Death at Dartmoor (17 page)

There was a chorus of agreement, so the three made their way back up the hill to the narrow track where they had left their pony and cart. But to their amazement, neither was there!

“It's gone!” Patsy cried. “The pony must have wandered away.”

“But how?” Kate asked, stunned. “I tied the pony myself. I
know
he couldn't have pulled loose.”

“Someone must have come along and taken him,” Mattie said with a scowl. “We're going to have quite a walk, I'm afraid.”

“Our lunch is gone, too,” Patsy said. “And I'm hungry. Damn and blast it!”

Disconsolately, they began to trudge in the direction of Widecombe, something over three miles to the south. But they hadn't gone more than half a mile when they heard the sound of hoofbeats, muffled by the fog. They looked up to see a horse and rider appearing out of the mist and coming toward them at a gallop.

“Charles!” Kate cried happily. “Whatever are
you
doing here?”

“Somebody stole our pony and cart,” Patsy said. Her voice was angry. “You should go after them, Charles, and bring it back! They took our lunch, too.”

Charles's mouth was set and his eyes were dark. “You're lucky that's all they took,” he said between his teeth. “Three men escaped from the prison this morning. They headed in this direction. No doubt they're the ones who took your cart. They might have taken you hostage, in the bargain.”

“Escaped?” Mattie gasped.
“Three?”

Charles swung down from his horse. “One of them hit a guard with a shovel, then all three went over a wall and into the mist. And one of them is the man I came to Dartmoor to see,” he added somberly to Kate. “Perhaps Spencer isn't as innocent as I thought.”

Mattie made a low sound, and Kate turned to look at her. She seemed to be struggling to gain her composure, and Kate was surprised. Mattie hadn't seemed the sort of woman to be easily frightened. She reached for her hand.

“Don't worry, Mattie,” she said comfortingly. “The men will be caught, and very soon, probably. No doubt the prison governor will send out search parties and set up roadblocks.”

“In the meantime,” Charles said firmly, “the weather's turning, and we ought to get back to Princetown. You ladies can take turns riding until we get to Widecombe, where we'll try to find another vehicle. Who wants to be first?” He looked from one to the other, a ghost of a smile on his mouth. “Well, don't all jump aboard at once.”

In the end, they drew straws. Patsy, who drew the shortest straw, climbed on the horse, while Kate and Charles walked a little behind. Mattie lagged back to herself for a few moments, then caught up.

“You mentioned that one of the men who escaped is named Spencer,” she said in a studiedly casual tone. “Can that be the doctor I read of, who was convicted in Edinburgh of murdering his wife?”

“Yes, that's the one.” Charles was grim. “I attempted to talk to him yesterday, but he wasn't very cooperative. I hoped I might have the means of clearing his name.”

Kate turned toward Mattie in time to see the color drain from her face. There was a moment of silence. “Clear ... his name?” Mattie's voice was taut. “How is that possible?”

Charles described the bloody print found in the victim's bedroom and added, “I was hoping to get Spencer's fingerprints in order to compare them to those left in the scene of the crime. The escape interrupted that, however, and probably renders the issue moot.”

“Moot?” Mattie's voice sounded choked. “Why is that?”

“Because attempted escape is tantamount to an admission of guilt,” Charles said, “at least in the eyes of the law.”

Kate stole another glance. Mattie's red wool hood had fallen forward, and her face was not visible. But her gloved hands were clenched into fists and her slight shoulders were stooped, as if she bore a heavy burden.

C
onan Doyle folded the
Chronicle,
thrust the newspaper under his arm, and rose from his table in the hotel dining room. He was breakfasting alone this morning, having seen his dear Jean off on the train to Yelverton the previous afternoon. Her leaving had nothing to do with the prison escape, of course; she had returned to Blackheath to fulfill a social obligation at the home of her parents. The Leckies, friends of Doyle's mother and sister, were aware of the relationship between their daughter and Doyle and approved of it, as did his own sister and brother and mother, and even his wife's mother, Mrs. Hawkins. Doyle had insisted on this unusual familial openness, for it seemed to him that if his and Jean's chaste, self-restrained love was recognized and accepted by their families, the whole thing became something like an extended engagement and somehow more morally right. But not even their families' approval could relieve him of the terrible conflict he felt every time he thought of the two women around whom his life revolved: the woman to whom he was bound by law and by right, and the woman he loved. It was a conflict that had torn at him each day of the last four years and would tear at him until Touie was finally dead and he and Jean were free to remany.

Deliberately and with a great effort, Doyle turned his mind to other things as he walked through the hotel lobby and back up the stairs to his room to work on his story. To the prison escape he had been reading about, and the recapture of two of the convicts who had been at large on the moor. Early the previous morning, there had been a great sound of cheering on the High Street and shouts of “They've got'um!” and “Here they come, boys!”

Doyle had flung open his hotel window and looked down to see a large crowd advancing toward the center of town, running beside a troop of carbine-carrying guards that were escorting a pony and an orange and green cart, the one stolen from Lady Sheridan and her friends on the day of the escape, Doyle guessed. In the cart were two manacled convicts, dressed in torn, muddy prison uniforms and looking much the worse for wear. The crowd was jubilant, all but a group of anxious women gathered directly below. Doyle heard one woman say to another, “Wot's t' be glad fer? T‘other wife-killer's still on th'loose, b‘ain't he? Us'ns b'ain't safe yet, 'til he be caught!”

