Death Comes to Dartmoor

by Vivian Conroy

  Merula flushed. “I did sleep, but I had nightmares about everything that happened. I kept dreaming of this deserted beach where in the distance fires burned. I was looking for someone, but the sand dragged me down, sucking me in, first to the ankles, then the knees, then the waist.”

  She shivered as the terrible feeling of being caught, trapped, enveloped her again, taking her breath away.

  With a concerned look, Bowsprit handed her a cup of coffee. “Better drink something hot. And then after you speak with the blacksmith, we can go for a walk? Get some fresh air. See some places.”

  Merula clenched the cup. “Do you know this area? You’ve been telling us so much about it. Have you been here before with Raven?”

  Bowsprit shook his head. “I haven’t been here before with his lordship. But I have been here before as a lad. We played on the moors all day long. Climbed the tors and tried to find a smuggler’s hide.”

  Merula held her breath a moment. “Do you know Harcombe Tor?”

  “Yes. Its strange shape is visible from afar.”

  “Could you take me there?”

  Bowsprit narrowed his eyes. “What do you want to do there? It’s just an abandoned hill. There’s nothing special to see.”

  “I want to see it and draw it. I’ll get my notebook and pencils. We can also take Lamb. We must not … indulge her infatuation with Mr. Webber too much.”

  Bowsprit’s brows drew together. “You do not approve of him?”

  “I’m merely concerned about her attaching herself to a man in this place where we’re staying for a little while. She’ll have to come back to London with us, and what then?”

  “Perhaps she won’t be coming back to London with us.”

  Merula stared at Bowsprit. “Why do you say that? She has just met this man. She has worked with my family for over a year. She knows me, us. Why …?”

  Bowsprit sighed. “Feelings change people. My captain always warned us when we came to port somewhere not to go with the local women. He said he had witnessed dozens of cases where the locals killed a sailor because they believed he had been too free with their women. Still, the men saw pretty faces and they were lonely, far away from home. I once barely managed to save a lad pursued by an angry mob who wanted to knife him. The experience changed him for a while until another pretty face came along. You cannot help it.”

  “But I can help it,” Merula said firmly, “and Lamb is coming back to London with us. If she believes Webber cares for her, then he must write letters to her for a few months, a year at the least, and then if their feelings are still strong, we can see.”

  Bowsprit smiled. “You don’t want to lose her. You value her.”

  “I don’t want to lose her to a man who may not be worthy of her. Wait. What’s that sound?”

  Peering out the window, Merula saw a sturdy brown pony approaching the house, laboring under the weight of the blacksmith. Although he wasn’t tall, his figure was stocky and his arms covered with muscle cords, probably from the work he earned his living with. “There’s Tillie’s father,” she said to Bowsprit. “I’ll go down to meet him,”

  “Remember that he was in the crowd who came out here to burn this place down. You never know what he might be up to.”

  “People are different when they are in a mob. They get pulled along by feelings, without thinking about the consequences. Now that he’s alone, I’m sure it’s safe to speak with him.”

  She couldn’t be sure at all, but she didn’t want Bowsprit standing right beside her listening in as she tried to address the grief-stricken man. She still hadn’t made up her mind about the best way to go about it.

  Bowsprit followed her and hovered at the front door while she went outside.

  The blacksmith jumped off his pony and looked at her with his deep-set, sad eyes. “Is Mr. Oaks around?”

  Merula was taken aback by the suggestion that the blacksmith had expected Oaks to be here. And yet he had come anyway? “No, he’s at the police station,” she said, adding hesitantly, “I thought you knew he had been arrested last night.”

  “I knew, but when I got the note asking me to come here, I assumed he had been released already. Rich people can get away with anything. They just pay up.”

  “Mr. Oaks is still at the police station. I’m sure the case will be handled with great care. They even asked a Scotland Yard inspector to come over and lead the investigation.”

  “What good will that do us? My daughter won’t come back.”

