The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor

by Laurie R. King

  “On the night of Saturday, the fifteenth of September, Gorton was seen walking north past Watern Tor. You did study those maps you brought down, I presume?”

  “Not studied, no. I glanced at a couple of them.”

  “You didn’t?” He sounded amazed and more than a bit disapproving. “What on earth were you doing all that time on the train?”

  “Reading,” I said evenly. I actually had deliberately buried myself in the most arcane piece of theological history I could lay my hands upon, as a protest and counterbalance to the forces pulling me to Devonshire. In retrospect, it seemed a bit childish, but I bristled when Holmes gave me that look of his.

  “Reading,” he repeated in a flat voice. “Wasting your time, Russell, with theological speculation and airy-fairy philosophising when there is work to be done.”

  “The work is yours, Holmes, not mine—I only agreed to bring you the maps. And the speculation of Jewish philosophers is as empirical as any of your conclusions.”

  His only reply was a scornful examination of his pipe-bowl.

  “Admit it, Holmes,” I pressed. “The only reason you so denigrate Talmudic studies is sheer envy over the fact that others perfected the art of deductive reasoning centuries before you were even born.”

  He did not deign to answer, which meant that the point was irrefutably mine, so I drove home my advantage: “And besides that, Holmes, what I was reading does actually have some bearing on this case—or at least on its setting. Were you aware that in the seventeenth century Moorish raiders came as far as the coasts of Devon and Cornwall, taking slaves? Why, Baring-Gould might have relatives in Spain today.”

  He did not admit defeat, but merely applied another match to his pipe and resumed the previous topic. “You must study the maps at the earliest opportunity. Watern Tor, since you do not know, is in a remote area in the northern portion of the moor. Gorton was seen there, heading west, on a Saturday evening, yet on the following Monday morning, thirty-six hours later, he was found miles away in the opposite direction, passed out in a drunken stupor in a rain-swollen leat on the southern reaches. He had a great lump on the back of his head and bog weeds in his hair, although there are no bogs in the part of the moor where he was found. He died a few hours later of his injuries and a fever, muttering all the while about his long, silent ride in Lady Howard’s carriage. He also said,” Holmes added in the driest of voices, “that Lady Howard had a huge black dog.”

  “Huh,” I grunted. “And did the dog have glowing eyes?”

  “Gorton neglected to say, and he was in no condition to respond to questions. There was one further and quite singular piece of testimony, however.”

  I eyed him warily, mistrusting the sudden jauntiness of his manner. “Oh yes?”

  “Yes. The farmer who found Gorton, and the farmer’s strapping son who helped carry the old miner to the house and fetched a doctor, both swear that in the soft ground beside the body, there were clear marks pressed firmly into the earth.” I was hit by a cold jolt of apprehension. “The two men have become fixtures in the Saracen’s Head, telling and retelling the story of how they found Gorton’s body surrounded by—”

  “No! Oh no, Holmes, please.” I put up my hand to stop his words, unable to bear what I could hear coming, a thundering evocation of one of the most extravagant phrases Conan Doyle ever employed. “Please, please don’t tell me that ‘on the ground beside the body, Mr Holmes, there were the footprints of a gigantic hound.’”

  He removed his pipe from his mouth and stared at me. “What on earth are you talking about, Russell? I admit that I occasionally indulge in a touch of the dramatic, but surely you can’t believe me as melodramatic as that.”

  I drew a relieved breath and settled back in my chair. “No, I suppose not. Forgive me, Holmes. Do continue.”

  “No,” he continued, putting the stem of his pipe back into place. “I do not believe it would be possible to distinguish a hound’s spoor from that of an ordinary dog—not without a stretch of ground showing the animal’s loping stride. These were simply a confusion of prints.”

  “Do you mean to tell me …” I began slowly.

  “Yes, Russell. There on the ground beside the body of Josiah Gorton were found”—he paused to hold out his pipe and gaze in at the bowl, which seemed to me to be drawing just fine, before finishing the phrase—“the footprints of a very large dog.”

