'By comparison, I'm sure it is. How much farther do we have?'
We did actually have a destination in this trackless waste. We had taken on the role of eyes and legs for Baring-Gould, but even Holmes, who had covered much of this same ground thirty years before, did not have the man's intimate knowledge of the place from which judgements could be drawn. The old man back in Lew Trenchard might instantly visualise the lie of the land at any given spot on the map, but his representatives needed to walk it first. Hence our expedition, and if the weather was not as we might wish, it did not appear that waiting for a clear day was a practical option. For all I knew this was a clear day, for Dartmoor.
Our trip was to be a large circle, putting up at a public house for the night halfway along. We were looking now for the place where the dead tin miner had last been seen, and after that would try to find the spot where in July a benighted farmhand had been terrified by a ghostly coach and a dog with a glowing eye, and the other place, two miles away and a month further on, where the courting couple had been rudely interrupted by the same coach.
I finished my apple, Holmes knocked out his pipe and stowed it, and we both settled our hats more firmly over our noses and ducked out of the leather doorway.
'Holmes,' I said, raising my collar and resuming the hunched-over walking position that was necessary in order to keep the rain off my spectacles. 'If Lady Howard stops her ghostly carriage to offer us a ride, I for one will accept. With pleasure.'
***
Josiah Gorton's last known path told us nothing whatsoever. Other than being one remote area among 350 square miles of remote countryside, there was nothing to distinguish it. According to Baring-Gould, the farm labourer who stopped to talk with Gorton lived over the hill and often travelled that way of a Saturday night, on his way to the inn where Gorton had spent the afternoon.
'Why, if he'd been snug inside all afternoon, did Gorton leave?' I asked. 'I'd have thought Saturday evening the high point of the week, particularly for someone accustomed to cadging drinks.'
'According to the publican when I was through here the other day, Gorton said he had business to attend to, unlikely as that might sound. No need to enquire further at the inn.' And so saying he turned, not in the direction of the inn, but towards the remote farm over the hill. Stifling a sigh, I followed.
It was a small farmstead, mossy and pinched and cowering down into the hillside away from the elements.
'A place this size couldn't have more than one hired man,' Holmes observed, heading for the barn. There we found him, a young man with a head like a furry turnip, scratching the broad, flat expanse of it beneath his cap and pursing his lips as he stood staring down at a prostrate cow. He glanced at us incuriously, as if we were oft-seen residents of the place rather than that rarity, the unexpected visitor, and then returned immediately to his perusal of the huge, heaving sides of the animal at his feet.
'I doan s'pose you knaw how ta turn a calf,' were his first words to us.
'Er, no,' Holmes admitted. 'Unless?' He turned to me, and the young man looked up in hope.
'No,' I said firmly. 'Sorry.'
His face fell back into its morose state. 'I can't do'n. I tried an' tried, but my hand, she just gets squeezed and dies. Poor ole cow,' he said with unexpected affection. 'Her'll just have to bide 'til Doctor gets here, that's all. He'll charge me half what the calf be worth,' he added. Long, contemplative seconds ticked by before he looked up, realising at last that he was not conversing with family members or two spirits of the moor. He asked, 'Be ye lost?'
'I do not believe we are,' said Holmes. 'Not if you're Harry Cleave.'
'That I am.' He put out a meaty hand that had all too obviously been but lightly sluiced since its last exploration of the cow's birth canal, and with only the briefest of hesitations, Holmes shook it. I left my own gloved hands firmly in my pockets, and instead smiled widely and nodded like a fool as introductions were made.
'Well,' said Cleave, 'no sense maundering, baint nothing I can do 'til Doctor comes. I sent the lil maid to vetch 'en,' he explained, 'when I seed how she lay. Let us go by the house and 'ave a cup.'
Paradise and ambrosia were the words he had uttered, and we crowded his heels across the muddy yard to the low stone farmhouse.
It was warm inside, from a peat fire burning low and red in the wide stone fireplace. I removed my glasses and could see little, but my cold-shrivelled skin began tentatively to unfold, and my nose told me of a soup on the fire and fragrant herbs strewn underfoot. I patted my way to a bench near the fireplace and settled in for what I sincerely hoped was to be a long and leisurely visit.
The tea Cleave made for us was fresh and powerful and sweetened as a matter of course by our host; what was more, he had cleansed his hands with soap before making it. I removed a layer of clothing, resumed my warmed spectacles, and examined the room and the young man, wondering if both were typical of the moor.
Cleave was a quiet, self-contained figure, short but heavily muscled. His dark eyes shone with an intelligent interest, and humour lurked ready at their corners. His easy authority over the house and its furnishings spoke more of an owner than a hired man, and I thought the simple room, light and tidy, suited him well.
'So,' he said, settling himself at a scrubbed wooden table with his own teacup. 'You comed out auver th'moor for ta vine 'Arry Cleave, and naow you've vound'n.'
I expected Holmes to follow his standard routine for such investigations, particularly useful in gossipy rural areas, which was to invent some piece of spectacular flimflam behind which he could hide his real purpose. I had even settled back in anticipation to watch the expert, but to my utter astonishment he instead chose to use the simple truth.
'I'm a friend of the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould. He asked me to look into Josiah Gorton's death.'
At the first name, Cleave's humour bloomed full across his face in surprise and wholehearted approval. It dimmed somewhat at the second name, but he left that for the moment.
'The Squire, by Gar. How is he?'
'Old. Tired, and not very well.'
