The Moor (18 page)

"I doan," she admitted. "But Eliz'beth Chase, along by Wheal Betsy, she be waitin' to see'y."

"Wheal Betsy being…?"

"Up from Mary Tavy."

Which was nearly back to Lew Trenchard from here.

"What does she want to see me about?"

"An 'edge'og."

I opened my mouth to continue this line of questioning, and then closed it, turned my back, and led the horse away. I would not be driven insane by the peculiarities gathered around me. I would not.

The rationale behind my expedition was fairly simple and really quite sensible, in its own way: The great inner sweep of the moor, in several remote spots of which a rather substantial ghostly carriage had been seen, was not, as Holmes had pointed out, a place overly endowed with facilities in which to store a coach and stable its horses. Granted, the moor was well populated with horses, but animals big enough and well enough trained to pull a carriage over rough ground by moonlight were hardly likely to blend in with the compact, wild inhabitants of the moor.

Around the edges of the moor, however, lived people, and people (as I had just demonstrated) noticed things and talked about them. The sound of harnessed horses at night, strange hoofprints in a lane, dogs barking at the moon, all would have attracted attention if they had come in from outside, passing through the circle of farms and villages. Therefore, a careful circuit of the moor's outer band of civilisation ought to tell us whether or not the carriage had passed through it.

On one level, the disproportionate use of our time hunting for something that might not exist was more than a touch ridiculous—what the detectives at Scotland Yard might have to say about our carriage hunt did not bear thinking. On the other hand, the search was typical of Holmes' approach to an investigation: One looked for an oddity, some little thing that stood out, and traced it to its source (praying that it was not a mere coincidence, a thing that was, unfortunately, far from unknown). This appearance of a mythic coach just at the time a moor man was killed was too much of a coincidence to be believed. Hence the hunt—or rather, our two hunts, one on each segment of the circumference.

Postbridge, unlike the earlier Two Bridges (which consisted of little more than the inn where Holmes and I had stayed the week before) was an actual settlement, boasting two churches and a telephone kiosk. I had a choice of inns there (if one used the term
inn
in its loosest sense), and I chose the place with the attempt at flowers near the entrance.

I was tired, and ached in a number of unfamiliar places. It was a long time since I had spent so many hours in the saddle, even without three violent collisions with the ground. I ate a meal that consisted mostly of flour in various forms (all of them inexplicably both tasteless and unpleasant to smell) and drank some thin, sour red wine that seemed to go with my mood, and then took myself to bed—without having questioned a single resident about traces of the coach. Holmes would positively quiver with disapproval when he discovered my neglect, I knew, but at that moment I could not have stirred myself into action had the threat of divorce been held over my head. I asked for a lamp to supplement the lonely candle on the bedside table, put on two pairs of woollen socks and a thick pullover, inserted myself between the clammy bedclothes, opened
Early Reminiscences
to read another chapter, and woke some hours later with the oily smell of the guttering lamp wick permeating the inside of my throat and nasal passages. I wound the wick down to extinguish it, pulled the covers over my aching head, and went back to sleep.

In the morning when I finally relinquished unconsciousness, the reason for the previous night's almost preternatural sense of smell as well as the odd disinclination to exert myself became obvious: I was working up to a cold.

Bleary, stuffy, aching, and thick-headed, I tottered down the stairs on legs that seemed less than securely connected to the rest of me. Scalding tea helped, but not enough, and the thought of venturing into the heavy rain I could see pouring down the windows was more than I could face. When a gust of wind-driven rain came rolling over the countryside at me, I accepted that as an omen; I told my landlady that I should be spending the day in my bed, not to have the room tidied, and I should ring if I wanted anything. With that I retreated, and slept on and off for the remainder of the day.

Inevitably, I woke in the middle of the night. The inn was completely still, no creaks or groans, not even the perpetual background gurgle of rain through downpipes. The silence was so remarkable it pulled me up to wakefulness, then alertness. I became aware of other things: the stuffy air, the faint and offensive smell of stale onion from the half-eaten bowl of soup I had left to be cleared, which still sat on the table near the door. I got out of bed and went to open the window, but once at the glass I was held by the sight before me. I turned back to fetch my spectacles and the coverlet from the bed, and perched on the narrow window seat for my first sight of the moor without rain falling.

