side from zingin' all they ole zongs over 'is ale, but 'e 'ad 'is pride, and look as 'e might like a gipsy, 'e were as honest as the day be long. An' though he liked to keep to hisself, he were willin' to help out, in a pinch. The maid took ill one year just at the height of lambin' and ole Josiah nursed 'er for two days 'til she were hersel' again. A good man, that. He'll be missed."

As a eulogy, one could do far worse.

We drank more tea, and Holmes questioned him further about the precise location and directions he and Gorton had taken. When a commotion sounded out in the yard and a girl of perhaps twelve burst in, Holmes allowed the farmer to return to his cow and the veterinarian, and before we could be pressed into surgical assistance to a bovine midwife, we took our leave.

***

A half hour brought us to the place where Cleave had seen Gorton, and another forty minutes to the Drake farm. It was down in a valley bottom, and we stood on the rise looking down at it. A more dismal site, or a more disreputable set of buildings, would have been hard to imagine. Even the trickle of smoke from the lopsided chimney seemed dirtier than usual.

To my surprise, Holmes turned his back on the farm and began to survey the ground that fell away from our hillock on all sides.

"Aren't we going down there?" I asked him.

"Gould thought it unnecessary. Unless Drake himself did away with Gorton, he would have no reason to lie about not seeing him, and according to Gould, Drake hasn't the wits to build a wall, much less arrange for a clever murder. And you'll have to admit, a man who can't bother to keep his chimney clean and is willing to live in the undoubtedly foul atmosphere that exists inside that house down there is hardly likely to go to the inconvenience of hauling a body to the other side of the moor. He'd be more inclined just to toss it down a nearby hole. Come."

I stared at his back as he descended the hill away from the Drake farm. "Gould thought—Holmes!" I protested. "When did you start accepting the conclusions of a total amateur instead of seeing for yourself?"

He turned and gave me an unreadable look. "When I found an amateur who knew his ground better than I knew London. I told you, Russell, he was my local informant."

It sounded to me as if the good Reverend Sabine was something more than that, but I could not begin to guess what.

We wandered back and forth across the landscape like a pair of tin seekers, climbing down to examine every low-lying place and streambed, stubbing our toes, twisting our ankles, and breaking our fingernails on the stones, catching our clothing on the gorse bushes, and developing cricks in our necks from the hunch-shouldered position adopted in the vain attempt to keep the rain from our collars. The wind began to rise, which dispersed the lower clouds but chilled me more than the rain had, and made it nearly impossible to avoid the increasingly near-horizontal drops. Dusk was gathering when I looked up from my regular occupation of scraping the sides of my muddy boots against a rock, and found Holmes gone. He had been there a minute before, so I knew he could not have gone far, but it was disconcerting to feel even for an instant that I was alone in that desolation. I called, but the wind snatched my words from my lips, then blinded me by driving the rain into my face. I made myself stop, and think.

After a minute I wiped the worst of the rain from my spectacles, and studied the land around me before making my way back to where I had last seen Holmes. Looking down into a deep, sharp-sided ravine with its complement of peat-brown water at the bottom, I saw his back disappearing around a bend. I called, but he did not hear me, so I was forced to follow him along the top of the ground; when he set off up a branch of the ravine I was obliged to scramble down into the depths as well.

I panted up to him some time later, and tried to catch my breath before I addressed him. "We're not going to reach the inn before nightfall," I observed casually. It was easier to talk out of the wind, and one could even find patches of rain-shadow against the sides of the ravine.

"No."

"Nor are we sleeping in the Drake barn."

"I fervently hope not."

"You're looking for Gorton's shelter?" I ventured.

"Of course. Ah." This last was at a scuff on a stone half grown over with turf, a scuff such as a rough-shod man might have made some months before. It might as easily have been made by a hundred other things, but there was little point in mentioning this to Holmes: He was off like a hound on a scent, and I could only follow in his wake and see where we might end up.

Where we ended up was a heap of rubble piled between a stream and one wall of the low ravine that the water had cut over the millennia. I could see nothing there but a heap of stones, albeit an orderly heap; however, Holmes walked up to it, walked around it, and vanished. I waited until he emerged, looking satisfied and standing back in order to study the adjoining walls of the little ravine.

"When Watson wrote up the Baskerville story," he told me, "he had me living on the moor in a prehistoric stone hut. Actual neolithic dwellings, of course, have long been collapsed and cannibalised by farmers, until they are marked by little more than rough circles on the ground. A person might, conceivably, lie down flat beneath the height of the remaining walls, but as any roof they once had disintegrated a thousand years ago, there would be little benefit.

