14
On the road passers-by always salute
and have a bit of a yarn, even though personally unacquainted,
and to go by in the dark without a greeting is a
serious default in good manners.
—A BOOK OF THE WEST: DEVON
K
ETTERIDGE WAS ALL smiles and affability when I joined him, the agitation gone and a celebratory mood in its place. In fact, a bottle of some very fine champagne was nestling in a bucket of ice, to be plucked out and opened as soon as I entered the hall. Ketteridge was alone, and a small table set with two places was standing discreetly to one side. I was not at all sure about the intimacy of this tête-à-tête, but the hall lights were blazing, sweeping away the memory of the quiet and somewhat mysterious reaches of the room in the other evening’s afterdinner candlelight, and Ketteridge did not seem in the least seductive, or even vaguely flirtatious. He seemed only brimming with high spirits, and his sun-dark face, full hair, and white, even teeth, though undeniably handsome, did not appeal to me personally (which was, frankly, a
great relief, following the memory of a couple of very disconcerting moments with a man in the Ruskin case).
“Mrs Holmes! Come, join me in a glass of this marvellous stuff.” He poured two glasses, gave me one, and held his own up before him to propose a toast. “To change!” he declared dramatically.
I hesitated. “I don’t know if I ought to drink to that, Mr Ketteridge. Not all change is good.”
“To growth, then. To progress.”
Not entirely certain what it was I was drinking to, I nonetheless put the rim of the glass to my lips and sipped.
“Are we celebrating something, Mr Ketteridge?”
“Always, my dear Mrs Holmes. There’s always something in life to celebrate. In this case, however, I think I may have found a buyer for Baskerville Hall.”
“I see. I did not realise your plans to move on were so far advanced.”
“They weren’t before; now they are. Sometimes decisions have to be made on the fly, as it were. Strike while the iron is hot.”
Privately, I agreed that striking at cold iron was not the most productive of exercises; however, neither was the availability of hot iron generally as accidental a state as he seemed to be suggesting. I found it hard to believe that a buyer for Baskerville Hall had simply dropped, preheated as it were, out of the air.
“I’m very glad for you. Do I take the champagne to mean that you have reached a happy agreement?” I was not so gauche as to ask how much he was getting for the hall, but I had found industrialists, particularly successful American industrialists, less likely to take offence at a discussion of pounds, shillings, and pence than the other sorts of wealthy Englishmen were, and a gold baron was surely an industrialist of a sort.
“Happy enough,” he said. “Yes, happy enough. And I think Baring-Gould and his friends will be satisfied. The buyer is an older man—just as well, it’s not exactly a family kind of a place, is it?—and he wants a quiet place to write and study while his wife joins the local hunt. An
American—the place seems to have a tradition for outsiders, doesn’t it? But I think they’ll fit in well.”
It was something of a surprise that Ketteridge would even consider the respective suitability of his buyers and their new neighbours, given the amount of money at stake, and I was touched by his thoughtfulness. Not, I reflected, that he would refuse to sell to a rapacious financier with a scheme to knock the house down and replace it with a set of holiday flats to hire out to city dwellers by the week, but he seemed genuinely happy that he had reached a right solution.
“When will the sale take place?” I asked. “Will you be leaving soon?”
“It’s not completely settled yet,” he hastened to say. “Some questions to hammer out first. Early spring, most likely. By June.”
Baring-Gould would have the entertainment of this odd American whom he had befriended, then, until the end. I smiled a bit sadly and drank my wine.
Ketteridge divided the remainder of the bottle between our two glasses (most of it having gone into his) and then rang for Tuptree, who came in and arranged the small table and two chairs before the fire.
“I thought this would be more comfortable, Mrs Holmes. The dining hall is a little formal, and damn—darned cold for someone who’s just been swimming on Dartmoor.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you. Although I have to say the dining hall is a room with a great deal of character. I should like to see it more thoroughly, sometime.”
“I’d be happy to give you the tour tonight, if you wish.”
“I would like that very much,” I said, and sat back to enjoy my meal.
We were served as attentively as we would have been in the formal setting, and the meal was, as before, simple food cooked superbly. I commented on it.
“Is your cook English, Mr Ketteridge, or American?”
“French, would you believe it? It took me three years to convince him that his sauces made me bilious and that the plainer meat and vegetables are, the better they taste.”
“How on earth did you convince a French chef of the virtues of simplicity ?” I asked, amused.
“I threatened him. Told him the next time he resigned, I’d actually accept it. I pay him more than he could get anywhere else, so he learned to change.”
I laughed with him. “How clever of you. I shall keep the technique in mind.”
“I don’t imagine you’d have much use for it,” he said. I kept my face straight, but he instantly realised how ill-mannered such a remark was and tried to cover his lapse. “That is to say, Reverend Gould was telling me the other evening how simply you and your husband live, down in Sussex.”
“It’s very true,” I said, sounding ever-so-slightly regretful. It was only to be expected that Ketteridge would want to prise any Sherlock Holmes gossip he could out of Baring-Gould, but either Baring-Gould or Holmes himself had neglected to mention that our unadorned manner of living had everything to do with choice and nothing with necessity. I toyed for a moment with the idea of making Ketteridge a cash offer on Baskerville Hall, then put it away. Independent wealth did not go well with the picture Ketteridge had formed of the Holmes household, and I decided that, for the present, I should leave the picture undisturbed. Besides which, he might actually accept my offer, and then where would I be?
“Tell me, Mrs Holmes, does your husband still investigate cases, or is he well and truly retired?”
Ah, I thought, Baring-Gould was not indiscreet enough to tell him everything.
