The Moor

Wheal Betsy proved to be the still very solid brick engine house of a now-abandoned mine, formerly a rich source of lead and silver. It was also, to my amusement, directly at the foot of Gibbet Hill.

As I rode, I began to feel as if I had the spirit of a young Baring-Gould at my side. It was the invariable result of immersing myself in the man's words and his surroundings for the past week, but it was not a troubling presence. Indeed, I was finding him an amusing companion, this solitary youth with the passion for the moor and a mind as bright, energetic, and indiscriminate as a magpie.

A small shoeless child behind a gate leading to a muddy track pointed me towards the home of Elizabeth Chase. A man leading a horse, its off foreleg neatly bandaged but causing it to limp, confirmed it with a wag of his chin over his shoulder. Half a mile farther on, a woman hanging a heap of men's shirts out in the fitful sunlight directed me back on my steps, to a narrow lane that I had missed at the first pass. It was, un-usually enough, a wooded lane, with actual overhead trees instead of the stunted, sparse shrubs that dominated this half of the moor. I followed it, on foot lest my hat be snatched off by branches, and came out at a scene from a children's story.

The cottage was ancient, tiny, orderly (but for the wayward curves of its walls and the thick lichen on its roof slates), and so clean the very stones seemed to gleam with polish. There seemed to be no one about—or at least no human. Six cats of varying colours and sizes lay distributed among a rough bench, a chopping block, and the rooftop, and three dogs (one of them missing a leg) wandered up to greet me. I could also see four breeds of chicken, a black swan with a crooked wing, two geese in a pen, a goat with a kid, and a shaggy Dartmoor pony with a bandage on its leg very like that on the leg of the draught horse I had seen being led down the lane—except that the pony's was on its near hind leg. I looked down at the grinning black-and-white face of the three-legged sheepdog, which also seemed to be lacking a number of its teeth, and said to it, "Where's your mistress?"

As if it had understood me, it whirled around to look at the house, and when I did the same, I saw Elizabeth Chase in her doorway.

At first glance she seemed a normal size, until I realized that I should have to bend nearly double in order to walk through the doorway, yet she stood easily within its frame. I am accustomed to other women seeming small, but this one could not have been any larger than the average eight-year-old, and when my attention went back from her shape to her face, I knew that I had indeed entered a fairy tale. She was brown and wrinkled and stooped, and the tilt to her head, though undoubtedly a result of the hump in her spine, gave her an air of quizzical humour, as if she looked at the world with a sideways laugh. I was smiling when I introduced myself, and told her I had heard she was waiting to see me.

"Oh goodness yes, my dear," she piped in an incredibly high, reedy little voice with a surprising lack of rural Devon in her accent. "You must be dear Mr Holmes' wife, although I have to say you look more like a son in those clothes. Still, they're warm I'm sure on a cold day—although it's not so very cold this morning, now is it? I think I'll just finish making us a cup of tea and we can take it sitting right out here where we can look at God's good sunlight and pretend it's spring, instead of nearly winter again—goodness, how cold the winters get, my old bones just ache at the thought of another one, and it doesn't seem fair, the summers are getting so very short. Do you want to help me carry the tea things, then? That's very sweet of you, my beauty. No, no, this isn't for you, little thing." The last sentence was directed at a thin grey tabby kitten halfway through adolescence, who had been in hopeful attendance from the moment its mistress stepped back into her cottage and all the time she had worked. The old woman's high voice sounded like ceaseless birdsong—or like the tin whistle the young man had played the night before—as she made the tea, shuffling around the watchful cat to kettle and tea caddy and cupboard and back. I had the strong impression that she talked continuously whether she had an audience or not—or perhaps I should say whether or not she had a human audience.

I took the tray from her and followed her with some difficulty out the door and to the rough-hewn bench in the sun. She lifted the somnolent cats down to the ground and told me to put the tray onto the bench, as the table that normally stood in front of the seat had collapsed the week before when a visiting cow had decided to use it for a scratching post, and it was now down at the neighbour's for repair.

She poured the tea and sweetened her cup with what looked like treacle but she told me was honey, brought her by a friend on the other side of the moor in exchange for a cracked hoof she'd managed to repair.

"You do a lot of animal doctoring," I commented.

"Yes dear, I'm the local witch." I blinked, and she began to giggle, a sound so high pitched it had the sleeping dogs twitching their ears. "I'm not a witch of course, child, though surely there are many here who would tell you I am. Just an old woman who knows her herbs and has the time to spend babying hurt creatures." She closed her eyes and sat for a while, basking like a turtle in the faint warmth of the autumnal sun. I drank my tea and enjoyed that same warmth on my back.

"Now tell me, dear," she said after a while (startling me, as my mind had wandered far away to Holmes and London), "which do you wish to hear about first? My hedgehog or Samuel's dog?"

"Dog?" I sat up sharply. "What do you know about a dog?"

"Oh, it was the son of Daniel down the road who saw it, last summer."

"Why didn't I hear about this?" I demanded suspiciously. With the entire moor seemingly living in one another's pockets, why had no one thought to mention an actual sighting of the Hound?

"Daniel is very good at keeping things to himself. His Samuel was embarrassed, so he promised to say nothing, and he didn't, except to me. Perhaps you'd like to hear about the Hound first, then. Make yourself comfortable, child. It's a long story.

"As I said, it was the son of Daniel down the road that saw the Hound. A fine young lad is Samuel, in school now of course, but then he was home on his summer holiday, and a good help to his parents he is, too. It isn't easy for them to be without him, but I told Daniel that his son's mind was too good to waste, and with a little help from me he won a place at the school in Exeter.

"But you're not interested in the maunderings of an old schoolteacher, are you, dear? You want the Hound, and although I might not tell it you if night was drawing in, on a sunny morning, I shall give it you.

"Samuel is a blessing and a help to his parents, and it so happened that his mother's sister up near Bridestowe had a baby the end of July, and though it all went well, thanks be to God, a month later she still was needing a bit of help with the heavy things. So Samuel was sent up every few days to take some fresh-baked bread or a dish of some kind that his mother had made, and help his aunty with the chores, and then walk back the next day. It's only five miles or so, and perfectly safe for a strapping young boy who knows to look out for mists and mires. Not like the city, which can be dangerous even for a full-grown man.

"Well, towards the end of August Samuel stayed later than usual. He was coming to the end of his holiday and, good boy that he is, he wanted to leave his aunty with a big pile of firewood and then finish the repairs to her henhouse that he'd begun. Of course, his uncle could've done those, but you know how boys need to feel they're indispensable.

"Between the firewood and the chicken run, then, he didn't leave until after tea. His aunty wanted him to stop another night and walk back in the morning, but it was a soft, clear evening and the moon was near full, and the little cot she had for him to sleep in was really too short for his growing legs, and his father liked him back of a Sunday morning to go to church, and aside from all that, his mother's breakfasts were better than his aunty's. Too, I think, knowing Samuel, it was an adventure, to cross the moor at night all by himself, when he'd only ever done it with an adult.

"You see, this was before all the stories got around about the strange happenings on the moor, although it was after I found Tiggy, which I'll tell you about in a minute.

"Samuel waited until the moon was up in the sky and then he kissed his aunty good-bye and left. He'd got in the habit of following the roads as far as Watervale, just this side of Lydford, because he sometimes found one of the neighbours driving home and he could take a ride in the back of their wagon or cart. That night, though, he didn't, so he left the road on Black Down and set off up the moor track.

"It's a goodly climb up the side of the moor, so Samuel used to go until he'd crossed the Tavy and then have a bit of a rest before the last bit. Sometimes his aunty'd give him a little something to keep him from starvation in the two hours it took him to get home, and that's when he would eat it, sitting on a stone over the river, waiting for his feet to dry before pulling his stockings and boots back on.

"That night it was a fruit scone with some preserves inside—a little stale, but Samuel didn't mind. He unwrapped it, and was sitting there eating it and watching the stream in the moonlight when something made him look up.

"At that place, the moor rises sharply, so it's quite a climb—too much for an old thing like me, but ideal for a boy like Samuel, just getting his muscles and proud of them. So when he looked up, the moor was over him, and outlined against the moonlit sky he saw a figure of hellish terror. At first he thought it a pony, it was so big, but then he saw how its tail raised up, and then he saw the light coming from the middle of its great, dark head.

"It was a dog, my dear, a dog such as hasn't been seen since Mr Holmes settled the Baskerville problem, a dog to bring a young boy nightmares and keep him locked inside when the sun is down.

"He ran, did Samuel, leaving his boots, his satchel, and his scone there by the river.

"Daniel never even considered that it might be his son's idea of a clever joke—one look at the state of the lad's feet and a person could tell that.

"Daniel wanted to take up his shotgun and go right back out, even if it meant carrying Samuel on his back, but the thought of going out into the night scared that brave little boy rigid. The next morning Daniel talked him into putting on a pair of old bedroom slippers and going back to the place by the river. The boy's boots and stockings were on the rock, right where he'd left them, but the scone was gone and the stone where Samuel had dropped it was licked clean, and the satchel he used for carrying his mother's cooking up to Bridestowe they found some distance off, torn to shreds.

"And a dog's footprints. Plenty of those, oh my, yes. Now, would you like to have another cup of tea before you hear about my little hedgehog?" the old woman asked brightly.

"Just a moment," I said, thinking furiously and trying hard to assimilate this abrupt development, the fleshing out of a hound of ghostly rumours into a thing of flesh and bone, interested in the consumption of sweet scones. "This was towards the end of August, around the full moon, and on a Saturday night?"

"That's right, dear."

Which put it the twenty-fifth of August, the day before the full moon and the day after the courting couple had seen the dog with the carriage.

"And neither of them said anything about it?"

"Daniel loves his son. The boy shakes whenever anyone brings it up, so Daniel thought it best not to tell anyone. I only found out because I asked him what was wrong with the boy."

"How old is Samuel?"

"Twelve, dear. A good, responsible age. Now I'll tell you about my Tiggy, shall I?"

I rubbed my brow, feeling a bit stunned, but said weakly, "Do, please."

"I was crossing the moor one day, back in the middle of summer," she began.

"Do you know the date?" I interrupted, although by that time I knew enough to expect the answer I received.

"No my love, I'm sorry, but I haven't much need any longer for numbers on a page. I can tell you," she continued, forestalling the second part of the question, "that it was in July, and near enough the full moon as makes no difference, and it was a Saturday too, because I went to church services with my friend in Widdecombe the next day." Even if she had been a schoolteacher, her answer was typical of those I had become accustomed to receiving, and in the end more precise than the answer of a calendar-user to whom days were easily forgotten dates instead of skies and seasons. She was describing the twenty-eighth of July, three days after Johnny Trelawny, and one day after the ramblers from London, had each seen Lady Howard's coach. I set my cup down on the bench and prepared to listen closely.

"I often go across the moor, you know. I have friends in Moretonhampstead and Widdecombe, and there's roots and things growing on that side and not this. So on a nice day when I don't have too many animals needing my eye—my 'patients,' as Daniel calls them—I'll take a sandwich and a bottle of tea and pay a call on my friends."

Both of the places she had named were a good fifteen or twenty miles across some fairly rough countryside. "Do you do the trip in a day?" I asked in surprise. Having seen her totter about, I doubted that she could cover more than two miles in an hour, and that on even ground.

"Oh, I stop the night there, dear," she reassured me. "Sometimes two nights, and come back the third day. One of Daniel's children feeds the beasties." As if that was all that might concern me. "But as I was saying, I was on the moor one day last summer when I heard the saddest little cry, it'd make your heart break to hear it. It was such a tiny noise, I had a time finding what was making it, until finally I found the poor wee thing in the shade of a standing stone. It'd been trying to dig a hole in the ground to hide itself in, but it hadn't a chance, even if it had been whole and strong." She seemed not far from tears at the pathos of the thing.

"A hedgehog," I said.

"That it was, a young Tiggy, would fit into your hand. I thought for sure it would die, it was that sorely treated, I decided all I could do was make it comfortable and sing to it until it passed on. So I popped it into my coat pocket and sang while I walked, and I took it out when Igot to Widdecombe, fully expecting to have to borrow a spade and bury it.

"Only, don't you know, the little face looked up at me, so trusting, I just knew it would pull through. We gave it some milk with a drop of brandy in it, set its little leg—the back one, on the left—and wrapped it with a splint made from a nice smooth corset stay cut down to size, and I pulled together the great tear in its back with a piece of silk embroidery floss—green, it was; quite striking—and put it into a little box with some cotton wool near the fire.

"And in the morning it wrinkled its little nose at me, asking clear as it could, 'Where's my breakfast?' "

"Was it all right, then?" I asked. Not perhaps the most professional of investigative enquiries, and certainly not the question Holmes would have had at that point, but I did want to know.

"Not very good, you understand, but it lived. I did have to take off its little foot with a pair of sewing scissors, I'm afraid. It was too badly crushed to save, and the infection would have killed it."

I winced at the picture of two ancient ladies bent over the kitchen table doing an amputation with a pair of scissors, and moved quickly on to the proper questions. "What had caused its injuries, do you know?"

"Now that's just it, dear," she said, sounding approving. "It was something moving fast—a cart-wheel, maybe, or a boot—that squashed the poor thing's leg, but a dog had at it, too."

The hair on the back of my neck stirred. "How do you know that?" I demanded.

"Which, the cart or the dog?"

"Both."

