The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (111 page)
Authors: Laurie R. King
BOOK: The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor
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However, there was a strong pulse of life in even the more abstruse tomes, a bounce and vigour one would not have predicted. His occasional references to Devon, and particularly Dartmoor, sang with life and humour, and if he was sometimes pompous and often paternalistic, the passion he felt for the land made up for it.
The novels were embarrassingly melodramatic, but intriguing. There seemed to me a deep vein of cruelty, almost brutality, running through his stories, a distinct lack of tenderness and compassion towards his characters, particularly those living in poverty, that seemed odd in a man dedicated to God’s service, and moreover an interest in savage, almost pagan emotions that was surely unusual in an otherwise calm and responsible squire. I began to understand his fascination with the moor, and also to wonder about the man’s blunt dismissal of his children on that first night, describing them merely as “scattered.”
I was in the final throes of a furious potboiler called
Mahalah
when Holmes came into the room. He said something; I grunted in reply and turned the page, and after a minute another page.
Mahalah
when Holmes came into the room. He said something; I grunted in reply and turned the page, and after a minute another page.
Ten minutes later I had finished the book and sat back, feeling equal parts exasperation and the sense of romantic tragedy that Baring-Gould had been trying to evoke. I looked at Holmes, then looked at him more attentively.
“Why are you dressing, Holmes?”
He glanced up from his task of threading one gold cuff link into his cuff. “Dinner, Russell. At Richard Ketteridge’s? I did inform you.”
“Oh Lord!” I threw myself at the wardrobe and snatched up my frock.
“How long do I have?”
“The car is already here. Five minutes will make us only fashionably late.”
I flung my clothes on the floor and dropped the frock over my head, succeeded in hoisting my silk stockings without putting a ladder into either of them, and turned to the mirror to subdue my hair into some kind of order.
“Is it still raining?” I asked.
“It is.”
“I must have an umbrella. Go and find me one. Please.”
As always happens when I am in a hurry, my hair went up lopsided and had to be taken down and arranged again. Still, in the end I was presentable. I caught up a thin woollen wrap and hurried downstairs.
Baring-Gould was passing through the hallway downstairs, and he wished me a pleasant evening without, I thought, actually seeing me. Holmes was in the porch, and as soon as he heard me coming he stepped out onto the drive and opened a huge, bright green umbrella over our heads, and escorted me the few feet to the sleek closed touring car that awaited us. A liveried chauffeur was one step ahead of him, holding the door. I climbed in, followed by Holmes. The chauffeur claimed the umbrella, closed it, and drew it after him into the front, and drove us away from Lew House.
8
With every wish to promote the well-being and
emancipation of the working classes, I should be sorry to see—
what is approaching—the extinction of the old squirearchy,
or rather being supplanted by the nouveaux riches.
emancipation of the working classes, I should be sorry to see—
what is approaching—the extinction of the old squirearchy,
or rather being supplanted by the nouveaux riches.
—EARLY REMINISCENCES
A
S WE BEGAN to thread our way through the narrow, deep-cut lanes that led upwards onto the moor itself, I became aware of something odd in the attitude of the man at my side. The light outside was fading, but it was still bright enough in the car for me to study him. He was slumped down into the comfortable seat, his arms crossed over his chest, and his face had a sour look on it that I had seen any number of times before.
S WE BEGAN to thread our way through the narrow, deep-cut lanes that led upwards onto the moor itself, I became aware of something odd in the attitude of the man at my side. The light outside was fading, but it was still bright enough in the car for me to study him. He was slumped down into the comfortable seat, his arms crossed over his chest, and his face had a sour look on it that I had seen any number of times before.
“Holmes, what is it?”
“What is what, Russell?” he said irritably, not taking his eyes from the passing stone walls crowned with hedgerows. “I do wish you would refrain from asking me questions that contain no grammatical antecedent.”
“An antecedent is unnecessary if both parties are aware of the topic under consideration, and you know full well what I’m talking about. Your
physical language is positively shouting your displeasure, but since this evening’s social event was not my idea, I cannot assume that you are resenting my coercion. You are peeved at something; what is it?”
physical language is positively shouting your displeasure, but since this evening’s social event was not my idea, I cannot assume that you are resenting my coercion. You are peeved at something; what is it?”
“Am I not to be allowed the privacy of my own thoughts without being subjected to an analysis of my ‘physical language’?”
“Not if you insist on indulging in those thoughts around me, no. If you wanted privacy, Holmes, you should not have married me.”
Bridling, he removed his gaze from the limited view outside the car windows and glared at me for a long moment before his good sense reasserted itself. His arms unknotted themselves and dropped to his lap, and he looked, if anything, almost sheepish. He lowered his voice, although the glass between us and the driver was thick and the whine of the climbing engine loud.
“I discovered only this evening that Ketteridge’s house is Baskerville Hall,” he said.
