Read The Moor for Free Online Page B

shoved the second pair up to join the first and straightened his back. He took in my trousers, and his face went even more sour.

    "Good morning, Miss Russell. My friend here tells me that you prefer that peculiar form of address over the 'Mrs' to which you are entitled."

    "Er, yes, I do. Thank you. Good morning, Mr Baring-Gould. Good morning, Holmes."

    "I see you found Mrs Elliott's breakfast," Baring-Gould stated, seeing the cup I still held.

    "I found it, yes."

    His old eyes beneath their remarkably rounded brows sharpened. "Inedible?" he asked.

    "It's all right," I hastened to say. "I often just take coffee in the morning."

    "Ask Mrs Elliott if you want something. I did tell her," he said in an aside to Holmes. "The only time the woman uses those chafing dishes is when there are twenty eggs to keep warm and a gallon of coffee. Was the coffee boiled away?" he shot at me.

    "Almost, yes. I snuffed out the flame as I came through."

    "Never mind, she'll be making more shortly. When there are guests in the house she produces meals eighteen hours a day, and she'll be anxious to make up for the first impression you had of her household. Women are quite mad when it comes to hospitality."

    I bit down hard on my tongue, though truth to tell I wouldn't have known quite where to start. Holmes made a noise deep in his throat that was not quite a cough, and hastily returned to the map. I took a swallow of my coffee-flavoured milk and turned my back on the two men to peruse the books on the walls, stopping to remove one from time to time and glance into it.

    "So, judging by this," Holmes said, continuing the conversation that had broken off with my entrance, "Josiah Gorton might readily have been brought from the place where he was last seen down to where he was found, without a soul seeing it."

    "Oh yes, easily, by anyone who knows the moor."

    "How intimate a knowledge would be required?"

    "I should have thought a week or two of wandering might do it. That and a good map."

    "It's a great pity, Gould, that I could not come at the time. The body might have told many tales."

    The old man made no polite effort to excuse Holmes his preoccupation, although he admitted, "I was not informed myself until after he had been prepared for burial. If you wish to speak with the women who laid his body out, I can give you their names."

    "I may do, later. Now tell me, where was this dog-and-carriage apparition seen? This is another reference to a local folktale, Russell," he explained. I looked up from the encyclopaedia article on pineapples that I was reading. "A particularly difficult local noblewoman—"

    "Noble by marriage only," inserted Baring-Gould.

    "A woman who married a local lord," Holmes corrected himself, "lost him, along with three other husbands, under circumstances the local populace thought suspicious, with some justification. She was never officially accused and tried, but for her sins she is said to be condemned to riding in a coach made of the bones of her dead husbands, driven by a headless horseman and led by a black hound with a single eye in the centre of his forehead. The carriage drives at midnight from the ancestral house near Tavistock up to Okehampton castle for Lady Howard to pluck one blade of grass—"

    "The hound plucks it," Baring-Gould sternly corrected him.

    "How could a hound pluck a blade of grass?" objected Holmes.

    "I merely tell you what the story says."

    "But a hound—"

    "Holmes," I interrupted.

    "Oh very well, the hound plucks the grass, and not until every blade is plucked—or bitten—can Lady Howard be free to take her rest. It's a popular story, with songs and such, that by the way probably gave Stapleton the idea for his personal variation on the so-called Baskerville hound—which does not, in the legend, actually glow. It is said, I should mention, to be highly unlucky to be offered a ride in the coach, and certain death actually to enter in with Lady Howard."

    "So I should