"Well, dear, I know that whatever it was squashed Tiggy had to be moving quickly, because if poor little Tiggy'd had a minute's warning he'd have curled up tight and been flattened right across, not just one stray leg. And the dog I know because any wild creature would've had more sense, and once tearing at Tiggy that way he'd either have stayed to finish him off or taken him home to feed his babies."

Unlikely as it seemed, this was a witness after Holmes' own heart, and I took my hat off to her. Literally.

"What pretty hair you have, my dear," she exclaimed, and reached out to pat it lightly. "I had a cousin once who had strawberry blonde hair just like yours, and she was bright as her hair, too."

I had to admit that I was not feeling particularly bright, and asked her if she had seen any hoof marks or cart tracks.

"I'm afraid I didn't, dear. The ground was dry, you know, and it takes something pretty heavy to make a dent."

I found it hard to imagine the turf of the moor dry and hard, but I had to defer to her greater knowledge of the place. I then asked her about the precise location of the hedgehog's unfortunate accident. I offered her my map, but she waved it away, saying that her eyes found such fine work a difficulty, so instead she described her route subjectively—the hills and flats, a tor gone by, a stream crossed, the morning sun in her eyes—and I eventually decided on a stone circle below a rise that seemed to coincide with her description. I folded up the map and replaced it in the breast pocket of my coat. She seemed not to have finished with me, however, and sat with her head at an angle and an expectant look on her face. I thought perhaps she was waiting for my final judgement, which I did not think I could give her.

"I have to admit, I don't know enough about the habits of hedgehogs to say if I agree with your ideas," I began. Her face instantly cleared and she began to nod in understanding.

"Then you won't know the real question here, and that is, 'What was Tiggy doing there?' "

"I'm sorry, you'll have to explain that."

"Tiggy doesn't live out on the moor, dear. Tiggy likes the woods and the soft places."

"And there aren't any?"

"Not in two or three miles of where I found him."

"What if some animal had carried it? Whatever gave it the bite, for example, or a big hawk?"

"Well, that's possible, I suppose, dear," she said, sounding very dubious. "But I was wondering if it wasn't more likely that Tiggy was accidentally taking a ride on whatever it was run him down."

THIRTEEN

…The reader is tripping over uncertain ground, not knowing what is to be accepted and what rejected.

—A Book of Dartmoor

When I took my leave from Elizabeth Chase, the good witch of Mary Tavy, my mind, to borrow a phrase from Baring-Gould's memoirs, was in a ferment. It was still only midday, and Lew House little more than two hours away; I decided to take a look at the place where she had found the injured Tiggy.

I found it without difficulty—there are not so many stone circles on the moor to make for a confusion—but I was not quite sure what to make of it. The site was typical of its kind, upright hunks of granite arranged in a rough circle on a piece of relatively flat ground and surrounded by the moor's low turf, broken here and there by stones and bracken. A double row of stones (one of Randolph Pethering's "Druid ceremonial passages") lay in the near distance, and a moorland track (the Abbot's Way?) ran alongside.

As Elizabeth Chase had indicated, the most curious part of the hedgehog affair was why the animal should have been out here in the first place. The more I thought about it, the more I had to agree: The little beasts are lovers of woods and the resultant soft leaf mould under which to take cover, a far cry from this blasted heath, which even a badger would have been hard put to carve into a home.

I pulled from Red's saddlebag the cheese and pickle sandwich and bottle of ale that I had asked for that morning at the Mary Tavy inn, and carried them over to a stone that had once, by the looks of the hollow in the ground at one end, been upright. I laid out my sandwich and opened the bottle with the bottle-opening blade of my pocket knife, and ate my lunch, enjoying the sun and my prehistoric surroundings, and most especially the delightful image of a hitchhiking hedgehog.

An almost lighthearted air of holiday had set in. After all, I had more or less completed my assignment, with an unlikely but glittering gem to carry back to Lew Trenchard and a mere handful of houses between here and the edge of the moor at which to carry out the formalities of my enquiries. My sense of taste had returned, I could very nearly breathe the air, and the sun was actually shining. I stretched out with my head on one stone and my boots on another, and rested for ten minutes before gathering my luncheon débris and swinging back up into the saddle.

"Home, Red," I said to him, and endured a few hundred yards of his trot before pulling him back to his usual amble.

This time when he shied, I was ready for him. Unfortunately.

Given a negative stimulus of sufficient strength, one can train even the most stubborn animal to avoid a given activity. Red had trained me quite effectively: No sooner did my mind begin to drift away into its own world than it snapped back to apprehensive attention. Twice, this was unnecessary. The third time my quick reversion to full awareness came at the precise moment that Red jumped. I clung like a burr, knowing that he would calm the moment his feet set down again on solid ground. However, this time, with me on his back, he did not; instead he panicked.

I had thought the gelding capable of two gaits and no speed. I was proved wrong, over the most lethal terrain imaginable, a vicious combination of jagged boulders and the soft, almost mucky turf they were set into. We pounded furiously through two hundred yards of this before his front foot went into a shallow rivulet, and he slewed over onto his side, feet kicking furiously. At the last possible moment I flung myself out of the saddle, but one flailing hoof caught me as I went and I hit the ground, not in a balanced roll, but as any untrained person would: hard. I probably would have broken an arm had I not landed on the sodden bank of the stream. Coughing and choking, I pushed myself out of the water and perched on the edge of the bank with my boots in the frigid stream until my head stopped whirling, and fished around for my fallen spectacles when I noticed their lack was one of the things contributing to my disorientation. Very luckily, they were not smashed, only bent and scratched. I threaded them back onto my ears and looked around for Red; when I saw him, my urge to commit murder was snatched away and my heart went into my throat. He was standing with his head down and one of his front legs raised off the ground.

I scrambled over to him and bent to examine the leg, finding to my great relief that it was not broken, although the knee was bleeding, tender, and swelling rapidly. The same could be said of various parts of my own anatomy: The arms and shoulders that had automatically protected my skull from the worst of the rocks would be a mass of bruises tomorrow, my forehead seemed to be bleeding, and I was not altogether certain about one of the ribs on my right side. Still, I was conscious and walking, and so, barely, was the horse.

I led him back to the stream, pushing and pulling until he was standing in it, and I began bathing his leg and my forehead in the cold water. After a while, the cold began to work. Both of us stopped bleeding and he relaxed his bad leg farther into the water until it was actually bearing a portion of his weight.

It would not, however, bear mine as well. While I waited for him to recover some degree of mobility, I stripped him of his burdens and changed my dangerously wet garments for the dry clothing in the bag. When I had packed them again, I retrieved the torn and sodden map from my pocket and sat with it on my knees.

I was, I decided reluctantly, too far from Lydford to lead the horse, and I was hesitant to leave an injured, elderly animal accustomed to shelter out here on its own. The healing hands of Elizabeth Chase were even farther away, perhaps four hours at a hobbling pace. I could return to the tiny, dirty farm I had stopped at between here and there. Or…

My eyes were pulled north on the map by a patch of tree markings, noteworthy in that expanse of rough grassland, and by its label: Baskerville Hall.

I had not intended to make another, unannounced, visit to Richard Ketteridge. The awareness of his curious establishment had been with me over the last days, of course, and when I had turned north the previous morning I had briefly toyed with the idea, before deciding that any further investigation of Baskerville Hall was best left to Holmes, who knew the ground.

Now, however, I was in a spot, and needed aid of the sort that Ketteridge could readily provide: food, warmth, shelter for the horse, and alternative transport. Of course, it would necessitate appearing before him a second time in a thoroughly soiled and dishevelled state, but pride could be swallowed—so long as it was washed down with a cup of hot tea. I folded the map back into its pocket and went to extricate the horse from its cold bath. Taking another look at the swollen leg, I decided that a firm wrap might make him more comfortable. One shirt did the job, tied into place with a pair of handkerchiefs, and I could then transfer the bags from the horse's back to my own.

Together we limped across the deserted landscape towards Baskerville Hall. The afternoon light faded, but with the map and compass at hand I was in no danger of getting lost, and my boots were slowly drying out. Red's leg seemed to improve as we went on; I, on the other hand, began to discover bruises I hadn't known were there, and the bruised (I hoped only bruised) rib made it difficult to breathe at all deeply. The heavy bag seemed to cut into my left shoulder, the tug of the reins yanked the right shoulder into flames, and there seemed to be something amiss with the hip below the bad rib as well. God alone knew what I looked like.

The high wall surrounding Baskerville Hall dictated that the horse at any rate should have to enter by way of the road. It was a long way around, and thoroughly dark when I found the gate, which was shut tight. Nonetheless, banging and shouts roused not only the sharp pains in shoulder and ribs, but a resident of the lodge house as well.

My appearance did not seem to inspire confidence. His wife, looking out of the window at me, was either more sensible or more near-sighted and ordered him to ring up to the house on the telephone to ask if I might be permitted entrance.

Permission was given, but the gatekeeper evidently did not bother with explanations or details. When he, the horse, and I finally emerged from the (still unlit) avenue of trees into the harsh glare of the thousand-watt Swan and Edison, both Ketteridge and Scheiman were outside the door peering in some agitation down the drive to see what could have delayed me. When we appeared, the two Americans made exclamations of surprise and hurried to take the reins and my elbow. I winced and retrieved the elbow.

"Mrs Holmes, what on earth happened here?" Ketteridge demanded.

"I'm really quite all right, Mr Ketteridge, although I know I must look as if I'd been set upon by thieves. The horse fell coming across a litter of rocks."

"Your head—"

"Just a cut, I didn't even pass out. I'm afraid the poor old boy is out of the running for a few days, though, and as you were not too far off I thought I might beg of you a stable for him and a ride for me to Lew House."

The agitation returned briefly, before Ketteridge took command of the situation and himself. "David, show Mrs Holmes to the upstairs bath next to the stairway, and ask Mrs McIverney to rustle up some spare clothes for her. Jansen, take the horse down to the stables and have Williams feed and water him and look to his leg. Mrs Holmes, when you've had a chance to tidy up I hope you'll join me for supper. I'm afraid the car isn't here at the moment, but it shouldn't be away too long. Houseguests, who went back to Exeter this afternoon. I'll have the driver run you down to Lew when we've eaten. All right?"

I could not very well argue with my benefactor, although I should almost have preferred to borrow a horse and return to Lew Trenchard on my own rather than cool my heels over an evening of stilted conversation in borrowed clothing. Still, the appeal of a deep, hot bath was undeniable, and Ketteridge did not seem in a mood to be contradicted. I surrendered the horse and my burden, and meekly followed the secretary into the house.

There remained, though, discomfort in the air, which seemed actually to increase as we penetrated the house. Scheiman called perfunctorily for Mrs McIverney, for a bath to be drawn, and for clothing to be brought, ignoring my (admittedly feeble) protestations that none of this was necessary with a great deal more brusqueness than I should have expected in a mere secretary.

His almost audible sigh of relief when the door to the bath was shutting behind me confirmed the feeling I had received, that my arrival had interrupted something of importance and I was being got out of the way while it was tidied offstage.

A normal uninvited guest would have assumed an attitude of conspicuous blithe ignorance and been careful to remain unseeing. Being no normal guest, I put on the air of innocence but tightened my scrutiny. Giving Scheiman and the maid two minutes to retreat, I opened the door quietly and put my head out into the hallway.

The maid rose hastily from her seat on a hard chair and greeted me expectantly.

"I, er…I'm going to need to wash my hair," I improvised. "Do you think you could warm some bath towels to help dry it?"

"Yes, mum. It's being done." She was cheerful and helpful, and had quite obviously been told not to leave her post outside my door. I might as well have been locked in. I thanked her, and closed the door.

The window was small and high and closed. I balanced on a chair and tugged it open, but there was nothing to be seen or heard, only the feeling of cold air sucking out the room's warm steam. This small, spartan, slightly grubby bathroom, a bath of the sort one might set aside for the use of poor relations rather than the gracious rescue of an honoured acquaintance's wife, was on the north end of the east wing, away from the main guest rooms, overlooking nothing but fields and moorland, far from any sound of voices coming up the main stairs. Far, too, I realised, from the front drive, the coach house, and the stables.

Much as I should have liked to sink into oblivion in the long, hot depths of the bath, I knew I could not submit to my imprisonment without at least trying to confirm my suspicions. Leaving the chair in place and the window wide open, I stripped one of the laces from my boots, tied it around a face flannel, and dropped the flannel in the water, swishing it around vigorously to give the maid the picture of my getting into the bath. I then resumed my perch with the other end of the bootlace wrapped around one toe. From time to time I pulled the flannel about, to evoke the sounds of languid bathing, all the while growing ever more stiff and uncomfortable with my head resting on the windowsill, waiting for a sound that would probably never come.

In the end, though, some ten or fifteen minutes after my vigil began, I was granted not only a sound, but a visual confirmation as well: The engine noise of Ketteridge's big touring car purred softly over the rooftops, and then a brief flare of the headlamps illuminated the tops of some trees that were at the very edge of my field of vision. The motor faded, going down the drive and away from the house. I did not know what it meant, but it was with satisfaction that I pulled down the window, replaced the chair and the laces, and slipped silently into the cooling bath.

FOURTEEN

On the road passers-by always salute and have a bit of a yarn, even though personally unacquainted, and to go by in the dark without a greeting is a serious default in good manners.

