The Hound of the Baskervilles: Baskerville Hall

Watson, Sir Henry, and Dr. Mortimer left London by train and travelled all day, watching the tidy green fields slowly give way to the wilder, emptier country of Devonshire.As the train carried them further from London, Sir Henry gazed hungrily out of the window, seeing for the first time as a grown man the wild moorland that his family had owned for centuries.At last they stepped down at a small country station, where a driver named Perkins was waiting with a wagonette to carry them and their luggage the rest of the way.

Watson noticed two armed soldiers standing guard at the station gate and learned that a dangerous convict named Selden had escaped from the prison nearby and was still hiding somewhere out on the moor.The wagonette carried them along narrow lanes with high green banks, and as the light began to fail, the moor around them grew steadily more bare and lonely.Sir Henry stayed cheerful and full of questions the whole way, but Watson felt a quiet, growing unease that he could not fully explain, even to himself.

Suddenly the road opened onto an avenue of ancient, dark yew trees, and Watson realized with a chill that this was the very alley where Sir Charles Baskerville had died.Beyond the yew alley, Baskerville Hall itself rose up out of the dusk: a huge, grim old house with twin towers and ivy climbing thick and heavy over its stone walls.Inside, a tall man with a black beard came forward to greet them: Barrymore, the butler, who had looked after the house since Sir Charles’s time.

Despite its size and its fine old furniture, the hall felt cold and unwelcoming to Watson, as though the house itself had not yet decided whether to accept its new master.Over a quiet dinner, Sir Henry admitted that he too felt a strange gloom settling over him, though he tried to laugh it off as nothing more than tiredness after the journey.

That night, Watson lay awake for a long time in his unfamiliar room, listening to the wind moaning outside among the old trees.Then, somewhere deep in the great house, he heard a low, choking sound: a woman, crying as if her heart would break.Watson sat up and listened for a long time, but the sound was never repeated, and by morning he could almost have believed he had dreamed it.

When he mentioned it at breakfast, Barrymore insisted that no woman in the house had been crying in the night, though Watson noticed that the butler would not quite meet his eyes as he said it.Watson wrote it all down carefully, certain that even the smallest detail might matter once he began to search for the truth behind Sir Charles’s death.Already, on his very first morning at Baskerville Hall, he felt sure that the case was far stranger, and the house far less empty, than anyone had told him.