The Death of a Much Travelled Woman

by Barbara Wilson

  “Oh, but that’s part of the charm,” I said. “We like to imagine a world where everything seemed simpler, where a traveller could come upon an enchanted place and describe it like a fairy tale. Nowadays it’s all Hiltons and package tours.”

  Miss Root shook her head and went to put the kettle on for tea. I took the opportunity to scan the bookshelves for other favorite books. Tommy Price had a wonderful library of women’s travel stories. Here were some of the classics: Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates by Lady Anne Blunt; My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Neel; Dust in the Lion’s Paw, the autobiography of Freya Stark; A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird.

  Here too were hard-to-find, wonderful titles like On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden (1883); To Lake Tanganika in a Bath-Chair by Annie Hore (1896); and Nine Thousand Miles in Eight Weeks: Being an Account of an Epic Journey by Motor-Car Through Eleven Countries and Two Continents by Mildred Bruce (1927). Yes, and here were the complete works of Tommy Price, detailing her travels to Greenland, the Amazon, Tibet, Ethiopia, Australia—all written in the tough, no-nonsense prose that had so delighted me in my youth.

  I opened Kangaroo Cowboys and read at random:

  It wasn’t long before Jake guessed I was not the fearless British ex-soldier I had made myself out to be. “Why,” he said to me one day as we were riding alongside each other through the bush, “you’re a lady, ain’t you?”

  Miss Root came back in with a tea tray and I told her enthusiastically, “One of the things I really loved about Tommy Price was her disguises. Half the time she was masquerading as a man, but she also loved to get herself up in any kind of native costume. Do you remember how she disguised herself as a harem girl to get into the Sheik’s inner sanctum?”

  “Oh yes,” said Constance dryly. “Tommy was quite the quick-change artist.”

  “I hadn’t realized she was still travelling,” I said. “Where’s she off to this time?”

  “The city of Pagan in Burma,” Constance said. “She said she had an old friend there she wanted to see. At her age she’s trying to pack in as much as possible.”

  The disapproving look came over Miss Root’s wrinkled face again. I wondered how it must feel to be always left behind.

  “You’ve known Miss Price a long time, I gather?” I said.

  She shook her head and asked, “More tea?”

  I returned to Mrs. Droppington’s farm house and spent the evening curled up with Kangaroo Cowboys, which Constance Root had insisted I take.

  “It can’t make up for having come all the way from London, but please take it anyway. I know Tommy wouldn’t mind.”

  The next morning I decided that I’d take a walk on the moors before returning to Exeter and London. I was disappointed not to have met Tommy Price, but felt inspired all the same. Would I still be on the go at eighty, visiting pagodas in the jungle? Or would I have retired to some quiet village like Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor? I had never been a true adventurer except in spirit; I liked a bittersweet espresso and a good newspaper far better than a jungle teeming with scorpions and snakes.

  Mrs. Droppington fixed me a hearty country breakfast and warned me about straying too far from the paths.

  “The mists and rain can come sudden up here. There’s plenty of folks lost on Dartmoor every year.”

  I promised to be careful and took the Wellingtons and oilskin slicker she pressed on me, as well as a sandwich and thermos of tea for later. It was a clear morning, sunny and brisk, just right for walking, and I set off in good spirits, dutifully sticking right to the paths. The hills above Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor had a number of famous tors, those masses of bulging granite that look in some cases like great fists pushing their way up from the earth and in other cases like Easter Island gods, with enormous noses and full lips. To gaze out across the landscape was to feel in a very wild place, at the top of the world; yet the ground itself was hard going, being covered with what is called clitter, the rubble from outcrops of granite, and being squelchily wet. Dartmoor is poorly drained; the land is a like a sponge, with bogs among the tussocks of purple moor grass and tufts of whortleberries and wild thyme.

  I walked for several hours, seeing few signs of life except for the occasional pony and, high above, the lark or stone curlew with its eerie cry. I had hoped to see some of the hut circles that Sheila Cragworth had been so keen on all those years ago, but all I saw were a few moorstones, the old stones along the ancient path that had been erected by villages like Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor centuries ago to help travellers find their way across the stretches of high ground. I remembered how irritating Sheila had found my superstitious bent. Poor old Sheila; she was now some sort of Tory functionary in Brighton, which showed what a broken heart could do to you.

