The Moor

We might have made faster time on our hands and knees, but our pride and the sodden state of the ground kept us from it. The cold breath of the moor pressed in on us like the tool of a deliberate and watchful living thing, trapping us, trying us, seeing if it could force us to break and run madly to our destruction. Had I not possessed Holmes' hand, the god Pan might have taken me, leading me astray to the trickling sound of his pipe.

Little more than a mile it was, but for almost an hour we stumbled through the gloom, visited occasionally by the sharp terror of a looming figure, which would turn out to be a standing stone, grey and lugubrious, or a fence post, indistinguishable from the monument. The final of these came after we had found a wall and were patting our way separately and at a greater speed. Abruptly out of the murk there emerged the stark outline of a soul in torment: a thin figure as tall as a man, stubby arms outstretched, head thrown back in a frozen shriek to the heavens. My heart gave a great thud inside my chest, and settled down to a fast thumping only when I realized that I was looking at a moorland cross. Holmes could hardly have missed my gasp, but he said nothing, only the welcome words a moment later, "I believe this is the gate to the farmyard."

Such proved to be the case, when we approached a tiny, heavily lichened stone building in a hollow of ground. We had even timed it well, because the farmer and his hired man were at the table for their noonday dinner. The farmwife was startled to see us approach her door, but she soon rallied, explaining that she was quite used to the odd informal guest, although it was rare to see a rambler outside of the summer months.

I found the delicacy of her unspoken question amusing, particularly as it was couched in a nearly unintelligible dialect and put to us in a tiny, multiple-purpose room already overcrowded with humanity, two dogs, and a basket of newly hatched chicks peeping beside the inglenook fireplace that functioned as kitchen range. Who was she to question the insanity of two outsiders spilling onto her doorstep from out of the fog?

Holmes took off his hat politely, and answered her as she moved around us to fetch two more plates and the necessary cutlery and mugs to go with them.

"We're not exactly here on a holiday stroll, madam. We heard that there was a sighting of Lady Howard's coach not far from here, and we were eager to hear more. You see," he said, warming to his story and taking his place on the bench and a spoon in his hand, "we collect odd tales such as that of Lady How—"

There was a sudden gurgling, clicking noise from the inglenook, emerging from what I had thought to be a pile of blankets draped across a chair to dry near the heat. I could make no sense of the sound, but it silenced everyone in the room, including Holmes. The two men and the farmwife all turned to stare at Holmes, and I saw with astonishment the look of chagrin spreading across his face.

"What was that?" I demanded. "I didn't hear."

"He—or she, I beg your pardon," he said to the tiny huddled figure, and started anew. "To translate, the remark was made, and I quote, 'By Gar, who is it but Znoop Zherlock?' 'Snoop Sherlock' was, I ought to explain, the nickname given me by the moor dwellers during the Baskerville case. We have here one of the older residents, evidently, who remembers me." He extricated his long legs from the bench and went over to the pile of blankets, extending his hand towards it. A small, gnarled paw appeared, followed by another burst of unintelligible speech—badly distorted, I diagnosed, by a complete lack of teeth, but still of such a heavy dialectical peculiarity as to constitute a separate language. I had thought Harry Cleave possessed an accent; I was mistaken. In fact, I shall not even attempt to transcribe the words as they were spoken, since an alphabet soup such as "Yar! Me luvvers, you mun vale leery, you cain't a' ated since bevower the foggy comed" makes for laborious, if picturesque, reading.

At first hearing, the speech was beyond me, although Holmes seemed to follow the sense of it readily enough. I merely applied myself to the hot, simple food that was put before me, and drank the cider in my mug. The talk washed over me, and as the pangs of cold and hunger subsided, I slowly began to make sense of what was being said.

The folk in this isolated farmstead were indeed aware of Lady Howard's coach, and did not like it one bit. The first witness to the apparition, back in July, had actually been a friend of the young farmhand's second cousin, and Holmes made haste to interrogate the farmhand as to the whereabouts of his second cousin's friend, whose euphonious name was Johnny Trelawny. It appeared, however, that Trelawny had fled the moor, despite being known far and wide as a brave man, a man indeed formerly thought fearless, who had done his service on the Western Front and to whom the occasional brawl was not unknown. There was no consideration that the intense teasing he had received during the month he remained the sole witness to Lady Howard's coach might be a contributing factor to Trelawny's disinclination to stay on the moor, and when Holmes enquired as to the man's employment, and was told that Johnny had lost his job after assaulting his employer (a known wag who came up to his employee in the pub and presented him with a tiny newborn puppy, asking if Trelawny thought it had been fathered by Lady Howard's hound), it seemed to me that fear was not perhaps the chief contributing factor in the man's departure. When Holmes ventured to suggest this alternate explanation, it was considered, and rejected. No, moor dwellers in general were staying away from the northwestern quarter of the moor, certainly at night. Johnny Trelawny would be no exception.

Holmes succeeded in drawing out roughly the date when Trelawny had seen this vision, establishing that it was probably the Tuesday or Wednesday before the full moon. However, when he tried to find where Trelawny had gone, the only point on which the family agreed was that the lad would not have gone back to his family home in Cornwall, due to a long-standing feud with an uncle. Exeter, the farmhand thought. Portsmouth, the farmwife suggested, and then used the opportunity to begin her own tale of another lad who had got a girl in trouble and run off as far as London, but the girl's father had taken his savings out of the jar in the woodshed to buy himself a train ticket, and as he set off across the moor on a dark night…

Stories tumbled out as the cider jug went around and the relief of confession began to be felt. Voices crossed and were raised and crossed again, with the constant running commentary of the toothless figure in the corner making a rhythm like a waterfall for the rest to talk over. Holmes had no difficulty in steering the tales towards the occult and the unusual, and out of the welter of sounds I received clear images and phrases, chief among which was a regular repetition of the phrase, "a coorius sarcumstance," pronounced each time with a shake of the head.

I had to agree, some of the circumstances they described were "coorius" indeed; in fact, I should have said they were highly unlikely. The black dogs and the mysteriously dead sheep any student of the supernatural might have expected, along with the standard two-headed foals and the infertile clutches of eggs, but the eagle carrying off a grown ewe made me raise an eyebrow, and when the farmwife swore that a bolt of lightning had shaken the earth and knocked one of her best plates from its perch, I closed my ears and reached for the board of gorgeous yellow cheese to accompany what I decided had to be my final glass of "zyder":England simply did not have earthquakes, not even in Dartmoor.

"Snoop Sherlock" valiantly listened to it all, trying hard to shape the conflicting narratives into hard fact of places and dates, contributing the odd remark and trying hard to deflect the inevitable spate of Baskerville reminiscences from the aged figure in the blankets. He finally brought the Babel to a close by the desperate measure of pulling out his watch and exclaiming theatrically over the passage of time, looking pointedly at the window and declaring that the fog seemed to have cleared, and finally standing up to leave (dealing his head a mighty crack on the low roof beam). We paid generously for the food, caught up our rucksacks, and made our escape, with the farmwife's thanks and the old woman's voice following us out of the door and across the weedy yard.

I quickly realised that having the fog clear on Dartmoor meant a transformation into rain. Uncomfortable, but infinitely better than the fog.

***

We took greater care to avoid total immersion in our next interviews, but we need not have worried. Of the courting couple who had later seen the coach and its dog, the girl refused to say anything, just burst into melodramatic tears and collapsed into the arms of a handsome young man. We were led to understand, moreover, that this young man was not the same beau with whom she had been the night of the apparition, and in the course of ascertaining the whereabouts of the former suitor (the one whom Baring-Gould had referred to as "stolid and un-imaginative") we nearly came to blows with the current gentleman.

The rejected suitor, Thomas Westaway, lived two miles off and was happy enough to interrupt his labours on a stone wall in exchange for some silver. Avoiding as best he could the touchy issue of Westaway's erstwhile ladylove, Holmes questioned him closely as to the precise location and times of the sighting.

The first query was settled by the lad pulling a piece of sacking cloth over his shoulders and leading us down the lane, over a stile (not a wooden contraption, merely lengths of stone protruding from the wall to form crude steps), and across a field. Built against the farther wall was a low shed, providing a sheltered feeding place for animals—and, no doubt, a sheltered private place for people. Baring-Gould's analysis of the situation was remarkably accurate, I thought.

On the other side of the wall was a flat track, similar in shape and wear to the track we had seen at the first site, either a part of the same road or a branch leading to it.

"This is where you saw the coach, is it?" Holmes asked, leaning against the wall and taking out his pipe and tobacco.

"Right here," young Westaway agreed. "Us heerd'y there, stood up and saw'n there, and seed 'er go by not forty feet off."

"You saw a woman inside, then?" I asked.

"Didn't see no one. It were fair dark inside the box."

"But you said—"

Holmes interrupted my protest. "I believe you'll find that the pronoun refers to the coach itself, Russell, not its occupant. Devonshire speech uses a creative approach to the gender of its pronouns."

"I seed her, I did, glowin' white with the bones of 'er vour 'usbands."

"Of course," said Holmes. "You say the carriage followed the track up and around the hill?"

"Oh yes. Acourse, we baint 'zackly seed 'er go, bein' halfway to th' house and all."

"Because of the dog?"

The lad had gone pale, and now swallowed hard. "He were there, afore thicky gert stone there. He just standed and stared at us, and whined like he wanted to come over the wall at us, bevore the driver whistled him on. That's when we ran."

"Were there any other noises, voices perhaps?"

"Just the harnesses clatterin' and thicky whistle. An' the growl."

"Growl?"

"Sort of a hiss, or maybe a rattle."

"From the dog?"

"I z'pose," he said dubiously. "He just sort a' comed with th' carriage."

Holmes thought it over before deciding not to press further with the hissing rattling growl.

"And the horses?"

"Dark, they was," the lad said promptly.

"Could you see whether there was one, or two?"

"Didn't see they a'tall."

"Then how did you know what colour they were?" Holmes asked with remarkable patience.

"Because I couldn't see they, is how I knew they was dark." It made sense to me, although for some reason, Holmes seemed to think the lad's logic less than impeccable. "Heered the harnesses a-jangling something mad, though, zo there may've been two, even more."

"But you did see the dog. It was light enough?"

"The moon were up, I saw her fine."

"What time did you two come up here?"

"Just past evening chores, us…" He saw his slip too late, and looked away. "The moon waddn' all that high, I reckon. It must've been still light, stays light late come August."

"You came up here while it was still light, but the moon was up when you left," Holmes said, completely ignoring his witness's attempt to save face.

"I z'pose. We come to talkin', you know?"

"I understand."

The lad looked hard at Holmes, ready to climb on his dignity and ride away at the least sign of humour or criticism, but the expression on Holmes' face was merely blandly expectant.

"I z'pose it was three, four hours altogether," he admitted. "We comed up like I zaid, after evening chores, and it were vull dark when we got back. 'Cept for the moon, of course."

"Where was the moon in the sky, when you looked over the wall and saw the dog?"

Our witness stood for a long moment, his face twisted in thought, before his hand went up to a point on the horizon. "There, more or less. It were a day or two past vull, but very bright, and it was a remarkable clear night. We'd been talking about all the ztars," he reminisced, and then ducked his head, blushing furiously.

We carefully did not see his discomfiture, but busied ourselves with climbing over the loosely laid stone wall to the track on the other side. There were no canine footprints to be seen; however, thirty yards up the hill we found a protruding boulder, one edge of which had been scraped to raw cleanness by a sharp edge. Holmes fingered it, and looked up at the farmer's lad.

"Has anyone been riding along here in the last months on a shod horse?"

"Why, no zur. Not that I know. Acourse, there's no telling what vurriners will get up to, in the summers."

"True," Holmes said, brushing off his hands. "It would have been nice to know that we're dealing with an actual, iron-shod horse rather than a ghostly emanation. Spectral apparitions are the devil's own objects to lay hands upon. Still, I thank you for your time," he said, before the lad could puzzle over his remark, and then he shook hands with the boy and gave him another coin. But before we parted, he gave the young man something else as well.

"Look, lad," he said confidentially. "I shouldn't worry too much about the girl. Best to find out now how undependable she is, instead of later, when there are children underfoot. No, you look around for a woman with brains and spirit. You'll never be bored." He clapped the boy hard on the back and walked off; it would have been hard to say whether the lad or myself was the more nonplussed.

***

It was by now late afternoon, and although in the still-long days of August we might just have reached Lew Trenchard before darkness fell, we should certainly never do so on an already dim October's day. We made for the nearest inn, which Holmes said was in the hamlet of Two Bridges.

We passed a number of prehistoric settlements, now mere grass-grown foundations of the original circular huts, and picked our way over three streams. The fourth we followed downstream rather than cross, and entered into an extraordinarily weird area, a long strip of strewn boulders and stunted oaks that seemed to writhe in the half-light of the approaching evening.

"Odd to see trees again," I commented, more to hear a voice than from any real need to communicate.

"A fey sort of place, isn't it? Wistman's Wood, it's called, which is either the corruption of a Celtic name meaning something along the lines of 'rocky woods along the water' or else the corruption of a Saxon term for 'foreigners,' indicating it was a Celtic wood, which in turn may be supported by the name 'Welshman's Wood' that some of the old people still use. You may take your choice of corruptions. Ah," he said, as we emerged from the wood, "nearly there."

Along the river and past a farmyard, and indeed we were nearly there—but not before the most extraordinary thing we had seen all day passed in front of our eyes. Indeed, it nearly ran us down, as we stepped confidently out onto the black surface of an actual macadamised road, only to leap back aghast into the safety of the walls as a furious black mechanical monstrosity came roaring around the bend straight at us. After two days spent among sheep and standing stones, this reminder of the twentieth century came as a considerable shock.

SIX

I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that cooking done over a peat fire surpasses cooking at the best club in London. But it may be that on the moor one relishes a meal in a manner impossible elsewhere.

—A Book of Dartmoor

The inn at Two Bridges, on the other hand, when finally we navigated the dangers of the road and passed beneath the sign of the Saracen's Head, was more akin to the sheep and the prehistoric stone circles than it was to the motorcar. The air was dense with the fragrance of dinner and beer, pipe tobacco and long generations of peat fires, and I immediately felt every cell in my body relax, secure in the knowledge that my needs would be well cared for.

A smiling boy whisked our disreputable packs upstairs, a smiling girl invited us to choose between a late service of afternoon tea and an early service of dinner, or just a quiet glass of something while we thought about it.

Greedily, I pounced on the offer of tea, asking only that it be delayed briefly so I might go upstairs and make myself presentable. Ten minutes later, I trotted back down and found Holmes (who had somehow contrived to tidy himself with neither bath nor possessions to hand) seated in a comfortable chair in front of a glowing fire, one hand holding a cup of tea, the other the remnants of a scone piled high with clotted cream and jam.