—A Book of the West: Devon

Ketteridge was all smiles and affability when I joined him, the agitation gone and a celebratory mood in its place. In fact, a bottle of some very fine champagne was nestling in a bucket of ice, to be plucked out and opened as soon as I entered the hall. Ketteridge was alone, and a small table set with two places was standing discreetly to one side. I was not at all sure about the intimacy of this tête-à-tête, but the hall lights were blazing, sweeping away the memory of the quiet and somewhat mysterious reaches of the room in the other evening's after-dinner candlelight, and Ketteridge did not seem in the least seductive, or even vaguely flirtatious. He seemed only brimming with high spirits, and his sun-dark face, full hair, and white, even teeth, though undeniably handsome, did not appeal to me personally (which was, frankly, a great relief, following the memory of a couple of very disconcerting moments with a man in the Ruskin case).

"Mrs Holmes! Come, join me in a glass of this marvellous stuff." He poured two glasses, gave me one, and held his own up before him to propose a toast. "To change!" he declared dramatically.

I hesitated. "I don't know if I ought to drink to that, Mr Ketteridge. Not all change is good."

"To growth, then. To progress."

Not entirely certain what it was I was drinking to, I nonetheless put the rim of the glass to my lips and sipped.

"Are we celebrating something, Mr Ketteridge?"

"Always, my dear Mrs Holmes. There's always something in life to celebrate. In this case, however, I think I may have found a buyer for Baskerville Hall."

"I see. I did not realise your plans to move on were so far advanced."

"They weren't before; now they are. Sometimes decisions have to be made on the fly, as it were. Strike while the iron is hot."

Privately, I agreed that striking at cold iron was not the most productive of exercises; however, neither was the availability of hot iron generally as accidental a state as he seemed to be suggesting. I found it hard to believe that a buyer for Baskerville Hall had simply dropped, preheated as it were, out of the air.

"I'm very glad for you. Do I take the champagne to mean that you have reached a happy agreement?" I was not so gauche as to ask how much he was getting for the hall, but I had found industrialists, particularly successful American industrialists, less likely to take offence at a discussion of pounds, shillings, and pence than the other sorts of wealthy Englishmen were, and a gold baron was surely an industrialist of a sort.

"Happy enough," he said. "Yes, happy enough. And I think Baring-Gould and his friends will be satisfied. The buyer is an older man—just as well, it's not exactly a family kind of a place, is it?—and he wants a quiet place to write and study while his wife joins the local hunt. An American—the place seems to have a tradition for outsiders, doesn't it? But I think they'll fit in well."

It was something of a surprise that Ketteridge would even consider the respective suitability of his buyers and their new neighbours, given the amount of money at stake, and I was touched by his thoughtfulness. Not, I reflected, that he would refuse to sell to a rapacious financier with a scheme to knock the house down and replace it with a set of holiday flats to hire out to city dwellers by the week, but he seemed genuinely happy that he had reached a right solution.

"When will the sale take place?" I asked. "Will you be leaving soon?"

"It's not completely settled yet," he hastened to say. "Some questions to hammer out first. Early spring, most likely. By June."

Baring-Gould would have the entertainment of this odd American whom he had befriended, then, until the end. I smiled a bit sadly and drank my wine.

Ketteridge divided the remainder of the bottle between our two glasses (most of it having gone into his) and then rang for Tuptree, who came in and arranged the small table and two chairs before the fire.

"I thought this would be more comfortable, Mrs Holmes. The dining hall is a little formal, and damn—darned cold for someone who's just been swimming on Dartmoor."

"That's very thoughtful of you. Although I have to say the dining hall is a room with a great deal of character. I should like to see it more thoroughly, sometime."

"I'd be happy to give you the tour tonight, if you wish."

"I would like that very much," I said, and sat back to enjoy my meal.

We were served as attentively as we would have been in the formal setting, and the meal was, as before, simple food cooked superbly. I commented on it.

"Is your cook English, Mr Ketteridge, or American?"

"French, would you believe it? It took me three years to convince him that his sauces made me bilious and that the plainer meat and vegetables are, the better they taste."

"How on earth did you convince a French chef of the virtues of simplicity?" I asked, amused.

"I threatened him. Told him the next time he resigned, I'd actually accept it. I pay him more than he could get anywhere else, so he learned to change."

I laughed with him. "How clever of you. I shall keep the technique in mind."

"I don't imagine you'd have much use for it," he said. I kept my face straight, but he instantly realised how ill-mannered such a remark was and tried to cover his lapse. "That is to say, Reverend Gould was telling me the other evening how simply you and your husband live, down in Sussex."

"It's very true," I said, sounding ever-so-slightly regretful. It was only to be expected that Ketteridge would want to prise any Sherlock Holmes gossip he could out of Baring-Gould, but either Baring-Gould or Holmes himself had neglected to mention that our unadorned manner of living had everything to do with choice and nothing with necessity. I toyed for a moment with the idea of making Ketteridge a cash offer on Baskerville Hall, then put it away. Independent wealth did not go well with the picture Ketteridge had formed of the Holmes household, and I decided that, for the present, I should leave the picture undisturbed. Besides which, he might actually accept my offer, and then where would I be?

"Tell me, Mrs Holmes, does your husband still investigate cases, or is he well and truly retired?"

Ah, I thought, Baring-Gould was not indiscreet enough to tell him everything.

"Very occasionally, when something interests him enough. For the most part he writes and conducts his research. We live a quiet life." That Ketteridge did not burst into wild laughter told me all I needed to know about his ignorance of Holmes' very active career. "Why do you ask?"

"I thought perhaps while he was down here I might hire him to look into the mysterious sightings of the Hound of the Baskervilles."

"Oh yes?" Interesting, I thought, that everyone should be confusing the Baskerville hound with the one accompanying Lady Howard's coach. Considering Richard Ketteridge's enthusiasms it was not all that surprising that he should do so, but I could only think that Conan Doyle's influence extended out here, twisting reality until it resembled fiction. It would not be the first time Holmes had confronted himself in a fictional mirror.

"You have heard of them?" he asked.

"The sightings? Yes, Baring-Gould mentioned them the other day. Why, have you seen it?"

"No. But I imagine they will be causing some uproar among my neighbours out on the moor."

"I should think so, considering the last time it was seen. Actually, I was wondering if the hound might not come here. As I remember, the Baskerville curse was the reason for its presence, but there's nothing to say whether it's Baskerville blood that attracts him, or merely ownership of the hall."

I studied him in all innocence, and saw a look of astonishment cross his face, followed by a great roar of laughter.

"Oh my," he sputtered. "Mrs Holmes, I never thought of that. Maybe I'd better start wearing garlic or something."

"A pistol seems to have been effective the last time," I noted.

His laughter faded, but the humour remained in his eyes. "But the last time it was an actual dog, painted with—phosphorus, wasn't it?"

"Yes," I said. "Of course you're right. How silly of me."

"Have you ever worked with your husband, Mrs Holmes?"

"On a case?"

"Yes."

I spread some butter on a piece of roll and ate it thoughtfully. "We did collaborate on a case, once, involving a stolen ham."

The absurdity of the thing delighted him, as I thought it might do, and he insisted I tell him about it. I did so, emphasising the ridiculous parts until the story verged on the burlesque—not, I admit, a difficult task. When we had put that story to bed and been served the next course, I played the polite guest and asked about his life.

"What about you, Mr Ketteridge? You must have had some fascinating adventures in Alaska."

"It was quite a time."

"What was your most exciting moment?"

"Exciting good or exciting terrifying?"

"Either. Both."

"Exciting good was the first time I looked into my pan and saw gold."

"On your claim?"

"Yes. Fifty feet of mud and rock and ice—when I first staked it, the stream was frozen. I had to thaw out the ground with a fire before I could get at the mud. But there was gold in it. Amazing stuff, gold," he mused, looking down at the ring on his finger and rubbing it thoughtfully. "Soft and useless, but its sparkle gets right into a man's bones. 'Gold fever' is a good name, because that's what it's like, burning you and eating you up."

"And the exciting bad?"

"The sheer terror. Had a handful of those, like pieces of peppercorn scattered through a plate of tasteless stew. Most of the work in the fields was dull slog—you were uncomfortable all the time, awake or asleep, always hungry, never clean, never warm except in summer when the mosquitos ate you alive, your feet and hands were always wet and bruised. Lord, the boredom. And then a charge you'd set wouldn't go off and you'd get the thrill of going up to it, knowing it might decide to explode in your face. Or a tunnel you'd poked into the hillside would start to collapse, between you and daylight. But the most exciting moment? Let's see. That would either be when the dogsled went over a ledge into Soda Creek, or the avalanche at the Scales."

The last name tickled a vague memory. "I've heard of the Scales. Wasn't that the name for a hill?"

"A hill," he said with a pitying smile. "A hell more like it, if you'll pardon my French. Chilkoot Pass, four miles straight up. Seemed like it anyway, even in summer when you could go back and forth, but in the winter, twelve hundred steps cut into the ice, the last mile was like climbing a ladder. And you had a year's worth of supplies to shift to the top—the Mounties checked to make sure; they didn't want a countryside of starving men—so you couldn't just climb it once unless you could afford to pay the freight cable to take your load up for you. There you were, in a mile-long line of freezing, exhausted men, so tight packed it was left, right, left, together all the way, your lungs aching and your head pounding in the altitude, and just when you think you can't lift your foot one more time, that you're going to drop in your tracks and die, you're at the top, falling into the snow with the crate on your back. And when you've got your breath back you take the ropes off that crate, sit on your shovel, and slide down the iced track to the bottom, where you put another crate on your shoulders and line up to start again. After twenty, twenty-five times you have your supplies at the top of the hill, and you're ready to start on your way to the fields. Lot of men stood in Sheep Camp at the bottom of the Scales, saw what they were up against, and their hearts just gave up on them. Sold their supplies for ten cents on the dollar and went home."

"But you didn't."

"Didn't have the sense to, no. It was winter, but the weather was still uncertain, and I'd only shifted half my load when the snow turned warm. Six, eight feet of wet snow in a couple of days. The Indians were smart—they cleared out back to town—but stubborn us.

"I knew it was going to get dangerous, so I started climbing early, still night in fact. I nearly made it, had my last load on my back and was halfway up when the cliffs gave way. The whole hill, a mile of snow and ice, just moved out from under our feet, a mile-long line of hundreds of men, their equipment, their dogs, everything just bundled up and swept down into Sheep Camp in a heap of snow. Seventy, eighty men died, my partner one of them. I was locked in, upside down, though I didn't know it—couldn't tell, it was dark and I couldn't move anything but my right hand. It was like being caught in set cement. My boot was sticking out, and that's what saved me, when they found it and dug me out."

"Good…heavens," I said weakly. I did not have to manufacture a response; the claustrophobic horror of his experience made me feel a bit lightheaded.

Ketteridge put down the glass that he had been nursing all during his narrative and looked at me with concern. "I'm so sorry, Mrs Holmes, have I upset you?"

"No no, just the idea of that sort of suffocation. It's pretty horrific."

"At the time, you know, I wasn't even frightened. Angry at first, if you can credit it—the thought that I'd have to carry everything up all over again just made me furious. I know, funny that should be the first thing on my mind. And then I was worried about my partner, who'd been just behind me, and then I was uncomfortable, all squashed and cold. But then that passed, and I began to feel warm; my wrenched leg didn't even hurt. Running out of air, I suppose, but it wouldn't have been a bad way to die, you know. Compared to some."

He smiled. "Shall we take coffee in the library, Tuptree? The car ought to be back soon."

This last was to me, and I folded my table napkin and stood up.

"May we walk through the dining hall?" I asked, gently reminding him of his promise.

"Certainly, if you like. The lighting in there isn't very good, I'm afraid. For some reason Baskerville never had that room wired for electricity. It's better during the day."

Ketteridge took up a candelabra and lit the tapers with the cigar lighter he carried in his pocket, and we went through into the great, dim banqueting hall. It was like walking into a cavern, empty and full of shadows—although in times past the entire manor had gathered here for meals, the family on its raised dais, the servants at long tables in the rest of the room. A minstrel's gallery looked down from the far end, silent and abandoned by all except the painted Baskervilles, a cheerless substitute indeed for the music the spot was intended to house. We strolled in near complete silence ourselves, down one side and up the end. He held the light up for me to see the portraits.

"The Baskervilles seem a varied lot," I commented.

"The last owner took all the good ones with her," he said ruefully. "She did leave these tapestries, though," he added, and carried the candles over to the interior wall to show me the dusty, faded figures that had once blazed with colour and movement. We examined them critically. "They're prettier in the daylight," he said, and I allowed him to escort me out of the room and down a long and infinitely more cheery corridor.

As a working library the room we entered left something to be desired, but as a masculine retreat that used books as a decorative backdrop for deep leather chairs and a square card table, it was more comfortable than the draughty reaches of the hall or dining room. Heavy draperies covered the windows and Tuptree, bearing a tray of coffee, followed us in the door.

"It's a pity you haven't been to the house in daylight, Mrs Holmes. It's quite a sight—these windows here look up onto the moor, and there are six tors sitting there, looking like you could reach out and touch them. On a clear day, that is. You must try to come back during the day—you and your husband, of course."

"I'd like that, thank you. I was so enjoying my ride out on the moor today, I hadn't realised how late it had got. I do apologise for keeping you up."

"This isn't late, Mrs Holmes, by no means, and I was charmed to have you drop in on me, for whatever reason. Were you just out for a ride, then?"

I had offered him that ride in case he wondered what on earth the good Mrs Holmes might have been doing in his deserted stretch of countryside. Whatever he was hiding from me, whomever he had spirited out from under my nose, might be as simple as a socially unacceptable buyer for Baskerville Hall or as embarrassing as an improper visitor of the female persuasion. In any case he could hardly suspect me of arranging the mishap that had delivered Red and myself here in such a state. I merely thought to divert his curiosity before it took hold in his mind.