The crisp half-moon rode a black sky, dotted here and there with the wisps of a few very high clouds. Postbridge itself was in a little hollow near a river, but the back of this inn faced out over the moor, and the moor was a place transformed, a stark landscape of gentle moonlit hills punctuated by patches of black rock or hollows, quiescent and motionless and unreal.

After probably an hour of sitting huddled staring out at the view, I woke abruptly from a doze and caught myself leaning towards the open window. I stood up, pulling the warm bedclothes back around my neck, and cast another glance at the moor. Actually, I decided, the white moon against the black sky was very pretty, but the moor itself was just pale expanse with dark patches, with one tor tantalisingly silhouetted against the moon. Much nicer than the ceaseless rain, though. Perhaps the storm's passing meant that it would remain clear the following day.

ELEVEN

How noticeable in the progress of mankind in knowledge is the fact that before the opening of a door hitherto shut, another that has swung wide for generations should be slammed and double bolted.

—Early Reminiscences

The sky was not exactly clear the next day, although it was not yet raining. Neither was my cold gone, though the fever had departed and my lungs were clean enough. I had no real excuse for indulging myself with another day in bed.

With my eye, however blearily, back on the job, I made my way methodically through the staff of the inn, asking my questions. To my growing consternation, every one of them knew who I was, why I was there, and had information saved up for me. Unfortunately, the information was all of the signs-and-portents variety, which might have proved interesting to a student of folklore but which led me no closer to the cold, dull realm of factual truth. I thanked each of my would-be informants, even the stable boy who gave me a thrice-watered-down version (or perhaps more accurately, thrice-added-to) of the fright a village girl had received from a neighbour's dog one night. I paid my account, and left.

Red seemed positively frisky after his day's rest. I wondered morosely how long he would wait before flinging me off, but his ears remained pricked, and we passed trees, standing stones, Scottish cows, and even a rabbit warren without incident. Perhaps it was the rain. Or being taken away from his warm stables, and we were now facing back towards home. Or a temporary brainstorm, Your Honour. Whatever it was, I found it a relief to remain seated and upright as the morning went by.

Aside from the horse's behaviour and the dry (if grey) skies, the day was one calculated to madden. Coughing and sneezing my way across the countryside, my level of energy too low to bother with imaginary demons beyond a vague wariness, I was greeted by each inhabitant with a dignified respect, as if I were the representative of a royal Personage. Heads were bared, work stopped, children lined up: even the odd curtsey, for God's sake.

They all tried very hard to give me something of value for my collection of strange events. Memories had very obviously been ransacked for anything out of the ordinary, anything at all: a pony missing, a neighbour's baby dead in its cradle, an uncle driven from his land, a cousin's friend disappearing. Under closer questioning, the baby had been sickly, the uncle old and ready to sell, and the girl who disappeared had come back a week later with a young new husband in tow. The pony was, admittedly, still gone; I promised to watch for it.

More than the frustration of fruitless questioning, it was the sense of ceremony that began to drive me mad, the feeling that the entire moor was bound together in a wordless conspiracy to honour the investigation. I did not know if it was Baring-Gould we were doing obeisance to or Holmes; all I knew for certain was, it wasn't me. The residents of the stone houses that huddled into the breast of the moor were invariably friendly, expectant, proud, and eager to help, and filled with the most arcane and useless pieces of information. Indeed, it seemed as if the most accurate knowledge they had was to do with me and my business, which I would just as well have left quiet.

Oh, there were plenty of coach sightings: twenty of them before the day was over, all of which faded to second- or thirdhand reports, or coaches with headlamps swiftly floating along the macadamised roads, or coaches that were more probably the next-farm-but-one's cart.

Finally, when I was tired and aching and seething with frustration, and thought it could not get any worse, it was brought to my attention that I had a nickname. No: not even my own proper nickname, but a mere appendage to that of my husband. At two o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the house opened the door, gave me a beatific smile of welcome, and addressed me as Zherlock Mary.

