The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (115 page)

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Authors: Laurie R. King

BOOK: The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor
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It was Gould who reassured me, or tried to. “I shouldn’t think they are practising this late in the season. They normally finish in September.”
“Before we go, Gould,” said Holmes, “just take a look at the map for us and tell Russell if there are any points a person could take a carriage onto the moor that aren’t obvious from the markings.”
“A ghostly carriage doesn’t need a road, Holmes,” Baring-Gould said in a stern whisper. Holmes did not deign to answer, merely took a folded
smaller-scale map from his pocket and shook it out, holding it up by the corners directly in front of Baring-Gould. The old man had only to pull down his spectacles from his forehead to study the map, but instead he smiled and waved Holmes away.
“No need for that; I can see it better with my eyes closed.” He did actually close his eyes, and Holmes laid the map over a table for those of us whose eyes were better than our knowledge of the moor. I took out a pencil.
“I think that, as the sightings have all been in the northern quarter, we need not bother with anything south of the Princetown Road. Is this reasonable?”
“For the present,” Holmes said, adding, “We may have to expand the search later.”
“Very well. From the south, we begin at the point where the Princetown Road enters Tavistock.” I dutifully made a small circle on the map. “From there up to Mary Tavy the gates are all on the east side of the Tavy, and will coincide with the lanes leading down to the river. Except,” he said, sitting forward and replacing his glasses onto his nose so he could take the pencil from me and circle an invisible fold in the contour lines, “except for here, a lane that appears to skirt the field. Since the map was made, however, the farmer took down a section of the old wall, and now drives his cattle up onto the moor along here.” The edge of his fingernail traced a dip in the contour lines. “Here is another place, but that should be obvious.” His eyes shifted sideways to take in my reaction. I nodded, and pointed to half a dozen other access points I could see. We both ignored the actual lanes and the labelled Moor Gates, looking only for the hidden places. “Along here,” he said, “there is an old miner’s trail. And this here; it used to be a railway line for bringing peat off the moor. And of course this path here, marginally negotiable if the driver were very good and the horses strong.”
It did not take long for Baring-Gould’s intimate knowledge of the moor to lay open the map to my eyes. I should begin by crossing the moor to the other side of Princetown, and from there work my way back
to Lydford, while Holmes cut across the moor up to the northeastern portion and worked his way counterclockwise. We should either meet in the middle or, failing that, return here Wednesday night.
I took my leave of Baring-Gould with considerably greater warmth than I would have thought possible even a day or two earlier. Holmes played for him again that night, and although the music ended early, he did not return to our rooms until a very late hour.
10
I had almost written God-forsaken, but checked my pen,
for God forsakes no place, though He may tarry to bless.
—A BOOK OF DARTMOOR
I
N THE MORNING I put together a bag—a simple enough procedure that amounted to pushing everything I had brought with me except my frock into the rucksack, borrowing a pair of sturdy riding boots, and adding the book of Baring-Gould’s memoirs and a map—and walked down to the barn.
Here I was presented with a dilemma: Baring-Gould himself had sent down an order that I be given the household’s ageing Dartmoor pony, a beast with a rough coat and a gloomy eye. However, being a pony (even though not apparently interbred with the Shetland) and I passing six feet in my boots and hat, the picture I had of me on its back had a distinctly ludicrous air. I wondered if perhaps Baring-Gould could be pulling some kind of joke, and then dismissed the thought as unlikely.
“Surely there’s another horse,” I protested to Charles Dunstan, the
household’s equally ageing Dartmoor stable lad (whom I had also seen working in the garden). “What about this nice fellow here?” The cob in the adjoining box was a good hand taller and, though older even than the pony, appeared able and amiable.
“That’s Red. He be th’orse what pulls the trap.”
“Can he be ridden?” To have a horse dedicated entirely to draught work was common enough on a big working farm, but unlikely here.
“Well, Mr Arundell rides’n all’y time, though he don’t ride to the hunt. But, Winnie’d be better up the moor. More surefooted, like.”
“It ought to be, with six feet touching the ground. Oh, never mind, Mr Dunstan,” I said, waving away his puzzlement. “Red will do fine.”
He was, fortunately, shod, and his saddle was soon on him, its stirrups lengthened to suit my legs and the roughness of the terrain. A leather saddlebag was found to hold my possessions and a small bag of oats, as well as a last-minute addition from Mrs Elliott’s kitchen that took up as much room as all the other objects combined. I pulled my hat down over my ears and, before any further additions could be found, such as a bell tent or a butterfly net, I put my heels into Red’s sides and rode away from Lew Trenchard in a light mist.
The horse was as solid and without frills as his name, capable of two gaits: a leisurely stroll and a spine-snapping trot. An experimental urge towards a canter met with a slowing of the trot and a laying back of the ears, a clear message that he was going as fast as he could, damn it, and if I didn’t like it, I could just get down and run myself.
I decided that there was no great need for speed, and where we were going there was no safe expanse of unbroken turf on which to practise it anyway. I and the horse settled down to our respective tasks.
However, Red had another idiosyncrasy that I did not discover until it was far too late to do anything about it: He shied.
My first hint of it was when I found myself tumbling into a protective roll in midair and thumping down onto the hard surface of the road at his feet. All the speed he lacked in forward motion he saved up for this burst of lateral movement: Red leapt like a startled cat, straight up and ten feet