I saw immediately what he dreaded: not, as I had feared, the feeling of a case taking a disastrously wrong turn, but rather the sort of fulsome praise he loathed. Holmes was fond enough of applause for those of his actions that he himself considered deserving, but he abhorred the popular notoriety that Watson’s narratives had spawned.
“Holmes, it’s been, what? Twenty years since that story was published. Surely—”
“Ketteridge’s secretary was reciting whole swaths of it last night to his master’s amusement. And Gould was playing along, curse him.”
“We could turn back to Lew Trenchard,” I suggested. “I could take ill, if you like.” One of the unexpected benefits of marriage, I had found, was that it gave a convenient scapegoat upon which public blame could be heaped.
“Generous of you to offer, Russell, but no. Tribulation is good for the soul, or so I hear. Although I admit that had I known last night, I might have avoided the invitation to dinner. Which may be why neither Ketteridge nor Gould happened to mention it.”
“Well, I shall reserve the option of a ladylike attack of the vapours if the reminiscences become too nauseating.”
“Thank you.”
“Think nothing of it. How did Ketteridge come to own Baskerville Hall? If he inherited, why didn’t he take the name?”
“He bought the place—lock, stock, and family portraits. Two years ago, according to Gould, he was on the final stages of a world tour when he passed through England and happened to hear about it from an acquaintance in a weekend shooting party up in Scotland. It appealed to him, he came out to look at it, and he ended up buying it from the sole surviving Baskerville, the daughter of the Sir Henry I knew.”
“Sir Henry had no sons?”
“He had two. They were both killed during the war, one in the Somme, the other somewhere in the Mediterranean, probably lost to a German submarine boat. Sir Henry died before the war, his widow in the influenza epidemic of 1919. With death duties, the daughter, who was only twenty-two or -three and unmarried, hadn’t enough left to maintain the hall. It’s one of those great stone sinkholes, a gold-hungry mire sucking down pounds and pence without a trace. As you can see,” he said, extending one long finger to point at the view through the window ahead.
The land beneath our tyres had climbed through the wooded fringe along the outer slopes of the moor and out into the tiny fields and walled pastures that occupy the edges of the moor itself. It had continued to rise until the low and homely cottages had fallen away, leaving only the bleak, boulder-strewn expanse of the interior. Unexpectedly, a dip in the barren ground fell away and grew trees. I caught a brief glimpse of what looked like a pair of thin towers rising above the branches, and then we dropped down into the trees.
The lodge gates showed signs of recent attention, for although the edges of the pillars were smooth and shapeless with age, the stone glowed as if freshly scrubbed and the elaborate tracery of the iron gates gleamed with new black paint. The lodge itself was fairly new and very
tidy and tenanted by someone sufficiently house-proud to have starched the white curtains into crispness. As we passed through the gates, I looked up at the amorphous stone objects that topped the flanking pillars. I thought they resembled enormous potatoes; Holmes said they were the boars’ heads of the Baskervilles.
tidy and tenanted by someone sufficiently house-proud to have starched the white curtains into crispness. As we passed through the gates, I looked up at the amorphous stone objects that topped the flanking pillars. I thought they resembled enormous potatoes; Holmes said they were the boars’ heads of the Baskervilles.
On the other side of the gate lay a long avenue of old trees that had dropped most of their leaves onto the drive. Nonetheless, the branches that met over our heads were thick enough to block the last rays of the evening’s light, so that we seemed to be driving into a long tunnel, illuminated from below by the powerful headlamps of the motorcar. There was a row of light standards, planted at the side of the drive at regular intervals, but they were unlit, visible only in our headlamps.
Then, twenty feet from the end of the tunnel, the front windscreen of the motorcar flared into a blaze of light, blinding us as if a powerful searchlight had been shone directly into our faces. The driver slowed and put up one hand to shield his eyes, and we emerged cautiously from the avenue of trees. The drive passed through an expanse of lawn lined with flower beds, and I found myself looking up at a house shaggy with ivy, its central block surmounted by the two towers I had seen from the approach. Impressive from a distance, they now looked crowded together, thrown out of balance with the original house by the addition of two modern wings. One huge light fixture hung from the wall above the porch, drenching the lower part of the house in blue-white brilliance. The upper reaches, shielded by a reflector, receded into darkness but for the squares of a few mullioned windows that had lights behind their curtains.
“Well,” said Holmes to himself, “I see Sir Henry got his thousand-candle-power Swan and Edison.”
“Two or three lesser bulbs might have got the job done less dramatically.”
“His purpose was to expel the gloom.”
“He did that,” I said, although I could not help noticing that where the light eventually trailed to a halt, the dark seemed even more solid than it had in the unlit avenue.
Richard Ketteridge had been standing at his open porch door when we emerged from the avenue of trees. He came out onto the drive to greet us, and now his hand was on my door, opening it. I arranged a gracious smile on my face and permitted him to hand me out of the motorcar. Fortunately, I did not trip and fall at his feet, and as the rain had momentarily slowed to a sort of falling fog, I waved away the driver with the umbrella.
