The Moor

He did not bother to answer, but pushed himself upright and walked back into the hall, where he stood looking oddly indecisive.

"Have you missed the train?" I asked. He waved it away as unimportant, then drew a crumpled packet of cigarettes from his pocket, pulled one out, lit it, and stood smoking while I put the maps and the second breakfast tray of the day in order.

"Let us go look at the bag Pethering left with the innkeeper," he said decisively. He threw the half-smoked cigarette onto the logs, and swept out the door.

***

It was a paltry offering that Pethering had left behind at the inn, comprising for the most part the "good" clothes he would not have needed while clambering over the moor. Holmes set aside the carefully folded if slightly threadbare grey suit, a silk tie that had the flavour of an aunt's Christmas present, a white shirt that had been worn once since being laundered, and a pair of polished shoes with mends in both soles. We

examined the rest: another shirt, both patched and in need of laundering, and a pair of thick socks, also dirty; a pen and a small block of lined paper; a yellowback novel with a sprung cover and water damage along its top edge (the product, I diagnosed, of a book dealer's pavement display, already cheap but rendered nearly unsaleable by an unanticipated shower of rain), and a copy of a book by Baring-Gould that I had not found in his study, although I had been looking for it: his guide to Devon.

I picked up the guidebook, checked the inside cover for a name, and found the first sheet carefully torn out. Pethering concealing his own name, perhaps, or was this book stolen from a library? I turned to the index and found Dartmoor, thumbed through to the central section on the moor, and found that Pethering had been there before me. He had used a tentative hand and a pencil with hard lead, but had made up for his lack of assertiveness in sheer quantity, correcting Baring-Gould's spelling, changing the names of some locations, and writing comments, annotations, and disagreements that crowded the side margins and flipped over onto the top and bottom.

I held out a random page to Holmes, who was busy dismantling a patent pencil. "Would you say this handwriting belongs to Pethering?"

He glanced at it and went back to the object in his hands. "Without a doubt."

"Do you think Fyfe would object to my borrowing it? Even without Pethering's comments, I had intended to read the book, only I couldn't find a copy in the study."

"You may have noticed that the study is now largely inhabited by volumes no one has valued enough to carry off. Gould keeps this book in the drawer of his bedside table along with his New Testament and Book of Common Prayer. And no, I'm sure Fyfe would not notice it gone."

"Baring-Gould keeps a guide to Devon in his bedside table?" I said. It seemed an odd place to find it, particularly as the man could scarcely see to read, even in a bright light.

"Sentimentality, I suppose." Holmes gave up on the pencil and tossed it back in the bag. "He can no longer get onto the moor, and can't even see it from the house, so he keeps his books easily to hand, along with one or two photographs and a sheaf of sketches." His words and gesture were so matter-of-fact as to be dismissive, but the lines etched on his face were not so casual.

I was so struck by the poignancy of the image that I did not think about his words until we had left the inn and were going down the hill towards Lew House.

"You said he keeps his books beside his bed. What are the others?"

"Just Devon and his book on Dartmoor. Oh, and a few manuscript copies of some of the songs he collected."

"I should very much like to look at the Dartmoor book."

"He wouldn't mind, I'm sure. It's not particularly rare, just something he treasures."

"Good. Now, how are we dividing up?"

"I shall follow Pethering's track up onto the moor, if you hunt down Miss Baskerville in Plymouth."

I had known he would suggest this particular arrangement rather than its reverse—even towards me, Holmes was usually gallant about shouldering the less comfortable tasks. Of course, this meant he took possession of the more interesting leads as well, but in this case I would not argue for the privilege of walking back out onto the moor. I merely asked when the next train left Coryton. Holmes took his watch from an inside pocket and glanced at it.

"Mrs Elliott will have an ABC, but I believe you'll find going to Lydford will put you on a train in a bit under two hours."

That would leave me time to change from my habitual trousers into the more appropriate all-purpose tweed skirt I had brought. Coming past the stables, I put my head inside and asked Mr Dunstan please to get the dog cart ready again. I smiled a sympathetic apology at his sigh of patient endurance, and trotted up to the house to pack the overnight bag I was sure to need.

Holmes came in as I was standing and surveying the room to see what I had forgotten. He held out a book.

"Gould says he hopes you find it of interest."

"Thank you Holmes," I said, and put it in the bag, first removing Pethering's copy of A Book of the West: Devon, whose tiny, pale annotations would, I knew, prove diabolical in the poor light and movement of the train. "Did Baring-Gould have any idea where to find Pethering?"

"He filed the man's letters down in the study, although he is certain the address was only care of the university. I'll dig them out before I go, and send them to Fyfe."

"Will you go tonight, or wait until the morning?"

"It will save me nearly two hours of daylight if I stop the night in Bridestowe or Sourton and set out at dawn. And unless I come across a problem, I ought to be back here Monday."

The "problem" he might stumble across could very well be related to the problem that had landed Pethering in the lake. Without looking at him, I asked, "Are you taking a revolver with you?"

"Yes."

I nodded, and fastened my bag shut.

"Good hunting," he told me.

"And you, Holmes," I answered, and to myself added, Just don't you become the prey.

***

It might have been faster to walk to Lydford, but I did arrive relatively unsullied by mud, and reached the station with ten minutes to spare. I walked up and down the platform in an attempt to keep warm, my breath steaming out as the sun sank low in the sky, taking with it any heat the day might have had. As usually happens, the clearing of the skies meant a sharp drop in temperature. There would be frost on the ground tonight, and tomorrow Holmes would find the moor a bitter place.

The train when it came was well populated, which was a blessing in disguise, for the carriages were old and draughty, and the only source of heat in my compartment was the three other passengers. We huddled in our overcoats (the others had the insight, or experience, to have brought travelling rugs) and watched the ice gather on the corners of the windows. It was far too cold to read, even if I had been able to turn the pages with gloved fingers. Instead, I wrapped my arms around to keep them and me warm, hunched my shoulders, and endured.

We stopped in every village that possessed more than six houses. It was black night when the train shuddered into Plymouth, although only eight o'clock. I stumbled towards a taxi and had the driver take me to whatever he judged to be the best hotel in town, where I took a room, a hot bath, and some dinner. It was too late to call on Miss Baskerville anyway, I told myself, and climbed into bed with the Book of Dartmoor.

Dartmoor

was the essential Baring-Gould: quirky, dogmatic, wildly enthusiastic, and as scattered as a blast from a bird gun. We began with quaking bogs, stepping into which he compared to a leisurely investigation of the underside of a duvet, adding with heavy-handed whimsy that whether or not the man who conducts such an investigation "will be able to give to the world benefit of his observations may be open to question." He then moved on to the beauties of furze, the glories of furze-blossom honey, tors, whortleberries, and tenements, Chinese orthography and customs, flint arrowheads and Christian saints, the rheumatic attack of Archbishop Lawrence, the peculiar phosphorescent characteristics of the moss Schistostega osmundaca, the Domesday book, dolmens, menhirs, and country roads. When he began to discuss the "twaddle and rubbish" of the Druid-supporting archaeologists I roused slightly, thinking of poor, mysterious Pethering, but Baring-Gould's discussion of the wind atop Brentor soothed me, and by the time he hit Elizabethan tin works and mediaeval adits, my eyelids were descending.

And then the word gold caught my eye, and I was jerked out of my torpor:

That gold was found in the granite rubble of the stream-beds is likely [wrote Baring-Gould, adding] A model of a gold-washing apparatus was found on the moor a few years ago. It was made of zinc.

Full stop. That, it appeared, was all the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould had to say about gold, although I read on attentively for another hundred pages while the author discussed such compelling topics as a forty-year-long lawsuit, the comparative vegetation of the east and west sides of the moor, the Welsh "martyr maid" St Winefred, the sycamore versus the beech, and the benefits of Dartmoor air for young men with weak lungs; nary a word about gold, or even the machines with which to wash it, or why I might care that they were made of zinc.

In disgust I shut down the light and pulled the bedclothes up to my chin. Despite the length of the day and the almost complete lack of sleep the two previous nights, I did not drift off for a long time, but lay contemplating the image of Josiah Gorton's hidden phial with its pinch of gold granules.

TWENTY

But to return to family portraits. That, in spite of the influx of fresh blood from all quarters, a certain family type remains, one can hardly doubt in looking through a genuine series of family pictures.

—Old Country Life

The first thing I saw in the formal drawing room of Miss Baskerville's house the following afternoon was the portrait of a Cavalier with fair ringlets and a stern, thin-lipped face, dressed in black velvet and a lace collar, taking possession of his surroundings from his place above the fire.

It had taken me some time to gain entrance to the room and the Cavalier's presence, for although I had been at the door at what I had thought a sufficiently early hour for a Sunday morning, the mistress of the house had already left.

The housemaid could not tell me precisely where her lady had gone, although she was happy to tell me that it was her habit of a Sunday morning to call on any of a number of her father's old and retired servants who lived in the area, enquiring as to their wants and transporting them to their respective churches (or, in one case, chapel). She would then arrive for the midday services at her own church, before dismissing her driver to attend to the redistribution of the old retainers to their homes, and walk home or, if the weather was too foul, wait at the rectory until her motorcar came to take her home.

I therefore had been obliged to take my place in the back of the Victorian monstrosity where she worshipped, which, even though I claimed a seat directly over a vent from the floor heating, was nonetheless intensely cold until about two-thirds of the way through the service, when the heat suddenly shot on and had us steaming and discreetly shedding garments.

During the sermon I reflected on something Mrs Elliott had mentioned in passing, that Mr Baring-Gould was one of those all-too-rare proponents of the ten-minute, single-topic sermon, to the extent that he would begin to clear his throat if an underling went to fifteen minutes, and rise briskly to his feet at twenty. This particular specimen of the clergy before me did not suffer from brevity of speech, although he compensated by displaying a considerable brevity of both wit and learning. The stout, sweating man beside me was kept from snores only by the sharpness of his wife's elbow.

The housemaid had given me a fair description of the lady I was seeking, and after the service had finally broken up I approached her outside on the pavement where she was pulling on her gloves and talking with friends. I waited until the friends had finished their business, a luncheon arrangement for the following week, and as they departed and she turned to go, I stepped to her side.

"Miss Baskerville, I believe?"

"Yes?" she asked.

"My name is Mary Russell. I'm a friend of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who asked me to look you up while I was in town." Which was not strictly true, but the look of reserved politeness she gave me was clear evidence that, while she knew who he was, she was not about to be mentioning my small deception in any casual letter or future conversation.

Our gloves clasped briefly while I explained that her housemaid had told me how to find her, and asked if I might walk back with her.

"Certainly," she said, not sounding at all certain.

"There are a few questions I need to ask you," I said as we turned in the direction of her house, and began to explain the bare outlines of my (unnamed) husband's longtime friendship with Baring-Gould, the reverend gentleman's state of health, and the memoirs he was trying to assemble.

She was a small, neat woman, who listened with her head bent and whose steps began briskly, only to slow with her increasing involvement in the story. She did not seem over gifted with a subtlety of mind, becoming only more confused as we went, and although she appeared anxious to be of service to the squire of Lew Trenchard, that old friend of her father's, she did not know what she could do for me. On her doorstep, she turned to me and said just that.

"Might I come in for a short time?" I suggested.

"Of course. Perhaps you will take luncheon with me?"

I assured her it was not necessary; she assured me it was no inconvenience; she gave instructions to the housemaid who had taken our things that two places were to be set at the table; and she then ushered me into the drawing room.

Aside from the painting of Sir Hugo, the room was light and feminine, with walls of cream and apricot and flowered-fabric chairs and draperies. It was not to my personal taste, but it was, I could easily see, tastefully if conventionally done.

"Would you like a glass of sherry, Miss Russell? I don't drink, myself, but…"

A hot rum toddy might have served to drive away the chill of the walk, but as that was not offered, and considering my hostess' abstinence, I declined. The hot tea we were brought instead was a help, although, not having spent the morning fasting, as she apparently had, I had not much use for the bland biscuits that accompanied it.

I waited while she performed her duties over the teapot, studying her and trying to choose the best approach to take. I had quickly decided that, while this woman was no foe, and could not possibly be siding with Scheiman or Ketteridge in whatever it was they were up to, at the same time she would not make much of an ally. Sympathetic she might be, particularly towards her former neighbours, but she was completely lacking in anything resembling imagination: One need only look at the portrait of Sir Hugo, glaring down across the chintz and fringes like an accountant with a highly unsavoury private life, to know the woman bereft of perception.