  I dropped my head into my hands and left it there for a long time while my husband sucked in quiet satisfaction at his pipe.

  “Holmes,” I said.

  “Yes, Russell.”

  “I am going to bed.”

  “A capital idea,” he replied.

  And so we did.

  3

  Oh! these architects! how I detest them for the mischief

  they have done. I should like to cut off their hands.

  —FURTHER REMINISCENCES

  IT RAINED ALL that night, a quiet, steady rhythm that soothed me into a sleep so sound that, although I woke briefly in the early morning to the click and murmur of hot water pushing its way through cold radiator pipes, I went back to sleep, and did not wake fully until nearly eight o’clock. Finding to my satisfaction that the dawn noises had not been an hallucination, I bathed and dressed—in trousers, despite my host’s sensibilities—and put up my hair, before making my way downstairs.

  At the foot of the stairs I paused and listened. The old house was content in its restored warmth but utterly silent; I could not even hear the rain. I took the opportunity to explore the various rooms we had bypassed the night before, finding, among other things, an airy, light-blue-and-white ballroom of wedding-cake splendour, lacking only a cob-webbed dinner service and Miss Havisham to complete the picture of merriment and life abruptly suspended by the years. I did no more than stand inside the door, feeling no wish to examine the intricate plaster-work more closely, and I could not help wondering if Baring-Gould ever came into this room. I backed out, closing the door silently.

  Back in the hall, I paused to examine the fireplace carving that Baring-Gould had commended to me the night before. It depicted a hunt, a parade of hounds with their tails curled energetically over their backs, pursuing a fox, who had abandoned bits and pieces of the goose he had stolen and was now making for what looked like a pineapple. I puzzled over it for a while, and then went back towards the stairway and then into the dining room, where I discovered a pot of coffee bubbling gently into sludge over a warming flame, a mound of leathery eggs similarly kept warm, some cold toast, and three strips of flabby bacon. I poured a tiny amount of boiled coffee essence and a large amount of lovely yellow milk into a cup and walked over to the window.

  Outside lay a small paved courtyard, deserted of life and leaves and with an arched walkway along the opposite side that looked like either a cloister or a row of almshouses. I went through a doorway and found the back stairway, and another doorway that opened into the kitchen, at the moment deserted although I could hear a woman’s voice raised in harangue at a distance. I retreated, retracing my steps past the staircase to another door, and there I found host and husband in a large cluttered room lined with bookshelves and brightened by a number of tall windows that gathered in the light even on a grey day like this. The two of them were standing with their heads together and their elbows resting on top of a small, high, sloping writing table, across which had been draped an Ordnance Survey map.

  My first impression on seeing the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould by light of day was that schoolboys and sinners alike must have found him terrifying. Even now at the edges of his tenth decade, with his thin white hair brushed over a mottled scalp, his back bent, and his face carved into deep lines, he struck one as a powerful source of disapproval and judgement, searching out wearily the misdeeds that a long lifetime had proven to him must invariably lie before him. He was a man who had seen a great deal in his eighty-nine years, and approved of little of it.

  Oddly, he was wearing two pairs of spectacles,
one of them pushed up into his hair, the other on his nose. Seeing me at the door, he shoved the second pair up to join the first and straightened his back. He took in my trousers, and his face went even more sour.

  “Good morning, Miss Russell. My friend here tells me that you prefer that peculiar form of address over the ‘Mrs’ to which you are entitled.”

  “Er, yes, I do. Thank you. Good morning, Mr Baring-Gould. Good morning, Holmes.”

  “I see you found Mrs Elliott’s breakfast,” Baring-Gould stated, seeing the cup I still held.

  “I found it, yes.”

  His old eyes beneath their remarkably rounded brows sharpened. “Inedible?” he asked.

  “It’s all right,” I hastened to say. “I often just take coffee in the morning.”

