The Moor - Laurie R. King [89]
I wandered nervously in and out of rooms until I found myself in Baring-Gould's study, where I retrieved the manuscript copy of Further Reminiscences from the heap of papers where I had left it. Being handwritten, I thought, the going would be slow, but distracting enough to take my mind off the events of the day. And so it proved—when, that is, I could keep my attention on the pages at all. Time and again I caught myself staring blindly into space, and wrenched my thoughts back onto Baring-Gould's writing. His early parishes did not seem to have been successes, and his marriage was touched upon so lightly that it would have been easy to miss it entirely. The manuscript was, in fact, the least revealing autobiography I had ever read, being much more concerned with the minutiae of European travel and the triumphs of antiquarian explorations than his relationship with his wife or the birth of his children. Belgian art, the history of Lew, a trip to Freiburg, lengthy letters to his friend and travelling companion Gatrill, ghost stories, love philtres, and thirty pages on the collecting of folk songs were occasionally interesting, often tedious. The only thing that caught my attention was a brief mention of gold, but when I reread the passage I saw that he was talking about Bodmin Moor, some distance to the west, and I read on as he described being first lost in the fog and then sucked up to his shoulders into a bog.
The long day dribbled to a close, punctuated only by a solitary dinner (I very nearly asked if I might join the others in the kitchen, but decided it would be too cruel) and an eventual adjournment upstairs—not to bed, which would have been futile, but to allow the servants to close up the house for the night.
Three times during the day I had my coat on and stood at the door, ready to set off up the hill to the village post-office telephone, and three times I took off my coat and went back to my book before the fire. If this case were to be given over to Scotland Yard, a word in Mycroft's ear would cause a memorandum to travel sideways, across two or three desks, until it finally reached the desk of a man who could pick up the telephone and arrange for one of the more sympathetic Yard men to be sent.
But what if that did happen, what if they even sent Holmes' old friend Lestrade himself? Would it make any difference if the official investigator was friendly or not? In fact, would it not actually be better if the Holmes partnership was disconnected from the police forces, allowing us to get on with our own investigation without undue interference? (Assuming, of course, that Holmes reappeared to take up his share of the burden. The man's penchant for disappearing at inconvenient moments was at times maddening.)
In the end, I stayed with my book, deciding that the pull of the telephone was only the urge to be doing something (anything!) and meekly removed myself upstairs at an appropriate hour.
By one o'clock in the morning, I had given up the attempt to read and sat watching my thoughts chase one another around by the low flicker of the fire. By two I had ceased feeding the coals and climbed under the bedclothes, but I did not even attempt to douse the light. I knew that the pathetic back of the dead man's head would be waiting for me in the dark, so I let my mind poke and prod at the restrictions that ignorance had laid, trying with a complete lack of success to put together a puzzle missing half its pieces.
At three o'clock a stealthy sound from downstairs jerked me up into instant alarm: heart pounding,