"I found it in his 'smuggler's hole,' the traditional turf-covered cache the old miners used to hide their valuables. From the appearance of the stones he used to disguise the opening, I should say it has sat there undisturbed for more than a month but considerably less than a year."
I took the phial and gently eased out the cork with my fingernails. There seemed to be a tiny quantity of fine gravel in the bottom, the size of a generous pinch. I cupped my right hand and upended the bottle, then stared at the substance in my hand in disbelief.
"Can that possibly be—gold?"
FIVE
Among semi-barbarous tribes it is customary that the tribe should have its place of assembly and consultation, and this is marked round by either stones or posts set up in the ground.
—A Book of Dartmoor
With the help of a torn-off corner of the map to make a funnel, we eased the gleaming specks back into their bottle. Holmes examined my palm closely, picked a couple of stray bits from their lodging place, and returned them to the bottle. Pushing the cork firmly into place, he slipped it into his pocket.
"It is an interesting substance for a tin miner to have in his possession, wouldn't you agree?" he asked.
"Particularly in that form. I would understand a gold ring he had found, or a coin from an ancient trove, but flakes? Surely there isn't gold on Dartmoor?"
"Not that I have ever heard. Perhaps I shall send this in for analysis, to see if chemical tests give us any indication of its provenance."
"But gold is an element. There won't be any distinguishing features, will there?"
"It depends on how pure it is, if this soil is a recent addition or the ore in which the gold came to life. Impurities differ, if this is in its raw state."
"There was nothing else in the cache?"
"A few knobs of tin and some tools. I left them there."
"So," I said with an air of moving on, "where next?"
"Northwest is where the farmhand saw Lady Howard's coach; southeast is the place it was seen by Gould's courting couple. We'll start at the top and work down."
Packing to leave our night's lodging was a matter of getting to our feet and buttoning on our waterproofs. We did so, and clambered up the slippery side of the ravine to the floor of the moor itself. There Holmes paused.
"One thing, Russell. Where we're going is a rather nasty piece of terrain. You must watch where you put your feet."
" 'The Great Grimpen Mire,' Holmes?" I asked lightly, a reference to the sucking depths that had apparently taken the life of the villain Stapleton, after he failed to murder his cousin and legitimate heir to the Baskerville estate, Holmes' client Sir Henry.
"That's a bit farther south, but similar, yes. There are mires, bogs, and 'featherbeds' or quaking bogs. With the first two, look for the tussocks of heavy grass or rushes around the edges, which offer a relatively firm footing, but if you see a stretch of bright green sphagnum moss, for God's sake stay away from it. The moss is a mat covering a pit of wet ooze; if one slips in under the mat, it would be a bit like laying a sodden featherbed on top of a swimmer. Not a pleasant death."
It was, I agreed, a gruesome picture. "What does one do then?"
"Not much, except spread your arms to give the greatest possible surface to the ooze, and wait for help. Struggling is invariably fatal, as any number of Dartmoor ponies have found. With their typical dark humour, the natives call the mires 'Dartmoor Stables.'
"Other than the quaking bogs, the chief danger is from the elements. At night or when the mist comes down, depend on the compass or, lacking that, find a stream and follow it down. All water comes off the moor eventually, and reaches people."
"Thank you, Holmes. And if I find myself going in circles, I'm to turn my coat inside out to keep the pixies from leading me astray."
He bared his teeth at me in a grin. "It couldn't hurt."
***
Baring-Gould had marked with great precision the place on the map where the ghostly carriage had appeared, and an hour or so later Holmes and I stood more or less on the spot. It was difficult to be certain, because the rain (to Holmes' great irritation) had immediately washed the ink from the surface of the map, leaving us with a small dark cloud instead of an X. Holmes began to walk slowly along the path, studying the spongy, short-cropped turf for the months-old marks of carriage wheels.
Quite hopeless, really, and after a couple of painstaking hours he finally admitted that there was little to distinguish the hoof and wheel of a carriage (both, presumably, iron-shod) from the naked hoof of any of a myriad of wandering Dartmoor ponies or the drag of a sledge or farm cart, at any rate not after a two-month interval.
Holmes straightened his spine slowly and stood for a while gazing up at the surrounding hills, several of which were crowned with the fantastical shapes of tors. The track we were on, unpaved and without gravel or metalling, was nonetheless flat and wide enough for a cart, and largely free of stones—which was enough to make it noteworthy—and of bracken, which made it visible against the brown hillside. It emerged from the side of one tor-capped hillock, wrapped around its side for a gently curving half mile or so, and then rose slightly to disappear at the foot of another tor, vaguely in the direction of Okehampton to the northwest.
"It does look like a road, Holmes. Or as if it had once been a road."
"There are a surprising number of tracks across the moor, dating to the period when goods were moved by packhorse and the lanes of the countryside below were a morass of mud between the hedgerows all winter. Sailors used them, too, as a shortcut between putting in at a port on one coast and searching for the next job on the other."
"Those lanes must have been truly horrendous if travel on the moor was seen as the easier alternative."
"Indeed. I believe that this particular remnant is the continuation of Cut Lane, which intersects Drift Lane near Postbridge and joins with the ancient main track from the central portion of the moor to Lydford, Lych Way."
"Cheerful name," I commented. "Lych" was the Old English word for corpse—hence the roofed-over lych gate outside most churches, for the temporary resting of the bier (and its bearers) on the way into the graveyard. I trusted that Holmes, a longtime student of linguistic oddities, would know this.
"Not by coincidence," Holmes replied. "The Lych Way was the traditional track by which corpses were carried to Lydford for burial."
"Good heavens. Do you mean to say there are no churchyards on the entire moor?"
"Not until the year 1260, I believe it was, when the bishop granted the moor dwellers the option of taking their dead to Widdecombe instead."
"Generous of him."
"Interestingly enough, archaeologists find few burial remains other than burnt scraps of bone. I suppose that either the peat soil is so acidic that it dissolves even the heavy bones with time, or else when the turf alternately dries in the summers and becomes saturated in winter, its contraction and expansion eventually pushes the bones up to the surface, where the wildlife finds them and hastens their dissolution. The two hypotheses would make for some interesting experiments," he mused.