Ketteridge began to speak the moment my door cracked open, his ebullient Americanisms spilling over us as he bowed over my hand and shook that of Holmes, pulling us inside all the while.
“Well, I must say, this is an honour, an honour indeed. Little did I know when I bought this place that I’d one day be welcoming the man who saved it from a rascal, all those years ago. Of course,” he confided to me, “it was one of the reasons I bought it in the first place, that ripping good story about the Hound. I felt like I was buying a piece of English history, and an exciting piece at that. Come in, come in,” he urged, for we had reached the door. “You’ll find a few changes in the old place,” he said to Holmes, and scurried forward to fling open the door into the hall itself, nearly bowling over the butler who stood on the other side.
“Sorry, Tuptree, didn’t see you there. Come in, Mrs Holmes, Mr Holmes, warm yourselves by the fire. What can we get you to drink?”
I decided that the butler must have worked in Ketteridge’s house for some time, since he was not only resigned to his employer’s hasty willingness to do away with his services by opening doors for himself, but he did not even react to receiving an apology from his employer. Perhaps, I amended my diagnosis, he had merely worked for Americans before.
The fire was enthusiastic and well fed, set in a massive and ancient fireplace surrounded by several yards of padded fender. I perched my backside on the leather, enjoying the heat and the crackle of the flames while Holmes and our host exchanged some innocuous words of greeting. After a moment, Tuptree came up with our drinks on his polished tray, and I then removed myself to a deep armchair of maroon leather and sipped my sherry, examining my surroundings with interest.
Sir Henry’s passion for lightbulbs had been indulged in the interior of his hall as well, with the result that I now sat in the best-lit Elizabethan building outside of a film stage. It was startling, particularly as I had not seen an electric light since leaving Oxford. Every dent and chisel mark in the balusters of the upstairs gallery were readily visible; I could see a small mend in the carpeting on the staircase, and pick out a faint haze of dust on the upper frames of the pictures. It was incongruous and somewhat disturbing—surely those high, age-blackened rafters were never meant to be viewed in such raw detail, nor the cracks and folds in the high, narrow stained-glass window picked out with an intense clarity they would not have even in full sun. The intense illumination made the old oak panelling gleam and brought out all the details of the coats of arms mounted on the walls, but on the whole it was not a successful pairing, for despite the apartment’s rich colours and sumptuous, almost cluttered appearance, the harshness of the light made the hall look stark and new, a not entirely successful copy of an old building.
I realised belatedly that the two men were looking at me attentively.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“I just asked what you made of the place,” replied Ketteridge.
“Actually, I was wondering how on earth you power all these lights.”
“Generators and batteries,” he said promptly. “Sir Henry put them in. Did it right, too—I can run every light in the place for six hours before the batteries start to run down. When they don’t break down, that is—a man from London is supposed to be here to look into what’s gone wrong with the row of lights in the avenue. They’ve been out for days.”
“The problems of the householder,” I murmured sympathetically.
He looked at me sideways, opened his mouth, changed his mind, and took a sip from his drink instead (not sherry, but by the look of it a lightly watered whisky) before turning back to Holmes.
“So what brings you to Dartmoor this time, Mr Holmes? Not another hound, I hope?”
“I am on holiday, Mr Ketteridge,” Holmes said blandly. “Merely paying
a visit to an old friend.” He, too, raised his glass, and smiled politely at the American.
a visit to an old friend.” He, too, raised his glass, and smiled politely at the American.
“Baring-Gould, yes. Did you meet him during the Baskerville case? He was here then, wasn’t he?”
“He was here, yes, but no, I had met him before that.”
Ketteridge wavered, and I could see him ruefully accept Holmes’ broad hint that any further questioning along that particular route would be boorish. He chose another.
“I believe we have a mutual friend, Mr Holmes.”
“Oh?” He was very polite; he did not even raise an eyebrow.
“Lady Blythe-Patton. You did a little job for her a few years back. I met the colonel at my club, and they invited me out to their country place for a weekend. Fine people. She had much to say about you.”
Only an American, I reflected, could actually form a new acquaintanceship at a men’s club. I kept my face without expression when Holmes turned to speak to me.
“I found a necklace that she had lost, Russell, many years ago when I was a hungry youth with the rent to pay.”
“Recovered it within an hour of entering the house, she says,” Ketteridge elaborated with a no-false-modesty sort of joviality.
“Behind the cushions of the settee,” Holmes replied, sounding bored. “I don’t suppose that within her panegyric she included the advice I gave her at the time?”
“Not that I recall, no,” Ketteridge said doubtfully.
“I told her that in the future she ought to remove her valuables to the safe before imbibing as heavily as she had been, and moreover, that increasing her expenditures on domestic staff might make it possible for the overworked housemaids to clean more thoroughly, turning out the cushions at regular intervals. The settee was really quite disgusting.”
Ketteridge thought this hilarious. I waited until his laughter was subsiding, and then I asked Holmes, “Did she actually pay you after that?”
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