The Moor - Laurie R. King [111]
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."
He got a faraway look on his face, which after several seconds relaxed into one of delight. "I had forgotten about that. Oh yes. Very clever, that." He chuckled. "Of necessarily limited duration, however."
"Most frauds are. But what I need to know is, are there any other references to gold on the moor in your books, either speculations as