I had to admit that the resemblance between Sir Hugo and Scheiman was faint, and that I should almost certainly have seen nothing had Holmes not planted the idea in my mind. The thin mouth, yes, and the general shape of the eye, but Scheiman's face, though thin, lacked the hardness of this portrait, and the cold disapproval behind the painted eyes was something I had never seen in those of Ketteridge's secretary. It came to me suddenly that Sir Hugo's portraitist had been afraid of his subject; moreover, I thought the fear justified.

"Miss Russell?" Startled, I turned to the small blond woman in the demure grey dress. A tiny frown line furrowed her smooth brow, and abruptly, my mind being no doubt receptive for such a thing, I could see the line furrowing David Scheiman's brow, the night Holmes and I had taken dinner in Baskerville Hall. Just as quickly, I dismissed the sureness that tried to accompany the revelation, reminding myself firmly that two frown lines did not a nefarious plot make. However, I also decided, taking the cup she was holding out to me, that I was not going to tell her as much as I might have had that line not appeared.

"That is a very interesting picture," I said. "It looks quite old."

"The date on the back is 1647," she said. "It is a distant relative of mine, Sir Hugo Baskerville. He is said to have been a rather naughty fellow, although I can't say he looks it. I rather liked the design of the lace on his collar."

"Do you have many of the old family portraits?" I asked innocently. "I mean to say, Mr Baring-Gould told me that yours is an old family, and I imagine there must have been quite a few pictures."

"I did bring two or three with me when I sold the house to Mr Ketteridge." She settled back into her chair for a nice, light, after-church sort of conversation with a new acquaintance. "There was a Reynolds of my great-great-grandfather that was rather valuable, and a nice portrait of a lady in a blue dress that just matched the boudoir set—I couldn't part with her—and of course the Sargent portraits of my parents. I hadn't actually intended to bring Sir Hugo—he seemed to go with the Hall, somehow, and I thought it might be best not to bring too many reminders of past glories, as it were. But Mr Ketteridge insisted I take it. In fact, he came down from the hall himself with it wrapped in a sheet, saying he couldn't bear for me to lose all of my family, and after all, Sir Hugo is a little bit famous. Do you know the story that Mr Conan Doyle called The Hound of the Baskervilles?"

I assured her that I was familiar with the tale and with Sir Hugo's place in it (although I might have used the word infamous instead), all the while aware of how very peculiar it was for Richard Ketteridge to have so generously parted with what, to a man lusting after the Baskerville story, had to be the single most compelling object in the collection.

"When did you move here?" I asked. Her pretty face clouded somewhat.

"A little more than two years ago. My father died before the war, my elder brother in 1916, my younger brother disappeared at sea in 1918, and my mother was so devastated after that, she had no energy to fight off the effects of the influenza. She died in the winter of 1919. I am the last Baskerville."

"How very sad," I said, meaning it.

"I tried to keep the house up, but it was hopeless. I was there more or less by myself, as it was so difficult to find capable men, and I know nothing about the running of an estate. After two years I had to admit defeat, and when Mr Ketteridge offered to buy it, at what my solicitor agreed was a very fair price, I sold it and moved here."

We had made our way through the tea and the biscuits, and when the maid bobbed her way into the room and suggested that luncheon was ready, we adjourned to the next room.

"I hope you don't object to a light luncheon, Miss Russell," she said. "I know that most people like a substantial dinner after church, but I can never seem to face it, somehow."

I told her I was quite content with sharing her standard fare, and prepared to make merry with the consommé and tinned asparagus in aspic.

"Do you miss the moor?" I asked after a while.

"Oh, I don't know. At first I thought I never would, it was so bright and cheerful and…lively here. But now, well, I sometimes think about when the furze would blossom, and the drifts when the ponies are driven down from the moor, and the dramatic smoke and fires when they swale the heather. I even miss those dreary tors that I used to find so gloomy, staring down at the Hall."

I laughed. "Gloomy it is, but oddly beautiful." I could well imagine, for a conventional girl only a bit older than I, that the huge old building miles from anything that might be termed society might well be a burden to be shed rather than an inheritance to be valued. I also remembered that her mother had not been born here, but had come obedient to her husband's criminous plans, later to be transferred to the protecting arm of Sir Henry and kept on the moor for the rest of her life.

I judged it time to return delicately to my main area of interest. "How did Mr Ketteridge come to hear about the Hall? An advertisement?"

"Oh no, I couldn't have done that. No, I wasn't actually even thinking about selling, really. After all, the land has been in the family for six hundred years—that's hardly something to be broken lightly. Although I know there's a lot of that sort of thing happening now, with the war and the change in the tax laws. Still, I probably would have held out for a while longer, but he came to me. He'd heard I was interested in letting it, but he wanted to buy it outright. He was passionate about it, seemed to know more than I did about its history, and just…loved it. I thought about it for a few weeks, during which time I had a huge bill for the coal and another for repairing some frozen pipes, and an estimate on woodworm and roof work—it all came at once.

"And I thought, Why should I be burdened with six centuries of Baskervilles? The house was built at a time when there was a huge estate of rich agricultural land, which various ancestors had whittled off over the years, leaving me with no means of keeping the roof standing. To me it was a burden—becoming a prison. To Mr Ketteridge it was a prize. I sold it."

I wondered how she would feel when news reached her that he had already tired of his prize. I was not about to be the one to tell her; rather, I looked at her with a degree of admiration, both for her sense of history's injustices and her self-respect. There was one question to be asked, though, particularly considering the attractive face and deferential manner that nature had wedded to her monetary inheritance.

"Have you ever considered marriage?"

She blushed, very prettily. "I had thought not to be granted that happiness, Miss Russell. I was once engaged, during the war, but six months later my fiancé was killed in France. Afterwards, well, it isn't quite so simple, is it?" She let her voice drift off as she considered me, Miss Russell, a woman five or six years her junior who wore, incongruously, a gold band on the ring finger of the right hand, where it could either be taken for a wedding band in the style of certain European communities, or for a memento. I did not enlighten her, letting her think that perhaps I, too, was one of England's many spinsters. Whole, eligible men in those postwar years were a rare species.

"However," she resumed, studying the spoon in her hand, "recently I have…come to an agreement."

I wished her congratulations and felicitations, and turned back to the all-important question of time.

"As I mentioned, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould is writing his memoirs."

"I believe I read something about a volume being published recently," she said, sounding none too definite about it.

"Well, as you can imagine, he is becoming a bit hazy when it comes to remembering specific details, particularly when it comes to the more recent events. You know how forgetful old people become in that way," I said, sending up a plea for forgiveness to the mentally acute if physically deteriorating old man in Lew Trenchard.

"I do," she agreed, sounding more sure of herself. Her charitable work with the aged retainers caused my generalisation to strike a familiar note.

"One of the things that was vexing him the other day was trying to remember when he first met Mr Ketteridge, so to put his mind at rest I told him that I would try to find out, while I was in Plymouth. Would you happen to know?"

"I should have thought very soon after Mr Ketteridge bought the Hall. Thank you, Mary," she said, which startled me for a moment until I saw she was speaking to the servant, who was clearing the plates preparatory to bringing the coffee.

"Do you know when—" I began to say, but she had only paused to recollect her dates.

"He first came to the Hall in April," she said finally. "Yes, it must have been early April, because the pipes burst in the first week of March and we were without water for three weeks altogether, and that's when I decided to see if I could find a tenant and move into town. He happened to arrive the day the plumbers were setting to work. I remember," she said with a smile, "because at first I thought he was one of them, and I was astonished that a plumber could make enough money to buy a car like that."

Her joke and the laugh that followed were wasted on me, because I was alert, almost quivering, like a bird dog at the first scent of the warm, feathered object it was bred to seek.

"The first part of April," I repeated. "And you decided to sell it to him fairly soon after that?"

"Oh, perhaps not all that soon. Just before the summer equinox, I believe it was. The moor is at its loveliest then, and the nights so short—I walked up after dinner to the nearest tor and sat watching the sun set, and when I went back down it was nearly midnight and the decision had been made."

And yet Ketteridge had told us he first heard about the Hall in Scotland shooting—something one did not do in the spring or midsummer. A coorius sarcumstance, indeed.

"So he first came to Baskerville Hall in April of 1921, and suggested that you sell to him, and you decided to do so two months later, in June. Is that correct?"

"Yes," she said, and then the frown line was back as it occurred to her that it was odd I should be interested.

"Mr Baring-Gould," I hastily reminded her. "He gets so upset when he can't recall precise details." That she did not object to this statement told me how little she knew him.

"Of course, the poor old man."

"Ketteridge would then have taken possession in the autumn?"

"I believe we signed the final documents on the first day of September. He moved in just after that."

"So he probably would have met Baring-Gould around that time, August or September," I said, as if an important question had been decided.

"I suppose so. If it matters, why don't you ask Mr Ketteridge himself?"

"I hate to bother him, and I was coming to Plymouth anyway. Besides, Mr Baring-Gould wanted to see how you were doing in your new home. It was nice of Mr Ketteridge to bring you the painting of Sir Hugo so soon after you had moved in," I added negligently. "A sort of housewarming present, I suppose he considered it."

"Yes," she agreed, offering me more coffee, which I refused. "He and David—Mr Scheiman—showed up at my door before the furniture was in place, to hang Sir Hugo for me."

I froze in the very act of bracing myself to begin the leave-taking process, seized by an awful premonition.

"Mr Scheiman," I repeated slowly. "Tell me, do you see much of David Scheiman?"

The pretty blush returned, and I felt a thud of confirmation, the physical kick of an absolutely vital piece of information so nearly missed, as she said, "Oh yes, he has been very attentive to my needs. He is the one," she added, quite unnecessarily. "We are to be married in the summer."

TWENTY-ONE

I think it not improbable that both the Archbishop of York and Claughton of Rochester had inserted my name into the Episcopal "Black Book," for I had shown precious little deference to either. But, so far from this injuring me, it has availed in limiting my energies to my own parish.

—Further Reminiscences

I had no idea what it might mean, that Ketteridge's secretary, a man with the mouth of old Sir Hugo, had proposed marriage to the only living child of Sir Henry Baskerville, but I did not need the kick in my vital organs to tell me it meant something.

For the life of me, however, I could think of nothing else to ask Miss Baskerville. I made polite noises, extracted from her an amorphous invitation for a return visit, and, with a final glance at the Cavalier over the fireplace, left her house. I went up the street and turned the corner, and there I stood, gazing into a row of severely pruned rose bushes, until the gentleman of the house came out and asked me with matching severity whether or not he could help me.

I moved on obediently, allowing my feet to drift me back to the hotel where I had stopped the previous night. There I retrieved my small bag, and took a taxi to the train station, only to find that I had several hours to wait before I could catch a train to Lydford.

I had nearly memorised portions of Dartmoor by the time I climbed up into the train, into a compartment even colder than had been the one on the way down. I made no attempt to read, but sat, my scarf and collar raised around my ears, my hands thrust up into my sleeves, staring at a button on the upholstered seat back across from me, thinking.

I felt certain that the various pieces of information we had assembled, if laid in the correct order, would make a pattern. As always, the extraneous data confused issues, and as always, it was not easy to know what was extraneous and what central. The best way of trying to find a pattern that I knew of was to hold all the data in mind, and remove one piece, and if that did not cause the remaining pieces to shift and click into place, replace it, and remove another.

And so, as the train chugged and slowed and paused at every village between Plymouth and Lydford, I sat and stared at the button, completely ignoring the glances, giggles, and growing consternation of the two young women sharing their compartment with a person who appeared to be in a trance, a young woman whose forehead revealed a half-healed gash with its fading yellow bruise whenever her hat shifted. I pawed over my pieces, holding them up to look at, removing each one in turn, trying to decide which contributed to the overall pattern and which was foreign to it.

Josiah Gorton stayed on the table, as did Lady Howard's coach. And Pethering? He remained, although the reason for his presence, both on the moor and ultimately in the lake, was not clear. But in the centre of the picture, did we find gold—actual, shiny gold? Or military tanks? Or something else entirely?

Up and down went the pieces, round and round went the questions, and all the while I was aware that time was beginning to enter into the equation, and I had none to waste.

It was dark when the train reached Lydford, and I was mildly surprised to find no sign of Charles Dunstan and the dog cart. I had told them I expected to return on an afternoon train, but perhaps he had got tired of waiting, or the pony had thrown a shoe, or some other demand had been made on his time. It was not raining, and the moon, three days from full, would soon be high enough in the sky to light my way. So, leaving a message with the station master as to my whereabouts, I walked down the road to an inn and took a large, hot meal.

