The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4

by Laurie R. King

  The sensation quickly proved itself justified. Lydford was truly the final outpost of comfort and light, and the moor a grim place indeed. The ground rose and the trees and hedgerows fell away, and the ground rose some more, and all the world was grey and wet and closed-in and utterly still. We climbed nearly a thousand feet in the first two miles, but after that the ground began to level out before us.

  It was, as Holmes had said, a huge bowl—or at any rate, what I could see of it seemed to be—a shallow, lumpy green bowl carved across by meandering dry-stone walls, dusted with dying vegetation and dead rocks, with many of its rises topped by weathered stones in bizarre shapes: Tors, the stones were called, and many of them had distinctive names given either by a fancied resemblance to their shapes (Hare, Fox, and Little Hound Tors) or by some reference lost in language (at least, to me) or in time (such as Lough, Ger, and Brat). There were nearly two hundred of the things, Holmes said, their fantastic shapes perched atop the rocky clitter around their disintegrating feet, and below that the low green turf, spongy with the water it held.

  In a place where the hand of humankind had so little visible impact, where a person could walk for an hour and see neither person nor dwelling, it seemed only proper that the very stones had names.

  We could see perhaps half a mile in any direction, but there was no sky, merely a cloud that brushed the tops of our hats, and the grey-green spongy turf beneath our boots merged imperceptibly into the light grey overhead, the dark grey of the stones that lay scattered about and the brown grey of the autumnal bracken fern. It was the sort of light that renders vision untrustworthy, where the eyes cannot accept the continual lack of stimulus and begin to invent faint wraiths and twisting shadows. Holmes’ pixies, waiting to tease the unwary traveller into a mire, no longer seemed so ludicrous, and had it not been for Holmes, I might very well have heard the soft pad of the Baskerville hound behind me and felt its warm breath on the back of my neck.

  However, with Holmes beside me as a talisman, the spooks kept their distance, and what might have been a place of animosity and danger was rendered merely desolate to the point of being grim. I thought that Holmes’ term wasteland was not inappropriate. Godforsaken might also be applied.

  The morning stretched on, not without incident, although the time between incidents seemed to be very long indeed. Once, my dulled eyes were surprised to see one of the boulders we were passing turn and look at us—a Dartmoor pony, as shaggy as a winter sheep and only marginally taller. Its eyes peered out from behind its plastered-down forelock, watching us pass before it resumed its head-down stance of stolid endurance, hunkered up against the wind, belly and nose dripping steadily. Holmes said it was most likely a hybrid, crossed with Shetland ponies brought in during the war in an attempt to breed animals suited for the Welsh mines. This particular beast did not seem well pleased with its adopted home.

  Once, we came across a weathered, lichen-covered stone cross, erected centuries before to mark the way for pilgrims, now proud in its solitude but starting to lean. One of its arms was missing and the other had been broken to a stump, and its feet were standing in a pool of water.

  Once, we saw a fox, picking its delicate way through a sweep of bracken fern, and shortly after that we glimpsed a buzzard making disconsolate circles against the clouds. The high point of the morning was when a startled woodcock burst from beneath our boots and flew from us in terror. The excitement of that encounter, however, did not last long, and soon we were back in the melancholy embrace of the brooding moor.

  Up a rise and down the other side, across a rivulet with sharply cut sides and a scurry of clear, peat-stained water in the bottom. Up again, avoiding a piece of granite the size of a bathtub thrusting out of the rough grass. A meandering ridge on an approaching hill, resembling the work of some huge, prehistoric mole, became on closer examination an ancient stone wall nearly subsumed by the slow encroachment of the turf. A distant sweep of russet across a hillside, a scurf of furze and dying bracken fern, was cut by the dark of another ancient wall drawn along its side.

  It was, I supposed, picturesque enough, given the limited palette of drab colours, but as a piece of Impressionist art it served to evoke only the disagreeable feelings of restlessness, melancholia, and a faint thread of menace.

  After an hour or so Holmes attempted to smoke, but he could not get his pipe to stay lit. We trudged on, speech and camaraderie left behind us in Lydford, as stolid and enduring as the pony, placing one foot in front of the other on the sparse grass covering the deep sodden peat beds that passed for soil.

