"I don't know where to start. I did not care much for it at first."
"You hated it."
"I hated it, yes. You must admit, it's one of the least hospitable places in the country."
"A good place to be alone with one's thoughts," he said.
Perhaps with fourteen children in the house, I reflected, solitude in any form was beyond the price of rubies. "After a couple of days up there, though, it came to me that the moor is in many ways like the desert. Did your travels ever take you to Palestine?"
"Alas, no. I should have liked to visit the Holy Land."
"Yes, it is a powerful experience. And I think you would have felt at home there. The harshness of the desert shapes the people and keeps them materially poor, but it also gives an immensely strong sense of identity and belonging."
The old man was smiling into the fire and nodding gently. I went on.
"In truth, I found the sense of community here…daunting." I told him how, beginning with the girl near Postbridge pointing me towards Elizabeth Chase, everyone I met knew an irritating amount about me and my business. "Except for the villagers. They didn't know me, and when the moor men were with the village dwellers, they seemed almost to treasure the secret of who I was." I began to tell him about the night in the Mary Tavy inn.
As I progressed, he grew more and more animated, sitting upright in his chair, then leaning forward that he might see my face more clearly. He made me describe the songs and the singers in detail, and hummed the tunes that I might confirm which one the singers had used. His eyes positively sparkled when I told him about the authoritative claim the moor men laid on Lady Howard's song. When he had milked every drop of information from me about the music (he even made me hum the tune I had played on the tin whistle) he sat back in his chair, tired but pleased.
" 'Green Broom' I collected from John Woodrich, in Thrushtleton," he said, "and the tune your singers used for 'Unquiet Grave' was a melody I noted down for another song. Magnificent music, that. You like it?"
"It's very…human," I said after a minute.
"People now lack patience, have no taste for a song that is not finished in three minutes. Modern music puts me in mind of a man I knew in Cambridge who had a mechanism into which one could put musical notes. It would then combine them to render a so-called tune, although to my ear they more closely resembled random cacophonies. Whenever I have the misfortune to hear a modern piece of music, such as when my American daughter-in-law assaults the piano, I begin to suspect that his machine is being put to considerable use."
I laughed politely, and then returned to a previous thought, which still occupied me greatly.
"I thought it odd that although the moor dwellers seemed well acquainted with me and my mission, the villagers didn't know me, not even in Postbridge, which is a tiny place. And I don't believe anyone in Ketteridge's establishment recognised what I was doing there, either."
"The moor men keep themselves to themselves, and Ketteridge employs foreigners."
"Foreigners?" I asked doubtfully. Other than Scheiman and the hidden chef, they all had sounded British.
"French, American, Scots, and even Londoners, even a Welshman, but not from here."
"I see. How odd. That explains how, even though he lives on the edges of the moor, he's apart from the moor life. Isolated from the Dartmoor…would it be too much of an exaggeration to call it an 'organism'?" I asked. He did not answer, only smiled to himself, his eyes closed now. Very soon, he was asleep in his chair. I fed the fire to keep him warm, and crept stiffly upstairs to see if I could coax a hot bath from the pipes.
***
Baring-Gould was awake again when I came down an hour later, drawn by the smells of yeast bread and coffee and much restored by the plentiful hot soak. Mrs Elliott swept in and out of the kitchen doors with hot plates and cups and dainties to tempt her old charge's failing palate. One of these was a small crystal bowl of wortleberry jam, a relative of the bilberry, but from a far richer branch of the family. I exclaimed my praise, and Baring-Gould told me about "gatherin' hurts" on the moor, an annual holiday spree akin to that of London's East End inhabitants who spilled out from the city every year to pick hops in the clean sun of Kent. I did have a question whose urgency had been growing over the last two days, but I waited politely for him to finish before I asked it.
"Do you know where Holmes is?"
"He is in London, of course."
"Does that mean someone came up with the names of the two people who saw the coach from the top of Gibbet Hill?"
"How stupid of me, I was forgetting that you weren't here. Yes, Mrs Elliott's nephew found the farmhouse they stayed in, although as there was no guest register the finding of them won't be easy. Still, Holmes seemed to think he could do it," he said complacently.
"Did he say when he expected to be back?"
"I thought to see him yesterday evening. I imagine he will be on today's train."
"How long have you known Holmes?" I heard myself asking. I had not intended to ask it: If Holmes wanted me to know, he would tell me, and it was possibly impolitic to let Baring-Gould know how little Holmes had mentioned him.
"Forever," he said. "His forever, that is, not mine. I'm his godfather."
I was completely staggered by this calm statement. By this time, of course, I knew something about Holmes' people (I was, after all, his wife) but somehow other than Mycroft they had never seemed very real or three-dimensional. It was like meeting Queen Victoria's wet nurse: One knew she must have had one, but her existence seemed rather unlikely.
"His godfather," I repeated weakly.
"I haven't done a terribly good job of it, have I?" He seemed amused at his failure, not troubled. I could think of no suitable response, so I remained silent. "Still, he seems to have turned out all right. Been a good husband to you, has he?" If I'd had trouble before finding an answer, now my mouth was hanging open. "He loves you, of course; that helps. Foolishly, perhaps, but men love like that, in flames compared to the warm steady love of women. I hope—"
I never found out what his hopes were, praise be to God. The ruckus outside must have been approaching for some time without us hearing—Baring-Gould because his hearing was so poor and me because of the astonishment pounding in my ears. The first intimation of a problem came with a huge crash in the kitchen and voices raised enough for even my host to stop what he was about to say and turn to the door.
"I say, Mrs—" he started to call. With that the door burst open and what looked like half the population of Lew Down spilled into the room, all of them gabbling at once.
Baring-Gould rose majestically to his feet and glared at them all. "Stop this at once," he thundered. Instant silence resulted. "Thomas, what is the meaning of this?"
The man automatically tugged off his cap, polite even in the extremity of his emotional upheaval. "A body, Rector," the man stammered. "There's a dead man in the lake."
SIXTEEN
The care for the tenants, the obligation of setting an example of justice, integrity, kindliness, religious observance, has been bred in him, and enforced by parental warning through three centuries at the least, on his infant mind. What is born in the bone comes out in the flesh.
—Early Reminiscences
It was fortunate that I was already dressed and wearing my shoes, because a pair of bedroom slippers would surely have been torn to shreds, or left behind, long before I reached the quarry lake. I was out of my chair before Baring-Gould could articulate a response to the man's statement, out of the front door without pausing to catch up a coat, across the drive, through the meadow, and on the edge of the watery chasm before anyone else had even emerged from the house on my trail.