The Moor

together by a woman could not have been so unremittingly solid, dark, and male. Even the many decorative touches were masculine, the carpets and statues, pillows, wall tapestries, and paintings all large, intense in colour, and lush in texture, the overall effect so rich one could almost taste it. Studying the room in mild curiosity, trying to analyse how this came about, I noticed the subtle use of geometry, from the square of the chairs and settee before the fireplace to the triangle formed by the arrangement of three discrete centres that were placed with deceptive thoughtlessness, across the expanse of floor.

It was a collection of deep red, blue, and black needlework pillows on the sofa opposite the fireplace that nudged me into realising what the room reminded me of: Moroccan architecture and decorative arts, the elaborate arabesques built around the most basic geometry, as if the strength of a Norman church were to be combined with the delicacy of a piece of lacework. It was very unlikely, given the setting of a building from the Elizabethan era risen from foundations two hundred years older, but the hall that had at first seemed cluttered and overly furnished with colour and pattern, now in the dimmer light of the many thick candles assumed the persona of an Oriental palace. I smiled: Our dusky host had made for himself a Moorish retreat in the midst of Dartmoor.

Holmes took a sip from his glass, and then beat his host to the questions. 'Tell us, Mr Ketteridge, just how a Californian who struck it rich in the goldfields comes to settle in remotest Dartmoor?'

'I see my friend has been talking about me,' he said with a smile.

'Gould has said nothing about your past,' said Holmes.

Ketteridge raised his eyebrows and looked slightly wary—the standard response when Holmes pulled personal history out of what appeared to be thin air.

'You guessed—' Ketteridge instantly corrected himself with a conspiratorial smile. 'You deduced that? Perhaps I won't ask what you based it on.' His smile was a bit strained, and he took a swallow from his glass before continuing.

'It was Alaska,' he began. 'Not the Californian fields, which were either worked out or under claim long before I was born. I was living in Portland in July of 1887, twenty-one years old and making a not very good living as a small shopkeeper, when on the sixteenth of the month rumours began to spread like wildfire that a ship had put in to San Francisco with fifty-thousand dollars of gold in a single suitcase. The next day this old rust-bucket the Portland put into Seattle harbour with nearly two tons of gold—two tons! More than a million dollars of gold, right there in one ship. Two hours after the news hit Portland, my dry-goods store was up for sale, cheap. I unloaded it in less than a week, bought my provisions, and lit out for the north.

'I never did find how many ships full of gold seekers had already left, but I was on one of the first dozen. Still, the river route freezes early, and I couldn't risk getting stuck, so cross-country it was, to Skagway and Dyea, across the Chilkoot Pass and north into the Yukon. Thought I'd make it to the goldfields before winter set in, but between one thing and another, I met it full on. Jesus—oh, pardon me, Mrs Holmes. Lord, it was cold. I nearly died—you wouldn't believe the kind of cold there. Tears freeze your eyes shut and break your lashes right off, spit is frozen solid before it hits the ground, leather boots that get wet will crack right across if they're not kept greased. And oh yes, if you don't see a tiny hole in your glove, your finger's turned to ice before you notice the cold.'

Smiling, he held out his left hand and wiggled the stump of the little finger.

'Still, I was lucky. I didn't starve or freeze, or get washed away in a river half turned to ice or buried under an avalanche or eaten alive by mosquitos or bears or wolfs or shot by an ornery claim-jumper or any of the thousand other ways to die. No, I made it, a little the worse for wear, it's true, but with adventure enough for a lifetime, and gold enough as well. Yes, I was lucky. When I got to the fields I found that there was still plenty of gold for a man possessed of stamina and a shovel. Within months of the discovery, the smallest creek and most remote hole were claimed.'

Richard Ketteridge was soon gone from the fields, with gold enough to buy his luxury for life.