  By midday I was as grey and silent as anything else in that bleak place, edgy with an unidentifiable sense of waiting and aching for a spot of colour. Had I known, I might have worn a red pullover, but all my clothes were warm and masculine and dull, and there was no relief from the monotony until Holmes stopped and I walked straight into him. The shock of change nearly caused me to fall, but my irritation died the instant I saw what had caught his interest: a shelter.

  It was a rough stone hut, used by shepherds, perhaps—short shepherds, we found, as once inside we both had to keep our heads well tucked down, but it had the better part of a roof, and even a cracked leather flap to cover most of the doorway. We had no fire other than the glowing bowl of Holmes’ pipe, but at least our sandwiches remained dry as we ate them, and the now-tepid coffee in the flask that Mrs Elliott had given us seemed positively festive as it touched my chilled lips. The demons retreated out into the fog, and with their absence, humour crept back in.

  “Well, Holmes,” I said, “I can certainly see why a person would fall in love with Dartmoor.”

  “It is said to be quite pleasant in the summer,” he said gloomily.

  “By comparison, I’m sure it is. How much farther do we have?”

  We did actually have a destination in this trackless waste. We had taken on the role of eyes and legs for Baring-Gould, but even Holmes, who had covered much of this same ground thirty years before, did not have the man’s intimate knowledge of the place from which judgements could be drawn. The old man back in Lew Trenchard might instantly visualise the lie of the land at any given spot on the map, but his representatives needed to walk it first. Hence our expedition, and if the weather was not as we might wish, it did not appear that waiting for a clear day was a practical option. For all I knew this was a clear day, for Dartmoor.

  Our trip was to be a large circle, putting up at a public house for the night halfway along. We were looking now for the place where the dead tin miner had last been seen, and after that would try to find the spot where in July a benighted farmhand had been terrified by a ghostly coach and a dog with a glowing eye, and the other place, two miles away and a month further on, where the courting couple had been rudely interrupted by the same coach.

  I finished my apple, Holmes knocked out his pipe and stowed it, and we both settled our hats more firmly over our noses and ducked out of the leather doorway.

  “Holmes,” I said, raising my collar and resuming the hunched-over walking position that was necessary in order to keep the rain off my spectacles. “If Lady Howard stops her ghostly carriage to offer us a ride, I for one will accept. With pleasure.”

  JOSIAH GORTON’S LAST known path told us nothing whatsoever. Other than being one remote area among 350 square miles of remote countryside, there was nothing to distinguish it. According to Baring-Gould, the farm labourer who stopped to talk with Gorton lived over the hill and often travelled that way of a Saturday night, on his way to the inn where Gorton had spent the afternoon.

  “Why, if he’d been snug inside all afternoon, did Gorton leave?” I asked. “I’d have thought Saturday evening the high point of the week, particularly for someone accustomed to cadging drinks.”

  “According to the publican when I was through here the other day, Gorton said he had business to attend to, unlikely as that might sound. No need to enquire further at the inn.” And so saying he turned, not in the direction of the inn
, but towards the remote farm over the hill. Stifling a sigh, I followed.

  It was a small farmstead, mossy and pinched and cowering down into the hillside away from the elements.

  “A place this size couldn’t have more than one hired man.” Holmes observed, heading for the barn. There we found him, a young man with a head like a furry turnip, scratching the broad, flat expanse of it beneath his cap and pursing his lips as he stood staring down at a prostrate cow. He glanced at us incuriously, as if we were oft-seen residents of the place rather than that rarity, the unexpected visitor, and then returned immediately to his perusal of the huge, heaving sides of the animal at his feet.

  “I doan s’pose you knaw how ta turn a calf,” were his first words to us.

  “Er, no,” Holmes admitted. “Unless?” He turned to me, and the young man looked up in hope.

  “No,” I said firmly. “Sorry.”