  “Ask Mrs Elliott if you want something. I did tell her,” he said in an aside to Holmes. “The only time the woman uses those chafing dishes is when there are twenty eggs to keep warm and a gallon of coffee. Was the coffee boiled away?” he shot at me.

  “Almost, yes. I snuffed out the flame as I came through.”

  “Never mind, she’ll be making more shortly. When there are guests in the house she produces meals eighteen hours a day, and she’ll be anxious to make up for the first impression you had of her household. Women are quite mad when it comes to hospitality.”

  I bit down hard on my tongue, though truth to tell I wouldn’t have known quite where to start. Holmes made a noise deep in his throat that was not quite a cough, and hastily returned to the map. I took a swallow of my coffee-flavoured milk and turned my back on the two men to peruse the books on the walls, stopping to remove one from time to time and glance into it.

  “So, judging by this,” Holmes said, continuing the conversation that had broken off with my entrance, “Josiah Gorton might readily have been brought from the place where he was last seen down to where he was found, without a soul seeing it.”

  “Oh yes, easily, by anyone who knows the moor.”

  “How intimate a knowledge would be required?”

  “I should have thought a week or two of wandering might do it. That and a good map.”

  “It’s a great pity, Gould, that I could not come at the time. The body might have told many tales.”

  The old man made no polite effort to excuse Holmes his preoccupation, although he admitted, “I was not informed myself until after he had been prepared for burial. If you wish to speak with the women who laid his body out, I can give you their names.”

  “I may do, later. Now tell me, where was this dog-and-carriage apparition seen? This is another reference to a local folktale, Russell,” he explained. I looked up from the encyclopaedia article on pineapples that I was reading. “A particularly difficult local noblewoman—”

  “Noble by marriage only,” inserted Baring-Gould.

  “A woman who married a local lord,” Holmes corrected himself, “lost him, along with three other husbands, under circumstances the local populace thought suspicious, with some justification. She was never officially accused and tried, but for her sins she is said to be condemned to riding in a coach made of the bones of her dead husbands, driven by a headless horseman and led by a black hound with a single eye in the centre of his forehead. The carriage drives at midnight from the ancestral house near Tavistock up to Okehampton castle for Lady Howard to pluck one blade of grass—”

  “The hound plucks it,” Baring-Gould sternly corrected him.

  “How could a hound pluck a blade of grass?” objected Holmes.

  “I merely tell you what the story says.”

  “But a hound—”

  “Holmes,” I interrupted.

  “Oh very well, the hound plucks the grass, and not until every blade is plucked—or bitten—can Lady Howard be free to take her rest. It’s a popular story, with songs and such, that by the way probably gave Stapleton the idea for his personal variation on the so-called Baskerville hound—which does not, in the legend, actually glow. It is said, I should mention, to be highly unlucky to be offered a ride in the coach, and certain death actually to enter in with Lady Howard.”

  “So I should imagine,” I murmured.

  “At any rate, Russell, the point is that Lady Howard and her hound have been seen on the moor.”

  During Holmes’ recitation, Baring-Gould, pausing occasionally to correct Holmes, had gone to a cupboard in the corner and returned with a very large, heavily worn, rolled-up map, which he now spread out across the worktable on top of the other. This one was of a smaller scale, the Ordnance Survey’s one-inch map—although I saw, looking more closely at it, that it actually comprised portions of four or five adjoining maps, carefully trimmed and fastened together so as to encompass the entire moor and its surrounding towns. Corrections had been made in a number of places, roads crossed out and redrawn and the names of tors and hamlets rewritten: Laughter Tor had become Lough Tor, Haytor Rocks changed to Hey Tor, Crazywell Pool was corrected to Clakeywell. The writing was cramped and sloping, undoubtedly that of Baring-Gould.

  Before Baring-Gould could begin, the door at the end of the room opened and a woman with iron-grey hair and an iron-hard face put her head inside.

  “Pardon me, Rector,” she said, “but you wanted me to tell you when the Harpers came in.”