"Yes, and what a place for it! I rode down to look at the Fox Tor mires and Childe's Tomb, and Wistman's Wood, and then the stone row near Merrivale, and I was aiming for Fur Tor, to get around the river, you see, when Red spooked and fell."

He seemed imperceptibly to relax, whether because of my list of sights or due to the breezy conversational style I had gradually come to assume, I could not tell.

"It is an interesting slice of landscape, isn't it?" he commented.

"Oh yes. Sitting on a tor and eating a picnic lunch with a stone row on one side and a tin-mining works on the other is not an everyday sort of experience."

"I think my favourite is Bowerman's Nose, not far from Hound Tor. Do you know it?"

"Over near Widdecombe? No, I haven't been there yet."

"Looks like a great stone man, staring defiantly up into the sky."

"But it actually has a nose, does it? I rode completely around Fox Tor looking for some resemblance to a fox. I couldn't find one."

"A bit like the constellations, aren't they? You'd have to have a good imagination, or bad eyesight, to see what they're named after."

"Actually," I said, "the tor where I took lunch today resembled nothing so much as what one finds in the road after a herd of cattle has passed by."

The earthy humour was to Ketteridge's liking. When he stopped laughing he swung his cup dangerously in the direction of the curtains and said, "There's a tor just out those windows that I think I'll rename Horse-Dropping Tor, in your honour, Mrs Holmes. Looks just like one we had over our house when I was young, only it's cold, wet, and grey instead of hot, dry, and red." His face, which when relaxed had been less handsome but more likeable, abruptly tightened. He put his cup into its saucer with a sharp rattle and began to pat his pockets in the semaphore of the tobacco smoker. The distant past, it would seem, was out of bounds in a way that his youth in Alaska had not been.

"If I were you, I shouldn't mention to Baring-Gould that you are giving his tors impolite names."

He instantly relaxed again and stopped his search for tobacco. "You're right. He wouldn't take to it kindly."

Baring-Gould was a safer topic of conversation. I permitted him to retreat into it, and we talked about the squire of Lew Trenchard for a while. I did not think Ketteridge fully realised the precarious state of the old man's health, but I was not about to be the one to tell him.

In the middle of a sentence, Ketteridge paused and said, "I hear the car." He resumed what he had been saying, and appeared quite content to sit in front of the fire and talk until midnight, but I decided that investigation or no, I had had enough. My rib and hip throbbed, my forehead and the bridge of my nose hurt sharply, and I was not in top condition anywhere, even mentally. I rose to my feet.

"Mr Ketteridge, I have taken up far too much of your time. I am very grateful for the rescue and your company, but I cannot keep you any longer."

As it transpired, however, I was not finished with him yet. When my (neatly repacked) bags were brought, Tuptree was carrying a man's overcoat and hat as well. Ketteridge was motoring down to Lew with me, "Just to make sure you arrive without problem," as he put it. Expecting that we would be attacked by highwaymen, perhaps? Or that I might be molested by his driver? It seemed, though, that this being the first pleasant evening in some time, he wanted to take a drive.

This meant that he actually did the driving, with Scheiman in the backseat alongside my saddlebags. Ketteridge held my door for me, then got in behind the wheel.

He was not a bad driver, although a touch aggressive and more apt to haul at the wheel than slip in and out between obstacles as his driver had. We flew down the tree-lined avenue and accelerated out through the open gate in a spray of gravel, and were very soon pulling into the drive at Lew House.

Somewhat to my surprise, he did not accept my invitation to enter.

"Paperwork to do, I'm sure you understand. But you'll let me know if Mr Holmes is interested in investigating the Hound sightings, won't you? We can talk about rates at the time."

Hah, I thought. The days when Sherlock Holmes worried about how much to charge for his services was long in the past.

"I shall speak to him about it," I said politely.

He stood next to the car until I had gone into the porch, and then I heard the car door close. The car circled the fountain with the bronze goose-boy, and drove away.

FIFTEEN

Hard by is Clakeywell Pool, by some called Crazywell. It is an old mine-work, now filled with water. It covers nearly an acre, and the banks are in part a hundred feet high. According to popular belief, at certain times at night a loud voice is heard calling from the water in inarticulate tones, naming the next person who is to die in the parish.

—A Book of Dartmoor

I paused in the Lew House porch for a long moment after the noise of the car had faded down the drive, pondering the curious etiquette required for entering a house in which one has been a guest in the very recent past, yet has been away for some days, and returns solitary when previously one had been an adjunct to a husband. It would have been simple had there been a butler, but I was not about to rouse the master of the house to open the door for me. I reached out to try the door handle and found it unlocked, but instead of letting myself in, I dropped my bags and walked back into the drive and past the fountain until I was in the rose garden, where I turned to take a long look at the house.

It was a puzzle. This house, this square block rising up in front of me against the night, was in a sense a fraud, an artificial product of one man's enthusiasms. Stuck-together bits and pieces stolen from other structures, held in place by nothing more substantial than the vision of an infirm and lonely old man, its cool and formal facade nestled incongruously into a tree-lined fold of English river valley; a run-down, ill-heated, understaffed, echoing pile of a place studded with anomalies like the opulent gallery ceiling upstairs and the faded but still glorious ballroom—the place ought to have seemed ridiculous, out of place, and easily abandoned to the brambles and oaks. Instead it stood, confident and unapologetic, as self-contained and idiosyncratic as the man who had created it.

Baskerville Hall, on the other hand, was the real thing. A structure grown slowly over the centuries and dramatically situated, it was filled with beautiful, cared-for things, well heated, adequately staffed, more than adequately lit (one could even get used to the electric lights, I knew), and mastered by a man in his physical and mental prime. It should have been an oasis of warmth and colour, an assertion of life and humanity shining out in the stony wilderness of the moor.

Why then did the substantial Baskerville Hall linger in the mind as somehow ethereal, unreal, and slightly "off ?" Was it merely the foreign influence on the Hall over the last three owners: Ketteridge, the Canadian Sir Henry, and old Sir Charles before him with his influx of South African gold? Could it even be as recent a change as Ketteridge and his exotic sense of design?

If so, then why was it that Lew House, which had undergone changes considerably more radical than modern lighting and a few Moorish cushions, felt the more solid on its foundations? Why did Lew House, that toy of its over-imaginative squire, still settle into its Devonshire home as if it had grown up from the very stone beneath its feet? Why was it Lew, run down though it was, that impressed a visitor with the secure knowledge that this house would stand, would still be here and sheltering its inhabitants long after the owls and foxes had moved into the windswept ruins of Baskerville Hall?

I decided I did not know. I also decided that champagne was too conducive to fancies, and it was time I took to my bed.

It was not even ten o'clock, but the house was silent. I thought it more than likely that the lights had been left burning for my sake, so I shut them down and locked the door. (As my room was in the front, if another visitor came it would only be I who was disturbed.)

I was thirsty, with the wine and coffee I had drunk, so I went through to the kitchen for a glass of water, and then climbed stiffly up the back stairway, feeling all the aches I had accumulated.

At the top of the stairs I noticed a shaft of light coming from a partially opened door down the corridor. I thought it was from Baring-Gould's room, and I paused, not wishing to disturb him, yet not willing to walk away in case the old man might have been taken ill. In the end I went quietly up the hallway and, tapping gently, allowed the door to drift open under my knuckles.

The squire of Lew Trenchard lay propped on his pillows, his hands folded together on top of the bedclothes. A faded red glasses-case lay on the table beside the bed, along with a worn white leather New Testament, looking oddly feminine, a lamp, a glass of water, and a small tray with at least ten bottles of pills and potions. The pocket of his striped pyjamas had torn and been carefully mended, I noticed, and this touch of everyday pathos made me suddenly aware of how shockingly vulnerable this fierce, daunting old man looked. I stepped backward to the door, but one eye glittered from a lowered lid.

"Is that you, Miss Russell? I cannot see you."

I stepped forward into the light. "Yes, Mr Baring-Gould. Is there anything I can get for you?"

He did not answer my question, if indeed he had heard it. His eye drifted shut and his breathing slowed. I eased back towards the door, and to my astonishment I heard him say, "I am relieved to see you home again safely. The storm the other night would have been ferocious on the open moor. I dreamt…" There was a pause, so long a pause that I began to think he had fallen asleep. "I dreamt I was a child by the seashore. The trees, you know. The Scotch pines and the oaks above the house sound remarkably like the surf on the coast of Cornwall, when the wind is blowing through them."

I waited, but that seemed to be all, so I wished him a good night and went to my room. There was no sign of Holmes, and one of his bags was missing, so I went quietly to bed, and to sleep.

***

At five o'clock in the morning I lay open-eyed, staring at the ceiling. The portions of my body that didn't ache gently hurt actively, with the occasional shooting pain from my ribs for variety.

This is ridiculous, I decided, and began the laborious process of oozing out from under the bedclothes. Surely I can make it down the stairs without waking Baring-Gould, and make myself a pot of tea without disturbing Mrs Elliott. I wrapped myself in Holmes' dressing gown, pushed my feet into his bedroom slippers, and tottered downstairs, considerably less spry than Elizabeth Chase.

I need not have bothered with silence: Baring-Gould was sitting before the drawing-room fire, a half-full cup of tea with the cold skin of age on it by his side. He held a book on his lap, a small green volume with gilt letters, mostly obscured by his hands but having something to do with Devon. He was not reading it, only holding it while he gazed into the fire. By the looks of the coals, he had been there for some hours.

"Good morning, Miss Russell," he said without turning his head. "Do come in."

"Good morning. I thought I might have some tea. Would you like another cup yourself?"

"That would be most kind of you. Although truthfully I can scarcely be said to have had the first one."

I removed the cup and returned with a tray holding pot, cups, and paraphernalia. I poured his cup, milked and sugared it to his instructions, and hesitated.

"Please do sit down, Miss Russell. Unless, of course, you have work to do."

"No," I said quickly, stung by the faint, so very faint, note of request in the proud voice. "No, I am between projects at the moment." Oh dear, that didn't sound very good. "You know how it is, one thing finished and the next still coming together in the back of the mind."

"I envy you. I never had the leisure to think in advance about the next, as you call it, project." He raised his tea to his lips to give me time to absorb the gentle scorn. This was not going well.

"What are you reading?" I asked him.

"Nothing, actually. My eyes are too bad. I do like to hold a book from time to time, though. Rather like conducting a telephone conversation with an old friend: unsatisfactory, but better than nothing at all."

"Would you…shall I read to you?"

"That is a kind offer, Miss Russell, but not perhaps at the moment."

Each time he said my name, it sounded as though he had it in italics. This unorthodox form of address was obviously more than he could swallow. I relented.

"Please, Rector, call me Mary."

"Very well, Mary. One of my daughters is named Mary, and she too has a lovely voice. No, I think that, rather than read to me from books in my library that I already know, I should prefer to hear about your own efforts. My friend Holmes tells me you are in the final stages of writing a book of your own. Tell me about it."

"I have finished it, in fact. The first draft, that is—I sent it to the publisher just before I came down here. There will be a fair amount of work before it's actually ready to publish, of course, but it is very nice to make it to the end of the first time through."

"Hmm," he said. "I never was much of one for second drafts. It always seemed to me that if my publisher did not like it to begin with, no amount of tinkering would set it right. Best to start on something new."

"So you would just scrap it?" I asked, astonished.

"Not invariably, but generally, yes. Who is your publisher?"

I told him, and he asked about the editor, and we talked about the mechanics of publishing for a few minutes. Then he asked, "And the subject? You never did answer me."

"Sophia," I said. "Wisdom."

"Hochmah," he said in rejoinder. "You are Jewish, I think?"

"I am. My father was a member of the Anglican Communion, but my mother was Jewish, which under rabbinic law makes me Jewish as well."

"Have you seen our church here in Lew?"

"On Sunday. It's very lovely."

"Paravi lucenum Christo meo," he said. I have prepared a lamp for my Christ.

I ventured a tiny joke from the same Psalm: " 'For the Lord has chosen Lew Down, he has desired it for his dwelling place.' "

He smiled. " 'This is my resting place forever, here I will dwell, for I have desired it.' Truly," he mused, "I have both desired and chosen. I had thought to have my daughter Margaret paint a picture in the church of the mother of God as Sophia, but we haven't got to it yet. It was my mother's name, Sophia."

"That is a portrait of you with her upstairs, isn't it? She was very pretty."

"Do you think so? Prettier than her anaemic-looking son, at any rate. The painter took against me, didn't like my asking so many questions about mixing paint and the techniques of perspective, so he made me look even more priggish than I think I actually did."

"It's a sweet picture," I protested.

He snorted. "You ought to see the thing I just sat for. Makes me look like an old boat."

"Is it here?"

"Oh no, hanging in London. What do you have to say about Sophia, then, Mary?"

So, at five in the morning in the echoing old house, we talked about theology. He was an interesting partner in conversation—as inquisitive as a child, but intractable and opinionated on the things he considered he knew; impatient with extraneous detail but insistent about the detail he thought important; utterly imperious yet innately gracious at the same time.

Curiously like another enthusiastic amateur I knew, in fact; two members of a dying breed.

When we had finished with that topic to his satisfaction, he turned to another. "Tell me what you make of Dartmoor, Mary."

To help myself think of an answer, I dribbled the last of the tea into my cup, milked it and sipped it and nearly choked on it—I had not noticed that we had been there long enough for the pot to stew cold and bitter. I hastily put down the cup.

"I don't know where to start. I did not care much for it at first."

"You hated it."

