The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (125 page)

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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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20
But to return to family portraits. That, in spite of the
influx of fresh blood from all quarters, a certain family
type remains, one can hardly doubt in looking through a
genuine series of family pictures.
—OLD COUNTRY LIFE
T
HE FIRST THING I saw in the formal drawing room of Miss Baskerville’s house the following afternoon was the portrait of a Cavalier with fair ringlets and a stern, thin-lipped face, dressed in black velvet and a lace collar, taking possession of his surroundings from his place above the fire.
It had taken me some time to gain entrance to the room and the Cavalier’s presence, for although I had been at the door at what I had thought a sufficiently early hour for a Sunday morning, the mistress of the house had already left.
The housemaid could not tell me precisely where her lady had gone, although she was happy to tell me that it was her habit of a Sunday morning to call on any of a number of her father’s old and retired servants who lived in the area, enquiring as to their wants and transporting
them to their respective churches (or, in one case, chapel). She would then arrive for the midday services at her own church, before dismissing her driver to attend to the redistribution of the old retainers to their homes, and walk home or, if the weather was too foul, wait at the rectory until her motorcar came to take her home.
I therefore had been obliged to take my place in the back of the Victorian monstrosity where she worshipped, which, even though I claimed a seat directly over a vent from the floor heating, was nonetheless intensely cold until about two-thirds of the way through the service, when the heat suddenly shot on and had us steaming and discreetly shedding garments.
During the sermon I reflected on something Mrs Elliott had mentioned in passing, that Mr Baring-Gould was one of those all-too-rare proponents of the ten-minute, single-topic sermon, to the extent that he would begin to clear his throat if an underling went to fifteen minutes, and rise briskly to his feet at twenty. This particular specimen of the clergy before me did not suffer from brevity of speech, although he compensated by displaying a considerable brevity of both wit and learning. The stout, sweating man beside me was kept from snores only by the sharpness of his wife’s elbow.
The housemaid had given me a fair description of the lady I was seeking, and after the service had finally broken up I approached her outside on the pavement where she was pulling on her gloves and talking with friends. I waited until the friends had finished their business, a luncheon arrangement for the following week, and as they departed and she turned to go, I stepped to her side.
“Miss Baskerville, I believe?”
“Yes?” she asked.
“My name is Mary Russell. I’m a friend of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who asked me to look you up while I was in town.” Which was not strictly true, but the look of reserved politeness she gave me was clear evidence that, while she knew who he was, she was not about to be mentioning my small deception in any casual letter or future conversation.
Our gloves clasped briefly while I explained that her housemaid had told me how to find her, and asked if I might walk back with her.
“Certainly,” she said, not sounding at all certain.
“There are a few questions I need to ask you,” I said as we turned in the direction of her house, and began to explain the bare outlines of my (unnamed) husband’s longtime friendship with Baring-Gould, the reverend gentleman’s state of health, and the memoirs he was trying to assemble.
She was a small, neat woman, who listened with her head bent and whose steps began briskly, only to slow with her increasing involvement in the story. She did not seem over gifted with a subtlety of mind, becoming only more confused as we went, and although she appeared anxious to be of service to the squire of Lew Trenchard, that old friend of her father’s, she did not know what she could do for me. On her doorstep, she turned to me and said just that.
“Might I come in for a short time?” I suggested.
“Of course. Perhaps you will take luncheon with me?”
I assured her it was not necessary; she assured me it was no inconvenience; she gave instructions to the housemaid who had taken our things that two places were to be set at the table; and she then ushered me into the drawing room.
Aside from the painting of Sir Hugo, the room was light and feminine, with walls of cream and apricot and flowered-fabric chairs and draperies. It was not to my personal taste, but it was, I could easily see, tastefully if conventionally done.
“Would you like a glass of sherry, Miss Russell? I don’t drink, myself, but …”
A hot rum toddy might have served to drive away the chill of the walk, but as that was not offered, and considering my hostess’ abstinence, I declined. The hot tea we were brought instead was a help, although, not having spent the morning fasting, as she apparently had, I had not much use for the bland biscuits that accompanied it.
I waited while she performed her duties over the teapot, studying her and trying to choose the best approach to take. I had quickly decided that, while this woman was no foe, and could not possibly be siding with Scheiman or Ketteridge in whatever it was they were up to, at the same
time she would not make much of an ally. Sympathetic she might be, particularly towards her former neighbours, but she was completely lacking in anything resembling imagination: One need only look at the portrait of Sir Hugo, glaring down across the chintz and fringes like an accountant with a highly unsavoury private life, to know the woman bereft of perception.
I had to admit that the resemblance between Sir Hugo and Scheiman was faint, and that I should almost certainly have seen nothing had Holmes not planted the idea in my mind. The thin mouth, yes, and the general shape of the eye, but Scheiman’s face, though thin, lacked the hardness of this portrait, and the cold disapproval behind the painted eyes was something I had never seen in those of Ketteridge’s secretary. It came to me suddenly that Sir Hugo’s portraitist had been afraid of his subject; moreover, I thought the fear justified.
“Miss Russell?” Startled, I turned to the small blond woman in the demure grey dress. A tiny frown line furrowed her smooth brow and abruptly, my mind being no doubt receptive for such a thing, I could see the line furrowing David Scheiman’s brow, the night Holmes and I had taken dinner in Baskerville Hall. Just as quickly, I dismissed the sureness that tried to accompany the revelation, reminding myself firmly that two frown lines did not a nefarious plot make. However, I also decided, taking the cup she was holding out to me, that I was not going to tell her as much as I might have had that line not appeared.