"I thought you didn't like cream and scones, Holmes," I said mildly, wasting no time to claim the larger of the two remaining on the plate and setting to with cream and jam. Holmes poured me a cup of tea and put the milk jug where I could reach it.

"Very occasionally, after a cold and strenuous day, I welcome a scone with Devonshire cream."

"Or two."

"Or two," he agreed. "Are you satisfied to stop the night here? I could arrange for a motor to take us to Lew Trenchard, if you would prefer, as our set tasks on the moor are, for the moment, more or less complete. I ought to consult with Gould before we determine our next actions." So saying, he stretched his legs out to the fire, rested his cup and saucer on the buttons of his waistcoat, and half closed his eyes. Somehow, he did not look overanxious to hurry off.

"Is there any need to return tonight?"

"None. And on the contrary," he said, lowering his voice, "the public bar might make for an informative evening."

"Grilling the locals while they're in their cups. Have you no shame?"

The corner of his mouth twitched and he allowed his eyes to shut. I ate my scones and poured out the last of the tea, refused the offered refill of both solid and liquid, and sat staring contentedly into the fire. When my cup was empty, I sighed, and glanced over at the relaxed figure in the next chair.

"Holmes, if that cup isn't empty, you're about to have an unfortunate stain."

It was not empty, but he drained it, replaced the cup on the tray, and we adjourned to the stronger refreshment and heartier companionship of the public bar.

***

The companionship we found went some distance beyond hearty, nearing raucous, and I slept late the following morning in the cloud-soft bed. I woke eventually, and lay staring through one eye at the teacup on the table beside the bed. I could smell the tea, could nearly taste the clean, acrid heat of it scouring the fur off my tongue, but I did not care much for the movement required in transporting cup to lips.

"God," I said, and then: "Do I remember dancing last night?"

"Briefly," said Holmes from somewhere across the room.

"God," I said again, and carefully pulled the bedclothes back up around my head.

***

We did not make an early start that morning. I am not certain it was even still morning when we left the Saracen's Head behind. I half wished I could leave my own head there, too.

"But I only drank cider, Holmes," I protested, when a mile of fresh air lay between us and the inn.

"Powerful stuff, Devonshire zyder." I had thought him untouched by our night of carousing with the natives, but on closer examination I decided that he, too, was moving with a degree more care and deliberation than was normal.

"Did we extract any information from the local inhabitants, though?"

"You don't remember?"

"Holmes."

"One of the lads told me an interesting tale about his wife's granny, who was alone in her house one night when the rest of the family had not yet returned from a wedding in Lydford, who heard a dog scratching at the door. She is, the boy admitted, very deaf, but her own dog raised such a noise trying to get out of the door it attracted her attention."

"Now there's a piece of hard evidence," I said. Sarcasm is a ready companion to a sore head.

"When did you learn to play the tin whistle?" Holmes asked innocently. "This is a talent you've kept well hidden from me."

"Oh Lord, I didn't play the tin whistle, did I? Yes, I suppose I did. I was going to surprise you with it someday; I thought it might prove a useful skill the next time we found ourselves disguised as gipsies or something."

"You did surprise me, and it did come in useful."

"Did it? I'm glad. How?"

"Do you recall the old smith-turned-motor-mechanic, Jacob Drew? With the full white beard and the red braces?"

"Er, vaguely." I remembered him not in the least, but I thought I would not admit it.

"He took quite a fancy to you, and came over to tell me while I was trying to tune that wretched excuse for a fiddle that we were not like all the summer trippers, and proceeded to recount some of their madder antics. Such as the pair of Londoners who stopped the night atop Gibbet Hill back in July and came down swearing they'd seen Lady Howard's coach of bones travelling across the moor."

"You don't say. Well, having met Dartmoor in all its forms, I can well believe in Lady Howard's coach, and in any number of black and ghostly huntsmen and their dogs as well. Where is the delightfully named Gibbet Hill?"

"The other side of Mary Tavy from here. We have to go near it in any case; I thought we might take a look."

"Sounds a charming place. Are we required to pass the night on its summit?"

"I think not."

"Good."

The rest of that trek across Dartmoor was uneventful, other than finding me wet, cold, hungry, and plagued with a headache. I also discovered what a kistvaen is by the simple process of falling into one (a burial hole ill-covered by a cracked and unbalanced slab of stone), and we met a herd of immensely shaggy, long-horned highland cattle, looking very much like prehistoric creatures recently risen from some weed-grown swamp. They did not much like the looks of us, either, and as a group took exception to our presence; fortunately, there was a wall nearby. Unfortunately, there was a small mire on the other side of the wall. When we came to Mary Tavy, it was with difficulty that we persuaded an innkeeper to allow us in, and then we were banished to the kitchen for our luncheon.

By afternoon, the clouds were high enough that Holmes thought it worthwhile to look and see what the two mad Londoners might have witnessed, so we trudged up the slippery sides of Gibbet Hill. This was not, as I had both assumed and hoped, so named because of some fancied resemblance of a rock formation, but because there had been an actual gibbet on the top of this prominent hill, employed on highwaymen captured on the busy road below, their bodies left high as an admonishment to their colleagues. It was an appropriately cheerless sort of place, gouged about with the remains of mines around its base and topped now not by a gibbet, but by a water-filled quarry, green with scum.

The view, however, was not without interest, and did indeed stretch for miles—or would have, given a clearer day. Holmes squatted down with the map, now in its final stages of returning to the state of pulp but still legible in the rectangles between the fold lines. He found a flat rock and aligned the map to the view in front of us, then began to tick off the landmarks: Brat, Doe, and Ger Tors, which I could see; Great Links and Fur Tors, which Holmes claimed he could see; all the sweep of the moor, emerging green and russet from the mist.

Placing his two index fingers on the map, one at each sighting of the ghostly coach, he compared the map and the land in front of us, his head bobbing up and down, up and down, until I began to feel a return of my earlier queasiness and went off to contemplate the waterlogged quarry.

I returned when I heard Holmes rising and trying to fold the map into a manageable size.

"Anything?"

"Not conclusive. We don't even know which way the coach was going when they saw it. We must try to find those two."

"Two stray Londoners on holiday in the middle of summer?" I exclaimed. "How do you propose to do that?"

"They may have spent one night shivering up here, but you can be certain they'd not repeat the experience. They will have made for the nearest kitchen and hot bath, and once there, they will have signed the guest register."

Holmes had a tremendous knack for sounding certain of himself, usually on the flimsiest of evidence. I took a deep breath and let it slowly out, and was just opening my mouth to agree to this scouring of all nearby inns, public houses, farmhouses, and cottages when Holmes interrupted me.

"However, that is not for tonight, and probably not the most efficient use of resources to do it ourselves. Gould can muster a troop of Irregulars for us, men who know the ground."

Immensely relieved, I swung my heavy knapsack back onto my shoulders, tightened my slack bootlaces to protect my toes against the downhill journey, and lightheartedly followed my husband down from Gibbet Hill.

SEVEN

Towards evening I was startled to see a most extraordinary object approach me—a man in a draggled, dingy, and disconsolate condition, hardly able to crawl along.

—A Book of Dartmoor

Darkness overtook us on the road back towards Lew Trenchard. As I stumbled in Holmes' wake, barely conscious of the vegetation and the people and the rich odours of dung and grass and rotting leaves, I reflected that I had been wet, bedraggled, and exhausted before—generally in Holmes' company—and after two years of marriage to the man I had come to accept this as a common state of affairs. I should have been somewhat happier about it if only he, too, might show the same results, but Holmes had always possessed the extraordinary ability to avoid grime. Given two puddles, identical on the surface, Holmes would invariably choose the one with the shallow, neatly gravelled bottom, whereas I, just as invariably, would put my foot into the other and be in muck past the ankle. Or go over a wall fleeing from a herd of horned Scottish cows and land respectively on green turf and churned-up mud.

So it was that we approached Lew House, with me limping and slurping in my boots while beside me walked my partner and husband, his only dishevelment after three days of moor-crawling the day's light stubble on his jaw and a high-tide mark of mud around the lower half of his otherwise clean boots. He looked as if he were returning from a gentle day's shooting; I seemed to have spent the day wrestling a herd of escaped pigs through a bog.

The smell of wood smoke grew stronger as we came up the drive to Lew House, and I could see lights pouring from the windows, making the cold mausoleum seem almost warm and beckoning. Considering the late hour, in fact, the house seemed fairly blazing with lights. Nice of Baring-Gould to make the effort, I thought, and was aware of a faint feeling of warmth towards the man. Only when we were actually within the porch and I heard the voices within did I realise my mistake, and by then it was too late to bolt for the servants' entrance.

Again, our host himself opened the door. This time, at his back and peering curiously around the cleric's high shoulder, stood another man, a wide, swarthy face topped with thick, greying, heavily pomaded hair. The man's liquid brown eyes blinked at the sight of us, and shifted from their initial astonishment to a politely, if inadequately, concealed amusement.

"Miss Russell," our host said, "you look a bit the worse for wear. Shall I ask Mrs Elliott—"

"No thank you," I said, stung into asperity by the amusement in his voice that matched that of the stranger's eyes. "It is predominantly external." I sat on the bench and tugged at my bootlaces, praying fervently that they would not knot on me. I was saved from this small but final humiliation when the ties slid loose, allowing me to prise the boots from my feet. The sodden condition of the stockings I should simply ignore, along with the rest of my state. Pretend you've just come from the hairdresser's, Russell, I commanded myself. Imagine you've arrived at the home of a poor relation whose misbehaviours you have come to chastise. Put your chin up and cut them off without a farthing.

When my coat and hat had been peeled away and joined the sodden gloves on the bench, I turned towards the door and put my chin up and my hand out.

"Good evening, Mr Baring-Gould. I trust you are keeping well?"

"What? Oh, yes. Yes, thank you." He stepped back so I could enter the house, where after a moment, recalled to himself by my attitude and my heavily applied accent of immaculate breeding, he took another step backwards and motioned to the man who was now at his shoulder rather than behind it.

"Miss Russell, this is a friend and neighbour, Mr Richard Ketteridge. Richard, Miss Mary Russell. And her husband, Mr Sherlock Holmes."

The warm hand of the stranger gripped my own frigid palm solidly. His hand was as broad and muscular as the rest of him, at one with his almost swarthy skin and the pale patches of old scars on his face but contrasting oddly with his exquisitely tailored evening suit. On his right hand he wore a wide band of a strikingly deep orange-coloured gold, set with a small diamond. His eyes were dark, his nose was broad, and the tip of the small finger on his left hand was missing. Greeting me, the laughter in his eyes did not fade; if anything it grew, even when he turned to my tidy husband and took his hand as well.

"Evening, good to meet you. I was glad to hear the Reverend has friends to stay; he ought to do it more often, 'specially with his family away. I was dining with friends down the road a piece, just stopped in to see how he was doing."

The speech was as vigorous as the handshake had been. It was also delivered in a ringing American accent, much the same accent my California-born father had possessed, and which lay beneath my own English tones (half acquired, half inherited from my London-born mother).

Baring-Gould shut the door behind Holmes and ushered us into the warmth. The room's fire was blazing, logs heaped high beneath the carved fox and hounds and warming the backsides of two more strangers. One of them was small, slim, and not much older than I, dressed also in evening wear and possessed of sleek blond hair and a neat beard surrounding a drawn-in mouth and rather stern eyes. The man beside him wore a clerical collar, a remarkably hairy tweed jacket, and an air of sporty bonhomie, and I was surprised when Baring-Gould introduced him as his curate, Gilbert Arundell—it seemed an odd pairing. The fair young man, who seemed much quieter than Ketteridge and whose dinner jacket was of a slightly inferior cut, proved to be the American's secretary. His name was David Scheiman, and the few words he spoke were also in an American accent, although an America farther east than that of his employer, and with both English and Germanic traces down at its childhood roots. His palm was damp and his grip was brief, and he had to draw himself together to look Holmes in the face (a not uncommon reaction when even the most blameless of individuals first met Holmes, as if they dreaded that he was about to look into their souls and see their inner thoughts and what they did with their private lives).

Ketteridge went to the cupboard and offered us a drink. Holmes accepted, saying he would merely go up and put on a pair of shoes first, but I smiled and demurred politely, and took my leave with as much dignity as I could muster. As I left, the conversation around the fireplace resumed: It seemed to have something to do with cricket.

Holmes did not catch me up until I was in the bathroom with the hot tap full on.

"You will come back down?" he asked, although it sounded more like an order than a question.

"Holmes, I'd rather starve to death."

He seemed honestly puzzled, whether because he had missed the amusement in the two men or because he could not see why I should object, I could not decide. He might even have been putting on an act of obtuseness for some reason, but I decided it did not matter, that in any case my reaction would be the same.

"Enjoy yourself, Holmes, while I enjoy my bath." I pushed him out and closed the door.

A long, hot, drowsy time later I became aware of a sound outside the door. I raised my ears clear of the cooling water, and listened for a moment. "Holmes?"

"Sorry, mum," said a young female voice. "Mrs Elliott thought you might like a bowl of soup. I'll just leave the cover on it to keep it hot, shall I?"

"That would be fine," I said. "Thank you. And thank Mrs Elliott for me, please."

"Yes mum." I heard the gentle rattle of a tray being put down, and then the door to the bedroom closed.

After a final sluice to rid myself of the last of the mud that had lodged itself in skin and hair and nails, I wrapped my hair in a towel and myself in a dressing gown, and went to investigate the tray. The soup was still warm, and immeasurably better than the nearly rancid, gruel-like mixture served us the first night. There were also freshly baked rolls, a large slab of crumbling orange cheddar, a slice of lemon tart, and an apple. I finished everything.

My hair was nearly dry by the time Holmes came upstairs. He had paused to change more than his muddy boots, and looked very appealing, tall and slim in his jet suit and snowy shirtfront. One thing led to another, as is the wont in a marriage, and we did not get around to speaking about Ketteridge until after the housemaid had fetched up the morning tea.

I settled myself up against the pillows while Holmes perched in his dressing gown on the seat beneath the mullioned windows.

"Tell me, Holmes, who is Richard Ketteridge and what is a Californian mulatto with the scars of frostbite on his face and fingers doing in Lew Trenchard, Devonshire?"

"Interesting chap, isn't he?" he said. "Gould sees a great deal of him." I squinted against the pallid morning light, moved my teacup from my stomach to the bedside table, found my glasses and put them on, raised myself to sit more vertically against the pillows, and looked at him.

"Would you care to elaborate?"

"No," he said, studying the burning end of the cigarette he held between his fingers. "No, I don't think that I would. I should prefer to have your unsullied reaction after you have met him properly. Which will be this evening," he added. "We are dining at his house."

