Death at Dartmoor (9 page)

“I don't mean to constrain creativity, of course,” Crossing was saying in a conciliatory tone. “The folklore of this place is fantastic enough to inspire the imagination of any writer. Pixies used to be seen often at Piskies' Holt in Huccaby Cleave, where troops of them used to gather on moonlit nights.”

“Pixies?” Doyle asked with some interest.

Crossing nodded. “Any Dartmoor child would be delighted to show you their favorite haunts. And there is the doomed huntsman and his demon hounds, whose eyes glow like balls of fire. And the gigantic hound that chased poor Luke Rogers twelve miles across the moor, not a month ago.”

Robinson leaned forward. “A gigantic hound?” he repeated eagerly. “D'you hear that, Doyle? That's the creature I described to you. The very one!”

“Indeed,” Crossing replied, his eyes twinkling. “There's a story about that hound, you know. It seems that Luke's wife was not amused when he arrived home much later than usual and told her about a great black dog who had waylaid him, whose very fur sparked fire. ‘Black doag afire!' she exclaimed.” Here Crossing slipped into the lilting dialect of the moormen. ‘Doan't ye tell me no such foolishness, Luke Rogers. Where wuz ye th' fust part o' th' aivnin'?' Luke explained that he had passed an hour or two at the pub at Newhouse. ‘Es, I thought so,' said his wife. ‘An' if ye go there agin, ye'll find me after ye. Ye've got away from th' houn' to be sure, but ye woan't get away from yer wife.' ”

“Y' see there, Doyle!” Robinson crowed, elbowing his friend. “The hound, to the life. The moor is a wild, fantastical place, full of creatures yet unknown to science! Something like Darwin's Galapagos, I imagine.”

“Wild and fantastical it is, sir,” Crossing said, with a little smile. “Or so Luke Rogers learned, after an hour or two at the pub at Newhouse. Our moor brew is powerful enough to conjure up any number of spectral hounds.”

Amid the general laughter, Charles turned to see the servants removing the food and then the cloth from the buffet table and then moving the table itself to the shadows at the dimmest end of the room. The somber clang of a gong shivered through the air, and their hostess called for their attention.

“Mr. Westcott tells me that the spirits are near and it is time for the séance,” she announced. “If you will take your seats around the table, we will begin.”

 

Several hours later, as Patsy undressed and climbed into the great oak bed in her room at the Duchy Hotel, she thought that the séance had been a massive disappointment. It wasn't her first such event, of course. She had attended a perfectly marvelous séance in Paris, where the heavy oak table had risen nearly a foot off the floor and a gray shadow had materialized in the depths of a gilt mirror, to the accompaniment of a ghostly humming and a faint whiff of lilac, which was said by one of the participants to be the favorite perfume of her dead aunt. And there had been another in the home of the British consulate in Cairo, where a spirit had plucked the strings of a lyre and performed urgent alphabetical rappings on a tambourine, while the scent of sandalwood wafted through the air—the ghost, it was said afterward, of a melancholy foreign lady who was trying to send a message to the lover who had poisoned her.

But there had been no such manifestations at the Thornworthy séance that night. The table had been placed at the darkened end of the room, the candles were extinguished, and a copper-backed screen shielded the fire, so that it was quite dark. They all sat silently around the table, their hands on it, as Nigel Westcott seemed to slip into a kind of trance, his breathing becoming slow and labored, and he uttered a few garbled words.

At that point, it actually seemed as if something might be about to happen—perhaps the Marquis of Thorn might step out of the fireplace—for the widow from Hexworthy, sitting next to Kate, gave a stifled shriek and began to babble in a high-pitched, frantic voice. Patsy, across the table, couldn't tell what she was saying. Something about someone being murdered, perhaps. But Lady Duncan warned the widow, quite sternly, to stop disturbing the spirits, and she subsided.