Some time later, filled with beef and leek pie, I gathered my coat and hat around me and stepped into the road. It was very cold, the sky clear, and there was no waiting dog cart. A motorcar went past, an ancient Ford rattletrap by the sound of it, and when my eyes had begun to adjust to the night, I slung my bag over my shoulder and followed in the direction of the Ford.

I knew where I was going, having tramped most of these lanes over the past two weeks, and although they looked very different in the pale, tree-blocked light from overhead, I knew I could not go too far wrong before coming either into the high road that ran from Launceston to Okehampton or the Coryton branch of the railway. I was well fed, adequately insulated as long as I kept moving, burdened only by the light bag and unthreatened by rain; all in all, it was the most pleasant Devonshire stroll I had yet undertaken.

I did not even miss my way (although I did follow the road, bad as it was, rather than cut through the fields on the rough path to Galford Farm). I crossed the Lew near the old dower house, saying hello to the dogs at the mill, who quieted and snuffled my by-now familiar hand, and came to Lew House through the woods at its back. I detoured at the last minute in order to enter by the porch, knowing that Mrs Elliott would think that the more proper behaviour for a guest, and threw open the door to the hall, bursting with fresh air and goodwill.

I was also bursting from the brisk exercise coupled with the soup and Devonshire ale I had drunk, so I hurried through the still house and up the stairs. It was early, but once there, the bed caught my eye. The room was cold and the bed looked soft, and within minutes I had burrowed into it and found warm sleep.

It was still cold in the morning, even colder, I thought, than the day before, and when I had dressed, I went outside to appreciate the morning. My walk was not a long one, but the brisk air and the smell of burning leaves drifting over from Lew Down filled me with well-being and gave me a good appetite for Mrs Elliott's breakfast. Baring-Gould had been in his bed since Friday, she told me, but his energy was returning and she thought he might come down in a day or two. Mr Holmes had got off to a late start on the Sunday, and was not expected back until the next day. And lastly, if I heard strange noises from the dining room, I was not to concern myself, because it would only be the sweep, working on the blocked chimney.

After breakfast I went up and found the annotated book on Devon that had been in Pethering's bag and brought it down with me to the warm hall to read. I pulled one of the armchairs up to the fire, threw some logs onto the red coals, kicked off my shoes, and drew my feet up under me in the chair. It was very pleasant, sitting in the solid, patient old house, in the wood-panelled room with the threadbare, sprung-bottomed furniture. The fire crackled to itself, the cat slept on the bench, the fox and hounds ran across the carved fireplace surround, and occasional voices came from the other end of the house. Sighing, deeply content, I began to read.

The book, too, was like settling in with an old friend in a new setting. We began with a desultory exploration of the ethnology of the inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall and their mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood, and moved on to glance at the Dumnonii, the Romans, and the Picts. The Roman invasion was given a few scattered lines, the introduction of the first lap-dog two pages. Baring-Gould bemoaned the way the tender, graceful melodies of the Devonshire countryside were giving way before the organ and the music-hall ditty, and how the picturesque and sturdy native architecture was scorned by the pretentious London professional. Anecdote tumbled after anecdote, tied together by sweeping generalisations with clouds at their foundations and romantic visions of lost times that were breathtaking in their blithe neglect of facts. Druidic fantasies he dismissed out of hand, while at the same time offering the presence of large crystals in some neolithic huts as proof that those huts had belonged to medicine men (who used the crystals for divining) and numerous small round pebbles in others as evidence of the Stone Age love of games.

I was enjoying myself so much, lost in the pull between respect for the man's boundless enthusiasm and indignation at his inability to take scholarship seriously, that I did not notice Mrs Elliott's approach until she touched my shoulder to get my attention. I looked up startled, to see her holding a yellow envelope in her hand.

"Terribly sorry, mum, but this just came for Mr Holmes, and the rector says would you like to take lunch with him, upstairs. Also, was you expecting Charley—Mr Dunstan—to meet you last night?"

"No, of course not," I lied. "It was a very tentative arrangement."

"Good," she said, sounding relieved. With everything else on her mind, she had simply failed to ask Dunstan to meet me. It was nice to know that even the iron woman was fallible.

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

"Twenty minutes," she said.

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

"A great sadness, though, that she had to give up her family's home."

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

"I have spent my life making Lew House."

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

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

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

"You like it, then?"

"Very much."

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the door, however, his voice stopped me.

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

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

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

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

"The Squire, he told us, if we needed anything, to come, and we've come."

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWENTY-TWO

Gold bydeth ever bright.

—Gould family motto

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

The gold story was given as follows:

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

Gold fraud.

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

What, I did not know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who is that?" he asked sharply.

"It is I, sir," I said, and stepped into the candle's glow.

"Mary, it's very late. Surely you're too young to begin this habit of broken nights."

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

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

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

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

"Has it ever been found?" I persisted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Rector, I'd really prefer not to go into that just now."

"Does it have to do with Richard Ketteridge?"

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

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

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

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

I got up from the bed. "Good night, sir."

"Good night, Mary. I wish you luck."

"Thank you." I turned to go.

"There was," he said thoughtfully, "another sort of fraud."

I stopped and waited.

"It involved tin, though," he said.

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

"I don't recall the details. Something to do with blowing bits of tin into the hillside to make the area look rich in the metal. Salting, don't they call it? I wonder what it has to do with salt?"

I was rocked back on my heels by the galvanic shock of his words, shooting down my spine like a bolt of electricity that set all the pieces of my puzzle shuddering as they danced across the table and began to bond together in front of me.

Salting, don't they call it.

Gold flakes in a spoonful of leafy sand. Josiah Gorton, killed for wandering the moor on a stormy night, and Randolph Pethering after him, for the same reason. A remote cottage in which the thunder knocked a plate from the hutch. God, I had it. I had it.

"Thank you," I said calmly. I paused on the way to the door. "Do you remember which book you wrote about that in?"

"Which one? My dear, there were so many. It might have been in Curiosities of Olden Times, or perhaps Dartmoor Idylls, or even Old Country Life. Does it matter?"

"I shouldn't think so. Good night."

Mrs Elliott was coming back in with the gurgling water bottle in her hand, and her appearance made me think of something else.

"Mrs Elliott, that family that was here today. Where were they from?"

"I don't know, and I don't care."

"What family was that?" Baring-Gould demanded.

Mrs Elliott shot me a dark look. "Samuel and Livy Taylor came by here, and the doctor is giving them a place for a few days until they can arrange transport to her brother's place in Dorset."

Baring-Gould answered immediately, without pausing for thought. "Their farm is near the West Okement, just below Higher Bowden."

And old Sally Harper and her husband had just moved from their farm a mile or two away. And what of the ancient woman wrapped in rugs, who had arrived here the other day? I would ask Mrs Elliott later, I thought. "Thank you again, and good night," I said with finality, and went back down to Baring-Gould's study.

It took me until four o'clock to find the reference, but find it I did, in a book entitled An Old English Home and Its Dependencies, a portion of a chapter on mineral rights. It told the story of a fraud committed, as Baring-Gould had said, by blowing pieces of tin into soil to create the appearance of a rich source.

If tin, why not gold?

***

I fell into bed and slept for three hours, and then rose and dressed and went down to ask Rosemary for directions to the doctor's surgery. I had to reassure her mightily that I was not ill, that I did not require her granny's tincture or a hot brick for my feet, only directions to the surgery. Reluctantly, she gave them.

The frost was thick on the lawns and the fallen leaves, but although I walked quickly, the doctor was already away, attending a difficult birth up on the moor. The doctor's wife, who ran the surgery, saw my disappointment and offered to help. When I told her I was looking for the evicted Taylors, she said with some asperity that she knew precisely where they were, and whose victuals they were eating as well. She pointed me down the road.

"My own house, that is; my sister lived in it until she died in the spring, and if that woman allows her brood to damage my mother's furniture, I'll not be responsible for my actions."

The household, however, was not as chaotic as I had expected. Taking the upset and the number of children into account, it was actually almost controlled. I did, nonetheless, ask Samuel Taylor to step outside for our conversation.

I asked him who owned the house from which he had been evicted. He scratched his head and set himself to the achievement of thought.

"Wall, it were the judge up by Ockington, but now that were the problem, baint it? Because he soldy, didn't he, just three months gone now, and sayed as soon as t'crops were in, we'd have to go."

"I don't suppose you know who the buyer was?" I asked without much hope, but he surprised me.

"Mr Oscar Richfield, he said, in Lunnon. I dunno what a Lunnon man wants with me zmall farm, but it be 'is now, and I hope it brings he joy."

He was not being bitter; he truly hoped his spot of river bottom would bring pleasure to its next owner. I myself very much doubted that joy would enter into the equation.

***

On my way back through Lew Down I stopped to use the public telephone. Mycroft had not yet left his Pall Mall digs for the office where he laboured, and I spoke briefly with him, explaining nothing, asking him merely to have discreet enquiries made about a Mr Oscar Richfield and his ownership of a tiny farm on the edge of Dartmoor.

When I returned to Lew House, I sought out Mrs Elliott to enquire about the old woman who had arrived the other day while I was working in Baring-Gould's study, and had since disappeared.

"You mean dear little Mrs Pengelly? Poor thing, had to leave the cottage her husband built with his own two hands, and go to distant family far away in Exeter. Still, she now has a bit of a nest egg to show for it, and that'll make her last years more cosy."

"Where did Mrs Pengelly come from?"

"Oh, she's Cornish, I'm sure."

"I mean to say, where was the cottage her husband built for her up on the moor?"

"Where? Oh my dear, I can't remember just where it was, but I'm sure it was not too far from Black Tor. A nasty place, to tell the truth, cold and lonesome. I told her she'd be much happier in Exeter."

"I'm sure you're right, Mrs Elliott. Thank you."

Rather confused, the good housekeeper left me alone with my thoughts, which revolved around this fact: Of the three individuals and families who had passed through Lew House in the recent weeks, each had come from virtually the same place on the moor. The very place where Holmes had set out the other night to investigate.

I did not like the tenor of my thoughts, but at present there seemed little I could do but stare out the window and wait for him to return.

TWENTY-THREE

She had not been long asleep when she was awakened by such a clatter at the door as if it was being broken down, and it was thundering and lightning frightful. Nurse was greatly frightened, but lay still, hoping the knocking would cease, but it only got worse and worse. At last she rose and opened the window, when she saw by the lightning flashing, which almost blinded her, a little man sitting on a big horse, hammering at the door.

—"A Pixy Birth" in A Book of the West: Devon

As the long morning drew on I became increasingly distracted, anxious to lay eyes on Holmes, unable to sit still any longer. I finally took my coat and told Mrs Elliott I would be back in time for dinner, and left Lew House.

I ended up not far up the high road to Okehampton, sitting in the window of an inn, drinking coffee and pushing a pastry around on the plate in front of me, staring blankly down the road, when I saw Holmes heave into view on a distant rise in the road. I quickly gathered up my things, left coins enough to cover the bill, and went out to meet him.

He came towards me, striding with brisk concentration and an enormous rucksack complete with tin cup swinging wildly from a tie on the side: A less likely member of the rambling brotherhood it would have been difficult to imagine.

We approached each other rapidly, halted on the macadam facing each other, opened our mouths, and spoke simultaneously.

"He's salting the streambed," said Holmes.

"He's planting gold to run a fraud," I said, adding for good measure, "with dynamite."

"Black powder," he corrected me, and added, "using thunderstorms to conceal the sounds of the explosions." He took my elbow to turn me back in the direction of Lew House. "Excellent Russell. How did you work it out?"

"It's all in Baring-Gould's books."

"What?" He paused to look at me in astonishment.

"In pieces, but it's there, for eyes that are looking for it."

"Scheiman's eyes." He started forward again.

"He is the bookish one of the pair, to be sure. He is also engaged to be married to Violet Baskerville."

This time Holmes came to a complete stop. He worked his shoulders to let the rucksack thud to the ground, then sat on it, taking out his pipe and eyeing me expectantly. I perched on a nearby stone.

"Miss Baskerville confirmed that Ketteridge was here in March of 1921, and purchased the Hall no later than June. And as soon as he had taken possession, he and Scheiman brought her the portrait of Sir Hugo, which now sits in her flowery drawing room looking truculent and very out of place."

"So I should imagine," he murmured around his pipe.

"How did you discover it?" I asked him.

