"You go, Holmes."
"Come along, Russell. You mustn't avoid your host simply because he is a rude old man. Besides which, he has quite taken to you."
"I'd hate to see how he expresses real dislike, then."
"He becomes very polite but rather inattentive," he said, holding the door open for me. "Precisely as you do, as a matter of fact."
Gould was awake, but he lay on his pillows moving little more than his eyes. His voice was clear but low, and with very little breath behind it.
"Mrs Elliott tells me you've rid me of a household pest."
"Does that sort of thing happen often?"
"Never. Only friends come here."
"You should have sent for the village constable."
"Pethering is harmless. I couldn't be bothered. Tell me what happened."
Holmes pulled up a chair and told him, making a tale out of it.I sat on the seat below the window, watching the two men. Baring-Gould's eyes, the only things alive in that tired, sallow face, flicked over to me when Holmes told him how I had moved closer to the collection of heavy objects as Pethering had raised his weapon, and they began to dance with appreciation as the story of the man's discomfiting progressed. Holmes embroidered it slightly, enjoying his audience, and at the end Baring-Gould closed his eyes and opened his mouth and began to shake softly in a rather alarming convulsion of silent laughter.
It was short-lived, and at the end of it he lay for a moment, and then drew a deep breath and let it out again.
"Poor man. Dear old William Crossing remarked somewhere that one of the great goals of the Druids seems to have been the puzzling of posterity. One could say they have been quite successful. Pethering hasn't shown up again?"
"Not yet."
"When he does, tell him I'll write him some sort of a letter. He's a lunatic, but he has a wife and child to feed."
"I'll tell him."
"How was your dinner last night?"
"I was glad that you finally chose to warn me that we were going to be at Baskerville Hall, but we sorted it out eventually. Thanks to Russell, actually, who gave an astonishingly realistic performance of a young wife fiercely protective of her eminent husband's comfort and reputation. Ketteridge no doubt thinks her a fool."
The sharp old eyes found me again across the room, and this time the twinkle in them was unmistakeable.
"That must have been quite an act," he said.
"It was."
Baring-Gould smiled gently to himself, and with that smile I had my first inkling of the nature of the hold this man had over Holmes.
"Russell and I will be away again tomorrow, but before we go, is there anything I can do for you?" Holmes asked him.
"Do you know," Baring-Gould answered after a moment, "if it isn't too much trouble, I should very much like some music."
Without a word Holmes rose and left the room. I sat in the window and listened to the slow, laboured breathing of the man in the bed, and when Holmes came back in with his violin, I slipped out.
For two hours I sat, first in our rooms and then downstairs, trying to read Baring-Gould's words concerning the Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and then his Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets while the violin played the same sort of wistful, simple music I had first heard on the muddy road from Coryton station. It filled every corner of the house, and finally I took the current book, his recently published Early Reminiscences (which I had unearthed in the study between a tattered issue of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association and a pamphlet by Baring-Gould entitled "How to Save Fuel") and escaped with it out of doors. Even the stables were not free of the music, I found. It was not until I closed the heavy door of the Lew Trenchard Church that silence finally enfolded me.
I had passed the building several times, a simple stone square with a proud tower, nestled into the tree-grown hillside and surrounded by gravestones and crosses. This was the first time I had been inside it, though, and I left the book of memoirs in my pocket while I looked around. It was an unsophisticated little stone building that straddled the centuries, with suggestions of thirteenth-century foundations rebuilt two and three hundred years later. The windows were not large, but the gloom cast was peaceful, not oppressive, and there was light enough to see. The air smelt of beeswax candles and wet wool from the morning services, but oddly enough, the feeling I received was not one of completion, but of preparation and waiting.
The single most dominating presence in the church was the screen framing the chancel. It was a magnificent thing, thick with niches and canopies, cornices and tracery, heavily encrusted with paint and gilt—far too elaborate for the crude little church but undeniably bearing the imprint of Sabine Baring-Gould's hand. It was his idea of what a Tudor rood screen should look like, and once I had recovered from its first startling appearance, I found myself liking it for its sheer vehement assertion that God's glory is to be found in a backwater parish on the skirts of Dartmoor.
There were other nice things in the church, somewhat overshadowed by the shiny new screen, and I spent some time admiring St Michael and his dragon on one bench-end, a jester dated 1524 on another, the triptych in the side chapel, the old brass chandelier, and the carvings on the pulpit, before eventually taking the book from my pocket and settling onto one of the better-lit benches with it. I did not think God would object to my reading in His house, particularly not the memoirs of the man who had created this unlikely chapel in the wilderness.
***
An hour or so later, the door from the porch opened and Holmes came in. He removed his hat and slapped the light rain off of it, and came around through the church to sit on the other end of my pew. He leant forward, propping his outstretched arms on the back of the seat ahead of him and holding the brim of the dangling hat with the fingers of both hands. The prayerlike attitude of his position was deeply incongruous.
I closed the book of memoirs and looked up at the screen with its scenes from the life of Jesus. After a minute I spoke. "He's dying, isn't he?"
"Yes."
"Is that why you've come?"
"I would have come anyway, but yes, it makes the solution of the case that much more urgent."
Other than the visual commotion around us, the church was utterly still. I thought I smelt incense as well as the beeswax, and I could picture Baring-Gould in his robes up in that pulpit, speaking a few well-chosen words that would have some of his parishioners squirming and others chuckling to themselves, and I felt a strong and unexpected bolt of sorrow to know that I would never witness that scene.
The case Holmes and I had just finished had begun with a debt to a dead woman. For several weeks over the summer I had lived with the fact that debts to the dead are heavier than those owed the living, because there is no negotiation, no forgiveness, only the stark knowledge that failure can never be recompensed, that even success can only restore balance. That case was a hard one in a lot of ways, and I had only begun to think about the lessons it had driven into me when Holmes' telegram had drawn me away from Oxford. Holmes, too, was still in the recovery stage, judging by the fact that he was still puffing on the black cigarettes he had taken up again in the most frustrating days of the Ruskin case. It had been a depressing affair whose solution only landed us in greater complexity, and now here we were, faced with another client who might not live to see the end of his case.
If working for the dead was hard, working for the dying looked to be harder yet: The already dead had eternity, after all. Baring-Gould did not.
"How long?" I asked.
"Weeks. Perhaps months. He will be gone before summer."
"I am sorry." Precisely what Baring-Gould meant to Holmes I still did not know, but I could readily see that there was depth to their relationship, and history.