Black Heather by Virginia Coffman

better view of the little stone buildings tucked away in the moorland, and surely, in the nearest one there would be someone who knew the injured man or his Jassy.
    I said, “You must stay here while I open the door. Can you hear me?”
    “Aye.”
    It began to trouble me that he should imagine his Jassy was in the taproom of this abandoned building. Could he possibly mean some other inn and some other taproom? Very probably. But it was too late now. As I turned and was about to hurry around the house to the entrance Sir Nicholas had used yesterday, the man reached out and caught my coat hem. His eyes looked very odd. The pupils seemed to be of different sizes, and his expression was vague. What worried me most was that there seemed to be drops of blood in his hair beneath his ear, and this would be most serious if there was some injury within his skull, more deadly than the blow upon the back of his head.
    “Tell ... Jassy ... wasn’t drunk.”
    Poor man. Apparently he had often been under the influence of spirits, and now could think of nothing else but to fear Jassy’s disapproval.
    “I understand, sir,” I said, trying to make him comfortably secure while I left him.
    As I went around the strange old house, closely followed by Timothy, and passing the broken window where I had climbed in yesterday, I was amazed that I should have been so frightened on my first visit. Faced with the prospect of a genuinely frightening occurrence, the serious injury of this unknown man, I felt I could look upon any fancied horrors inside and laugh at them, for they would be mere figments of my imagination. The building was old, it is true, but there were many Cornish inns that were older, and under the bright open light of morning, even with the sun obscured behind puffed white clouds, the place looked like a solid, excellently constructed domicile for a young ladies’ academy. It lacked only the brisk cleaning, the dusting and refurbishing that any unused house would require before one moved in. So it appeared from the outside, at least.
    I passed between the inn and what remained of the outbuildings, a series of now broken sheds through whose shattered roofs the snows of a dozen winters had sifted and lain for many months, causing the floors within to become moldy from the standing water. It always made me sad to see disused houses, even disused storage rooms, and I thought of all the wretched people crowded into the cities with which I was more or less familiar, like Cardiff in Wales, and Falmouth and Plymouth in my own country. There were many inequities in life that I had observed on my journey from Cornwall into England and up to the North Country!
    At the back of the Hag’s Head, beyond the kitchen, was the scullery door through which Sir Nicholas and I had left the inn yesterday. I was surprised to find it swinging back and forth in the wind, not at all as my companion had left it; for I distinctly remembered his closing and latching the door. However, when I examined the flimsy lock, I saw that it was clearly possible that the door had swung open of its own accord, and I convinced myself that this was indeed what had happened. It was so desperately necessary to find some way of getting help to the stranger that I had to believe the old inn was deserted.
    I hurried through the scullery and the kitchen, which, to my senses, still smelled of the thousands of roasts of mutton that had been spitted and turned here in the great fireplace. It smelled too of charcoal and crisp kid’s flesh. But once again, and more insistently now that I knew what had occurred here, there was the odor of burned wood and cloth, and of mold, that ever-present sign of disused and sad places.
    I found myself, ridiculously enough, lost in a passage between the pantries adjoining the kitchen, and the common room through which I had entered yesterday. I watched to see which way Timothy would go, but he darted back into the pantry to lick the stone floor