Not even Snoop Mary, for God's sake.

I turned and left the farmyard, too demoralised even to ask my questions.

That farm was the last for a bit, the next one being about three-quarters of an hour away on the other side of a tor-capped hill. I was exhausted, my fever was creeping back up, my throat, head, and joints ached, and my nose ran continuously. I felt ill and useless, I was certain that when I returned to Lew House I should find Holmes sitting with his feet up in front of the fire with the case neatly solved, and I was hit by a wave of homesickness for Oxford and books, my pen scratching peaceably in front of my own fire, a cup of lovely hot coffee steaming on the desk at hand's reach, the ideas marching cleanly out in logical procession, my own ideas that no one else could second-guess or circumvent or —

Red shied, and I hit the ground hard.

When I had come to a halt, I flopped over onto my back on the nice soft turf, gazing up into a sky that I had not realised was nearly clear of clouds, and I began calmly, easily, to weep.

It was not just the irritation and the illness that made me cry, although they certainly lowered my defences considerably. It was not even my fury at this damnable horse, which was powerful, but momentary. It was, I think, more than anything the emotional burden from the previous case spilling over, a burden of grief I had pushed away under the pressure of solving the murder, and then contrived to avoid by a change of scenery and more work when it ended.

So I lay flat on my back and cried like a child, in recognised grief for Dorothy Ruskin and fresh, raw grief for the dying Baring-Gould, in frustration at the ridiculous mockery of detective work I was forced to carry out and at my inability to anticipate the antics of my four-legged companion, in rage at the horse and at the sudden shock of pain; at everything and nothing, I cried.

Not for long, of course, because I soon could not breathe at all and I thought my head should explode if I did not stop. I gingerly raised myself upright, then got to my feet, and walked over to sit on a nearby boulder that a hundred years ago or so had fallen away from the tor that loomed over my head. I dried my face, blew my nose, rested my head in my hands until the pounding internal pressure had subsided—long enough for a rabbit to lose its fear and venture out of its bury among the clitter. It ducked into hiding when I put my glasses on preparatory to standing and retrieving Red, but when I raised my head I thumped back down onto the boulder, more stunned than I had been by any of the falls.

For I saw: beauty. I saw before me an undulating sweep of green and russet hills crowned by the watchful tors and divided up by the meandering streams and the stone walls. A cloud moved in front of the pale autumnal sun, its dark shadow passing across the hills like a hand in front of a face, leaving the surface clean and refreshed.

Dartmoor lay stretched before me, quiet, ageless, green, brown, and open; not vast, but limitless; not open to conquest, but willing to befriend; calm, contemplative, watchful. It was, I saw in a flash of revelation, very like the Palestinian desert I had known and come to love four years before, a harsh and unfriendly place until one succumbed to its dictates and submitted to the lesser rhythms of life in a dry land.

Dartmoor was a wet desert, its harsh climate the other end of the spectrum from the hot, dry climate of Palestine, but with similar small, tight, ungenerous, and intense results. Fighting the strictures of a desert brought only exhaustion, ignoring its demands risked death, but an open acceptance of the perfection of the life to be lived therein—one might find unexpected riches there. And, perhaps, here.

The fitful sun went away eventually, and the moor stopped speaking to me, but when I got to my feet it was all different.

I was no longer a stranger here.

I climbed up the fat, weathered stones tumbling down from the tor and stood looking down at this miraculously transformed piece of countryside. At last I knew what we were doing here, why the death of an itinerant moor man should matter, why Baring-Gould had found his calling and the spiritual nourishment he required, breathing the air of Dartmoor.

When eventually I returned to Red and to my task I was chagrined to find that the change in my perspective did not have much effect on the frustration I felt in trying to question the moor dwellers, or on my physical state: It still felt like trying to carve blancmange, and I still ached and coughed and sneezed. It certainly had no gentling effect on Red, who managed to dump me off once more before we stopped for the evening.