  “The Harpers? Oh yes. Would you feed them, Mrs Elliott, and get them settled in? I’ll not be much longer here.”

  The housekeeper nodded and began to draw back, then stopped and addressed Holmes. “You’re not tiring him, I trust,” she said, sounding threatening.

  “We are trying not to do so,” Holmes said.

  She studied her master for a minute, then withdrew.

  “Another sign of the unrest on the moor,” Baring-Gould said with a sigh. “Longtime residents, people with roots deep into the peat, pulling up and moving away. Like Josiah Gorton, Sally Harper’s father was one of my songmen. I collected two ballads and three tunes from the man, oh, it must be nearly thirty years ago. He gave me an alternative verse to ‘Green Broom,’ as I recall, as well as a sprightly tune, set with most unseemly words that I had to rewrite before it could be published. Sally was a blooming young thing then, and now she and her husband have had to sell off their farm up near Black Tor, a very old place with several generations of newtakes added to the original. Never had children, and although they have a bit of money from the farm sale, the house they have their eyes on near Milton Abbot isn’t ready yet. I felt I ought to help out, and it’ll only be for a few days. Hard to believe it was that many years ago. Where were we? Yes, Josiah Gorton.”

  He bent closely over the fine lines of the map, squinting for a moment until he had his bearings, and his long, gnarled finger came down in the upper left quadrant of the map, tracing an uneven line down to the lower right.

  “This is the most likely route for Gorton to have taken,” he said, which, I realised to my surprise, was for my sake, not that of Holmes, who had already been over the route. He then drew his hand back and put it down a short distance from where he had started. “And here is the place Lady Howard’s coach was seen, on the night Gorton disappeared.” This was, judging by the few roads and fewer dwellings, one of the most deserted areas of the entire moor, a place thick with the Gothic script mapmakers use to indicate antiquities: hut circles, stone rows, stone avenues, tumuli, and ancient trackways, as well as an ominous scattering of those grass-tuft symbols that indicate marshland. There were no orange roads for miles, or even the hollow lines of minor roads, only densely gathered contour lines, numerous streams, and the markings for “rough pasture.” A howling wilderness indeed.

  What was a kistvaen? I wondered, seeing the word on the map, but Holmes spoke before I could ask.

  “Who on earth was out in that wasteland to see a spectral coach?” he demanded.

  “It is not a wasteland, Holmes,” Baring-Gould corrected him sharply. “Merely sparsely populated. A farmworker saw it. He was benighted on his way home from a wedding.”

&nb
sp; “Why does that say ‘Artillery Range’?” I interrupted without thinking.

  I felt two sets of disapproving male eyes boring into me, and did not look up from the map.

  “Because,” said Baring-Gould, addressing me as if I were a regrettably slow child, “the army uses it to practice with their guns. A fair portion of the moor is given over to them during the summer months, and is therefore off limits to the rambler and antiquarian. They do post the firing schedules at various places around the moor, and they are scrupulous about mounting the red warning flags, but it is really most inconvenient of them.”

  I sympathised, but privately I could see why the army should want to make use of Dartmoor: There was probably less life to disturb in that handsbreadth of the map than on any other English ground south of Hadrian’s Wall. Even the mapmakers seemed to have tired of the exercise before they penetrated to the middle, for most of the Gothic markings were along the edges. Or perhaps primitive man found the centre of the place too daunting even for him, I reflected. I suppressed a shiver.

  “A farmworker on his way home from a celebration might not be considered the best of witnesses,” Holmes noted drily, returning to the subject at hand. “How much had he drunk?”

  “Quite a bit,” Baring-Gould had to admit.

  Holmes’ only comment was with his eyebrows, but that was enough. He bent to study the map for a moment, then turned to a familiar packet, selected a map, and spread it with a flourish over the top of Baring-Gould’s marked-up old sheet. He then withdrew a fountain pen from his breast pocket.

  “The sighting of the coach around the time Gorton was last seen was here, would you say?”