"Dining! Holmes, I don't have a gown suitable for evening."

"Of course you don't."

"You go. Have a nice time with the other gents over your cigars."

"I told him we were not kitted up for formal dress, and he assured me black tie was not required. A simple frock. You did bring a frock."

"And the shoes to go with it." It was a very nice frock, too, and unless I tripped going out of the door and went sprawling, I should not be disgraced in wearing it. I acquiesced. I was more than a little curious about Mr Richard Ketteridge, even without Holmes' enigmatic refusal to discuss the man. A man with the scarred skin and abused hands of a labourer wearing the clothing of a West End dandy, who could demonstrate his intimate familiarity with the prickly squire of Lew Trenchard by acting as drinks host, was no simple character.

***

First, however, was the good Mrs Elliott's breakfast table. I took with me a pen and paper, and as we sat I sketched in the dates we had accumulated thus far:

Tuesday 25 or Wednesday 26 July—Johnny Trelawny sees coach, dog

Friday 27 July—London ramblers on Gibbet Hill see coach

Friday 24 August—courting couple sees coach, dog

Saturday 15 September—Josiah Gorton last seen in northwest quadrant

Monday 17 September—Gorton found in southeast

I passed the paper over to Holmes, who glanced at it, took my pen, and added,

Monday 20 August—plate falls off shelf

Sunday 26 August—Granny hears dog

"Holmes!" I said in some irritation. "You needn't mock me."

"I am not mocking your calendar, Russell," he protested. "I am merely contributing to it."

He seemed sincere, but I couldn't think what a broken plate or a lonely granny who heard noises in the night might have to do with Lady Howard's coach. Rather than arguing, however, I let it stand.

"Does the list tell you anything?" he asked offhandedly, reaching for the coffee.

"The moon was full around the twenty-sixth of July and the twenty-seventh of August," I said, "and that could explain why the coach was visible then."

"Or rather, why the coach was out then, so as to be visible."

"Precisely. However, that does not explain the timing of Josiah Gorton's death, which was a full eight or ten days before September's full moon."

"Nor does it explain the broken plate."

I was already tired of the broken plate, and decided he was merely using it to annoy me. I was grateful when Mrs Elliott chose that moment to bring us our breakfasts.

After we had eaten, Holmes arranged with Mrs Elliott for a troop of rural Irregulars to quarter the Mary Tavy inns, public houses, hostelries, and farmhouses in search of two Londoners who had seen a ghostly carriage. He then spent the day closeted with Baring-Gould, going over our time on the moor. I, too, spent the day with the man, though not in his physical presence. I uncovered a cache of his books and settled in with a stack of them beside my chair.

It was a singular experience. Odd, in fact. I had to admit that the man was brilliant, although I drew the line at "genius." He held an opinion on everything—European cliff dwellings, Devonshire folk songs, comparative mythology, architecture, English saints, werewolfs, archaeology, philology, anthropology, theology—and seemed possessed of a vast impatience with those who disagreed with him. Inevitably, though, the breadth of his scope meant a lack of depth, which he may have gotten away with in his novels and the werewolf book, but which rendered, for example, the works on theology quite useless. Theology is, after all, my field of expertise, and the best I could say for Baring-Gould and his conclusions (for example, that Christianity was proven to be true by the simple fact that it worked) was that he showed himself to be an enthusiastic amateur who might have made some real contribution to the world of scholarship had he possessed a more focussed sense of discipline.

However, there was a strong pulse of life in even the more abstruse tomes, a bounce and vigour one would not have predicted. His occasional references to Devon, and particularly Dartmoor, sang with life and humour, and if he was sometimes pompous and often paternalistic, the passion he felt for the land made up for it.

The novels were embarrassingly melodramatic, but intriguing. There seemed to me a deep vein of cruelty, almost brutality, running through his stories, a distinct lack of tenderness and compassion towards his characters, particularly those living in poverty, that seemed odd in a man dedicated to God's service, and moreover an interest in savage, almost pagan emotions that was surely unusual in an otherwise calm and responsible squire. I began to understand his fascination with the moor, and also to wonder about the man's blunt dismissal of his children on that first night, describing them merely as "scattered."

I was in the final throes of a furious potboiler called Mahalah when Holmes came into the room. He said something; I grunted in reply and turned the page, and after a minute another page.

Ten minutes later I had finished the book and sat back, feeling equal parts exasperation and the sense of romantic tragedy that Baring-Gould had been trying to evoke. I looked at Holmes, then looked at him more attentively.

"Why are you dressing, Holmes?"

He glanced up from his task of threading one gold cuff link into his cuff. "Dinner, Russell. At Richard Ketteridge's? I did inform you."

"Oh Lord!" I threw myself at the wardrobe and snatched up my frock. "How long do I have?"

"The car is already here. Five minutes will make us only fashionably late."

I flung my clothes on the floor and dropped the frock over my head, succeeded in hoisting my silk stockings without putting a ladder into either of them, and turned to the mirror to subdue my hair into some kind of order.

"Is it still raining?" I asked.

"It is."

"I must have an umbrella. Go and find me one. Please."

As always happens when I am in a hurry, my hair went up lopsided and had to be taken down and arranged again. Still, in the end I was presentable. I caught up a thin woollen wrap and hurried downstairs.

Baring-Gould was passing through the hallway downstairs, and he wished me a pleasant evening without, I thought, actually seeing me. Holmes was in the porch, and as soon as he heard me coming he stepped out onto the drive and opened a huge, bright green umbrella over our heads, and escorted me the few feet to the sleek closed touring car that awaited us. A liveried chauffeur was one step ahead of him, holding the door. I climbed in, followed by Holmes. The chauffeur claimed the umbrella, closed it, and drew it after him into the front, and drove us away from Lew House.

EIGHT

With every wish to promote the well-being and emancipation of the working classes, I should be sorry to see—what is approaching—the extinction of the old squirearchy, or rather being supplanted by the nouveaux riches.

—Early Reminiscences

As we began to thread our way through the narrow, deep-cut lanes that led upwards onto the moor itself, I became aware of something odd in the attitude of the man at my side. The light outside was fading, but it was still bright enough in the car for me to study him. He was slumped down into the comfortable seat, his arms crossed over his chest, and his face had a sour look on it that I had seen any number of times before.

"Holmes, what is it?"

"What is what, Russell?" he said irritably, not taking his eyes from the passing stone walls crowned with hedgerows. "I do wish you would refrain from asking me questions that contain no grammatical antecedent."

"An antecedent is unnecessary if both parties are aware of the topic under consideration, and you know full well what I'm talking about. Your physical language is positively shouting your displeasure, but since this evening's social event was not my idea, I cannot assume that you are resenting my coercion. You are peeved at something; what is it?"

"Am I not to be allowed the privacy of my own thoughts without being subjected to an analysis of my 'physical language'?"

"Not if you insist on indulging in those thoughts around me, no. If you wanted privacy, Holmes, you should not have married me."

Bridling, he removed his gaze from the limited view outside the car windows and glared at me for a long moment before his good sense reasserted itself. His arms unknotted themselves and dropped to his lap, and he looked, if anything, almost sheepish. He lowered his voice, although the glass between us and the driver was thick and the whine of the climbing engine loud.

"I discovered only this evening that Ketteridge's house is Baskerville Hall," he said.

I saw immediately what he dreaded: not, as I had feared, the feeling of a case taking a disastrously wrong turn, but rather the sort of fulsome praise he loathed. Holmes was fond enough of applause for those of his actions that he himself considered deserving, but he abhorred the popular notoriety that Watson's narratives had spawned.

"Holmes, it's been, what? Twenty years since that story was published. Surely—"

"Ketteridge's secretary was reciting whole swaths of it last night, to his master's amusement. And Gould was playing along, curse him."

"We could turn back to Lew Trenchard," I suggested. "I could take ill, if you like." One of the unexpected benefits of marriage, I had found, was that it gave a convenient scapegoat upon which public blame could be heaped.

"Generous of you to offer, Russell, but no. Tribulation is good for the soul, or so I hear. Although I admit that had I known last night, I might have avoided the invitation to dinner. Which may be why neither Ketteridge nor Gould happened to mention it."

"Well, I shall reserve the option of a ladylike attack of the vapours if the reminiscences become too nauseating."

"Thank you."

"Think nothing of it. How did Ketteridge come to own Baskerville Hall? If he inherited, why didn't he take the name?"

"He bought the place—lock, stock, and family portraits. Two years ago, according to Gould, he was on the final stages of a world tour when he passed through England and happened to hear about it from an acquaintance in a weekend shooting party up in Scotland. It appealed to him, he came out to look at it, and he ended up buying it from the sole surviving Baskerville, the daughter of the Sir Henry I knew."

"Sir Henry had no sons?"

"He had two. They were both killed during the war, one in the Somme, the other somewhere in the Mediterranean, probably lost to a German submarine boat. Sir Henry died before the war, his widow in the influenza epidemic of 1919. With death duties, the daughter, who was only twenty-two or -three and unmarried, hadn't enough left to maintain the hall. It's one of those great stone sinkholes, a gold-hungry mire sucking down pounds and pence without a trace. As you can see," he said, extending one long finger to point at the view through the window ahead.

The land beneath our tyres had climbed through the wooded fringe along the outer slopes of the moor and out into the tiny fields and walled pastures that occupy the edges of the moor itself. It had continued to rise until the low and homely cottages had fallen away, leaving only the bleak, boulder-strewn expanse of the interior. Unexpectedly, a dip in the barren ground fell away and grew trees. I caught a brief glimpse of what looked like a pair of thin towers rising above the branches, and then we dropped down into the trees.

The lodge gates showed signs of recent attention, for although the edges of the pillars were smooth and shapeless with age, the stone glowed as if freshly scrubbed and the elaborate tracery of the iron gates gleamed with new black paint. The lodge itself was fairly new and very tidy and tenanted by someone sufficiently house-proud to have starched the white curtains into crispness. As we passed through the gates, I looked up at the amorphous stone objects that topped the flanking pillars. I thought they resembled enormous potatoes; Holmes said they were the boars' heads of the Baskervilles.

On the other side of the gate lay a long avenue of old trees that had dropped most of their leaves onto the drive. Nonetheless, the branches that met over our heads were thick enough to block the last rays of the evening's light, so that we seemed to be driving into a long tunnel, illuminated from below by the powerful headlamps of the motorcar. There was a row of light standards, planted at the side of the drive at regular intervals, but they were unlit, visible only in our headlamps.

Then, twenty feet from the end of the tunnel, the front windscreen of the motorcar flared into a blaze of light, blinding us as if a powerful search light had been shone directly into our faces. The driver slowed and put up one hand to shield his eyes, and we emerged cautiously from the avenue of trees. The drive passed through an expanse of lawn lined with flower beds, and I found myself looking up at a house shaggy with ivy, its central block surmounted by the two towers I had seen from the approach. Impressive from a distance, they now looked crowded together, thrown out of balance with the original house by the addition of two modern wings. One huge light fixture hung from the wall above the porch, drenching the lower part of the house in blue-white brilliance. The upper reaches, shielded by a reflector, receded into darkness but for the squares of a few mullioned windows that had lights behind their curtains.

"Well," said Holmes to himself, "I see Sir Henry got his thousand-candle-power Swan and Edison."

"Two or three lesser bulbs might have got the job done less dramatically."

"His purpose was to expel the gloom."

"He did that," I said, although I could not help noticing that where the light eventually trailed to a halt, the dark seemed even more solid than it had in the unlit avenue.

Richard Ketteridge had been standing at his open porch door when we emerged from the avenue of trees. He came out onto the drive to greet us, and now his hand was on my door, opening it. I arranged a gracious smile on my face and permitted him to hand me out of the motorcar. Fortunately, I did not trip and fall at his feet, and as the rain had momentarily slowed to a sort of falling fog, I waved away the driver with the umbrella.

Ketteridge began to speak the moment my door cracked open, his ebullient Americanisms spilling over us as he bowed over my hand and shook that of Holmes, pulling us inside all the while.

"Well, I must say, this is an honour, an honour indeed. Little did I know when I bought this place that I'd one day be welcoming the man who saved it from a rascal, all those years ago. Of course," he confided to me, "it was one of the reasons I bought it in the first place, that ripping good story about the Hound. I felt like I was buying a piece of English history, and an exciting piece at that. Come in, come in," he urged, for we had reached the door. "You'll find a few changes in the old place," he said to Holmes, and scurried forward to fling open the door into the hall itself, nearly bowling over the butler who stood on the other side.

"Sorry, Tuptree, didn't see you there. Come in, Mrs Holmes, Mr Holmes, warm yourselves by the fire. What can we get you to drink?"

I decided that the butler must have worked in Ketteridge's house for some time, since he was not only resigned to his employer's hasty willingness to do away with his services by opening doors for himself, but he did not even react to receiving an apology from his employer. Perhaps, I amended my diagnosis, he had merely worked for Americans before.

The fire was enthusiastic and well fed, set in a massive and ancient fireplace surrounded by several yards of padded fender. I perched my backside on the leather, enjoying the heat and the crackle of the flames while Holmes and our host exchanged some innocuous words of greeting. After a moment, Tuptree came up with our drinks on his polished tray, and I then removed myself to a deep armchair of maroon leather and sipped my sherry, examining my surroundings with interest.

Sir Henry's passion for lightbulbs had been indulged in the interior of his hall as well, with the result that I now sat in the best-lit Elizabethan building outside of a film stage. It was startling, particularly as I had not seen an electric light since leaving Oxford. Every dent and chisel mark in the balusters of the upstairs gallery were readily visible; I could see a small mend in the carpeting on the staircase, and pick out a faint haze of dust on the upper frames of the pictures. It was incongruous and somewhat disturbing—surely those high, age-blackened rafters were never meant to be viewed in such raw detail, nor the cracks and folds in the high, narrow stained-glass window picked out with an intense clarity they would not have even in full sun. The intense illumination made the old oak panelling gleam and brought out all the details of the coats of arms mounted on the walls, but on the whole it was not a successful pairing, for despite the apartment's rich colours and sumptuous, almost cluttered appearance, the harshness of the light made the hall look stark and new, a not entirely successful copy of an old building.

I realised belatedly that the two men were looking at me attentively.

"I'm sorry?" I said.

"I just asked what you made of the place," replied Ketteridge.

"Actually, I was wondering how on earth you power all these lights."

"Generators and batteries," he said promptly. "Sir Henry put them in. Did it right, too—I can run every light in the place for six hours before the batteries start to run down. When they don't break down, that is—a man from London is supposed to be here to look into what's gone wrong with the row of lights in the avenue. They've been out for days."

