Holmes took off his hat politely, and answered her as she moved around us to fetch two more plates and the necessary cutlery and mugs to go with them.
"We're not exactly here on a holiday stroll, madam. We heard that there was a sighting of Lady Howard's coach not far from here, and we were eager to hear more. You see," he said, warming to his story and taking his place on the bench and a spoon in his hand, "we collect odd tales such as that of Lady How—"
There was a sudden gurgling, clicking noise from the inglenook, emerging from what I had thought to be a pile of blankets draped across a chair to dry near the heat. I could make no sense of the sound, but it silenced everyone in the room, including Holmes. The two men and the farmwife all turned to stare at Holmes, and I saw with astonishment the look of chagrin spreading across his face.
"What was that?" I demanded. "I didn't hear."
"He—or she, I beg your pardon," he said to the tiny huddled figure, and started anew. "To translate, the remark was made, and I quote, 'By Gar, who is it but Znoop Zherlock?' 'Snoop Sherlock' was, I ought to explain, the nickname given me by the moor dwellers during the Baskerville case. We have here one of the older residents, evidently, who remembers me." He extricated his long legs from the bench and went over to the pile of blankets, extending his hand towards it. A small, gnarled paw appeared, followed by another burst of unintelligible speech—badly distorted, I diagnosed, by a complete lack of teeth, but still of such a heavy dialectical peculiarity as to constitute a separate language. I had thought Harry Cleave possessed an accent; I was mistaken. In fact, I shall not even attempt to transcribe the words as they were spoken, since an alphabet soup such as "Yar! Me luvvers, you mun vale leery, you cain't a' ated since bevower the foggy comed" makes for laborious, if picturesque, reading.
At first hearing, the speech was beyond me, although Holmes seemed to follow the sense of it readily enough. I merely applied myself to the hot, simple food that was put before me, and drank the cider in my mug. The talk washed over me, and as the pangs of cold and hunger subsided, I slowly began to make sense of what was being said.
The folk in this isolated farmstead were indeed aware of Lady Howard's coach, and did not like it one bit. The first witness to the apparition, back in July, had actually been a friend of the young farmhand's second cousin, and Holmes made haste to interrogate the farmhand as to the whereabouts of his second cousin's friend, whose euphonious name was Johnny Trelawny. It appeared, however, that Trelawny had fled the moor, despite being known far and wide as a brave man, a man indeed formerly thought fearless, who had done his service on the Western Front and to whom the occasional brawl was not unknown. There was no consideration that the intense teasing he had received during the month he remained the sole witness to Lady Howard's coach might be a contributing factor to Trelawny's disinclination to stay on the moor, and when Holmes enquired as to the man's employment, and was told that Johnny had lost his job after assaulting his employer (a known wag who came up to his employee in the pub and presented him with a tiny newborn puppy, asking if Trelawny thought it had been fathered by Lady Howard's hound), it seemed to me that fear was not perhaps the chief contributing factor in the man's departure. When Holmes ventured to suggest this alternate explanation, it was considered, and rejected. No, moor dwellers in general were staying away from the northwestern quarter of the moor, certainly at night. Johnny Trelawny would be no exception.
Holmes succeeded in drawing out roughly the date when Trelawny had seen this vision, establishing that it was probably the Tuesday or Wednesday before the full moon. However, when he tried to find where Trelawny had gone, the only point on which the family agreed was that the lad would not have gone back to his family home in Cornwall, due to a long-standing feud with an uncle. Exeter, the farmhand thought. Portsmouth, the farmwife suggested, and then used the opportunity to begin her own tale of another lad who had got a girl in trouble and run off as far as London, but the girl's father had taken his savings out of the jar in the woodshed to buy himself a train ticket, and as he set off across the moor on a dark night…
Stories tumbled out as the cider jug went around and the relief of confession began to be felt. Voices crossed and were raised and crossed again, with the constant running commentary of the toothless figure in the corner making a rhythm like a waterfall for the rest to talk over. Holmes had no difficulty in steering the tales towards the occult and the unusual, and out of the welter of sounds I received clear images and phrases, chief among which was a regular repetition of the phrase, "a coorius sarcumstance," pronounced each time with a shake of the head.
I had to agree, some of the circumstances they described were "coorius" indeed; in fact, I should have said they were highly unlikely. The black dogs and the mysteriously dead sheep any student of the supernatural might have expected, along with the standard two-headed foals and the infertile clutches of eggs, but the eagle carrying off a grown ewe made me raise an eyebrow, and when the farmwife swore that a bolt of lightning had shaken the earth and knocked one of her best plates from its perch, I closed my ears and reached for the board of gorgeous yellow cheese to accompany what I decided had to be my final glass of "zyder":England simply did not have earthquakes, not even in Dartmoor.
"Snoop Sherlock" valiantly listened to it all, trying hard to shape the conflicting narratives into hard fact of places and dates, contributing the odd remark and trying hard to deflect the inevitable spate of Baskerville reminiscences from the aged figure in the blankets. He finally brought the Babel to a close by the desperate measure of pulling out his watch and exclaiming theatrically over the passage of time, looking pointedly at the window and declaring that the fog seemed to have cleared, and finally standing up to leave (dealing his head a mighty crack on the low roof beam). We paid generously for the food, caught up our rucksacks, and made our escape, with the farmwife's thanks and the old woman's voice following us out of the door and across the weedy yard.
I quickly realised that having the fog clear on Dartmoor meant a transformation into rain. Uncomfortable, but infinitely better than the fog.
***
We took greater care to avoid total immersion in our next interviews, but we need not have worried. Of the courting couple who had later seen the coach and its dog, the girl refused to say anything, just burst into melodramatic tears and collapsed into the arms of a handsome young man. We were led to understand, moreover, that this young man was not the same beau with whom she had been the night of the apparition, and in the course of ascertaining the whereabouts of the former suitor (the one whom Baring-Gould had referred to as "stolid and un-imaginative") we nearly came to blows with the current gentleman.
The rejected suitor, Thomas Westaway, lived two miles off and was happy enough to interrupt his labours on a stone wall in exchange for some silver. Avoiding as best he could the touchy issue of Westaway's erstwhile ladylove, Holmes questioned him closely as to the precise location and times of the sighting.
The first query was settled by the lad pulling a piece of sacking cloth over his shoulders and leading us down the lane, over a stile (not a wooden contraption, merely lengths of stone protruding from the wall to form crude steps), and across a field. Built against the farther wall was a low shed, providing a sheltered feeding place for animals—and, no doubt, a sheltered private place for people. Baring-Gould's analysis of the situation was remarkably accurate, I thought.