  “I’m very sorry about your daughter’s death. I don’t know Mr. Oaks well at all, but when we arrived here, he was very distraught about your daughter’s disappearance. He seemed to be afraid for her sake.”

  “For his own, you mean.” The blacksmith’s eyes flickered. “He bothered her. Don’t you think I know? She never wanted to say a bad word about him, but a father knows. First those lechers at the inn, then Mr. Oaks. A fine gentleman from the city, she called him, a real educated person.”

  He laughed softly and bitterly. “She was always one to believe the best of people. Softhearted, never saw any bad in anyone. She would have gone to meet her killer, never suspecting …”

  He drew breath, clenching his hands. “She was a silly girl, and some say she deserved to die for being so silly, but …”

  “Who says so?” Merula asked indignantly.

  “Ben Webber, of course. He’s telling everyone who wants to hear that my Tillie was too curious for her own good. That she pried among Mr. Oaks’s animals and got herself killed.”

  “How does Ben Webber know that? Has Tillie ever shown the animals to him?”

  The blacksmith shrugged. “He’s too smooth for my liking. I told Tillie time and time again not to get too friendly with him. But she never could stand him liking Fern. She might have felt that the animals made her more interesting or something.”

  He studied Merula with his bleak eyes. “Is there a horse for me to tend here? Why did you send for me?”

  “I wanted to tell you personally how sorry I am about your daughter’s death. I only heard good things about her. How kind she was and how hard she worked, also to support you after her mother’s death.”

  His jaw tightened. “I earn a good living tending to horses, making nails and tools. I didn’t need her to support me. She had to save for her own household someday. She’d get married, have children.” He wrung his hands. “All gone now. All gone.”

  Merula swallowed. “I’m very sorry about that.”

  “It can’t be helped. That’s what the doctor said when my wife was dying. I begged him, begged him, to stop the coughing and the blood that came from within, but he just said, ‘It can’t be helped.’ ”

  “Some diseases can’t be cured.”

  “He took all my money,” the blacksmith hissed. “Every time, he had another draft she might try. Eat more eggs. Try poultry. Like we could afford that! But we worked hard, Tillie and me, so she would get better. Then she died anyway. Left us behind.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “I’m sure that she didn’t want to leave you,” Merula said softly. She had assumed that in communities where living conditions were hard, illness and death were more readily accepted, but the man’s grief was raw, bordering on anger, it seemed.

  The blacksmith stared at the ground. He mumbled something to himself. Merula couldn’t quite make it out, but it sounded vaguely like, “Yes, she did.”

  The pony pushed him in the back, as if to drag him from his sad mood. The blacksmith eyed her. “If there’s no work for me to do here, I’ll be leaving again.”

  “I’ll recompense you for your time.” Merula turned to Bowsprit behind the door, gesturing at him to produce some money.

  The blacksmith seemed to waver between refusing this offer out of pride or accepting some much-needed income.

  Merula reached into the open door to accept some coins from Bowsprit, who knew it was better he stay out of sight. Turning to walk down the steps again, she saw
the blacksmith had already mounted his pony. She rushed down to give him the money. His hand was trembling as he accepted it.

  “Did Oaks’s horse really have such distinctive shoes?” Merula asked, standing beside the pony’s head. “You stated to the police you were certain that the tracks left on the riverbank beside the body were made by his horse and no other. How could you know?”

  The man held her gaze, his weathered face working as if in indecision. “Your fine Scotland Yard detective can work that out for himself. And you can keep your blood money.”

  He threw the coins down on the ground in front of Merula’s feet and turned his pony away from her. Its behind almost knocked into Merula, and she was just able to jump aside.

  Bowsprit came rushing down the steps and asked if she was well. Glaring after the rider, he groused, “There was no need for him to be so rude to you.”

  “He didn’t want to accept the money; he called it blood money.” Merula trembled as the full force of the situation sank in. “He actually thinks I was offering him a reward to change his testimony about the hoofprints left by the river.”