"The problems of the householder," I murmured sympathetically.

He looked at me sideways, opened his mouth, changed his mind, and took a sip from his drink instead (not sherry, but by the look of it a lightly watered whisky) before turning back to Holmes.

"So what brings you to Dartmoor this time, Mr Holmes? Not another hound, I hope?"

"I am on holiday, Mr Ketteridge," Holmes said blandly. "Merely paying a visit to an old friend." He, too, raised his glass, and smiled politely at the American.

"Baring-Gould, yes. Did you meet him during the Baskerville case? He was here then, wasn't he?"

"He was here, yes, but no, I had met him before that."

Ketteridge wavered, and I could see him ruefully accept Holmes' broad hint that any further questioning along that particular route would be boorish. He chose another.

"I believe we have a mutual friend, Mr Holmes."

"Oh?" He was very polite; he did not even raise an eyebrow.

"Lady Blythe-Patton. You did a little job for her a few years back. I met the colonel at my club, and they invited me out to their country place for a weekend. Fine people. She had much to say about you."

Only an American, I reflected, could actually form a new acquaintanceship at a men's club. I kept my face without expression when Holmes turned to speak to me.

"I found a necklace that she had lost, Russell, many years ago when I was a hungry youth with the rent to pay."

"Recovered it within an hour of entering the house, she says," Ketteridge elaborated with a no-false-modesty sort of joviality.

"Behind the cushions of the settee," Holmes replied, sounding bored. "I don't suppose that within her panegyric she included the advice I gave her at the time?"

"Not that I recall, no," Ketteridge said doubtfully.

"I told her that in the future she ought to remove her valuables to the safe before imbibing as heavily as she had been, and moreover, that increasing her expenditures on domestic staff might make it possible for the overworked housemaids to clean more thoroughly, turning out the cushions at regular intervals. The settee was really quite disgusting."

Ketteridge thought this hilarious. I waited until his laughter was subsiding, and then I asked Holmes, "Did she actually pay you after that?"

"Do you know," he said, sounding surprised, "I don't believe she did."

Our little piece of burlesque succeeded in putting Ketteridge off track just long enough for me to nudge the train of conversation off in another direction.

"Tell me, Mr Ketteridge, what do you do to amuse yourself, here on the moor?"

His answer wound along the lines of outdoor enterprises and the pleasures of restoring a down-at-its-heels building to a state of glory, interspersed with regular away trips; however, listening between the lines, it sounded to me as if the charms of Dartmoor had begun to pall, and the thrill of owning the piece of English literary history that was Baskerville Hall was beginning to fail in its compensation for the setting. What he did for amusement on Dartmoor, it appeared, was get away from it, to London, Scotland, Paris, and even New York. He had bought the hall in a burst of enthusiasm, spent many months and a great number of dollars arranging it to his satisfaction, and now that the rich man's toy was shiny and nearing completion, clean air, fox hunts, and conversations with the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould would not be enough to keep him.

Ketteridge seemed to become aware of how thin his answer had been, and rapidly turned the topic back to Holmes. "And you, Mr Holmes, down there on the Sussex Downs; surely beekeeping doesn't occupy your every waking hour? I've noticed how few and far between Conan Doyle's stories have been lately—you must keep your hand in the investigation business, if nothing else than to give him something to write about."

Holmes took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and placidly answered, "Active investigation is a task for younger men, Mr Ketteridge. I spend my days writing."

I busied myself with my empty glass, but before Ketteridge could give verbal expression to the scepticism on his face, movement at the far end of the room attracted his attention. The butler Tuptree stood at a doorway and informed us that our dinner was served. As we turned towards him, Holmes shot me an eloquent glance. I raised my eyebrows a fraction, and he shook his head minutely. It seemed that it was not yet time for me to succumb to the vapours, despite the fact that since we had entered his house, Ketteridge had not allowed more than half a dozen sentences to pass without pulling the conversation back to the Baskerville case. For some reason, Holmes did not wish to leave. However, I decided that enough had become enough.

I went through into the dining room, followed by Holmes. Once inside, I stepped to one side, paused while Holmes walked past me into the room, and then turned on my heel to come face to face with Ketteridge, who necessarily jerked to a halt. I drew myself up, put a hand out to his sleeve, and, looking at him eye to eye (actually, I was a fraction taller than he), I spoke in a slow, clear, ironclad voice.

"My husband does not really enjoy talking about his old cases, Mr Ketteridge. It makes him uncomfortable."

Most men, and certainly forceful men like Ketteridge, tend to overlook women unless they be unattached and attractive. I usually allow this because I often find it either amusing or convenient to be invisible. Such had been the case with Ketteridge, between my self-effacement and his fascination with Holmes, but now he reared back on his heels in astonishment. I merely held his eyes for a moment longer, then smiled, let go of his arm, and left him to gather his wits and scurry around to seat us at the long, gleaming table that was set with four places and lit only by candlelight. The dim light was a great relief.

A distraction arrived in the form of Ketteridge's secretary, David Scheiman, adjusting his tie as he entered hurriedly and slipped into the fourth chair.

"Sorry I'm late," he said. "I got involved in my work and lost track of the time."

"All you missed was a drink and some pleasant conversation, David," his employer said. "Both of which you can catch up with. Wine, Mrs Holmes?"

I am not certain why I did not correct his form of address to the surname I normally use, the one I was born with. Men do not change their names with marriage, and it had always struck me as odd that women were expected to do so. Perhaps I did not correct him because I did not wish to underscore the impression of unexpected strength I had just made on him, or perhaps it was for some other reason, but after a tiny hesitation, I merely nodded and allowed Tuptree to pour a dark red wine into my glass. Holmes did not remark on the incident, not even nonverbally, but I knew he had not missed it.

"What sort of work were you doing, Mr Scheiman, that so occupied you?" I asked, more to set the conversational ball rolling than from any real interest. What I could see of him in the uncertain light confirmed that he was a pleasant if unprepossessing young man, fair-haired, prim, with a blond beard trimmed neatly low on his cheeks and a moustache that nearly obscured his thin lips. His hands, like those of his employer's, were large and callused, and the skin of his face was browned to an agreeable semblance of rude good health.

"Some old manuscripts," he said unexpectedly. "It's very interesting, the number of myths and legends that can be found about the moor. You wouldn't believe the diversity, even when the stories are basically the same. Take the myth of the black hound, for example—"

Holmes, across from me, winced perceptibly, but before he could slump into resignation, Ketteridge spoke up.

"Very interesting, I'm sure, David. Perhaps you could tell us a story after dinner." Scheiman frowned in what appeared to be confusion, a sharp line appearing low on his forehead, but he did not press the matter. Ketteridge continued, "You know of course, Mrs Holmes, that your host at Lew Trenchard is a great collector of stories, but perhaps he has not mentioned that he travelled to Iceland when he was a young man?"

"He hasn't said anything about it, no," I replied, a literally true statement, although because of my day's reading I was aware of his voyage.

"A great traveller he was, like his father. Of course, he was practically born on the road, so I guess you could say it's in his blood. His father got itchy feet when the boy was about three or four, bundled his family up, popped them in a carriage, and took off for the Continent. That's how Baring-Gould grew up, moving from Germany to the south of France and back again, until he was about fifteen, when he finally spent some time here. What a way to spend your childhood, eh? No teachers, no rules, learning languages by speaking them and science when it interests you."

It was much the same history that Baring-Gould himself had told us the first night, and now, having some idea of the man's life, I reflected that his parents' approach towards their son's education did explain something about Baring-Gould's flighty attitude towards research.

"Have you read his memoirs?" he asked us. I shook my head, having just taken a mouthful of food, and Holmes said simply that he had not. "Very interesting book. Very interesting life. It's just the first volume, of course. The next will be out next year, and he's working on the third one now."

"There's nothing about the Baskerville legend in the first volume," Scheiman remarked.

"Of course not," said Ketteridge, a touch repressively. "It ends thirty years before that. Now tell me, Mr Holmes, you're something of an antiquarian. Do you think the Romans ever made it up onto Dartmoor?"

The conversation moved away from Holmes' professional life for a time while Ketteridge and Holmes discussed tin mining and Phoenician traders, moorland crosses, the conflict between the military and the visitor during the summer months, prison reform, and the possible meanings behind the avenues of standing stones (which personally I had decided were the result of near terminal boredom on the part of the natives, who would have found heaving large rocks into upright lines an exciting alternative to watching the fog blow about) while I sat and listened politely and Scheiman drank three glasses of wine.

Gradually the topic turned back towards Baring-Gould and his work, the problems the man had in maintaining a writing schedule with his failing health, and the progress of the third and final volume of his memoirs. At this point Scheiman again interjected a comment.

"I wonder if The Hound of the Baskervilles will be in that volume," he said to Holmes. His speech was slightly slurred, and I thought that perhaps he had not missed his predinner drinks, after all. Ketteridge shot him a hard glance.

"David, I think you've had enough wine," he said. His voice was quiet but hard, almost threatening, and his secretary put down his glass in an instant and automatic response. Unfortunately, the edge of it caught the side of his dinner plate, a glancing blow but enough to jolt the glass out of his hand and send its contents shooting down the table straight at me. I jerked back, avoiding the worst of it, but not all.

Everyone but Holmes was on his feet, me dabbing at the front of my dress, Scheiman looking abruptly ill, and Ketteridge flushing with anger.

"David, I think you'd better leave." Without a word, his secretary dropped his table napkin on his chair and obeyed. Ketteridge apologised;one of Tuptree's minions silently whisked away the place setting, I reassured him (I hoped not falsely) that no permanent damage had been done my frock, and we resumed our places and our meal.

Ketteridge picked up his fork and determinedly resumed the conversation where he had left off, regaling us with stories of our host in Lew House. We heard about the pet bat that used to perch on Baring-Gould's shoulder when he was a schoolmaster (the boys called it his familiar, and swore it whispered dark secrets in his ear), and the Icelandic pony he had rescued and brought home with him, about the long black bag he had taken to carrying as a travel case, draped over his shoulder and called by the pupils "Gould's Black Slug." Ketteridge had never met Baring-Gould's wife, Grace, who died in 1916, but had prised the story of their courtship out of Baring-Gould's half brother and one-time curate, Arthur Baring-Gould, and recounted for us the tale of how the thirty-year-old parish priest had seen a nearly illiterate, sixteen-year-old girl going home in her clogs from her work in the mill and known that she would be his wife. He sent her away to friends, who taught her a correct accent and how to make polite conversation, and when she was nineteen they had married: the tall, eccentric, middle-aged parson and the short, quiet, hard-working young girl with the gentle iron will and the generous heart and the unexpected dry sense of humour. It was an unlikely match of great affection and mutual dependence, and everyone agreed that he had not been the same since she had died.

To do him justice, I do not think that when Ketteridge began the story, he was aware that his two guests might take it as something more personal than a quaint and touching tale of another's marriage. His face gave away the moment when he did become aware that he was speaking to a man and a woman with an even more exaggerated disparity of age, if not of education, but he rallied and ploughed on as if unconscious of the potential discomfort his narrative might bring.

However, immediately that story ended, he went off on another tack entirely, and we were soon hearing about the Baring-Gould archaeological excavations on the moor and the reports of the Devonshire Association.

Sweet course and cheese disposed of, we returned to the central hall, bidding farewell to the serried ranks of purchased ancestors staring down at us from the dark recesses of the minstrel's gallery at the far end of what was more accurately a banqueting hall than a dining room. Back in the hall, we found the brilliant lighting blessedly shut down, replaced by the gentling glow of a multitude of candles. It had been an excellent meal, the food unadorned, even homely, but beautifully cooked; now, the chairs in front of the fireplace where we sat to drink our coffee and the men their brandies were comfortable, and the conversation, Ketteridge having laid aside his curiosity about Holmes' past cases, was amiable. All in all, a much nicer evening than I had anticipated.

Even the hall seemed more appealing. Without the stark electric lights, the room reverted to its proper nature, a richly furnished chamber that had outlasted dynasties, outlasted too the family it had housed for five centuries.

It was, despite its opulence, remarkably comfortable and easy on the eyes and the spirit. I had assumed that Ketteridge bought the furnishings along with the portraits, but looking at them again, I began to wonder. The pieces were all either very old indeed or too new to have been installed during the Baskerville reign, and surely a house put together by a woman could not have been so unremittingly solid, dark, and male. Even the many decorative touches were masculine, the carpets and statues, pillows, wall tapestries, and paintings all large, intense in colour, and lush in texture, the overall effect so rich one could almost taste it. Studying the room in mild curiosity, trying to analyse how this came about, I noticed the subtle use of geometry, from the square of the chairs and settee before the fireplace to the triangle formed by the arrangement of three discrete centres that were placed with deceptive thoughtlessness, across the expanse of floor.

It was a collection of deep red, blue, and black needlework pillows on the sofa opposite the fireplace that nudged me into realising what the room reminded me of: Moroccan architecture and decorative arts, the elaborate arabesques built around the most basic geometry, as if the strength of a Norman church were to be combined with the delicacy of a piece of lacework. It was very unlikely, given the setting of a building from the Elizabethan era risen from foundations two hundred years older, but the hall that had at first seemed cluttered and overly furnished with colour and pattern, now in the dimmer light of the many thick candles assumed the persona of an Oriental palace. I smiled: Our dusky host had made for himself a Moorish retreat in the midst of Dartmoor.

Holmes took a sip from his glass, and then beat his host to the questions. "Tell us, Mr Ketteridge, just how a Californian who struck it rich in the goldfields comes to settle in remotest Dartmoor?"

"I see my friend has been talking about me," he said with a smile.

"Gould has said nothing about your past," said Holmes.

Ketteridge raised his eyebrows and looked slightly wary—the standard response when Holmes pulled personal history out of what appeared to be thin air.

"You guessed—" Ketteridge instantly corrected himself with a conspiratorial smile. "You deduced that? Perhaps I won't ask what you based it on." His smile was a bit strained, and he took a swallow from his glass before continuing.

"It was Alaska," he began. "Not the Californian fields, which were either worked out or under claim long before I was born. I was living in Portland in July of 1887, twenty-one years old and making a not very good living as a small shopkeeper, when on the sixteenth of the month rumours began to spread like wildfire that a ship had put in to San Francisco with fifty-thousand dollars of gold in a single suitcase. The next day this old rust-bucket the Portland put into Seattle harbour with nearly two tons of gold—two tons! More than a million dollars of gold, right there in one ship. Two hours after the news hit Portland, my dry-goods store was up for sale, cheap. I unloaded it in less than a week, bought my provisions, and lit out for the north.

