“Here, Holmes,” I quavered.
“I believe we will find a farmhouse just over the next hill. I can hear a cow and some chickens.”
“I still can’t see, Holmes.”
“Nor can I, Russell. Still, I suppose we’ll manage. Give me your hand.”
Willingly, I did so, and followed him through the unseen landscape.
We might have made faster time on our hands and knees but our pride and the sodden state of the ground kept us from it. The cold breath of the moor pressed in on us like the tool of a deliberate and watchful living thing, trapping us, trying us, seeing if it could force us to break and run madly to our destruction. Had I not possessed Holmes’ hand, the god Pan might have taken me, leading me astray to the trickling sound of his pipe.
Little more than a mile it was, but for almost an hour we stumbled through the gloom, visited occasionally by the sharp terror of a looming figure, which would turn out to be a standing stone, grey and lugubrious, or a fence post, indistinguishable from the monument. The final of these came after we had found a wall and were patting our way separately and at a greater speed. Abruptly out of the murk there emerged the stark outline of a soul in torment: a thin figure as tall as a man, stubby arms outstretched, head thrown back in a frozen shriek to the heavens. My heart gave a great thud inside my chest, and settled down to a fast thumping only when I realized that I was looking at a moorland cross. Holmes could hardly have missed my gasp, but he said nothing, only the welcome words a moment later, “I believe this is the gate to the farmyard.”
Such proved to be the case, when we approached a tiny, heavily lichened stone building in a hollow of ground. We had even timed it well, because the farmer and his hired man were at the table for their noonday dinner. The farmwife was startled to see us approach her door, but she soon rallied, explaining that she was quite used to the odd informal guest, although it was rare to see a rambler outside of the summer months.
I found the delicacy of her unspoken question amusing, particularly as it was couched in a nearly unintelligible dialect and put to us in a tiny, multiple-purpose room already overcrowded with humanity, two dogs, and a basket of newly hatched chicks peeping beside the inglenook fireplace that functioned as kitchen range. Who was she to question the insanity of two outsiders spilling onto her doorstep from out of the fog?
Holmes took off his hat politely, and answered her as she moved around us to fetch two more plates and the necessary cutlery and mugs to go with them.
“We’re not exactly here on a holiday stroll, madam. We heard that there was a sighting of Lady Howard’s coach not far from here, and we were eager to hear more. You see,” he said, warming to his story and taking his place on the bench and a spoon in his hand, “we collect odd tales such as that of Lady How—”
There was a sudden gurgling, clicking noise from the inglenook, emerging from what I had thought to be a pile of blankets draped across a chair to dry near the heat. I could make no sense of the sound but it silenced everyone in the room, including Holmes. The two men and the farmwife all turned to stare at Holmes, and I saw with astonishment the look of chagrin spreading across his face.
“What was that?” I demanded. “I didn’t hear.”
“He—or she, I beg your pardon,” he said to the tiny huddled figure, and started anew. “To translate, the remark was made, and I quote, ‘By Gar, who is it but Znoop Zherlock?’ ‘Snoop Sherlock’ was, I ought to explain, the nickname given me by the moor dwellers during the Baskerville case. We have here one of the older residents, evidently, who remembers me.” He extricated his long legs from the bench and went over to the pile of blankets, extending his hand towards it. A small, gnarled paw appeared, followed by another burst of unintelligible speech—badly distorted, I diagnosed, by a complete lack of teeth, but still of such a heavy dialectical peculiarity as to constitute a separate language. I had thought Harry Cleave possessed an accent; I was mistaken. In fact, I shall not even attempt to transcribe the words as they were spoken, since an alphabet soup such as “Yar! Me luvvers, you mun vale leery, you cain’t a’ ated since bevower the foggy comed” makes for laborious, if picturesque, reading.
At first hearing, the speech was beyond me, although Holmes seemed to follow the sense of it readily enough. I merely applied myself to the hot, simple food that was put before me, and drank the cider in my mug. The talk washed over me, and as the pangs of cold and hunger subsided, I slowly began to make sense of what was being said.