"I hated it, yes. You must admit, it's one of the least hospitable places in the country."

"A good place to be alone with one's thoughts," he said.

Perhaps with fourteen children in the house, I reflected, solitude in any form was beyond the price of rubies. "After a couple of days up there, though, it came to me that the moor is in many ways like the desert. Did your travels ever take you to Palestine?"

"Alas, no. I should have liked to visit the Holy Land."

"Yes, it is a powerful experience. And I think you would have felt at home there. The harshness of the desert shapes the people and keeps them materially poor, but it also gives an immensely strong sense of identity and belonging."

The old man was smiling into the fire and nodding gently. I went on.

"In truth, I found the sense of community here…daunting." I told him how, beginning with the girl near Postbridge pointing me towards Elizabeth Chase, everyone I met knew an irritating amount about me and my business. "Except for the villagers. They didn't know me, and when the moor men were with the village dwellers, they seemed almost to treasure the secret of who I was." I began to tell him about the night in the Mary Tavy inn.

As I progressed, he grew more and more animated, sitting upright in his chair, then leaning forward that he might see my face more clearly. He made me describe the songs and the singers in detail, and hummed the tunes that I might confirm which one the singers had used. His eyes positively sparkled when I told him about the authoritative claim the moor men laid on Lady Howard's song. When he had milked every drop of information from me about the music (he even made me hum the tune I had played on the tin whistle) he sat back in his chair, tired but pleased.

" 'Green Broom' I collected from John Woodrich, in Thrushtleton," he said, "and the tune your singers used for 'Unquiet Grave' was a melody I noted down for another song. Magnificent music, that. You like it?"

"It's very…human," I said after a minute.

"People now lack patience, have no taste for a song that is not finished in three minutes. Modern music puts me in mind of a man I knew in Cambridge who had a mechanism into which one could put musical notes. It would then combine them to render a so-called tune, although to my ear they more closely resembled random cacophonies. Whenever I have the misfortune to hear a modern piece of music, such as when my American daughter-in-law assaults the piano, I begin to suspect that his machine is being put to considerable use."

I laughed politely, and then returned to a previous thought, which still occupied me greatly.

"I thought it odd that although the moor dwellers seemed well acquainted with me and my mission, the villagers didn't know me, not even in Postbridge, which is a tiny place. And I don't believe anyone in Ketteridge's establishment recognised what I was doing there, either."

"The moor men keep themselves to themselves, and Ketteridge employs foreigners."

"Foreigners?" I asked doubtfully. Other than Scheiman and the hidden chef, they all had sounded British.

"French, American, Scots, and even Londoners, even a Welshman, but not from here."

"I see. How odd. That explains how, even though he lives on the edges of the moor, he's apart from the moor life. Isolated from the Dartmoor…would it be too much of an exaggeration to call it an 'organism'?" I asked. He did not answer, only smiled to himself, his eyes closed now. Very soon, he was asleep in his chair. I fed the fire to keep him warm, and crept stiffly upstairs to see if I could coax a hot bath from the pipes.

***

Baring-Gould was awake again when I came down an hour later, drawn by the smells of yeast bread and coffee and much restored by the plentiful hot soak. Mrs Elliott swept in and out of the kitchen doors with hot plates and cups and dainties to tempt her old charge's failing palate. One of these was a small crystal bowl of wortleberry jam, a relative of the bilberry, but from a far richer branch of the family. I exclaimed my praise, and Baring-Gould told me about "gatherin' hurts" on the moor, an annual holiday spree akin to that of London's East End inhabitants who spilled out from the city every year to pick hops in the clean sun of Kent. I did have a question whose urgency had been growing over the last two days, but I waited politely for him to finish before I asked it.

"Do you know where Holmes is?"

"He is in London, of course."

"Does that mean someone came up with the names of the two people who saw the coach from the top of Gibbet Hill?"

"How stupid of me, I was forgetting that you weren't here. Yes, Mrs Elliott's nephew found the farmhouse they stayed in, although as there was no guest register the finding of them won't be easy. Still, Holmes seemed to think he could do it," he said complacently.

"Did he say when he expected to be back?"

"I thought to see him yesterday evening. I imagine he will be on today's train."

"How long have you known Holmes?" I heard myself asking. I had not intended to ask it: If Holmes wanted me to know, he would tell me, and it was possibly impolitic to let Baring-Gould know how little Holmes had mentioned him.

"Forever," he said. "His forever, that is, not mine. I'm his godfather."

I was completely staggered by this calm statement. By this time, of course, I knew something about Holmes' people (I was, after all, his wife) but somehow other than Mycroft they had never seemed very real or three-dimensional. It was like meeting Queen Victoria's wet nurse: One knew she must have had one, but her existence seemed rather unlikely.

"His godfather," I repeated weakly.

"I haven't done a terribly good job of it, have I?" He seemed amused at his failure, not troubled. I could think of no suitable response, so I remained silent. "Still, he seems to have turned out all right. Been a good husband to you, has he?" If I'd had trouble before finding an answer, now my mouth was hanging open. "He loves you, of course; that helps. Foolishly, perhaps, but men love like that, in flames compared to the warm steady love of women. I hope—"

I never found out what his hopes were, praise be to God. The ruckus outside must have been approaching for some time without us hearing—Baring-Gould because his hearing was so poor and me because of the astonishment pounding in my ears. The first intimation of a problem came with a huge crash in the kitchen and voices raised enough for even my host to stop what he was about to say and turn to the door.

"I say, Mrs—" he started to call. With that the door burst open and what looked like half the population of Lew Down spilled into the room, all of them gabbling at once.

Baring-Gould rose majestically to his feet and glared at them all. "Stop this at once," he thundered. Instant silence resulted. "Thomas, what is the meaning of this?"

The man automatically tugged off his cap, polite even in the extremity of his emotional upheaval. "A body, Rector," the man stammered. "There's a dead man in the lake."

SIXTEEN

The care for the tenants, the obligation of setting an example of justice, integrity, kindliness, religious observance, has been bred in him, and enforced by parental warning through three centuries at the least, on his infant mind. What is born in the bone comes out in the flesh.

—Early Reminiscences

It was fortunate that I was already dressed and wearing my shoes, because a pair of bedroom slippers would surely have been torn to shreds, or left behind, long before I reached the quarry lake. I was out of my chair before Baring-Gould could articulate a response to the man's statement, out of the front door without pausing to catch up a coat, across the drive, through the meadow, and on the edge of the watery chasm before anyone else had even emerged from the house on my trail.

I was not, however, before any others at the lake. Gathering a great breath, I cupped my hands and shouted at the full strength of my lungs, "Stop where you are! Don't touch him!"

Even over the constant splash of the waterfall my unladylike bellow bounced off the stone walls with sufficient force to startle the would-be rescuers. One of them slipped and fell backwards from the rowboat into the lake, which distracted the others long enough for me to race around the lake's rim and plunge down the closer of the one-time quarry's two access ramps, now a steep hillside heavily overgrown with fern and bramble, and slippery with fallen leaves. I caught my breath at the water's edge and waited for the boat to reach the shore.

Two other men had been picking their way around the precipitous south wall of the lake, and now stood eyeing me disapprovingly.

"Please," I called to them. "You must leave him there until the police have seen him. I know it doesn't seem respectful of the dead, but it's necessary, believe me. And try to walk back in the same place you went over."

I suppose that had it been summer, I might not have been so quick to think of the possibility of what the police blotters call foul play. On a long summer's night I could well imagine the lure this cool, slightly ominous spot might be for a group of young men on their way home from the pub. But in October, and with the awareness of wrongdoing on the moor, it was the first thing that came to mind, and I did not want heavy boots destroying any evidence we might unearth.

The five men gathered around me, one of them dripping wet, none of them showing much inclination to leave. I suggested mildly that the wet one might be better off dry, and thus rid myself of him and an escort, but the three remaining men, one of whom I had seen working around Lew House, planted themselves like trees and looked suspicious.

"Do you know who it is?" I asked them. They did not, only that it was a man, and he was not from around here, both of which facts I had already determined by a brief glance from the quarry rim. (That, and the sure knowledge that it was not Holmes. Not that for a moment I actually thought it was: My mad dash from the house was set off by professional concerns, not wifely imaginings. Truly.) The trousers on those reassuringly short legs had never belonged to a Devonshire working man. "Has anyone gone for the police and a doctor?"

"Don't need doctor for that'n, missus."

"A doctor needs to declare him dead. It's a legal requirement. Did you send for them?"

"Mr Arundell went to fetch'n." Baring-Gould's curate lived in the house overlooking the lake.

"Good. Now, we can't use the boat again in case there are fingerprints on it. Can we find another boat? I'd like to take a look at the body."

They were shocked. "You baint wantin' to be doing that, missus."

"You're quite right, I don't particularly want to, but I think I ought to."

"Thicky be Miz Holmes," the familiar-looking man said to the other two in explanation, and that indeed seemed to explain and excuse all manner of misbehaviour, because they suddenly became cooperative, even eager.

"You feel free to use thicky boat, missus. Baint nobuddy else 'as used'n in weeks. He were dry as an ole bone."

"Well, in that case, good. Now, if you, Mr…?"

We paused for introductions: Andrew Budd was the young gardener, Albert Budd his older cousin, and Davey Pearce the third and eldest, an uncle of some sort. We shook hands gravely, and resumed.

"If Mr Andrew Budd would come and handle the boat for me, and you, Mr Budd the elder, would take up a position on the top of this ramp and stop anyone from coming down, perhaps, Mr Pearce, you could make your way around to the top of the other ramp and stop anyone from interfering on that side. And if you see any footprints, any hoof or tyre marks, any scuffs, give them wide berth. Yes? Good."

It was bitter cold out on the slate-coloured water of the submerged quarry. A layer of mist clung low to the surface of the lake, causing my inadequate clothes to go clammy against my skin, while over our heads the half-bare trees rose up in watchful disapproval, the flares of intense yellow from their remaining leaves the only colours in this tight, closed-in little universe. Budd rowed the short distance over to where the body floated, facedown in the water. A hat, sodden but not yet completely waterlogged, had lodged against a submerged branch ten feet away, and as soon as I saw the thin hair floating like pond weed around the head, I knew who this had been.

My thoughts were echoed in an imperious shout that would have had me in the water beside the corpse had it not been for the strong arm of Andrew Budd.

"Who is it?" The call came from high above, and I turned carefully and saw, to my amazement, Baring-Gould with half a dozen others, perched on the rim looking down. There was a chair in back of him, I saw; he had travelled here by the simple expedient of having himself carried, seat and all, in a makeshift litter.

"It's Randolph Pethering," I called back, and began to shiver. Budd saw it, and began to take off his coat, but I waved him away. "Keep it on, I'll just get it wet. Can you get us a bit closer, please?" We eased up until the prow was touching the antiquarian's sleeve. He was only resting among the floating twigs and leaves against the bank, not lying up on it, and looked to be settling down into the water. Having said we must wait for the police officials to supervise the removal of the body, I was hesitant to interfere, but at the same time I did not wish them to be forced to drag this pit for a sunken corpse, and after all, it was highly unlikely that the constables in charge of recovering the body would pay the slightest attention to the niceties of investigation, anyway. I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth against the reaction of my ribs, and reached down my right hand to take hold of the back of Pethering's jacket. Budd made an inarticulate protest.

"I have to do this," I told him. "He's about to sink in the water. Back us away from the bank a little, please."

When the body was free from the rocks, I rolled him over, taking care not to add any scrapes or marks to those he might already possess, and taking care too not to let go of him lest he disappear into the depths. As I moved him, however, I noted that this did not actually seem an immediate likelihood, which was in itself interesting. Furthermore, his face when it came up to the surface was dark with livor mortis where the blood had slowly settled after death. Pethering had not died in the water, and he had not died in the last few hours.

One side of the thin, pale hair was clotted with a brown bloodstain, and the heels of his sturdy walking boots were heavily scuffed and thick with mud. However, while I was hanging over the edge of the skiff and the body was floating alongside, I could not learn a great deal more. It would have to wait for a methodical examination on dry land, preferably by someone else.

"Can you reach his hat?" I asked Budd, and as I waited for him to manoeuvre to where he could bring the sodden thing onboard, I studied my surroundings. The two steep, overgrown access ramps, on the west and the southeast walls; the stream that Baring-Gould had diverted to fill his father's quarry splashing in from the north, pushing this body down to the south wall along with the other debris; a sad little boathouse, once cheerful; autumnal trees drooping over the water and depositing their leaves; and a crowd now of at least twenty men, women, and children watching with interest this underdressed woman with a corpse on the other end of her arm.

The ramp I had come down, in the south wall, had shown no drag marks; but then again, its top was very near the drive to the curate's house. The western ramp, on the other hand, though actually closer to the house, was more sheltered, and I thought it likely he had been placed in the lake from that ramp. One man could not have tipped him over the edge without a great deal more damage to the body than there seemed to be. Two adults might have swung Pethering and thrown him over, and if so, the launching site would have been precisely where Baring-Gould and the others were standing. I sighed. Little point to objecting, I supposed, but still: "Rector, could you have those people move around to the other side? There could be footprints right there."

One of the women at his side leant over to repeat my message in his ear, and in seconds the assembly was tiptoeing away from the gathering place, lifting their skirts and eyeing the ground as if it were about to bite them. Baring-Gould resumed his chair and he, too, migrated around the rim, where he was joined by the pink-cheeked, helmeted forces of law and order in the person of the local police constable. The voice of legal authority came, inevitably:

"Here, what are you doing down there?"