  His face fell back into its morose state. “I can’t do’n. I tried an’ tried, but my hand, she just gets squeezed and dies. Poor ole cow,” he said with unexpected affection. “Her’ll just have to bide ’til Doctor gets here, that’s all. He’ll charge me half what the calf be worth,” he added. Long, contemplative seconds ticked by before he looked up, realising at last that he was not conversing with family members or two spirits of the moor. He asked, “Be ye lost?”

  “I do not believe we are,” said Holmes. “Not if you’re Harry Cleave.”

  “That I am.” He put out a meaty hand that had all too obviously been but lightly sluiced since its last exploration of the cow’s birth canal, and with only the briefest of hesitations, Holmes shook it. I left my own gloved hands firmly in my pockets, and instead smiled widely and nodded like a fool as introductions were made.

  “Well,” said Cleave, “no sense maundering, baint nothing I can do ’til Doctor comes. I sent the lil maid to vetch ’en,” he explained, “when I seed how she lay. Let us go by the house and ’ave a cup.”

  Paradise and ambrosia were the words he had uttered, and we crowded his heels across the muddy yard to the low stone farmhouse.

  It was warm inside, from a peat fire burning low and red in the wide stone fireplace. I removed my glasses and could see little, but my coldshrivelled skin began tentatively to unfold, and my nose told me of a soup on the fire and fragrant herbs strewn underfoot. I patted my way to a bench near the fireplace and settled in for what I sincerely hoped was to be a long and leisurely visit.

  The tea Cleave made for us was fresh and powerful and sweetened as a matter of course by our host; what was more, he had cleansed his hands with soap before making it. I removed a layer of clothing, resumed my warmed spectacles, and examined the room and the young man, wondering if both were typical of the moor.

  Cleave was a quiet, self-contained figure, short but heavily muscled. His dark eyes shone with an intelligent interest, and humour lurked ready at their corners. His easy authority over the house and its furnishings spoke more of an owner than a hired man, and I thought the simple room, light and tidy, suited him well.

  “So,” he said, settling himself at a scrubbed wooden table with his own teacup. “You comed out auver th’moor for ta vine ’Arry Cleave, and naow you’ve vound’n.”

  I expected Holmes to follow his standard routine for such investigations, particularly useful in gossipy rural areas, which was to invent some piece of spectacular flimflam behind which he could hide his real purpose. I had even settled back in anticipation to watch the expert, but to my utter astonishment he instead chose to use the simple truth.

  “I’m a friend of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould. He asked me to look into Josiah Gorton’s death.”

  At the first name, Cleave’s humour bloomed full across his face in surprise and wholehearted approval. It dimmed somewhat at the second name, but he left that for the moment.

  “The Squire, by Gar. How is he?”

  “Old. Tired, and not very well.”

  “Yair,” Cleave agreed sadly. “That he must be, poor ole beggar. He were old when I’as a child, and used to come across him digging his ’oles or writin’ down zongs. Fey old fellow. I remember thinking oncet, he looked like God in Paradise, ‘walkin’ in the garden at the end of the day.’ Proud and amused. So, he wants to knaw what happened to ole Josiah, mmm?”

  “Yes,” said Holmes. “Yes, he does.”

  “And his legs won’t carry him no more, is it? Pity, that. It’s been a mort of years since he’s been up the moor. Still, he’d be inter’sted, acourse. Wisht I could tell you what you want to knaw, but all I knaw is, Josiah was a-makin’ ’is way out along Hew Down on the Sattiday night, we exchanged a word or two, and we both went our ways. I never saw nothin’ like this ‘ghostly carridge’ they be talkin’ of. Nothin’ ’tall.”

  “What did Gorton say to you?”

  “’Tweren’t nothin’ much. Just ‘Evening’ and a word on the weather, which were thundery and low and lookin’ to spit down but wasn’t yet, and I offered him the barn if he needed a roof, but he said no, and ‘Wish ’ee well’ it was.”

  “Did he say he had a place to stay? I shouldn’t think there are many farms in that direction.”

  “’Fore dark he’d only have made it to Drake Hill, but he didnal, Drake hisself telled me.”

  “And after dark?”

