The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (9 page)

Amber shook her head. ‘Not exactly. The story hangs on the legend of a ghostly hound which is a sign of death for the Baskerville family. So, OK, there
was
a Baskerville family in this area. Long-established, wealthy... They had a castle or something at Eardisley, which is only about six miles up the road. And there’s a pub called the Baskerville Arms over at Clyro, which is just over the other side of Brilley Mountain.’

‘And did they have a ghostly hound?’

‘No, but the Vaughan family did. They lived at Hergest Court, which is only a mile or so away from here, across the valley. There was a hound that was supposed to mean death for someone in the family if it was seen. And it has been seen. Apparently. Over the years.’

‘To this day?’

Amber shrugged. ‘There are no Vaughans left now. Anyway, Conan Doyle is supposed to have been related to either the Baskervilles or the Vaughans – maybe both, I don’t remember – and it’s believed that he stayed here, in this house, to research the story. Or he heard it while he was staying here. Or something.’

Jane was impressed. If this was true it was well worth all Ben’s efforts. ‘But why would Conan Doyle switch the story to Devon?’

‘We don’t know,’ Amber said. ‘As Kennedy says in his letter, a lot of Holmes enthusiasts reject the Welsh Border theory entirely, because there’s also a Devon legend that fits. Maybe Doyle liked the name Baskerville enough to want to use it but didn’t want to implicate the actual family, so he set the novel somewhere where there aren’t any obvious Baskervilles.’

Jane thought of the stone hounds on the Stanner Hall gateposts. ‘Did the Baskervilles have anything to do with this house?’

‘Not that we know of. It was built by a family called Chancery. It must have been fairly new at the time the book came out in 1902. But it was built to look historic, so maybe it gave Conan Doyle an idea of what he wanted. I mean, it certainly looks more like the Baskerville Hall he describes in the book than Hergest Court does. Just a farmhouse now.’

‘Honey, it’s how novelists work,’ Natalie said. ‘You take a bit of this, bit of that, and muddle it all up so that there are no comebacks.’

Jane recalled something else. ‘A woman brought it up at the murder weekend. She wanted Ben to talk about it, but he hinted he was saving it.’

‘Well, of course he was,’ Amber said. ‘He was saving it for the annual conference of The Baker Street League. The plan was that Ben would get The League to endorse the evidence that this place is quite possibly the real Baskerville Hall, and then we’d start publicizing it. And, at the same time, Antony—’

There was a loud clink and a muted splash. Natalie had tossed a soup ladle into one of the sinks. She stood with her hands on her narrow hips, annoyed.

‘It’s all my fault. If I’d bothered to check out Kennedy on the Net
before
Ben had invited him, we’d all have realized that, as he was born in bloody Tavistock, he might
not
have been an ardent supporter of the theory that
The Hound
had sod-all to do with Devon.’

‘How much does all this matter?’ Jane asked.

‘You can’t do
all
his thinking for him, Nat,’ Amber said. ‘He gets an idea and he’s off. Doesn’t do his homework. He didn’t even know Kennedy had scotched the Herefordshire theory in at least two of his own books.’ She turned to Jane. ‘Dartmoor gets a lot of Hound-related tourism – Americans, Japanese. It’s like King Arthur in Cornwall: they don’t exactly want to share it.’

Jane gazed around the vast kitchen. The high windows were full of pine tops and dark purple dusk. It wasn’t very warm in here.

‘What will you do now?’

Amber shrugged. ‘Ben’s still desperately trying to get hold of Antony, to put him off for a couple of weeks while he rethinks everything. He won’t give up. He can’t. We’ve very little money left, and if we sell up now we sell at a loss.’

‘Who’s Antony?’

‘What?’ Amber closed her eyes, opened them and blinked a few times, shaking her head despairingly. ‘Sorry. Sorry, Jane, I thought you knew about that. Antony Largo. Old mate of Ben’s from Beeb days. Independent producer, documentaries. There’s a series that his outfit’s putting together for Channel Four, called
Punching the Clock
, about successful people hitting hard times and having to make a new start in mid-life. So Antony approaches Ben, and Ben tells him to stuff it – I mean, he refuses to think of himself as being in mid-life, for a
start
. It’s always the beginning for Ben.’

