The Moor - Laurie R. King [74]
In the end, though, some ten or fifteen minutes after my vigil began, I was granted not only a sound, but a visual confirmation as well: The engine noise of Ketteridge's big touring car purred softly over the rooftops, and then a brief flare of the headlamps illuminated the tops of some trees that were at the very edge of my field of vision. The motor faded, going down the drive and away from the house. I did not know what it meant, but it was with satisfaction that I pulled down the window, replaced the chair and the laces, and slipped silently into the cooling bath.
FOURTEEN
On the road passers-by always salute and have a bit of a yarn, even though personally unacquainted, and to go by in the dark without a greeting is a serious default in good manners.
—A Book of the West: Devon
Ketteridge was all smiles and affability when I joined him, the agitation gone and a celebratory mood in its place. In fact, a bottle of some very fine champagne was nestling in a bucket of ice, to be plucked out and opened as soon as I entered the hall. Ketteridge was alone, and a small table set with two places was standing discreetly to one side. I was not at all sure about the intimacy of this tête-à-tête, but the hall lights were blazing, sweeping away the memory of the quiet and somewhat mysterious reaches of the room in the other evening's after-dinner candlelight, and Ketteridge did not seem in the least seductive, or even vaguely flirtatious. He seemed only brimming with high spirits, and his sun-dark face, full hair, and white, even teeth, though undeniably handsome, did not appeal to me personally (which was, frankly, a great relief, following the memory of a couple of very disconcerting moments with a man in the Ruskin case).
"Mrs Holmes! Come, join me in a glass of this marvellous stuff." He poured two glasses, gave me one, and held his own up before him to propose a toast. "To change!" he declared dramatically.
I hesitated. "I don't know if I ought to drink to that, Mr Ketteridge. Not all change is good."
"To growth, then. To progress."
Not entirely certain what it was I was drinking to, I nonetheless put the rim of the glass to my lips and sipped.
"Are we celebrating something, Mr Ketteridge?"
"Always, my dear Mrs Holmes. There's always something in life to celebrate. In this case, however, I think I may have found a buyer for Baskerville Hall."
"I see. I did not realise your plans to move on were so far advanced."
"They weren't before; now they are. Sometimes decisions have to be made on the fly, as it were. Strike while the iron is hot."
Privately, I agreed that striking at cold iron was not the most productive of exercises; however, neither was the availability of hot iron generally as accidental a state as he seemed to be suggesting. I found it hard to believe that a buyer for Baskerville Hall had simply dropped, preheated as it were, out of the air.
"I'm very glad for you. Do I take the champagne to mean that you have reached a happy agreement?" I was not so gauche as to ask how much he was getting for the hall, but I had found industrialists, particularly successful American industrialists, less likely to take offence at a discussion of pounds, shillings, and pence than the other sorts of wealthy Englishmen were, and a gold baron was surely an industrialist of a sort.
"Happy enough," he said. "Yes, happy enough. And I think Baring-Gould and his friends will be satisfied. The buyer is an older man—just as well, it's not exactly a family kind of a place, is it?—and he wants a quiet place to write and study while his wife