The Moor - Laurie R. King [60]
"You're with Znoop Zherlock, baint you? I heerd tell you're 'is wife?"
I supposed the question on the end of her last statement was understandable, even without the oddity of our ages, as I was wearing the same sort of raiment as she was.
"That I am."
"And you're here for the Squire, Mr Baring-Gould."
"Here now," I protested. "What makes you think that?"
"Oh, me mum's cousin's close friends with the zister of Miz Endacott, who cleans for Miz Elliott three days a week."
"What do they think I'm doing for Mr Baring-Gould?" I demanded, and walked across to look over the wall at this all-knowing gossip.
"Ye be axin' questions about old Josiah Gorton and the ghostly carridge."
"Well, I'll be—" I stopped, stoppered my rising irritation, and asked more calmly, "So, do you know anything about either?"
"I doan," she admitted. "But Eliz'beth Chase, along by Wheal Betsy, she be waitin' to see'y."
"Wheal Betsy being…?"
"Up from Mary Tavy."
Which was nearly back to Lew Trenchard from here.
"What does she want to see me about?"
"An 'edge'og."
I opened my mouth to continue this line of questioning, and then closed it, turned my back, and led the horse away. I would not be driven insane by the peculiarities gathered around me. I would not.
The rationale behind my expedition was fairly simple and really quite sensible, in its own way: The great inner sweep of the moor, in several remote spots of which a rather substantial ghostly carriage had been seen, was not, as Holmes had pointed out, a place overly endowed with facilities in which to store a coach and stable its horses. Granted, the moor was well populated with horses, but animals big enough and well enough trained to pull a carriage over rough ground by moonlight were hardly likely to blend in with the compact, wild inhabitants of the moor.
Around the edges of the moor, however, lived people, and people (as I had just demonstrated) noticed things and talked about them. The sound of harnessed horses at night, strange hoofprints in a lane, dogs barking at the moon, all would have attracted attention if they had come in from outside, passing through the circle of farms and villages. Therefore, a careful circuit of the moor's outer band of civilisation ought to tell us whether or not the carriage had passed through it.
On one level, the disproportionate use of our time hunting for something that might not exist was more than a touch ridiculous—what the detectives at Scotland Yard might have to say about our carriage hunt did not bear thinking. On the other hand, the search was typical of Holmes' approach to an investigation: One looked for an oddity, some little thing that stood out, and traced it to its source (praying that it was not a mere coincidence, a thing that was, unfortunately, far from unknown). This appearance of a mythic coach just at the time a moor man was killed was too much of a coincidence to be believed. Hence the hunt—or rather, our two hunts, one on each segment of the circumference.
Postbridge, unlike the earlier Two Bridges (which consisted of little more than the inn where Holmes and I had stayed the week before) was an actual settlement, boasting two churches and a telephone kiosk. I had a choice of inns there (if one used the term inn in its loosest sense), and I chose the place with the attempt at flowers near the entrance.
I was tired, and ached in a number of unfamiliar places. It was a long time since I had spent so many hours in the saddle, even without three violent collisions with the ground. I ate a meal that consisted mostly of flour in various forms (all of them inexplicably both tasteless and unpleasant to smell) and drank some thin, sour red wine that seemed to go with my mood, and then took myself to bed—without having questioned a single resident about traces of the coach. Holmes would positively quiver with disapproval when he discovered my neglect, I knew, but at that moment I could not have stirred myself into action had the threat of divorce been held over my head. I asked for a lamp