to the side. He didn’t then bolt, didn’t kick, didn’t play hard to get; he just flew to one side as if being yanked offstage by a giant hand, and then stood placidly, looking slightly puzzled as to why I had chosen to fling myself to the ground, and waited for me to catch the reins and remount.
Which I did, having first checked to make sure I was whole and then looked closely at his hoofs, legs, girth, and anyplace else I could think of for a possible reason for his extreme action. Finding none, we rode on cautiously, and when there was no repeat of this aberration, my grip gradually loosened and my attention returned to its wandering ways, and an hour or so later the same thing happened.
Why hadn’t the accursed stable lad bothered to mention this small quirk? I wondered, picking myself up painfully from the rocks.
We did cover the remainder of the ten-odd miles to Tavistock without incident. I scraped the mud from my clothing, fed and watered myself and the horse at an inn, remounted, and turned upward onto the moor. The mist firmed up into a drizzle.
Perversely, Red seemed to enjoy hills, leaning into them at a faster pace than his usual amble. Climbing the steep hill up from Tavistock, for the first time since leaving Lew Trenchard I began to think this might not be such a bad idea after all.
The road wound up the side of a hill, climbing a thousand feet in a mile, all of it a narrow but well-used track. At one tight patch we were confronted by a lorry committed inexorably to its downward journey, and I was grateful that Red did not argue about the need to remove ourselves from its path with all speed. We cowered in a faint indentation in the wall, pressing against the dripping bushes, and I heard the vehicle scrape a quantity of paint from its opposite side before it was past, the driver calling a nonchalant thanks. The rest of the climb was made without incident, and the moor opened up before us.
I dismounted, to give Red a rest but also to allow myself a moment to study this strange place. Even with Holmes’ assurance that I need only keep to the roads, I did not relish the thought of entering the moor by myself. I stood beside Red and thought about the clear sense of personality
I had had forced on me in the fog, the idea that Dartmoor was alive. Are you going to allow me to pass? I asked it, only half mocking. Will you keep from throwing your rain and wind at me, pulling your mists up over my head, setting your haunts to plague me and your pixies to lead me astray? I don’t much like you, I told the land before me, but I mean you no harm. There was no answer, other than the sound of Red cropping at the brief grass with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. After a bit, I got to my feet. Friend or foe, I had no choice but to enter.
The road stretched out across the flat, rock-studded ground, the same terrain I had seen north of here, interrupted only by a quarry gouged into a dip and curve of the road and by the prison, riding a rise some distance from the road near Princetown. A grim place like all its kind, it seemed to declare that there would be no coddling of felons here, that punishment, discomfort, and boredom were to be their lot. The motto over the gate, I had heard, read PARCERE SUBJECTIS, or “To spare the Vanquished,” and with Virgil I had to agree that it was marginally more humane to incarcerate one’s enemy than it was to slaughter him. Built originally as a camp for prisoners in the Napoleonic War, Princetown Prison had seen the Black Hole and the cat-o’-nine tails, starvation diet and hard labour, and if recent years had seen a more enlightened régime, the image of life within those grey, circular walls remained one of brutality and deprivation, what Holmes had referred to as a place designed for the breaking of men’s spirits. I suddenly realised that I had been sitting and looking at the prison for too long, and that I did not wish to have a guard sent down to ask my business. I put my heels to Red’s side; for once he obliged.
He did not throw me again until we were nearly in Postbridge, when I was leaning inattentively in the saddle to look over a wall and found the wall coming rapidly up to meet me. Long years of martial training gave my body an automatic response to a fall, but hitting a padded gymnastic mat and flying into a pile of stones were different matters entirely.
I climbed back over the wall and grabbed the reins with more force than was either necessary or sensible. “Damn you!” I shouted at him. “A few bruises are one thing, but if you break my spectacles, how do you
expect us to get home again?” I stormed around to mount, and had my left foot in the stirrup when a voice came from somewhere behind me.
“Does him usually hanswer you?”
I turned with my foot still in the irons, and nearly fell again. There was a face looking at me over the wall on the opposite side on the road, a person so wrapped up in scarfs and hats as to make any sexual identification difficult, but I thought it a young woman rather than an unlined, beardless youth. I laughed, embarrassed more at my loss of temper than at having been caught talking to the animal.
“He hasn’t answered me yet, but we only met a short time ago. It wouldn’t surprise me too much if he did.”
“Him’s Mr Arundell’s ’oss, bainty?”
“Yes,” I said, surprised. Lew House was a fair distance from here.
“Thought so. They boft’n cheap ’cause ’e kept dumping the lady who had’n avore. Don’t do it to menvolk, cooriusly enuv.”
A misogynist gelding. Dear God, what on earth was I doing here? “You know Mr Arundell?”
“He rides down here sometimes when th’ hunt’s on, though he do like ter follow th’ hounds on foot.”
“Having met Red, I couldn’t blame him.”
“I knaw who ye be,” she said conversationally.
“Do you?”
“You’re with Znoop Zherlock, baint you? I heerd tell you’re ’is wife?”
I supposed the question on the end of her last statement was understandable, even without the oddity of our ages, as I was wearing the same sort of raiment as she was.
“That I am.”
“And you’re here for the Squire, Mr Baring-Gould.”
“Here now,” I protested. “What makes you think that?”
“Oh, me mum’s cousin’s close friends with the zister of Miz Endacott, who cleans for Miz Elliott three days a week.”
“What do they think I’m doing for Mr Baring-Gould?” I demanded, and walked across to look over the wall at this all-knowing gossip.
“Ye be axin’ questions about old Josiah Gorton and the ghostly carridge.”
“Well, I’ll be—” I stopped, stoppered my rising irritation, and asked more calmly, “So, do you know anything about either?”
“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.

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