The folk in this isolated farmstead were indeed aware of Lady Howard’s coach, and did not like it one bit. The first witness to the apparition, back in July, had actually been a friend of the young farmhand’s second cousin, and Holmes made haste to interrogate the farmhand as to the whereabouts of his second cousin’s friend, whose euphonious name was Johnny Trelawny. It appeared, however, that Trelawny had fled the moor, despite being known far and wide as a brave man, a man indeed formerly thought fearless, who had done his service on the Western Front and to whom the occasional brawl was not unknown. There was no consideration that the intense teasing he had received during the month he remained the sole witness to Lady Howard’s coach might be a contributing factor to Trelawny’s disinclination to stay on the moor, and when Holmes enquired as to the man’s employment, and was told that Johnny had lost his job after assaulting his employer (a known wag who came up to his employee in the pub and presented him with a tiny newborn puppy, asking if Trelawny thought it had been fathered by Lady Howard’s hound), it seemed to me that fear was not perhaps the chief contributing factor in the man’s departure. When Holmes ventured to suggest this alternate explanation, it was considered, and rejected. No, moor dwellers in general were staying away from the northwestern quarter of the moor, certainly at night. Johnny Trelawny would be no exception.
Holmes succeeded in drawing out roughly the date when Trelawny had seen this vision, establishing that it was probably the Tuesday or Wednesday before the full moon. However, when he tried to find where Trelawny had gone, the only point on which the family agreed was that the lad would not have gone back to his family home in Cornwall, due to a long-standing feud with an uncle. Exeter, the farmhand thought. Portsmouth, the farmwife suggested, and then used the opportunity to begin her own tale of another lad who had got a girl in trouble and run off as far as London, but the girl’s father had taken his savings out of the jar in the woodshed to buy himself a train ticket, and as he set off across the moor on a dark night …
Stories tumbled out as the cider jug went around and the relief of confession began to be felt. Voices crossed and were raised and crossed again, with the constant running commentary of the toothless figure in the corner making a rhythm like a waterfall for the rest to talk over. Holmes had no difficulty in steering the tales towards the occult and the unusual, and out of the welter of sounds I received clear images and phrases, chief among which was a regular repetition of the phrase, “a coorius sarcumstance,” pronounced each time with a shake of the head.
I had to agree, some of the circumstances they described were “coorius” indeed; in fact, I should have said they were highly unlikely. The black dogs and the mysteriously dead sheep any student of the supernatural might have expected, along with the standard two-headed foals and the infertile clutches of eggs, but the eagle carrying off a grown ewe made me raise an eyebrow, and when the farmwife swore that a bolt of lightning had shaken the earth and knocked one of her best plates from its perch, I closed my ears and reached for the board of gorgeous yellow cheese to accompany what I decided had to be my final glass of “zyder”: England simply did not have earthquakes, not even in Dartmoor.
“Snoop Sherlock” valiantly listened to it all, trying hard to shape the conflicting narratives into hard fact of places and dates, contributing the odd remark and trying hard to deflect the inevitable spate of Baskerville reminiscences from the aged figure in the blankets. He finally brought the Babel to a close by the desperate measure of pulling out his watch and
exclaiming theatrically over the passage of time, looking pointedly at the window and declaring that the fog seemed to have cleared, and finally standing up to leave (dealing his head a mighty crack on the low roof beam). We paid generously for the food, caught up our rucksacks, and made our escape, with the farmwife’s thanks and the old woman’s voice following us out of the door and across the weedy yard.
I quickly realised that having the fog clear on Dartmoor meant a transformation into rain. Uncomfortable, but infinitely better than the fog.
