The Moor - Laurie R. King [79]
In the middle of a sentence, Ketteridge paused and said, "I hear the car." He resumed what he had been saying, and appeared quite content to sit in front of the fire and talk until midnight, but I decided that investigation or no, I had had enough. My rib and hip throbbed, my forehead and the bridge of my nose hurt sharply, and I was not in top condition anywhere, even mentally. I rose to my feet.
"Mr Ketteridge, I have taken up far too much of your time. I am very grateful for the rescue and your company, but I cannot keep you any longer."
As it transpired, however, I was not finished with him yet. When my (neatly repacked) bags were brought, Tuptree was carrying a man's overcoat and hat as well. Ketteridge was motoring down to Lew with me, "Just to make sure you arrive without problem," as he put it. Expecting that we would be attacked by highwaymen, perhaps? Or that I might be molested by his driver? It seemed, though, that this being the first pleasant evening in some time, he wanted to take a drive.
This meant that he actually did the driving, with Scheiman in the backseat alongside my saddlebags. Ketteridge held my door for me, then got in behind the wheel.
He was not a bad driver, although a touch aggressive and more apt to haul at the wheel than slip in and out between obstacles as his driver had. We flew down the tree-lined avenue and accelerated out through the open gate in a spray of gravel, and were very soon pulling into the drive at Lew House.
Somewhat to my surprise, he did not accept my invitation to enter.
"Paperwork to do, I'm sure you understand. But you'll let me know if Mr Holmes is interested in investigating the Hound sightings, won't you? We can talk about rates at the time."
Hah, I thought. The days when Sherlock Holmes worried about how much to charge for his services was long in the past.
"I shall speak to him about it," I said politely.
He stood next to the car until I had gone into the porch, and then I heard the car door close. The car circled the fountain with the bronze goose-boy, and drove away.
FIFTEEN
Hard by is Clakeywell Pool, by some called Crazywell. It is an old mine-work, now filled with water. It covers nearly an acre, and the banks are in part a hundred feet high. According to popular belief, at certain times at night a loud voice is heard calling from the water in inarticulate tones, naming the next person who is to die in the parish.
—A Book of Dartmoor
I paused in the Lew House porch for a long moment after the noise of the car had faded down the drive, pondering the curious etiquette required for entering a house in which one has been a guest in the very recent past, yet has been away for some days, and returns solitary when previously one had been an adjunct to a husband. It would have been simple had there been a butler, but I was not about to rouse the master of the house to open the door for me. I reached out to try the door handle and found it unlocked, but instead of letting myself in, I dropped my bags and walked back into the drive and past the fountain until I was in the rose garden, where I turned to take a long look at the house.
It was a puzzle. This house, this square block rising up in front of me against the night, was in a sense a fraud, an artificial product of one man's enthusiasms. Stuck-together bits and pieces stolen from other structures, held in place by nothing more substantial than the vision of an infirm and lonely old man, its cool and formal facade nestled incongruously into a tree-lined fold of English river valley; a run-down, ill-heated, understaffed, echoing pile of a place studded with anomalies like the opulent gallery ceiling upstairs and the faded but still glorious ballroom—the place ought to have seemed ridiculous, out of place, and easily abandoned to