The Moor - Laurie R. King [31]
I found the delicacy of her unspoken question amusing, particularly as it was couched in a nearly unintelligible dialect and put to us in a tiny, multiple-purpose room already overcrowded with humanity, two dogs, and a basket of newly hatched chicks peeping beside the inglenook fireplace that functioned as kitchen range. Who was she to question the insanity of two outsiders spilling onto her doorstep from out of the fog?
Holmes took off his hat politely, and answered her as she moved around us to fetch two more plates and the necessary cutlery and mugs to go with them.
"We're not exactly here on a holiday stroll, madam. We heard that there was a sighting of Lady Howard's coach not far from here, and we were eager to hear more. You see," he said, warming to his story and taking his place on the bench and a spoon in his hand, "we collect odd tales such as that of Lady How—"
There was a sudden gurgling, clicking noise from the inglenook, emerging from what I had thought to be a pile of blankets draped across a chair to dry near the heat. I could make no sense of the sound, but it silenced everyone in the room, including Holmes. The two men and the farmwife all turned to stare at Holmes, and I saw with astonishment the look of chagrin spreading across his face.
"What was that?" I demanded. "I didn't hear."
"He—or she, I beg your pardon," he said to the tiny huddled figure, and started anew. "To translate, the remark was made, and I quote, 'By Gar, who is it but Znoop Zherlock?' 'Snoop Sherlock' was, I ought to explain, the nickname given me by the moor dwellers during the Baskerville case. We have here one of the older residents, evidently, who remembers me." He extricated his long legs from the bench and went over to the pile of blankets, extending his hand towards it. A small, gnarled paw appeared, followed by another burst of unintelligible speech—badly distorted, I diagnosed, by a complete lack of teeth, but still of such a heavy dialectical peculiarity as to constitute a separate language. I had thought Harry Cleave possessed an accent; I was mistaken. In fact, I shall not even attempt to transcribe the words as they were spoken, since an alphabet soup such as "Yar! Me luvvers, you mun vale leery, you cain't a' ated since bevower the foggy comed" makes for laborious, if picturesque, reading.
At first hearing, the speech was beyond me, although Holmes seemed to follow the sense of it readily enough. I merely applied myself to the hot, simple food that was put before me, and drank the cider in my mug. The talk washed over me, and as the pangs of cold and hunger subsided, I slowly began to make sense of what was being said.
The folk in this isolated farmstead were indeed aware of Lady Howard's coach, and did not like it one bit. The first witness to the apparition, back in July, had actually been a friend of the young farmhand's second cousin, and Holmes made haste to interrogate the farmhand as to the whereabouts of his second cousin's friend, whose euphonious name was Johnny Trelawny. It appeared, however, that Trelawny had fled the moor, despite being known far and wide as a brave man, a man indeed formerly thought fearless, who had done his service on the Western Front and to whom the occasional brawl was not unknown. There was no consideration that the intense teasing he had received during the month he remained the sole witness to Lady Howard's coach might be a contributing factor to Trelawny's disinclination to stay on the moor, and when Holmes enquired as to the man's employment, and was told that Johnny had lost his job after assaulting his employer (a known wag who came up to his employee in the pub and presented him with a tiny newborn puppy,