“Very occasionally, when something interests him enough. For the most part he writes and conducts his research. We live a quiet life.” That Ketteridge did not burst into wild laughter told me all I needed to know about his ignorance of Holmes’ very active career. “Why do you ask?”
“I thought perhaps while he was down here I might hire him to look into the mysterious sightings of the Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“Oh yes?” Interesting, I thought, that everyone should be confusing the Baskerville hound with the one accompanying Lady Howard’s coach. Considering Richard Ketteridge’s enthusiasms it was not all that surprising that he should do so, but I could only think that Conan Doyle’s influence extended out here, twisting reality until it resembled fiction. It would not be the first time Holmes had confronted himself in a fictional mirror.
“You have heard of them?” he asked.
“The sightings? Yes, Baring-Gould mentioned them the other day. Why, have you seen it?”
“No. But I imagine they will be causing some uproar among my neighbours out on the moor.”
“I should think so, considering the last time it was seen. Actually, I was wondering if the hound might not come here. As I remember, the Baskerville curse was the reason for its presence, but there’s nothing to say whether it’s Baskerville blood that attracts him, or merely ownership of the hall.”
I studied him in all innocence, and saw a look of astonishment cross his face, followed by a great roar of laughter.
“Oh my,” he sputtered. “Mrs Holmes, I never thought of that. Maybe I’d better start wearing garlic or something.”
“A pistol seems to have been effective the last time,” I noted.
His laughter faded, but the humour remained in his eyes. “But the last time it was an actual dog, painted with—phosphorus, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course you’re right. How silly of me.”
“Have you ever worked with your husband, Mrs Holmes?”
“On a case?”
“Yes.”
I spread some butter on a piece of roll and ate it thoughtfully. “We did collaborate on a case, once, involving a stolen ham.”
The absurdity of the thing delighted him, as I thought it might do, and he insisted I tell him about it. I did so, emphasising the ridiculous parts until the story verged on the burlesque—not, I admit, a difficult
task. When we had put that story to bed and been served the next course, I played the polite guest and asked about his life.
“What about you, Mr Ketteridge? You must have had some fascinating adventures in Alaska.”
“It was quite a time.”
“What was your most exciting moment?”
“Exciting good or exciting terrifying?”
“Either. Both.”
“Exciting good was the first time I looked into my pan and saw gold.”
“On your claim?”
“Yes. Fifty feet of mud and rock and ice—when I first staked it the stream was frozen. I had to thaw out the ground with a fire before I could get at the mud. But there was gold in it. Amazing stuff, gold,” he mused, looking down at the ring on his finger and rubbing it thoughtfully. “Soft and useless, but its sparkle gets right into a man’s bones. ‘Gold fever’ is a good name, because that’s what it’s like, burning you and eating you up.”
“And the exciting bad?”
“The sheer terror. Had a handful of those, like pieces of peppercorn scattered through a plate of tasteless stew. Most of the work in the fields was dull slog—you were uncomfortable all the time, awake or asleep, always hungry, never clean, never warm except in summer when the mosquitos ate you alive, your feet and hands were always wet and bruised. Lord, the boredom. And then a charge you’d set wouldn’t go off and you’d get the thrill of going up to it, knowing it might decide to explode in your face. Or a tunnel you’d poked into the hillside would start to collapse, between you and daylight. But the most exciting moment ? Let’s see. That would either be when the dogsled went over a ledge into Soda Creek, or the avalanche at the Scales.”
The last name tickled a vague memory. “I’ve heard of the Scales. Wasn’t that the name for a hill?”
“A hill,” he said with a pitying smile. “A hell more like it if you’ll pardon my French. Chilkoot Pass, four miles straight up. Seemed like it anyway, even in summer when you could go back and forth, but in the
winter, twelve hundred steps cut into the ice, the last mile was like climbing a ladder. And you had a year’s worth of supplies to shift to the top—the Mounties checked to make sure; they didn’t want a countryside of starving men—so you couldn’t just climb it once unless you could afford to pay the freight cable to take your load up for you. There you were, in a mile-long line of freezing, exhausted men so tight packed it was left, right, left, together all the way, your lungs aching and your head pounding in the altitude, and just when you think you can’t lift your foot one more time, that you’re going to drop in your tracks and die, you’re at the top, falling into the snow with the crate on your back. And when you’ve got your breath back you take the ropes off that crate, sit on your shovel, and slide down the iced track to the bottom, where you put another crate on your shoulders and line up to start again. After twenty, twenty-five times you have your supplies at the top of the hill, and you’re ready to start on your way to the fields. Lot of men stood in Sheep Camp at the bottom of the Scales, saw what they were up against, and their hearts just gave up on them. Sold their supplies for ten cents on the dollar and went home.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Didn’t have the sense to, no. It was winter, but the weather was still uncertain, and I’d only shifted half my load when the snow turned warm. Six, eight feet of wet snow in a couple of days. The Indians were smart—they cleared out back to town—but stubborn us.
“I knew it was going to get dangerous, so I started climbing early, still night in fact. I nearly made it, had my last load on my back and was halfway up when the cliffs gave way. The whole hill, a mile of snow and ice, just moved out from under our feet, a mile-long line of hundreds of men, their equipment, their dogs, everything just bundled up and swept down into Sheep Camp in a heap of snow. Seventy, eighty men died, my partner one of them. I was locked in, upside down, though I didn’t know it—couldn’t tell, it was dark and I couldn’t move anything but my right hand. It was like being caught in set cement. My boot was sticking out, and that’s what saved me, when they found it and dug me out.”
“Good … heavens,” I said weakly. I did not have to manufacture a response; the claustrophobic horror of his experience made me feel a bit lightheaded.