“Well, as you can imagine, he is becoming a bit hazy when it comes to remembering specific details, particularly when it comes to the more recent events. You know how forgetful old people become in that way,” I said, sending up a plea for forgiveness to the mentally acute if physically deteriorating old man in Lew Trenchard.
“I do,” she agreed, sounding more sure of herself. Her charitable work with the aged retainers caused my generalisation to strike a familiar note.
“One of the things that was vexing him the other day was trying to remember when he first met Mr Ketteridge, so to put his mind at rest I told him that I would try to find out, while I was in Plymouth. Would you happen to know?”
“I should have thought very soon after Mr Ketteridge bought the Hall. Thank you, Mary,” she said, which startled me for a moment until I saw she was speaking to the servant, who was clearing the plates preparatory to bringing the coffee.
“Do you know when—” I began to say, but she had only paused to recollect her dates.
“He first came to the Hall in April,” she said finally. “Yes, it must have been early April, because the pipes burst in the first week of March and we were without water for three weeks altogether, and that’s when I decided to see if I could find a tenant and move into town. He happened to arrive the day the plumbers were setting to work. I remember,” she said with a smile, “because at first I thought he was one of them, and I was astonished that a plumber could make enough money to buy a car like that.”
Her joke and the laugh that followed were wasted on me, because I was alert, almost quivering, like a bird dog at the first scent of the warm, feathered object it was bred to seek.
“The first part of April,” I repeated. “And you decided to sell it to him fairly soon after that?”
“Oh, perhaps not all that soon. Just before the summer equinox, I believe it was. The moor is at its loveliest then, and the nights so short—I walked up after dinner to the nearest tor and sat watching the sun set, and when I went back down it was nearly midnight and the decision had been made.”
And yet Ketteridge had told us he first heard about the Hall in Scotland shooting—something one did not do in the spring or midsummer. A coorius sarcumstance, indeed.
“So he first came to Baskerville Hall in April of 1921, and suggested that you sell to him, and you decided to do so two months later in June. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” she said, and then the frown line was back as it occurred to her that it was odd I should be interested.
“Mr Baring-Gould,” I hastily reminded her. “He gets so upset when he can’t recall precise details.” That she did not object to this statement told me how little she knew him.
“Of course, the poor old man.”
“Ketteridge would then have taken possession in the autumn?”
“I believe we signed the final documents on the first day of September. He moved in just after that.”
“So he probably would have met Baring-Gould around that time, August or September,” I said, as if an important question had been decided.
“I suppose so. If it matters, why don’t you ask Mr Ketteridge himself?”
“I hate to bother him, and I was coming to Plymouth anyway. Besides, Mr Baring-Gould wanted to see how you were doing in your new home. It was nice of Mr Ketteridge to bring you the painting of Sir Hugo so soon after you had moved in,” I added negligently. “A sort of house-warming present, I suppose he considered it.”
“Yes,” she agreed, offering me more coffee, which I refused. “He and David—Mr Scheiman—showed up at my door before the furniture was in place, to hang Sir Hugo for me.”
I froze in the very act of bracing myself to begin the leave-taking process, seized by an awful premonition.
“Mr Scheiman,” I repeated slowly. “Tell me, do you see much of David Scheiman?”
The pretty blush returned, and I felt a thud of confirmation, the physical kick of an absolutely vital piece of information so nearly missed, as she said, “Oh yes, he has been very attentive to my needs. He is the one,” she added, quite unnecessarily. “We are to be married in the summer.”
21
I think it not improbable that both the Archbishop
of York and Claughton of Rochester had inserted my name
into the Episcopal “Black Book,” for I had shown precious
little deference to either. But, so far from this injuring
me, it has availed in limiting my energies to my own parish.
—FURTHER REMINISCENCES
I
HAD NO idea what it might mean, that Ketteridge’s secretary, a man with the mouth of old Sir Hugo, had proposed marriage to the only living child of Sir Henry Baskerville, but I did not need the kick in my vital organs to tell me it meant something.
For the life of me, however, I could think of nothing else to ask Miss Baskerville. I made polite noises, extracted from her an amorphous invitation for a return visit, and, with a final glance at the Cavalier over the fireplace, left her house. I went up the street and turned the corner, and there I stood, gazing into a row of severely pruned rose bushes, until the gentleman of the house came out and asked me with matching severity whether or not he could help me.
I moved on obediently, allowing my feet to drift me back to the hotel where I had stopped the previous night. There I retrieved my small
bag, and took a taxi to the train station, only to find that I had several hours to wait before I could catch a train to Lydford.
I had nearly memorised portions of
Dartmoor
by the time I climbed up into the train, into a compartment even colder than had been the one on the way down. I made no attempt to read, but sat, my scarf and collar raised around my ears, my hands thrust up into my sleeves, staring at a button on the upholstered seat back across from me, thinking.
