'A capital idea,' he replied.
And so we did.
THREE
—Further Reminiscences
It rained all that night, a quiet, steady rhythm that soothed me into a sleep so sound that, although I woke briefly in the early morning to the click and murmur of hot water pushing its way through cold radiator pipes, I went back to sleep, and did not wake fully until nearly eight o'clock. Finding to my satisfaction that the dawn noises had not been an hallucination, I bathed and dressed—in trousers, despite my host's sensibilities—and put up my hair, before making my way downstairs.
At the foot of the stairs I paused and listened. The old house was content in its restored warmth but utterly silent; I could not even hear the rain. I took the opportunity to explore the various rooms we had bypassed the night before, finding, among other things, an airy, light-blue-and-white ballroom of wedding-cake splendour, lacking only a cobwebbed dinner service and Miss Haversham to complete the picture of merriment and life abruptly suspended by the years. I did no more than stand inside the door, feeling no wish to examine the intricate plasterwork more closely, and I could not help wondering if Baring-Gould ever came into this room. I backed out, closing the door silently.
Back in the hall, I paused to examine the fireplace carving that Baring-Gould had commended to me the night before. It depicted a hunt, a parade of hounds with their tails curled energetically over their backs, pursuing a fox, who had abandoned bits and pieces of the goose he had stolen and was now making for what looked like a pineapple. I puzzled over it for a while, and then went back towards the stairway and then into the dining room, where I discovered a pot of coffee bubbling gently into sludge over a warming flame, a mound of leathery eggs similarly kept warm, some cold toast, and three strips of flabby bacon. I poured a tiny amount of boiled coffee essence and a large amount of lovely yellow milk into a cup and walked over to the window.
Outside lay a small paved courtyard, deserted of life and leaves and with an arched walkway along the opposite side that looked like either a cloister or a row of almshouses. I went through a doorway and found the back stairway, and another doorway that opened into the kitchen, at the moment deserted although I could hear a woman's voice raised in harangue at a distance. I retreated, retracing my steps past the staircase to another door, and there I found host and husband in a large, cluttered room lined with bookshelves and brightened by a number of tall windows that gathered in the light even on a grey day like this. The two of them were standing with their heads together and their elbows resting on top of a small, high, sloping writing table, across which had been draped an Ordnance Survey map.
My first impression on seeing the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould by light of day was that schoolboys and sinners alike must have found him terrifying. Even now at the edges of his tenth decade, with his thin white hair brushed over a mottled scalp, his back bent, and his face carved into deep lines, he struck one as a powerful source of disapproval and judgement, searching out wearily the misdeeds that a long lifetime had proven to him must invariably lie before him. He was a man who had seen a great deal in his eighty-nine years, and approved of little of it.
Oddly, he was wearing two pairs of spectacles, one of them pushed up into his hair, the other on his nose. Seeing me at the door, he shoved the second pair up to join the first and straightened his back. He took in my trousers, and his face went even more sour.
'Good morning, Miss Russell. My friend here tells me that you prefer that peculiar form of address over the 'Mrs' to which you are entitled.'
'Er, yes, I do. Thank you. Good morning, Mr Baring-Gould. Good morning, Holmes.'
'I see you found Mrs Elliott's breakfast,' Baring-Gould stated, seeing the cup I still held.
'I found it, yes.'
His old eyes beneath their remarkably rounded brows sharpened. 'Inedible?' he asked.
'It's all right,' I hastened to say. 'I often just take coffee in the morning.'
'Ask Mrs Elliott if you want something. I did tell her,' he said in an aside to Holmes. 'The only time the woman uses those chafing dishes is when there are twenty eggs to keep warm and a gallon of coffee. Was the coffee boiled away?' he shot at me.
'Almost, yes. I snuffed out the flame as I came through.'
'Never mind, she'll be making more shortly. When there are guests in the house she produces meals eighteen hours a day, and she'll be anxious to make up for the first impression you had of her household. Women are quite mad when it comes to hospitality.'
I bit down hard on my tongue, though truth to tell I wouldn't have known quite where to start. Holmes made a noise deep in his throat that was not quite a cough, and hastily returned to the map. I took a swallow of my coffee-flavoured milk and turned my back on the two men to peruse the books on the walls, stopping to remove one from time to time and glance into it.
'So, judging by this,' Holmes said, continuing the conversation that had broken off with my entrance, 'Josiah Gorton might readily have been brought from the place where he was last seen down to where he was found, without a soul seeing it.'
'Oh yes, easily, by anyone who knows the moor.'
'How intimate a knowledge would be required?'
'I should have thought a week or two of wandering might do it. That and a good map.'
'It's a great pity, Gould, that I could not come at the time. The body might have told many tales.'
The old man made no polite effort to excuse Holmes his preoccupation, although he admitted, 'I was not informed myself until after he had been prepared for burial. If you wish to speak with the women who laid his body out, I can give you their names.'
'I may do, later. Now tell me, where was this dog-and-carriage apparition seen? This is another reference to a local folktale, Russell,' he explained. I looked up from the encyclopaedia article on pineapples that I was reading.
