Death Comes to Dartmoor

by Vivian Conroy

Her breathing caught. He looked just like the man who had approached her the previous night.

  “Hurry!” she exclaimed. “We must get over there as quickly as we can.” She broke into a half trot.

  Bowsprit came after her at once. “What is the matter?” His voice was tense, having lost the playfulness of his exchange with Lamb.

  “That man is the one who spoke to me last night. He seems to have known my mother. He came to Harcombe Tor, so he must know that it’s important somehow. I need to speak with him.”

  “No.” Bowsprit caught her arm. “Let’s not go farther.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “His lordship thinks it best if you do not get involved with the past.”

  Merula halted and gaped at Bowsprit. “His lordship thinks it best? Why? What does he know? My past is my past, and I can get involved with it when I want to. If you do not wish to accompany me, then turn back.”

  Pulling her arm free from his grasp, she raced on, ignoring his protests.

  What did Raven think? That he was her brother or her guardian? That he could decide everything for her? He hadn’t even seen the man properly last night. He had not been able to judge what kind of man he was. He had to suppose the man was somehow bad, else he wouldn’t have wanted to keep her away from him, she conjectured. But he had no right. This meant the world to her. She would push on now.

  She expected Bowsprit to overtake her and argue with her again, perhaps even try to stop her by force. He was a strong man and fiercely loyal to his master, taking his orders and not wanting to fail him. Surely Bowsprit wouldn’t want to return to Raven and tell him he had let her go to the forbidden prospect anyway?

  Why had Raven even supposed she would meet the man from last night again? Why had he discussed the matter with Bowsprit, who had not been present for the meteor gazing at Gorse Manor?

  What was going on?

  Merula lowered her speed, if only because she was panting and unable to continue as she had. Bowsprit wasn’t coming, and when she looked back over her shoulder, she saw him and Lamb far behind, speaking with each other as if they were still bickering about the hat and Ben Webber.

  Merula felt half glad, half disappointed that he was so easily distracted and not further attempting to persuade her to see things his way. But then, she was free now to do what she wanted.

  Near the tor, the two women had wandered down a path, looking at the ground as if they were searching for something. One of them carried a book in her hand. Were they studying the legend of the will in blood, interested in those riches Bowsprit had just mentioned?

  The man stood leaning on a branch he had picked up to use as a walking cane. His hat with a small feather was shoved to the back of his head. He looked casual, a tourist enjoying the scenery.

  Merula came upon him quickly, from behind, appearing by his side. He turned his head to her, a smile on his lips that died when he saw who she was. His eyes widened a moment, and his nostrils flared like those of a horse that discerns an adder on the path in front of him. “You!” he cried.

  “Yes, it’s me. I came to see the tor. But you are here as well. You must have known it was my mother’s favorite place to come.” Merula was just guessing here, but she had to open the conversation and quickly, before Bowsprit remembered his duties to Raven and came after her to drag her away.

  “This wasn’t a favorite place of hers.” The man shook his head. “She never liked this wide open land. She loved the bustle of the city.”

  “Then why did she come here?”

  “Because he was here; for what other reason?” The man held her gaze. “She would have followed him to the ends of the earth.”

  “My father?”

  The man didn’t respond. He studied her closely, his eyes roaming her face with a half-sad expression. “You are very much like her.”

  “How can that be? I have a photograph of her at home, on my dressing table, and in that she doesn’t look like me at all.”

  The man held her gaze a moment, as if he was coming to some sort of decision. Then he reached into his pocket and produced a leather wallet such as held valuable papers or bonds. He opened it and reached into the depths of it, pulling out something with a careful, almost tender touch.

  It was half of a photograph. The woman in the image looked as if the sunlight was in her face: a mild frown across her eyes, her head held to the side a little. Her dress was simple but elegant with embroidery. Light in sharp contrast with her dark hair.

  Merula gasped as she saw how alike were her own exuberant hair and strong features. The mouth, the chin …

  She looked up at the man. “Why are you carrying this photograph?”

  “It’s a keepsake of happier days.”

  “It’s but a half. Where is the other half? Who was in it?”

  He returned the photograph to his wallet and put that in his pocket. “You look like your mother and you sound like your mother. Determined to have things her way. But it ended badly for her, and I do not wish for you to have that same experience.”

  He looked past her and called out to the women, “Careful, ladies, stay on the dirt path. The moors can be soggy.” Without looking at Merula, he continued, “They’re interested in plants. I take them to places where they can see them. In the past, Cranley was hardly a tourist attraction, but with the railroad opening up this area, there are ever more city people eager to explore the moors. Some come for birds, others for old burial sites. There are rumors some graves hold great riches in gold or jewelry.”

  “The kistvaens?” Merula asked.

  He narrowed his eyes. “You’re here to look for them as well? You should be aware that it seems to have ended badly for those who have found such graves and appropriated something from them.”

  Merula frowned. The books in Oaks’s room. Had he wanted to find such graves? Or had he discovered that others were after them?

  And how might Tillie fit into all of it?

