The Moor by Laurie R. King Read Free Book Online

imagine," I murmured.

    "At any rate, Russell, the point is that Lady Howard and her hound have been seen on the moor."

    During Holmes' recitation, Baring-Gould, pausing occasionally to correct Holmes, had gone to a cupboard in the corner and returned with a very large, heavily worn, rolled-up map, which he now spread out across the worktable on top of the other. This one was of a smaller scale, the Ordnance Survey's one-inch map—although I saw, looking more closely at it, that it actually comprised portions of four or five adjoining maps, carefully trimmed and fastened together so as to encompass the entire moor and its surrounding towns. Corrections had been made in a number of places, roads crossed out and redrawn and the names of tors and hamlets rewritten: Laughter Tor had become Lough Tor, Haytor Rocks changed to Hey Tor, Crazywell Pool was corrected to Clakeywell. The writing was cramped and sloping, undoubtedly that of Baring-Gould.

    Before Baring-Gould could begin, the door at the end of the room opened and a woman with iron-grey hair and an iron-hard face put her head inside.

    "Pardon me, Rector," she said, "but you wanted me to tell you when the Harpers came in."

    "The Harpers? Oh yes. Would you feed them, Mrs Elliott, and get them settled in? I'll not be much longer here."

    The housekeeper nodded and began to draw back, then stopped and addressed Holmes. "You're not tiring him, I trust," she said, sounding threatening.

    "We are trying not to do so," Holmes said.

    She studied her master for a minute, then withdrew.

    "Another sign of the unrest on the moor," Baring-Gould said with a sigh. "Longtime residents, people with roots deep into the peat, pulling up and moving away. Like Josiah Gorton, Sally Harper's father was one of my songmen. I collected two ballads and three tunes from the man, oh, it must be nearly thirty years ago. He gave me an alternative verse to 'Green Broom,' as I recall, as well as a sprightly tune, set with most unseemly words that I had to rewrite before it could be published. Sally was a blooming young thing then, and now she and her husband have had to sell off their farm up near Black Tor, a very old place with several generations of newtakes added to the original. Never had children, and although they have a bit of money from the farm sale, the house they have their eyes on near Milton Abbot isn't ready yet. I felt I ought to help out, and it'll only be for a few days. Hard to believe it was that many years ago. Where were we? Yes, Josiah Gorton."

    He bent closely over the fine lines of the map, squinting for a moment until he had his bearings, and his long, gnarled finger came down in the upper left quadrant of the map, tracing an uneven line down to the lower right.

    "This is the most likely route for Gorton to have been taken," he said, which, I realised to my surprise, was for my sake, not that of Holmes, who had already been over the route. He then drew his hand back and put it down a short distance from where he had started. "And here is the place Lady Howard's coach was seen, on the night Gorton disappeared." This was, judging by the few roads and fewer dwellings, one of the most deserted areas of the entire moor, a place thick with the Gothic script mapmakers use to indicate antiquities: hut circles, stone rows, stone avenues, tumuli, and ancient trackways, as well as an ominous scattering of those grass-tuft symbols that indicate marshland. There were no orange roads for miles, or even the hollow lines of minor roads, only densely gathered contour lines, numerous streams, and the markings for "rough pasture." A howling wilderness indeed.

    What was a kistvaen ? I wondered, seeing the word on the map, but Holmes spoke before I could ask.

    "Who on earth was out in that wasteland to see a spectral coach?" he demanded.

    "It is not a wasteland, Holmes," Baring-Gould corrected him sharply. "Merely sparsely populated. A farmworker saw it. He was benighted on his way home