The Moor (7 page)

"What is that building?" I asked Holmes.

He followed my gaze. "Brentor Church. Dedicated in the fourteenth century, to Saint Michael, I believe."

I smiled; of course it would be a church, and could only be to St Michael, the choice of missionaries the world around seeking to quell the local spirits by planting a mission on the site of the native holy places and giving it over to St Michael and all his Angels. Somehow, the valiant little outthrust of a building did not appear convinced of the conquest.

I looked back at the rising moor, and decided that I could not blame the Brentor Church; I myself did not relish the idea of breaching those walls and walking out onto the flat expanse of the moorland within, no more than I would have relished a swim in the quarry lake next to Lew House—and for similar reasons.

I became aware of Holmes, studying my face. I shot him a brief smile and pulled my coat more closely together over my chest. "It looks cold," I said, but he was not fooled.

"It is a place that encourages fanciful thoughts," he said indulgently. However, I noticed that even he cast a quick glance at the presence on the horizon before we resumed our path to Lew House.

We arrived back in time for afternoon tea, which we took by ourselves, as Baring-Gould was resting. It was a superb reward for our day's wet outing, and I gathered that Mrs Elliott had taken advantage of the Harpers' presence to create a true Devonshire tea, the pièce de résistance of which was a plate piled high with hot, crumbly scones to rival Mrs Hudson's, a large bowl of thick, yellow clotted cream, and a second bowl containing deep red strawberry jam. When we had finished, I hunted the cook down in her kitchen, where she stood watching while two elderly, time-worn moor dwellers methodically made their way through the plates of food before them, and I thanked her. She simply nodded, but she did so with a faint pinkness around her neck.

At dinner, Baring-Gould did appear, and afterwards regaled us with stories and songs of this, his native land. We went to bed early and slept well, and the next morning we set off for the moor.

FOUR

The interior consists of rolling upland. It has been likened to a sea after a storm suddenly arrested and turned to stone; but a still better resemblance, if not so romantic, is that of a dust-sheet thrown over the dining room chairs.

—A Book of Dartmoor

A brief hour's tramp through wet woods brought us to the village of Lydford, nestled along a river at the very edge of the moor's rising slopes. There we succumbed to the temptations of the flesh and spent a glorious thirty minutes in front of an inn's blazing fireplace, drinking coffee and steaming our boots. When we shouldered our packs and pushed our way back out into the inhospitable day, it was with the clear sensation of leaving all civilisation behind.

The sensation quickly proved itself justified. Lydford was truly the final outpost of comfort and light, and the moor a grim place indeed. The ground rose and the trees and hedgerows fell away, and the ground rose some more, and all the world was grey and wet and closed-in and utterly still. We climbed nearly a thousand feet in the first two miles, but after that the ground began to level out before us.

It was, as Holmes had said, a huge bowl—or at any rate, what I could see of it seemed to be—a shallow, lumpy green bowl carved across by meandering dry-stone walls, dusted with dying vegetation and dead rocks, with many of its rises topped by weathered stones in bizarre shapes: Tors, the stones were called, and many of them had distinctive names given either by a fancied resemblance to their shapes (Hare, Fox, and Little Hound Tors) or by some reference lost in language (at least, to me) or in time (such as Lough, Ger, and Brat). There were nearly two hundred of the things, Holmes said, their fantastic shapes perched atop the rocky clitter around their disintegrating feet, and below that the low green turf, spongy with the water it held.

In a place where the hand of humankind had so little visible impact, where a person could walk for an hour and see neither person nor dwelling, it seemed only proper that the very stones had names.

We could see perhaps half a mile in any direction, but there was no sky, merely a cloud that brushed the tops of our hats, and the grey-green spongy turf beneath our boots merged imperceptibly into the light grey overhead, the dark grey of the stones that lay scattered about, and the brown grey of the autumnal bracken fern. It was the sort of light that renders vision untrustworthy, where the eyes cannot accept the continual lack of stimulus and begin to invent faint wraiths and twisting shadows. Holmes' pixies, waiting to tease the unwary traveller into a mire, no longer seemed so ludicrous, and had it not been for Holmes, I might very well have heard the soft pad of the Baskerville hound behind me and felt its warm breath on the back of my neck.