I felt certain that the various pieces of information we had assembled, if laid in the correct order, would make a pattern. As always, the extraneous data confused issues, and as always, it was not easy to know what was extraneous and what central. The best way of trying to find a pattern that I knew of was to hold all the data in mind, and remove one piece, and if that did not cause the remaining pieces to shift and click into place, replace it, and remove another.
And so, as the train chugged and slowed and paused at every village between Plymouth and Lydford, I sat and stared at the button, completely ignoring the glances, giggles, and growing consternation of the two young women sharing their compartment with a person who appeared to be in a trance, a young woman whose forehead revealed a half-healed gash with its fading yellow bruise whenever her hat shifted. I pawed over my pieces, holding them up to look at, removing each one in turn, trying to decide which contributed to the overall pattern and which was foreign to it.
Josiah Gorton stayed on the table, as did Lady Howard’s coach. And Pethering? He remained, although the reason for his presence, both on the moor and ultimately in the lake, was not clear. But in the centre of the picture, did we find gold—actual, shiny gold? Or military tanks? Or something else entirely?
Up and down went the pieces, round and round went the questions, and all the while I was aware that time was beginning to enter into the equation, and I had none to waste.
It was dark when the train reached Lydford, and I was mildly surprised to find no sign of Charles Dunstan and the dog cart. I had told
them I expected to return on an afternoon train, but perhaps he had got tired of waiting, or the pony had thrown a shoe, or some other demand had been made on his time. It was not raining, and the moon, three days from full, would soon be high enough in the sky to light my way. So, leaving a message with the station master as to my whereabouts, I walked down the road to an inn and took a large, hot meal.
Some time later, filled with beef and leek pie, I gathered my coat and hat around me and stepped into the road. It was very cold, the sky clear, and there was no waiting dog cart. A motorcar went past, an ancient Ford rattletrap by the sound of it, and when my eyes had begun to adjust to the night, I slung my bag over my shoulder and followed in the direction of the Ford.
I knew where I was going, having tramped most of these lanes over the past two weeks, and although they looked very different in the pale, tree-blocked light from overhead, I knew I could not go too far wrong before coming either into the high road that ran from Launceston to Okehampton or the Coryton branch of the railway. I was well fed, adequately insulated as long as I kept moving, burdened only by the light bag and unthreatened by rain; all in all, it was the most pleasant Devonshire stroll I had yet undertaken.
I did not even miss my way (although I did follow the road, bad as it was, rather than cut through the fields on the rough path to Galford Farm). I crossed the Lew near the old dower house, saying hello to the dogs at the mill, who quieted and snuffled my by-now familiar hand, and came to Lew House through the woods at its back. I detoured at the last minute in order to enter by the porch, knowing that Mrs Elliott would think that the more proper behaviour for a guest, and threw open the door to the hall, bursting with fresh air and goodwill.
I was also bursting from the brisk exercise coupled with the soup and Devonshire ale I had drunk, so I hurried through the still house and up the stairs. It was early, but once there, the bed caught my eye. The room was cold and the bed looked soft, and within minutes I had burrowed into it and found warm sleep.
It was still cold in the morning, even colder, I thought, than the day before, and when I had dressed, I went outside to appreciate the morning. My walk was not a long one, but the brisk air and the smell of burning leaves drifting over from Lew Down filled me with well-being and gave me a good appetite for Mrs Elliott’s breakfast. Baring-Gould had been in his bed since Friday, she told me, but his energy was returning and she thought he might come down in a day or two. Mr Holmes had got off to a late start on the Sunday, and was not expected back until the next day. And lastly, if I heard strange noises from the dining room, I was not to concern myself, because it would only be the sweep, working on the blocked chimney.
After breakfast I went up and found the annotated book on Devon that had been in Pethering’s bag and brought it down with me to the warm hall to read. I pulled one of the armchairs up to the fire, threw some logs onto the red coals, kicked off my shoes, and drew my feet up under me in the chair. It was very pleasant, sitting in the solid, patient old house, in the wood-panelled room with the threadbare, sprungbottomed furniture. The fire crackled to itself, the cat slept on the bench, the fox and hounds ran across the carved fireplace surround, and occasional voices came from the other end of the house. Sighing, deeply content, I began to read.
The book, too, was like settling in with an old friend in a new setting. We began with a desultory exploration of the ethnology of the inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall and their mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood, and moved on to glance at the Dumnonii, the Romans, and the Picts. The Roman invasion was given a few scattered lines, the introduction of the first lapdog two pages. Baring-Gould bemoaned the way the tender, graceful melodies of the Devonshire countryside were giving way before the organ and the music-hall ditty, and how the picturesque and sturdy native architecture was scorned by the pretentious London professional. Anecdote tumbled after anecdote, tied together by sweeping generalisations with clouds as their foundations and romantic visions of lost times that were breathtaking in their blithe neglect of
facts. Druidic fantasies he dismissed out of hand, while at the same time offering the presence of large crystals in some neolithic huts as proof that those huts had belonged to medicine men (who used the crystals for divining) and numerous small round pebbles in others as evidence of the Stone Age love of games.