I left Baring-Gould to explain and to assert his own, considerably more ancient form of authority over the upstart with his shiny buttons and his shallow roots in the last century. I huddled in the boat, holding on to Pethering's coat with my now-numb fingers (his collar would have been easier, but I recoiled from brushing his cold flesh any more than I had to) and watching the glowering, gesticulating constable, and I decided that there was no point in maintaining an exactness in the investigative process. I was satisfied that Pethering had not been placed where he was found, and as I could not let go of him until he was unable to sink or to float off, it was high time to hand him over to properly constituted authority. "Thank you, Mr Budd. Back to the ramp, I think. Try not to hit him with your oar."

It was clumsy work, and after I tried, and failed, to keep Pethering out of the oar's way, Budd turned the boat and sculled it backwards with short, choppy strokes. At the ramp I let the constable drag the body up onto the shore, leaving it half in the water. Now that he had possession of the thing, he looked down at it in growing consternation, and did not notice at first when I got back into the boat. When the corner of his eye caught the movement of Budd pushing off, he protested loudly, more loudly than strictly necessary.

I tried to reassure him. "I'm not going anywhere, constable. I'll be right back." To Budd I said, "Take me over to the other side, please. I'd like to have a look at it before half the parish tramps it down."

The PC did not like this at all, and raised his voice to order us to return. I can't think he imagined we had anything to do with the death, but for a man more accustomed to drunken farmhands and petty break-ins than dead bodies, and faced with a pair in a boat who delivered a body and now proposed to row away, all he could do was to grasp hard onto the essentials—and we were as essential a thing as he could find. Seeing us making our way to the only other exit from this pit, he turned on his heels and churned up the hillside and around the rim. I saw him flitting behind the half-bare trees, and my heart sank at what those furious boots would do to any marks on the ramp.

Davey Pearce was still at the top of his ramp, holding back his crowd of two very small children and studying all the activity with great interest. "Try to stop him from coming down the ramp," I called to him without much hope, and indeed, when the constable appeared at Pearce's side, he did not look open to reason. He pushed Pearce to one side and started down towards us.

However, I had reckoned without Baring-Gould. His old voice rang out with the authority of six centuries of landholders, John Gold the Crusader ordering his troops into battle with the Saracen. "Pearce, hold him there."

And Pearce, who was old enough to have the traditional ways built into his very bones, reached out through the thin veneer of governmental authority and laid a meaty hand on the constable, and he held him there. He sat on him, actually, with the beatific smile of licensed insurrection on his face.

Before I could climb out of the boat, Budd tapped me on the arm and held out his wool coat. I looked at the heavy pullover he still wore, and took the coat.

The sloping hillside before me must have been hellish for hauling up slabs of stone but it was no great obstacle for a strong person carrying the inert body of a small man across his shoulders, which is what the killer had done until he slipped on some wet leaves about halfway down. After that, he had dragged Pethering, which accounted for the marks I had seen on the backs of the antiquarian's waterlogged boots. At the edge of the water he had fumbled and splashed and no doubt got himself wet from the knees down, working to push the body out into the lake, before climbing back up to the rim (each step slipping slightly as his wet shoes hit the damp leaves) and making his way off.

Before I went to investigate his destination, though, I returned to the place where he had fallen, studying it with great care from all angles until I could visualise the man's movements precisely.

He had been carrying Pethering over both shoulders, I decided, left hand steadying his load, right hand out as a balance. When his right heel hit a patch of wet leaves and skidded out from under him, he thumped down on his backside, with Pethering landing on the ground in back of him. I could see clearly where the man's right foot had stretched out to leg's length, where his left heel had dug in, where his right hand plunged into the leaves in back of him, and where the seat of his trousers landed hard. The length of Pethering stretched out at cross angles, heels to the man's right hand, head to his left. The man got to his feet (no doubt brushing at his clothing in disgust) and went around to Pethering's shoulders to drag him off downhill the rest of the way to the water.

It was all remarkably clear, one of the most elegant examples of spoor I had ever seen, and I was very pleased with myself until I stood up, brushing off my own hands, and saw my audience stretched around the rim of the lake. They had been standing, stone still and silent, as I examined the ground, so intent on a precise re-creation of what had gone on here that I had duplicated the man's very movements, dipping into a fall, flinging a leg out to mimic the sliding foot, standing and brushing and hoisting and pulling—all of my movements small and controlled, mere shorthand, as it were, but nonetheless vastly entertaining. Even the constable beneath Davy Pearce lay silently staring at me. My face began to burn, and I gruffly shouldered my way past the people at the top to examine the path that ran there.

The man who had brought Pethering here, however, had vanished into the scuffed leaf mould. The path was too well used for a single passerby to have left his mark, and he was not so obliging as to have deposited a thread from Pethering's coat or a tuft from his trousers legs on a passing branch, not that I could discover.

I finally gave it up and went back to the lake, where I found the doctor arrived, the body being loaded onto a stretcher, and the stony-faced, muddy coated police constable under the control of an inspector.

The inspector, whose name was Fyfe, did not know what to make of me; I could see him decide that it was best to defer judgement until all the votes were in. Noncommittally, he tugged his hat politely at Baring-Gould's introduction and merely said he'd be speaking to me later. As none of what I had found could influence the first flush of his investigation, I agreed, asking only that he please do his best to keep the curious off the western ramp.

"PC Bennett is taking care of that," he said mildly. I refrained from looking across at the hapless constable, reduced to guard duty.

I was also, quite simply, not up to the prolonged explanation and argument that I was sure would ensue when a rural inspector of police encountered a female amateur detective's analysis of a crime. All of a sudden I was deathly tired and enormously cold, and Baring-Gould, loyally standing by, looked even worse.

"Inspector, I'll go back to the house now and finish my breakfast," I heard my voice say. "The rector ought to be in out of the cold, as well." I did not listen to hear the inspector's yea or nay; I only waited until I saw Baring-Gould turning to his waiting sedan-chair and two strong men leaping forward to carry him back to the warmth.

I did not even make it across the meadow before the reaction hit me. In part it was sheer physical cold, but also, and I think chiefly, it was the psychic strain of dealing competently and in a professional manner in the face of a bloating corpse, and moreover one that I had known, however briefly, alive.

I was shuddering with cold when I got back to the house. An anxious housemaid stood at the door, ordered no doubt by Mrs Elliott to stay there but eager to know what was happening. Her questions died when she saw my face, and she helped me take off the borrowed coat. I was shivering so badly I could barely speak, but I succeeded in telling her that the coat was to be returned to Andrew Budd, and that I was going to bath.

I used the nail-brush on the skin of my right hand until the hand looked raw, and I drained the bath and ran it full and even hotter. My skin went pink, then red, but I still trembled inside, until the maid appeared (looking a bit pink herself—Mrs Elliott's stern hand had resumed control downstairs, a dim part of my mind diagnosed) with a tea tray and a cup already poured—very little tea in it, but a great deal of hot milk, sugar, and whisky. I drank the foul mixture with gratitude, and the fluttering subsided.

I began to relax, and then to think, and eventually I succumbed to a brief gust of shaky, half-hysterical laughter: Who would have thought I could make such a fuss over an irritating insect like Pethering?

SEVENTEEN

As the drift tin was exhausted, and the slag of the earlier miners was used up, it came to be necessary to run adits for tin, and work the veins.

—A Book of Dartmoor

Insect or not, the squashing of him left me distinctly queasy, on and off during the day. Baring-Gould withdrew to his room, leaving Inspector Fyfe little scope for questioning apart from me. When we had been over it all so many times even he was thoroughly sick of it, he left.

A few minutes later the housemaid Rosemary slipped in and placed a tray on the table beside the chair where I sat trying to summon the energy to rise.

"Mrs Elliott thought you could maybe use a coffee," she murmured, and slipped out again.

Bully for Mrs Elliott, I thought, to offer as refreshment a change from the endless cups of tea we had been swilling all day. A bracing cup of coffee to celebrate the (however temporary) repelling of constabulary boarders, and along with it, I was amused to find, a selection of three kinds of freshly baked biscuits that explained the odours that had wafted in from the door that connected the drawing room to the kitchen. If Mrs Elliott chose to work off her upset by indulging in an orgy of baking, it was fine with me.

I wandered nervously in and out of rooms until I found myself in Baring-Gould's study, where I retrieved the manuscript copy of Further Reminiscences from the heap of papers where I had left it. Being handwritten, I thought, the going would be slow, but distracting enough to take my mind off the events of the day. And so it proved—when, that is, I could keep my attention on the pages at all. Time and again I caught myself staring blindly into space, and wrenched my thoughts back onto Baring-Gould's writing. His early parishes did not seem to have been successes, and his marriage was touched upon so lightly that it would have been easy to miss it entirely. The manuscript was, in fact, the least revealing autobiography I had ever read, being much more concerned with the minutiae of European travel and the triumphs of antiquarian explorations than his relationship with his wife or the birth of his children. Belgian art, the history of Lew, a trip to Freiburg, lengthy letters to his friend and travelling companion Gatrill, ghost stories, love philtres, and thirty pages on the collecting of folk songs were occasionally interesting, often tedious. The only thing that caught my attention was a brief mention of gold, but when I reread the passage I saw that he was talking about Bodmin Moor, some distance to the west, and I read on as he described being first lost in the fog and then sucked up to his shoulders into a bog.

The long day dribbled to a close, punctuated only by a solitary dinner (I very nearly asked if I might join the others in the kitchen, but decided it would be too cruel) and an eventual adjournment upstairs—not to bed, which would have been futile, but to allow the servants to close up the house for the night.

Three times during the day I had my coat on and stood at the door, ready to set off up the hill to the village post-office telephone, and three times I took off my coat and went back to my book before the fire. If this case were to be given over to Scotland Yard, a word in Mycroft's ear would cause a memorandum to travel sideways, across two or three desks, until it finally reached the desk of a man who could pick up the telephone and arrange for one of the more sympathetic Yard men to be sent.

But what if that did happen, what if they even sent Holmes' old friend Lestrade himself? Would it make any difference if the official investigator was friendly or not? In fact, would it not actually be better if the Holmes partnership was disconnected from the police forces, allowing us to get on with our own investigation without undue interference? (Assuming, of course, that Holmes reappeared to take up his share of the burden. The man's penchant for disappearing at inconvenient moments was at times maddening.)

In the end, I stayed with my book, deciding that the pull of the telephone was only the urge to be doing something (anything!) and meekly removed myself upstairs at an appropriate hour.

By one o'clock in the morning, I had given up the attempt to read and sat watching my thoughts chase one another around by the low flicker of the fire. By two I had ceased feeding the coals and climbed under the bedclothes, but I did not even attempt to douse the light. I knew that the pathetic back of the dead man's head would be waiting for me in the dark, so I let my mind poke and prod at the restrictions that ignorance had laid, trying with a complete lack of success to put together a puzzle missing half its pieces.

At three o'clock a stealthy sound from downstairs jerked me up into instant alarm: heart pounding, mouth open, I strained for a repetition. It came, and I instantly swung my feet off the bed and was reaching for a heavy object when my brain succeeded in asserting itself against the adrenaline. It was unlikely that a burglar or would-be murderer would have a key to the front door.

Sure enough, in less than two minutes my bedroom door opened, quietly but surely, and Holmes came in, wearing the dark suit of London with an inexplicable quantity of mud and grass clinging to the ankles. He closed the door, turned, and stopped dead.

"Good Lord, Russell, what have you been up to?"

I had almost forgotten the state of my face, but whatever he saw behind the bruises and contusions had him by my side in a few rapid steps.

"What?" he demanded. "What is it?"

I did not give him his answer until some time later, but then, I did not need to. Holmes was always very satisfactory at determining, with a minimum of clues, what in a given situation was the required course of action.

***

There are times when verbal communication, vital as it may be in a partnership, is insufficient; this was one of those times. I clung to him, and even slept for a while towards morning before finally, reluctantly, stirring.

"Pethering is dead," I told him. He jerked and I felt him looking at my forehead. "No, there is no relationship to my injuries—I got those in a fall up on the moor." I gave him a brief sketch of my trip across Dartmoor and a slightly more detailed description of my impromptu visit to Baskerville Hall, then went on to the previous day's sequence of events, starting with theology at dawn and ending with meaningless words on a page at midnight. Once, I might have been too ashamed to tell him about my exaggerated response to the death of a scarcely known nuisance, but we had been through too much together for my overreaction to cause more than a pang of embarrassment in the telling. Or perhaps I was just too tired to care.

"They will do an autopsy?" he asked.

"Fyfe said they would do."

"And he's preserved the marks on the ramp?"

"They had a tarpaulin over it."

"Better than nothing at all, I suppose. Plaster casts of the heel marks?"

"I doubt it."

"I shall have to insist."

I laughed shortly. "I don't know how much influence you'll have down here. Certainly the name of Sherlock Holmes' wife is nothing to conjure with."

"Ah, poor Russell, forced to ride along in her husband's turn-ups. It is a backward area, with no respect for women's brains. Never mind; we'll both have to resort to Gould's influence before we're through."

"It is very impressive, that influence. He had a law-abiding dairyman assaulting a police constable, just for the asking."

"I told you it was a backwoods. They probably still practice corn sacrifice. Tell me about Ketteridge."

I told him everything I could remember about my hours in Baskerville Hall. He listened intently, asking no questions, and when I had finished he rose and, wrapping his dressing-gown around him, went to stir the fire into life. Having done so, he took up his pipe and lit it, puffing thoughtfully down at the newly crackling flames.

"You handled it well," he said unexpectedly.

