The Moor - Laurie R. King [103]
"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