The Moor - Laurie R. King [78]
As a working library the room we entered left something to be desired, but as a masculine retreat that used books as a decorative backdrop for deep leather chairs and a square card table, it was more comfortable than the draughty reaches of the hall or dining room. Heavy draperies covered the windows and Tuptree, bearing a tray of coffee, followed us in the door.
"It's a pity you haven't been to the house in daylight, Mrs Holmes. It's quite a sight—these windows here look up onto the moor, and there are six tors sitting there, looking like you could reach out and touch them. On a clear day, that is. You must try to come back during the day—you and your husband, of course."
"I'd like that, thank you. I was so enjoying my ride out on the moor today, I hadn't realised how late it had got. I do apologise for keeping you up."
"This isn't late, Mrs Holmes, by no means, and I was charmed to have you drop in on me, for whatever reason. Were you just out for a ride, then?"
I had offered him that ride in case he wondered what on earth the good Mrs Holmes might have been doing in his deserted stretch of countryside. Whatever he was hiding from me, whomever he had spirited out from under my nose, might be as simple as a socially unacceptable buyer for Baskerville Hall or as embarrassing as an improper visitor of the female persuasion. In any case he could hardly suspect me of arranging the mishap that had delivered Red and myself here in such a state. I merely thought to divert his curiosity before it took hold in his mind.
"Yes, and what a place for it! I rode down to look at the Fox Tor mires and Childe's Tomb, and Wistman's Wood, and then the stone row near Merrivale, and I was aiming for Fur Tor, to get around the river, you see, when Red spooked and fell."
He seemed imperceptibly to relax, whether because of my list of sights or due to the breezy conversational style I had gradually come to assume, I could not tell.
"It is an interesting slice of landscape, isn't it?" he commented.
"Oh yes. Sitting on a tor and eating a picnic lunch with a stone row on one side and a tin-mining works on the other is not an everyday sort of experience."
"I think my favourite is Bowerman's Nose, not far from Hound Tor. Do you know it?"
"Over near Widdecombe? No, I haven't been there yet."
"Looks like a great stone man, staring defiantly up into the sky."
"But it actually has a nose, does it? I rode completely around Fox Tor looking for some resemblance to a fox. I couldn't find one."
"A bit like the constellations, aren't they? You'd have to have a good imagination, or bad eyesight, to see what they're named after."
"Actually," I said, "the tor where I took lunch today resembled nothing so much as what one finds in the road after a herd of cattle has passed by."
The earthy humour was to Ketteridge's liking. When he stopped laughing he swung his cup dangerously in the direction of the curtains and said, "There's a tor just out those windows that I think I'll rename Horse-Dropping Tor, in your honour, Mrs Holmes. Looks just like one we had over our house when I was young, only it's cold, wet, and grey instead of hot, dry, and red." His face, which when relaxed had been less handsome but more likeable, abruptly tightened. He put his cup into its saucer with a sharp rattle and began to pat his pockets in the semaphore of the tobacco smoker. The distant past, it would seem, was out of bounds in a way that his youth in Alaska had not been.
"If I were you, I shouldn't mention to Baring-Gould that you are giving his tors impolite names."
He instantly relaxed again and stopped his search for tobacco. "You're right. He wouldn't take to it kindly."
Baring-Gould was a safer topic of