The torch approached, and I could hear a voice: Holmes talking loudly, which I hoped meant he expected me to be waiting in the only logical place, where indeed I was. I heard the sound of scuffing feet, and Ketteridge speaking sharply, and then they were on top of me.
I hit the plunger and raised the shotgun more or less simultaneously, just as Holmes threw himself backwards against Ketteridge. The sound of the blast and the unexpected attack conspired against the accuracy of Ketteridge’s gun, so that although his finger tightened spasmodically against the trigger, the shot went wide and the torch flew out of his hand an instant later, its beam whirling crazily into the air. Holmes tumbled off into the darkness near the river, and I let off one barrel of the shotgun for effect.
Disarmed and barraged, Ketteridge did not hesitate, but whirled and sprinted back in the direction from which he had come, towards the slowly erupting hillside. He vanished into the cloud of dust, but I was not about to follow until I had Holmes safely up and out of the water.
My lawfully wedded husband had come to rest just above the waterline, wedged painfully among the rocks and swearing mightily. I propped the gun against a boulder and fished out my pocket knife, cutting the bonds of his hands first and then his legs.
“Thank you, Russell,” he said when he was upright and had his breath back. “Precisely where I had anticipated, with even more effect than I had hoped for. Where is Ketteridge?”
“Off up the hill, heading for the vehicle. Or was it horses?” I held out a hand and helped him extricate himself from the slick rocks.
“A peculiar contraption, a motorcar with very wide, highly inflated tyres and a great deal of padding over the engine—practically silent on the moor and leaving no tracks. However, he will not go anywhere in it tonight. And Scheiman?”
“May have gone with him.”
“He was behind us.”
“Oh God. I hope I haven’t killed him.” I looked in apprehension back at the cloud of dust, swirling mightily in the still shaft of light from the miraculously unbroken torch that Ketteridge had dropped. It was only then that I realised the rain had stopped. “I did not imagine that the blast would be so big.”
“It should not have been. Perhaps the cliff was unstable. I shall have to leave you to deal with Scheiman. Can you do that?”
“Holmes, you can’t go after Ketteridge without a weapon. At least wait until we’ve taken Scheiman’s gun away from him.”
“Russell, I will not permit a second villain to escape me on this moor,” he said grimly. “Follow when you can.” He caught up the torch from the ground and flung himself up the hill after Ketteridge.
I replaced the spent shell, and with great circumspection I went downstream to the site of the blast, expecting at any moment to be pounded upon by the murderous secretary. When I found him, though, he was quite incapable of pouncing, being unconscious and half buried under tons of rock from the collapsed hillside. I checked his pockets, removing the sturdy clasp knife I found in one of them, and then set about digging him out.
One ankle was broken, and the bone above it as well, and I knew he would be black from the waist down by the next day. If he lived that long. I dragged him away, tied his hands behind his back, then took off my waterproof and my woollen overcoat and tucked them securely around him. I would prefer that if this escapade cost Scheiman his life, it be at the hands of a judge, not mine.
I did not find his gun, which must either have fallen from his pocket or been flung from his grasp, but I knew that if I could not see it, he was
not likely to find it either. I turned to follow Holmes and Ketteridge up onto the moor.
From high on the remains of my protective tor it was an easy thing to find the men, two beams of light moving across the darkling plain, perhaps half a mile apart and going west. It was difficult to tell how far off the closer of the torches was, but I thought not less than two miles. I started down the hill in their wake.
Following the river upstream, I reached a place where it was little more than a stream, and there I found Ketteridge’s vehicle, the means Scheiman had devised to frighten the moor dwellers: Lady Howard’s coach. I took a moment to look at it and found to my surprise that underneath the big square superstructure with the remains of phosphorescent paint daubed on the corners—the “glowing bones” of the Lady’s hapless husbands—lay the same powerful touring car that had carried us to and from Baskerville Hall, with the standard Dunlop tyres replaced by large, highly inflated tubes that would leave no tracks and also serve to underscore the ghostly silence of the thing. They had probably been inspired by the secret amphibious tank, I realised—Mycroft would be incensed—and, the horse that had appeared to be pulling it must have been ridden by one of the men, with loose harnesses jangling for effect. Abruptly, I remembered that I had no time to moon over the device; I tore my attention from it and headed back out onto the moor.
My distance from the two men meant I had continually to climb the heights to keep track of their progress, so that run as I might, I could not gain on them. Each time I climbed, there were still the two of them, although the distance between them slowly decreased, as Ketteridge had to choose his path while Holmes merely followed. In fact, I began to wonder if Holmes was not deliberately keeping his distance. I redoubled my efforts.
The wind had calmed considerably, but when I thought I heard a faint cracking noise from the vast space before me, I could not be certain. I shone my light desperately all around, found a rise, followed it, stood on my toes on a boulder, and saw a light, one single light. It was not moving.
I ran. Oblivious of streams and stones and the hellish waterlogged dips and gouges of an old peat works, I ran, up a rise and down the other side and splashed three steps into the bog that stretched out there before my interior alarm sounded. I backed out laboriously, the muck holding fast at my boots and calves and only letting go with a slow sucking noise. I staggered when my heels hit solid ground and I sat down hard, then got to my feet and searched the basin. Rushes, Holmes had said, look for footing among the rushes, and indeed, along the edges of the bog stood tussocks of thick grass in a rough semicircle. Following those proved heavy going, but I did not sink in past my lowest bootlaces, and I made the other side of the mire with no further harm. Up that hill I went, and there below me, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, lay the beam of a single torch, lying, by the looks of it, on the ground, motionless.
