The Moor - Laurie R. King [59]
I dismounted, to give Red a rest but also to allow myself a moment to study this strange place. Even with Holmes' assurance that I need only keep to the roads, I did not relish the thought of entering the moor by myself. I stood beside Red and thought about the clear sense of personality I had had forced on me in the fog, the idea that Dartmoor was alive. Are you going to allow me to pass? I asked it, only half mocking. Will you keep from throwing your rain and wind at me, pulling your mists up over my head, setting your haunts to plague me and your pixies to lead me astray? I don't much like you, I told the land before me, but I mean you no harm. There was no answer, other than the sound of Red cropping at the brief grass with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. After a bit, I got to my feet. Friend or foe, I had no choice but to enter.
The road stretched out across the flat, rock-studded ground, the same terrain I had seen north of here, interrupted only by a quarry gouged into a dip and curve of the road and by the prison, riding a rise some distance from the road near Princetown. A grim place like all its kind, it seemed to declare that there would be no coddling of felons here, that punishment, discomfort, and boredom were to be their lot. The motto over the gate, I had heard, read PARCERE SUBJECTIS, or "To spare the Vanquished," and with Virgil I had to agree that it was marginally more humane to incarcerate one's enemy than it was to slaughter him. Built originally as a camp for prisoners in the Napoleonic War, Princetown Prison had seen the Black Hole and the cat-o'-nine tails, starvation diet and hard labour, and if recent years had seen a more enlightened régime, the image of life within those grey, circular walls remained one of brutality and deprivation, what Holmes had referred to as a place designed for the breaking of men's spirits. I suddenly realised that I had been sitting and looking at the prison for too long, and that I did not wish to have a guard sent down to ask my business. I put my heels to Red's side;for once he obliged.
He did not throw me again until we were nearly in Postbridge, when I was leaning inattentively in the saddle to look over a wall and found the wall coming rapidly up to meet me. Long years of martial training gave my body an automatic response to a fall, but hitting a padded gymnastic mat and flying into a pile of stones were different matters entirely.
I climbed back over the wall and grabbed the reins with more force than was either necessary or sensible. "Damn you!" I shouted at him. "A few bruises are one thing, but if you break my spectacles, how do you expect us to get home again?" I stormed around to mount, and had my left foot in the stirrup when a voice came from somewhere behind me.
"Does him usually hanswer you?"
I turned with my foot still in the irons, and nearly fell again. There was a face looking at me over the wall on the opposite side of the road, a person so wrapped up in scarfs and hats as to make any sexual identification difficult, but I thought it a young woman rather than an unlined, beardless youth. I laughed, embarrassed more at my loss of temper than at having been caught talking to the animal.
"He hasn't answered me yet, but we only met a short time ago. It wouldn't surprise me too much if he did."
"Him's Mr Arundell's 'oss, bainty?"
"Yes," I said, surprised. Lew House was a fair distance from here.
"Thought so. They boft'n cheap 'cause 'e kept dumping the lady who had'n avore. Don't do it to menvolk, cooriusly enuv."
A misogynist gelding. Dear God, what on earth was I doing here? "You know Mr Arundell?"
"He rides down here sometimes when t' hunt's on, though he do like ter follow th' hounds on foot."
"Having met Red, I couldn't blame him."
"I knaw who ye be," she said conversationally.
"Do you?"