"Shelling in the bed of the Okemont," he said briefly, and having got his pipe going, he stood up again. I was about to protest, but decided that unless we were to risk patches of frostbite about our persons to match those of the gold baron, the story would best be told in the warmth of Lew House. I hopped down from my rock and reached for the rucksack, and in the process of heaving it onto my back, I was nearly sent staggering off the road into the ditch.

"What on earth is in this?" I exclaimed. "Rocks?"

"A few rocks, yes. Also three books, a cookstove, and a very wet one-man canvas tent."

"Pethering was camped out in the open during Tuesday's storm," I deduced. I turned to face the right direction and leant forward to let the dead weight drive me along. "He must have heard or seen them laying the charges that would drive the grains of gold into the gravel bed, and been foolish enough to allow himself to be seen."

"It went beyond that. He had camped up in a protected area on the edge of Sourton Common, half a mile away, but I found signs of a struggle and blood that had seeped down between some stones, right near the river."

"You think he was insane enough actually to go down and accost them, face to face?"

"Did he not seem the type?"

"I'm afraid you're right. God protect us from fanatics."

Holmes dismissed Pethering. "Were there any answers to my telegrams?"

"Just from the laboratory in London." I told him what the report had said, adding, "I'd have expected traces of the explosive."

"Perhaps it was too small a sample," he said. "The lack of response to my other enquiries is irritating. I had hoped to find a warrant outstanding for Scheiman, at any rate. What can they be doing?"

His irritation faded briefly when we entered Lew House and found a telegraph envelope on the table just inside the door. He ripped it open and read it while I was struggling to ease the load from my shoulders without allowing it to crash violently onto the floorboards. I straightened slowly and circled my shoulders experimentally to see if the ache was going to get any worse.

"Is your shoulder bothering you, Russell?" Holmes asked, his back to me. The irritation was back in his voice; whatever the news, it was not what he had wanted.

"It's fine. What does the telegram say?"

He thrust it at me and went off in the direction of the kitchen, where I heard him talking with Mrs Elliott for a moment before he returned to take up his place before the fire.

"You must have warned them not to use names," I noted curiously, reading the flimsy a second time.

"I mentioned it was a rural area and circumspection was wise."

Circumspection in this case may have been unnecessary, for the telegram from New York merely stated:

FIRST PARTY UNKNOWN SECOND PARTY HEADMASTER RETIRED DUE TO ILL HEALTH. SCHOOL SOLD 1921 NOW FAILING.

M BRIDGES

The necessarily terse style engendered by telegraphic communication, even compounded by Holmes' caution, could not explain the dearth of information provided by this little missive. "I'd say this raises rather more questions than it answers, wouldn't you agree?"

My partner's face twisted briefly in a moue of annoyance. "My usual informant in the police department must be away. Bridges is his inferior officer, in the fullest sense of the word. Still, it would indicate that Scheiman left New York voluntarily, rather than with the hounds of the department on his heels. Interesting that he should have chosen to run a school, as his father did. In this case, the school's failure to survive his departure could be an indication of his having pillaged the coffers a bit too effectively, or merely a sign of the man's immense charisma on which the entire enterprise rode."

I did not think it necessary even to respond to this last scenario. Instead, I said, "Tell me about Pethering."

Mrs Elliott came in then with tea and a plate of toasted muffins, and when she had returned to her kitchen, Holmes told me how he had spent the last three days.

"In the end I did not leave here until nearly midday on Sunday," he began, although I knew that, from Mrs Elliott. Well after midday, in fact;Holmes had stayed with Baring-Gould all morning, had waited while the old man recited the morning services, and had in fact not left until after the noon meal. I did not tell him I knew this, and he did not explain. "I took a room at the inn in Sourton that night. I did succeed in prising a cup of tea from them before I left in the morning, but I could not wait until the kitchen was awake. I haven't had a proper meal, now that I think of it, until noon today." He paused to reach for a buttered muffin.

"As you will have seen from the map, it is a stiff climb up onto the moor, closer akin to rock climbing than walking. However, it was the way Pethering took, so I had no choice.

"I came out on Sourton Common just after dawn on Monday, a short distance above the old tramway to the peat works at the head of Rattle Brook. It did not take long to find the place where Pethering had made his first camp, almost as soon as he gained the moor—he didn't even bother to look for a sheltered place, no doubt because darkness overtook him. I set off from there in the direction of Watern Tor, almost due east and four miles by the map, but nearly twice that on foot, what with the hills and the streams and the congregation of marshes that intrude in that place.

"There was no knowing for certain Pethering's exact route, but I came across signs of his passing. For a man who reveres antiquities he was very casual about what rubbish he strewed across the countryside.

"His second night he camped near Watern Tor, and judging by the number of tins I found at his campsite, he remained in that vicinity from teatime Monday until midday Tuesday, no doubt searching for giant canine footprints in the boggy areas, where I found a number of his own boot marks. He might have remained longer but for the storm, which began to blow in at about two o'clock in the afternoon.

"He may have thought he could get off the moor before it hit; certainly he would not have wished to remain where he had settled down, which was a very exposed and uncomfortable place. He packed up his rucksack in some haste, leaving behind one tent peg and a couple of unopened tins of food, and launched due west, aiming, I believe, for the ravine of the West Okemont, which his map would have told him would be windy, but less vulnerable than where he was.

"The storm caught him just after he'd crossed the river, three hard miles short of Sourton. He found a low place in the hill leading down to the river, got his tent more or less up, and crawled inside.

"It must have been a wild night for him, with nothing to eat but cold beans spooned from the tin, the roof of his tent blowing about and leaking in a number of places—his sleeping roll, which I abandoned, weighed as much as all the other things combined.

"And then, at some time during the evening, just after the height of the storm when the soil was at its most sodden, something made him leave the tent and venture down to the river, slopping through the wet ground more than half a mile to a place where the river is bordered by a narrow strip of primeval oak forest similar to Wistman's Wood."

"Black Tor Copse," I said, having read my guidebook and my map.

He nodded. "There it was he met his death, in a stretch of rough but open terrain. Pieces of his broken hand torch lay between the rocks, and the blood that seeped down had been only lightly diluted by rain."

"The storm blew through by midnight in Postbridge."

"And slightly earlier to the north. He lay there for an hour or more, and after the rain had ended and begun to seep off the surface of the peat, his body was carried a mile or so down the river and hidden in an abandoned mine. His assailants then went back for the tent and his possessions, dragging and carrying them a lesser distance to the adit that I came across on my last tour of the area."

"Ah. Too fastidious to share the watching place with a corpse," I suggested.

"It would also indicate that they are not finished with the adit, whether they are proposing to use it for storing things or for watching from, or simply as a shelter out of the rain."

"And yet you removed the rucksack."

"It had been thrown far to the back in the collapsing portion of the shaft used for their rubbish tip, with the sleeping roll thrown on top. I thought it unlikely they would brave the unsavoury elements to retrieve it, so I simply rearranged the sleeping roll to look as it had before, and took the other possessions out from under it."

I decided against closer enquiry concerning the type of rubbish in the tip; I also vowed to have my overcoat cleaned at the earliest opportunity.

"I found the adit first, and after I left there I continued downriver, where I found the signs of what I first took to be shelling from the range just north of there, as if the guns had overshot their mark. It had been roughly concealed, by spade work and a redistribution of leaves, and I imagine that in another month, with the last leaf-fall, it will be invisible.

"A short distance farther on, however, in a piece of broken ground that was once a tin works, I was interested to find the ground more freshly disturbed, with signs of digging still clear to be seen. On closer examination, I found pipes."

"Pipes?" I said, as there flashed before me the bizarre image of a collection of meerschaums and briars planted stem-first into a hill.

"Empty steel piping, two inches in diameter and approximately two feet long. There were twenty of them altogether, arranged about four feet apart from one another, sunk into the ground and covered carefully with a cap to keep the inside clear of debris."

"Not filled with pieces of gold and a charge of black powder?"

"Not yet." His eyes gleamed briefly. "I believe that the technique is to prepare the hole by drilling or shoveling down into soft ground and inserting a length of hollow pipe. One then takes a similar length of a smaller diameter of thin-walled, soft pipe which has had a good number of holes drilled or punched into it and then been loosely packed with the charge and the gold, probably an ounce or so mixed into a spadeful of river sand. The smaller of the pipes is then dropped—gently —into the larger, after which the outer pipe is withdrawn, and the wires on the detonators fastened onto a master wire running to the detonator plunger."

"And, boom. Clean up the pipes and wires, and you have gold flakes in your streambed."

"Farther down the river," he continued, "I found the mine where Pethering's body had lain. I left the rucksack beneath some rocks nearby, and walked down the footpath until I came to a farm.

"And do you know, the residents of the farm thought on the whole that perhaps they had heard a motorcar, just after dark, on Thursday night."

For a long moment I could not think why he was looking at me so intently. I began to reconstruct Thursday in my mind, and when I did I felt as if someone had hit me very low in the stomach.

"Just after dark? Oh Holmes, no. You don't mean…You can't mean…"

"Approximately how long was Scheiman gone with the motorcar when you were at Baskerville Hall?"

"Perhaps three hours," I answered reluctantly.

"Say fourteen miles from Baskerville Hall to the farm, a mile up and down to retrieve the body, fourteen miles back. Three hours sounds right."

I put my hand over my mouth in revulsion. If Holmes was right, the car in which Ketteridge had driven me back to Lew House had also contained the two-day-old body of Randolph Pethering. Ketteridge must have known. He had to know.

"Did Ketteridge know?" I asked.

"So it would seem, unless you think Scheiman motored back home with his employer, and then immediately turned around and retraced his steps to bring the body here."

"No. And I can't see Scheiman quite so cold-blooded, not to turn a hair at his innocent employer's getting behind the wheel with a corpse in the boot of the car." I shuddered at the reminder that I had been in that car, had sat making inconsequential remarks about the beauty of the evening, while just behind me lay the folded-up remains of the man whose coat I would be hanging onto the following morning.

I pushed it away from me. "Why not leave him in the mine? Why bring him here?"

"Look at the map, Russell. Even though the actual sightings cut across the diagonal from northeast to central west, I think we can safely say that their entire purpose has been to keep people away from the northwestern segment of the moor. When they have been forced to create points of interest, such as where Josiah Gorton was left and the hound sighted, or Pethering's body found, each of those points has been away from the northwestern quadrant. It would have been a risk to leave a body in a mine so near the area they wanted people to avoid—bodies have a way of getting themselves found, after all, particularly when they lie less than a mile from farms with their sharp-nosed dogs. And it would be arduous in the extreme to dig a large enough hole in the sodden peat to bury someone, and carrying him across the moor, to Watern Tor perhaps, would also involve the risk of discovery. Josiah Gorton they transported clear to the other side of the moor, but for some reason—grown cocky perhaps, or short of time, or merely the difference between disposing of a wandering tin seeker who had no family and a young and educated outsider whose death could be expected to attract a degree of attention—they decided to remove Pethering from the moor altogether. Your arrival that day at Baskerville Hall may have given them the idea, or they might have settled on it in any case."

I thought about it for a long minute, dissatisfied, but there was no more to be done with the question at the moment. "Have you been up on the moor all this time, then?"

"More or less. After interviewing the farmer I determined that there was, indeed, a place where a motorcar had pulled off the road two or three days before. Dunlops," he said, before I could ask. "Relatively new, such as Ketteridge's motor runs on."

"Thank God for that. I was beginning to think he was as ghostly as Lady Howard."

"Though it's not much use as proof in a court of law."

"True."

"I then went to visit the army garrison near Okehampton."

"Good heavens."

"I had to be sure that what appeared to be shelling was in fact not."

"Of course."

"Major-General Nicholas Wyke-Murchington gave me a cup of tea."

"How nice."

"Not terribly. It was nine o'clock this morning and I could have done with strong coffee and a full breakfast."

"Where did you stop the night yesterday?"

"In the farmer's barn."

I had half expected him to say, In the abandoned mine. At least the barn would have been dry and, with any luck, warm.

"So you had a nice tea with the major-general."

"And, with Mycroft's cachet in hand, he showed me his tank."

"A singular honour."

"Any self-respecting spy would have died laughing at the sight of it, although I can well believe it would not have sunk into the mire of Passchendaele. It distinctly resembles a duck perched atop a half-inflated balloon, and it moves—trundles is perhaps the word—at the pace of an arthritic old woman."

"A truly revolutionary design."

"He also gave me another piece of information that I think you will not mock so freely."

"A radical model submarine boat with wings?"

"No, the schedule for firing."

