Death at Dartmoor (2 page)

 

Miss Evelyn Spencer,
prison reformer

 

^*
William Crossing,
author of
Guide to Dartmoor
and expert interpreter of the moor and its people

 

Vicar Thomas Garrett,
of Saint Michael and All Angels, Princetown, Dartmoor

 

James Lorrimer,
M.R.C.S., medical officer for the parishes of Grimpen, Thorsley, and High Barrow, Dartmoor

 

Constable Daniel Chapman,
Mid-Devon
Constabulary

C
onstable Daniel Chapman of the Mid-Devon Constabulary loved his work with a passion that perplexed his wife and, truth be told, puzzled even him. It was not that he was well paid, for the eighteen shillings he brought in each week was not much above the rate paid to a common laborer, and, like a laborer, he was required to be out in all weathers. It was not that the work was easy, either, in spite of the fact that Princetown was a small town and that, for the most part, the moor dwellers of Mid-Devon were a peaceable lot. Since the prison—ill-famed Dartmoor Prison, which loomed like a gray granite ghost out of the lowering Dartmoor mist—required quite a number of guards and since the guards were not always of the highest moral character, Constable Chapman often found his work cut out for him, especially when Saturday and payday arrived, and the hard-drinking, short-tempered fellows crowded into Princetown's two pubs to spend their money on ale.

But in spite of these things, Daniel Chapman felt profoundly proud when he buttoned the gold buttons of his navy blue uniform coat, put on his tall, blue helmet, and bade his wife and children good-bye at the front door of their small stone cottage at the top of the High Street. He felt even prouder when he walked around to the back of the cottage and unlocked the door of the tiny constable's office (for Princetown's constable, as was often the case, lived and worked in the same place). Stepping inside, the first thing he saw was the Ordnance map fixed to one wall, and on the other a board pinned full of official notices from the Devonshire Constabulary, signed with Superintendent Weaver's official flourish. The sight of the map and the notices reminded him once again that he, Constable Daniel Dickson Chapman, was the only representative of the King's law across all the west moor, from Okehampton down to Plymouth. (The constable did not count the governor of the Dartmoor Prison, of course, who was only a custodial agent for the men incarcerated there and had nothing to do with enforcing the law. That was Daniel Chapman's business, and only his.)

The office was as cold as the outdoors. Constable Chapman went to the small iron stove in the corner of the room, scooped the ashes from the grate into a bucket, and carried them out to the ash heap in the rear. Back inside, he lit a fire of small faggots and added pieces of peat. There was enough water in the bucket to fill the kettle, and while he waited for it to heat, he sat down at a wooden table and attacked the mound of reports and papers that always seemed to be lying in wait for him, keeping him off the streets and away from the people whom he was committed to serve.

The constable was just getting well started when the door opened, letting in a
whoosh
of cold air. A small, ruddy-faced man stamped in, puffed out his breath, and in his musical Devonshire speech, announced, “Us've got dogs o‘er Chagford way, Constable. Two sheep dead an' two down. There wud've bin more, only young Jemmy come up on 'um on his way to school and chased ‘um off. Knowin' that ye be so partic'lar 'bout keepin' informed as to goin's-on here'bouts, I thought ye'd like t' know.”

“Thank‘ee, Rafe.” The constable matched the man's soft speech as best he could, although his Bristol tongue was harsher and more clipped. “ 'Tis the third such report i' the last fortnight. I'll let folks know t'keep they eyes open.”

“Us'll be shootin' on sight,” Rafe said darkly.

“Well, then, be certain t' shoot dogs, not folks,” the constable said mildly.

“Aye, fay,” Rafe said, agreeing, and stamped out.

The kettle began to hiss, and Constable Chapman got up to make a cup of tea. Sheep-killing dogs, a lost child, a drunken prison guard locked up for breaking a window in the Black Dog—that would be the sum of his reporting for the entire fortnight. Cup in hand, he turned to gaze out the window, which opened onto wide fields and stone fences, with Beardown Hill in the distance, and beyond, Beardown Tor, its granite knobs black against the winter-brown moor. In spite of the occasional problems created by the prison, it was far easier to keep the peace on Dartmoor than to police the dirty streets of Bristol. And the land was lovelier and infinitely more fascinating than any city vista, the uplands rising and falling and rising again, their shoulders constantly swept by the fresh, clean wind, their soft flanks granite studded, their gray heads topped with stone tors that reared up like monsters out of antiquity.

The constable smiled to himself. Yes, the land, always the fresh, clean, vast land, beyond the reach of any man to sully it. That was the real reason he loved his work.

 

Vicar Thomas Garrett, of Saint Michael and All Angels, on the other hand, did not love his work—a fact that he freely acknowledged as he lit his pipe, stirred one small teaspoonful of sugar into his tea, and settled himself at his desk in the vicarage to work on his Sunday sermon. Oh, it was not that he disliked his Princetown parishioners or the moor dwellers, most of whom lived in a handful of unfortunate hamlets flung like rough stones, randomly coming to rest between the hills and along the dales. It was not that he disliked his clerical duties, either, for Thomas Garrett's father and grandfather and great-grandfather had been clergymen, and when he donned surplice and stole and stepped up to the pulpit to speak to his flock, he felt that he was not only carrying out the work of the Lord but carrying on a noble family tradition as well. And of course there was no disliking Saint Michael's, which for all its stony austerity was an impressive example of Devonshire granite work, its tall, square tower offering a splendid view northward across the valley of the West Dart and into the very heart of the moor.

