The Moor - Laurie R. King [32]
Holmes succeeded in drawing out roughly the date when Trelawny had seen this vision, establishing that it was probably the Tuesday or Wednesday before the full moon. However, when he tried to find where Trelawny had gone, the only point on which the family agreed was that the lad would not have gone back to his family home in Cornwall, due to a long-standing feud with an uncle. Exeter, the farmhand thought. Portsmouth, the farmwife suggested, and then used the opportunity to begin her own tale of another lad who had got a girl in trouble and run off as far as London, but the girl's father had taken his savings out of the jar in the woodshed to buy himself a train ticket, and as he set off across the moor on a dark night…
Stories tumbled out as the cider jug went around and the relief of confession began to be felt. Voices crossed and were raised and crossed again, with the constant running commentary of the toothless figure in the corner making a rhythm like a waterfall for the rest to talk over. Holmes had no difficulty in steering the tales towards the occult and the unusual, and out of the welter of sounds I received clear images and phrases, chief among which was a regular repetition of the phrase, "a coorius sarcumstance," pronounced each time with a shake of the head.
I had to agree, some of the circumstances they described were "coorius" indeed; in fact, I should have said they were highly unlikely. The black dogs and the mysteriously dead sheep any student of the supernatural might have expected, along with the standard two-headed foals and the infertile clutches of eggs, but the eagle carrying off a grown ewe made me raise an eyebrow, and when the farmwife swore that a bolt of lightning had shaken the earth and knocked one of her best plates from its perch, I closed my ears and reached for the board of gorgeous yellow cheese to accompany what I decided had to be my final glass of "zyder":England simply did not have earthquakes, not even in Dartmoor.
"Snoop Sherlock" valiantly listened to it all, trying hard to shape the conflicting narratives into hard fact of places and dates, contributing the odd remark and trying hard to deflect the inevitable spate of Baskerville reminiscences from the aged figure in the blankets. He finally brought the Babel to a close by the desperate measure of pulling out his watch and exclaiming theatrically over the passage of time, looking pointedly at the window and declaring that the fog seemed to have cleared, and finally standing up to leave (dealing his head a mighty crack on the low roof beam). We paid generously for the food, caught up our rucksacks, and made our escape, with the farmwife's thanks and the old woman's voice following us out of the door and across the weedy yard.
I quickly realised that having the fog clear on Dartmoor meant a transformation into rain. Uncomfortable, but infinitely better than the fog.
***
We took greater care to avoid total immersion in our next interviews, but we need not have worried. Of the courting couple who had later seen the coach and its dog, the girl refused to say anything, just burst into melodramatic tears and collapsed into the arms of a handsome young man. We were led to understand, moreover, that this young man was not the same beau with whom she had been the night of the apparition, and in the course of ascertaining the whereabouts of the former suitor (the one whom Baring-Gould had referred to as "stolid and un-imaginative") we nearly came to blows with the current gentleman.
The rejected suitor, Thomas Westaway, lived two miles off and was happy enough to interrupt his labours on a stone wall in exchange