"But, didn't Baring-Gould say they only used the ranges in the summer?"

"Except when they wish to practice in foul-weather conditions."

"I'd have thought the summer months here would suffice, but pray continue."

"Night manoeuvres are planned, in moonlight, on Thursday night. The day after tomorrow. And the schedule has been posted on the moor notice boards."

"Now, why should—wait," I said, beginning to see what he was suggesting. "We're past the usual season when one might reasonably count on the occasional thunderstorm, and yet Scheiman and Ketteridge have been making preparations for another blast."

"The occasional natural thunderstorm, certainly, but would not an artificial storm suffice to conceal their activities, with the thunder of guns instead of that from the sky? A man standing in the entranceway to the old adit could easily see when the soldiers were away from the immediate area, but could also see the flash from the firing that would conceal the blast of the black powder."

Another thought came to me. "And the moon is nearly full as well. By God, one way or another, we may be able to catch them at it!"

Holmes smiled slowly, but merely said, "I should be interested to see the references you found in Gould's books."

We moved upstairs to our room, where I showed him the places and left him, stretched out shoeless on the bed with one book in his hands and one on either side of him on the counterpane. When I put my head in an hour later, he was asleep. I went quietly away.

TWENTY-FOUR

Where the one-inch fails recourse must be had to the six-inch map.

—A Book of the West: Devon

Wednesday morning the frost had departed and the sky was dull with cloud, but inside Lew House there was a feeling of sunshine and relief, because the squire of Lew Trenchard was on his feet again.

Holmes and I had a great deal to discuss and some complicated arrangements to make before the army's scheduled firing on Thursday night; however, the topic being mooted over the breakfast table was honey. The painted Virtues looked on in approval and Holmes seemed more than willing to indulge his old friend, so I could only throw up my hands and give myself over to the game.

"I gave you some of the metheglin the other night," Baring-Gould was saying. "Now have a taste of the honey it was made from."

Holmes obediently thrust his teaspoon into the pot of thick stuff before him on the table, twirled the spoon to keep its burden intact, and put it into his mouth. Baring-Gould and I watched, and even Rosemary stopped in the act of taking the coffeepot to be refilled and waited for the judgement.

"Remarkable," said Holmes stickily. He reached for his coffee cup.

Baring-Gould nodded vigorously. "Didn't I tell you? It is produced from furze blossoms, a most superb and aromatic variety. Keeping bees on the moor is no easy thing, as you know, because of the perpetual wind, but there is a monk down at the Buckfast Abbey who has succeeded. Brother Adam, his name is—a young man, but already the head beekeeper." (Was head beekeeper so hard-fought a position, I wondered idly, that only a monk of high seniority would be likely to win it?) "He has some very sound ideas about breeding—you ought to get down there and talk with him."

"Yes," said Holmes, "I have corresponded with Brother Adam. He consulted me recently on the acarine problem. I suggested he look to Italy, which I believe is free from the disease."

"You don't say. He's a German, of course, which hasn't made it easy for him the last few years, but he's an original—a true character. Perhaps a bit over enthusiastic, I admit, but all the more appealing for it in this age when detachment rules and cool indifference is the standard of behaviour. Do you know," he said, warming to his new topic, "in the old times there were men and women who stood out; now there seems to be a plague of homogeneity, spread by the machinations of the press and the ease of railway travel. Why, I am sure you have heard of this crystal wireless set which seems certain to achieve popularity; I imagine that the resultant instant communication will complete what modern education and quick travel have begun, and we will soon see the death of regionalism and individuality. Haven't you found this, Holmes? The world is becoming filled with sameness, with men and women as like as marbles. Not a true eccentric in sight." I looked at him carefully, waiting for the twinkle that would tell me he was making a jest, but he was frowning as he drizzled furze honey over his toast. I glanced over at Holmes, who was nodding in solemn agreement over the tragic loss of eccentricity in the modern world, and I had to get up and go to the kitchen for a moment to ask Mrs Elliott if we might have another few slices of brown bread toasted. When I returned, Baring-Gould was telling a story, apparently concerning one of his late lamented characters.

"—begging, dressed as a seaman who had been shipwrecked, or a farmer whose land was under water in Kent. He would watch the newspapers, you see, for word of the latest disaster, and take on whatever disguise that might call for. One day he might be a householder burnt out of his house, taking up a position on the pavement wearing little more than a charred blanket; the next day he would appear as an impoverished soldier. He had letters of verification from magistrates and noblemen—forged, of course. The gipsies eventually claimed him, and elected him King of the Beggars. You could learn from him, Holmes." He chuckled at the idea.

"Still, Gould," said Holmes, "there have always been degrees of rogue. One may feel a grudging admiration for Bamfylde-Moore Carew because of his sheer effrontery, but then there are men like the Scamp."

"Oh yes," Baring-Gould said, allowing his knife and fork to come to a brief pause. "The Scamp was indeed a bad lot." He resumed his meal, and spoke in my direction. " 'The Scamp,' is my family's name for one of the eighteenth-century Goulds, Captain Edward—his portrait is on the stairway. He nearly lost us this estate, and certainly lost a great deal else. He killed a man, one of his gambling partners, and at his trial was defended by one John Dunning, to whom he also owed a great deal of money. An eyewitness to the shooting testified that he saw Edward Gould by moonlight, but at the trial Dunning produced a calendar proving there had been no moon that night. Gould was acquitted, though by that time he was so in debt to Dunning that he had to make over nearly everything he owned to the man, which would have lost us Lew Trenchard had it not been under his mother's name. And the funny thing was, the calendar John Dunning produced? It was a fake."

It did not seem terribly amusing to me, and even Baring-Gould merely shook his head at the iniquity. Holmes did not even seem to be listening. His attention was on the door to the kitchen, and when Rosemary came through it his eye was on her right hand and the yellow envelope she carried.

"Yes, Rosemary?" said Baring-Gould. "What is it?"

"Telegram, sir, for Mr Holmes."

Holmes had the point of his knife through it before the door had swung shut, and his eyes dashed back and forth over the lines before coming up to mine. He nodded, then folded the square away into an inner pocket and turned to Baring-Gould with a brief and genial explanation and a deft change of subject.

After breakfast Baring-Gould went off to write some letters and take a rest, and Holmes handed me the yellow envelope. The author of this telegram had taken Holmes' concern for circumspection to heart, and the wording of his message was cautious indeed:

PRIMARY SUBJECT KNOWN TO US REGARDING ACTIVITIES INVOLVING SALE OF REAL PROPERTIES FOLLOWING UNVERIFIABLE MISREPRESENTATION OF MINERALS CONTAINED THEREIN. SUGGEST FURTHER ENQUIRIES COLORADO NEVADA SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. SECOND SUBJECT UNKNOWN HERE. APOLOGIES FOR EXPORT TAINTED GOODS. LETTER FOLLOWS.

HARRISON

"Ketteridge is known for fraudulently selling land, claiming it had 'minerals'—I assume gold—when it did not," I interpreted the paper in my hand. "Harrison is with the Alaska police?"

"The Mounties, actually. The Canadians were largely responsible for policing the Territories during the gold rush. I would say by the tone of his apology and the fact that he has been following Ketteridge's career, he knows the man to have been guilty of gold fraud but could not pin it on him." He paused and looked up, gazing through me more than at me. "What was it Ketteridge said about his childhood? He let slip some description about the land, when he was talking to you at Baskerville Hall."

"Red stone," I said. "Something about the hills where he grew up having tors, only they were dry and red."

The far-off look on his face told of a search of that prodigious memory of his, as full of jumble as a lumber room. After a few minutes he suddenly came across the bit of lumber he had been seeking, and his eyes gleamed with satisfaction.

"San Diego," he said. "Late 1860s, perhaps 1870."

"Sorry?" I prompted when he said no more. His gaze focussed.

"There was a gold rush in the red hills outside San Diego, California, in the late 1860s. It was an actual discovery, but as was the case with most such finds, it was soon overwhelmed by the influx of swindlers, claim jumpers, and speculators."

"And Ketteridge's accent comes from the southern part of California. But he couldn't have had anything to do with that; he's barely your age."

"Fifty-seven, unless he lied about being twenty-one when the Klondike rush began. No, he is too young, but he may have learnt the techniques as a child—at his father's knee, perhaps, or merely seeing the activities around him as he was growing up. I shall look forward to receiving Harrison's following letter, which may allow us to pin the man down with his crimes where the police forces of two other countries have failed."

It was only then that the full picture of what we were facing, mad as it seemed, hit me: the very real possibility of a gold rush on Dartmoor. The mediaeval tin seekers with their prodding and digging and dark, shallow tunnels in the earth would be nothing to the catastrophe set off by the whisper of that spellbinding word, gold. It would be over in weeks, of course, as soon as the blasted hillsides gave forth nothing heavier than tin and the diverted streams washed away everything but flecks of base metals from the flumes, but the devastation wrought by tens of thousands of hobnailed boots and spades and sticks of dynamite, the ruin they would leave behind across the ravaged face of the moor—it did not bear thinking.

I shook my head, more to clear it than in denial. "Surely we wouldn't see an actual gold rush here. It's…preposterous."

"You think the English immune to gold fever?"

"We've got to stop it."

"I wonder," said Holmes contemplatively, and stopped.

"About the possibility of a gold rush?" I prodded.

"No, that is clearly possible. Rather, I was reflecting on the care with which they have set up the elaborate mechanism of rumours. The hound and the carriage may be both a diversion while they are salting the ground as well as an essential part of the plot itself. A deeper layer of deception, as it were, to encourage potential speculators to reason along the lines of, 'A: The rich American gold baron has been buying up land on the quiet and trying to frighten people away; B: The gold baron is a clever and successful investor; therefore C: The value of the gold at Black Tor must be considerable, and we ought to buy in now, without hesitation.' I should think it would also make for an interesting legal conundrum," he commented, "if one were to sell pieces of land without actually making fraudulent claims as to its content, relying only on rumours."

"Surely it would have to be illegal," I said, although I was not at all certain.

"Ultimately, yes, it would be declared fraud, but only after lengthy consideration. However, one would assume that his plans include a hasty departure from the scene the moment the cheques from the auction are deposited."

"And the house," I added suddenly. "Ketteridge even has a buyer for the house."

"That was a surprise," said Holmes thoughtfully. "I should have thought Scheiman's goal was as much the restoration of his side of the Baskerville family to its place in the Hall as it was mere money, but he is far too close to the centre of things to hope to claim ignorance.

"Still, we haven't time to dig into that now, not with the deadline of tomorrow night. I can only hope," he said, scowling out the window at the dark sky, "the weather is not so inclement as to force postponement of the army's manoeuvres."

"They did wish for realistic battle conditions," I said to encourage him, deliberately overlooking the fact that with any luck, we should be out in the downpour, with the additional spice of twenty charges of black powder threatening to go off around our feet.

With the large-scale maps of the area, six inches to the mile, we began our campaign. Pausing only for lunch and whenever Rosemary came to the drawing-room door with coffee, we laid our plans.

The assumption we were working on was that Ketteridge and Scheiman would be in Black Tor Copse when the firing of the artillery guns began at ten o'clock on Thursday night, using the flash and noise of the guns to provide cover for the salting operation they had prepared. Furthermore, because we were nearing the full moon, it was possible that they would also take advantage of the moonlight to cause another appearance of Lady Howard's coach. Holmes and I would be in Black Tor Copse, waiting for the two men, but to keep track of them properly we were going to need the assistance of a band of competent Irregulars. I began to make a list as Holmes talked.

"Two to watch Baskerville Hall itself, so we know how and when they set off. If Mrs Elliott can find a young man with a motorcycle, that would be ideal, but a bicycle would suffice. Not a pony—they are difficult to hide beneath a bush." I wrote down Bville Hall-2-cycle. "They will need to know precisely who we are looking for, and where the nearest telephone kiosk is, to put a call through to the inn in Sourton."

By teatime we had the mechanism of our trap smoothly oiled and functioning—or at least the plan for it. When Ketteridge and Scheiman left Baskerville Hall on Thursday night, whether by road or over the moor, they would be seen. The witness would then go to the telephone kiosk, place a call to another member of our Devonshire Irregulars waiting at the Sourton inn, who would then bring us the message—or, if something interfered with the generous time allowance, there was even a convenient hill above Sourton Common, visible from where Holmes and I would be hidden, for a simple, brief signal from a lamp or torch, in case the imminent arrival of the two men made approaching the copse itself inadvisable.