No, the vicar's dislike of his work was at once larger and more trivial than any other reason that he might have advanced, for the truth was that Thomas Garrett was a very young man—still in his twenties—unmarried, and handsome, if he did say so himself. While pursuing his studies at Oxford, Mr. Garrett had developed an intense fondness for the pleasures of fine food, fine wine, and fine conversation, none of which, sad to say, were to be easily discovered in Dartmoor. Fine food was limited to the dining room of the Duchy Hotel in Princetown, where fine wine might occasionally be obtained as well; otherwise, the vicar had recourse only to the plain Devon cuisine of his house-keeper, Mrs. Blythe, or the greasy hot pies and stout brown ale served over the bar at the Black Dog or the Plume of Feathers. But fine conversation of the sort he had grown accustomed to during his student days—ample, free-ranging, clever conversation about books, music, politics, religion, affairs of the Empire—was not to be had among the people of the moor, or at least in the households that Mr. Garrett had occasion to visit. As a consequence, he had fallen into the moor habit of talking about moor people and their trivial moor doings—the intricacies of local genealogies, the fortunes of local agriculture, the vagaries of local weather—and had become, he realized sadly, rather a gossip, and a lonely one, at that.

But, Mr. Garrett thought as he sipped his tea and pulled on his pipe, things might just be looking up. He had recently been asked to serve as spiritual adviser to Lady Rosalind Duncan, wife to Sir Edgar Duncan, master of Thornworthy, a large estate near the hamlet of Chagford, a few miles up the Torquay Road. Sir Edgar, who came from an old county family, had inherited Thomworthy some four years before. While he and Lady Duncan had been in the habit of keeping largely to themselves in the earlier years of their residency at Thomworthy, they now seemed to be taking a more sociable course—perhaps because Sir Edgar had been mentioned as a possible Liberal candidate for Mid-Devon.

In fact, the Duncans were having an entertainment that very night and had invited as their guest a medium from London, quite a famous man, about whom the vicar had read and whom he most earnestly desired to meet. Before Mr. Garrett found himself exiled to the intellectual deserts of the moor, spiritualism had been a subject of great fascination to him, and he was eager to meet Nigel Westcott. And since he had learned that the company that evening would include another visitor to the moor, a famous writer of detective fiction whose work he also fervently admired, the vicar was quite excited by the prospect that this day opened up before him. If more days such as this were to be had, Mr. Garrett thought as he opened his Bible, he might grow to like his work, and Dartmoor, after all.

P
atsy Marsden leaned one elbow on the white damask tablecloth and gazed at the opposite wall, where the gilt-framed photograph of Queen Victoria was draped in black crape and surmounted by an elaborate black bow. The newspapers said that it was the end of an era, and Patsy hoped that it was—the end of the interminable prudishness that the Queen represented and the beginning of a more cheerful, less confining time. King Edward was definitely not prudish, with his racehorses, his shooting parties, and his Mrs. Keppel, who was widely known as the First Lady of the Bedchamber. The new era promised to be more openly entertaining than the old, and perhaps some of the freedoms the Royals seemed to enjoy would percolate down to the rest.

Patsy turned to look out the window of the Duchy Hotel. The clouds that hung over Dartmoor were gray and forbidding, and while the damp wind was not particularly cold, it was so fierce that it snatched off men's hats and twisted ladies' skirts—those few ladies, that is, who ventured out into Dartmoor's famously inclement weather.

But Patsy herself, undaunted by such minor discomforts as a damp wind, had just returned from a long morning's ramble in the direction of Merrivale Bridge, to see the famous hut circles and Standing Stone. She might be storm-tossed and pink-cheeked, but why should she be daunted by a bit of a wind? After all, she had journeyed through far less hospitable landscapes: across the burning Gobi desert, the frozen Alps, the steaming mangrove swamps of West Africa. What's more, her mostly solitary travels were not of the usual sort, where English ladies accompanied by their English maids stayed in the posh hotels that were frequented by English travelers, seeing the world not as it really
was
—astonishingly varied in landscape; extravagantly, colorfully rich in unique cultures and customs—but as a pale reflection of the ordered and decorous England they knew. Nor did Patsy carry with her the usual baggage, only (like the American journalist Nellie Bly, on her famous seventy-two-day trip around the world) one small bag containing a change of clothing and another containing her photography gear. And like Isabella Bird and Mary Kingsley Amis, traveling women whose books she devoured and whose stubborn determination to challenge society's familiar order she admired, Patsy now returned only briefly to England, to meet a few favorite friends, make the required duty call upon her mother, and—during this visit—to see to the publication of her photographs, a most exciting event in her life.