The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

this on the Net? — the then editor of the Strand said that he understood Fletcher Robinson obtained the original story from — and I quote — “A Welsh guidebook”. I can show you that reference in two biographies of Doyle. So while I couldn’t deny that he borrowed elements of the Cabell legend to flesh out the scenario, all the evidence still says it starts right here.’

‘And the small fact that the coachman Doyle and Robinson employed in Devon was one… Harry Baskerville? How does that equate, my friend?’

‘Oh.’ Jane was dismayed. ‘Is that true?’

‘Perfectly true,’ Ben confirmed. ‘And Baskerville himself assumed that his name had been borrowed. However, Stashower, in his biography of Conan Doyle, points out that Doyle mentioned the proposed title The Hound of the Baskervilles in a letter to his mother before he and Robinson went to Devon — before he even met Harry Baskerville. I can show you the reference.’

Antony didn’t reply. Jane was delighted. The awkward encounter with the shooters seemed to have given Ben a blast of confidence.

It had been almost funny — these two guys, with their South Wales accents, up from Ebbw Vale, claiming they’d been hired by a local farmer to get rid of foxes. Well, Jane had realized at once that this was bollocks; the usual situation with rough shooting was that guys like this paid the farmers for the privilege.

Anyway, the shooters had got totally the wrong idea, assuming that Ben, despite the jogging kit, was some local hunter warning them off his patch. And Ben, being Ben, hadn’t corrected the impression, he’d played to it — Jane could hear his voice changing, acquiring this military edge. Initially, he’d just been rescuing the situation, saving face, but in the end he’d had the Ebbw Vale guys backing defensively away, up the public footpath to Hergest Ridge, bawling after them, ‘Bloody cowboys! Your card’s marked in this area, believe it!’

He might not have been potentially one of the greats, as Amber had put it, but he was still a bloody good actor. And now he was on a roll, his argument flowing.

‘So, like, why did Conan Doyle transfer the whole thing to Dartmoor?’ Jane asked.

Ben shrugged, lifting his hands from the wheel. ‘Don’t you find that interesting in itself? Also, why did Doyle decide to rubbish the concept of a ghostly hound in the book when in real life he’d have pounced on it with all the enthusiasm he lavished nearly twenty years later on those patently faked photos of the Cottingley Fairies?’

‘Right.’ Jane knew those pictures: close-ups of innocent young girls’ faces with these archetypal Arthur Rackham-style fairies frolicking in front of them. Obvious fakes now, but convincing enough in the early days of photography. It wasn’t so much of an indictment of Conan Doyle’s gullibility.

Ben turned into the tarmac drive leading to Kington church. ‘What’s also interesting is that originally The Hound wasn’t going to be a Sherlock Holmes story at all. Doyle had already killed Holmes by then — dragged over the Reichenbach Falls in the arms of his arch-enemy Moriarty. And then he writes what’s become a famous letter to the editor of the Strand, announcing his plans for The Hound with the words, “I have the idea of a real creeper.” But you see it wasn’t, at that time, going to be a Holmes adventure at all. So when Holmes was brought in, Doyle wrote the story as if it was something that had happened pre-Reichenbach.’

‘And did he…?’ Antony eyed Ben thoughtfully — some respect at last, Jane thought. ‘I’m sorry, I know he was a fellow Scot, but my knowledge here is a wee bit scant… Did Conan Doyle write other stories that were essentially supernatural?’

Ben nosed the car into some bushes, where the ground was still furred with frost. He pulled on the handbrake with a fusillade of ratchet clicks and switched off the engine.

‘Yes, Antony. Of course.’

‘So when he decided to make it a Holmes tale, he knew that’d be an aspect going out the window, Holmes being the ultimate rationalist. If Holmes is gonnae solve the case, there has to be a rational explanation.’

‘Yes. And what I’m wondering… was Doyle specifically asked by the Baskerville family — or someone else — to put in some distance? There’s a traditional belief in this area that he was distantly related to the Baskervilles, who were in turn, way back, related by marriage to the Vaughans. Obviously, there’s still a lot of research to be done here. Hidden connections.’

‘He didn’t have to use the name at all, though, did he?’

‘Still, hell of a good name, isn’t it? Where would that title be without it?’ Still buzzing, like he’d been snorting coke or something, Ben stepped out onto the frosted grass. ‘Come and meet the Vaughans.’

There was no tradition of shamanism or the priesthood in Lew Jeavons’s family. He’d come to England from Jamaica as a teenager, his father working on the buses. As a young man he went to New York where he was ordained and met an Englishwoman, on attachment to Harvard, an academic.

‘And we found our way back here. Which I always felt was my home.’

‘You were… into healing in America?’

‘Well, I’ve always thought I was channelling healing.’ He nodded at the big cat on his knees. ‘Talk to Lucius about it. He was run over on the main road at Fromes Hill in the summer. The driver didn’t stop. I’m the next car along, and I pick him up, along with his exploded intestines. Take him along to the vet, who puts back the intestines, shakes his head, takes out his syringe. But I shake my head. Bring Lucius back here, to be my cat for whatever time he has left.’

‘He looks brilliant.’

‘He limps a little now, that’s all. Cats respond directly to love and hands-on. People are more complex. My wife… she should’ve recovered, that was the point. It wasn’t such a big heart attack, they didn’t think it was a bypass situation. I was convinced she was going to recover fully, and I took my eye off of the ball, and she had a second heart attack. I was leading a healing ministry in Oxford at the time, and we were all full of it: missionary zeal — hey, this is what the Church of England’s been lacking for so long! And in the middle of all this healing frenzy, my beloved wife, she just ups and dies. Happens within a month. What was that saying to me? What was He telling me?’

‘You must’ve been… bitter.’

‘And bewildered. I didn’t think I was arrogant, I didn’t think I needed bringing down — and there, you see, that proves I was arrogant, my first thought was that it was because of me that she was taken away — God telling the big healer, You are nothing, man!’

‘How old was she?’

‘Forty-nine. No age. Yes, I was bitter, sure I was bitter. What do they think — we can’t hate God because we’re priests?’

Merrily said, ‘The… problem I have with this is the obvious one: some people recover, some don’t. Some people who are prayed for — really, really prayed for, by many people…’

‘I know.’

‘So all the hopes build up and, in the end…’

‘It’s a lottery?’

‘Or it’s not our decision. Not a decision we can — or should — try to influence, despite what the Gospel —’

‘Oh boy,’ Jeavons said. ‘You really don’t get it, do you? We do it because it’s all we do. It’s fundamental: the care of bodies, the care of souls, the care of the living earth. It’s how we develop within ourselves — by suffering through our failure and trying again and suffering some more. We suffer, Merrilee. A doctor fails to heal someone, he says, Well, hell, I prescribed all the right drugs, I did what I could. But we must suffer. And that isn’t what you wanted to hear, is it?’

‘I… don’t know what I wanted.’

‘Maybe you just don’t understand about the nature of suffering, and that suffering can be a truly positive state. We should discuss this sometime.’