  She raised a hand to her face. “If he starts saying that he was invited here and I tried to give him money, people may believe Oaks is really guilty and we are bribing people to get him acquitted.”

  She breathed deep. “It was stupid of me to bring up money at all. I only wanted to recompense him for his time and effort coming out here while there was nothing for him to do. Raven’s idea that he should be away from what was familiar to him so he might open up …” She exhaled in a frustrated huff. “It didn’t work. Raven and I should have gone to his smithy anyway.”

  “If you had, some might have argued you went there to put pressure on him to change his testimony.” Bowsprit picked up the coins, rubbing them between his fingers to clean them of dirt. “In hindsight, it might have been better if we hadn’t contacted him at all. It might give a wrong impression and harm Oaks’s case.”

  Merula sighed. “Indeed. And I didn’t even learn much useful about Tillie. Just confirmation of what we already knew, that she was a kindhearted and gullible girl. What I did find odd was the mention of Ben Webber claiming Tillie had been too curious for her own good because she had pried among Oaks’s animals. How would Webber know that unless Tillie had told him? Does Webber think Tillie’s prying upset the kraken and the monster came after her? Or is there something else she discovered? We assumed earlier that she might have discovered something that caused her death. We thought it might have happened at the inn, where she could have overheard something. But what if it happened here, in the house?”

  She stared after the retreating figure of the blacksmith. “He was resentful about his wife’s death. It was years ago, I understood from what others said, and still … he blames the doctor for not curing her. That must have been the old village doctor who was in practice here. The new doctor said that his predecessor was so beloved—well, apparently, not by all.”

  Bowsprit slipped the coins into his pocket with a grave expression. “If our blacksmith can carry a grudge like that, it doesn’t bode well for Oaks. Even if the police do let him go, the blacksmith will still consider him guilty and might come after him. The old laws of an eye for an eye are very much alive here. The only way to truly clear Oaks’s name, for now and the future, is to deliver the real killer and irrefutable evidence as to his or her guilt.”

  Merula nodded. “Let us hope Raven is making some progress at the police station. But before he’s back, we have something else to do. I’ll get my things now, and we can set out for Harcombe Tor.”

  * * *

  The wind was strong across the moors, whirling around them, attacking them now from one side, then the other. Merula’s hair, although pinned up and secured under her hat, was being gradually undone, strands pulling loose and sweeping back across her face.

  Lamb, by her side, was not faring any better, at times holding on to her simple straw hat with both hands to prevent it from being torn away. The other hat, the one she had been working on, was at the house—fortunately, probably, as Merula doubted the newly attached feathers would be able to withstand this force of nature.

  Bowsprit walked vigorously, his bare head in the wind, his arms waving by his sides. His normally florid expression was now even redder from exertion and the cold swept into his cheeks by the wind. He looked about him with a keen interest, as if recalling those childhood adventures he had mentioned to Merula and reliving those summers all over again.

  Every now and then he halted to collect a bit of stone from the path and show it to Lamb, who responded without much enthusiasm. Even the heather he picked for her to dry and take home was ignored, forcing him to carry the bunch himself. The wind tore at it, but the flowers were too small to suffer damage.

  “That is Harcombe Tor,” Bowsprit called through the sizzle of air in Merula’s ears. He pointed in the distance. “The locals call it the will in blood.”

  “What?” Merula queried, certain she had misheard it.

  “The will in blood,” Bowsprit repeated. “Legend tells of two men vying for a woman’s love. They came to this tor for a duel. One of them cheated and turned before he had taken the obligatory paces. He shot the other in the back. But with his dying breath, the injured man managed to hit his cheating rival as well. Shot in the leg, the cheater couldn’t get away, so he died a slow and painful death out here on the moors. In the time left to him, he wrote his last will on the tor’s rocky face, with his own blood.”

  Lamb gasped. “Stop this terrible tale. I don’t want to hear more.”

