I had passed the building several times, a simple stone square with a proud tower, nestled into the tree-grown hillside and surrounded by gravestones and crosses. This was the first time I had been inside it, though, and I left the book of memoirs in my pocket while I looked around. It was an unsophisticated little stone building that straddled the centuries, with suggestions of thirteenth-century foundations rebuilt two and three hundred years later. The windows were not large, but the gloom cast was peaceful, not oppressive, and there was light enough to see. The air smelt of beeswax candles and wet wool from the morning services, but oddly enough, the feeling I received was not one of completion, but of preparation and waiting.
The single most dominating presence in the church was the screen framing the chancel. It was a magnificent thing, thick with niches and canopies, cornices and tracery, heavily encrusted with paint and gilt—far too elaborate for the crude little church but undeniably bearing the imprint of Sabine Baring-Gould’s hand. It was his idea of what a Tudor rood screen should look like, and once I had recovered from its first startling appearance, I found myself liking it for its sheer vehement assertion that God’s glory is to be found in a backwater parish on the skirts of Dartmoor.
There were other nice things in the church, somewhat overshadowed by the shiny new screen, and I spent some time admiring St. Michael and his dragon on one bench-end, a jester dated 1524 on another, the triptych in the side chapel, the old brass chandelier, and the carvings on the pulpit, before eventually taking the book from my pocket and settling onto one of the better-lit benches with it. I did not think God would object to my reading in His house, particularly not the memoirs of the man who had created this unlikely chapel in the wilderness.
A
N HOUR OR so later, the door from the porch opened and Holmes came in. He removed his hat and slapped the light rain off of it, and came around through the church to sit on the other end of my pew. He leant forward, propping his outstretched arms on the back
of the seat ahead of him and holding the brim of the dangling hat with the fingers of both hands. The prayerlike attitude of his position was deeply incongruous.
I closed the book of memoirs and looked up at the screen with its scenes from the life of Jesus. After a minute I spoke. “He’s dying isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’ve come?”
“I would have come anyway, but yes, it makes the solution of the case that much more urgent.”
Other than the visual commotion around us, the church was utterly still. I thought I smelt incense as well as the beeswax, and I could picture Baring-Gould in his robes up in that pulpit, speaking a few well-chosen words that would have some of his parishioners squirming and others chuckling to themselves, and I felt a strong and unexpected bolt of sorrow to know that I would never witness that scene.
The case Holmes and I had just finished had begun with a debt to a dead woman. For several weeks over the summer I had lived with the fact that debts to the dead are heavier than those owed the living because there is no negotiation, no forgiveness, only the stark knowledge that failure can never be recompensed, that even success can only restore balance. That case was a hard one in a lot of ways, and I had only begun to think about the lessons it had driven into me when Holmes’ telegram had drawn me away from Oxford. Holmes, too, was still in the recovery stage, judging by the fact that he was still puffing on the black cigarettes he had taken up again in the most frustrating days of the Ruskin case. It had been a depressing affair whose solution only landed us in greater complexity, and now here we were, faced with another client who might not live to see the end of his case.
If working for the dead was hard, working for the dying looked to be harder yet: The already dead had eternity, after all. Baring-Gould did not.
“How long?” I asked.
“Weeks. Perhaps months. He will be gone before summer.”
“I am sorry.” Precisely what Baring-Gould meant to Holmes I still did not know, but I could readily see that there was depth to their relationship, and history.
He did not refuse my sympathy, did not say anything about Baring-Gould’s fullness of years. He just nodded.
After a while, we left the church. The flat ground surrounding the building was, inevitably, covered with gravestones new and ancient. One of the newer was at the foot of the church tower down a small slope, and I went over to look at it. As I had thought, the name on the stone was that of Grace Baring-Gould, the transplanted mill girl who had married the parson and ended up here, the squire’s wife. On her stone were carved the words DIMIDIUM ANIMAE MEAE. “Half my life,” Baring-Gould had placed there. I had no doubt that he waited now to join her.
We turned and went up the road to the village of Lew Down, where we took lunch in the Blue Lion, then walked around to the public bar to ask if Randolph Pethering had been seen that day. The barman knew immediately who we were talking about.
“You’ve missed’en, by abaut two hours. Gone aut auver th’ moor.”
“Out onto the moor? Why?”
“’Untin’ ’ounds,” he declared. “’S’ right, he’s gone a-hunting the ’Ound of the Baskervilles.” He peered at our faces, waiting for a reaction, and laughed aloud at what he saw there. Then he explained. “Mr Petherin’s one of they story fellas, writes down any rummage people tell’en. Ole Will’m Laddimer, ’e comes by while Mr Petherin’s tuckin’ into ’is eggs this morning, and ’e sits and ’e tells Mr Petherin’ abaut the goin’s-on up the moor. You heerd tell they been seein’ Lady ’Oward’s carriage, and them’s seed the ’ound’s footprints ’round abaut daid bodies?”
“We heard.”
Somewhat deflated, either by the loss of an opportunity to recount the story or because of Holmes’ flat inflection, the barman went on. “That’s all, really. Mr Petherin’ heerd the ’ound was seen near Watern Tor and went to looky. He’ll be back tomorry most likely. A pity you’ve already beed aut along the tor—you could’ve meeted him there.”
As we carried our glasses to a table, I said to Holmes, “I don’t know why I imagined we might keep our business to ourselves here.”
“There’s no privacy in a village; for that you need either a truly remote setting or a city. No, everyone in this end of Devon will know who we are and what we’re about.”
“I did wonder why you made no attempt to conceal our identity up on the moor.”
“There’s no point in even trying, not unless you’re willing to sustain a complete disguise.”
