The Moor - Laurie R. King [53]
It was short-lived, and at the end of it he lay for a moment, and then drew a deep breath and let it out again.
"Poor man. Dear old William Crossing remarked somewhere that one of the great goals of the Druids seems to have been the puzzling of posterity. One could say they have been quite successful. Pethering hasn't shown up again?"
"Not yet."
"When he does, tell him I'll write him some sort of a letter. He's a lunatic, but he has a wife and child to feed."
"I'll tell him."
"How was your dinner last night?"
"I was glad that you finally chose to warn me that we were going to be at Baskerville Hall, but we sorted it out eventually. Thanks to Russell, actually, who gave an astonishingly realistic performance of a young wife fiercely protective of her eminent husband's comfort and reputation. Ketteridge no doubt thinks her a fool."
The sharp old eyes found me again across the room, and this time the twinkle in them was unmistakeable.
"That must have been quite an act," he said.
"It was."
Baring-Gould smiled gently to himself, and with that smile I had my first inkling of the nature of the hold this man had over Holmes.
"Russell and I will be away again tomorrow, but before we go, is there anything I can do for you?" Holmes asked him.
"Do you know," Baring-Gould answered after a moment, "if it isn't too much trouble, I should very much like some music."
Without a word Holmes rose and left the room. I sat in the window and listened to the slow, laboured breathing of the man in the bed, and when Holmes came back in with his violin, I slipped out.
For two hours I sat, first in our rooms and then downstairs, trying to read Baring-Gould's words concerning the Curious Myths of the Middle Ages and then his Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets while the violin played the same sort of wistful, simple music I had first heard on the muddy road from Coryton station. It filled every corner of the house, and finally I took the current book, his recently published Early Reminiscences (which I had unearthed in the study between a tattered issue of the Transactions of the Devonshire Association and a pamphlet by Baring-Gould entitled "How to Save Fuel") and escaped with it out of doors. Even the stables were not free of the music, I found. It was not until I closed the heavy door of the Lew Trenchard Church that silence finally enfolded me.
I had passed the building several times, a simple stone square with a proud tower, nestled into the tree-grown hillside and surrounded by gravestones and crosses. This was the first time I had been inside it, though, and I left the book of memoirs in my pocket while I looked around. It was an unsophisticated little stone building that straddled the centuries, with suggestions of thirteenth-century foundations rebuilt two and three hundred years later. The windows were not large, but the gloom cast was peaceful, not oppressive, and there was light enough to see. The air smelt of beeswax candles and wet wool from the morning services, but oddly enough, the feeling I received was not one of completion, but of preparation and waiting.
The single most dominating presence in the church was the screen framing the chancel. It was a magnificent thing, thick with niches and canopies, cornices and tracery, heavily encrusted with paint and gilt—far too elaborate for the crude little church but undeniably bearing the imprint of Sabine Baring-Gould's hand. It was his idea of what a Tudor rood screen should look like,