  I had lunch next to a particularly impressive tor that looked like a Northwest totem pole with a raven’s beak and a bear’s torso and finished Kangaroo Cowboys:

  Someone once said to me: Why travel? After all, there’s nothing new to discover, no place where no one has been before. To that I would say that more than half of travel, perhaps ninety percent of travel, is imagination. Some people can stay home and live lives of great adventure; others may roam the entire globe and yet remain as provincial as a country lad. What you get out of travel is what you put into it; and if you put your whole imagination, you get a great deal.

  I had difficulty reading the last words and raised my head to realize that, quite suddenly, the weather had changed.

  An opaque white cloud was pouring over me like a sift of flour; but this cloud was wet and thick. It blanketed out the sun, the path, and even the tor at my back. Within a few minutes I couldn’t see my boots in front of me. The fog quickly crept under my collar and through my clothes, until I felt chilled all over. I stood up, but had no idea which direction to move, or whether to chance moving anywhere. Shapes and sounds were completely distorted; I thought I heard a curlew, and the cry made my skin crawl. The pixies were going to get me, if the Wisht Hounds didn’t first. It was almost preferable to break my neck stumbling through the clitter, or to fall into a bog and drown. I hugged my arms to my chest and thought, ‘be calm, the fog will lift in a minute.’ But it didn’t. It got worse. A howling wind tore at my hat, and pellets of hail whipped my face.

  What would the intrepid Tommy Price do in a situation like this? Once, I remembered, she had run out of petrol in Greenland and had to walk for hours through a blazing white landscape without markers. She had kept her spirits up by singing Noel Coward tunes. I tried one in a quavering voice. In reality I wasn’t much good with nature adventures. I was used to taking care of myself in awkward, unfamiliar, and even dangerous situations involving people, but weather was another matter. Weather was serious.

  Still, thinking of Tommy Price helped a little. I flattened my body against the side of the tor and began to inch around its circumference. The cold granite scraped my face, but at last I found what I had vaguely recalled: a slit in the rock wide enough for a body to squeeze into. I don’t know how long I sheltered there, but I had plenty of time to regret large portions of my life, particularly the portion that had begun the day before with my arrival in Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. I assumed that if I stayed there long enough, a search party would be sent out for me. Possibly Mrs. Droppington, seeing the fog sweep over the moors, had already alerted the search-and-rescue mission.

  I may have dozed a little; at least I thought I was dreaming when I sensed a lull in the wind and a slight thinning of the fog. It wasn’t complete, but still, looking out from my crack in the tor I realized I could see boulders, and the path, and some furze bushes. That was enough for me; if I didn’t get moving I would freeze to death—my fingers inside my gloves were already like ice. I charged down the path, hoping that by always going down I would find my way back to the valley. I couldn’t see any markers, couldn’t remember how many paths there had been. The landscape seemed completely changed; no longer did the moor se
em a bracing plateau with bones of granite jutting up through the thin soil. It was a swampy morass of pea-green bogs and pools that I could only avoid sometimes by jumping from tussock to tussock.

  Still, even if I was chilled to the marrow, haunted by the thought of vicious pixies, and terribly, hopelessly lost, the fog was lifting.

  If it hadn’t lifted, I doubt that I would have seen what I did: a tweed cap floating on a pool of green scum, and just underneath, the outlines of a woman’s body, face down.

  The coroner ruled the death of Tommy Price accidental. Everyone knew Miss Price’s predilection for walking on the moors in every kind of weather. People did drown in the bogs—not often, but within memory. She was eighty-something, after all, and not as clear-headed as she could have been.

  I returned to London with a violent cold and horrible memories of my headlong flight down the hill and into the first cottage I saw. The search party had no difficulty finding Tommy Price, in spite of my incoherent directions; apparently she had stumbled into a well-known bog, not deep but treacherous all the same. More than a few ponies had lost their footing there and tired themselves out trying to get free.