Later that same morning, Doyle had encountered Charles Sheridan, who told him that Black and Wilcox had been apprehended by a farmer with a shotgun, as they tried to steal clothing from his wife's clothesline. Black had to be subdued at gunpoint, but Wilcox, who was wet through and sick with cold, was glad enough to surrender. Nothing was known of the third man, however, who according to Black, had merely seized the opportunity to jump when they did and had not been party to their escape plan, which seemed to have been more of an impulse to get clear of the prison than a well-reasoned scheme to get themselves off the moor. Spencer had slipped off on his own almost immediately after the escape and long before Black and Wilcox had come across the pony cart at Grimspound.

“ 'Twuz a lucky find,” Black boasted, with an ugly, gap-toothed grin. “Lunch an' a bottle as well as a 'orse. The bottle alone wuz worth a couple of weeks in the punishment cells.”

Upon hearing this tale, Doyle had felt the nudge of inspiration. He went straight to his room, where pages of
The Hound
were spread out on the desk, and settled down to work. Within the hour, he had invented his own escaped convict—Seldon, the Notting Hill murderer, with beetling forehead and sunken, animal eyes, exactly the face of Black—and Dr. Watson was musing on the fear and loathing inspired in local hearts by “this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out.” Doyle was quite pleased with this new element, for the introduction of Seldon would complicate the story and help build suspense: a red herring across Holmes's path, as it were. He wouldn't go to the trouble of weaving Seldon into the main plot, he decided, but rather merely introduce him as a kind of confusing distraction and then kill him off in the end. In fact, this business was exactly what he needed to make an otherwise simple puzzle harder for the reader to decipher.

In fact, he was so pleased that he took a recess from the story to write a letter to The Ma'am (the affectionate name he used for his mother), telling her how well the project was going. He did not mention that he had severed his connection to Fletcher Robinson, however. He had not heard from the man since he had given him the news that he was concluding their collaboration, nor did he expect to, unless there was a delay in the check for the royalties Robinson had been promised.

Doyle frowned and put down his pen, thinking that the only thing he regretted was that he and Bertie had not parted more amicably. He had always hated verbal confrontation, which seemed to him vulgar and ungentlemanly, and would go out of his way to avoid it. Better to take out one's feelings on the cricket field or, better still, in a boxing match, which had always seemed to him the perfect place to settle one's scores; “an exhibition of hardihood without brutality,” he had once written, “of good-humoured courage without savagery, of skill without trickery.” In fact, he had more than once wished to pummel the living devil out of those literary critics who pretended not to see anything of worth in his novels, and he would have been willing to trade a few blows with Bertie, and put up that 25 percent as the prize! But he was half again Bertie's weight, and a match was out of the question.

Doyle sighed and picked up his pen again. There was no getting around it. He was going to have to share those royalties.

 

Kate and Patsy had been out for a short walk to an abandoned tin workings less than two miles outside of town. Charles would not have approved of their going, no doubt, but he was attending to business at the prison, and anyway, Kate was sure it was safe.

“If the convict is still on the moor, he's miles away,” she told Patsy. “At any rate, he won't linger anywhere near the prison.”

“I agree,” Patsy said. “He's probably in Plymouth, booking passage to the continent. That's what I should do, if I wanted to get away.” She paused, smiling softly. “I met someone on the moor when I was out walking taking photographs yesterday, Kate. A man I found ... quite intriguing.”

“Oh?” Kate asked with a little laugh. “Don't tell me you've fallen into love at first sight again! I should have thought that your romantic adventure with that wild Egyptian fellow—Ahmed? was that his name?—would have taught you a lesson.” It had been quite an adventure, Kate remembered, involving an insane flurry of love letters, a mad moonlight dash through the deserted streets of Cairo, and ultimately, a pair of broken hearts. But Patsy was young and healthy, and Kate knew that her heart had mended quickly. She wasn't so sure about Ahmed's heart, but—

“Ahmed was much too traditional,” Patsy said firmly. “I had no intention of marrying a man who would refuse to allow his wife to have a public life.” She tossed her head. “Anyway, this man is nothing like Ahmed. He is an engineer, tramping around the moor, evaluating the possibilities for modern tin mining. It would be quite an economic boon to the people here if the resources could be developed.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “What sort of person is he, besides being an engineer?” she asked teasingly. “A handsome person, no doubt, dashing and adventuresome. Young? Younger than Ahmed?”

“Older than Ahmed,” Patsy said with a little frown. “Handsome in a rugged sort of way. Not dashing, but intelligent and interesting and capable, and with a background as an Army engineer, before he entered civilian life. We walked quite some distance across the moor, in the direction of Tavistock, where he is staying. But I very much doubt that I will see him again,” she added, “so it is not likely to bloom into the sort of romantic adventure I had with Ahmed.” She sighed regretfully. “More's the pity.”

“But at least you won't risk breaking your heart again,” Kate retorted with some asperity, “which should be some consolation.”

“Should it?” Patsy asked, in a musing tone. “What's the good of a heart that can't be broken? There's a terrible waste in that, don't you think?”

An hour later, Kate and Patsy were returning to Princetown across Walkhampton Common when they saw Mattie, wrapped in her red cloak and stumbling down the public footpath from the direction of King's Tor. When they caught up with her, Kate was surprised to see that she seemed troubled: her cheeks pale, her blue eyes distressed, her hair blown about. She did not look like the same self-possessed young woman who had lectured to them about Grimspound just two days before.