"I never did find how many ships full of gold seekers had already left, but I was on one of the first dozen. Still, the river route freezes early, and I couldn't risk getting stuck, so cross-country it was, to Skagway and Dyea, across the Chilkoot Pass and north into the Yukon. Thought I'd make it to the goldfields before winter set in, but between one thing and another, I met it full on. Jesus—oh, pardon me, Mrs Holmes. Lord, it was cold. I nearly died—you wouldn't believe the kind of cold there. Tears freeze your eyes shut and break your lashes right off, spit is frozen solid before it hits the ground, leather boots that get wet will crack right across if they're not kept greased. And oh yes, if you don't see a tiny hole in your glove, your finger's turned to ice before you notice the cold."

Smiling, he held out his left hand and wiggled the stump of the little finger.

"Still, I was lucky. I didn't starve or freeze, or get washed away in a river half turned to ice or buried under an avalanche or eaten alive by mosquitos or bears or wolfs or shot by an ornery claim-jumper or any of the thousand other ways to die. No, I made it, a little the worse for wear, it's true, but with adventure enough for a lifetime, and gold enough as well. Yes, I was lucky. When I got to the fields I found that there was still plenty of gold for a man possessed of stamina and a shovel. Within months of the discovery, the smallest creek and most remote hole were claimed."

Richard Ketteridge was soon gone from the fields, with gold enough to buy his luxury for life.

"I married my childhood sweetheart, and buried her ten years later. Somehow it wasn't all so fine after she died, and so I sold up and began to wander: the Japans, Sydney, Cape Town. I ended up here a couple of years ago, heard about it from a friend up in Scotland less than two weeks after I entered the country. Now if that isn't fate for you—it took my fancy and so I stayed. I like the air here. It reminds me of the best parts of Alaska, in the spring. Still, the winters are cold, and I'm beginning to feel the old itch again, more than the odd month in New York or Paris can scratch."

His story had the worn and polished texture of a favourite possession, taken out regularly to be handed around and admired, and I could easily imagine him sitting with his new friends in a Scottish hunting lodge after a day's rough shoot, trading stories of unlikely places and successful ventures.

"You plan to move, then?" Holmes asked.

"I think so."

"Baring-Gould will miss you," commented Holmes.

"I'll miss him. He's a crazy old coot, but he does tell some fine stories. I'll think of him when I'm sitting in the sun, in the south of France, maybe, or even Hong Kong for a real change. My secretary would like that, wouldn't you, David?"

I had not been aware of the secretary's presence behind me, so light were his footsteps and so heavy the carpeting. He came into the low glow around the fire, his shoulders hunched in embarrassment, and went to the coffee tray to pour himself a cup. He had been away less than two hours, but he sounded stone-cold sober now.

"I really must apologise," he said to us. "I have some sort of blood imbalance that makes me highly sensitive to the effects of alcohol. I shouldn't drink at all, really. I make such a fool of myself. I do beg your pardon if I seemed at all…forward."

"My dear boy," said Ketteridge, "I'm sure you offended none of us. I was merely concerned, knowing your sensitivity, that you might make yourself ill."

It had sounded more like anger than concern in his voice, back in the dining room, but I assumed that he was being generous in excusing the younger man's lapse. Employees did not normally indulge in public drunkenness, even in the relative informality of an American household, and Scheiman knew it: He sat in a chair apart from his employer and the guests, away from the fire.

"So, David. Do you have a story from Dartmoor for us?"

"I, er, they're not really all that interesting. That is to say, I find them interesting, but—"

"Mr Scheiman," said Holmes in resignation. "Perhaps you might tell my wife the story of the Baskerville curse."

Scheiman looked startled, and glanced at his employer for instructions. Although Ketteridge had so firmly discouraged his secretary from inflicting these doggy reminiscences on us, he could hardly now insist that his guest be saved from them when it was Holmes himself asking. Ketteridge shrugged.

"As our guest suggests, David. Do tell the story of the black hound of Dartmoor." And so Scheiman, looking uncomfortable, began his story.

"In doing some reading about the history of the area, I came across the story that the Baskerville curse was actually based on. Not the one as given in The Hound of the Baskervilles," he said, with an apologetic glance at Holmes, "but the true story. There lived in the seventeenth century a squire by the name of Richard Cavell or Cabell. He was a man of great passions, who had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune, to marry him a beautiful young wife.

"For the first year or two all was well, except that they had no children. Soon, however, he discovered that she was betraying him. He forbade her visitors and kept her at home, but it continued, and became ever more indiscriminate. He sent away every male household servant aside from the near-children and the truly elderly, he hedged her around with limits, but still his wife turned her back on him. His jealousy grew. When he saw her flirting with a stable hand, he hit her and forbade her to ride. When he witnessed her in conversation with the farm manager, he punished her again and locked her in the house. He grew afraid that the women in the house would plot with their mistress to bring her lovers, and so he got rid of the old servants and hired new ones. He loved his wife and he hated her, and soon the only friend she was allowed was her dog.

"The day came when he again caught her in yet another transgression. He beat her nearly to death, threw her in her room, and took the key.

"By this time the woman feared for her life. She let herself down the wall of the house on the ivy and fled, on foot, for the house of her sister across the moor.

"She did not make it. He discovered her absence, mounted his horse, and rode her down and, in his passion of jealous rage, he killed her. But as he drew his knife from the body of his wife, the woman's only friend took its revenge. The dog went for him and tore out the throat of his mistress' murderer. The dog then disappeared, out into the desolation of the moor, where to this day he wanders, waiting either for his mistress, or for her husband."

A short silence fell, silence other than the hiss and crackle of the low-burning fire, until Holmes stirred. "Interesting," he said in a bored voice, and pulled out his watch.

"Yes," I said brightly. "It is interesting. The—"

Holmes interrupted me loudly, no doubt fearing (with reason) my scathing response to the clean-up job the secretary had done on what was essentially a very dirty little story. "My dear," he said, all syrup and honey, "I know you undoubtedly have a strong academic interest in the tale, but the hour is late."

We faced off over the empty coffee service. Ketteridge dutifully cleared his throat, although he was no doubt conscious of how his social triumph of having Sherlock Holmes to dine in Baskerville Hall could only be capped by the marital battle he could feel brewing. I ignored him.

"As I was saying," I continued, "it is quite interesting. The squire's name might be related to the Latin for horse, caballus, or it might be a reference to a political intrigue or cabal in which the squire was involved, presumably as a Cavalier in the Civil War. But you know, the truly tantalising bit there is that his name is the same as that of King Arthur's beloved hound. The centre of Arthurian legend is somewhat to the north of here, I realise, but—"

Holmes interrupted again, with not a trace of the relief he must have felt at hearing only this nonsense. "It could also indicate that Cabell was simply his name. It is time we were gone, Mr Ketteridge."

Scheiman had been interested in what I was saying, but with the interruption I noticed that Ketteridge was looking at me oddly, so I subsided, and allowed the business of leave-taking to rise up around me.

In the car, Holmes sat back and said in a quiet voice to the back of the driver's head, "You know of course the Latin words cavillari and cave."

"Related to calvi, to sneer," I said, also too quietly for the driver to overhear, "and cave: beware."

He smiled briefly, and we sat for the rest of the drive in amicable silence.

NINE

Some have speculated that the standing stones were intended for astronomical observation, and for determining the solstices; but such fancies may be dismissed…and as for stone gate sockets, it is really marvellous that the antiquaries of the past did not suppose they were basins for sacrificial lustration.

One really wonders in reading such nonsense as this whether modern education is worth much.

—A Book of Dartmoor

It was long after midnight when the big car finished negotiating the lanes and turned through the Lew House gates, but again all the lights downstairs were burning. I could have used a relatively early night, I thought with resignation; at least this time I was dressed for an occasion.

"How on earth did I get the impression that Baring-Gould lived a solitary life?" I asked. "He seems to have an endless stream of visitors, and at all hours."

After allowing Ketteridge's chauffeur to open my door and to retrieve the fur rug in which I had been wrapped, I thanked him absently and followed Holmes into the house. There had been no vehicle standing outside, and to my surprise, the hall where I had first met Baring-Gould, and later been faced with Ketteridge, Scheiman, and the curate Arundell, was now deserted but for the cat asleep in front of the freshly fed fire.

"Hello?" Holmes called in a low voice. When no answer came, he started for the stairs, then stopped abruptly. A figure was rising up from the high-backed chair that faced the fireplace, the figure of a bony, brown man in his late thirties with sparse hair, loosened collar, and rumpled tweed suit. He had obviously been asleep, and was now blinking at us in growing alarm. He reached quickly down and came up gripping the fire poker; still, he looked more ridiculous than threatening.

"Who are you?" he demanded in an uncertain voice. "What do you want?"

"I might ask the same of you," said Holmes, and calmly set about divesting himself of his outdoor garments. He dropped his hat and gloves onto a pie-crust table and began to unbutton his overcoat. "Where is Mr Baring-Gould?"

"He's locked in his bedroom." Holmes' long fingers paused for a moment at the implications in this statement. "He said he was going to bed, and he just left, and I tried…They just…" He stopped, looking shamefaced but with his chin raised in an incongruously childish defiance. "I said I'd just wait here; he has to come down sometime."

Holmes' fingers slowly resumed their task. He pulled off his scarf and overcoat and tossed them across the back of a sofa, then walked across to close the inner doorway so our voices would not carry up the stairs. He then went over to the drinks cabinet, poured two glasses of brandy, walked over to where I was standing and handed me one, and finally took his drink over to the sofa, where he settled down, stretching his left arm casually along the cushioned back and propping his left ankle on his right knee.

"Correct me if I'm wrong," he said after he had taken a swallow of brandy, "but it sounds to me remarkably as if you pushed your way into Mr Baring-Gould's presence, drove him to seek refuge in his bedroom, followed him despite, no doubt, the objections of his servants, attempted to force your way through a locked door, and then retreated down here to lay siege, drinking the old man's liquor and burning his firewood, secure in the knowledge that everyone under this roof is twice your age and incapable of enforcing their master's wishes."

The man took a step forward and I thought for a moment that I was going to have to take action, since Holmes (another inhabitant nearly twice the man's age) was settled deep into the sofa. However, the fireplace poker in his hand seemed to have been forgotten, although I kept a close eye on it and mentally noted heavy objects within reach that I could grab up to pelt him with.

"No!" he protested furiously. "I only want to talk to him. He has to be made to understand—"

"Please keep your voice down, young man," Holmes interrupted sharply. "And we might begin with your name."

"Randolph Pethering," he said more quietly. "I'm a…I'm a lecturer. In Birmingham, at the teachers' training college. I must speak with Mr Baring-Gould about his anti-Druidical prejudice. He must withdraw the statements he has made, or at the very least speak up for my thesis. I can't get a publisher; they've all read his books and articles about the ruins on the moor, and they won't even listen to me. So I've drawn up a list of his mistakes, and if he doesn't help me by speaking to my publisher, so help me, I'll release it to the press. He'll be ruined. A laughingstock!"

His voice had climbed again during this all but incomprehensible tirade, but Holmes and I could only stare at him until he broke off, wiping his brow and panting with emotion and the heat of the fire and no doubt the alcohol he had drunk.

Holmes balanced his glass on the arm of the sofa, steepled his fingers, touched them to his lips, and addressed the distraught figure.

"Mr Pethering, am I to understand that you regard yourself as an antiquarian?"

"I am an archaeological anthropologist, sir. A good deal more of a scientist than that old man upstairs."

Holmes let it pass. "And yet you are convinced of the presence of Druidical remains up on the moor?"

"Most certainly! The stone rows for their ceremonial processions and the sacred circles for religious rites; the sacrificial basins on the tops of the tors and the places of oracle; those exquisitely balanced logan stones they used for oracular readings; the Druidical meeting place of Wiseman's Wood near Two Bridges, rich with the sacred mistletoe; the great tolmen in the Teign below Scorhill circle; the stone idols—why, it's as plain as the nose on your face," he exclaimed in a rush. "And Baring-Gould and his ilk would have us believe that the circular temples are mere shepherds' huts, and that the runic markings on the—"

The rapidity of Holmes' movement surprised me, and it must have terrified Pethering, who nearly tumbled backwards into the fire as Holmes leapt to his feet, took three long steps forward, twisted the poker from the man's hand, and snatched him back from the fire. He then stood looming over him with a terrible scowl on his face.

"You are tedious, young man, and I see no reason to permit you to remain here and plague our breakfast table. Would you prefer to leave under your own power, or do we put you out?"

He left. Holmes latched the door. We then made our way around the entire perimeter of the building, checking every window and door, before going upstairs to bed. I had to agree with Holmes that there was no need to stand guard: Pethering was not the sort who would actually break a window to get back in.

***

The antiquarian Pethering was not at the breakfast table the following morning, Sunday. Neither was anyone else, for that matter, nor did the room show any sign that there had been an earlier setting. We eventually ran Mrs Elliott to earth out of doors, supervising the digging up of potatoes by an elderly gardener. The morning air was still and damp and smelt richly of loam, and I breathed it in with appreciation. Bells were ringing somewhere not too far off, that evocative clamour of an English Sunday. After a minute or two Mrs Elliott turned and saw us, and her face lit up.

"There you are, then, nice and early. I didn't know when you'd be wanting your breakfast, bein' up so late and all, but it's all ready, I'll have it in a moment."

We tried to assure her that toast and tea would be adequate, but she bustled us out of her kitchen and in a very short time presented us with enough food to keep a labourer happy. This was, it seemed, by way of a reward.

"I am so grateful to you, runnin' that rascal off the place. I thought Charley—Mr Dunstan—was goin' to fetch his whip, but Mr Baring-Gould settled it by up and goin' to bed. I half expected that I'd have to step across the man to take up the Rector's tea this morning, but then I heard you come in and him go out, and I went to sleep like a baby in sheer relief."

"That's quite all right, Mrs Elliott. I only regret we were not back earlier; it might have saved some grief all around. Is he still in bed, then?"

Her dour countrywoman's face drew in and became pinched as with pain. "There's days he doesn't get up," she said. "This looks to be one of them."

"May I speak with him?"

"Oh surely, for a brief time. He doesn't sleep, he says, just thinks and prays. With his eyes shut," she added. "I'll take you up after you've had your breakfast."

Her good temper had manifested itself in lovely soft curds of scrambled eggs, fresh toast, and three kinds of jam, and we soon put away our labourers' portions, sighing with satisfaction. Our introduction to the cuisine of Lew House the week before may have been dismal, but the meals since then had been of a very different order—not fancy, but good, solid English cooking. I commented on the change to Holmes.

"Yes," he said. "Mrs Elliott was away visiting her sister. The village woman left in charge did little but stretch the remnants of the previous meals, and no one seemed capable of adjustments to the central heating when it went off. Mrs Elliott arrived back the morning after you arrived;she was not pleased at the state of the household." He sounded amused, and I could well imagine the proud housekeeper's reaction to the tough stewed rabbit we had been served. He drained his coffee cup and stood up. "Shall we go and see Gould?"

