The Moor - Laurie R. King [66]
The pub was still for a good ten seconds when they had finished. With a general sigh and murmur, the audience, including the village men who had themselves sung, expressed its appreciation and began to move away into the night.
The moor men, too, drained their glasses and got to their feet. With a nod of the head or a brief tug at the cap they each bade me their farewells. The pub was soon empty but for the girl collecting glasses on a tray; I went upstairs and left her to it.
TWELVE
The old woman was not regarded as a witch, but she was accredited with a profound acquaintance with herbs and their virtues.
—Further Reminiscences
My first task for the new day was to hunt down the woman whose name I had been given (what seemed a remarkably long time before) by the girl speaking to me over the wall near Postbridge. Elizabeth Chase, the girl had said, near Wheal Betsy, wanted to see me about a hedgehog. It sounded unlikely enough to be true.
Wheal Betsy proved to be the still very solid brick engine house of a now-abandoned mine, formerly a rich source of lead and silver. It was also, to my amusement, directly at the foot of Gibbet Hill.
As I rode, I began to feel as if I had the spirit of a young Baring-Gould at my side. It was the invariable result of immersing myself in the man's words and his surroundings for the past week, but it was not a troubling presence. Indeed, I was finding him an amusing companion, this solitary youth with the passion for the moor and a mind as bright, energetic, and indiscriminate as a magpie.
A small shoeless child behind a gate leading to a muddy track pointed me towards the home of Elizabeth Chase. A man leading a horse, its off foreleg neatly bandaged but causing it to limp, confirmed it with a wag of his chin over his shoulder. Half a mile farther on, a woman hanging a heap of men's shirts out in the fitful sunlight directed me back on my steps, to a narrow lane that I had missed at the first pass. It was, un-usually enough, a wooded lane, with actual overhead trees instead of the stunted, sparse shrubs that dominated this half of the moor. I followed it, on foot lest my hat be snatched off by branches, and came out at a scene from a children's story.
The cottage was ancient, tiny, orderly (but for the wayward curves of its walls and the thick lichen on its roof slates), and so clean the very stones seemed to gleam with polish. There seemed to be no one about—or at least no human. Six cats of varying colours and sizes lay distributed among a rough bench, a chopping block, and the rooftop, and three dogs (one of them missing a leg) wandered up to greet me. I could also see four breeds of chicken, a black swan with a crooked wing, two geese in a pen, a goat with a kid, and a shaggy Dartmoor pony with a bandage on its leg very like that on the leg of the draught horse I had seen being led down the lane—except that the pony's was on its near hind leg. I looked down at the grinning black-and-white face of the three-legged sheepdog, which also seemed to be lacking a number of its teeth, and said to it, "Where's your mistress?"
As if it had understood me, it whirled around to look at the house, and when I did the same, I saw Elizabeth Chase in her doorway.
At first glance she seemed a normal size, until I realized that I should have to bend nearly double in order to walk through the doorway, yet she stood easily within its frame. I am accustomed to other women seeming small, but this one could not have been any larger than the average eight-year-old, and when my attention went back from her shape to her face, I knew that I had indeed entered a fairy tale. She was brown and wrinkled and stooped, and the tilt to her head, though undoubtedly a result of the hump in her spine, gave her an air of quizzical humour, as if she looked at the world with a sideways laugh. I was smiling when I introduced myself, and told her I had heard she was waiting to see me.