I took a swallow of the dark beer in my glass and found it filled the mouth pleasingly, rich with yeast and hops. I took another, and put the glass on the table with respect.
“What next, Holmes?” I asked.
“For the next two or three days I think we need to divide forces. I will go north to finish quartering the ranges for Mycroft’s accursed spies and get that task out of the way. You can take the southwest. We need to find out how that carriage gets up onto the moor, and there are a limited number of routes it can take.”
I reached out and turned the glass around on the table, and with an effort pushed down the cold apprehension that wanted to rise up at the idea of walking alone onto the face of Dartmoor. When my voice was completely trustworthy, I asked him, “Why do you assume the carriage comes onto the moor? Isn’t it more likely that it is kept on the moor and brought out when needed?”
“It is of course possible, but in fact there are very few houses up there where a carriage and a pair of horses could be hidden, whereas there are a hundred places around the edges of the moor with considerably greater privacy. The northeastern edges particularly, which is why you on the south and west will be covering a greater amount of ground than I will.”
“Do we leave this afternoon?”
“In the morning. That will give you a chance to study your maps. And I think it might speed matters up if we arranged a horse for you.
You’ll be making a circuit of half the moor; you would be a week on foot.”
Although normally I prefer to walk rather than be tied to the needs of a horse, I did not argue. Anything that would cut short the number of days I was to spend up on that bleak place had my approval.
I
SPENT THE afternoon in Baring-Gould’s study, alone but for the fire, one somnolent cat, and a visit from Mrs Elliott with a tea tray. I was aware of movement in the house—footsteps in and out of the bedrooms overhead, kitchen noises from beyond the door, the arrival of a mud-caked cart that disgorged an old woman, wrapped in rugs and dignity—but I ignored them all.
Instead, I made a complete perusal of the shelves and their contents, climbing up on the back of a chair and hanging from my fingertips at the higher reaches like a rock climber. There was not a great number of books, considering that the man was supposed to be a scholar and had been in the same house for forty years, and the volumes on the upper reaches particularly were covered with a thick blanket of dust.
I did find quite a few books written by Baring-Gould. In fact, after the first dozen or so I only thumbed through them to get an idea of the topic, and then replaced most of them, not being particularly interested in
A Book of the Rhine from Cleve to Mainz; The Tragedy of the Caesars; A History of Sarawak Under Its Two White Rajahs; Iceland, Its Scenes and Sagas;
a biography of Nelson; or even
Post-Mediaeval Preachers
, although I did set aside monographs on “The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain” and “Village Conferences on the Creed,” plus a few books with irresistible titles:
Freaks of Fanaticism and Other Strange Events; Devonshire Characters and Strange Events
(Baring-Gould seemed to like strange and curious events);
Virgin Saints and Martyrs;
and two novels, one called
Pabo, the Priest,
the other
Urith: A Tale of Dartmoor,
the latter of which I could at least justify by calling it local research.
At the very end of the afternoon, when the grey light of the day had long turned to black at the windows and the smells of dinner were coming in under the door, I found what I had originally had in mind when I had entered the study five hours before and forgotten in the pleasure of prospecting the shelves for nuggets: a manuscript copy of
Further Reminiscences,
the Baring-Gould memoir for the second thirty years of his life. The clean copy was probably now with his publisher, as the first volume had only just come out, and this version was sprinkled with crosshatchings and corrections, but the small handwriting was surprisingly legible. I left it in place, as a loose sheaf of papers requires a sedentary reader, but I planned to return to it later. Of the third volume, 1894–1924, there seemed to be only thirty pages or so of manuscript in a manila folder inside the high writing desk, along with a pen with a worn nib, crusted with ink, and a dusty inkwell. I held the manuscript pages in my hand, wondering bleakly if he would ever finish the volume. It did not appear to have been worked on for some time.
The study door opened and Holmes walked in. “Dinner in ten minutes, Russell. You ought to have memorised those maps by this time.”
The maps. I had not even looked at the things, although Holmes could not know that for certain, as they had been shifted around in the course of the afternoon’s ransacking—I might, after all, have folded them up after having committed the pertinent sections to memory. I murmured something noncommittal and began to search earnestly for a pencil. Holmes picked one up and held it out to me, not a whit deceived. I thanked him and stuck it in my shirt pocket, noticing as I did so the state of my nails.
“I think I ought to go and tidy up,” I said. A fair percentage of the several cubic feet of dust I had set free seemed to have settled on my person. I picked up the tall stack of books I had set aside for reading and tucked them underneath my arm.
“Don’t forget these, Russell,” he said drily. I took the maps he was holding out, wedged them on top of the books, and made my way out of the crowded study and up the stairs.
A
FTER DINNER WE climbed the stairs to Baring-Gould’s bedroom. We found him seated in a chair at the window, looking tired and ill and without strength. Looking what he in fact was: a man not far from his death.
Watching him, one could see the effort it cost him, but he succeeded in rallying his forces, his eyes coming to life, his mind focussing again on us and the problem he had given into our hands.
“We’re off tomorrow, Gould, for two days,” Holmes told him. “We need to find how Lady Howard’s carriage is coming up onto the moor, and I have to take a closer look at the army ranges for Mycroft.”
A smile tugged at Baring-Gould’s mouth. “Don’t let them blow you up, Holmes.”
“I shall endeavour to avoid becoming a target,” Holmes assured him.
“You don’t mean they’re actually firing up there?” I exclaimed.
“It is a firing range, Russell.”
“But—” I bit back the mouthful of protests and cautions, as there would be little point in voicing them. Besides which, I told myself, Holmes would never have reached his present age if he could not be trusted to dodge an artillery shell.