"You go, Holmes."

"Come along, Russell. You mustn't avoid your host simply because he is a rude old man. Besides which, he has quite taken to you."

"I'd hate to see how he expresses real dislike, then."

"He becomes very polite but rather inattentive," he said, holding the door open for me. "Precisely as you do, as a matter of fact."

Gould was awake, but he lay on his pillows moving little more than his eyes. His voice was clear but low, and with very little breath behind it.

"Mrs Elliott tells me you've rid me of a household pest."

"Does that sort of thing happen often?"

"Never. Only friends come here."

"You should have sent for the village constable."

"Pethering is harmless. I couldn't be bothered. Tell me what happened."

Holmes pulled up a chair and told him, making a tale out of it.I sat on the seat below the window, watching the two men. Baring-Gould's eyes, the only things alive in that tired, sallow face, flicked over to me when Holmes told him how I had moved closer to the collection of heavy objects as Pethering had raised his weapon, and they began to dance with appreciation as the story of the man's discomfiting progressed. Holmes embroidered it slightly, enjoying his audience, and at the end Baring-Gould closed his eyes and opened his mouth and began to shake softly in a rather alarming convulsion of silent laughter.

It was short-lived, and at the end of it he lay for a moment, and then drew a deep breath and let it out again.

"Poor man. Dear old William Crossing remarked somewhere that one of the great goals of the Druids seems to have been the puzzling of posterity. One could say they have been quite successful. Pethering hasn't shown up again?"

"Not yet."

"When he does, tell him I'll write him some sort of a letter. He's a lunatic, but he has a wife and child to feed."

"I'll tell him."

"How was your dinner last night?"

"I was glad that you finally chose to warn me that we were going to be at Baskerville Hall, but we sorted it out eventually. Thanks to Russell, actually, who gave an astonishingly realistic performance of a young wife fiercely protective of her eminent husband's comfort and reputation. Ketteridge no doubt thinks her a fool."

The sharp old eyes found me again across the room, and this time the twinkle in them was unmistakeable.

"That must have been quite an act," he said.

"It was."

Baring-Gould smiled gently to himself, and with that smile I had my first inkling of the nature of the hold this man had over Holmes.

"Russell and I will be away again tomorrow, but before we go, is there anything I can do for you?" Holmes asked him.

"Do you know," Baring-Gould answered after a moment, "if it isn't too much trouble, I should very much like some music."

Without a word Holmes rose and left the room. I sat in the window and listened to the slow, laboured breathing of the man in the bed, and when Holmes came back in with his violin, I slipped out.

For two hours I sat, first in our rooms and then downstairs, trying to read Baring-Gould's words concerning the Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and then his Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets while the violin played the same sort of wistful, simple music I had first heard on the muddy road from Coryton station. It filled every corner of the house, and finally I took the current book, his recently published Early Reminiscences (which I had unearthed in the study between a tattered issue of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association and a pamphlet by Baring-Gould entitled "How to Save Fuel") and escaped with it out of doors. Even the stables were not free of the music, I found. It was not until I closed the heavy door of the Lew Trenchard Church that silence finally enfolded me.

I had passed the building several times, a simple stone square with a proud tower, nestled into the tree-grown hillside and surrounded by gravestones and crosses. This was the first time I had been inside it, though, and I left the book of memoirs in my pocket while I looked around. It was an unsophisticated little stone building that straddled the centuries, with suggestions of thirteenth-century foundations rebuilt two and three hundred years later. The windows were not large, but the gloom cast was peaceful, not oppressive, and there was light enough to see. The air smelt of beeswax candles and wet wool from the morning services, but oddly enough, the feeling I received was not one of completion, but of preparation and waiting.

The single most dominating presence in the church was the screen framing the chancel. It was a magnificent thing, thick with niches and canopies, cornices and tracery, heavily encrusted with paint and gilt—far too elaborate for the crude little church but undeniably bearing the imprint of Sabine Baring-Gould's hand. It was his idea of what a Tudor rood screen should look like, and once I had recovered from its first startling appearance, I found myself liking it for its sheer vehement assertion that God's glory is to be found in a backwater parish on the skirts of Dartmoor.

There were other nice things in the church, somewhat overshadowed by the shiny new screen, and I spent some time admiring St Michael and his dragon on one bench-end, a jester dated 1524 on another, the triptych in the side chapel, the old brass chandelier, and the carvings on the pulpit, before eventually taking the book from my pocket and settling onto one of the better-lit benches with it. I did not think God would object to my reading in His house, particularly not the memoirs of the man who had created this unlikely chapel in the wilderness.

***

An hour or so later, the door from the porch opened and Holmes came in. He removed his hat and slapped the light rain off of it, and came around through the church to sit on the other end of my pew. He leant forward, propping his outstretched arms on the back of the seat ahead of him and holding the brim of the dangling hat with the fingers of both hands. The prayerlike attitude of his position was deeply incongruous.

I closed the book of memoirs and looked up at the screen with its scenes from the life of Jesus. After a minute I spoke. "He's dying, isn't he?"

"Yes."

"Is that why you've come?"

"I would have come anyway, but yes, it makes the solution of the case that much more urgent."

Other than the visual commotion around us, the church was utterly still. I thought I smelt incense as well as the beeswax, and I could picture Baring-Gould in his robes up in that pulpit, speaking a few well-chosen words that would have some of his parishioners squirming and others chuckling to themselves, and I felt a strong and unexpected bolt of sorrow to know that I would never witness that scene.

The case Holmes and I had just finished had begun with a debt to a dead woman. For several weeks over the summer I had lived with the fact that debts to the dead are heavier than those owed the living, because there is no negotiation, no forgiveness, only the stark knowledge that failure can never be recompensed, that even success can only restore balance. That case was a hard one in a lot of ways, and I had only begun to think about the lessons it had driven into me when Holmes' telegram had drawn me away from Oxford. Holmes, too, was still in the recovery stage, judging by the fact that he was still puffing on the black cigarettes he had taken up again in the most frustrating days of the Ruskin case. It had been a depressing affair whose solution only landed us in greater complexity, and now here we were, faced with another client who might not live to see the end of his case.

If working for the dead was hard, working for the dying looked to be harder yet: The already dead had eternity, after all. Baring-Gould did not.

"How long?" I asked.

"Weeks. Perhaps months. He will be gone before summer."

"I am sorry." Precisely what Baring-Gould meant to Holmes I still did not know, but I could readily see that there was depth to their relationship, and history.

He did not refuse my sympathy, did not say anything about Baring-Gould's fullness of years. He just nodded.

After a while, we left the church. The flat ground surrounding the building was, inevitably, covered with gravestones new and ancient. One of the newer was at the foot of the church tower down a small slope, and I went over to look at it. As I had thought, the name on the stone was that of Grace Baring-Gould, the transplanted mill girl who had married the parson and ended up here, the squire's wife. On her stone were carved the words DIMIDIUM ANIMAE MEAE. "Half my life," Baring-Gould had placed there. I had no doubt that he waited now to join her.

We turned and went up the road to the village of Lew Down, where we took lunch in the Blue Lion, then walked around to the public bar to ask if Randolph Pethering had been seen that day. The barman knew immediately who we were talking about.

"You've missed'en, by abaut two hours. Gone aut auver th' moor."

"Out onto the moor? Why?"

" 'Untin' 'ounds," he declared. " 'S' right, he's gone a-hunting the 'Ound of the Baskervilles." He peered at our faces, waiting for a reaction, and laughed aloud at what he saw there. Then he explained. "Mr Petherin's one of they story fellas, writes down any rummage people tell'en. Ole Will'm Laddimer, 'e comes by while Mr Petherin's tuckin' into 'is eggs this morning, and 'e sits and 'e tells Mr Petherin' abaut the goin's on up the moor. You heerd tell they been seein Lady 'Oward's carriage, and them's seed the 'ound's footprints 'round abaut daid bodies?"

"We heard."

Somewhat deflated, either by the loss of an opportunity to recount the story or because of Holmes' flat inflection, the barman went on. "That's all, really. Mr Petherin' heerd the 'ound was seen near Watern Tor and went to looky. He'll be back tomorry most likely. A pity you've already beed aut along the tor—you could've meeted him there."

As we carried our glasses to a table, I said to Holmes, "I don't know why I imagined we might keep our business to ourselves here."

"There's no privacy in a village; for that you need either a truly remote setting or a city. No, everyone in this end of Devon will know who we are and what we're about."

"I did wonder why you made no attempt to conceal our identity up on the moor."

"There's no point in even trying, not unless you're willing to sustain a complete disguise."

I took a swallow of the dark beer in my glass and found it filled the mouth pleasingly, rich with yeast and hops. I took another, and put the glass on the table with respect.

"What next, Holmes?" I asked.

"For the next two or three days I think we need to divide forces. I will go north to finish quartering the ranges for Mycroft's accursed spies and get that task out of the way. You can take the southwest. We need to find out how that carriage gets up onto the moor, and there are a limited number of routes it can take."

I reached out and turned the glass around on the table, and with an effort pushed down the cold apprehension that wanted to rise up at the idea of walking alone onto the face of Dartmoor. When my voice was completely trustworthy, I asked him, "Why do you assume the carriage comes onto the moor? Isn't it more likely that it is kept on the moor and brought out when needed?"

"It is of course possible, but in fact there are very few houses up there where a carriage and a pair of horses could be hidden, whereas there are a hundred places around the edges of the moor with considerably greater privacy. The northeastern edges particularly, which is why you on the south and west will be covering a greater amount of ground than I will."

"Do we leave this afternoon?"

"In the morning. That will give you a chance to study your maps. And I think it might speed matters up if we arranged a horse for you. You'll be making a circuit of half the moor; you would be a week on foot."

Although normally I prefer to walk rather than be tied to the needs of a horse, I did not argue. Anything that would cut short the number of days I was to spend up on that bleak place had my approval.

***

I spent the afternoon in Baring-Gould's study, alone but for the fire, one somnolent cat, and a visit from Mrs Elliott with a tea tray. I was aware of movement in the house—footsteps in and out of the bedrooms overhead, kitchen noises from beyond the door, the arrival of a mud-caked cart that disgorged an old woman, wrapped in rugs and dignity—but I ignored them all.

Instead, I made a complete perusal of the shelves and their contents, climbing up on the back of a chair and hanging from my fingertips at the higher reaches like a rock climber. There was not a great number of books, considering that the man was supposed to be a scholar and had been in the same house for forty years, and the volumes on the upper reaches particularly were covered with a thick blanket of dust.

I did find quite a few books written by Baring-Gould. In fact, after the first dozen or so I only thumbed through them to get an idea of the topic, and then replaced most of them, not being particularly interested in A Book of the Rhine from Cleve to Mainz; The Tragedy of the Caesars; A History of Sarawak under its Two White Rajahs; Iceland, its Scenes and Sagas;a biography of Nelson; or even Post-Mediaeval Preachers, although I did set aside monographs on "The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain" and "Village Conferences on the Creed," plus a few books with irresistible titles: Freaks of Fanaticism and Other Strange Events; Devonshire Characters and Strange Events (Baring-Gould seemed to like strange and curious events); Virgin Saints and Martyrs; and two novels, one called Pabo, the Priest, the other Urith:A Tale of Dartmoor, the latter of which I could at least justify by calling it local research.

At the very end of the afternoon, when the grey light of the day had long turned to black at the windows and the smells of dinner were coming in under the door, I found what I had originally had in mind when I had entered the study five hours before and forgotten in the pleasure of prospecting the shelves for nuggets: a manuscript copy of Further Reminiscences, the Baring-Gould memoir for the second thirty years of his life. The clean copy was probably now with his publisher, as the first volume had only just come out, and this version was sprinkled with cross-hatchings and corrections, but the small handwriting was surprisingly legible. I left it in place, as a loose sheaf of papers requires a sedentary reader, but I planned to return to it later. Of the third volume, 1894 -1924, there seemed to be only thirty pages or so of manuscript in a manila folder inside the high writing desk, along with a pen with a worn nib, crusted with ink, and a dusty inkwell. I held the manuscript pages in my hand, wondering bleakly if he would ever finish the volume. It did not appear to have been worked on for some time.

The study door opened and Holmes walked in. "Dinner in ten minutes, Russell. You ought to have memorised those maps by this time."

The maps. I had not even looked at the things, although Holmes could not know that for certain, as they had been shifted around in the course of the afternoon's ransacking—I might, after all, have folded them up after having committed the pertinent sections to memory. I murmured something noncommittal and began to search earnestly for a pencil. Holmes picked one up and held it out to me, not a whit deceived. I thanked him and stuck it in my shirt pocket, noticing as I did so the state of my nails.

"I think I ought to go and tidy up," I said. A fair percentage of the several cubic feet of dust I had set free seemed to have settled on my person. I picked up the tall stack of books I had set aside for reading and tucked them underneath my arm.

"Don't forget these, Russell," he said drily. I took the maps he was holding out, wedged them on top of the books, and made my way out of the crowded study and up the stairs.

***

After dinner we climbed the stairs to Baring-Gould's bedroom. We found him seated in a chair at the window, looking tired and ill and without strength. Looking what he in fact was: a man not far from his death.

Watching him, one could see the effort it cost him, but succeeded in rallying his forces, his eyes coming to life, his mind focussing again on us and the problem he had given into our hands.

"We're off tomorrow, Gould, for two days," Holmes told him. "We need to find how Lady Howard's carriage is coming up onto the moor, and I have to take a closer look at the army ranges for Mycroft."

A smile tugged at Baring-Gould's mouth. "Don't let them blow you up, Holmes."

"I shall endeavour to avoid becoming a target," Holmes assured him.

"You don't mean they're actually firing up there?" I exclaimed.

"It is a firing range, Russell."

"But—" I bit back the mouthful of protests and cautions, as there would be little point in voicing them. Besides which, I told myself, Holmes would never have reached his present age if he could not be trusted to dodge an artillery shell.

It was Gould who reassured me, or tried to. "I shouldn't think they are practising this late in the season. They normally finish in September."

"Before we go, Gould," said Holmes, "just take a look at the map for us and tell Russell if there are any points a person could take a carriage onto the moor that aren't obvious from the markings."

"A ghostly carriage doesn't need a road, Holmes," Baring-Gould said in a stern whisper. Holmes did not deign to answer, merely took a folded smaller-scale map from his pocket and shook it out, holding it up by the corners directly in front of Baring-Gould. The old man had only to pull down his spectacles from his forehead to study the map, but instead he smiled and waved Holmes away.

