The Moor (38 page)

Holmes inclined his head at it. "The moor took him," he said, and scrubbed tiredly at his face with both hands. "He got halfway across before he broke through. I tried to pull him out, but he held the gun on me until the last minute, until only his hand and his eyes were above the surface. He shot at me when I tried to…I did attempt to save him."

I bent down to pick up his torch, and when I had put it in his hand I allowed my fingers to rest briefly on the back of his neck. "You said it yourself, Holmes. The moor took him. Come, let us go home."

TWENTY-SIX

In my advanced old age I really entertain more delight in the beauties of Nature and of Art than I did in my youth. Appreciation of what is good and true and comely grows with years, and this growth, I feel sure, is no more to be quenched by death than is the life of the caddis-worm when it breaks forth as the may fly. I do not look back upon the past and say, "All is dead!" What I repeat in my heart, as I watch the buds unfold, and the cuckoo-flowers quivering in the meadow, and I inhale the scent of the pines in the forest, and hear the spiral song of the lark is "All is Promise."

—Further Reminiscences

We did go home, to our own home on the Sussex Downs, soon after that. First, however, we had one final task to perform on the moor.

Three days after the police had dragged Richard Ketteridge's body from the grip of the quaking bog, we borrowed the dead man's touring car, stripped of its costume and restored to its Dunlops, and drove it up to the door of Lew House. While the bronze goose-herd looked on, we piled the passenger seat high with pillows, loaded the boot with a picnic of cold roast goose with sage and onion stuffing, mutton sandwiches, and honey wine, and waited while the squire of Lew Trenchard took his place on the cushions. We tucked the old man in with travelling rugs and placed a hot brick beneath his shoes, and with Holmes at his side and myself driving, we took the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould up onto the moor for one last earthly look at that region he loved best in all the world.

EDITOR'S POSTSCRIPT

As I write these words the last home is being decorated with heather and moss to receive the body of one whom I shall bury to-morrow, the last of my old parishioners, one of God's saints, who has lived a white and fragrant life, loving and serving God, bringing up a family in the same holy line of life, and closing her eyes in peace to pass into the Land of Promise, which here we cannot see, but in which we can believe, and to which we hope to attain.

—Further Reminiscences

Considering the circumstances, it is a little surprising that more of the manuscripts written by Mary Russell do not involve well-known public names. It may be, of course, that famous people have tediously familiar problems, and by this point in his career, Sherlock Holmes could not be bothered with any cases but those that most appealed to him. A connoisseur often finds him- or herself drawn away from the commonplace, excellent as it may be, and into the more unexpected or eccentric reaches of the area of expertise; that description surely applies here.

Insofar as I can determine, the bones of Ms. Russell's narrative would stand: The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould was most emphatically a real person, a true and unexpected British eccentric: an academic romancer, a gullible skeptic, a man both cold and passionate. With more sides to his personality than the Kohinoor has facets, he went his brilliant and self-centered way, ruling his family and his Devonshire manor with an air of distracted authority, setting off whenever the fancy struck him out onto Dartmoor, up to London, or over to the Continent. His wife, Grace, must have been a saint of God—although to Baring-Gould's credit, it would appear that he was aware of it.

The mind-boggling scope of his ninety prolific years (150 books, fifty of them fiction) exists for the most part in the dustier reaches of library storage vaults throughout the world, from
Were-Wolves and their Natural History
to the relatively well known
Songs of the West
. For those interested in the life of this scion of a pair of illustrious stems, I would recommend, after his two volumes of memoirs (
Early Reminiscences
and
Further Reminiscences,
each of which covers thirty years of his life), either of two biographies: William Purcell's
Onward Christian Soldier,
or
Sabine Baring-Gould,
by Bickford Dickinson (who was Baring-Gould's grandson and himself rector of Lew Trenchard Church from 1961 to 1967). Further, there is a Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society ( c/o the Hon. Sec. Dr. Roger Bristow, Davidsland, Brendon Hill, Copplestone, Devon EX17 5NX, England) where, for the princely sum of six pounds sterling per annum, one will receive three newsletters and the fellowship of a number of Right-Thinking people. And if the reader wishes to add a dimension to his or her appreciation of Baring-Gould by becoming an auditor, an audiotape comprising a sparkling selection of the Devonshire folk songs collected by Baring-Gould, along with excerpts from his writings and memoirs, may be found through The Wren Trust, 1 St. James Street, Okehampton, Devon, EX20 1DW, England.

As an additional curious note, when another of Sabine Baring-Gould's grandsons, the equally brilliant and multifaceted William Stuart Baring-Gould, came to write his famous biography of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (which he called
Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: A Life of the World's First Consulting Detective
), he seems to have turned to his grandfather's
Early Reminiscences
as a source of raw material from which he might construct Holmes' early childhood (about which, admittedly, nothing whatsoever is actually known). W. S. Baring-Gould changed only the dates; the rest, from the father's injury that discharged him from the Indian Army and his subsequent passion for Continental travel that led to family life in a carriage, the boy's early archaeological passion and his sporadic education, and even the names of the ships on which the families Baring-Gould and Holmes sailed from England, bear a truly remarkable similarity.

***

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould died on January 2, 1924, twenty-six days short of his ninetieth birthday, bare weeks after the events described in this book. It pleases me to think that when he left his body, which lies beside Grace's at the feet of Lew Trenchard Church, he did so secure in the knowledge that his beloved moor was safe from the worst torments of the twentieth century. I like to think that he died happy. Most of all, I want to believe that, all rumor to the contrary notwithstanding, he breathed the air of his moor one last time before he died.

—Laurie R. King

Freedom, California

St. Swithin's Day 1997

I'm going, I reckon, full mellow

To lay in the churchyard my head;

So say, God be with you, old fellow,

The last of the singers is dead.