  Even in London, I could not stop thinking about Tommy Price and Constance Root. Had it been Tommy who drove past me so quickly in the car? Why had Miss Root said Tommy was going to Burma when she was only out on the moors for a walk? That disapproval Miss Root had worn so plainly on her wrinkled face—was that envy? Or hatred? Perhaps she was jealous that Tommy Price’s books were appearing in print again, that she was receiving public attention. But could she have been envious enough to kill Tommy? Would a woman in her eighties have the strength to push Tommy into a bog? And how would Constance have gotten Tommy up there in the first place?

  Of course, the oddest thing was that when the constable came to Tommy Price’s cottage to inform Miss Root of the sad news, she was not in. A note pinned to the back door canceled her milk delivery for an indefinite time. The car was gone.

  “And she never came back,” said Mrs. Droppington when I rang her a week later. “It’s created an awful confusion here. You see, Miss Price left everything to Miss Root in her will, just like Miss Root left everything to Miss Price. Who’s going to get it if Miss Root doesn’t come back? I’m over there watering the plants every other day, but I can’t do that forever.”

  I had a sudden image of Constance strolling among the golden pagodas of upper Burma. Could she have decided to do away with Tommy and to steal her plane ticket? The likeliest way for Tommy to enter Burma was to fly from London to Calcutta or Bangkok, then switch to a smaller plane and fly on to Rangoon. A few phone calls told me that a Miss Constance Root, not a Miss Edith Price, had booked a round-trip ticket with Air India to Calcutta on December 2, but that she hadn’t used it.

  That didn’t mean that Miss Root hadn’t murdered Tommy Price and taken quite a different flight. Perhaps Miss Root had been planning to flee to Burma after the murder and only my unlooked-for arrival had stopped her. However, for someone who had just murdered a woman and was preparing to escape to Burma, Miss Root had not seemed particularly agitated during my visit. Cold-bloodedness seemed much more likely to have been a characteristic of Tommy Price than of Constance Root.

  I recalled a favorite passage from To the Top of the Very Top:

  James lay there, stiff as a corpse on a mortuary slab.

  “Frozen, poor old sod,” I said to my companions.

  They were silent, struck with icy horror—James was the first of our party to die—who would be next?

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” I said gruffly. “We’ll never get him down the mountain. We’ll have to bury him here, in the snow, on the side of Mount Ktchnqhtl. Yes, he’d like that, I know. James was a brave chap, a climber till the end.”

  Yes, it seemed far more plausible that Tommy Price, with her nerves of steel and her tough, resilient old body—hardened by years of trekking, sailing, and camel-riding—would be able to kill fragile Miss Root. But the motives for such a murder seemed even less clear. Why would Tommy, basking in the fame of rediscovery, decide to bump off her old companion, who perhaps had been her lover once, or least a good friend? Were there tensions between them that Tommy’s sudden return to notoriety had inflamed? But if so, why didn’t Tommy, with her vast acquaintance around the world, just leave? Why didn’t she take that trip to Pagan?

  I kept remembering the tweed cap floating on the green scum of the bog. After evading bandits and mercenaries and surviving frostbite and shipwrecks, what an inglorious end, to die face down in a pool of water.

  It struck me as curious that I couldn’t remember ever seeing a photograph of Tommy Price. Not in any of her books, not in the interviews that had recently been published. I called an editor I knew at Harridan Press, which was reprinting Tommy’s travel books, and asked Gillian if she had an author photograph.

  “My dear,” said Gillian. “I never even met Tommy Price. We corresponded by post and the odd phone call. She said her health was too bad to come to London, that she never travelled any more.”

  “What did her voice sound like?”

  “Nothing special, rather low and pleasant, not particularly quavery, if you know what I mean.”

  That was Constance’s voice all right; but it could also have been Tommy Price’s.

  “What’s this all about, anyway?” asked Gillian.

  “Oh, just curiosity. I was supposed to meet her, but it didn’t work out. I’m sorry, that’s all.”

  “Well I think she had a dashed good pop-off,” said Gillian. “Terribly dramatic, don’t you think, to sink like a stone into a bog on Dartmoor? We’re changing the back cover copy on the next two reprints.”