"No need for that; I can see it better with my eyes closed." He did actually close his eyes, and Holmes laid the map over a table for those of us whose eyes were better than our knowledge of the moor. I took out a pencil.

"I think that, as the sightings have all been in the northern quarter, we need not bother with anything south of the Princetown Road. Is this reasonable?"

"For the present," Holmes said, adding, "We may have to expand the search later."

"Very well. From the south, we begin at the point where the Prince-town Road enters Tavistock." I dutifully made a small circle on the map. "From there up to Mary Tavy the gates are all on the east side of the Tavy, and will coincide with the lanes leading down to the river. Except," he said, sitting forward and replacing his glasses onto his nose so he could take the pencil from me and circle an invisible fold in the contour lines, "except for here, a lane that appears to skirt the field. Since the map was made, however, the farmer took down a section of the old wall, and now drives his cattle up onto the moor along here." The edge of his fingernail traced a dip in the contour lines. "Here is another place, but that should be obvious." His eyes shifted sideways to take in my reaction. I nodded, and pointed to half a dozen other access points I could see. We both ignored the actual lanes and the labelled Moor Gates, looking only for the hidden places. "Along here," he said, "there is an old miner's trail. And this here; it used to be a railway line for bringing peat off the moor. And of course this path here, marginally negotiable if the driver were very good and the horses strong."

It did not take long for Baring-Gould's intimate knowledge of the moor to lay open the map to my eyes. I should begin by crossing the moor to the other side of Princetown, and from there work my way back to Lydford, while Holmes cut across the moor up to the northeastern portion and worked his way counterclockwise. We should either meet in the middle or, failing that, return here Wednesday night.

I took my leave of Baring-Gould with considerably greater warmth than I would have thought possible even a day or two earlier. Holmes played for him again that night, and although the music ended early, he did not return to our rooms until a very late hour.

TEN

I had almost written God-forsaken, but checked my pen, for God forsakes no place, though He may tarry to bless.

—A Book of Dartmoor

In the morning I put together a bag—a simple enough procedure that amounted to pushing everything I had brought with me except my frock into the rucksack, borrowing a pair of sturdy riding boots, and adding the book of Baring-Gould's memoirs and a map—and walked down to the barn.

Here I was presented with a dilemma: Baring-Gould himself had sent down an order that I be given the household's ageing Dartmoor pony, a beast with a rough coat and a gloomy eye. However, being a pony (even though not apparently interbred with the Shetland) and I passing six feet in my boots and hat, the picture I had of me on its back had a distinctly ludicrous air. I wondered if perhaps Baring-Gould could be pulling some kind of joke, and then dismissed the thought as unlikely.

"Surely there's another horse," I protested to Charles Dunstan, the household's equally ageing Dartmoor stable lad (whom I had also seen working in the garden). "What about this nice fellow here?" The cob in the adjoining box was a good hand taller and, though older even than the pony, appeared able and amiable.

"That's Red. He be th'orse what pulls the trap."

"Can he be ridden?" To have a horse dedicated entirely to draught work was common enough on a big working farm, but unlikely here.

"Well, Mr Arundell rides'n all'y time, though he don't ride to th' hunt. But, Winnie'd be better up the moor. More surefooted, like."

"It ought to be, with six feet touching the ground. Oh, never mind, Mr Dunstan," I said, waving away his puzzlement. "Red will do fine."

He was, fortunately, shod, and his saddle was soon on him, its stirrups lengthened to suit my legs and the roughness of the terrain. A leather saddlebag was found to hold my possessions and a small bag of oats, as well as a last-minute addition from Mrs Elliott's kitchen that took up as much room as all the other objects combined. I pulled my hat down over my ears and, before any further additions could be found, such as a bell tent or a butterfly net, I put my heels into Red's sides and rode away from Lew Trenchard in a light mist.

The horse was as solid and without frills as his name, capable of two gaits: a leisurely stroll and a spine-snapping trot. An experimental urge towards a canter met with a slowing of the trot and a laying back of the ears, a clear message that he was going as fast as he could, damn it, and if I didn't like it, I could just get down and run myself.

I decided that there was no great need for speed, and where we were going there was no safe expanse of unbroken turf on which to practise it anyway. I and the horse settled down to our respective tasks.

However, Red had another idiosyncrasy that I did not discover until it was far too late to do anything about it: He shied.

My first hint of it was when I found myself tumbling into a protective roll in midair and thumping down onto the hard surface of the road at his feet. All the speed he lacked in forward motion he saved up for this burst of lateral movement: Red leapt like a startled cat, straight up and ten feet to the side. He didn't then bolt, didn't kick, didn't play hard to get; he just flew to one side as if being yanked offstage by a giant hand, and then stood placidly, looking slightly puzzled as to why I had chosen to fling myself to the ground, and waited for me to catch the reins and remount.

Which I did, having first checked to make sure I was whole and then looked closely at his hoofs, legs, girth, and anyplace else I could think of for a possible reason for his extreme action. Finding none, we rode on cautiously, and when there was no repeat of this aberration, my grip gradually loosened and my attention returned to its wandering ways, and an hour or so later the same thing happened.

Why hadn't the accursed stable lad bothered to mention this small quirk? I wondered, picking myself up painfully from the rocks.

We did cover the remainder of the ten-odd miles to Tavistock without incident. I scraped the mud from my clothing, fed and watered myself and the horse at an inn, remounted, and turned upward onto the moor. The mist firmed up into a drizzle.

Perversely, Red seemed to enjoy hills, leaning into them at a faster pace than his usual amble. Climbing the steep hill up from Tavistock, for the first time since leaving Lew Trenchard I began to think this might not be such a bad idea after all.

The road wound up the side of a hill, climbing a thousand feet in a mile, all of it a narrow but well-used track. At one tight patch we were confronted by a lorry committed inexorably to its downward journey, and I was grateful that Red did not argue about the need to remove ourselves from its path with all speed. We cowered in a faint indentation in the wall, pressing against the dripping bushes, and I heard the vehicle scrape a quantity of paint from its opposite side before it was past, the driver calling a nonchalant thanks. The rest of the climb was made without incident, and the moor opened up before us.

I dismounted, to give Red a rest but also to allow myself a moment to study this strange place. Even with Holmes' assurance that I need only keep to the roads, I did not relish the thought of entering the moor by myself. I stood beside Red and thought about the clear sense of personality I had had forced on me in the fog, the idea that Dartmoor was alive. Are you going to allow me to pass? I asked it, only half mocking. Will you keep from throwing your rain and wind at me, pulling your mists up over my head, setting your haunts to plague me and your pixies to lead me astray? I don't much like you, I told the land before me, but I mean you no harm. There was no answer, other than the sound of Red cropping at the brief grass with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. After a bit, I got to my feet. Friend or foe, I had no choice but to enter.

The road stretched out across the flat, rock-studded ground, the same terrain I had seen north of here, interrupted only by a quarry gouged into a dip and curve of the road and by the prison, riding a rise some distance from the road near Princetown. A grim place like all its kind, it seemed to declare that there would be no coddling of felons here, that punishment, discomfort, and boredom were to be their lot. The motto over the gate, I had heard, read PARCERE SUBJECTIS, or "To spare the Vanquished," and with Virgil I had to agree that it was marginally more humane to incarcerate one's enemy than it was to slaughter him. Built originally as a camp for prisoners in the Napoleonic War, Princetown Prison had seen the Black Hole and the cat-o'-nine tails, starvation diet and hard labour, and if recent years had seen a more enlightened régime, the image of life within those grey, circular walls remained one of brutality and deprivation, what Holmes had referred to as a place designed for the breaking of men's spirits. I suddenly realised that I had been sitting and looking at the prison for too long, and that I did not wish to have a guard sent down to ask my business. I put my heels to Red's side;for once he obliged.

He did not throw me again until we were nearly in Postbridge, when I was leaning inattentively in the saddle to look over a wall and found the wall coming rapidly up to meet me. Long years of martial training gave my body an automatic response to a fall, but hitting a padded gymnastic mat and flying into a pile of stones were different matters entirely.

I climbed back over the wall and grabbed the reins with more force than was either necessary or sensible. "Damn you!" I shouted at him. "A few bruises are one thing, but if you break my spectacles, how do you expect us to get home again?" I stormed around to mount, and had my left foot in the stirrup when a voice came from somewhere behind me.

"Does him usually hanswer you?"

I turned with my foot still in the irons, and nearly fell again. There was a face looking at me over the wall on the opposite side of the road, a person so wrapped up in scarfs and hats as to make any sexual identification difficult, but I thought it a young woman rather than an unlined, beardless youth. I laughed, embarrassed more at my loss of temper than at having been caught talking to the animal.

"He hasn't answered me yet, but we only met a short time ago. It wouldn't surprise me too much if he did."

"Him's Mr Arundell's 'oss, bainty?"

"Yes," I said, surprised. Lew House was a fair distance from here.

"Thought so. They boft'n cheap 'cause 'e kept dumping the lady who had'n avore. Don't do it to menvolk, cooriusly enuv."

A misogynist gelding. Dear God, what on earth was I doing here? "You know Mr Arundell?"

"He rides down here sometimes when t' hunt's on, though he do like ter follow th' hounds on foot."

"Having met Red, I couldn't blame him."

"I knaw who ye be," she said conversationally.

"Do you?"

"You're with Znoop Zherlock, baint you? I heerd tell you're 'is wife?"

I supposed the question on the end of her last statement was understandable, even without the oddity of our ages, as I was wearing the same sort of raiment as she was.

"That I am."

"And you're here for the Squire, Mr Baring-Gould."

"Here now," I protested. "What makes you think that?"

"Oh, me mum's cousin's close friends with the zister of Miz Endacott, who cleans for Miz Elliott three days a week."

"What do they think I'm doing for Mr Baring-Gould?" I demanded, and walked across to look over the wall at this all-knowing gossip.

"Ye be axin' questions about old Josiah Gorton and the ghostly carridge."

"Well, I'll be—" I stopped, stoppered my rising irritation, and asked more calmly, "So, do you know anything about either?"

"I doan," she admitted. "But Eliz'beth Chase, along by Wheal Betsy, she be waitin' to see'y."

"Wheal Betsy being…?"

"Up from Mary Tavy."

Which was nearly back to Lew Trenchard from here.

"What does she want to see me about?"

"An 'edge'og."

I opened my mouth to continue this line of questioning, and then closed it, turned my back, and led the horse away. I would not be driven insane by the peculiarities gathered around me. I would not.

The rationale behind my expedition was fairly simple and really quite sensible, in its own way: The great inner sweep of the moor, in several remote spots of which a rather substantial ghostly carriage had been seen, was not, as Holmes had pointed out, a place overly endowed with facilities in which to store a coach and stable its horses. Granted, the moor was well populated with horses, but animals big enough and well enough trained to pull a carriage over rough ground by moonlight were hardly likely to blend in with the compact, wild inhabitants of the moor.

Around the edges of the moor, however, lived people, and people (as I had just demonstrated) noticed things and talked about them. The sound of harnessed horses at night, strange hoofprints in a lane, dogs barking at the moon, all would have attracted attention if they had come in from outside, passing through the circle of farms and villages. Therefore, a careful circuit of the moor's outer band of civilisation ought to tell us whether or not the carriage had passed through it.

On one level, the disproportionate use of our time hunting for something that might not exist was more than a touch ridiculous—what the detectives at Scotland Yard might have to say about our carriage hunt did not bear thinking. On the other hand, the search was typical of Holmes' approach to an investigation: One looked for an oddity, some little thing that stood out, and traced it to its source (praying that it was not a mere coincidence, a thing that was, unfortunately, far from unknown). This appearance of a mythic coach just at the time a moor man was killed was too much of a coincidence to be believed. Hence the hunt—or rather, our two hunts, one on each segment of the circumference.

Postbridge, unlike the earlier Two Bridges (which consisted of little more than the inn where Holmes and I had stayed the week before) was an actual settlement, boasting two churches and a telephone kiosk. I had a choice of inns there (if one used the term inn in its loosest sense), and I chose the place with the attempt at flowers near the entrance.

I was tired, and ached in a number of unfamiliar places. It was a long time since I had spent so many hours in the saddle, even without three violent collisions with the ground. I ate a meal that consisted mostly of flour in various forms (all of them inexplicably both tasteless and unpleasant to smell) and drank some thin, sour red wine that seemed to go with my mood, and then took myself to bed—without having questioned a single resident about traces of the coach. Holmes would positively quiver with disapproval when he discovered my neglect, I knew, but at that moment I could not have stirred myself into action had the threat of divorce been held over my head. I asked for a lamp to supplement the lonely candle on the bedside table, put on two pairs of woollen socks and a thick pullover, inserted myself between the clammy bedclothes, opened Early Reminiscences to read another chapter, and woke some hours later with the oily smell of the guttering lamp wick permeating the inside of my throat and nasal passages. I wound the wick down to extinguish it, pulled the covers over my aching head, and went back to sleep.

In the morning when I finally relinquished unconsciousness, the reason for the previous night's almost preternatural sense of smell as well as the odd disinclination to exert myself became obvious: I was working up to a cold.

Bleary, stuffy, aching, and thick-headed, I tottered down the stairs on legs that seemed less than securely connected to the rest of me. Scalding tea helped, but not enough, and the thought of venturing into the heavy rain I could see pouring down the windows was more than I could face. When a gust of wind-driven rain came rolling over the countryside at me, I accepted that as an omen; I told my landlady that I should be spending the day in my bed, not to have the room tidied, and I should ring if I wanted anything. With that I retreated, and slept on and off for the remainder of the day.

Inevitably, I woke in the middle of the night. The inn was completely still, no creaks or groans, not even the perpetual background gurgle of rain through downpipes. The silence was so remarkable it pulled me up to wakefulness, then alertness. I became aware of other things: the stuffy air, the faint and offensive smell of stale onion from the half-eaten bowl of soup I had left to be cleared, which still sat on the table near the door. I got out of bed and went to open the window, but once at the glass I was held by the sight before me. I turned back to fetch my spectacles and the coverlet from the bed, and perched on the narrow window seat for my first sight of the moor without rain falling.

The crisp half-moon rode a black sky, dotted here and there with the wisps of a few very high clouds. Postbridge itself was in a little hollow near a river, but the back of this inn faced out over the moor, and the moor was a place transformed, a stark landscape of gentle moonlit hills punctuated by patches of black rock or hollows, quiescent and motionless and unreal.

After probably an hour of sitting huddled staring out at the view, I woke abruptly from a doze and caught myself leaning towards the open window. I stood up, pulling the warm bedclothes back around my neck, and cast another glance at the moor. Actually, I decided, the white moon against the black sky was very pretty, but the moor itself was just pale expanse with dark patches, with one tor tantalisingly silhouetted against the moon. Much nicer than the ceaseless rain, though. Perhaps the storm's passing meant that it would remain clear the following day.

