'I will not participate in an army spy-search. I absolutely refuse. I'd rather talk to drunken farmhands about spectral coaches.'
'It is peripheral, Russell,' he said soothingly. 'I made the mistake of letting Mycroft know where I was going, and he asked me to do this while I was here. We are in Devon because of Gould's case, and any work for Mycroft is strictly secondary. Although I don't believe we need stoop to interviewing rural inebriates, particularly those who have had three weeks to build up a story.'
I wrenched my boots up from the muddy pasture and started walking again. We were mounting a rise, approaching a raw patch of ground with a few small trees trying weakly for a foothold. It seemed to be a wide, oval depression in the earth, but that impression did not prepare me for what in a moment lay at our feet. I was so startled I took a step back from it.
It was a pit, an enormous water-filled crater with nearly vertical sides gouged straight into the green pasture barely a stone's throw from Baring-Gould's front door. A gush of water shot out from the bank on the far side and plummeted down into the lake, looking more like a furious storm drain than a debouching stream. A ramshackle boathouse, incongruously resembling a Swiss chalet, clung to the bank across from the waterfall.
'What on earth—?'
'Astonishing, isn't it?' Holmes was staring morosely at the water that lay a good forty feet below us. It was impossible to tell how deep the water was beneath that leaden surface, but it had a definite feeling of profundity. 'Gould's father had the brilliant idea of establishing a quarry here, as a source of income. You see the two ramps cut to haul it out? Nearly overgrown now. When Gould took over in the 1880s he diverted a stream to fill it. He claims it is pleasantly cool on a hot day, to paddle about in a boat.'
I looked at the gaping maw of the almost subterranean lake with distaste. 'It's monstrous. What could his father have been thinking of? Do you suppose Baring-Gould allowed his children down there?'
'Oh, indeed,' he said with a smile of what appeared to be reminiscence on his face. 'They were a rowdy lot, encouraged by their father. Even the girls. One of them nearly drowned during a race of leaky hip-baths—Mary, I think it was.'
I could well believe that the sinister little lake might hold any number of drowned bodies. 'By the looks of the place, she was lucky not to have been swallowed up by one of Jules Verne's lurking sea monsters. May we go?'
We circled the foreboding pit cautiously and found on the other side a small house and a drive and eventually a road. I recognised the sheltered wall where Holmes had sat with his violin the night before, and we walked past it, past the churchyard, through the village and the wet, autumnal woods of Lew Trenchard, and out into the surrounding countryside, not saying much, but working ourselves back into the rhythms of easy intimacy. My feet grew numb but my chest expanded, drawing in the rich air as my eyes rejoiced in the lush green landscape.
We stopped to take lunch at a small public house, where they gave us a rich leek soup and a thick wedge of game pie washed down with a lively dark beer. Rather to my surprise, Holmes asked after my academic work in Oxford. I told him what I had been doing, and over his postprandial pipe he in turn brought me up to date on the progress of our previous case, the legal proceedings against the man whose arrest we had been instrumental in achieving the month before.
Nothing earth-shaking, but when we resumed our rain gear, we had resumed our sense of partnership as well.
Greatly content, we turned back to Lew Trenchard. The rain had let up slightly and the heavy clouds had lifted, so that when we came to the top of a small rise Holmes stopped and pointed out across the stone wall that bordered the road, over the small fields with their half-bare hedgerows, past a scattering of snug farmhouses with gently smoking chimneys, and beyond to where the ground rose, and rose.
From here it looked like a huge wall, placed there to keep the gentle Devonshire countryside at bay. Green slopes around the base gave way to extrusions of dark rock, and the ridge, perhaps four miles away, seemed to tower over our heads.
'Dartmoor,' said Holmes unnecessarily.
'Good Lord,' I said. 'How high is it?'
'Perhaps twelve hundred feet or so higher than we are here. It appears more, does it not?'
'It looks like a fortress.'
'Over the centuries, it has effectively served as one. It has certainly kept the casual visitor away.'
'I can believe that,' I said emphatically. The moor loomed up, cold and fierce and daunting and uncomfortable, a geographical personality that seemed very aware of us, yet at the same time scornful of our timidity and weakness. In the distance, one of the hills dimly visible through the clouds was crowned with a shape that seemed too regular to be natural. It looked proud and tiny and out of place, as if trying to convince itself that the hill it rode on could not shrug it off if it wished.
'What is that building?' I asked Holmes.
He followed my gaze. 'Brentor Church. Dedicated in the fourteenth century, to Saint Michael, I believe.'
I smiled; of course it would be a church, and could only be to St Michael, the choice of missionaries the world around seeking to quell the local spirits by planting a mission on the site of the native holy places and giving it over to St Michael and all his Angels. Somehow, the valiant little outthrust of a building did not appear convinced of the conquest.
I looked back at the rising moor, and decided that I could not blame the Brentor Church; I myself did not relish the idea of breaching those walls and walking out onto the flat expanse of the moorland within, no more than I would have relished a swim in the quarry lake next to Lew House—and for similar reasons.
I became aware of Holmes, studying my face. I shot him a brief smile and pulled my coat more closely together over my chest. 'It looks cold,' I said, but he was not fooled.
'It is a place that encourages fanciful thoughts,' he said indulgently. However, I noticed that even he cast a quick glance at the presence on the horizon before we resumed our path to Lew House.
We arrived back in time for afternoon tea, which we took by ourselves, as Baring-Gould was resting. It was a superb reward for our day's wet outing, and I gathered that Mrs Elliott had taken advantage of the Harpers'