"What Watson meant, although it sounds less romantic, was one of these, a tin miner's hut—or in this case, to be precise, a blowing house, judging by the remnants of the furnace in that wall and the broken mold stone that now forms the doorstep. Considerably more recent construction than the neolithic, as you can see." During the course of this informative little lecture he had begun to climb up what my eyes were only now beginning to read as a manmade ruin rather than a natural rock-slide, and he now paused, balancing precariously on a pair of shaky stones, to reach with both arms into an indentation in the ravine wall. He tugged at something, which emerged as a much-dented bucket; hugging it to his chest, he leapt lightly down. "Peat," he said, and ducked again inside the pile of rock. This time I followed, into a room which was larger than appeared likely from outside, and had indeed once been a living space. "You intend to pass the night here," I said, not as a question, for Holmes was already laying a fire with the dry peat turves.

"If there are signs left of Gorton's disappearance, we shall see them in the morning," he said placidly.

I stared into the thought of the long, hungry night ahead of me, and thought, Oh well; at least we shall be out of the rain, and reasonably warm.

***

I had, in fact, underestimated Holmes, or at any rate his preference for some degree of comfort. He pulled from his knapsack a second parcel of food, thick beef and mustard sandwiches and boiled eggs, and followed the meal with coffee brewed in a tin cup, which also served as the shared drinking vessel. We wrapped ourselves in our garments, and prepared to sleep. Holmes was soon asleep, his snores barely audible over the sound of the storm, but I was kept awake by the eerie sob and moan of the wind, like a lost child outside our stone hut, and the low gurgle of running water, sounding like a half-heard conversation; once I started awake from a doze with the absolute certainty that there were eyes watching me from the entrance. I was very grateful that night for the presence of Holmes, as sensible as a jolt of cold water even when he was sleeping, and eventually I grew accustomed to the peculiar noises, or they faded, and I slept.

In the morning we drank more peat-smoke-flavoured coffee, although there was nothing more solid to chew on than the grounds in the bottom of the cup. Holmes downed the first tin cup of coffee and ducked out of the hut as soon as it was light outside. I took my time manufacturing a cup of coffee for myself, since I could hear the rain continuing to drip off the stones and into the stream. What Holmes thought he could find out there, after weeks of rain, I could not imagine, and I had no intention of going to investigate any sooner than I had to. I brought the water to a boil, shook some ground coffee into the cup, stirred it with the stub of a pencil I had in my shirt pocket, and sat on my heels to drink it, straining it through my front teeth. Why was it, I reflected irritably, that Holmes' little adventures never took us to luxury hotels in the south of France, or to warm, sandy Caribbean beaches?

Holmes returned in three-quarters of an hour, looking smug. I poured the last of the grounds into the cup of water I had been keeping hot, stirred it, and handed it to him. He pulled off his gloves, cupped both hands around the cup, and drank cautiously.

"Had I known I should be called on to make Turkish coffee," I said, "I would have asked Mahmoud for lessons." He grunted, and drank, and when the cup was empty he tapped out the grounds and filled it a last time to heat water for the ritual of shaving, sans mirror. He nicked himself twice.

"I take it you found nothing," I said as I helped him daub the leaks.

"On the contrary, I made a very interesting discovery. Unfortunately, I cannot see what possible bearing it might have on the case."

"What did you find?"

He reached into an inner pocket and drew out a small, stoppered bottle such as the chemist dispenses, dirty but dry.

"I found it in his 'smuggler's hole,' the traditional turf-covered cache the old miners used to hide their valuables. From the appearance of the stones he used to disguise the opening, I should say it has sat there undisturbed for more than a month but considerably less than a year."

I took the phial and gently eased out the cork with my fingernails. There seemed to be a tiny quantity of fine gravel in the bottom, the size of a generous pinch. I cupped my right hand and upended the bottle, then stared at the substance in my hand in disbelief.

"Can that possibly be—gold?"

FIVE

Among semi-barbarous tribes it is customary that the tribe should have its place of assembly and consultation, and this is marked round by either stones or posts set up in the ground.

—A Book of Dartmoor

With the help of a torn-off corner of the map to make a funnel, we eased the gleaming specks back into their bottle. Holmes examined my palm closely, picked a couple of stray bits from their lodging place, and returned them to the bottle. Pushing the cork firmly into place, he slipped it into his pocket.

"It is an interesting substance for a tin miner to have in his possession, wouldn't you agree?" he asked.

"Particularly in that form. I would understand a gold ring he had found, or a coin from an ancient trove, but flakes? Surely there isn't gold on Dartmoor?"

"Not that I have ever heard. Perhaps I shall send this in for analysis, to see if chemical tests give us any indication of its provenance."

"But gold is an element. There won't be any distinguishing features, will there?"

"It depends on how pure it is, if this soil is a recent addition or the ore in which the gold came to life. Impurities differ, if this is in its raw state."