'I married my childhood sweetheart, and buried her ten years later. Somehow it wasn't all so fine after she died, and so I sold up and began to wander: the Japans, Sydney, Cape Town. I ended up here a couple of years ago, heard about it from a friend up in Scotland less than two weeks after I entered the country. Now if that isn't fate for you—it took my fancy and so I stayed. I like the air here. It reminds me of the best parts of Alaska, in the spring. Still, the winters are cold, and I'm beginning to feel the old itch again, more than the odd month in New York or Paris can scratch.'

His story had the worn and polished texture of a favourite possession, taken out regularly to be handed around and admired, and I could easily imagine him sitting with his new friends in a Scottish hunting lodge after a day's rough shoot, trading stories of unlikely places and successful ventures.

'You plan to move, then?' Holmes asked.

'I think so.'

'Baring-Gould will miss you,' commented Holmes.

'I'll miss him. He's a crazy old coot, but he does tell some fine stories. I'll think of him when I'm sitting in the sun, in the south of France, maybe, or even Hong Kong for a real change. My secretary would like that, wouldn't you, David?'

I had not been aware of the secretary's presence behind me, so light were his footsteps and so heavy the carpeting. He came into the low glow around the fire, his shoulders hunched in embarrassment, and went to the coffee tray to pour himself a cup. He had been away less than two hours, but he sounded stone-cold sober now.

'I really must apologise,' he said to us. 'I have some sort of blood imbalance that makes me highly sensitive to the effects of alcohol. I shouldn't drink at all, really. I make such a fool of myself. I do beg your pardon if I seemed at all…forward.'

'My dear boy,' said Ketteridge, 'I'm sure you offended none of us. I was merely concerned, knowing your sensitivity, that you might make yourself ill.'

It had sounded more like anger than concern in his voice, back in the dining room, but I assumed that he was being generous in excusing the younger man's lapse. Employees did not normally indulge in public drunkenness, even in the relative informality of an American household, and Scheiman knew it: He sat in a chair apart from his employer and the guests, away from the fire.

'So, David. Do you have a story from Dartmoor for us?'

'I, er, they're not really all that interesting. That is to say, I find them interesting, but—'

'Mr Scheiman,' said Holmes in resignation. 'Perhaps you might tell my wife the story of the Baskerville curse.'

Scheiman looked startled, and glanced at his employer for instructions. Although Ketteridge had so firmly discouraged his secretary from inflicting these doggy reminiscences on us, he could hardly now insist that his guest be saved from them when it was Holmes himself asking. Ketteridge shrugged.

'As our guest suggests, David. Do tell the story of the black hound of Dartmoor.' And so Scheiman, looking uncomfortable, began his story.

'In doing some reading about the history of the area, I came across the story that the Baskerville curse was actually based on. Not the one as given in The Hound of the Baskervilles,' he said, with an apologetic glance at Holmes, 'but the true story. There lived in the seventeenth century a squire by the name of Richard Cavell or Cabell. He was a man of great passions, who had the fortune, or perhaps misfortune, to marry him a beautiful young wife.

'For the first year or two all was well, except that they had no children. Soon, however, he discovered that she was betraying him. He forbade her visitors and kept her at home, but it continued, and became ever more indiscriminate. He sent away every male household servant aside from the near-children and the truly elderly, he hedged her around with limits, but still his wife turned her back on him. His jealousy grew. When he saw her flirting with a stable hand, he hit her and forbade her to ride. When he witnessed her in conversation with the farm manager, he punished her again and locked her in the house. He grew afraid that the women in the house would plot with their mistress to bring her lovers, and so he got rid of the old servants and hired new ones. He loved his wife and he hated her, and soon the only friend she was allowed was her dog.

'The day came when he again caught her in yet another transgression. He beat her nearly to death, threw her in her room, and took the key.

'By this time the woman feared for her life. She let herself down the wall of the house on the ivy and fled, on foot, for the house of her sister across the moor.

'She did not make it. He discovered her absence, mounted his horse, and rode her down and, in his passion