Jane smiled. It was one of the aspects of Ben she most approved of.

‘But it started him thinking,’ Amber said, ‘and he told Antony about his plans to pinch a piece of the Sherlock Holmes tourist trade, and now he’s half-sold him on the idea of a separate documentary on all of
that
. Which would have launched the whole thing nationally – brought us a lot of publicity for the hotel and some sort of fee, presumably.’

‘Also,’ Nat said, ‘the crew would have to stay somewhere, so that would tide us over the lean period before Christmas.’

Amber looked doubtful. ‘Crews aren’t what they used to be. It’s usually one person with a Handycam from Boots. And they’d have been doing most of their filming during the conference of The Baker Street League, when we’d be full up anyway. But that... obviously doesn’t apply any more. We’re stuffed.’

She picked up the double oven glove and slid her hands into it and covered her eyes. Jane wasn’t sure if this was a comic gesture or concealment of actual tears. She imagined Ben telling Amber about the idyllic country-house hotel he’d found for them: open log fires, big, warm, traditional kitchen where she could work her magic. Cosy and romantic. Amber not realizing then that Ben’s idea of romance was a howling in the night and a fiery hound on the moors.

Natalie walked over and put an arm around Amber. The worldly big sister, taller and leaner and more together. ‘We can still do
something
. We can rescue something.’

‘We need more time, and we haven’t got it. Antony’s booked in for tonight, Ben can’t reach him on his mobile. He could turn up any time.’ Amber lowered the oven gloves; her eyes were dry. ‘Look at this place. It’s like some old workhouse.’

‘No, it’s cool,’ Jane said. ‘Really.’

‘It’s bloody freezing, Jane. I keep on at Ben to check out this damp patch under the stairs, and he avoids it. He thinks burst pipes mystically seal themselves. This makes it four leaks we’ve had since the autumn. Does that augur well?’

Jane looked up through the window, moving to her right so that one of the ridges of Stanner Rocks came into view. It was a proven scientific fact that Stanner Rocks were strange, because of the Standing Wave that altered the climate, the comparative darkness of the rock itself, holding the heat, and the thin soil where plants grew that you couldn’t find anywhere else in Britain. Jane felt that, in ancient times, Stanner Rocks would have been sacred, like some gloomy, miniature form of Ayer’s Rock in Australia.

‘I mean, until you live in a place like this you never realize what plumbing’s about,’ Amber wailed. ‘There’s miles of pipe –
miles
.’

‘I mean there’s an energy here,’ Jane said. ‘And it’s right on the Border. On the edge.’

‘We’re all on the edge,’ Amber said bitterly.

Ben, however, when he strode into the kitchen, seemed to have recovered – now apparently relishing the adversity, refocused.

‘I
think
... we’ll put Antony in the tower room.’

‘You couldn’t stop him?’ Amber said in dismay.

‘I stopped trying.’ Ben, in tight black jeans and a white shirt, was swaying like a tightrope walker re-establishing his balance. ‘The more I think about it,
we
don’t need the bloody Baker Street League. What we have is strong enough.’

‘Oh God,’ Amber said.

‘You don’t mind going back to your old room for a couple of nights, do you, Jane?’

‘She already has,’ Amber said. ‘Why do you want to put Antony Largo in the tower room?’

‘More of an atmosphere.’ Ben smiled at Jane. ‘Don’t you think?’

Jane must have blushed or something, because Ben smirked and said, ‘Nip up and open the windows, Jane, would you, and give the bedding a shake.’

‘Right.’

Oh well... Up the steps into the lobby, which now merged with the hall. Up the baronial stairs...

And when you got to the top of the first flight and turned right, through the fire doors, into the ill-lit passage towards the west, it was clear why this part of the house – although it probably had the best rooms – had been set aside by the Foleys as staff quarters.