It was a very pretty little mechanism, complex enough to be interesting but with safety nets in case of the unexpected. And, as even the best-designed machine is apt to fail, the absolutely essential part of the procedure—in this case, witnessing the crime and laying hands on the criminals—was dependent only on Holmes and myself. All the rest was a means of providing testimony in an airtight court case, when the time came. For that reason I suggested that for the overall witness atop Gibbet Hill we draft Andrew Budd, for his calm self-assurance (other than when he was faced with a cow in his garden) that would ride well through the witness box.

Mrs Elliott would be called on to ensure that Budd and our other Irregulars were brought to Lew House the following morning, so we might explain what we needed, but until then the best use of our time was to take a good dinner and make an early night of it.

Just before we sat down at the table, a pair of telegrams arrived. One of them was from Birmingham, and cleared up a minor facet of our mystery:

RANDOLPH PETHERING ALIAS RANDOLPH PARKER IS JOB APPLICANT NOT LECTURER AT YORK. CURRENTLY EMPLOYED COUNCIL SCHOOL BEDFORD NOT TEACHERS COLLEGE BIRMINGHAM BUT POSSESSES LONGTIME MONOMANIA CONCERNING HIGH JOB POSSIBILITIES IF ONLY DRUID BOOK PUBLISHED. CONSIDERED QUOTE HARMLESS LUNATIC END QUOTE.

The other telegram was from Holmes' brother in London:

PSEUDONYM CONCEALING LANDHOLDER GOLDSMITH ENTERPRISES MAIN OFFICES LOS ANGELES MANY HOLDINGS VICINITY OKEHAMPTON GOOD HUNTING.

MYCROFT

"Oscar Richfield is a false front hiding a Californian corporation that is buying up that part of Dartmoor," I translated.

"And behind the doors of the corporation, I have no doubt, stands Richard Ketteridge," said Holmes. "Is that goose I smell?"

Baring-Gould was present at dinner, looking less tired than he had been. Again the two of them set off on a meandering peregrination of topics and tales, but I was well used to it by now, and rather enjoyed it.

We were nearly finished with the goose course when Holmes abruptly broke off what he had been saying and froze, head up and intently listening. His raised hand demanded silence, but after half a minute, during which I heard nothing, I asked tentatively, "Holmes?"

In answer he whirled to his feet and tore the curtains back from the window. Again we all waited; again he held us in silence.

Three minutes passed, four, before it came: the briefest flicker lit up the heavy clouds.

No matter it was past the season; a thunderstorm was on its way to Dartmoor.

TWENTY-FIVE

All at once I uttered a cry of "Help me!" and sank to my armpits. It was instantaneous. I was in water, not on moss; and in sinking all I could do was to catch at some particles of floating moss, slime, half-rotten weed and water weed…

I felt as if I were striving against a gigantic octopus that was endeavouring with boneless fleshy arms to drag me under water.

—Further Reminiscences

You don't think—" I started to say. The entire day's long and elaborate plans had all rested on the assumption that the two Americans planned to use the following evening's artillery fire to cover their noise, that they were unlikely to wait for a natural thunderstorm. Probably, they would remain snug at home tonight. Still —

"We cannot take the chance," he snapped. "I will bring the dog cart up; you fetch the waterproofs and put on your boots, find two torches. And, Russell? My revolver is in the drawer. Bring it."

Without another word he dashed out of the door, leaving me to soothe the affronted Baring-Gould. I could only tell him that the case was coming into its final stages, and we would explain it all very soon; with any luck, tomorrow. As I left him, I heard him declare in a querulous voice, "He always was a headstrong boy."

I diverted through the kitchen to ask Mrs Elliott to throw together a packet of sandwiches, as it looked to be a long night, and ran upstairs to pull every warm and watertight garment we possessed out of the drawers and wardrobes. Holmes' revolver, with its box of bullets, was in the drawer beside the bed. I loaded it and put it in my pocket.

Downstairs I found Rosemary in the kitchen wrapping a stack of sandwiches in greased paper. Mrs Elliott, by the sound of it, was in the dining room, the object of Baring-Gould's feeble anger, so I asked Rosemary, "Is there a shotgun in the house?"

"In the pantry, mum," she said promptly, pointing to a door on the other side of the room. It took me a moment to see it, lying flat on a high shelf. There were six cartridges as well, standing in a neat row, which I scooped up and dropped into another pocket. I checked to be sure the gun was not loaded, asked Rosemary for a length of oiled cloth, and gathered up everything, leaving the house through the kitchen door.

Down in the stables, I helped Holmes with the last of the buckles and walked the shaggy pony out into the drive. Holmes lit a lamp and hung it off the side—highly inadequate as a headlamp, but enough to warn other vehicles we might meet on the road. I flicked the reins as soon as he was beside me and we trotted up the road, pulled by the bewildered but willing pony.

Holmes began to pull on layers of the clothing I had brought. Within a mile the first drops of rain fell, and by the time we passed through Bridestowe the rain was heavy and the going slowed. The pony was indomitable, as might be expected of a Dartmoor native, and he had no problem distinguishing the way even when we left the high road for the lesser road and, later, the lesser road for the farm track.

At the farm, Holmes splashed across the yard to the well-lit farmhouse while I began to loose the pony from its traces. Before I had finished, a pair of thick hands took over from me.

"I'll finish that, mum," said the man. I left him to it, taking the shotgun from under the seat and tucking its oiled cloth securely around it, then handing Holmes his gun and the bag of provisions.

The rain pelted down, and we set off for the moor.

It was a hair-raising two miles, up the steep side of the moor wall and across the river to Black Tor Copse. I have never had very good nighttime vision, even without the downpour that made my spectacles approximately as effective as my uncorrected vision. The flashes from the slowly approaching storm provided me with the only illumination we could afford, not knowing when and from where Ketteridge and Scheiman would come (the question of if was momentarily shelved; time alone would answer that).

When we had splashed and stumbled up the bed of the stream for what seemed hours, finally the stunted trees of the copse began to rise up around us. There was no path, just hillside, and I wondered how Holmes thought we were going to fight our way across to the other bank without giving the two men enough prior warning for them to flee halfway to Mary Tavy.

"It's clearer farther up, and there is a path of sorts," Holmes said in answer to my question. "We need to be here to see them, but there should not be a problem with crossing over when the time comes."

I had to take his word for it, because we seemed to be at the place he had in mind. A slab of rock had fallen from above and lodged against two large standing pillars, giving us a small shelter, open at the back but keeping off the rain. I loosened three layers of buttons and found a shirttail to wipe my lenses.

Holmes excavated similarly for his pipe and tobacco pouch, and waited for the next lightning strike to light the match, with his back turned to the gorge and his shoulders hunched. He smoked with one hand cupped over the bowl, that no giveaway glow might be seen.

We settled in to wait.

The rain poured down and the gorge was sporadically illuminated by the stark blue lightning, and I sat and sometimes squatted and every so often stood upright, bent over double beneath the stone ceiling, in order to ease my legs. I tucked my hands under my arms and rubbed my gloves together briskly and wriggled my toes inside my damp boots, and we waited.

Time passed, the centre of the storm drew closer, and the rain fell, and still we waited. Holmes did not light a second match, sucking instead at his empty pipe, and the harsh light flashed with increasing regularity along the gushing river and the bank of rock across from us and the furiously blowing branches of the oak wood, followed at ever more brief intervals by the grumble and crack of thunder, and still the two men did not come.

" 'Those dark hours in which the powers of evil are exalted,' " I thought I heard Holmes murmur.

"An evil night," I agreed.

"An evil place," he said.

"Come now, Holmes," I protested. "Surely a place cannot be inherently evil."

"Perhaps not. But I have noticed that the great bowl of Dartmoor seems to act as a kind of focussing device, exaggerating the impulses of the men who come within its sphere, for better or for worse. Gould might well have been a petty tyrant if left in his parish in Mersea, bullying his wife and driving his bishop to distraction. Here, however, the very air allowed him to expand, to become something larger than himself. Similarly Stapleton—I've wondered if he mightn't have continued as a minor crook had he not come here, where he filled out into a deft manipulator of local lore and a would-be murderer. And now these two."

I did not answer. After a while I pulled the bag over and offered Holmes a sandwich. Rosemary had cut meat from the carcass of the goose for them, and laid them in the bread with a layer of rich herb stuffing. They were delicious, but still the storm beat at the stones around us, and still we waited, and still the men did not come.

The hands of my pocket watch crept around, and the powers of darkness moved over the face of the moor. Midnight came and midnight passed, and neither of us had moved or spoken for some time, when I began to feel a strange sensation in the air around me. Looking back, it was probably only the psychic eeriness of the night combined with the physical sensation brought by the electric charges of the storm, building and ebbing, but it began to feel almost as if there were another person in the rock shelter with us—or if not a person, then at least a Presence. It did not seem to me, as Holmes had suggested, an evil presence, nor even a terribly powerful one, but I thought it old, very old, and patient. It felt, I decided, as if the moor itself were holding watch with us. Holmes did not seem aware of anything other than discomfort and impatience, and I did not care to mention my fancies to him. I was, however, very grateful for his warm bulk beside me.

And then, just when I was on the edge of giving up on our expedition, the two men came, with a brief bobble of a hand torch from upriver. My paranormal phantasms burst with the sight, and the spirit of Dartmoor sank back into the stones. Holmes put his empty pipe into his pocket and leant forward. I unwrapped the shotgun far enough to slide two cartridges into it, then laid it back down by my feet.

Two lights appeared, tight beams that lit the feet of the men and, as they came closer, the tool bag each carried in his left hand. They crossed by in front of us, picking their way along the edge of the stream, and stopped perhaps forty feet away. The next burst of light from the sky revealed two heavily swathed figures, one taller than the other, both looking down at a stretch of rocky hillside. The shorter of the two dropped to one knee, and the light flickered out, and a great thump of thunder rumbled down the riverbed.

We were still waiting, but at least now we had something to watch other than the rocks. Ketteridge knelt down for two or three minutes at his bag, and although I could not see what he was doing there, he had to be preparing the equipment for wiring the charge. While he was there, the taller man, who had to be Scheiman, moved around the area, stopping every few feet to bend to his bag and do something on the ground. Once I saw the gleam of a shaft of metal.

"He's sliding the smaller pipes, which are perforated and loaded with gold-bearing sand and the charge of black powder, into the holes, and removing the larger ones from around them," Holmes murmured.

It was quite clearly a thing Scheiman had done any number of times before. Despite the furious weather beating at his slick coat, his movements were quick and sure. He planted six of the charges, and Ketteridge was beginning to unfurl a spool of wire when Holmes touched my arm. "We've seen enough. Come."

I pulled my clothes back around me, tucked the gun under my right arm, and followed Holmes, patting my way along the wall with my free hand. The rain had let up a fraction, but it was still rather like walking into sea waves breaking against a rocky cliff, without the salt. However, I kept my feet and pushed my way through the copse, and in twenty yards or so we came upon the promised path, and could stumble along at a marginally faster rate. Each time lightning struck we stopped moving, and when our eyes had readjusted to the dark, we went on.

We crossed the river around the bend from where the men were working and continued up the cliff and onto the moor above. The ground here was as usual littered with stone, but it was not entirely stone, which made it not only easier to walk, but to walk quietly. Holmes took my arm and spoke into my ear.

"They will have a vehicle somewhere, or at least horses tethered in the adit. I will immobilise it or loose them, as the case may be, and join you at the height of the tor just above where they are working. I will be ten or fifteen minutes behind you."

Giving me no chance to argue, he disappeared into the night. I turned, put my head down against the wind and rain, and followed the path of the river back to a place opposite where we had been waiting. The tor was easy enough to see, outlined against the clouds of the night, and I suddenly realised the storm was abating somewhat, that the faint illumination of the clouds had to come from the full moon behind them.

I could hear voices now, snatches of disconnected phrases that served to warn me that noise would no longer be obscured by the storm.

"—go live in the desert after this, someplace it never rains." Scheiman's voice.

"—afford to—"

A long, indistinct muttering came from below while I picked my way around the tumble of loose stones on their centuries-long journey from the top of the tor to the bottom of the stream. I heard the phrase"—the Hall?" and then another fit of low speech and a laugh. When the wind stopped for an unexpected moment I heard Scheiman's voice, so clear it startled me.

"Where the hell's the last one of these?" he said. My foot came down wrongly on a stone, shifting sideways and making me fight to keep my balance. I nearly fell, I nearly dropped the shotgun down into the ravine, but in the end I did neither, and their voices continued uninterrupted. I took a deep breath and found myself a secure boulder to sit on. The whole hillside seemed even less stable than the other tors I had known; perhaps the stream was undermining it at a greater rate? Or could the series of blasts the hillside had been subjected to over the last three months have weakened the already brittle stone? I sat cautiously, and kept my feet still.