“That is a very interesting picture,” I said. “It looks quite old.”
“The date on the back is 1647,” she said. “It is a distant relative of mine, Sir Hugo Baskerville. He is said to have been a rather naughty fellow, although I can’t say he looks it. I rather like the design of the lace on his collar.”
“Do you have many of the old family portraits?” I asked innocently. “I mean to say, Mr Baring-Gould told me that yours is an old family, and I imagine there must have been quite a few pictures.”
“I did bring two or three with me when I sold the house to Mr Ketteridge.” She settled back into her chair for a nice, light latter-church
sort of conversation with a new acquaintance. “There was a Reynolds of my great-great-grandfather that was rather valuable, and a nice portrait of a lady in a blue dress that just matched the boudoir set—I couldn’t part with her—and of course the Sargent portraits of my parents. I hadn’t actually intended to bring Sir Hugo—he seemed to go with the Hall, somehow, and I thought it might be best not to bring too many reminders of past glories, as it were. But Mr Ketteridge insisted I take it. In fact, he came down from the Hall himself with it wrapped in a sheet, saying he couldn’t bear for me to lose all of my family, and after all, Sir Hugo is a little bit famous. Do you know the story that Mr Conan Doyle called
The Hound of the Baskervilles
?”
I assured her that I was familiar with the tale and with Sir Hugo’s place in it (although I might have used the word
infamous
instead), all the while aware of how very peculiar it was for Richard Ketteridge to have so generously parted with what, to a man lusting after the Baskerville story, had to be the single most compelling object in the collection.
“When did you move here?” I asked. Her pretty face clouded somewhat.
“A little more than two years ago. My father died before the war, my elder brother in 1916, my younger brother disappeared at sea in 1918, and my mother was so devastated after that, she had no energy to fight off the effects of the influenza. She died in the winter of 1919. I am the last Baskerville.”
“How very sad,” I said, meaning it.
“I tried to keep the house up, but it was hopeless. I was there more or less by myself, as it was so difficult to find capable men, and I know nothing about the running of an estate. After two years I had to admit defeat, and when Mr Ketteridge offered to buy it, at what my solicitor agreed was a very fair price, I sold it and moved here.”
We had made our way through the tea and the biscuits, and when the maid bobbed her way into the room and suggested that luncheon was ready, we adjourned to the next room.
“I hope you don’t object to a light luncheon, Miss Russell,” she said.
“I know that most people like a substantial dinner after church, but I can never seem to face it, somehow.”
I told her I was quite content with sharing her standard fare, and prepared to make merry with the consommé and tinned asparagus in aspic.
“Do you miss the moor?” I asked after a while.
“Oh, I don’t know. At first I thought I never would, it was so bright and cheerful and … lively here. But now, well, I sometimes think about when the furze would blossom, and the drifts when the ponies are driven down from the moor, and the dramatic smoke and fires when they swale the heather. I even miss those dreary tors that I used to find so gloomy, staring down at the Hall.”
I laughed. “Gloomy it is, but oddly beautiful.” I could well imagine, for a conventional girl only a bit older than I, that the huge old building miles from anything that might be termed society might well be a burden to be shed rather than an inheritance to be valued. I also remembered that her mother had not been born here, but had come obedient to her husband’s criminous plans, later to be transferred to the protecting arm of Sir Henry and kept on the moor for the rest of her life.
I judged it time to return delicately to my main area of interest. “How did Mr Ketteridge come to hear about the Hall? An advertisement?”
“Oh no, I couldn’t have done that. No, I wasn’t actually even thinking about selling, really. After all, the land has been in the family for six hundred years—that’s hardly something to be broken lightly. Although I know there’s a lot of that sort of thing happening now, with the war and the change in the tax laws. Still, I probably would have held out for a while longer, but he came to me. He’d heard I was interested in letting it, but he wanted to buy it outright. He was passionate about it, seemed to know more than I did about its history, and just … loved it. I thought about it for a few weeks, during which time I had a huge bill for the coal and another for repairing some frozen pipes, and an estimate on woodworm and roof work—it all came at once.
“And I thought, Why should I be burdened with six centuries of Baskervilles? The house was built at a time when there was a huge estate of
rich agricultural land, which various ancestors had whittled off over the years, leaving me with no means of keeping the roof standing. To me it was a burden—becoming a prison. To Mr Ketteridge it was a prize. I sold it.”
I wondered how she would feel when news reached her that he had already tired of his prize. I was not about to be the one to tell her; rather, I looked at her with a degree of admiration, both for her sense of history’s injustices and her self-respect. There was one question to be asked, though, particularly considering the attractive face and deferential manner that nature had wedded to her monetary inheritance.
“Have you ever considered marriage?”
She blushed, very prettily. “I had thought not to be granted that happiness, Miss Russell. I was once engaged, during the war, but six months later my fiancé was killed in France. Afterwards, well, it isn’t quite so simple, is it?” She let her voice drift off as she considered me, Miss Russell, a woman five or six years her junior who wore, incongruously, a gold band on the ring finger of the right hand, where it could either be taken for a wedding band in the style of certain European communities, or for a memento. I did not enlighten her, letting her think that perhaps I, too, was one of England’s many spinsters. Whole, eligible men in those postwar years were a rare species.
“However,” she resumed, studying the spoon in her hand, “recently I have … come to an agreement.”
I wished her congratulations and felicitations, and turned back to the all important question of time.
“As I mentioned, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould is writing his memoirs.”
“I believe I read something about a volume being published recently,” she said, sounding none too definite about it.

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