WE TOOK GREATER care to avoid total immersion in our next interviews, but we need not have worried. Of the courting couple who had later seen the coach and its dog, the girl refused to say anything, just burst into melodramatic tears and collapsed into the arms of a handsome young man. We were led to understand, moreover, that this young man was not the same beau with whom she had been the night of the apparition, and in the course of ascertaining the whereabouts of the former suitor (the one whom Baring-Gould had referred to as “stolid and unimaginative”) we nearly came to blows with the current gentleman.
The rejected suitor, Thomas Westaway, lived two miles off and was happy enough to interrupt his labours on a stone wall in exchange for some silver. Avoiding as best he could the touchy issue of Westaway’s erstwhile ladylove, Holmes questioned him closely as to the precise location and times of the sighting.
The first query was settled by the lad pulling a piece of sacking cloth over his shoulders and leading us down the lane, over a stile (not a wooden contraption, merely lengths of stone protruding from the wall to form crude steps), and across a field. Built against the farther wall was a low shed, providing a sheltered feeding place for animals—and, no doubt, a sheltered private place for people. Baring-Gould’s analysis of the situation was remarkably accurate, I thought.
On the other side of the wall was a flat track, similar in shape and wear to the track we had seen at the first site, either a part of the same road or a branch leading to it.
“This is where you saw the coach, is it?” Holmes asked, leaning against the wall and taking out his pipe and tobacco.
“Right here,” young Westaway agreed. “Us heerd’y there, stood up and saw’n there, and seed ’er go by not forty feet off.”
“You saw a woman inside, then?” I asked.
“Didn’t see no one. It were fair dark inside the box.”
“But you said—”
Holmes interrupted my protest. “I believe you’ll find that the pronoun refers to the coach itself, Russell, not its occupant. Devonshire speech uses a creative approach to the gender of its pronouns.”
“I seed her, I did, glowin’ white with the bones of ’er vour ’usbands.”
“Of course,” said Holmes. “You say the carriage followed the track up and around the hill?”
“Oh yes. Acourse, we baint ’zackly seed ’er go, bein’ halfway to th’ house and all.”
“Because of the dog?”
The lad had gone pale, and now swallowed hard. “He were there, afore thicky gert stone there. He just standed and stared at us, and whined like he wanted to come over the wall at us, bevore the driver whistled him on. That’s when we ran.”
“Were there any other noises, voices perhaps?”
“Just the harnesses clatterin’ and thicky whistle. An’ the growl.”
“Growl?”
“Sort of a hiss, or maybe a rattle.”
“From the dog?”
“I z’pose,” he said dubiously. “He just sort a’ comed with th’ carriage.”
Holmes thought it over before deciding not to press further with the hissing rattling growl.
“And the horses?”
“Dark, they was,” the lad said promptly.
“Could you see whether there was one, or two?”
“Didn’t see they a’tall.”
“Then how did you know what colour they were?” Holmes asked with remarkable patience.
“Because I couldn’t see they, is how I knew they was dark.” It made sense to me, although for some reason, Holmes seemed to think the lad’s logic less than impeccable. “Heered the harnesses a-jangling something mad, though, zo there may’ve been two, even more.”
“But you did see the dog. It was light enough?”
“The moon were up, I saw her fine.”
“What time did you two come up here?”
“Just past evening chores, us …” He saw his slip too late, and looked away. “The moon waddn’ all that high, I reckon. It must’ve been still light, stays light late come August.”
“You came up here while it was still light, but the moon was up when you left,” Holmes said, completely ignoring his witness’s attempt to save face.
“I z’pose. We come to talkin’, you know?”
“I understand.”
The lad looked hard at Holmes, ready to climb on his dignity and ride away at the least sign of humour or criticism, but the expression on Holmes’ face was merely blandly expectant.
“I z’pose it was three, four hours altogether,” he admitted. “We comed up like I zaid, after evening chores, and it were vull dark when we got back. ’Cept for the moon, of course.”
“Where was the moon in the sky, when you looked over the wall and saw the dog?”
Our witness stood for a long moment, his face twisted in thought, before his hand went up to a point on the horizon. “There, more or less. It were a day or two past vull, but very bright, and it was a remarkable clear night. We’d been talking about all the ztars,” he reminisced, and then ducked his head, blushing furiously.