  “Looking for sundew, though, should be quite harmless,” the man observed. “It earns me some extra money on the side to make it through yet another summer.”

  “So you’ve been coming here for a longer time. Ever since you met my mother? Was she interested in plants as well? I love plants and animals. I also love to sketch and draw. Was she creative? Am I like her inside as well as out?”

  The questions tumbled out in Merula’s eagerness to learn something, anything.

  But the man stared at the ground, poking into the sand with his cane.

  Merula pressed, “If you say this is to earn money on the side, it means looking for plants is not your real profession. What do you do, then? Where are you staying?”

  He looked at her now and smiled. “No, no. I’m not telling you anything by which you might be able to find me again. It was my mistake to address you last night. You must forgive me for that.”

  She waited for a further explanation, but he didn’t give one. His features were guarded, his mouth a tight line.

  The chilly wind still breathed upon Merula, but inside of her a cold fear was much worse, fear that he would disappear again as he had the previous night, taking with him any answers he might have about her parents. She had never been this close to a discovery before. “You were at Mr. Bixby’s party,” she said quickly. “Are you a friend of his?”

  “Hardly.”

  The bitterness in that one word couldn’t be overlooked. Merula stepped closer to him, lowering her voice. “Is Mr. Bixby somehow a dangerous man? I heard of a murder here recently. A girl from Cranley who served as—”

  She fell silent as he turned his eyes on her, glaring at her with strange fire. “Murder? What is that to you? Leave this place as soon as you can. It’s not a happy place. It never was.”

  “The man I’m staying with is locked up for the murder. The victim was his servant girl, but I don’t think he’s guilty. We must help him to get free again.”

  “We?” the man queried.

  “Lord Raven Roys
ton and I. We’ve solved a murder before. You may have read about it in the newspapers. The butterfly conspiracy?”

  The man studied her with a frown. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I remember now. Your mother had a sister who was married to a man called DeVeere. That’s why I recognized the name when I read about this conspiracy. I couldn’t remember, though, where I had heard it. It’s all a long time ago.”

  Still he carried her mother’s photograph in his wallet. The edges were worn, as if it had been handled many times over the years. “Do you know why my mother parted with me? Why she didn’t keep me?”

  “How could she keep you when she was dead?”

  Merula stepped back. Despite having heard all her life that her parents were dead, she had never truly believed it. Because of the secrecy, she had guessed they were still alive and she was just not allowed to know about them. She had secretly imagined herself finding them someday, being reunited with them. Being able to ask them all her questions.

  Or just fall into their arms.

  And now this prospect was swept away from her, carried off on the violent wind that streaked the moor. Her mother was dead.

  The man reached out and touched her arm, supported her. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I thought you knew. But you stagger as if you’re hearing this for the first time.”

  “It has been told to me. But I never wanted to believe it.” She hung her head, her eyes full of tears. “I hoped that …” Her voice cracked.

  “I’m sorry,” the man repeated. “I cannot make it any better for you. She died.”

  “When?”

  “Shortly after you were born.”

  “Did …” Merula’s throat constricted, and she could barely speak. “Did she love me? Did she want to keep me? If she had not died …”

  The man didn’t reply. Merula looked up at him, caught the glimpse of compassion in his eyes. She pulled away from him, reeling with this new blow. “She didn’t love me. She didn’t want me. She wanted to get rid of me. Even if she had lived, she would have sent me to Aunt Emma to care for me.”

  He didn’t deny it.

  Tears ran down Merula’s cheeks. She wanted to beat this man or beat the ground or run away screaming until the pressure on her chest grew less. Her mother had never wanted a child, had never cared for her, had just thought up a way to get rid of her and live her life again. To follow the man she had loved?

  The man spoke through gritted teeth, “I’m sorry that I came over to you last night. I shouldn’t have done that. I had drunk too much, and it made me sentimental. Longing for times which are over and done with. It’s just that … you are so like her.”

  For a moment, there was a hunger in his face, a need for those old times he referred to, to bring them back to life. “I was selfish. I thought it couldn’t hurt to speak with you and see her likeness in your features, the way in which you suddenly break into a smile or look pensive, like you want to understand the workings of the world. She wanted to understand them too. A party like the one last night would have been perfect to her mind. Stargazing, discussing the infinity of the universe.”

  The bitterness returned to his expression. “She was always walking with her head in the clouds. Ignoring the reality of life. She believed things had a way of working themselves out. Well, they did, but not the way she had hoped for.”

  He clenched the cane he held. “I shouldn’t have approached you. Or, just now, I should have denied being the same man you talked to last night. In a way, I am a different man. My head was light then and my heart full of the colors she painted for me when she was still alive.”

  The breathless quality of his voice touched Merula deep inside, conjuring up images of wonderful artwork created by the mother she had never known. Her own sketches were tolerable, perhaps even showing a bit of talent. A link with the past?

  The man said, “But this morning I am sober, and everything inside is gray and stone cold like this barren land.” He gestured around him. “That is what is tangible and real. No fantasy induced by too much good port.”

