The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The wind made a grab at Antony Largo’s voice and the folded fabric of the car’s roof flapped violently behind Jane. She sank down in the little seat to hear the rest of the stuff he presumably hadn’t felt able to say inside the hotel.

‘—An artist and turned her into a skivvy. You had to prove you didn’t need any of us: “I’m gonnae show these bastards, I’m getting out of London and create a wee paradise and get m’self fit and youthful again and make them all as sick as pigs.” How naive is that? Truth of it is, you do need us, you arsehole.’

Ben hung grimly on to the wheel, slowing the car, breathing in deeply, swallowing something. ‘The building on your left,’ he said finally, through his teeth, ‘is Hergest Court.’

Disappointing.

Like, it should have been bigger. Must have been bigger once, seeing it was built on a motte, an obvious castle mound above unkempt grounds and what might have been an old pond, even a moat. It was about fifty yards back from the road, part stone, part timbered. The stone end had a sloping roof, the timbered end just stopped.

‘Like it’s been sawn off,’ Jane said.

‘This is only a fragment of what it used to be.’ Ben had reversed into a track of hard mud and turned the car to face the house.

It looked stark, the way buildings with timber framing rarely did. There ought to be wooded hills rising behind it, but there were only the cold fields and the waxy sky. On the sawn-off side were sporadic trees — a gloomy yew, a bent pine — and then some industrial-looking farm buildings.

‘Rather forlorn now, I admit,’ Ben said. ‘Been let out in recent years by the owners. Lived in usually by tenant farmers, and it was even a rural art gallery for a while. You can tell by the mound it’s built on that it used to be fortified, way back.’

‘How far back?’ Jane asked, interested now — more so than if it had been tarted up inside some mock- Elizabethan knot-garden.

‘Well, thirteenth century at least. That’s recorded.’

‘It’s no’ my idea of Baskerville Hall,’ Antony Largo said.

Ben switched off the engine, and the atmosphere between him and Largo seemed to tauten, like some invisible sheet of cellophane dividing the front seats. Jane hunched into a corner of the back seat and kept her hands in the pockets of her fleece. No other vehicle had passed since they’d arrived. No smoke was coming out of any of the three visible chimneys of Hergest Court.

‘By the fifteenth century, it had become the house of the Vaughans,’ Ben said. ‘The most important family in the history of Kington.’

Antony stretched his legs. ‘And they’re your prototype Baskervilles?’

‘There is a long-established Baskerville family in the area, which accounts for the name. But the Vaughans have the history. The central figure is Thomas Vaughan, who switched from the Lancastrian side to the Yorkists in the Wars of the Roses. Killed at the Battle of Banbury in 1469. He was known as Black Vaughan.’

‘Naturally,’ Antony said.

Ben frowned. ‘Because of his black hair, apparently. To distinguish him from his brother who had red hair.’

‘Maybe you could just not mention that.’

Jane said quickly, ‘It was Hugo Baskerville in the book, wasn’t it? The guy who was supposed to have brought down the curse on the family?’

‘A wild, profane and godless man, according to Conan Doyle’s Baskerville manuscript.’ Ben turned around to face her. ‘Conan Doyle brings his legend forward almost exactly two centuries, to the time of the Great Rebellion — the English Civil War. So both the historical background and Doyle’s created one feature civil wars which tore the country apart. Doyle puts Hugo in the seventeenth rather than the fifteenth century. It’s exactly how an author would muddy the waters.’

‘And there was a girl, wasn’t there?’ Jane said.

‘A neighbouring yeoman’s daughter whom Hugo fancies and abducts. He drags her back to Baskerville Hall, but she escapes down the ivy from an upstairs room that night, while he and his cronies are getting pissed — the inference being that, hearing their ribald laughter, she suspects that they’re all going to come up and gang-rape her. When Hugo finds that she’s gone, his night’s pleasure denied him, he offers himself, body and soul, to the Powers of Darkness if he can be allowed to catch up with her again. Then he mounts his horse, orders the hunting pack to be unleashed and rides off furiously across the moor, with his hounds, to hunt her down.’

‘Across the moor,’ Antony looked around. ‘Do I see a moor?’

Ben frowned. ‘For which, if we were shooting the scene, we might substitute Hergest Ridge. Which begins’ — he jerked a thumb at where the land rose steeply behind the car — ‘just there. It’s wild, it has its curious features. And Stanner Rocks are surely as brooding as any Dartmoor tor.’

Antony smiled.

‘What happened to the girl?’ Jane asked. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Hugo’s companions go chasing after him,’ Ben said. ‘They’re scared of what he’ll do if he catches up with her. They encounter a night shepherd on the moor who’s in such a state of terror that he can hardly speak. He tells them he’s seen the hounds pursuing the hapless maiden, followed by Hugo on his black mare. And then, silently following Hugo, the worst thing of all.’

‘Another hound.’ Antony Largo laid on this melodramatically spooky Scottish voice, like Private Fraser in those old Dad’s Army episodes. ‘Only bigger… and meaner.’

‘They eventually find the girl in a clearing, dead of fatigue or fear,’ Ben said. ‘And then they find Hugo. And, standing over him, a great black beast, bigger than any hound—’

‘—Ever seen by mortal eyes,’ Antony Largo said.

Ben finally turned to him. ‘You’ve actually read it, then, Antony.’

‘Of course I’ve read it, you tosser, I’m a pro. I do my prep — even for this sh— So, here’s your beastie plucking at Hugo’s throat, and then it finally rips it all away.’ Antony clenched his teeth and growled until his own laughter began to choke him. ‘And it turns on these guys, with its jaws all dripping with blood and flesh and its eyes on fire. And they all shit themselves on the spot and leg it. End of legend.’

Ben didn’t laugh. ‘Not exactly.’

‘Yeah, OK. From then on, if the Hound is heard howling in the night or seen prowling the precincts, then it’s no’ what you’d call a fortunate omen for the Baskervilles.’

‘It means death,’ Ben said.

‘We know that,’ Jane said. ‘But, like, how closely does that match the story of this Black Vaughan?’

Ben didn’t reply. He put his shoulder against the driver’s door, crunched it open and stepped out onto the edge of the road.

‘Obviously, not that closely at all,’ Antony murmured.

Ben leaned against the car. ‘There are actually local people who won’t come down here at night. Don’t smile, Antony, this isn’t the city, this isn’t even the soft country. Vaughan was associated with a black hound, which some sources suggested was in some way satanic. Now, although the spectral black dog is a familiar motif in British folklore, the death connection is less common. But I can tell you that there are still some local people who just won’t come this way for fear of meeting it on the road. I have that on good authority.’

‘Say that on camera, will they, pal?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

Jane glanced across at Hergest Court. Nothing was moving. ‘Have people seen something?’

‘It’s odd,’ Ben said. ‘You talk to people in town and they’ll say, “Oh, old so-and-so’s seen the Hound, he’ll tell you about it. And then, when you find old so-and-so, he looks blank, never even heard of it. Which is extremely unconvincing and, in my view, the denials prove the fact of it. As I understand it, what’s been seen is a big black dog that disappears into walls, solid things. And there are other related phenomena that I’ll explain about later.’