'A particularly difficult local noblewoman—'
'Noble by marriage only,' inserted Baring-Gould.
'A woman who married a local lord,' Holmes corrected himself, 'lost him, along with three other husbands, under circumstances the local populace thought suspicious, with some justification. She was never officially accused and tried, but for her sins she is said to be condemned to riding in a coach made of the bones of her dead husbands, driven by a headless horseman and led by a black hound with a single eye in the centre of his forehead. The carriage drives at midnight from the ancestral house near Tavistock up to Okehampton castle for Lady Howard to pluck one blade of grass—'
'The hound plucks it,' Baring-Gould sternly corrected him.
'How could a hound pluck a blade of grass?' objected Holmes.
'I merely tell you what the story says.'
'But a hound—'
'Holmes,' I interrupted.
'Oh very well, the hound plucks the grass, and not until every blade is plucked—or bitten—can Lady Howard be free to take her rest. It's a popular story, with songs and such, that by the way probably gave Stapleton the idea for his personal variation on the so-called Baskerville hound—which does not, in the legend, actually glow. It is said, I should mention, to be highly unlucky to be offered a ride in the coach, and certain death actually to enter in with Lady Howard.'
'So I should imagine,' I murmured.
'At any rate, Russell, the point is that Lady Howard and her hound have been seen on the moor.'
During Holmes' recitation, Baring-Gould, pausing occasionally to correct Holmes, had gone to a cupboard in the corner and returned with a very large, heavily worn, rolled-up map, which he now spread out across the worktable on top of the other. This one was of a smaller scale, the Ordnance Survey's one-inch map—although I saw, looking more closely at it, that it actually comprised portions of four or five adjoining maps, carefully trimmed and fastened together so as to encompass the entire moor and its surrounding towns. Corrections had been made in a number of places, roads crossed out and redrawn and the names of tors and hamlets rewritten: Laughter Tor had become Lough Tor, Haytor Rocks changed to Hey Tor, Crazywell Pool was corrected to Clakeywell. The writing was cramped and sloping, undoubtedly that of Baring-Gould.
Before Baring-Gould could begin, the door at the end of the room opened and a woman with iron-grey hair and an iron-hard face put her head inside.
'Pardon me, Rector,' she said, 'but you wanted me to tell you when the Harpers came in.'
'The Harpers? Oh yes. Would you feed them, Mrs Elliott, and get them settled in? I'll not be much longer here.'
The housekeeper nodded and began to draw back, then stopped and addressed Holmes. 'You're not tiring him, I trust,' she said, sounding threatening.
'We are trying not to do so,' Holmes said.
She studied her master for a minute, then withdrew.
'Another sign of the unrest on the moor,' Baring-Gould said with a sigh. 'Longtime residents, people with roots deep into the peat, pulling up and moving away. Like Josiah Gorton, Sally Harper's father was one of my songmen. I collected two ballads and three tunes from the man, oh, it must be nearly thirty years ago. He gave me an alternative verse to 'Green Broom,' as I recall, as well as a sprightly tune, set with most unseemly words that I had to rewrite before it could be published. Sally was a blooming young thing then, and now she and her husband have had to sell off their farm up near Black Tor, a very old place with several generations of newtakes added to the original. Never had children, and although they have a bit of money from the farm sale, the house they have their eyes on near Milton Abbot isn't ready yet. I felt I ought to help out, and it'll only be for a few days. Hard to believe it was that many years ago. Where were we? Yes, Josiah Gorton.'
He bent closely over the fine lines of the map, squinting for a moment until he had his bearings, and his long, gnarled finger came down in the upper left quadrant of the map, tracing an uneven line down to the lower right.
'This is the most likely route for Gorton to have been taken,' he said, which, I realised to my surprise, was for my sake, not that of Holmes, who had already been over the route. He then drew his hand back and put it down a short distance from where he had started. 'And here is the place Lady Howard's coach was seen, on the night Gorton disappeared.' This was, judging by the few roads and fewer dwellings, one of the most deserted areas of the entire moor, a place thick with the Gothic script mapmakers use to indicate antiquities: hut circles, stone rows, stone avenues, tumuli, and ancient trackways, as well as an ominous scattering of those grass-tuft symbols that indicate marshland. There were no orange roads for miles, or even the hollow lines of minor roads, only densely gathered contour lines, numerous streams, and the markings for 'rough pasture.' A howling wilderness indeed.
What was a
'Who on earth was out in that wasteland to see a spectral coach?' he demanded.
'It is not a wasteland, Holmes,' Baring-Gould corrected him sharply. 'Merely sparsely populated. A farmworker saw it. He was benighted on his way home from a wedding.'
'Why does that say 'Artillery Range'?' I interrupted without thinking.
I felt two sets of disapproving male eyes boring into me, and did not look up from the map.
'Because,' said Baring-Gould, addressing me as if I were a regrettably slow child, 'the army uses it to practice with their guns. A fair portion of the moor is given over to them during the summer months, and is therefore off limits to the rambler and antiquarian. They do post the firing schedules at various places around the moor, and they are scrupulous about mounting the red warning flags, but it is really most inconvenient of them.'
I sympathised, but privately I could see why the army should want to make use of Dartmoor: There was probably less life to disturb in that hand's-breadth of the map than on any other English ground south of Hadrian's