The problem was, it had been dragged into the 1960s or 1970s and left there. The walls were lined with woodchip, probably to hide the damp, and it was dim and dusty, a languid light drifting from a tall, narrow window at the bottom of the passage. This area of the house needed a lot of money spending on it. Money they probably thought they’d have to spare, but now it had gone, on the basics: keeping the damp out and the heat in. Or trying to.

The first room, convenient for the stairs, was Ben and Amber’s own. What must it have been like when they first arrived here, and they were the only people sleeping in this huge house? This was Mum’s problem with Ledwardine Vicarage magnified about four times. A lot of the time, even now, Ben and Amber would be alone here during the week. Most of the part-time staff – cleaners and waiters – came in daily during the summer, or when there were guests.

‘Jane!’ The fire doors clicking together. It was Ben. ‘Forgot to give you the key.’

He strode ahead of her down the passage, near to the end, unlocking the last door on the right. Actually, she was quite glad to have him here with her. Stupid, huh?

Inside the door, there were steps up into the actual tower, and then another door. When Jane had first started work here, she’d been flattered and excited to be given the room under the witch’s-hat tower. OK, it was big, cold, needed redecorating, but it was, like, you know...
the room under the witch’s-hat tower
.

Ben put on the light. The room had gloomy maroon flock wallpaper, pretty old, and less than half as much furniture as a space this size needed to look vaguely comfortable – the three-quarter divan, the wooden stool serving as a bedside table, the mahogany wardrobe with the cracked mirror.

The aim, apparently, was to create an en-suite bathroom at one end, and this was actually essential before you could legitimately charge anyone for spending a night here and experiencing those incredible views across Hergest Ridge into Wales.

With the light on, all you could see through the triple windows now was a thin slash of electric mauve low in the sky, like the light under a door. Ben stood in the middle of the room, rubbing his hands.

‘Couldn’t take it, then, Jane?’

‘Sorry?’

‘You wanted out.’

‘Well, you know... look at it. It’s like sleeping in... in somewhere too big.’

‘That’s all?’

‘All?’

‘No other reason?’

‘Should there be?’ Sod this; she was giving nothing away – she was going to make him say it.

Ben leaned over his folded arms, rocking slightly. ‘So you had a perfectly untroubled night’s sleep.’

‘Don’t people usually?’

‘One of the builders – when we were having the partition wall taken down, between the hall and lobby – he stayed in here, and he didn’t want to spend a second night.’

‘Oh?’

‘He thought it was haunted.’

‘What happened?’

‘Oh... noises, he reckoned. Breathing. And he said he thought he saw a woman’s shape outlined against the window. Next morning, he was not a happy man. Said he thought we’d set him up.’

Jane struggled to bring up a smile. ‘Did you set
me
up?’

‘I thought... well, you’re quite interested in this sort of thing, aren’t you? Weird stuff.’

‘So-so. Ghosts are a bit... I mean, they’re usually just imprints, aren’t they? Emotional responses trapped in the atmosphere. Nothing to worry about.’ She was furious –
the bastard
. ‘I mean, I wish you’d
told
me...’

‘You’d have been expecting something then. Pointless exercise. So you wouldn’t mind moving back sometime, if necessary?’

‘Look, Ben, I wouldn’t mind spending a night in a sleeping bag on a station platform, but I’d rather have an ordinary-sized room, thanks.’

Ben grinned. ‘Ah, Jane.’

‘What?’

‘I should’ve realized the most important thing for you would be retaining your cool.’

‘Look, my mother’s—’

He lifted an eyebrow. Did he know? She
thought
not.

‘My mother’s a vicar. They’re not bothered by this sort of... you know.’

‘Right,’ Ben said.

That was close. She didn’t want Mum involved in anything here. This was her
separate
thing.

‘So you’re going to try this guy, erm... in here.’

‘Antony Largo. If you think
you
’re cool...’

‘I don’t!’ Jane said, smarting, going to turn down the bed clothes.