Murder in the Queen's Armes

'Yes,” Julie said. “That's quite an animal. What in the world is he?'

'Crossbreed,” Colonel Conley said. “I went into dog breeding after the war, you see, and Bowser is my prize. Proper name, Pyecombe Sable of Hempstead. Half mastiff, half staghound, with perhaps a little werewolf thrown in. Magnificent creature, don't you think? Ran in the Count de Vergie's pack, you know?” Gideon and Julie looked mutely at him. “At Chateau Touffon? Near Vienne? You really haven't heard of it? Famous for its stag hunts, and the count's pack is disputably the best in the world. Unfortunately, Bowser tends toward over enthusiasm, and he tore the throat out of a horse.” He dug his knuckles fondly into the root of a huge, tawny ear. “And,” he whispered respectfully, “came as near as dammit to doing in a man. I'm afraid he has a bit of a mean streak in him.'

'Does he really?” Gideon said, eyeing Bowser, who was quivering and twitching with convincing blood lust.

Again the colonel laughed. “I'm sure you've noticed. Don't worry, though. There isn't any way he can get through.” He shook the gate in the fence, jangling a sturdy padlock on a heavy chain. “I take extreme precautions. It's perfectly safe. Enjoy your walk, and don't pay any attention to him on your way back. He gets accustomed to you after a time or two.'

As they twisted their way through the stile to enter the open country, Bowser thundered again, deprived of his rightful prey, but Colonel Conley tugged on his collar and said, “Bad show, Bowser,” and the dog sat down, mumbling and drooling. Julie and Gideon walked a few hundred yards into the meadow, out of sight and sound of the dog, and then Julie sat suddenly on a log and started thumbing through Scenic Dorset Walks

'Are we lost already?” Gideon asked.

'No, I'm looking for an alternate way back.'

'And disappoint Bowser?'

'You better believe it.” She chewed the corner of her lip and wrinkled her nose. Strange. Gideon had always thought nose-wrinkling ridiculous and unsightly; on Julie it devastated him.

'No,” she said, “we have to come back through Barr's Lane unless we want to go way out of our way and walk along A-35.” She closed the booklet. “Uh-uh. What kind of country walk would that be?'

'Right. Besides, don't worry about Bowser. I had him in the palm of my hand.” He sat down next to her on the log. “Hey, just look at where we are. Can the world be all bad if there are still places like this?'

'This is Dyne Meadow, according to the book. It is nice, isn't it?'

They were in a green and gently undulating grassy field bordered on one side by a dark copse of pines, and on another by a sparkling, tree-lined stream. To the west they could see a ruined stone barn around which grazed a few placid cattle; and to the north, half a mile off, a farmer plowed his field near a stark, whitewashed farmhouse. The noise of his tractor was like the far-off, lazy buzzing of a bee. It might have been 1940 or 1920. If not for the tractor, it could have been 1720.

'How lovely,” Julie sighed. “Let's just stay here forever.'

They stayed, in fact, half an hour, just drinking in the peace, and then, pacified themselves, proceeded hand in hand.

As Gideon had predicted, it was extremely muddy, especially near the stiles, where the ground had been churned into glue by cattle hooves. But it was Dorset mud, of which the locals were justly proud. Gray and gloopy as it looked and felt, it was solid enough so that it hardly wet their feet, yet liquid enough to slide from their shoes without caking. The lowering sky, while it threatened to burst with rain at any moment, held off, and the moisture- heavy air was fragrant with Dorset's grassy smell.

Rights of way in rural England are not quite what Americans imagine them to be. They are unlikely to be posted, and they frequently do not consist of paths visible to the naked eye. Following a guidebook, one simply skirts the western flank of this coppice of larches, bears slightly right, and walks through the northern end of that beech spinney, then crosses the gravel road, bearing north-northeast at a spot one hundred yards west of the signposts to Knickers-on-Tyne, just beyond a lightning-shattered pine tree. Even with a map, one is likely to spend a lot of time lost and trespassing. After a while Julie and Gideon settled for following the instructions in Scenic Dorset Walks in only the most approximate fashion, taking care to give plenty of room to the bulls they occasionally saw, and to avoid walking over worked fields that weren't supposed to be there.

They never managed to find Wootton Fitzpaine, but they walked through quiet woods and over grassy hills from which there were misty views of rolling, impossibly green countryside quilted into squares and trapezoids by trim, winter-brown hedgerows, and dotted by scattered groups of two or three thatch-roofed old buildings. They climbed over wooden stiles and walked through little white picket gates (who kept them all so spruce and freshly painted?) with gateposts set neatly in the middles of hedges, and they crossed little burbling brooks on footbridges consisting of a single plank. And always there was the fragrance of rain-wet grass. They saw no other people except farmers, and those at great distances, but there were cows and sheep and great black birds that squawked overhead.

'Are those crows?” Gideon asked. “Or ravens?” His voice startled them both; they had been walking in easy, companionable silence for almost an hour.

'Let me know if one lands on a ruler, and I'll tell you.'

'Come again?'

'The crows are a few inches smaller. Otherwise I can't tell; at least not from here. There's something about the tails, I think.'

'Some park ranger you are. I thought you knew all about birds.'

'But I'm not a park ranger anymore. I got married, remember? And, being a good, old-fashioned wife, I left my lovely job in lovely Olympic National Park to go where my husband went.'

'Yea,” Gideon said, “even unto San Mateo, California.” He said it lightly, but it was something that worried them both. When they had met, she had been senior ranger at the park in Washington and he'd been teaching at Northern California University, where he'd been made full professor the year before. They ran into trouble at once. There had been no ranger jobs for Julie anywhere near San Francisco Bay, and the newly opened Port Angeles campus of the University of Washington—the first university on the Olympic Peninsula—did not yet have a graduate anthropology department to which Gideon might apply. Somebody's career had to be interrupted for a while.

There had been a lot of discussions, but no arguments. To both of them, the idea of Gideon doing anything but