  I went to the British Library and found all Tommy’s books. Not a single one had a photograph inside or out, though there were plenty of drawings of Tommy in burnooses, chaps, and snow parkas with fur around the face. I couldn’t help being struck, as I flipped through the different volumes, by how very many disguises she had assumed. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t want her photograph taken.

  Or perhaps there was another reason.

  I called Mrs. Droppington again.

  “This might seem an odd question, Mrs. Droppington, but did you ever actually see Tommy Price?”

  “Of course. What do you mean? That is, when she was at the cottage, which wasn’t very often; that is, I suppose she was gone for stretches at a time; that is, I do remember seeing photographs of her as a girl when her brother lived in the cottage.”

  There was a lengthy pause, and then Mrs. Droppington said thoughtfully, “Do you know, my dear, you’ve set me thinking. It’s a curious thing, but I am really not so sure after all that I did ever see Tommy Price all that much. Ever since Tommy took over the cottage and Constance came to stay, I suppose it’s Constance I’ve seen. I knew from what Constance said that Tommy was often travelling. Constance would come into the greengrocers and say, ‘Tommy’s just back from Tanzania and says she absolutely must have sprouts for luncheon.’”

  “But you couldn’t exactly say what Tommy Price looked like?”

  “I often saw her from a distance,” said Mrs. Droppington. “Tommy loved to walk, you know. She was always striding across the moors, with her cap and walking stick. Quite a distinctive walk,” Mrs. Droppington went on, gaining confidence. “Not at all like Miss Root’s, which was so…feminine.”

  I had a theory, which might be hard to prove, that Constance Root and Tommy Price were the same woman. That Tommy Price, with her love of disguise, had invented a kind of alter ego in Miss Root. After all, the two of them hadn’t moved to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor until the 1970s, some years after Tommy Price’s books had gone out of print.

  I imagined Tommy to be a proud woman, one who would find it difficult to admit that because of age and money she could no longer travel so easily, nor, if she did, write about it in a way that anyone would find interesting. She didn’t want to retire as Tommy Price and have people say
that she used to be a famous traveller, so she came up with Constance Root, a proper English lady, who could live on very little, yet still, with her stories of Tommy Price’s adventures, keep her past myth alive. When the books began to be reissued, Tommy Price must have been thrilled at first, and then increasingly worried that her secret would be revealed. Hence the ban on photographs. She didn’t want anyone from the village seeing the face of Tommy Price in the newspaper and saying, “But isn’t that our Miss Root from Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor?”

  The strain must have been too much for her, so that she had decided to do away with herself. Which was why no one had seen Constance after Tommy’s death and why the plane ticket hadn’t been used.

  Of course, such a theory had its soft spots. Why the camera-shy, reclusive Tommy had invited me to Dartmoor on the day before her suicide was the largest of them.

  I travelled to Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor in the same way as before, by train to Exeter and then by hired car to the village. But this time I came very late at night. I parked my car in the village and, all in black, with only a flashlight, I walked quickly to the familiar cottage.

  The wind whistled through the moonlit night. I tried not to think about Wisht Hounds and pixies. With tools I had borrowed from a friend in London whose East End family dabbled in the burglary trade, I let myself in the front door of the cottage.

  It looked the same as it had two weeks ago when I had visited: the same old-fashioned furniture, dustier now, the same book-lined sitting room, illumined through the windows by moonlight. I went into the sitting room and let my flashlight play along the spines of all those wonderful old titles. Tommy Price hadn’t been the only woman writing books in the 1930s. There had been Olive Chapman with Across Lapland with Sledge and Reindeer; and Rosita Forbes with Unconducted Wanders and Adventures: Being a Gipsy Salad: Some Incidents, Excitements and Impressions of Twelve, Highly-Seasoned Years. I wondered what had happened to those writers. I knew that sometimes a traveller only took one huge trip and then retired in triumph to dine off stories of savages or sultans forever—and that sometimes she kept going, year after year, like Freya Stark and Dervla Murphy, drawn to hardship and adventure long past the age when most women were settling down to crocheting and gardening. What a shame that Tommy Price hadn’t had the courage to admit to her double life. She was never going to enjoy the acclaim now she so richly deserved. I couldn’t help taking down the volume of Bound for Greenland. I had always loved its description of the end of the voyage. Softly I read aloud: