The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (122 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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He had been carrying Pethering over both shoulders, I decided, left hand steadying his load, right hand out as a balance. When his right heel hit a patch of wet leaves and skidded out from under him, he thumped down on his backside, with Pethering landing on the ground in back of him. I could see clearly where the man’s right foot had stretched out to leg’s length, where his left heel had dug in, where his right hand plunged into the leaves in back of him, and where the seat of his trousers landed hard. The length of Pethering stretched out at cross angles, heels to the man’s right hand, head to his left. The man got to his feet (no doubt brushing at his clothing in disgust) and went around to Pethering’s shoulders to drag him off downhill the rest of the way to the water.
It was all remarkably clear, one of the most elegant examples of spoor I had ever seen, and I was very pleased with myself until I stood up, brushing off my own hands, and saw my audience stretched around the rim of the lake. They had been standing, stone still and silent, as I examined the ground, so intent on a precise re-creation of what had gone on here that I had duplicated the man’s very movements, dipping into a fall, flinging a leg out to mimic the sliding foot, standing and brushing and hoisting and pulling—all of my movements small and controlled, mere shorthand, as it were, but nonetheless vastly entertaining. Even the constable beneath Davey Pearce lay silently staring at me. My face began to burn, and I gruffly shouldered my way past the people at the top to examine the path that ran there.
The man who had brought Pethering here, however, had vanished into the scuffed leaf mould. The path was too well used for a single passerby to have left his mark, and he was not so obliging as to have deposited a thread from Pethering’s coat or a tuft from his trousers legs on a passing branch, not that I could discover.
I finally gave it up and went back to the lake, where I found the doctor arrived, the body being loaded onto a stretcher, and the stony-faced, muddy-coated police constable under the control of an inspector.
The inspector, whose name was Fyfe, did not know what to make of me; I could see him decide that it was best to defer judgement until all the votes were in. Noncommittally, he tugged his hat politely at Baring-Gould’s introduction and merely said he’d be speaking to me later. As none of what I had found could influence the first flush of his investigation, I agreed, asking only that he please do his best to keep the curious off the western ramp.
“PC Bennett is taking care of that,” he said mildly. I refrained from looking across at the hapless constable, reduced to guard duty.
I was also, quite simply, not up to the prolonged explanation and argument that I was sure would ensue when a rural inspector of police encountered a female amateur detective’s analysis of a crime. All of a sudden I was deathly tired and enormously cold, and Baring-Gould, loyally standing by, looked even worse.
“Inspector, I’ll go back to the house now and finish my breakfast,” I heard my voice say. “The rector ought to be in out of the cold, as well.” I did not listen to hear the inspector’s yea or nay; I only waited until I saw Baring-Gould turning to his waiting sedan-chair and two strong men leaping forward to carry him back to the warmth.
I did not even make it across the meadow before the reaction hit me. In part it was sheer physical cold, but also, and I think chiefly, it was the psychic strain of dealing competently and in a professional manner in the face of a bloating corpse, and moreover one that I had known, however briefly, alive.
I was shuddering with cold when I got back to the house. An anxious housemaid stood at the door, ordered no doubt by Mrs Elliott to stay there but eager to know what was happening. Her questions died when she saw my face, and she helped me take off the borrowed coat. I was shivering so badly I could barely speak, but I succeeded in telling her that the coat was to be returned to Andrew Budd, and that I was going to bath.
I used the nail-brush on the skin of my right hand until the hand looked raw, and I drained the bath and ran it full and even hotter. My
skin went pink, then red, but I still trembled inside, until the maid appeared (looking a bit pink herself—Mrs Elliott’s stern hand had resumed control downstairs, a dim part of my mind diagnosed) with a tea tray and a cup already poured—very little tea in it, but a great deal of hot milk, sugar, and whisky. I drank the foul mixture with gratitude, and the fluttering subsided.
I began to relax, and then to think, and eventually I succumbed to a brief gust of shaky, half-hysterical laughter: Who would have thought I could make such a fuss over an irritating insect like Pethering?
17
As the drift tin was exhausted, and the slag of
the earlier miners was used up, it came to be necessary to
run adits for tin, and work the veins.
—A BOOK OF DARTMOOR
I
NSECT OR NOT, the squashing of him left me distinctly queasy, on and off during the day. Baring-Gould withdrew to his room, leaving Inspector Fyfe little scope for questioning apart from me. When we had been over it all so many times even he was thoroughly sick of it, he left.
A few minutes later the housemaid Rosemary slipped in and placed a tray on the table beside the chair where I sat trying to summon the energy to rise.
“Mrs Elliott thought you could maybe use a coffee,” she murmured, and slipped out again.
Bully for Mrs Elliott, I thought, to offer as refreshment a change from the endless cups of tea we had been swilling all day. A bracing cup of coffee to celebrate the (however temporary) repelling of constabulary
boarders, and along with it, I was amused to find, a selection of three kinds of freshly baked biscuits that explained the odours that had wafted in from the door that connected the drawing room to the kitchen. If Mrs Elliott chose to work off her upset by indulging in an orgy of baking, it was fine with me.
I wandered nervously in and out of rooms until I found myself in Baring-Gould’s study, where I retrieved the manuscript copy of
Further Reminiscences
from the heap of papers where I had left it. Being handwritten, I thought, the going would be slow, but distracting enough to take my mind off the events of the day. And so it proved—when, that is, I could keep my attention on the pages at all. Time and again I caught myself staring blindly into space, and wrenched my thoughts back onto Baring-Gould’s writing. His early parishes did not seem to have been successes, and his marriage was touched upon so lightly that it would have been easy to miss it entirely. The manuscript was, in fact, the least revealing autobiography I had ever read, being much more concerned with the minutiae of European travel and the triumphs of antiquarian explorations than his relationship with his wife or the birth of his children. Belgian art, the history of Lew, a trip to Freiburg, lengthy letters to his friend and travelling companion Gatrill, ghost stories, love philtres, and thirty pages on the collecting of folk songs were occasionally interesting, often tedious. The only thing that caught my attention was a brief mention of gold, but when I reread the passage I saw that he was talking about Bodmin Moor, some distance to the west, and I read on as he described being first lost in the fog and then sucked up to his shoulders into a bog.
The long day dribbled to a close, punctuated only by a solitary dinner (I very nearly asked if I might join the others in the kitchen, but decided it would be too cruel) and an eventual adjournment upstairs—not to bed, which would have been futile, but to allow the servants to close up the house for the night.
Three times during the day I had my coat on and stood at the door, ready to set off up the hill to the village post-office telephone, and three
times I took off my coat and went back to my book before the fire. If this case were to be given over to Scotland Yard, a word in Mycroft’s ear would cause a memorandum to travel sideways, across two or three desks, until it finally reached the desk of a man who could pick up the telephone and arrange for one of the more sympathetic Yard men to be sent.
But what if that did happen, what if they even sent Holmes’ old friend Lestrade himself? Would it make any difference if the official investigator was friendly or not? In fact, would it not actually be better if the Holmes partnership was disconnected from the police forces, allowing us to get on with our own investigation without undue interference? (Assuming, of course, that Holmes reappeared to take up his share of the burden. The man’s penchant for disappearing at inconvenient moments was at times maddening.)
In the end, I stayed with my book, deciding that the pull of the telephone was only the urge to be doing something (anything!) and meekly removed myself upstairs at an appropriate hour.
By one o’clock in the morning, I had given up the attempt to read and sat watching my thoughts chase one another around by the low flicker of the fire. By two I had ceased feeding the coals and climbed under the bedclothes, but I did not even attempt to douse the light. I knew that the pathetic back of the dead man’s head would be waiting for me in the dark, so I let my mind poke and prod at the restrictions that ignorance had laid, trying with a complete lack of success to put together a puzzle missing half its pieces.
At three o’clock a stealthy sound from downstairs jerked me up into instant alarm: heart pounding, mouth open, I strained for a repetition. It came, and I instantly swung my feet off the bed and was reaching for a heavy object when my brain succeeded in asserting itself against the adrenaline. It was unlikely that a burglar or would-be murderer would have a key to the front door.
Sure enough, in less than two minutes my bedroom door opened quietly but surely, and Holmes came in, wearing the dark suit of London
with an inexplicable quantity of mud and grass clinging to the ankles. He closed the door, turned, and stopped dead.
“Good Lord, Russell, what have you been up to?”
I had almost forgotten the state of my face, but whatever he saw behind the bruises and contusions had him by my side in a few rapid steps.
“What?” he demanded. “What is it?”
I did not give him his answer until some time later, but then, I did not need to. Holmes was always very satisfactory at determining, with a minimum of clues, what in a given situation was the required course of action.
 
 
T
HERE ARE TIMES when verbal communication, vital as it may be in a partnership, is insufficient; this was one of those times. I clung to him, and even slept for a while towards morning before finally, reluctantly, stirring.
“Pethering is dead,” I told him. He jerked and I felt him looking at my forehead. “No, there is no relationship to my injuries—I got those in a fall up on the moor.” I gave him a brief sketch of my trip across Dartmoor and a slightly more detailed description of my impromptu visit to Baskerville Hall, then went on to the previous day’s sequence of events, starting with theology at dawn and ending with meaningless words on a page at midnight. Once, I might have been too ashamed to tell him about my exaggerated response to the death of a scarcely known nuisance, but we had been through too much together for my overreaction to cause more than a pang of embarrassment in the telling. Or perhaps I was just too tired to care.
“They will do an autopsy?” he asked.
“Fyfe said they would do.”
“And he’s preserved the marks on the ramp?”
“They had a tarpaulin over it.”
“Better than nothing at all, I suppose. Plaster casts of the heel marks?”
“I doubt it.”
“I shall have to insist.”
I laughed shortly. “I don’t know how much influence you’ll have down here. Certainly the name of Sherlock Holmes’ wife is nothing to conjure with.”
“Ah, poor Russell, forced to ride along in her husband’s turn-ups. It is a backward area, with no respect for women’s brains. Never mind; we’ll both have to resort to Gould’s influence before we’re through.”
“It is very impressive, that influence. He had a law-abiding dairyman assaulting a police constable, just for the asking.”
“I told you it was a backwoods. They probably still practice corn sacrifice. Tell me about Ketteridge.”
I told him everything I could remember about my hours in Baskerville Hall. He listened intently, asking no questions, and when I had finished he rose and, wrapping his dressing-gown around him, went to stir the fire into life. Having done so, he took up his pipe and lit it, puffing thoughtfully down at the newly crackling flames.
“You handled it well,” he said unexpectedly.
“At least I didn’t fall apart until I was alone.”
“That is all one may ask of oneself.”
“I suppose. I feel stupid.”
“Human,” he corrected me.
“God, who would be a human being?” I said, although I was beginning to feel somewhat better about the episode and its effect on me.
“I’ve often thought the same,” he commented drily, and then returned to business. “You have no idea who Ketteridge might have been escorting so anxiously off the premises?”
“None.”
“No smell of perfume, for example, or of cigarettes? The night he was here, Ketteridge mentioned that he smokes only cigars, and his fingers did not give lie to it.”
“No perfume. Cigarettes, yes, but I think Scheiman smokes them.”
“I believe you are right. Do you know, that entire ménage interests
me strangely. Tell me: When Ketteridge allowed you the brief tour of the banqueting hall, did you notice a portrait of a Cavalier in black velvet, lace collar, and a plumed hat?”
“No,” I said slowly. “A variety of uniforms, one blue velvet jacket, and an assortment of wigs, but no Cavalier.”
“As I thought, the portrait of old Sir Hugo Baskerville, the scoundrel whose sins led to the Baskerville curse in the first place, has been taken down from the gallery. I should be very interested to know when.”
“And why?”
“When might tell us why.” Having delivered his epigram, he tossed the barely drawing pipe onto the mantelpiece and began to pull clothing from drawers and wardrobe.
“Holmes, tell me what you found in London.”
“Breakfast first, Russell; the morning is half gone and I, for one, have not eaten since lunchtime yesterday.”
I forbore to look pointedly at the first pale light at the window curtains, merely removed my recovering body from the bed and proceeded to clothe it. Holmes was not the only one who could follow nonverbal commands.
Before we left the bedroom, however, there was something I had to know. “Holmes, why did you tell me you’d met Baring-Gould during the Baskerville case?”
“I did not. I merely said that I had used him during the case.”
“You deliberately misled me. Why didn’t you want me to know he was your godfather?”
He paused in the act of brushing his hair and looked over at me, startled. “Good heavens, he is, isn’t he? I had completely forgotten.” He turned back to the mirror slowly. “Extraordinary thought, is it not?”
With that, I had to agree.
 
 
M
RS ELLIOTT WAS up and ready for us, although Baring-Gould was not. I had not expected he would be, after the
rigours of the day before; I could only hope he had not suffered from the unwonted expenditure of his limited energies.
The chimney in the dining room was still not functioning satisfactorily, so we had been served in the drawing room with the painted Virtues looking down at us, and there we remained for our council. I had to wait until Holmes had tamped and lit and puffed at his pipe, a delaying nuisance that had not grown any easier to bear over the years. I swear he did it deliberately to irritate me.
“Holmes,” I growled after several long minutes, “I am going to take up knitting, and make you sit and wait while I count the row of stitches.”
“Nonsense,” he said with a final dig and puff. “You are quite capable of talking and counting at the same time. Am I to understand that you wish to hear the results of my sojourn?”
“Holmes, when I left you on Monday, you were going to northern Dartmoor and returning here two days later. It is now Saturday, and the only word I have had were secondhand rumours of a hasty trip to London. I’ve told you about Pethering’s death and my visit to Baskerville Hall; I see no reason to go into my trip over the moor and my conversation about hedgehogs with the witch of Mary Tavy parish until you’ve given me something in return.”
“Ah, I see you’ve met Elizabeth Chase.”
Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a husband whom I might astonish.
“Holmes,” I said sternly.
“Oh very well. Yes, I went onto the moor, and no, I was not blown to bits; I was not even lightly shelled. I even missed the worst of the storm on the Tuesday. I asked farmwifes, shepherds, three stonemasons, two thatchers, a goose girl, and the village idiot whether or not they had seen a ghostly carriage or a black dog, had heard anything peculiar, noticed anything out of the ordinary. All but the village idiot gave me nothing but nonsense, and he gave me nothing but a smile.
“The testing ground for Mycroft’s secret weapon (which, by the way,
is a sort of amphibious tank) is to the east of Yes Tor, down to Blacka-ven Brook. It’s a pocket of ground difficult to overlook except from the army’s own observation huts, but I did find a patch of hillside outside the artillery range with an adit showing signs of recent use.”
“An adit being a horizontal mine shaft,” I said tentatively, dredging up the word from somewhere in my recent reading. Holmes nodded. “Not an active mine, I take it?”
“By no means. Its entrance was heavily overgrown and nearly obscured by a rockfall.”

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