During the next long quarter of an hour the two men discovered that either they had failed to construct twenty of the devices or else left one somewhere. After an instructive few minutes listening to the genial Ketteridge's viciously flaying tongue, I heard them decide that nineteen would have to do, although Scheiman would not sleep until he was absolutely positive that he had not left one lying about the shed in Baskerville Hall. They went back to their task; I went back to waiting.

I was not close enough to the edge of the cliff to see them both, although their lights flickered occasionally on the oak copse on the opposite bank and from time to time one or the other would walk briefly through one of the places I could see. Ketteridge now appeared with the spool of wire in one hand. He made a loop of it, laid the loop on the ground, and put two or three rocks on it to hold it in place. He then stood up and began walking upstream, letting the wire spool out behind him, and disappeared around the bend.

I wondered how far he would go, to set up the triggering device.

I wondered if Holmes would give the river wide berth on his return.

I wondered what I should do if Holmes did not reappear shortly.

I did not wonder for long, though; to my horror I heard shouts echoing from upstream, loud shouts of anger that could only mean one thing. I flung myself off my rock and ran silently around the rise of the tor, and there I saw Holmes, caught in the beam of Ketteridge's torch, his open hands outstretched.

"Stand there and don't move a muscle, Mr Holmes," Ketteridge was saying. "I'm a dead-eye shot."

"Of that I have no doubt, Mr Ketteridge," said Holmes. He stood and waited while the narrow beam came closer, and soon Ketteridge was in front of him, blinding Holmes with his torch.

"Hands on top of your head, Holmes," he ordered, and did a thorough search of Holmes' pockets, ending up with Holmes' gun, folding knife, and torch. By this time another light was shining from the riverbed and Scheiman's panic-laden voice could be heard shouting enquiries.

"It's nothing, David," Ketteridge shouted back over his shoulder. "Just an intruder. You'd better finish laying those charges before this storm is completely gone. I'll blow it as soon as you're ready." The other torch beam wavered and then disappeared, and I strained to hear what Ketteridge was saying to Holmes.

"Well, well, Mr Holmes. I was afraid of this."

"That, I presume, is why you attempted to distract me with Pethering."

"I'm sorry it didn't do the trick. I liked you, Mr Holmes, and I'd have been just as happy to do my business here and be away without meeting you again. Speaking of which, where is your wife?"

I started, and began to creep backwards towards the safety of my tor.

"Asleep in Lew House I should think," Holmes told him.

"No assistants at all, then?"

"I fear not."

Ketteridge kept the torch on Holmes' face for half a minute, then without warning dropped it down for a fast search of the hillside. I leapt back as soon as I saw it coming, and backed rapidly towards the rocks from which I had come. I heard Ketteridge say something to Holmes, and then the two of them started towards me.

I thought Ketteridge would play his torch over the side of the clitter that faced the river and be satisfied with that, so I circled around to the far side of the tor. It appeared, however, that he was prepared to be a good deal more thorough; his light was coming around to my right, and unless I fled away over Sourton Common, where a chance lightning strike would show me up like a spotlight, I had to keep the central mound of the tor between us. I continued circling, feeling the shaky ground under my feet and balancing with the damned gun in my hand and no light on my way. He was gaining on me quickly, the very edge of his beam lighting the top of a pile of rocks to my right before skipping away, but in moments he would have me. I dived for the pile, thinking to freeze into a rocklike lump beneath my coat, but to my astonishment I discovered that the solid mound of rock was split down the middle. I shoved my way into the concealing crack, and precipitated headfirst into a low, smooth, and remarkably dry depression among the stones; I was thoroughly hidden, within the very heart of the tor.

I squirmed around to look out of the entrance, and watched the light approach. It lit the entrance with a shocking burst of brightness, but the flare of reflection as the beam passed over my glasses must have appeared like any other reflection from off the watery slope. I shrank back and watched them pass, and after they were well past I slowly emerged, as wary as any rabbit venturing from its bury.

They started down the slope, Ketteridge far enough behind Holmes to keep his prisoner at a distance, but too close for me to chance the scattered shot from my own gun, even if, as I found when I came to the edge of the cliff, they had not been on a direct line of fire. I sat down on my heels to see what developed.

Scheiman stood watching them come down the steep hillside, gun in one hand and torch in the other. His tool bag lay empty on the ground, the twenty heavier two-inch pipes in an untidy pile next to it, the nineteen charges buried in their place. Ketteridge put his pistol in his pocket and walked over to his own bag, from which he took a ball of twine. Approaching Holmes, he said, "My secretary is not quite as good a shot as I am, Mr Holmes, but he is certainly good enough for this distance. Don't try to move."

He bent and tied Holmes' hands together behind his back, then hobbled his feet loosely, but securely. He tied it off, cut the end with his pocket knife, and stood away from Holmes.

"Be seated, Mr Holmes. We won't be very long. David, watch him closely."

Holmes looked around and chose a mossy rock, shuffled over to it, and took his seat. Scheiman watched him intently, and moved over near him.

"Don't stand too close to him, David," Ketteridge warned, and then went back to finishing the connexion of each of the nineteen charges to the master switch at the end of the spool of wire. Lightning flared briefly overhead, but the grumble that followed was distant, almost perfunctory. Holmes had not looked up at me once. I could not tell if he knew I was there, although he would be certain I was not too far away. There was no other place for me to be. There was also no means for me to reach Holmes, no way I could dispatch the two men without putting Holmes into mortal danger, either from their guns or from the wide spread of shot from my own. I should have to wait, and hope he could provide me with an opening. Meanwhile, I knew, he would encourage Ketteridge to talk.

Holmes eased his shoulders and spoke in a clear voice to Ketteridge where he knelt over the pieces of wire. "Am I right in assuming that you and Mr Scheiman here first met on the boat from New York? This plan of yours seems to have been assembled somewhat, shall we say, piecemeal?"

Ketteridge's sure hands did not react. "We did, yes. It was a very monotonous journey, and when David came onboard in New York, what else was there to do but talk?" He reached down into a pocket and drew out a small pair of wire cutters, and snipped the join before wrapping it methodically. "I had no plans for England. It didn't seem the sort of place for my particular kind of scheme, so I was just going to relax, see the countryside, and spend some of the money I'd made…elsewhere." Satisfied with his handiwork, he dug into his bag for a bit of broken tile, propped it over the wires to keep the rain off, and then shifted over to the next pipe. "We talked around things, if you know what I mean. It was funny, a meeting of minds, you might say. Nobody else in the world would've known what we were really talking about, but David and I knew." He paused to look over his shoulder. "I suppose you might've known, if you'd been listening in. No, we recognised each other like two Masons with a handshake, and sort of told each other about our scams, without saying much direct. Anyway, when the boat docked we said good-bye without thinking any more about it. I mean to say, he'd amused me with his talk about the school he'd run in upstate New York that went bust—oh, don't worry, David," he said at his secretary's protest, "Mr Holmes knows about it, I'm sure. And David knew something about my little tricks in the goldfields, buying up dud land and selling it off as claims to men hundreds of miles away. Neither of us told the other anything that might be called incriminating, but we were sort of showing off our cleverness, I suppose, to someone who'd appreciate it.

"So, there I was in London having the time of my life when who should appear at my hotel but David, looking all excited and with a great plan for the two of us.

"Turns out David is a Baskerville." He swivelled again to look at Holmes, and I could see his teeth gleam as he turned back again. "Thought you might know that one, too. One of the reasons he came over here was to take a look at the family house that his father, who wasn't exactly legitimate, you might say, was cheated out of. So, when David gets to Plymouth, what does he hear but that the big old place is in the hands of one solitary little girl, who wants to find herself a tenant and move into town.

"Well, being a tenant isn't exactly what David has in mind, although he doesn't really have enough of the ready stuff to buy the Hall outright. He sits and thinks it over for a couple of days, and then comes to look me up with a proposition: He and I run a swindle, whatever kind of swindle I want, we share the results, and he can then afford to move in and become the lord of the manor."

"Hardly a peerage," Holmes said drily.

Ketteridge gave a dismissive wave with the wire clippers. "Well, I had to tell him that city jobs aren't exactly my strong point. Too many foreign ideas, and way too many, what do you call them, bobbies? But I invite him to dinner and he tells me about this place, and I begin to get a few ideas. A remote place like this, a man can have some room to set things up. So, we talk it over and we come to an agreement: I run the land-sale side of things, and he takes care of scaring people away from the piece of ground we're developing as well as giving me a hand with toting and hauling."

"Which he did by adapting some vehicle or other to resemble Lady Howard's coach, and then bringing in some large, dark dog to add to the charade. Actually," Holmes said, "I was rather wondering why you didn't make more extensive use of the dog."

Ketteridge laughed and shook his head over the wires. "Have you ever worked with a dog, Mr Holmes? Maybe the one we managed to get hold of was just particularly badly trained, but it was a real nightmare. Oh, it looked the part all right, and David even fixed a cute little contraption on its head to give it a 'glowing eye'—powered by a battery—but the whole point of having the dog was making it ghostly, and a hundred and twenty pounds of dog is anything but. Lock it in the stables and it howls and scratches the door down; turn it loose and it chases sheep and gets itself shot at; you have to feed it meat and then clean up after it so your ghostly dog isn't leaving great stinking piles across the countryside; and you never know, when you're off on a Lady Howard run, if the dog isn't going to take off. We did two trips out with the 'coach' back in July, and two in August, and halfway through the second one the damned animal lit off at high speed for a nearby farm where I'd guess there was a bitch on heat. We were unbelievably lucky there, because the family was away, all except one deaf old granny, but my nerves couldn't take it, and I had David get rid of the animal. I have to hand it to David's father, to go about his own version of the scheme with just a big dog. Damned if I know how he did it."

"And for this he planned to get the Hall and you would get—what?"

"Oh, I'd have the lion's share of the actual money—which only seemed fair since I was doing most of the expert work—and as we planned it, I'd then sell him Baskerville Hall—all fixed up and pretty as we made it—just as the swindle started, for what would be on paper a goodly sum but in actual fact would be less than a dollar. I'd take the blame and the profits and skip the country, he'd be left with egg on his face, having not only been so stupid as to choose such a crook for a boss but to have fallen for his boss's land scheme as well. But then again, he'd have all the linen in Baskerville Hall to wipe it off with. And," he paused again, this time sitting back on his heels to grin across at his assistant, "this clever devil even went and got himself engaged to that pasty-faced Baskerville woman. He was looking to have it all."

"Until Pethering."

Ketteridge uttered a monosyllabic curse, and went back to his work. "Yeah, until that blasted shrimp stumbled into our setup. Jesus, what a piece of luck. I mean, the old guy last month, that was one thing, but then he goes and cracks the nosey little mutt of a professor on the head."

"What else could I have done?" Scheiman shouted. "We couldn't let him go, and he sure wouldn't be paid off."

"You're absolutely right, David," Ketteridge said freely. It sounded like a familiar argument, one in which he was not terribly interested any longer. "But it did put paid to you taking over the Hall. Having the neighbours whispering among themselves that you had more to do with that damn American's swindle than it looks like is one thing, but actual murder, now, that's something I find neighbours are slow to overlook. No, David, like I've told you, you're just going to have to take your share of the money and abandon the Hall to the mice. Find a nice lady in some warm climate and set up a school there."

He stood up and dusted off his hands, and shone the torch over his work to check it: nineteen bits of broken tile, nineteen leads running to the main wire, all of them neat and dry and ready to go. And what was he planning to do with Holmes?

"You tidy up those pipes, David, and make sure I haven't left anything behind. I'll take Mr Holmes and meet you at the end of the wire. Up you go, Mr Holmes," he said, taking out his gun. "Just follow the wire." He aimed the torch at Holmes' feet, and followed him away from the tin works.

With Holmes held to a hobbling pace, they would be some minutes reaching the plunger that would set off the charges. I abandoned my post above the river and circled the bend to get there before them, and by the fitful light from the moon and the occasional pale flare of the faraway lightning, I scrambled down to the river, dislodging stones and risking life and limbs in my haste.

