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couched in a nearly unintelligible dialect and put to us in a tiny,
multiple-purpose room already overcrowded with humanity, two dogs, and a
basket of newly hatched chicks peeping beside the inglenook fireplace that
functioned as kitchen range. Who was she to question the insanity of two
outsiders spilling onto her doorstep from out of the fog?
Holmes took off his hat politely, and answered her as she moved around us to
fetch two more plates and the necessary cutlery and mugs to go with them.
We re not exactly here on a holiday stroll, madam. We heard that there was a
sighting of Lady Howard s coach not far from here, and we were eager to hear
more. You see, he said, warming to his story and taking his place on the
bench and a spoon in his hand, we collect odd tales such as that of Lady
How
There was a sudden gurgling, clicking noise from the inglenook, emerging from
what I had thought to be a pile of blankets draped across a chair to dry near
the heat. I could make no sense of the sound but it silenced everyone in the
room, including Holmes. The two men and the farmwife all turned to stare at
Holmes, and I saw with astonishment the look of chagrin spreading across his
face.
What was that? I demanded. I didn t hear.
He or she, I beg your pardon, he said to the tiny huddled figure, and
started anew. To translate, the remark was made, and I quote, By Gar, who is
it but Znoop Zherlock? Snoop Sherlock was, I ought to explain, the nickname
given me by the moor dwellers during the Baskerville case. We have here one of
the older residents, evidently, who remembers me. He extricated his long legs
from the bench and went over to the pile of blankets, extending his hand
towards it. A small, gnarled paw appeared, followed by another burst of
unintelligible speech badly distorted, I diagnosed, by a complete lack of
teeth, but still of such a heavy dialectical peculiarity as to constitute a
separate language. I had thought Harry Cleave possessed an accent; I was
mistaken. In fact, I shall not even attempt to transcribe the words as they
were spoken, since an alphabet soup such as Yar! Me luvvers, you mun vale
leery, you cain t a ated since bevower the foggy comed makes for laborious,
if picturesque, reading.
At first hearing, the speech was beyond me, although Holmes seemed to follow
the sense of it readily enough. I merely applied myself to the hot, simple
food that was put before me, and drank the cider in my mug. The talk washed
over me, and as the pangs of cold and hunger subsided, I slowly began to make
sense of what was being said.
The folk in this isolated farmstead were indeed aware of Lady Howard s coach,
and did not like it one bit. The first witness to the apparition, back in
July, had actually been a friend of the young farmhand s second cousin, and
Holmes made haste to interrogate the farmhand as to the whereabouts of his
second cousin s friend, whose euphonious name was Johnny Trelawny. It
appeared, however, that Trelawny had fled the moor, despite being known far
and wide as a brave man, a man indeed formerly thought fearless, who had done
his service on the Western Front and to whom the occasional brawl was not
unknown. There was no consideration that the intense teasing he had received
during the month he remained the sole witness to Lady Howard s coach might be
a contributing factor to Trelawny s disinclination to stay on the moor, and
when Holmes enquired as to the man s employment, and was told that Johnny had
lost his job after assaulting his employer (a known wag who came up to his
employee in the pub and presented him with a tiny newborn puppy, asking if
Trelawny thought it had been fathered by Lady Howard s hound), it seemed to me
that fear was not perhaps the chief contributing factor in the man s
departure. When Holmes ventured to suggest this alternate explanation, it was
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considered, and rejected. No, moor dwellers in general were staying away from
the northwestern quarter of the moor, certainly at night. Johnny Trelawny
would be no exception.
Holmes succeeded in drawing out roughly the date when Trelawny had seen this
vision, establishing that it was probably the Tuesday or Wednesday before the
full moon. However, when he tried to find where Trelawny had gone, the only
point on which the family agreed was that the lad would not have gone back to
his family home in Cornwall, due to a long-standing feud with an uncle.
Exeter, the farmhand thought. Portsmouth, the farmwife suggested, and then
used the opportunity to begin her own tale of another lad who had got a girl
in trouble and run off as far as London, but the girl s father had taken his
savings out of the jar in the woodshed to buy himself a train ticket, and as
he set off across the moor on a dark night&
Stories tumbled out as the cider jug went around and the relief of confession
began to be felt. Voices crossed and were raised and crossed again, with the
constant running commentary of the toothless figure in the corner making a
rhythm like a waterfall for the rest to talk over. Holmes had no difficulty in
steering the tales towards the occult and the unusual, and out of the welter
of sounds I received clear images and phrases, chief among which was a regular
repetition of the phrase, a coorius sarcumstance, pronounced each time with
a shake of the head.
I had to agree, some of the circumstances they described were coorius
indeed; in fact, I should have said they were highly unlikely. The black dogs
and the mysteriously dead sheep any student of the supernatural might have
expected, along with the standard two-headed foals and the infertile clutches
of eggs, but the eagle carrying off a grown ewe made me raise an eyebrow, and
when the farmwife swore that a bolt of lightning had shaken the earth and
knocked one of her best plates from its perch, I closed my ears and reached
for the board of gorgeous yellow cheese to accompany what I decided had to be
my final glass of zyder : England simply did not have earthquakes, not even
in Dartmoor.
Snoop Sherlock valiantly listened to it all, trying hard to shape the
conflicting narratives into hard fact of places and dates, contributing the
odd remark and trying hard to deflect the inevitable spate of Baskerville
reminiscences from the aged figure in the blankets. He finally brought the
Babel to a close by the desperate measure of pulling out his watch and
exclaiming theatrically over the passage of time, looking pointedly at the
window and declaring that the fog seemed to have cleared, and finally standing
up to leave (dealing his head a mighty crack on the low roof beam). We paid
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