"Certainly," she said, not sounding at all certain.
"There are a few questions I need to ask you," I said as we turned in the direction of her house, and began to explain the bare outlines of my (unnamed) husband's longtime friendship with Baring-Gould, the reverend gentleman's state of health, and the memoirs he was trying to assemble.
She was a small, neat woman, who listened with her head bent and whose steps began briskly, only to slow with her increasing involvement in the story. She did not seem over gifted with a subtlety of mind, becoming only more confused as we went, and although she appeared anxious to be of service to the squire of Lew Trenchard, that old friend of her father's, she did not know what she could do for me. On her doorstep, she turned to me and said just that.
"Might I come in for a short time?" I suggested.
"Of course. Perhaps you will take luncheon with me?"
I assured her it was not necessary; she assured me it was no inconvenience; she gave instructions to the housemaid who had taken our things that two places were to be set at the table; and she then ushered me into the drawing room.
Aside from the painting of Sir Hugo, the room was light and feminine, with walls of cream and apricot and flowered-fabric chairs and draperies. It was not to my personal taste, but it was, I could easily see, tastefully if conventionally done.
"Would you like a glass of sherry, Miss Russell? I don't drink, myself, but…"
A hot rum toddy might have served to drive away the chill of the walk, but as that was not offered, and considering my hostess' abstinence, I declined. The hot tea we were brought instead was a help, although, not having spent the morning fasting, as she apparently had, I had not much use for the bland biscuits that accompanied it.
I waited while she performed her duties over the teapot, studying her and trying to choose the best approach to take. I had quickly decided that, while this woman was no foe, and could not possibly be siding with Scheiman or Ketteridge in whatever it was they were up to, at the same time she would not make much of an ally. Sympathetic she might be, particularly towards her former neighbours, but she was completely lacking in anything resembling imagination: One need only look at the portrait of Sir Hugo, glaring down across the chintz and fringes like an accountant with a highly unsavoury private life, to know the woman bereft of perception.
I had to admit that the resemblance between Sir Hugo and Scheiman was faint, and that I should almost certainly have seen nothing had Holmes not planted the idea in my mind. The thin mouth, yes, and the general shape of the eye, but Scheiman's face, though thin, lacked the hardness of this portrait, and the cold disapproval behind the painted eyes was something I had never seen in those of Ketteridge's secretary. It came to me suddenly that Sir Hugo's portraitist had been afraid of his subject; moreover, I thought the fear justified.
"Miss Russell?" Startled, I turned to the small blond woman in the demure grey dress. A tiny frown line furrowed her smooth brow, and abruptly, my mind being no doubt receptive for such a thing, I could see the line furrowing David Scheiman's brow, the night Holmes and I had taken dinner in Baskerville Hall. Just as quickly, I dismissed the sureness that tried to accompany the revelation, reminding myself firmly that two frown lines did not a nefarious plot make. However, I also decided, taking the cup she was holding out to me, that I was not going to tell her as much as I might have had that line not appeared.
"That is a very interesting picture," I said. "It looks quite old."
"The date on the back is 1647," she said. "It is a distant relative of mine, Sir Hugo Baskerville. He is said to have been a rather naughty fellow, although I can't say he looks it. I rather liked the design of the lace on his collar."
"Do you have many of the old family portraits?" I asked innocently. "I mean to say, Mr Baring-Gould told me that yours is an old family, and I imagine there must have been quite a few pictures."
"I did bring two or three with me when I sold the house to Mr Ketteridge." She settled back into her chair for a nice, light, after-church sort of conversation with a new acquaintance. "There was a Reynolds of my great-great-grandfather that was rather valuable, and a nice portrait of a lady in a blue dress that just matched the boudoir set—I couldn't part with her—and of course the Sargent portraits of my parents. I hadn't actually intended to bring Sir Hugo—he seemed to go with the Hall, somehow, and I thought it might be best not to bring too many reminders of past glories, as it were. But Mr Ketteridge insisted I take it. In fact, he came down from the hall himself with it wrapped in a sheet, saying he couldn't bear for me to lose all of my family, and after all, Sir Hugo is a little bit famous. Do you know the story that Mr Conan Doyle called The Hound of the Baskervilles?"
I assured her that I was familiar with the tale and with Sir Hugo's place in it (although I might have used the word infamous instead), all the while aware of how very peculiar it was for Richard Ketteridge to have so generously parted with what, to a man lusting after the Baskerville story, had to be the single most compelling object in the collection.
"When did you move here?" I asked. Her pretty face clouded somewhat.
"A little more than two years ago. My father died before the war, my elder brother in 1916, my younger brother disappeared at sea in 1918, and my mother was so devastated after that, she had no energy to fight off the effects of the influenza. She died in the winter of 1919. I am the last Baskerville."
"How very sad," I said, meaning it.
"I tried to keep the house up, but it was hopeless. I was there more or less by myself, as it was so difficult to find capable men, and I know nothing about the running of an estate. After two years I had to admit defeat, and when Mr Ketteridge offered to buy it, at what my solicitor agreed was a very fair price, I sold it and moved here."
We had made our way through the tea and the biscuits, and when the maid bobbed her way into the room and suggested that luncheon was ready, we adjourned to the next room.
"I hope you don't object to a light luncheon, Miss Russell," she said. "I know that most people like a substantial dinner after church, but I can never seem to face it, somehow."
I told her I was quite content with sharing her standard fare, and prepared to make merry with the consommé and tinned asparagus in aspic.
"Do you miss the moor?" I asked after a while.
"Oh, I don't know. At first I thought I never would, it was so bright and cheerful and…lively here. But now, well, I sometimes think about when the furze would blossom, and the drifts when the ponies are driven down from the moor, and the dramatic smoke and fires when they swale the heather. I even miss those dreary tors that I used to find so gloomy, staring down at the Hall."
I laughed. "Gloomy it is, but oddly beautiful." I could well imagine, for a conventional girl only a bit older than I, that the huge old building miles from anything that might be termed society might well be a burden to be shed rather than an inheritance to be valued. I also remembered that her mother had not been born here, but had come obedient to her husband's criminous plans, later to be transferred to the protecting arm of Sir Henry and kept on the moor for the rest of her life.
I judged it time to return delicately to my main area of interest. "How did Mr Ketteridge come to hear about the Hall? An advertisement?"
"Oh no, I couldn't have done that. No, I wasn't actually even thinking about selling, really. After all, the land has been in the family for six hundred years—that's hardly something to be broken lightly. Although I know there's a lot of that sort of thing happening now, with the war and the change in the tax laws. Still, I probably would have held out for a while longer, but he came to me. He'd heard I was interested in letting it, but he wanted to buy it outright. He was passionate about it, seemed to know more than I did about its history, and just…loved it. I thought about it for a few weeks, during which time I had a huge bill for the coal and another for repairing some frozen pipes, and an estimate on woodworm and roof work—it all came at once.