Shortly after, Nigel Westcott recovered himself and asked huskily whether the messages he had been receiving from his spirit contact had come through to the others. There was a chorus of disappointed
no
s (the widow seemed to be quite overcome, and was being comforted by Kate), while the vicar voiced his opinion that the presence of some skeptic at the table had prevented the spirits from manifesting themselves.

“I am the skeptic,” Charles said as they climbed into Robinson's coach for the drive back to the hotel. “No one has yet produced any evidence to demonstrate to me that table-tiltings and spirit-rappings are anything but the same out-and-out fakery that is used by magicians.”

“The significant word is
yet,”
Mr. Doyle remarked thoughtfully. “I myself must reserve judgment until I have witnessed something I cannot detect to be fakery.”

Charles arched an eyebrow. “And how will you be sure? Perhaps you will merely have been beguiled by a skillful fraud, whose ability to deceive surpasses your ability to detect.”

Doyle had frowned, Patsy laughed, and Kate reached over to squeeze her husband's hand. “You have failed once again to suspend your disbelief,” she said playfully. “I fear, my lord, that we shall have to leave you at the hotel tomorrow night. With you present, the spirits may never speak.”

“Tomorrow night?” Patsy asked, thinking that she had missed something.

“To be sure,” Doyle replied. “As we left, Lady Duncan mentioned that Mr. Westcott has agreed to give it another go, since everyone was disappointed tonight. No supper is planned, but we're all invited. Perhaps the spirits will be more cooperative tomorrow night.”

Patsy didn't care much about tomorrow night's spirits, she thought as she drowsily plumped her pillow and snuggled under the feather-filled comforter. But she was looking forward to tomorrow morning's ramble with the knowledgeable Mr. Crossing, who had promised to show her any number of excellent subjects for her camera.

In his room at the opposite end of the hall from Miss Marsden, Conan Doyle had not yet gone to bed. A tidy fire burned in the grate and his chair awaited him, but he stood before his window, wrapped in a green silk dressing gown, gazing down at the empty street, the gas lamps wreathed in twisting ribbons of mist.

Doyle frowned. He was thinking with a great deal of discomfort about Fletcher Robinson—Bertie. What the devil was he to do about the man? When they had first met aboard ship on their return from South Africa, he had been quite taken with the affable young journalist, who had already made something of a name for himself as a wartime correspondent for the
Daily Express.
A few weeks ago, Bertie had invited him to Norfolk for a pleasant golfing holiday, entertaining him with eerie tales of his native Devon and the great moor, among them a local legend of a gigantic hound. When Doyle remarked that the strange tale might serve as the background for a ghost story, Robinson had been quick to propose a title and sketch out a plot—a skill at which he was quite adept. Almost before Doyle knew it, he found himself agreeing to a collaboration, and the next morning, still under the spell of Robinson's boyish enthusiasm about the project, he wrote a note to his mother to say that they planned to coauthor a “small book.” He even mentioned Robinson's proposed title, The Hound of
the Baskervilles,
and the fact that they intended to spend a fortnight at Bertie's family home, to the east of Dartmoor, where they could make day trips to the moor and steep themselves in atmosphere for the project.

At that point, of course, Doyle had given no thought to bringing Holmes or Watson into the plot, for Holmes was dead, and anyway, that would only muddle things. The two of them did not intend their tale to be a detective story but rather a classic masterpiece of the supernatural, in the manner of Dickens's “The Signalman” or Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw,” which they saw as striking exactly the tone of psychological fear and dread that they were after.

All this literary discussion was delightfully exhilarating, although if Doyle had been a bit more cautious he might have recalled that he'd not had much success with such ventures. He and J. M. Barrie had thrown themselves into the libretto for a comic opera which had proved a disastrous failure, and his impulsive agreement to coauthor a work with his brother-in-law Willie Hornung had come to a similar bad end.