However, with Holmes beside me as a talisman, the spooks kept their distance, and what might have been a place of animosity and danger was rendered merely desolate to the point of being grim. I thought that Holmes' term
wasteland
was not inappropriate.
Godforsaken
might also be applied.

The morning stretched on, not without incident, although the time between incidents seemed to be very long indeed. Once, my dulled eyes were surprised to see one of the boulders we were passing turn and look at us—a Dartmoor pony, as shaggy as a winter sheep and only marginally taller. Its eyes peered out from behind its plastered-down forelock, watching us pass before it resumed its head-down stance of stolid endurance, hunkered up against the wind, belly and nose dripping steadily. Holmes said it was most likely a hybrid, crossed with Shetland ponies brought in during the war in an attempt to breed animals suited for the Welsh mines. This particular beast did not seem well pleased with its adopted home.

Once, we came across a weathered, lichen-covered stone cross, erected centuries before to mark the way for pilgrims, now proud in its solitude but starting to lean. One of its arms was missing and the other had been broken to a stump, and its feet were standing in a pool of water.

Once, we saw a fox, picking its delicate way through a sweep of bracken fern, and shortly after that we glimpsed a buzzard making disconsolate circles against the clouds. The high point of the morning was when a startled woodcock burst from beneath our boots and flew from us in terror. The excitement of that encounter, however, did not last long, and soon we were back in the melancholy embrace of the brooding moor.

Up a rise and down the other side, across a rivulet with sharply cut sides and a scurry of clear, peat-stained water in the bottom. Up again, avoiding a piece of granite the size of a bathtub thrusting out of the rough grass. A meandering ridge on an approaching hill, resembling the work of some huge, prehistoric mole, became on closer examination an ancient stone wall nearly subsumed by the slow encroachment of the turf. A distant sweep of russet across a hillside, a scurf of furze and dying bracken fern, was cut by the dark of another ancient wall drawn along its side.

It was, I supposed, picturesque enough, given the limited palette of drab colours, but as a piece of Impressionist art it served to evoke only the disagreeable feelings of restlessness, melancholia, and a faint thread of menace.

After an hour or so Holmes attempted to smoke, but he could not get his pipe to stay lit. We trudged on, speech and camaraderie left behind us in Lydford, as stolid and enduring as the pony, placing one foot in front of the other on the sparse grass covering the deep sodden peat beds that passed for soil.

By midday I was as grey and silent as anything else in that bleak place, edgy with an unidentifiable sense of waiting and aching for a spot of colour. Had I known, I might have worn a red pullover, but all my clothes were warm and masculine and dull, and there was no relief from the monotony until Holmes stopped and I walked straight into him. The shock of change nearly caused me to fall, but my irritation died the instant I saw what had caught his interest: a shelter.

It was a rough stone hut, used by shepherds, perhaps—short shepherds, we found, as once inside we both had to keep our heads well tucked down, but it had the better part of a roof, and even a cracked leather flap to cover most of the doorway. We had no fire other than the glowing bowl of Holmes' pipe, but at least our sandwiches remained dry as we ate them, and the now-tepid coffee in the flask that Mrs Elliott had given us seemed positively festive as it touched my chilled lips. The demons retreated out into the fog, and with their absence, humour crept back in.

"Well, Holmes," I said, "I can certainly see why a person would fall in love with Dartmoor."

"It is said to be quite pleasant in the summer," he said gloomily.

"By comparison, I'm sure it is. How much farther do we have?"

We did actually have a destination in this trackless waste. We had taken on the rôle of eyes and legs for Baring-Gould, but even Holmes, who had covered much of this same ground thirty years before, did not have the man's intimate knowledge of the place from which judgements could be drawn. The old man back in Lew Trenchard might instantly visualise the lie of the land at any given spot on the map, but his representatives needed to walk it first. Hence our expedition, and if the weather was not as we might wish, it did not appear that waiting for a clear day was a practical option. For all I knew this was a clear day, for Dartmoor.