"There was nothing else in the cache?"

"A few knobs of tin and some tools. I left them there."

"So," I said with an air of moving on, "where next?"

"Northwest is where the farmhand saw Lady Howard's coach; southeast is the place it was seen by Gould's courting couple. We'll start at the top and work down."

Packing to leave our night's lodging was a matter of getting to our feet and buttoning on our waterproofs. We did so, and clambered up the slippery side of the ravine to the floor of the moor itself. There Holmes paused.

"One thing, Russell. Where we're going is a rather nasty piece of terrain. You must watch where you put your feet."

" 'The Great Grimpen Mire,' Holmes?" I asked lightly, a reference to the sucking depths that had apparently taken the life of the villain Stapleton, after he failed to murder his cousin and legitimate heir to the Baskerville estate, Holmes' client Sir Henry.

"That's a bit farther south, but similar, yes. There are mires, bogs, and 'featherbeds' or quaking bogs. With the first two, look for the tussocks of heavy grass or rushes around the edges, which offer a relatively firm footing, but if you see a stretch of bright green sphagnum moss, for God's sake stay away from it. The moss is a mat covering a pit of wet ooze; if one slips in under the mat, it would be a bit like laying a sodden featherbed on top of a swimmer. Not a pleasant death."

It was, I agreed, a gruesome picture. "What does one do then?"

"Not much, except spread your arms to give the greatest possible surface to the ooze, and wait for help. Struggling is invariably fatal, as any number of Dartmoor ponies have found. With their typical dark humour, the natives call the mires 'Dartmoor Stables.'

"Other than the quaking bogs, the chief danger is from the elements. At night or when the mist comes down, depend on the compass or, lacking that, find a stream and follow it down. All water comes off the moor eventually, and reaches people."

"Thank you, Holmes. And if I find myself going in circles, I'm to turn my coat inside out to keep the pixies from leading me astray."

He bared his teeth at me in a grin. "It couldn't hurt."

***

Baring-Gould had marked with great precision the place on the map where the ghostly carriage had appeared, and an hour or so later Holmes and I stood more or less on the spot. It was difficult to be certain, because the rain (to Holmes' great irritation) had immediately washed the ink from the surface of the map, leaving us with a small dark cloud instead of an X. Holmes began to walk slowly along the path, studying the spongy, short-cropped turf for the months-old marks of carriage wheels.

Quite hopeless, really, and after a couple of painstaking hours he finally admitted that there was little to distinguish the hoof and wheel of a carriage (both, presumably, iron-shod) from the naked hoof of any of a myriad of wandering Dartmoor ponies or the drag of a sledge or farm cart, at any rate not after a two-month interval.

Holmes straightened his spine slowly and stood for a while gazing up at the surrounding hills, several of which were crowned with the fantastical shapes of tors. The track we were on, unpaved and without gravel or metalling, was nonetheless flat and wide enough for a cart, and largely free of stones—which was enough to make it noteworthy—and of bracken, which made it visible against the brown hillside. It emerged from the side of one tor-capped hillock, wrapped around its side for a gently curving half mile or so, and then rose slightly to disappear at the foot of another tor, vaguely in the direction of Okehampton to the northwest.

"It does look like a road, Holmes. Or as if it had once been a road."

"There are a surprising number of tracks across the moor, dating to the period when goods were moved by packhorse and the lanes of the countryside below were a morass of mud between the hedgerows all winter. Sailors used them, too, as a shortcut between putting in at a port on one coast and searching for the next job on the other."

"Those lanes must have been truly horrendous if travel on the moor was seen as the easier alternative."

"Indeed. I believe that this particular remnant is the continuation of Cut Lane, which intersects Drift Lane near Postbridge and joins with the ancient main track from the central portion of the moor to Lydford, Lych Way."

"Cheerful name," I commented. "Lych" was the Old English word for corpse—hence the roofed-over lych gate outside most churches, for the temporary resting of the bier (and its bearers) on the way into the graveyard. I trusted that Holmes, a longtime student of linguistic oddities, would know this.

"Not by coincidence," Holmes replied. "The Lych Way was the traditional track by which corpses were carried to Lydford for burial."

"Good heavens. Do you mean to say there are no churchyards on the entire moor?"

"Not until the year 1260, I believe it was, when the bishop granted the moor dwellers the option of taking their dead to Widdecombe instead."

"Generous of him."

"Interestingly enough, archaeologists find few burial remains other than burnt scraps of bone. I suppose that either the peat soil is so acidic that it dissolves even the heavy bones with time, or else when the turf alternately dries in the summers and becomes saturated in winter, its contraction and expansion eventually pushes the bones up to the surface, where the wildlife finds them and hastens their dissolution. The two hypotheses would make for some interesting experiments," he mused.