"At least I didn't fall apart until I was alone."

"That is all one may ask of oneself."

"I suppose. I feel stupid."

"Human," he corrected me.

"God, who would be a human being?" I said, although I was beginning to feel somewhat better about the episode and its effect on me.

"I've often thought the same," he commented drily, and then returned to business. "You have no idea who Ketteridge might have been escorting so anxiously off the premises?"

"None."

"No smell of perfume, for example, or of cigarettes? The night he was here, Ketteridge mentioned that he smokes only cigars, and his fingers did not give lie to it."

"No perfume. Cigarettes, yes, but I think Scheiman smokes them."

"I believe you are right. Do you know, that entire ménage interests me strangely. Tell me: When Ketteridge allowed you the brief tour of the banqueting hall, did you notice a portrait of a Cavalier in black velvet, lace collar, and a plumed hat?"

"No," I said slowly. "A variety of uniforms, one blue velvet jacket, and an assortment of wigs, but no Cavalier."

"As I thought, the portrait of old Sir Hugo Baskerville, the scoundrel whose sins led to the Baskerville curse in the first place, has been taken down from the gallery. I should be very interested to know when."

"And why?"

"When might tell us why." Having delivered his epigram, he tossed the barely drawing pipe onto the mantelpiece and began to pull clothing from drawers and wardrobe.

"Holmes, tell me what you found in London."

"Breakfast first, Russell; the morning is half gone and I, for one, have not eaten since lunchtime yesterday."

I forbore to look pointedly at the first pale light at the window curtains, merely removed my recovering body from the bed and proceeded to clothe it. Holmes was not the only one who could follow nonverbal commands.

Before we left the bedroom, however, there was something I had to know. "Holmes, why did you tell me you'd met Baring-Gould during the Baskerville case?"

"I did not. I merely said that I had used him during the case."

"You deliberately misled me. Why didn't you want me to know he was your godfather?"

He paused in the act of brushing his hair and looked over at me, startled. "Good heavens, he is, isn't he? I had completely forgotten."He turned back to the mirror slowly. "Extraordinary thought, is it not?"

With that, I had to agree.

***

Mrs Elliott was up and ready for us, although Baring-Gould was not. I had not expected he would be, after the rigours of the day before; I could only hope he had not suffered from the unwonted expenditure of his limited energies.

The chimney in the dining room was still not functioning satisfactorily, so we had been served in the drawing room with the painted Virtues looking down at us, and there we remained for our council. I had to wait until Holmes had tamped and lit and puffed at his pipe, a delaying nuisance that had not grown any easier to bear over the years. I swear he did it deliberately to irritate me.

"Holmes," I growled after several long minutes, "I am going to take up knitting, and make you sit and wait while I count the row of stitches."

"Nonsense," he said with a final dig and puff. "You are quite capable of talking and counting at the same time. Am I to understand that you wish to hear the results of my sojourn?"

"Holmes, when I left you on Monday, you were going to northern Dartmoor and returning here two days later. It is now Saturday, and the only word I have had were secondhand rumours of a hasty trip to London. I've told you about Pethering's death and my visit to Baskerville Hall; I see no reason to go into my trip over the moor and my conversation about hedgehogs with the witch of Mary Tavy parish until you've given me something in return."

"Ah, I see you've met Elizabeth Chase."

Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a husband whom I might astonish.

"Holmes," I said sternly.

"Oh very well. Yes, I went onto the moor, and no, I was not blown to bits; I was not even lightly shelled. I even missed the worst of the storm on the Tuesday. I asked farmwifes, shepherds, three stonemasons, two thatchers, a goose girl, and the village idiot whether or not they had seen a ghostly carriage or a black dog, had heard anything peculiar, noticed anything out of the ordinary. All but the village idiot gave me nothing but nonsense, and he gave me nothing but a smile.

"The testing ground for Mycroft's secret weapon (which, by the way, is a sort of amphibious tank) is to the east of Yes Tor, down to Black-a-ven Brook. It's a pocket of ground difficult to overlook except from the army's own observation huts, but I did find a patch of hillside outside the artillery range with an adit showing signs of recent use."

"An adit being a horizontal mine shaft," I said tentatively, dredging up the word from somewhere in my recent reading. Holmes nodded. "Not an active mine, I take it?"

"By no means. Its entrance was heavily overgrown and nearly obscured by a rock-fall."

"How did you find it?"

"I smelt it."

"You smelt…?"

"Coffee. Whoever spent time in there brewed coffee, and threw the grounds at the roots of the whortleberry bushes growing near the entrance."

"Good heavens."

"Extraordinary oversight, I agree," he said, which was not quite what I was exclaiming about, but I let it pass. "The rest of his débris he simply threw back into the shaft—eggshells, greasy paper, tins, apple cores—but the coffee dregs went out in front. Presumably he was in the habit of drinking it at his front door, as it were, and dashing out the thick remnants in the bottom of his cup where he stood. As you are aware, Russell, habit is the snare by which many a criminal is caught."

"How recently was he there?"

"Two or three weeks, I should say. Not more. And to anticipate your question, the new tank was last tested seventeen days ago."

"Suggestive," I agreed. "But that does not explain five days and a trip to London."

"Patience," counselled my husband, one of the least patient individuals I have ever met. "I returned here late on Tuesday, spent a pleasant evening with Gould, and on Wednesday a lad arrived with the name of the people we were looking for."

"The London hikers?"

"Not quite, although he had found the farmhouse where they stayed. Unfortunately, being an informal hostelry, they do not keep records of their guests, and as the two Londoners had not made advance arrangements, there was little evidence as to whence they came. However, they were a memorable pair, even without the tale of the ghostly carriage they brought with them down the hill: young, the man perhaps twenty-eight, the woman a year or two younger, who impressed the farmwife as being a 'proper lady,' or in other words, wealthy. The man, on the other hand, had a heavier accent, and seemed much more shaken by the idea of seeing a ghostly carriage on the moor than his wife was. He also had a bad limp and one 'special shoe,' and at some point during the stay told the farmer that he was studying to become a doctor."

The limp, the nerves, and the student's advanced age gave him away as a wounded soldier. I asked drily, "You mean to say you didn't get his regiment?"

"But of course. Not from the farmer, although he did give me the name of the village where the future doctor was injured during Second Ypres, and the War Office could have told me his regiment and thence his identity. However, I thought it simpler to phone around the teaching hospitals and enquire after a young man missing part of his foot. I found him straight off, at Bart's."

"So simple," I murmured.

"Regrettably so. Do you have the maps?"

"Upstairs. What is left of them." I trotted up and retrieved the pile, some of them pristine, hardly unfolded. Those for the north quarter had seen hard use, and I pulled open the still-damp sheets with care and laid them across the padded bench that sat in front of the fire. There happened to be an elderly cat upon it, but the animal did not seem to mind being covered up. No doubt, living in the Baring-Gould household, it had seen stranger usage.

He pored over the maps for a long time, then said, "Do we have the one-inch-to-the-mile here?"

I dug through and found it. He laid it out, found Mary Tavy and the nearby Gibbet Hill, and then took out a pencil. Using the side of a folded map as a straight edge and pulling the map to one side to find a flat place, he began to draw a series of short lines, fanning out from Gibbet Hill and touching the tops of half a dozen peaks and tors to the northeast of the hill. These were, I understood, the tors and hilltops visible from the peak.

"It was dark, and their sense of direction was sadly wanting, but they were quite definite that whatever they saw was to the northeast, that it wrapped around a hill, going from right to left, and after a minute or two disappeared behind a tor—probably, they thought, Great Links or Dunna Goat."

"And what exactly was it they saw?"

"A pair of lights, old-style lanterns rather than the new automobile headlamps, mounted on the upper front corners of a light-coloured square frame. They had with them a strong pair of field glasses."

"As if two lanterns on a coach built of bones."

"As you say."

"How would you judge them as witnesses?"

He shrugged. "Ramblers," he said dismissively. "The sort of young people who would read up on the more arcane myths and legends of an area and spend a week traipsing about, raising blisters and searching for Local Romance."

"Holmes, that sounds perilously close to what I have been doing this last week."

He looked startled. "My dear Russell, I was certainly not drawing a comparison between your search for information and the self-indulgent—"

"Of course not, Holmes. Did they see a dog, or any person either inside or driving?"

"Not to be certain, no, although they had convinced themselves that they saw a large black shadow moving with the horse."

"Of course they did. Was there anything else to be had in London?"

"There was, but I should like to delay until you've read something. Just remain there," he said, getting to his feet. "I won't be a moment."

He went out and, judging by the sounds of another door opening almost immediately he left the drawing room, I knew he was in Baring-Gould's study. A certain amount of time passed, and several muffled thuds, before he returned with a slim book in his hand. He tossed it in my lap and picked up his pipe from the ashtray on the table.

"How long is it since you've read that?" he asked.

"That," to my amazement, was Conan Doyle's account of The Hound of the Baskervilles, looking heavily read. "At least three years. I'm not certain," I replied.

"More than that, perhaps. I should like to consult with Gould for an hour or two; you have a look at that and see if anything within Baskerville Hall strikes you as it did me."

"But Holmes—"

"When I return, Russell. It won't take you long, and you might even find it amusing. Though perhaps," he added as he was going out the door, "not for the reasons Conan Doyle intended."

EIGHTEEN

Take my advice. Henceforth possess your mind with an idea, when about to preach. Drive it home. Do not hammer it till you have struck off the head. A final tap and that will suffice.

—Further Reminiscences

Actually, although I would have hesitated to admit it in Holmes' hearing, I enjoyed Conan Doyle's stories. They were not the cold, factual depictions of a case that Holmes preferred (indeed, when some years later he found that Conan Doyle had set a pair of stories in the first person, as if Holmes himself were describing the action, Holmes threatened the man with everything from physical violence to lawsuits if he dared attempt it again), but taken as Romance, they were entertaining, and I have nothing against the occasional dose of simple entertainment.

In any event, it was no great hardship to settle into my chair with the book and renew my acquaintance with Dr Mortimer, the antiquarian enthusiast who brings Holmes the curse of the Baskervilles, and with the young Canadian Sir Henry Baskerville, come to the moor to claim his title and his heritage. I met again the ex-headmaster Stapleton and the woman introduced as his sister, and the mysterious Barrymores, servants to old Sir Charles. The moor across which I had so recently wandered came alive in all its dour magnificence, and I was very glad this book had not been among my reading the previous weekend, leaving me to ride out on the moor with the image of the hound freshly imprinted on my mind. I could well imagine the terror raised by hearing the rhythm of four huge running paws (or the "thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank" of fog that Dr Watson described), the hoarse panting from between those massive jaws, even without the eerie glow of phosphorus on its coat to render it otherworldly:

A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame.

So engrossed was I that I completely missed the reference Holmes had wanted me to see. Only when the Hound was dead did I recall the point of the exercise, and thumbed back to the previous chapter that described the evening when Holmes first saw the interior of Baskerville Hall. The reference startled me, and I sat deep in thought for twenty minutes or so, contemplating the "straight severe face" which was "prim, hard, and stern, with a firm-set, thin-lipped mouth, and a coldly intolerant eye" until I heard the door behind me open.

I said over my shoulder, "You think Scheiman may be a Baskerville? Stapleton's son, even?"

"Stapleton's body was never found," Holmes pointed out unnecessarily as he resumed his chair on the other side of the fire. "I was never happy with Scotland Yard's conclusion, and always felt it possible that he had prepared an escape route and slipped through it while we were occupied elsewhere, but he was never seen, and after two weeks, Scotland Yard was satisfied with his fate in the mire and took their watch from the ports."

"I have to agree that the description of the Cavalier painting, wicked Sir Hugo himself with his prim lips and his flaxen hair, does fit Scheiman."

"Scheiman is by no means so clear a case, else I should have noticed it when first I laid eyes on him. If Stapleton married in America —although legal marriage it could not have been, nor indeed would Sir Henry's have been to Beryl Stapleton, the supposed widow—the woman contributed a great deal more to her son's looks than did the father. Ears, eyes, cheekbones, and hands are all hers; only the mouth (which you will have noticed he takes care to conceal beneath a beard) and the stature are his father's."

"You wondered when the portrait of Sir Hugo had gone: If the surviving Baskerville took it with her rather than sell it with the others to Ketteridge, for the dubious privilege of preserving a memento of the family history perhaps, then its absence is innocent, whereas if it was removed after the sale, by Ketteridge or Scheiman—"

"Then the why is obvious: that Scheiman's family resemblance might not be seen by visitors to the house."

"Visitors such as Sherlock Holmes. I don't think I told you, by the way, that Ketteridge was interested in hiring you to investigate the hound sightings."

That brought a laugh, as I had thought it might do, albeit a brief one.

"What brought the resemblance to your mind?" I asked. Surely he hadn't picked up The Hound of the Baskervilles to read on the train?

"A number of things. Scheiman's interest in the antiquities of the moor, the dim lighting of the dining hall, how he spent the least amount of time possible with us—with me, who had known Stapleton. But, I have to admit, the actual possibility was got through hindsight.

"As I told you, the Ketteridge establishment interests me. It interested me when first I saw the man helping himself to Gould's liquor cabinet. He does not fit in Dartmoor, and does not seem eccentric enough to justify the oddity of his presence here.

"So while I was in town, I initiated some enquiries about Ketteridge and his secretary. The responses to my telegrams will take days, even weeks, but I did come across one thing of interest: The two men were not together when they boarded the ship coming over here. Ketteridge began his journey in San Francisco, but Scheiman joined the ship in New York."