I was enjoying myself so much, lost in the pull between respect for the man’s boundless enthusiasm and indignation at his inability to take scholarship seriously, that I did not notice Mrs Elliott’s approach until she touched my shoulder to get my attention. I looked up startled, to see her holding a yellow envelope in her hand.
“Terribly sorry, mum, but this just came for Mr Holmes, and the rector says would you like to take lunch with him, upstairs. Also, was you expecting Charley—Mr Dunstan—to meet you last night?”
“No, of course not,” I lied. “It was a very tentative arrangement.”
“Good,” she said, sounding relieved. With everything else on her mind, she had simply failed to ask Dunstan to meet me. It was nice to know that even the iron woman was fallible.
I took the envelope and told her, “I’d be happy to take lunch with Mr Baring-Gould.”
“Twenty minutes,” she said.
I tore open the thin paper, but it was only from the laboratory in London where Holmes had left the gold with its soil sample. Wordier than it needed to be and sprinkled with technical terms that either the sender had misspelt or the telegraphist had found troublesome, it for the most part confirmed what Holmes had already found: a pinch of the purest gold in a dessert-spoonful of humus and sand. It did not tell me what the mixture meant.
I allowed my eyes to rest on the lively carving above the fireplace, the high-tailed hounds and goose-stealing fox that Baring-Gould had said belonged to the Elizabethan period. It occurred to me, to my amusement, that he was quite strictly correct: It did, by style and setting, belong there, even if it had come into actual existence in a century far removed from those of Elizabeth’s reign. I dropped my book on the
chair, stroked the sleeping cat and the carved fox with equal affection, and went upstairs to make myself look presentable for the nearly blind and infinitely sly old squire of Lew Trenchard.
“
M
ARY,” HE GREETED me, in a stronger voice than I had expected. “Come in, my dear, and keep me company as I eat the good Mrs Elliott’s fare.” He was sitting nearly upright in the carved bed, propped against half a dozen pillows, and a wide, solid table with very short legs had been arranged over his lap and laid with a linen cloth, silver, and a crystal water glass. A smaller, considerably taller table had been laid for me and set facing him at the side of the bed. I began to take my place, and then paused, and stepped around to the head of the bed and briefly kissed his smooth, aged cheek before taking my seat.
He looked both flustered and pleased, but did not comment. “How are you keeping, Mary?” he asked. “And how did you find poor Miss Baskerville?”
“I am well, thank you, and Miss Baskerville seems a good deal happier in the bright lights of Plymouth than I believe she would have been in Baskerville Hall.”
“A great sadness, though, that she had to give up her family’s home.”
“Sadness that her parents and brothers died, I agree, but I personally am not convinced of the need to yoke oneself for life to the service of a mere building.”
“I have spent my life making Lew House.”
“And you have created a place of great dignity and serenity, but I cannot see you demanding that your son and grandson enter penury in order to keep it standing.” I do not know why I was so certain of this. One might have thought the immense investment the house represented, not only in pounds sterling but in painstaking thought and emotional commitment, would have caused its creator to demand an equal passion on the part of his descendants, but somehow I did not think that to be true of him. And indeed, after a long moment, he nodded, reluctantly.
“True. But it is hard, living so long and seeing so many old families forced to abandon their heritage and move away from the roots planted by their forefathers. Although I will say that the idea of opening up the central hall and the picture gallery to charabancs of lemonade-swilling families is almost more abhorrent. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be better to return to the Viking way, and burn each man’s riches with him when he is gone. You are laughing at me, Mary.”
“I’m not,” I protested, but seeing the lift of his eyebrow, I admitted, “Well, perhaps a little. But in this case it would be a great pity; to put Lew House to the torch.”
“You like it, then?”
“Very much.”
“‘The lot is fallen unto me in a fair ground; I have a goodly heritage,’” he said with a small sigh that I took to be of satisfaction, and then Mrs Elliott and Rosemary came in with the meal.
As I had noticed before, for a man staring death in the face he had a healthy appetite, and ate the simple fare with gusto. He asked me if I had ever tasted mutton from a sheep raised on the herb-rich traditional pasturage of my own Sussex, and I could tell him that yes, one of my neighbours had a small and undisturbed field that had been saved from the plough during the grain-hungry years of the Napoleonic War. He expressed his envy, and proceeded to talk about food, of his lifelong lust for roast goose with sage-and-onion stuffing, which his wife had indulged as often as she could, of the superiority of spit-roasted beef over the pale, half-steamed modern version, of the cheeses of France and the shock of tasting an egg from a hen fed cheaply on fish meal and the wartime blessing of living in a community that produced its own butter. It ended with a small story about the portion of his honeymoon spent in London, when he had subjected his poor young bride to a pantechnicon with its improving display of knowledge through a variety of semiscientific machines and lectures, and the dry sandwiches they had eaten on that occasion. The sandwiches, he said with a note of reminiscence in his voice, had seemed to Grace more than appropriate to the setting.