I nervously checked to be sure the shotgun was loaded and went forward stealthily until I could make out the dark figure sitting on the ground beside the light. My heart gave one great thud of relief, like a shout, and subsided.
“Holmes?” I said. “I thought I heard a shot.”
He turned at my voice, and then looked back at the terrain before him. “You did,” he said. “He would not allow me to approach.”
“Approach?” I asked, and walked up to stand by his side. His boots were mere clots of black, viscous mud, as were his trouser legs past his knees.
I played my torch beyond him to see what he was staring at, and saw there at our feet a stretch of smooth, finely textured turf, looking as if someone had spread a large carpet of some pale green stuff across the floor of the moor. On the side nearest us the carpet appeared scuffed, and the torchlight picked out some gleaming black substance splashed across the centre of it that I realised must be mud. The rest of the surface was pristine. A quaking bog, Holmes had called it. A featherbed, was Baring-Gould’s jocular name: a bed beneath which Ketteridge now slept.
Holmes inclined his head at it. “The moor took him,” he said, and scrubbed tiredly at his face with both hands. “He got halfway across before
he broke through. I tried to pull him out, but he held the gun on me until the last minute, until only his hand and his eyes were above the surface. He shot at me when I tried to … I did attempt to save him.”
I bent down to pick up his torch, and when I had put it in his hand I allowed my fingers to rest briefly on the back of his neck. “You said it yourself, Holmes. The moor took him. Come, let us go home.”
EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT
As I write these words the last home is being decorated
with heather and moss to receive the body of one whom I
shall bury to-morrow, the last of my old parishioners,
one of God’s saints, who has lived a white and fragrant
life, loving and serving God, bringing up a family in the
same holy line of life, and closing her eyes in peace to
pass into the Land of Promise, which here we cannot see,
but in which we can believe, and to which we hope to attain.
—FURTHER REMINISCENCES
C
ONSIDERING THE CIRCUMSTANCES, it is a little surprising that more of the manuscripts written by Mary Russell do not involve well-known public names. It may be, of course, that famous people have tediously familiar problems, and by this point in his career, Sherlock Holmes could not be bothered with any cases but those that most appealed to him. A connoisseur often finds him- or herself drawn away from the commonplace, excellent as it may be, and into the more unexpected or eccentric reaches of the area of expertise; that description surely applies here.
Insofar as I can determine, the bones of Ms. Russell’s narrative would stand: The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was most emphatically a real person, a true and unexpected British eccentric: an academic romancer, a gullible skeptic, a man both cold and passionate. With more sides to
his personality than the Kohinoor has facets, he went his brilliant and self-centered way, ruling his family and his Devonshire manor with an air of distracted authority, setting off whenever the fancy struck him out onto Dartmoor, up to London, or over to the Continent. His wife, Grace, must have been a saint of God—although to Baring-Gould’s credit it would appear that he was aware of it.
The mind-boggling scope of his ninety prolific years (150 books, fifty of them fiction) exists for the most part in the dustier reaches of library storage vaults throughout the world, from
Were-Wolves and their Natural History
to the relatively well-known
Songs of the West
. For those interested in the life of this scion of a pair of illustrious stems, I would recommend, after his two volumes of memoirs (
Early Reminiscences
and
Further Reminiscences
, each of which covers thirty years of his life), either of two biographies: William Purcell’s
Onward Christian Soldier
, or
Sabine Baring-Gould
, by Bickford Dickinson (who was Baring-Gould’s grandson and himself rector of Lew Trenchard Church from 1961 to 1967). Further, there is a Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society (c/o the Hon. Sec. Dr. Roger Bristow, Davidsland, Brendon Hill, Copplestone, Devon EX17 5NX, England) where, for the princely sum of six pounds sterling per annum, one will receive three newsletters and the fellowship of a number of Right-Thinking people. And if the reader wishes to add a dimension to his or her appreciation of Baring-Gould by becoming an auditor, an audiotape comprising a sparkling selection of the Devonshire folk songs collected by Baring-Gould, along with excerpts from his writings and memoirs, may be found through The Wren Trust, 1 St. James Street, Okehampton, Devon, EX20 1DW, England.
As an additional curious note, when another of Sabine Baring-Gould’s grandsons, the equally brilliant and multifaceted William Stuart Baring-Gould, came to write his famous biography of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (which he called
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World’s First Consulting Detective
), he seems to have turned to his grandfather’s
Early Reminiscences
as a source of raw material from which he might construct Holmes’ early childhood (about which, admittedly,
nothing whatsoever is actually known). W. S. Baring-Gould changed only the dates; the rest, from the father’s injury that discharged him from the Indian Army and his subsequent passion for Continental travel that led to family life in a carriage, the boy’s early archaeological passion and his sporadic education, and even the names of the ships on which the families Baring-Gould and Holmes sailed from England, bear a truly remarkable similarity.
T
HE REVEREND SABINE Baring-Gould died on January 2, 1924, twenty-six days short of his ninetieth birthday, bare weeks after the events described in this book. It pleases me to think that when he left his body, which lies beside Grace’s at the foot of Lew Trenchard Church, he did so secure in the knowledge that his beloved moor was safe from the worst torments of the twentieth century. I like to think that he died happy. Most of all, I want to believe that, all rumor to the contrary notwithstanding, he breathed the air of his moor one last time before he died.
—Laurie R. King
Freedom, California
St. Swithin’s Day 1997