"There could be an explanation for that."

"There could be any number of explanations. However, Ketteridge told us he came over in the summer, yet his passage was in early March."

I had to agree that although the oddity was hardly evidence of criminal activity, it did call for a closer examination of the two men.

"You've sent wires to New York and San Francisco?"

"And Portland and Alaska."

"So you think Ketteridge is involved."

"He may or may not be. Scheiman is definitely up to something."

The generality of the word something was unlike Holmes; after a moment's thought, and particularly when he would not look at me, I knew why.

"You believe that Scheiman is after Mycroft's tank," I said in disgust.

"It does not do to theorise in advance of one's facts," he said primly.

I made a rude remark about his facts, and went on. "If this is deteriorating into a spy hunt, Holmes, you don't need me. It's been a truly invigorating holiday from my books, but perhaps I may be allowed to take my leave."

"Two murders now, Russell. I should have thought that sufficient to overcome your distaste for the War Office."

I dropped my head back onto the chair and closed my eyes. "You really need me, Holmes?"

"I could ask Watson."

Dr Watson was only five years older than Holmes, but his heavy frame had aged as Holmes' wiry build and whip-hard constitution had not. I dismissed his halfhearted suggestion. "A cold day on the moor would cripple him." That Holmes might rely on police help or Mycroft's men was so improbable as to be unworthy of mention. "I'll stay and see it through. Although I can't promise that I won't blow up that flipping tank myself at the end of it."

"That's my Russell." He smiled. I scowled.

"Will you go down to see Miss Baskerville yourself, to ask about the painting?" I asked him.

"I should like to know as well some of the particulars concerning the sale of the Hall. Yes, I shall go myself. Now, you have yet to tell me about Elizabeth Chase's hedgehogs."

"One hedgehog, and it does not belong to her. It now resides in the garden of a friend of Miss Chase's in Widdecombe-in-the-Moor, where Miss Chase carried it to nurse it back to health after finding it on the twenty-eighth of July, its leg crushed by a fast-moving wheel and its back bitten by large teeth."

"Aha!"

"Indeed. Moreover, she goes on to offer us one large and spectral dog with a glowing eye and a taste for scones." To my great pleasure, this statement actually startled Holmes.

I told him about Elizabeth Chase's wounded hedgehog and about Samuel's encounter with the Hound, and after telling him I sat forward and pulled the map to me, marking with an X the spot between the stone row and the hut circles where she had heard the piteous cry of poorwee Tiggy and the place where Samuel had seen the dog. Holmes took the pencil and drew in the probable route of the coach as seen from Gibbet Hill, added a star shape to mark the adit in which he had found signs of life, and we studied the result: my X, his line, two Xs for the sightings of the coach in July, and a circle to show where Josiah Gorton had last been seen. All of them together formed a jagged line running diagonally across the face of the moor from Sourton Tor in the northwest to Cut Lane in the southeast, roughly six miles from one end to the other. The imaginary line's nearest point to Baskerville Hall was three miles, although the closest sighting, that of the courting couple, was more than four miles away.

I sat for a time in contemplation of the enigmatic line while Holmes slumped back into his chair, eyes closed and fingers steepled. When he spoke, his remark seemed at first oblique.

"I find I cannot get the phial of gold dust from my mind."

"Did you give it over for analysis?"

"I looked at it myself in the laboratory. Small granules of pure gold—not ore—with a pinch of some high-acid humus and a scraping of deteriorated granitic sand."

"Peat is highly acidic," I suggested.

"Peat, yes, but there was a tiny flat fragment that looked as if it might have been a decomposed leaf of some tough plant such as holly or oak."

"Wistman's Wood is oak."

"So are a number of other places around the moor. I shall ring the laboratory later today, to see if their more time-consuming chemical analyses have given them any more than I found. In the meanwhile, I think I can just catch the train to Plymouth, although it may mean stopping there the night. Perhaps you could go and ask Mrs Elliott if Gould's old dog cart is available."

"And if the pony can pull it." Red was still in residence at Baskerville Hall.

Holmes went up to put his shaving kit and a change of linen into his bag, and I put the breakfast things back on the tray and took them into the kitchen. There I found Mrs Elliott, looking somewhat dishevelled.

"Oh bless you, my dear. I don't know what I'm going to do. Rosemary and Lettice have taken to their beds with sick headaches—from crying no doubt; they'd be better off working and keeping their minds off that silly man, but there you have it."

"I'm sorry, Mrs Elliott. Is there anything I can do to help?" I asked hesitantly. "Washing up or something?"

She looked shocked. "That will not be necessary, mum. But thank you for the kind thought." She would have to be in a sorry state indeed before she allowed a guest to plunge her ladylike hands into a pan full of dishes.

"Well, please let me know if there is something I can do. But I need to ask, can someone take Mr Holmes down to the station? He needs to catch the train to Plymouth."

She looked up at the clock over the mantelpiece and hurriedly began to dry her hands. "He'll need to step smart, then. I'll have Mr Dunstan hitch the pony to the cart."

She ducked out through the door. I eyed the stack of unwashed dishes and left them alone, going up the back stairs to tell Holmes the cart would be ready. I found him just closing his bag, and reported on the time constrictions. He nodded and sat down to change his shoes.

"What do you wish me to do while you're away?" I asked. I was half tempted to throw together a bag and join him, for the sake of movement if nothing else.

"We need to know more about Pethering," he said. One set of laces was looped and tied, and the other foot raised. "I want you to—"

"Sorry, Holmes," I said, raising one hand. "Was that the door?" We listened, hearing nothing, and I went over to the window. There was a motorcar in the drive, but the porch roof obscured my view of the door, so, feeling a bit like a fishwife, I opened the window and put my head out to call. "Hello? Is someone there?"

After a moment a hatted, overcoated man came into view, backing slowly out from the porch and craning his head to see where the voice had come from.

"Inspector Fyfe!" I said. He found me and tipped his hat uncertainly. "Do come inside and warm yourself; the door is not locked. We'll be right down." I drew in my head and latched the window.

Holmes was already out of the room, and I did not catch him up until he was shaking hands with a still-hatted Inspector Fyfe in the hall. As I seemed to be playing hostess (or rather, in the temporary absence of Mrs Elliott and her disturbed assistants, housemaid), I took his coat and hat. Not knowing quite what to do with them, I laid them across the back of a chair and joined the two men at the fire.

Fyfe rubbed his hands together briskly in front of the smouldering fire, while Holmes squatted down to coax it back to life. "What can we do for you, Inspector?" I asked.

"I have some questions to ask Mr Baring-Gould about the man Pethering."

Holmes looked up. "What do you imagine Gould would know about him?"

"Well, I hope he knows something, because we can't find a trace of where he comes from or who he is."

Holmes' eyebrows went up. "I understood that he was a Reader at one of the northern universities. York, I believe Gould said."

"They've never heard of him. Nor do they have anyone on their staff who fits his description, an archaeologist or anthropologist or what-have-you, with a wife and young family."

"You interest me, Inspector. Mrs Elliott," he said, raising his voice, and indeed, when I turned to look, there she was in the door to the drawing room. "Would you be so good as to tell Mr Dunstan that I won't be needing the cart? I shall have to take a later train. And I believe the inspector could make good use of a hot drink." He swept the maps off the bench in front of the fire, uncovering the blithely sleeping tabby, and sat down beside the animal, gesturing Fyfe towards a chair. "Tell me what you do know about him, Inspector."

Fyfe settled onto the edge of the nearest armchair. "I'll be calling in Scotland Yard this afternoon," he said, sounding resigned about it. "We don't have the facilities here. Meantime, about all we know about Pethering, or whatever his name might be, is that he arrived at Coryton station on the Saturday afternoon, walked up to Lew Down to arrange a room at the inn, had some tea, and then came here to Lew House, where he stayed from 'round about six until you turned him out, which Miss—Mrs—which your wife says was a shade after midnight.

"He then returned to Lew Down and knocked up the innkeeper, who let him in. He came down from his room around ten o'clock Sunday morning, struck up a conversation with William Latimer, who stepped in to deliver a basket of eggs his wife had promised for Saturday but couldn't bring because one of their boys fell out of an apple tree and broke his arm, and she was away at the surgery getting it seen to. Latimer told Pethering about the sightings of the hound on the moor, Pethering got all excited and rushed upstairs to get his map. Latimer showed him where to look, and Pethering ran upstairs again, put on his heavy boots, and packed two bags—or one bag and a large rucksack. He left the bag with the innkeeper, and walked off down the high road in the direction of Okehampton.

"A farmer near Collaven saw him 'round about two o'clock, making for the moor. That's the last anyone saw of the man alive."

I retrieved the one-inch map from the floor and looked for Collaven. It lay at the foot of the moor, two miles north of Lydford and a mile from Sourton Tor, on the edge of the area so heavily marked by our pencilled lines and Xs.

"Where was he going?" Holmes asked.

"Latimer told him the hound had been seen near Watern Tor."

His elbows on his knees, Holmes gazed into the fire, fingers steepled and resting on his lips. "Why the hound?" he mused.

Before Fyfe could respond, the rattle of crockery heralded Mrs Elliott's approach. Holmes prodded the cat until it jumped down, tail twitching in disgust, allowing Mrs Elliott to put the tray on the bench. She had thoughtfully included a high pile of buttered toast and three plates, although Holmes and I had only recently eaten. Fyfe, however, ate nearly all of it, drinking three cups of coffee as well before he was through.

"What was that about the hound?" he asked, his voice rather muffled with toast.

"I was merely wondering, Inspector, why the hound should be making an appearance."

Fyfe swallowed. "I understood there'd been a number of sightings over the summer."

"Those were of Lady Howard's coach, which does indeed come complete with dog, but that does not explain why the dog should also appear sans coach."

Fyfe had suspended his toast in puzzlement. "I took it the hound referred to the Hound of the Baskervilles story."

"They are very different hounds, Inspector, separated by their time, their ghostly genesis, and their mission. It is as if Jacob were to have appeared in Isaac's tent to receive his blessing wearing Joseph's coat of many colours: not entirely impossible, one would suppose, but not terribly reasonable either."

"Different stories," I translated for the inspector, who was looking confused. "Everyone seems to be mixing up the two different hounds."

"The only question is," said Holmes, "whether or not the confusion is deliberate."

"Hardly the only question, Holmes," I objected mildly.

"No? You may be right. Tell me what the postmortem found, Inspector."

Fyfe hastily thrust the remainder of his wedge of toast into his mouth and reached into his pocket for a notebook. When the page was found and the toast was out of the way, he began to read. "A slim but adequately nourished male approximately thirty-seven years old, five feet six inches tall, distinguishing features a birthmark on his right shoulder blade the size of a shilling and an old scar on his left knee. Minor dental work—the description is being sent out—and otherwise in good health until someone cracked his skull open with a length of pipe." The last sentence had not depended on the notebook.

"Why pipe?" Holmes asked sharply. "Did the pathologist find traces?"

"No, I just said pipe to indicate the size and hardness. Could have been a walking stick of some dashed hard wood, or the barrel of a rifle, if the killer didn't mind mistreating his gun that way. 'Course, it'd make more sense than the other way around. I once had a gunshot that we thought was murder until we had the victim's hand-print off the end of the barrel—a shotgun it was, and he'd swung it at another man, and when the stock hit the other man, the gun discharged and took off the head of the man holding it. But that's neither here nor there," he said, recalling himself to the matter at hand. "Some blunt instrument a little thicker than your thumb, most likely from behind by a right-handed man. Went at a slight angle, up to the front." He drew a line just above his own hairline, clearing the ear and ending at his right temple. It could have been a blow delivered by a left-handed individual standing above the victim, if Pethering had been on his knees, for example, but Fyfe's simpler explanation was the more likely.

"When was death?"

"Very soon after he was hit—there was not much bleeding into the brain, and external blood loss the doctor estimated at less than a pint. Rigor had come and gone, putrefaction had begun in spite of the cold. Doctor said all in all he was probably killed late Tuesday or early Wednesday, but he'd only been in the water a few hours. Less than a day, certainly."

"Stomach contents?" Holmes asked. Fyfe looked sideways at me and put the next piece of toast down onto the edge of his plate.

"Been a long time since he'd eaten, just traces of what the doctor thought might be egg and bread."

Which helped not at all, as that combination might be eaten at any time of the day, from breakfast to tea, particularly on a hike into the moor.

Holmes jumped to his feet and held out his hand to Inspector Fyfe, who, after a quick pass at his trouser knee, shook it.

"Thank you, Inspector. That is all very interesting. You have taken the fingerprints of the body?"

"Yes, we raised some good prints, in spite of the puffiness from the water. Nothing yet, but we've sent them to London."

"Good. Let us know what else you find. We'll be in touch."

NINETEEN

In La Vendée we saw men with bare legs wading in the shallow channels that intersect the low marshy fields. After a moment of immersion out was flung one leg and then another, to each of which clung several leeches…

The women do not go in after them; and they are more rubicund, and indeed more lively. Leech-catching is not conducive to hilarity.

—Early Reminiscences

Neither Fyfe nor I was quite sure how Holmes had come to assume apparent control of the investigation, but the arrangement seemed to have at least tacit understanding on all sides. Fyfe took his somewhat bemused leave, having been reassured that Baring-Gould would be questioned when he woke as to his past communication with the man he knew as Randolph Pethering, and that information passed on to Fyfe.

Holmes closed the door behind Fyfe and leant back against it for a moment as if trying to bar any further complications from entering.

"That is a poser, is it not, Holmes?" I remarked.