"Wouldn't they just? I tremble to think what the 'cut' in Cut Lane refers to."

"A passage dug into the hillside to make the transport of peat easier; nothing more sinister than that. This particular track wends its way along several peat diggings, although it is now in disuse because what peat is still taken off the moor goes by way of the train line just west of here. The track as it is would be quite sufficient to take a well-balanced carriage pulled by one or two horses—though not, perhaps, at any great speed."

The thought of that ride made my teeth ache—or perhaps it was only that they were clenched hard against the cold. This local colour was all very interesting, but I thought it time to bring up one of the more essential matters at hand.

"Holmes, had you planned on taking a meal in the near future? How far is the nearest inn?"

"Oh, miles away," he said absently. "But there is sure to be a farmwife willing to sell us a bowl of soup. However, Russell, I must say I like not the looks of the weather."

At first glance, the sky appeared just as it had since we first trudged up the hill out of Lydford, glowering and grey. Taking a more attentive look, however, it occurred to me that what I had taken as the commonplace annoyance of moisture condensing on my spectacles was in truth much more widespread and foreboding: wisps of mist were rising up out of the land and coalescing around us.

Muttering dire maledictions at himself, Holmes set off rapidly downhill at an angle away from the worst of it, and I hastened to keep up with him. The strategy worked for perhaps twenty minutes, after which the moor laid its soft grey hands around us and we stood blind.

"Holmes?" I called, determined not to panic.

"Damnation," he said succinctly.

"I can't see, Holmes."

"Of course you can't see, Russell," he said peevishly. "We're in a fog." I was relieved, however, to hear his voice begin to come closer. I began to talk, as a sort of audial beacon to bring him in.

"I don't suppose you can do your blindman's trick of finding your way across the moor as you can across London?"

"Hardly," he said, nice and near now. There was even a dim, dark shape from which the voice seemed to emanate. "Do you have your compass?"

"And a map," I said, shrugging off my knapsack to get out the latter. "Perhaps if I brought it up to touch my nose, I might even read it. You know, Holmes, I wouldn't want you to think that I don't appreciate these connubial efforts of yours; you must work very hard to invent little projects we can share. However, must you always take things to such an extreme?"

I stood upright with the map in my hand and the knapsack securely on my foot, and it seemed to me that where the reassuring dark shape had been, there was only unrelieved grey. "Holmes?" I asked nervously. There was only silence.

"Holmes!" I said sharply.

"Quiet, Russell," said a voice from behind me. "I am attempting to hear."

Had I moved, or had he? And what could he be listening to? I strained for a sound, any sound, even the unearthly banshee noises of the night before, but all I heard was the vague and omnipresent trickling of water, and then the sound of footsteps: retreating footsteps.

"Where are you going, Holmes?" I demanded.

"Just up the rise here to listen. Don't lose the knapsack."

I felt around for the pack, which indeed was no longer weighting down my boot, and when I found it I made haste to put it on.

I waited, fog-blind and abandoned, and amused myself by inventing spectres. Baring-Gould's church grims were not too likely out here, perhaps, given that we were far from either Lydford or the "modern," i.e., thirteenth-century alternative churchyard at Widdecombe, but bahr-ghests seemed just the sort of creatures one might expect to occupy the shifting monochrome on all sides. What of the long-legged Old Stripe? And what was the other spectre Baring-Gould had mentioned? A jacky-twoad? Perhaps there would not be one of those—but if I were to hear anything remotely resembling the footsteps of a gigantic hound, I knew that I should run away shrieking, easy prey for the tricks of the pixies. Fog invariably makes a rich spawning-bed for wraiths and threats and the malevolent eyes of watching foes, but that Dartmoor fog, combined as it was with the very real dangers of mire and boulder and sharp-sided stream, was one of the most fertile sources of spooks and mind-goblins that I have known.

I could not have stood in my position for more than six or seven minutes, but that was quite enough for the internal quaking to reach a point far beyond that which the cold, wet air would explain. Theoretically, I suppose, we could have simply sat and outwaited the fog; even on Dartmoor it must lift sometime. I knew, however, that it would not be possible to remain there for any length of time without being scarred by the experience, because I had no doubt now that Dartmoor was alive, as Baring-Gould and later Holmes himself had intimated, alive and aware and quite able to look after itself against possible invaders.

It was very hard work to keep quiet when I heard the approaching slop of Holmes' boots, but I forced myself to do so. However, I could not entirely control my voice when I answered his call of "Russell?"

"Here, Holmes," I quavered.

"I believe we will find a farmhouse just over the next hill. I can hear a cow and some chickens."

"I still can't see, Holmes."

"Nor can I, Russell. Still, I suppose we'll manage. Give me your hand."

Willingly, I did so, and followed him through the unseen landscape.