The Moor - Laurie R. King [40]
"Precisely. However, that does not explain the timing of Josiah Gorton's death, which was a full eight or ten days before September's full moon."
"Nor does it explain the broken plate."
I was already tired of the broken plate, and decided he was merely using it to annoy me. I was grateful when Mrs Elliott chose that moment to bring us our breakfasts.
After we had eaten, Holmes arranged with Mrs Elliott for a troop of rural Irregulars to quarter the Mary Tavy inns, public houses, hostelries, and farmhouses in search of two Londoners who had seen a ghostly carriage. He then spent the day closeted with Baring-Gould, going over our time on the moor. I, too, spent the day with the man, though not in his physical presence. I uncovered a cache of his books and settled in with a stack of them beside my chair.
It was a singular experience. Odd, in fact. I had to admit that the man was brilliant, although I drew the line at "genius." He held an opinion on everything—European cliff dwellings, Devonshire folk songs, comparative mythology, architecture, English saints, werewolfs, archaeology, philology, anthropology, theology—and seemed possessed of a vast impatience with those who disagreed with him. Inevitably, though, the breadth of his scope meant a lack of depth, which he may have gotten away with in his novels and the werewolf book, but which rendered, for example, the works on theology quite useless. Theology is, after all, my field of expertise, and the best I could say for Baring-Gould and his conclusions (for example, that Christianity was proven to be true by the simple fact that it worked) was that he showed himself to be an enthusiastic amateur who might have made some real contribution to the world of scholarship had he possessed a more focussed sense of discipline.
However, there was a strong pulse of life in even the more abstruse tomes, a bounce and vigour one would not have predicted. His occasional references to Devon, and particularly Dartmoor, sang with life and humour, and if he was sometimes pompous and often paternalistic, the passion he felt for the land made up for it.
The novels were embarrassingly melodramatic, but intriguing. There seemed to me a deep vein of cruelty, almost brutality, running through his stories, a distinct lack of tenderness and compassion towards his characters, particularly those living in poverty, that seemed odd in a man dedicated to God's service, and moreover an interest in savage, almost pagan emotions that was surely unusual in an otherwise calm and responsible squire. I began to understand his fascination with the moor, and also to wonder about the man's blunt dismissal of his children on that first night, describing them merely as "scattered."
I was in the final throes of a furious potboiler called Mahalah when Holmes came into the room. He said something; I grunted in reply and turned the page, and after a minute another page.
Ten minutes later I had finished the book and sat back, feeling equal parts exasperation and the sense of romantic tragedy that Baring-Gould had been trying to evoke. I looked at Holmes, then looked at him more attentively.
"Why are you dressing, Holmes?"
He glanced up from his task of threading one gold cuff link into his cuff. "Dinner, Russell. At Richard Ketteridge's? I did inform you."
"Oh Lord!" I threw myself at the wardrobe and snatched up my frock. "How long do I have?"
"The car is already here. Five minutes will make us only fashionably late."
I flung my clothes on the floor and dropped the frock over my head, succeeded in hoisting my silk stockings without putting a ladder into either of them, and turned to the mirror to subdue my hair into some kind of order.
"Is it still raining?" I asked.
"It is."
"I must have an umbrella. Go and find me one. Please."
As always happens when I am in a hurry, my hair went up lopsided and had to be taken down and arranged again. Still, in the end I was presentable. I caught up a thin woollen wrap and hurried downstairs.
Baring-Gould was passing through the