ELEVEN

How noticeable in the progress of mankind in knowledge is the fact that before the opening of a door hitherto shut, another that has swung wide for generations should be slammed and double bolted.

—Early Reminiscences

The sky was not exactly clear the next day, although it was not yet raining. Neither was my cold gone, though the fever had departed and my lungs were clean enough. I had no real excuse for indulging myself with another day in bed.

With my eye, however blearily, back on the job, I made my way methodically through the staff of the inn, asking my questions. To my growing consternation, every one of them knew who I was, why I was there, and had information saved up for me. Unfortunately, the information was all of the signs-and-portents variety, which might have proved interesting to a student of folklore but which led me no closer to the cold, dull realm of factual truth. I thanked each of my would-be informants, even the stable boy who gave me a thrice-watered-down version (or perhaps more accurately, thrice-added-to) of the fright a village girl had received from a neighbour's dog one night. I paid my account, and left.

Red seemed positively frisky after his day's rest. I wondered morosely how long he would wait before flinging me off, but his ears remained pricked, and we passed trees, standing stones, Scottish cows, and even a rabbit warren without incident. Perhaps it was the rain. Or being taken away from his warm stables, and we were now facing back towards home. Or a temporary brainstorm, Your Honour. Whatever it was, I found it a relief to remain seated and upright as the morning went by.

Aside from the horse's behaviour and the dry (if grey) skies, the day was one calculated to madden. Coughing and sneezing my way across the countryside, my level of energy too low to bother with imaginary demons beyond a vague wariness, I was greeted by each inhabitant with a dignified respect, as if I were the representative of a royal Personage. Heads were bared, work stopped, children lined up: even the odd curtsey, for God's sake.

They all tried very hard to give me something of value for my collection of strange events. Memories had very obviously been ransacked for anything out of the ordinary, anything at all: a pony missing, a neighbour's baby dead in its cradle, an uncle driven from his land, a cousin's friend disappearing. Under closer questioning, the baby had been sickly, the uncle old and ready to sell, and the girl who disappeared had come back a week later with a young new husband in tow. The pony was, admittedly, still gone; I promised to watch for it.

More than the frustration of fruitless questioning, it was the sense of ceremony that began to drive me mad, the feeling that the entire moor was bound together in a wordless conspiracy to honour the investigation. I did not know if it was Baring-Gould we were doing obeisance to or Holmes; all I knew for certain was, it wasn't me. The residents of the stone houses that huddled into the breast of the moor were invariably friendly, expectant, proud, and eager to help, and filled with the most arcane and useless pieces of information. Indeed, it seemed as if the most accurate knowledge they had was to do with me and my business, which I would just as well have left quiet.

Oh, there were plenty of coach sightings: twenty of them before the day was over, all of which faded to second- or thirdhand reports, or coaches with headlamps swiftly floating along the macadamised roads, or coaches that were more probably the next-farm-but-one's cart.

Finally, when I was tired and aching and seething with frustration, and thought it could not get any worse, it was brought to my attention that I had a nickname. No: not even my own proper nickname, but a mere appendage to that of my husband. At two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the house opened the door, gave me a beatific smile of welcome, and addressed me as Zherlock Mary.

Not even Snoop Mary, for God's sake.

I turned and left the farmyard, too demoralised even to ask my questions.

That farm was the last for a bit, the next one being about three-quarters of an hour away on the other side of a tor-capped hill. I was exhausted, my fever was creeping back up, my throat, head, and joints ached, and my nose ran continuously. I felt ill and useless, I was certain that when I returned to Lew House I should find Holmes sitting with his feet up in front of the fire with the case neatly solved, and I was hit by a wave of homesickness for Oxford and books, my pen scratching peaceably in front of my own fire, a cup of lovely hot coffee steaming on the desk at hand's reach, the ideas marching cleanly out in logical procession, my own ideas that no one else could second-guess or circumvent or —

Red shied, and I hit the ground hard.

When I had come to a halt, I flopped over onto my back on the nice soft turf, gazing up into a sky that I had not realised was nearly clear of clouds, and I began calmly, easily, to weep.

It was not just the irritation and the illness that made me cry, although they certainly lowered my defences considerably. It was not even my fury at this damnable horse, which was powerful, but momentary. It was, I think, more than anything the emotional burden from the previous case spilling over, a burden of grief I had pushed away under the pressure of solving the murder, and then contrived to avoid by a change of scenery and more work when it ended.

So I lay flat on my back and cried like a child, in recognised grief for Dorothy Ruskin and fresh, raw grief for the dying Baring-Gould, in frustration at the ridiculous mockery of detective work I was forced to carry out and at my inability to anticipate the antics of my four-legged companion, in rage at the horse and at the sudden shock of pain; at everything and nothing, I cried.

Not for long, of course, because I soon could not breathe at all and I thought my head should explode if I did not stop. I gingerly raised myself upright, then got to my feet, and walked over to sit on a nearby boulder that a hundred years ago or so had fallen away from the tor that loomed over my head. I dried my face, blew my nose, rested my head in my hands until the pounding internal pressure had subsided—long enough for a rabbit to lose its fear and venture out of its bury among the clitter. It ducked into hiding when I put my glasses on preparatory to standing and retrieving Red, but when I raised my head I thumped back down onto the boulder, more stunned than I had been by any of the falls.

For I saw: beauty. I saw before me an undulating sweep of green and russet hills crowned by the watchful tors and divided up by the meandering streams and the stone walls. A cloud moved in front of the pale autumnal sun, its dark shadow passing across the hills like a hand in front of a face, leaving the surface clean and refreshed.

Dartmoor lay stretched before me, quiet, ageless, green, brown, and open; not vast, but limitless; not open to conquest, but willing to befriend; calm, contemplative, watchful. It was, I saw in a flash of revelation, very like the Palestinian desert I had known and come to love four years before, a harsh and unfriendly place until one succumbed to its dictates and submitted to the lesser rhythms of life in a dry land.

Dartmoor was a wet desert, its harsh climate the other end of the spectrum from the hot, dry climate of Palestine, but with similar small, tight, ungenerous, and intense results. Fighting the strictures of a desert brought only exhaustion, ignoring its demands risked death, but an open acceptance of the perfection of the life to be lived therein—one might find unexpected riches there. And, perhaps, here.

The fitful sun went away eventually, and the moor stopped speaking to me, but when I got to my feet it was all different.

I was no longer a stranger here.

I climbed up the fat, weathered stones tumbling down from the tor and stood looking down at this miraculously transformed piece of countryside. At last I knew what we were doing here, why the death of an itinerant moor man should matter, why Baring-Gould had found his calling and the spiritual nourishment he required, breathing the air of Dartmoor.

When eventually I returned to Red and to my task I was chagrined to find that the change in my perspective did not have much effect on the frustration I felt in trying to question the moor dwellers, or on my physical state: It still felt like trying to carve blancmange, and I still ached and coughed and sneezed. It certainly had no gentling effect on Red, who managed to dump me off once more before we stopped for the evening.

It did, however, help me begin to understand the people I was dealing with, isolated individuals who were nonetheless bound tightly together by the land on which they dwelt. When I spoke to a woman feeding the chickens in her yard or a family squeezed together for a meal, I was speaking not just with solitary, hard-pressed people, but with members of the community that was Dartmoor.

And not a damn one of them had seen anything that sounded the least bit important.

Holmes and I had agreed to meet back at Lew House on Wednesday night. I could actually have made it back there, but it would have meant a job incomplete (even a futile job) and ten wasted miles to return in order to finish it. Instead, I rode down to Mary Tavy and placed a call from the post office there to the postmistress in Lew Down, asking her to have someone take a message to Baring-Gould saying that Mary Russell had been delayed and would not return until the following evening. I waited as the woman on the other end of the line wrote the message, and thanked her.

"Oh, that's quite all right, Mrs Holmes," she said cheerfully. "I'll have my boy run right down with it. However, I think Mr Holmes is still away as well. In London, you know."

It was news to me, but I was not about to admit it. I rang off, shaking my head at a bush telegraph system that surpassed anything I had ever met in rural Sussex.

I found a room in a pleasant old inn in Mary Tavy (not, incidentally, the same inn where Holmes and I had lunched following our encounter with the Scottish cattle) and fell into bed for three or four hours when I first arrived. I woke hungry and went down for some dinner and what proved to be a very interesting evening with the locals—interesting not for the information received, which was nil, but for the insight.

It took me a little while to realise, in the course of conversing about local politics and the fiends in Whitehall, that there were two very separate groups of men in the pub: those who lived in the village, and the men who lived up on the moor. Slowly, through glances and silences and the sorts of tiny smiles that may as well be winks, I came to see that as far as the moor men were concerned, the villagers were a separate and, regrettably, slightly inferior race.

My first inkling of this attitude came when, to my surprise, I was not greeted by name, or even with the stance of familiarity that had been characteristic of the last few days. At first, I assumed with pleasure that I had found a roomful of natives who had not heard of me; then I began to notice the covert glances and secret smiles of the quieter, more roughly dressed members of the drinking community. One by one these half dozen men would catch my eye, touch his hat brim briefly or raise his glass in my direction, and turn back to his conversation.

It was a very peculiar and strangely warming sensation, being part of a secret society. Somehow, the fact that my fellow conspirators were impoverished, unwashed, and possibly illiterate farmers and shepherds was more amusing than anything else. Certainly they seemed to find it so, judging by the twinkle in a number of eyes.

Halfway through my second pint, one of the young men I had been talking with reached into a pocket and stretched out his arm to set something on the table beside my glass: a tin whistle. I looked at it, and then looked up into his weathered young face with the secret smile in the back of his eyes.

"I heerd tell you play'n," he said.

I shook my head and moved the slim instrument back onto his side of the table.

"The noises I make with it couldn't be called playing, I'm afraid."

"Baint what us hears." He might as well have winked and nudged me in the ribs with his elbow, but I refused to blush at the memory of the evening in Two Bridges to which he was no doubt referring. He picked up his small flute, flipped it over and caught it, put it to his mouth, and started to play. When the first sprightly notes hit the smoke-filled air, the moor men glanced at one another, and then at the town dwellers, and one by one they cleared their throats and began to sing.

What I heard that night was a last vestige of the dying art of the Dartmoor songmen. They began with a cheerful tune and the story of a monstrously lazy young man whose father, a cutter of green broom, threatens to burn the house down around his son's ears if the lad doesn't go out and work. The young man hauls himself out to the woods, succeeds in cutting a respectable bundle of the broom, and on his way home is spotted by a wealthy widow. She is smitten, and instantly proposes marriage. He reluctantly agrees to sacrifice his career and leave off his labours for her sake, and the song ends with the sly observation:

"Now in market and fair, the folk all declare,

There's nothing like cutting down broom, green broom."

The singers correctly read my broad grin as a request for more, and they launched into another song, this one about two star-crossed lovers, and then another about, of all things, a bell-ringing competition, set to a gorgeous tune that wound the strong voices around one another like the ring of bells they evoked, ending precisely as a ring of bells would, with a low, final note, sustained and then hushed.

We sat in silence, united momentarily in beauty, but as I stirred to thank them, one of the villagers decided it was time to keep up their side. He opened his mouth, and as the words "Tom Pearce, Tom Pearce, lend me your grey mare" rang out in the room, my heart cringed. Uncle Tom Cobbley rode off to Widdecombe Fair with his companions—accompanied, I was interested to note, solely by the Mary Tavy contingent. The moor men sat back, listening politely, but as soon as Tom and the rest had finally joined the old mare's ghostly, rattling bones, the whistle piped up again and set us on the road to another fair, one with considerably more risqué goings-on. (Two of the moor men glanced at me first before they joined in, reassuring themselves that I would be too innocent to grasp the underlying meaning of the references to locks, locksmiths, and the young lady's "wares.")

They sang for more than two hours, during which time they collected what must have been half the town, who stood watching from the doors and the nether reaches of the dim, ancient rooms. The village singers occasionally pushed a song in edgeways; when they did, the half dozen moor dwellers sat attentively waiting for them to finish, although I had the feeling that they knew the village songs, even if the villagers might not know those of the moor.

At long last, and sounding reluctant, the pub owner called for last orders. The young man who had begun the whole affair began carefully to clean his whistle on the tail of his shirt, but to my surprise, instead of putting it away when he had finished, he held it out to me. To my greater surprise, I took it.

I thought for a moment, turning the simple instrument over in my hands, until I decided on a tune, a song I had learnt to play on the tin whistle's wooden brother a long, long time before, at my mother's knee. It was a sad, repetitive Jewish song that came from the heart; judging from the hush in the room, it went straight there, too.

I finished, having played blessedly free of mistakes, and gave my companion back his whistle. He took it without comment, but I thought, on the whole, that he approved.

"Time for one more," he said, and raised his eyebrows to ask if I might have any suggestions.

"The song about Lady Howard's coach?" I asked tentatively. He repeated the little consultation ritual with which he had begun the evening's entertainment, glancing first at his fellows to assess their agreement and then at the villagers to make certain they were in their places. He then put the flute to his lips and began the restless, eerie tune that Baring-Gould had sung. Two of the villagers started to join in, but one dropped out after a sharp glance from one of the moor singers, and the other stopped when he was kicked by a companion. The six members of my secret conspiracy were left singing, their voices harmonising easily in what was obviously a well-known song, one of them gently thumping the table in front of him to underscore the driving cadence. Unlike the other songs they had sung, however, this one was serious business. They seemed to be listening to the words as they sang, and stared in blank concentration at fire or glass, their only contact with one another, and with me, their intended audience, through throat and ear.

It was an odd song, and my first reaction was confirmed, that this was no bedside carol for a small child. I had to wonder how one particular small child, the imaginative eldest son of a landholding family, felt about the verse that refers to Lady Howard drawing the squire into her coach.

The pub was still for a good ten seconds when they had finished. With a general sigh and murmur, the audience, including the village men who had themselves sung, expressed its appreciation and began to move away into the night.

The moor men, too, drained their glasses and got to their feet. With a nod of the head or a brief tug at the cap they each bade me their farewells. The pub was soon empty but for the girl collecting glasses on a tray; I went upstairs and left her to it.

TWELVE

The old woman was not regarded as a witch, but she was accredited with a profound acquaintance with herbs and their virtues.

—Further Reminiscences

My first task for the new day was to hunt down the woman whose name I had been given (what seemed a remarkably long time before) by the girl speaking to me over the wall near Postbridge. Elizabeth Chase, the girl had said, near Wheal Betsy, wanted to see me about a hedgehog. It sounded unlikely enough to be true.