We carefully did not see his discomfiture, but busied ourselves with climbing over the loosely laid stone wall to the track on the other side. There were no canine footprints to be seen; however, thirty yards up the hill we found a protruding boulder, one edge of which had been scraped to raw cleanness by a sharp edge. Holmes fingered it, and looked up at the farmer’s lad.
“Has anyone been riding along here in the last months on a shod horse?”
“Why, no zur. Not that I know. Acourse, there’s no telling what vurriners will get up to, in the summers.”
“True,” Holmes said, brushing off his hands. “It would have been nice to know that we’re dealing with an actual, iron-shod horse rather than a ghostly emanation. Spectral apparitions are the devil’s own objects to lay hands upon. Still, I thank you for your time,” he said, before the lad could puzzle over his remark, and then he shook hands with the boy and gave him another coin. But before we parted, he gave the young man something else as well.
“Look, lad,” he said confidentially. “I shouldn’t worry too much about the girl. Best to find out now how undependable she is, instead of later, when there are children underfoot. No, you look around for a woman with brains and spirit. You’ll never be bored.” He clapped the boy hard on the back and walked off; it would have been hard to say whether the lad or myself was the more nonplussed.
IT WAS BY now late afternoon, and although in the still-long days of August we might just have reached Lew Trenchard before darkness fell, we should certainly never do so on an already dim October’s day. We made for the nearest inn, which Holmes said was in the hamlet of Two Bridges.
We passed a number of prehistoric settlements, now mere grassgrown foundations of the original circular huts, and picked our way over three streams. The fourth we followed downstream rather than cross, and entered into an extraordinarily weird area, a long strip of strewn boulders and stunted oaks that seemed to writhe in the half-light of the approaching evening.
“Odd to see trees again,” I commented, more to hear a voice than from any real need to communicate.
“A fey sort of place, isn’t it? Wistman’s Wood, it’s called, which is either the corruption of a Celtic name meaning something along the lines of ‘rocky woods along the water’ or else the corruption of a Saxon term for ‘foreigners,’ indicating it was a Celtic wood, which in turn may be supported by the name ‘Welshman’s Woo
d’ that some of the old people still use. You may take your choice of corruptions. Ah” he said, as we emerged from the wood, “nearly there.”
Along the river and past a farmyard, and indeed we were nearly there—but not before the most extraordinary thing we had seen all day passed in front of our eyes. Indeed, it nearly ran us down, as we stepped confidently out onto the black surface of an actual macadamised road, only to leap back aghast into the safety of the walls as a furious black mechanical monstrosity came roaring around the bend straight at us. After two days spent among sheep and standing stones, this reminder of the twentieth century came as a considerable shock.
6
I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that cooking done
over a peat fire surpasses cooking at the best club in London.
But it may be that on the moor one relishes a meat
in a manner impossible elsewhere.
—A BOOK OF DARTMOOR
THE INN AT Two Bridges, on the other hand, when finally we navigated the dangers of the road and passed beneath the sign of the Saracen’s Head, was more akin to the sheep and the prehistoric stone circles than it was to the motorcar. The air was dense with the fragrance of dinner and beer, pipe tobacco and long generations of peat fires, and I immediately felt every cell in my body relax, secure in the knowledge that my needs would be well cared for.
A smiling boy whisked our disreputable packs upstairs, a smiling girl invited us to choose between a late service of afternoon tea and an early service of dinner, or just a quiet glass of something while we thought about it.
Greedily, I pounced on the offer of tea, asking only that it be delayed briefly so I might go upstairs and make myself presentable. Ten minutes later, I trotted back down and found Holmes (who had somehow contrived to tidy himself with neither bath nor possessions to hand) seated in a comfortable chair in front of a glowing fire, one hand holding a cup of tea, the other the remnants of a scone piled high with clotted cream and jam.
The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor Page 95
