In the silence that followed, Mrs Elliott gave herself a vigorous shake to settle her ruffled feathers back into place, snapped at Rosemary to scrub down the table at which the children had been sitting, threw the tea towel she held onto the sideboard, and began snatching up the plates from which her invaders had been eating. Before her eyes could fall on me, I made my exit, and went back to my book.
Peace returned to Lew Trenchard, and peace reigned uninterrupted over the cat, the fire, and me for a good twenty minutes, until I found myself reading a story about a gold fraud on Dartmoor, and the afternoon was no longer a peaceful thing.
TWENTY-TWO
Gold bydeth ever bright.
—Gould family motto
It came in a chapter on Okehampton, buried between a lengthy discussion of a white-breasted bird credited with being a harbinger of death and a song, given in the vernacular, about a young man who, vexed because his sheep had run away, "knacked" his old "vayther" on the head and was condemned to hang.
The gold story was given as follows:
Some years ago a great fraud was committed in the neighbourhood. It was rumoured that gold was to be found in the gozen—the refuse from the mines. All who had old mines on their land sent up specimens to London, and received reports that there was a specified amount of gold in what was forwarded. Some, to be sure that there was no deception, went up with their specimens and saw them ground, washed, and analysed, and the gold extracted. So large orders were sent up for gozen-crushing machines. These came down, were set to work, and no gold was then found. The maker of the machines had introduced gold-dust into the water that was used in the washing of the crushed stone.
Gold fraud.
All my nerves tingled. This was not precisely what I had been looking for to make the pieces fall into place—gozen laundering and the sale of a large number of machines did not go far enough—but by God I knew that something about the concept of gold fraud was the key.
What, I did not know.
I devoured the rest of the book, but again, Baring-Gould had finished playing with that shiny idea and did not return to it, not within those covers. He did mention using the idea in a novel, but I doubted the usefulness of a fictional development of gozen laundering. I felt like throwing the volume across the room.
I did not. Instead, I dutifully went back and picked my way over Pethering's remarks, the myriad tiny scratchings of his own mania. He knew nothing about gold, nothing about the moor, nothing about scholarship at all, I soon decided. Nearly every remark reverted to Druidical evidence, and whenever Baring-Gould wrote a criticism of the doctrine, it set off a tirade so intense that Pethering had taken to writing between the lines of print to fit it all in.
Long before I reached the end of the book, my nerve broke, and I did end up throwing the book against the wall, upsetting the cat and bending the book's cover irreparably. I put on my coat and went for a long walk in the freezing air, and in the course of the walk I came to a reluctant decision: Despite the fragile state of his health, Baring-Gould should have to be asked about gold fraud.
I went to see Mrs Elliott when I returned, finding her as usual in the kitchen.
"I need to talk to Mr Baring-Gould, Mrs Elliott, just for a few minutes. Could you please let me know when he's awake?"
"I'll not have you upsetting him," she declared, the unerring mother hen, obviously still feeling the effects of the invasion of snotty-nosed children.
"I didn't do so before," I pointed out, "and I shall try my best not to do so now, but it concerns what he brought us here to do. Ultimately, it is in his own interest."
She seemed to find this argument specious, for which I could not blame her. It was clearly self-serving. However, grudgingly she allowed that when he had eaten his supper (which he would do upstairs and alone) she would ask if he could see me briefly. I thanked her, and told her I would be in his study.
There I worked, pulling books from the shelves, thumbing methodically through them looking for further tales of auric crime and finding nothing more than dust. Rosemary came to tell me my own dinner was ready, and I ate it with a book in front of me, scanning each page, unaware of its contents aside from a lack of the word gold. It was a tedious and no doubt pointless way of doing research, and it would take a very long time to go through the ninety or more books of his that I had not yet read, but it gave me something to do while I waited.
Unfortunately, the waiting was prolonged by Baring-Gould falling asleep over his supper. Mrs Elliott refused to wake him, telling me firmly that he was sure to awaken refreshed in two or three hours, or perhaps four, and he would surely speak to me then.
In an agony of frustration I returned to the endless shelves, feeling like Hercules faced with his task in the stables. Rosemary silently brought me coffee at nine, and again before she went to bed at eleven. Jittering, unkempt, and black-handed from the books, I waited.
At midnight I heard footsteps in the silent house. Mrs Elliott's tread sounded on the stairway outside the study door, and faded, going into the kitchen. When she came out, I was at the study door, waiting.
"Come, dear," she said cheerfully, and then, "Oh my, you do look a little the worse for wear. Never mind, two minutes with the rector and then you can have a nice wash and into bed."
Grimly, I followed her up the stairs and to Baring-Gould's bedroom, and there I waited while she gave him his hot drink and medicine and plumped his pillows and chattered cheerfully until my hands tingled with wanting to pitch her out the window.
In the end it was Baring-Gould who broke the impasse. The light from the single candle was not strong enough for his old eyes to pick me out, but I must have moved, for he craned his head forward and squinted at where I stood.
"Who is that?" he asked sharply.
"It is I, sir," I said, and stepped into the candle's glow.
"Mary, it's very late. Surely you're too young to begin this habit of broken nights."
"She has a question to ask you, Rector," put in Mrs Elliott, and to my relief took herself out of the door with the hot-water bottle.
"Come, then, Mary. Sit down where I can see you, and ask. It must be important, not to wait until the morning." I sat down as indicated, on the bed beside him.
"I don't know how important it is, just vexatious, because I can't find any more information. In your book on Dartmoor you mention that gold may be found in the gravel streams of the moor."
"Did I? How very irresponsible of me," he said with a complete lack of either interest or concern.
"Has it ever been found?" I persisted.
"Never. Ridiculous thought. I did use it in the Guavas novel, for the romance of it, but I don't believe anyone has ever actually filled so much as a single goose-quill from the soil of the moor. The closest to gold I have ever seen in a lifetime of wandering Dartmoor is the moss Schistostega osmundacea, which gleams with sparks of gold when seen in a certain light."
"I see. But, in your book on Devon, the first volume of A Book of the West, you describe a gold fraud, which involved washing gold into samples of the gozen from old tin mines in order to sell great numbers of the crushing machines."