  He focused on her with his flaming eyes. “There’s no happiness in this encounter, Miss Merriweather. Either for you or me. I shouldn’t have told you anything.”

  “On the contrary,” Merula managed to say. “This is a good day for me. Now I will learn to embrace reality. To accept that my parents never cared for me and abandoned me. To accept even that Aunt Emma was right when she told me, over and over, not to ask questions and not to seek out the truth about the past. She said it wouldn’t make me happy, and she was right.”

  Wistfully, she added, “She usually is.”

  Dear Aunt Emma, who always imagined that the worst would happen. Who wanted to wrap her daughter, Julia, and Merula in tissue paper to keep them away from all the hardship in the world. From even knowing about the darker sides of life.

  Merula wasn’t sure Aunt Emma’s attitude was the best to take. But at least it came from a good heart.

  The man didn’t respond. He took deep breaths as he stood there quietly beside her.

  She looked at his face through her tears. “You are angry,” she concluded, half surprised. What had seemed bitterness at first, or regret, was now something different altogether. “You are so angry that if there was something here you could throw and break, you would do it.”

  As he kept silent, she continued, wiping at her tears impatiently, “Why are you angry? At me? My mother? Aunt Emma, perhaps, for telling me what she has? It has not been much.”

  “At myself.” He smiled sadly at her. “I was the one who wrote the letter to your aunt.”

  “What letter? There was a letter?” Merula’s head reeled. “Aunt Emma only ever told me I had been left with them and that the pendant …”

  “The pendant?” His eyes flashed. “You saw the pendant? Of course. That brought you here. To this tor.” He spat the last word as if it was utterly despicable. As if he carried a deep-seated hatred against this very place.

  Merula reached up and produced the pendant from under her neckline.

  He stared at it. “You are wearing it? Why?”

  “Because it is all I have of her. Of them. A connection to them, to the past.”

  As Merula spoke and saw the confusion in his eyes and a new flash of anger, she continued, hesitantly, feeling her way into this new thought that had struck her. “But you just said to me that she didn’t like this land. She didn’t like this place, so why would she have made a pendant of the tor and worn it and … This was never hers.”

  The women who had been studying the ground came walking back, waving at the man.

  “I have to leave,” he said. “I must guide them further to look for the rare species they are after. I don’t even know all of their Latin names, only the places where they are likely to grow. I’m not as educated as they are, perhaps not even as you are. I wager you know the Latin names of plants. If you solved this butterfly conspiracy … Were there not members of the Royal Zoological Society involved?”

  “Tell me what the pendant means.” Merula grasped his arm. “It refers to this tor. To this place. Did they meet here? Were they married here?” It seemed unlikely, as the tor didn’t have special meaning for couples. It was the place of a duel between two men vying for a single woman who had both died. “Please tell me anything,” she pleaded desperately. “Anything other than that …”

  My mother never loved me. She never wanted me.

  He shook his head. “I cannot change the past. I did then what I believed was right. I wanted you to be happy. I believed that a family life would be best for you, not this … wandering existence. Perhaps I was wrong. If so, forgive me.”

  He held her gaze a moment, and his smile became deeper, warmer. “Forgive me.”

  Then he pulled himself away and went to meet the women. The one with the book held it out to him, open at some page on which she wanted to point out something to him.

  Merula stood, the tears cold on her cheeks under the win
d that raced across the moors and hit into the tor as if trying to beat it to the ground. The man met the ladies, spoke with them about the book, then gestured at the tor as if explaining something. Was he a local guide, an expert on Dartmoor lore? But he had said this work was extra. To get him through another summer.

  What had he meant about a wandering existence?

  Why had he been angry, and why did he still carry the photograph of her mother in his pocket? After so many years …

  “There we are.” Bowsprit stood beside her. He wanted to say more, but his eyes narrowed as he studied her face, detected the tears on her cheeks. “His lordship was right,” he said tightly. “This can only make you unhappy. I should have stopped you.”

  “No!” Merula almost struck at him. “You’re all the same. Men trying to decide what is best for me. Because I am a girl, weak, fanciful, not able to fend for myself. But I do want to know the truth. Even if it hurts.”

  She pushed past him and walked back in the direction from which they had come. There was no point in going after the man, as he was with company and he wouldn’t tell her any more anyway. He had been so emphatic about already having said too much. But she now knew a few things. These women were here to study plants. They had to be staying somewhere. At a hotel? With friends?

  Whatever way, she would track them. She would track him.

  Via Bixby, who had invited him to his party. That meant he knew who the man was.

  She didn’t care what others thought. What Raven thought. If he approved. If not, then so be it. She wanted to know more. Needed to know more.

  If she didn’t discover the full truth about her birth, her mother, father, the abandonment, she’d die inside.

  She felt like it had started already.

  CHAPTER 12

  “I told you not to let her go after that man!” Raven’s voice carried through the door into the corridor.

  Merula stood motionless, fascinated by the intensity of the anger quivering in his words.

  “I tried to stop her, my lord, but she would not listen. I could hardly have slung her over my shoulder and carried her off.”