Title: The Moor
Author(s): Laurie R. King
Publisher(s): St. Martin$prime;s Press
Pages: 307
Year: 1998
Format: MOBY
Language: English
**************************************************************************************
Download
The random article:
I had no idea what it might mean, that Ketteridge’s secretary, a man with the mouth of old Sir Hugo, had proposed marriage to the only living child of Sir Henry Baskerville, but I did not need the kick in my vital organs to tell me it meant something.
For the life of me, however, I could think of nothing else to ask Miss Baskerville. I made polite noises, extracted from her an amorphous invitation for a return visit, and, with a final glance at the Cavalier over the fireplace, left her house. I went up the street and turned the corner, and there I stood, gazing into a row of severely pruned rose bushes, until the gentleman of the house came out and asked me with matching severity whether or not he could help me.
I moved on obediently, allowing my feet to drift me back to the hotel where I had stopped the previous night. There I retrieved my small bag, and took a taxi to the train station, only to find that I had several hours to wait before I could catch a train to Lydford.
I had nearly memorised portions of Dartmoor by the time I climbed up into the train, into a compartment even older than had been the one on the way down. I made no attempt to read, but sat, my scarf and collar raised around my ears, my hands thrust up into my sleeves, staring at a button on the upholstered seat back across from me, thinking.
I felt certain that the various pieces of information we had assembled, if laid in the correct order, would make a pattern. As always, the extraneous data confused issues, and as always, it was not easy to know what was extraneous and what central. The best way of trying to find a pattern that I knew of was to hold all the data in mind, and remove one piece, and if that did not cause the remaining pieces to shift and click into place, replace it, and remove another.
And so, as the train chugged and slowed and paused at every village between Plymouth and Lydford, I sat and stared at the button, completely ignoring the glances, giggles, and growing consternation of the two young women sharing their compartment with a person who appeared to be in a trance, a young woman whose forehead revealed a half-healed gash with its fading yellow bruise whenever her hat shifted. I pawed over my pieces, holding them up to look at, removing each one in turn, trying to decide which contributed to the overall pattern and which was foreign to it.
Josiah Gorton stayed on the table, as did Lady Howard’s coach. And Pethering? He remained, although the reason for his presence, both on the moor and ultimately in the lake, was not clear. But in the centre of the picture, did we find gold—actual, shiny gold? Or military tanks? Or something else entirely?