  “’Tweren’t no moon to speak of, and he wasn’t carrying a lantern, but I s’pose I thought he was heading for one of his old mines. There’s some still have buildings you could shelter in, if you wasn’t too particular. That’s right, that’s what I figgered, because he said he would’n take my barn, he was lookin’ to earn hisself a week’s beer money.”

  “His precise words?”

  “Near ’nough. Zomething about buyin’ me a pint when next he seed me. Any row, he liked ’is zecrets and his findings, did Josiah, so I leaved ’im to it.”

  “Did he often buy you a drink?”

  “Never in mortal memory.”

  “Interesting.”

  “’E were a good’n, were Josiah. Kept hisself to hisself, ’side from zingin’ all they ole zongs over ’is ale, but ’e ’ad ’is pride, and look as ’e might like a gipsy, ’e were as honest as the day be long. An’ though he liked to keep to hisself, he were willin’ to help out, in a pinch. The maid took ill one year just at the height of lambin’ and ole Josiah nursed ’er for two days ’til she were hersel’ again. A good man, that. He’ll be missed.”

  As a eulogy, one could do far worse.

  We drank more tea, and Holmes questioned him further about the precise location and directions he and Gorton had taken. When a commotion sounded out in the yard and a girl of perhaps twelve burst in, Holmes allowed the farmer to return to his cow and the veterinarian, and before we could be pressed into surgical assistance to a bovine midwife, we took our leave.

  A HALF HOUR brought us to the place where Cleave had seen Gorton, and another forty minutes to the Drake farm. It was down in a valley bottom, and we stood on the rise looking down at it. A more dismal site, or a more disreputable set of buildings, would have been hard to imagine. Even the trickle of smoke from the lopsided chimney seemed dirtier than usual.

  To my surprise, Holmes turned his back on the farm and began to survey the ground that fell away from our hillock on all sides.

  “Aren’t we going down there?” I asked him.

  “Gould thought it unnecessary. Unless Drake himself did away with Gorton, he would have no reason to lie about not seeing him, and according to Gould, Drake hasn’t the wits to build a wall, much less arrange for a clever murder. And you’ll have to admit, a man who can’t bother to keep his chimney clean and is willing to live in the undoubtedly foul atmosphere that exists inside that house down there is hardly likely to go to the inconvenience of hauling a body to the other side of the moor. He’d be more inclined just to toss it down a nearby hole. Come.”

  I stared at his back as he descended the hill away from the Drake farm. “Gould thought—Holmes!” I protested. �
��When did you start accepting the conclusions of a total amateur instead of seeing for yourself?”

  He turned and gave me an unreadable look. “When I found an amateur who knew his ground better than I knew London. I told you, Russell, he was my local informant.”

  It sounded to me as if the good Reverend Sabine was something more than that, but I could not begin to guess what.

  We wandered back and forth across the landscape like a pair of tin seekers, climbing down to examine every low-lying place and streambed, stubbing our toes, twisting our ankles, and breaking our fingernails on the stones, catching our clothing on the gorse bushes, and developing cricks in our necks from the hunch-shouldered position adopted in the vain attempt to keep the rain from our collars. The wind began to rise, which dispersed the lower clouds but chilled me more than the rain had, and made it nearly impossible to avoid the increasingly near-horizontal drops. Dusk was gathering when I looked up from my regular occupation of scraping the sides of my muddy boots against a rock, and found Holmes gone. He had been there a minute before, so I knew he could not have gone far, but it was disconcerting to feel even for an instant that I was alone in that desolation. I called, but the wind snatched my words from my lips, then blinded me by driving the rain into my face. I made myself stop, and think.

  After a minute I wiped the worst of the rain from my spectacles, and studied the land around me before making my way back to where I had last seen Holmes. Looking down into a deep, sharp-sided ravine with its complement of peat-brown water at the bottom, I saw his back disappearing around a bend. I called, but he did not hear me, so I was forced to follow him along the top of the ground; when he set off up a branch of the ravine I was obliged to scramble down into the depths as well.

  I panted up to him some time later, and tried to catch my breath before I addressed him. “We’re not going to reach the inn before nightfall,” I observed casually. It was easier to talk out of the wind, and one could even find patches of rain-shadow against the sides of the ravine.