Our trip was to be a large circle, putting up at a public house for the night halfway along. We were looking now for the place where the dead tin miner had last been seen, and after that would try to find the spot where in July a benighted farmhand had been terrified by a ghostly coach and a dog with a glowing eye, and the other place, two miles away and a month further on, where the courting couple had been rudely interrupted by the same coach.

I finished my apple, Holmes knocked out his pipe and stowed it, and we both settled our hats more firmly over our noses and ducked out of the leather doorway.

"Holmes," I said, raising my collar and resuming the hunched-over walking position that was necessary in order to keep the rain off my spectacles. "If Lady Howard stops her ghostly carriage to offer us a ride, I for one will accept. With pleasure."

***

Josiah Gorton's last known path told us nothing whatsoever. Other than being one remote area among 350 square miles of remote countryside, there was nothing to distinguish it. According to Baring-Gould, the farm labourer who stopped to talk with Gorton lived over the hill and often travelled that way of a Saturday night, on his way to the inn where Gorton had spent the afternoon.

"Why, if he'd been snug inside all afternoon, did Gorton leave?" I asked. "I'd have thought Saturday evening the high point of the week, particularly for someone accustomed to cadging drinks."

"According to the publican when I was through here the other day, Gorton said he had business to attend to, unlikely as that might sound. No need to enquire further at the inn." And so saying he turned, not in the direction of the inn, but towards the remote farm over the hill. Stifling a sigh, I followed.

It was a small farmstead, mossy and pinched and cowering down into the hillside away from the elements.

"A place this size couldn't have more than one hired man," Holmes observed, heading for the barn. There we found him, a young man with a head like a furry turnip, scratching the broad, flat expanse of it beneath his cap and pursing his lips as he stood staring down at a prostrate cow. He glanced at us incuriously, as if we were oft-seen residents of the place rather than that rarity, the unexpected visitor, and then returned immediately to his perusal of the huge, heaving sides of the animal at his feet.

"I doan s'pose you knaw how ta turn a calf," were his first words to us.

"Er, no," Holmes admitted. "Unless?" He turned to me, and the young man looked up in hope.

"No," I said firmly. "Sorry."

His face fell back into its morose state. "I can't do'n. I tried an' tried, but my hand, she just gets squeezed and dies. Poor ole cow," he said with unexpected affection. "Her'll just have to bide 'til Doctor gets here, that's all. He'll charge me half what the calf be worth," he added. Long, contemplative seconds ticked by before he looked up, realising at last that he was not conversing with family members or two spirits of the moor. He asked, "Be ye lost?"

"I do not believe we are," said Holmes. "Not if you're Harry Cleave."

"That I am." He put out a meaty hand that had all too obviously been but lightly sluiced since its last exploration of the cow's birth canal, and with only the briefest of hesitations, Holmes shook it. I left my own gloved hands firmly in my pockets, and instead smiled widely and nodded like a fool as introductions were made.

"Well," said Cleave, "no sense maundering, baint nothing I can do 'til Doctor comes. I sent the lil maid to vetch 'en," he explained, "when I seed how she lay. Let us go by the house and 'ave a cup."

Paradise and ambrosia were the words he had uttered, and we crowded his heels across the muddy yard to the low stone farmhouse.

It was warm inside, from a peat fire burning low and red in the wide stone fireplace. I removed my glasses and could see little, but my cold-shrivelled skin began tentatively to unfold, and my nose told me of a soup on the fire and fragrant herbs strewn underfoot. I patted my way to a bench near the fireplace and settled in for what I sincerely hoped was to be a long and leisurely visit.

The tea Cleave made for us was fresh and powerful and sweetened as a matter of course by our host; what was more, he had cleansed his hands with soap before making it. I removed a layer of clothing, resumed my warmed spectacles, and examined the room and the young man, wondering if both were typical of the moor.

Cleave was a quiet, self-contained figure, short but heavily muscled. His dark eyes shone with an intelligent interest, and humour lurked ready at their corners. His easy authority over the house and its furnishings spoke more of an owner than a hired man, and I thought the simple room, light and tidy, suited him well.