In this case, the difficulty was that Robinson had run dry of ideas after that first energetic outburst. And when Doyle had handed him a preliminary section of the story, he'd had the temerity to scratch out perfectly good sentences and insert his own—and insist on treating every forthcoming page in exactly the same way! What's more, Bertie's much-vaunted knowledge of the moor had turned out to be about as extensive as the average day-tripper's, a fact that tonight's embarrassing exchange with Crossing had demonstrated. And worst of all, the more intimate he and his coauthor became, the more of a bore the fellow seemed—a genial bore, but nonetheless irritating, especially since he'd begun to talk so possessively about “their” story.

So, after chewing the whole mess over for several days, Doyle had decided to extricate himself from the frustrations of this ill-advised collaboration. He had come up with exactly the right method, too. He would bring Holmes and Watson into the piece and make it, after all, a detective story—
his
detective story, of course, for Robinson could not expect to lay claim to a Sherlock Holmes mystery. Anyway, his was the name that would sell the thing. Robinson's name would never be worth more than a couple of shillings.

And while Doyle didn't like to be crass about it, money was the central issue here. He had often joked that he'd killed his bank account when he killed Sherlock Holmes, but it was the unfortunate truth. His last novel,
A Duet,
had been a commercial failure, the book on the Boer War had brought in nothing at all, and he was chronically short of funds. With Holmes in
The Hound,
he felt sure that Greenhough Smith at
The Strand
would gladly give him a hundred pounds per thousand words. Without Holmes, he'd have to settle for substantially less. Yes, all things considered, Sherlock was the single stone that would bring down two very different birds: Bertie's ambition to be the coauthor of
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
and his own unhappy need for money. He hated like fury to go back on his word to anyone, even to Robinson, and no doubt he would suffer pangs of conscience for it. But there it was. He had no other choice.

Having come to this conclusion a day or so ago, Doyle had excused himself from staying longer at Ipplepen and had moved to Princetown, to the Duchy Hotel, where he could finish his work without any more interference from Robinson, particularly those offers to edit his work! The only question that remained was how and when to tell Bertie that their short-lived collaboration was over.

With a dejected sigh, he leaned his forehead against the cold glass of the window. He didn't suppose the matter would end there, for he knew Bertie well enough to realize that the man might be contentious. While they didn't have a written agreement—he'd been astute enough, at least, not to back himself into that sort of corner—Bertie had drawn him into a conversation about their project in the hearing of several friends. Even Harry Baskerville, the coachman whose surname Robinson had filched, had seen them in the billiards room, going over the story together. Doyle was not a pessimistic man, but he could smell trouble ahead over this thing. He would no doubt have to promise to pay the fellow something out of his royalties to get him to step aside.

He sighed again as he turned from the window, went back to his chair, and sat down. An unopened envelope lay on the table beside him, a letter from his wife Louisa, at home with the children at their new house, Undershaw. She was dying of consumption—had been dying for eight long years—and he knew what he would read in the letter: a cheerful report of the family's doings, a bit of gossip about friends, a solicitous wish for his health, and between every line, her constant, steadfast, undying love. He should read it, he knew, and write a response to go into the morning post. Touie—his pet name for her—insisted on hearing from him each day that he was absent, and most days, he dutifully complied.

His hand hesitated for a moment above the envelope on the table but went instead to his pocket. He took out an already much-read letter and unfolded it slowly, taking in the heady fragrance of roses that scented it. It was from Jean Leckie, the woman Doyle had loved for four years, since their meeting on March 15, 1897, an anniversary that he always marked by giving her a single white blossom, a snowdrop. But Doyle knew in his heart that his love for Jean did not have the purity symbolized by the flower. While he fought hard against the darkness of desire and so far had won—if winning were measured by his adamant refusal to permit himself to physically consummate their love—his undeniable yearning for her constantly offended his sense of what was right and true. It was the source of an enormous conflict in his soul, eating away at him day and night.

He sighed and refolded the letter once again. He did not need to read it, for he had already memorized its few lines. Jean would be here tomorrow, and they would be together again, for at least a few hours. He could touch her hand, kiss her lips, enjoy the warmth and comfort of her delightful company.

Under the circumstances, it was all he could ask, and more—far more—than he had any right to expect.