The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read Free Page B

opaque white cloud was pouring over me like a sift of flour; but this cloud was wet and thick. It blanketed out the sun, the path, and even the tor at my back. Within a few minutes I couldn’t see my boots in front of me. The fog quickly crept under my collar and through my clothes, until I felt chilled all over. I stood up, but had no idea which direction to move, or whether to chance moving anywhere. Shapes and sounds were completely distorted; I thought I heard a curlew, and the cry made my skin crawl. The pixies were going to get me, if the Wisht Hounds didn’t first. It was almost preferable to break my neck stumbling through the clitter, or to fall into a bog and drown. I hugged my arms to my chest and thought, ‘be calm, the fog will lift in a minute.’ But it didn’t. It got worse. A howling wind tore at my hat, and pellets of hail whipped my face.
    What would the intrepid Tommy Price do in a situation like this? Once, I remembered, she had run out of petrol in Greenland and had to walk for hours through a blazing white landscape without markers. She had kept her spirits up by singing Noel Coward tunes. I tried one in a quavering voice. In reality I wasn’t much good with nature adventures. I was used to taking care of myself in awkward, unfamiliar, and even dangerous situations involving people, but weather was another matter. Weather was serious .
    Still, thinking of Tommy Price helped a little. I flattened my body against the side of the tor and began to inch around its circumference. The cold granite scraped my face, but at last I found what I had vaguely recalled: a slit in the rock wide enough for a body to squeeze into. I don’t know how long I sheltered there, but I had plenty of time to regret large portions of my life, particularly the portion that had begun the day before with my arrival in Sticklecombe-in-the-Moor. I assumed that if I stayed there long enough, a search party would be sent out for me. Possibly Mrs. Droppington, seeing the fog sweep over the moors, had already alerted the search-and-rescue mission.
    I may have dozed a little; at least I thought I was dreaming when I sensed a lull in the wind and a slight thinning of the fog. It wasn’t complete, but still, looking out from my crack in the tor I realized I could see boulders, and the path, and some furze bushes. That was enough for me; if I didn’t get moving I would freeze to death—my fingers inside my gloves were already like ice. I charged down the path, hoping that by always going down I would find my way back to the valley. I couldn’t see any markers, couldn’t remember how many paths there had been. The landscape seemed completely changed; no longer did the moor seem a bracing plateau with bones of granite jutting up through the thin soil. It was a swampy morass of pea-green bogs and pools that I could only avoid sometimes by jumping from tussock to tussock.
    Still, even if I was chilled to the marrow, haunted by the thought of vicious pixies, and terribly, hopelessly lost, the fog was lifting.
    If it hadn’t lifted, I doubt that I would have seen what I did: a tweed cap floating on a pool of green scum, and just underneath, the outlines of a woman’s body, face down.
    The coroner ruled the death of Tommy Price accidental. Everyone knew Miss Price’s predilection for walking on the moors in every kind of weather. People did drown in the bogs—not often, but within memory. She was eighty-something, after all, and not as clear-headed as she could have been.
    I returned to London with a violent cold and horrible memories of my headlong flight down the hill and into the first cottage I saw. The search party had no difficulty finding Tommy Price, in spite of my incoherent directions; apparently she had stumbled into a well-known bog, not deep but treacherous all the same. More than a few ponies had lost their footing there and tired themselves out trying to get free.
    Even in London, I could not stop thinking about Tommy