  “He wrote that the tor was the key to his fortune,” Bowsprit continued to Merula. “Needless to say, people have flocked here ever since, digging and looking for the alleged riches. As far as I know, no one has been able to unearth anything.”

  He shrugged. “Just another tale to tell in winter at the log fire when the evenings are long.”

  “I think mine of the dead coachman thundering through London at night is much better,” Lamb said with her nose in the wind.

  The tor’s distinctive shape seemed to lure them closer. Merula’s heart beat fast at the idea that her parents had walked here, hand in hand, had admired the view, had listened to the cries of the birds. Had they been on a vacation here?

  Had they eloped here to marry?

  Was there a record of their marriage in the archives at the little church? Could she go there and ask the vicar for it?

  But was her last name, Merriweather, really her father’s name?

  And if she had so little reliable information to provide, would the vicar be willing to help her? He might suppose there was some sort of scandal at the heart of the matter and prefer to avoid association with it.

  Lamb gave a cry as one foot half sank into a puddle. Bowsprit reached out to help her upright again. “I hate this land!” Lamb vehemently declared. “It’s so … wide and lonely and it’s cold all the time. High summer, clear and sunny, it should be sweltering, but this ruddy wind is just making me shiver.”

  “Better think twice if you want to live here,” Bowsprit said, with a quick look at her.

  Lamb gaped at him. “Live here? Whoever put that into your head?”

  Bowsprit shrugged. “I don’t suppose you adorned that hat this morning to show it off to the larks. But this land is lonely and the word ruddy not appropriate for a young lady who’s looking up.”

  “You’re a horrible man.” Lamb’s cheeks were flaming now. “Nosy too. Worse than Heartwell at home.”

  Merula suppressed a grin. Heartwell was her family’s butler and a man who longed to know every little thing there was to know. He listened at doors, held letters over lamps to try to read the contents through the envelope, peeked into ledgers whenever one was left open somewhere. As he had keys to all rooms and cupboards, he could go everywhere and just “happen to notice” something.

  In his essence, he was a decent man, who kept a tight rein on the footmen, ensuring
they were not dallying with the maids, and seeing to everyone having fair wages and their days off. He never struck out in anger, didn’t drink, and didn’t threaten to leave as soon as something didn’t meet with his approval, as some butlers did to increase their value. His curiosity was his only vice.

  “I daresay,” Bowsprit retorted, looking hurt, “that I am not at all like Heartwell. I didn’t have to spy to see you with the hat. The rest is mere deduction.”

  “Deduction?” Lamb scoffed. “The whole case with Lady Sophia went to your head. You think you’re some kind of detective. But you’re all wrong about me.”

  “Oh.” Bowsprit kicked against a stone. “So you’re not going to wear that hat while we are here?”

  “Of course I’m going to wear it. That’s why I changed it.” Lamb huffed with indignation. “I can wear anything I want without having to ask your permission for it.”

  Merula decided it was time to intervene and pointed at the tor. “Do you also see people at the tor? Or am I mistaken?”

  Bowsprit reached into his pocket and produced field glasses. He held them out to Merula. “You can have a closer look.”

  “How did you get those?” Lamb asked with wide eyes. “Did you take them from Mr. Oaks’s drawer?”

  “Like you took the feathers from his specimens?”

  “Not at all. How dare you!” Lamb stamped her foot, dirt flying up at her dress. The mud attached itself to the fabric in several places, forming ugly brownish smudges.

  Lamb cried out in frustration. “Now see what you’ve done!”

  She leaned down to brush the dirt away, but Bowsprit grabbed her elbow. “It’s wet. First let it dry up, and then you can easily brush it off with a soft brush. If you start rubbing at it now, the smudges will be lasting.”

  Lamb gave him a look as if she didn’t believe a word he said, but still she didn’t brush at the dirt again.

  Merula took the field glasses and held them to her eyes. She had to adjust them a moment to focus on the tor. Then she saw it better. There were people there. Two women and a man. The man looked like …