The plunging device stood ready, waiting only for its connexion to the wire and the lowering of its contact points. I hesitated only a moment before deciding that it did not actually matter if another tiny quantity of gold flakes found their way into the gozen of old tin mine, and it would make for an almighty distraction. I found my penknife and, with my torch shaded by a handkerchief and held between my knees on the ground, I hastily stripped the ends of the wire, looped them around the points, and screwed down the contacts as quickly as I could. I then picked it up and, tugging to make sure the wire was not caught on anything, stumbled rapidly downriver to the obscuring bend in the cliff face. I could hear nothing above the noise of running water, but in less than a minute I saw the glow of the moving torch, and I got ready to act. I did not know where Scheiman was, although I assumed he would not be far behind his boss, but I could think of no better plan. I did, I admit, say a fervent prayer for protection in an act of madness.

The torch approached, and I could hear a voice: Holmes talking loudly, which I hoped meant he expected me to be waiting in the only logical place, where indeed I was. I heard the sound of scuffling feet, and Ketteridge speaking sharply, and then they were on top of me.

I hit the plunger and raised the shotgun more or less simultaneously, just as Holmes threw himself backwards against Ketteridge. The sound of the blast and the unexpected attack conspired against the accuracy of Ketteridge's gun, so that although his finger tightened spasmodically against the trigger, the shot went wide and the torch flew out of his hand an instant later, its beam whirling crazily into the air. Holmes tumbled off into the darkness near the river, and I let off one barrel of the shotgun for effect.

Disarmed and barraged, Ketteridge did not hesitate, but whirled and sprinted back in the direction from which he had come, towards the slowly erupting hillside. He vanished into the cloud of dust, but I was not about to follow until I had Holmes safely up and out of the water.

My lawfully wedded husband had come to rest just above the waterline, wedged painfully among the rocks and swearing mightily. I propped the gun against a boulder and fished out my pocket knife, cutting the bonds of his hands first and then his legs.

"Thank you, Russell," he said when he was upright and had his breath back. "Precisely where I had anticipated, with even more effect than I had hoped for. Where is Ketteridge?"

"Off up the hill, heading for the vehicle. Or was it horses?" I held out a hand and helped him extricate himself from the slick rocks.

"A peculiar contraption, a motorcar with very wide, highly inflated tyres and a great deal of padding over the engine—practically silent on the moor and leaving no tracks. However, he will not go anywhere in it tonight. And Scheiman?"

"May have gone with him."

"He was behind us."

"Oh God. I hope I haven't killed him." I looked in apprehension back at the cloud of dust, swirling mightily in the still shaft of light from the miraculously unbroken torch that Ketteridge had dropped. It was only then that I realised the rain had stopped. "I did not imagine that the blast would be so big."

"It should not have been. Perhaps the cliff was unstable. I shall have to leave you to deal with Scheiman. Can you do that?"

"Holmes, you can't go after Ketteridge without a weapon. At least wait until we've taken Scheiman's gun away from him."

"Russell, I will not permit a second villain to escape me on this moor," he said grimly. "Follow when you can." He caught up the torch from the ground and flung himself up the hill after Ketteridge.

I replaced the spent shell, and with great circumspection I went downstream to the site of the blast, expecting at any moment to be pounced upon by the murderous secretary. When I found him, though, he was quite incapable of pouncing, being unconscious and half buried under tons of rock from the collapsed hillside. I checked his pockets, removing the sturdy clasp knife I found in one of them, and then set about digging him out.

One ankle was broken, and the bone above it as well, and I knew he would be black from the waist down by the next day. If he lived that long. I dragged him away, tied his hands behind his back, then took off my waterproof and my woollen overcoat and tucked them securely around him. I would prefer that if this escapade cost Scheiman his life, it be at the hands of a judge, not mine.

I did not find his gun, which must either have fallen from his pocket or been flung from his grasp, but I knew that if I could not see it, he was not likely to find it either. I turned to follow Holmes and Ketteridge up onto the moor.

From high on the remains of my protective tor it was an easy thing to find the men, two beams of light moving across the darkling plain, perhaps half a mile apart and going west. It was difficult to tell how far off the closer of the torches was, but I thought not less than two miles. I started down the hill in their wake.

Following the river upstream, I reached a place where it was little more than a stream, and there I found Ketteridge's vehicle, the means Scheiman had devised to frighten the moor dwellers: Lady Howard's coach. I took a moment to look at it and found to my surprise that underneath the big square superstructure with the remains of phosphorescent paint daubed on the corners—the "glowing bones" of the Lady's hapless husbands—lay the same powerful touring car that had carried us to and from Baskerville Hall, with the standard Dunlop tyres replaced by large, highly inflated tubes that would leave no tracks and also serve to underscore the ghostly silence of the thing. They had probably been inspired by the secret amphibious tank, I realised—Mycroft would be incensed—and, the horse that had appeared to be pulling it must have been ridden by one of the men, with loose harnesses jangling for effect. Abruptly, I remembered that I had no time to moon over the device; I tore my attention from it and headed back out onto the moor.

My distance from the two men meant I had continually to climb the heights to keep track of their progress, so that run as I might, I could not gain on them. Each time I climbed, there were still the two of them, although the distance between them slowly decreased, as Ketteridge had to choose his path while Holmes merely followed. In fact, I began to wonder if Holmes was not deliberately keeping his distance. I redoubled my efforts.

The wind had calmed considerably, but when I thought I heard a faint cracking noise from the vast space before me, I could not be certain. I shone my light desperately all around, found a rise, followed it, stood on my toes on a boulder, and saw a light, one single light. It was not moving.

I ran. Oblivious of streams and stones and the hellish waterlogged dips and gouges of an old peat works, I ran, up a rise and down the other side and splashed three steps into the bog that stretched out there before my interior alarm sounded. I backed out laboriously, the muck holding fast at my boots and calves and only letting go with a slow sucking noise. I staggered when my heels hit solid ground and I sat down hard, then got to my feet and searched the basin. Rushes, Holmes had said, look for footing among the rushes, and indeed, along the edges of the bog stood tussocks of thick grass in a rough semicircle. Following those proved heavy going, but I did not sink in past my lowest bootlaces, and I made the other side of the mire with no further harm. Up that hill I went, and there below me, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, lay the beam of a single torch, lying, by the looks of it, on the ground, motionless.

I nervously checked to be sure the shotgun was loaded and went forward stealthily until I could make out the dark figure sitting on the ground beside the light. My heart gave one great thud of relief, like a shout, and subsided.

"Holmes?" I said. "I thought I heard a shot."

He turned at my voice, and then looked back at the terrain before him. "You did," he said. "He would not allow me to approach."

"Approach?" I asked, and walked up to stand by his side. His boots were mere clots of black, viscous mud, as were his trouser legs past his knees.

I played my torch beyond him to see what he was staring at, and saw there at our feet a stretch of smooth, finely textured turf, looking as if someone had spread a large carpet of some pale green stuff across the floor of the moor. On the side nearest us the carpet appeared scuffed, and the torchlight picked out some gleaming black substance splashed across the centre of it that I realised must be mud. The rest of the surface was pristine. A quaking bog, Holmes had called it. A featherbed, was Baring-Gould's jocular name: a bed beneath which Ketteridge now slept.

Holmes inclined his head at it. "The moor took him," he said, and scrubbed tiredly at his face with both hands. "He got halfway across before he broke through. I tried to pull him out, but he held the gun on me until the last minute, until only his hand and his eyes were above the surface. He shot at me when I tried to…I did attempt to save him."

I bent down to pick up his torch, and when I had put it in his hand I allowed my fingers to rest briefly on the back of his neck. "You said it yourself, Holmes. The moor took him. Come, let us go home."

TWENTY-SIX

In my advanced old age I really entertain more delight in the beauties of Nature and of Art than I did in my youth. Appreciation of what is good and true and comely grows with years, and this growth, I feel sure, is no more to be quenched by death than is the life of the caddis-worm when it breaks forth as the may fly. I do not look back upon the past and say, "All is dead!" What I repeat in my heart, as I watch the buds unfold, and the cuckoo-flowers quivering in the meadow, and I inhale the scent of the pines in the forest, and hear the spiral song of the lark is "All is Promise."

—Further Reminiscences

We did go home, to our own home on the Sussex Downs, soon after that. First, however, we had one final task to perform on the moor.

Three days after the police had dragged Richard Ketteridge's body from the grip of the quaking bog, we borrowed the dead man's touring car, stripped of its costume and restored to its Dunlops, and drove it up to the door of Lew House. While the bronze goose-herd looked on, we piled the passenger seat high with pillows, loaded the boot with a picnic of cold roast goose with sage and onion stuffing, mutton sandwiches, and honey wine, and waited while the squire of Lew Trenchard took his place on the cushions. We tucked the old man in with travelling rugs and placed a hot brick beneath his shoes, and with Holmes at his side and myself driving, we took the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould up onto the moor for one last earthly look at that region he loved best in all the world.

EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT

As I write these words the last home is being decorated with heather and moss to receive the body of one whom I shall bury to-morrow, the last of my old parishioners, one of God's saints, who has lived a white and fragrant life, loving and serving God, bringing up a family in the same holy line of life, and closing her eyes in peace to pass into the Land of Promise, which here we cannot see, but in which we can believe, and to which we hope to attain.

—Further Reminiscences

Considering the circumstances, it is a little surprising that more of the manuscripts written by Mary Russell do not involve well-known public names. It may be, of course, that famous people have tediously familiar problems, and by this point in his career, Sherlock Holmes could not be bothered with any cases but those that most appealed to him. A connoisseur often finds him- or herself drawn away from the commonplace, excellent as it may be, and into the more unexpected or eccentric reaches of the area of expertise; that description surely applies here.

Insofar as I can determine, the bones of Ms. Russell's narrative would stand: The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was most emphatically a real person, a true and unexpected British eccentric: an academic romancer, a gullible skeptic, a man both cold and passionate. With more sides to his personality than the Kohinoor has facets, he went his brilliant and self-centered way, ruling his family and his Devonshire manor with an air of distracted authority, setting off whenever the fancy struck him out onto Dartmoor, up to London, or over to the Continent. His wife, Grace, must have been a saint of God—although to Baring-Gould's credit, it would appear that he was aware of it.

The mind-boggling scope of his ninety prolific years (150 books, fifty of them fiction) exists for the most part in the dustier reaches of library storage vaults throughout the world, from Were-Wolves and their Natural History to the relatively well known Songs of the West. For those interested in the life of this scion of a pair of illustrious stems, I would recommend, after his two volumes of memoirs (Early Reminiscences and Further Reminiscences, each of which covers thirty years of his life), either of two biographies: William Purcell's Onward Christian Soldier, or Sabine Baring-Gould, by Bickford Dickinson (who was Baring-Gould's grandson and himself rector of Lew Trenchard Church from 1961 to 1967). Further, there is a Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society ( c/o the Hon. Sec. Dr. Roger Bristow, Davidsland, Brendon Hill, Copplestone, Devon EX17 5NX, England) where, for the princely sum of six pounds sterling per annum, one will receive three newsletters and the fellowship of a number of Right-Thinking people. And if the reader wishes to add a dimension to his or her appreciation of Baring-Gould by becoming an auditor, an audiotape comprising a sparkling selection of the Devonshire folk songs collected by Baring-Gould, along with excerpts from his writings and memoirs, may be found through The Wren Trust, 1 St. James Street, Okehampton, Devon, EX20 1DW, England.

As an additional curious note, when another of Sabine Baring-Gould's grandsons, the equally brilliant and multifaceted William Stuart Baring-Gould, came to write his famous biography of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (which he called Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective), he seems to have turned to his grandfather's Early Reminiscences as a source of raw material from which he might construct Holmes' early childhood (about which, admittedly, nothing whatsoever is actually known). W. S. Baring-Gould changed only the dates; the rest, from the father's injury that discharged him from the Indian Army and his subsequent passion for Continental travel that led to family life in a carriage, the boy's early archaeological passion and his sporadic education, and even the names of the ships on which the families Baring-Gould and Holmes sailed from England, bear a truly remarkable similarity.

***

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould died on January 2, 1924, twenty-six days short of his ninetieth birthday, bare weeks after the events described in this book. It pleases me to think that when he left his body, which lies beside Grace's at the feet of Lew Trenchard Church, he did so secure in the knowledge that his beloved moor was safe from the worst torments of the twentieth century. I like to think that he died happy. Most of all, I want to believe that, all rumor to the contrary notwithstanding, he breathed the air of his moor one last time before he died.

—Laurie R. King

Freedom, California

St. Swithin's Day 1997

I'm going, I reckon, full mellow

To lay in the churchyard my head;

So say, God be with you, old fellow,

The last of the singers is dead.