Baring-Gould was passing through the hallway downstairs, and he wished me a pleasant evening without, I thought, actually seeing me. Holmes was in the porch, and as soon as he heard me coming he stepped out onto the drive and opened a huge, bright green umbrella over our heads, and escorted me the few feet to the sleek closed touring car that awaited us. A liveried chauffeur was one step ahead of him, holding the door. I climbed in, followed by Holmes. The chauffeur claimed the umbrella, closed it, and drew it after him into the front, and drove us away from Lew House.
EIGHT
With every wish to promote the well-being and emancipation of the working classes, I should be sorry to see—what is approaching—the extinction of the old squirearchy, or rather being supplanted by the nouveaux riches.
—Early Reminiscences
As we began to thread our way through the narrow, deep-cut lanes that led upwards onto the moor itself, I became aware of something odd in the attitude of the man at my side. The light outside was fading, but it was still bright enough in the car for me to study him. He was slumped down into the comfortable seat, his arms crossed over his chest, and his face had a sour look on it that I had seen any number of times before.
"Holmes, what is it?"
"What is what, Russell?" he said irritably, not taking his eyes from the passing stone walls crowned with hedgerows. "I do wish you would refrain from asking me questions that contain no grammatical antecedent."
"An antecedent is unnecessary if both parties are aware of the topic under consideration, and you know full well what I'm talking about. Your physical language is positively shouting your displeasure, but since this evening's social event was not my idea, I cannot assume that you are resenting my coercion. You are peeved at something; what is it?"
"Am I not to be allowed the privacy of my own thoughts without being subjected to an analysis of my 'physical language'?"
"Not if you insist on indulging in those thoughts around me, no. If you wanted privacy, Holmes, you should not have married me."
Bridling, he removed his gaze from the limited view outside the car windows and glared at me for a long moment before his good sense reasserted itself. His arms unknotted themselves and dropped to his lap, and he looked, if anything, almost sheepish. He lowered his voice, although the glass between us and the driver was thick and the whine of the climbing engine loud.
"I discovered only this evening that Ketteridge's house is Baskerville Hall," he said.
I saw immediately what he dreaded: not, as I had feared, the feeling of a case taking a disastrously wrong turn, but rather the sort of fulsome praise he loathed. Holmes was fond enough of applause for those of his actions that he himself considered deserving, but he abhorred the popular notoriety that Watson's narratives had spawned.
"Holmes, it's been, what? Twenty years since that story was published. Surely—"
"Ketteridge's secretary was reciting whole swaths of it last night, to his master's amusement. And Gould was playing along, curse him."
"We could turn back to Lew Trenchard," I suggested. "I could take ill, if you like." One of the unexpected benefits of marriage, I had found, was that it gave a convenient scapegoat upon which public blame could be heaped.
"Generous of you to offer, Russell, but no. Tribulation is good for the soul, or so I hear. Although I admit that had I known last night, I might have avoided the invitation to dinner. Which may be why neither Ketteridge nor Gould happened to mention it."
"Well, I shall reserve the option of a ladylike attack of the vapours if the reminiscences become too nauseating."
"Thank you."
"Think nothing of it. How did Ketteridge come to own Baskerville Hall? If he inherited, why didn't he take the name?"
"He bought the place—lock, stock, and family portraits. Two years ago, according to Gould, he was on the final stages of a world tour when he passed through England and happened to hear about it from an acquaintance in a weekend shooting party up in Scotland. It appealed to him, he came out to look at it, and he ended up buying it from the sole surviving Baskerville, the daughter of the Sir Henry I knew."
"Sir Henry had no sons?"
"He had two. They were both killed during the war, one in the Somme, the other somewhere in the Mediterranean, probably lost to a German submarine boat. Sir Henry died before the war, his widow in the influenza epidemic of 1919. With death duties, the daughter, who was only twenty-two or -three and unmarried, hadn't enough left to maintain the hall. It's one of those great stone sinkholes, a gold-hungry mire sucking down pounds and pence without a trace. As you can see," he said, extending one long finger to point at the view through the window ahead.
The land beneath our tyres had climbed through the wooded fringe along the outer slopes of the moor and out into the tiny fields and walled pastures that occupy the edges of the moor itself. It had continued to rise until the low and homely cottages had fallen away, leaving only the bleak, boulder-strewn expanse of the interior. Unexpectedly, a dip in the barren ground fell away and grew trees. I caught a brief glimpse of what looked like a pair of thin towers rising above the branches, and then we dropped down into the trees.
The lodge gates showed signs of recent attention, for although the edges of the pillars were smooth and shapeless with age, the stone glowed as if freshly scrubbed and the elaborate tracery of the iron gates gleamed with new black paint. The lodge itself was fairly new and very tidy and tenanted by someone sufficiently house-proud to have starched the white curtains into crispness. As we passed through the gates, I looked up at the amorphous stone objects that topped the flanking pillars. I thought they resembled enormous potatoes; Holmes said they were the boars' heads of the Baskervilles.
On the other side of the gate lay a long avenue of old trees that had dropped most of their leaves onto the drive. Nonetheless, the branches that met over our heads were thick enough to block the last rays of the evening's light, so that we seemed to be driving into a long tunnel, illuminated from below by the powerful headlamps of the motorcar. There was a row of light standards, planted at the side of the drive at regular intervals, but they were unlit, visible only in our headlamps.
Then, twenty feet from the end of the tunnel, the front windscreen of the motorcar flared into a blaze of light, blinding us as if a powerful search light had been shone directly into our faces. The driver slowed and put up one hand to shield his eyes, and we emerged cautiously from the avenue of trees. The drive passed through an expanse of lawn lined with flower beds, and I found myself looking up at a house shaggy with ivy, its central block surmounted by the two towers I had seen from the approach. Impressive from a distance, they now looked crowded together, thrown out of balance with the original house by the addition of two modern wings. One huge light fixture hung from the wall above the porch, drenching the lower part of the house in blue-white brilliance. The upper reaches, shielded by a reflector, receded into darkness but for the squares of a few mullioned windows that had lights behind their curtains.
"Well," said Holmes to himself, "I see Sir Henry got his thousand-candle-power Swan and Edison."
"Two or three lesser bulbs might have got the job done less dramatically."
"His purpose was to expel the gloom."
"He did that," I said, although I could not help noticing that where the light eventually trailed to a halt, the dark seemed even more solid than it had in the unlit avenue.
Richard Ketteridge had been standing at his open porch door when we emerged from the avenue of trees. He came out onto the drive to greet us, and now his hand was on my door, opening it. I arranged a gracious smile on my face and permitted him to hand me out of the motorcar. Fortunately, I did not trip and fall at his feet, and as the rain had momentarily slowed to a sort of falling fog, I waved away the driver with the umbrella.