Appleby's End Read online

  Judith shook her head. “Quite enough legends already.” She waved her hand in a gesture embracing both banks. “All this is the Raven country still, you know.”

  “Is it, indeed?” said Appleby – in the respectful tones in which the English commonly acknowledge such territorial statements. “Then you can’t all be so overwhelming a burden on your cousin Everard’s resources.”

  “My dear man, I don’t mean we own it. All Everard has left is a chunk of park and a couple of hummocky farms. I mean this is the country Ranulph wrote about. Hardy’s Wessex, Trollope’s Barsetshire, Ranulph Raven’s Dream country. See?”

  “I see. And did Ranulph create the legends, or just find them lying about?”

  “It rather seems as if he grubbed them up. Anything with lurid possibilities that happened within twenty miles about he would ferret out and add knobs to.”

  “What a dismal trade.” Appleby spoke with distaste. “Did Ranulph write about nothing but crimes?”

  “Anything melodramatic served. Long-lost heirs and missing wills and Eastern drugs and somnambulism – stuff hopelessly vieux jeu now, but it went down well enough at the time. Particularly somnambulism. It’s unbelievable the number of queer things that happen in sleep in Ranulph’s world. And he liked the supernatural – or the supernatural and water. For instance, I remember one story called The Spectral Hound. It’s about some great brute that’s suspected of having rabies and is hanged. Everybody sees it hanged in a barn. But its ghost turns up at night and haunts the place, and presently all the other dogs round about go rabid too. Well, a ghostly bow-wow handing round hydrophobia is a bit too steep, so they investigate and discover that the creature had been buried in a dung-hill. The warmth and ferment had revived it.”

  “Resuscitation. Your cousin Everard should make a note of it. But I don’t think it sounds a very entertaining story.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Judith seemed inclined to stick up for the family genius. “That sort of thing depends very much on how it’s told.” She threw away her cigarette. “But I think this tell-me-a-story idea is falling a bit flat. I vote we swim. There’s a five-mile walk in front of us already.”

  “And through what appears to be completely empty country. Doesn’t anybody live round here?” Appleby found himself speaking rather as if the paucity of the rural population was a personal grievance. “Were they all despatched by the mad dogs?” His glance returned from the snow-covered countryside to the river bank. “By Jove, we’re drifting straight inshore.”

  The river had widened again at a broad bend, and towards the outer perimeter of this, where the bank was low and the water probably deep, the current was steadily driving them. It looked as if in a few seconds a jump would be possible. “Come on,” said Appleby, “we’ll make that dinner yet.” He pulled Judith to her feet, so that they stood unsteadily on the curved roof of the carriage. “When I say jump, jump.”

  “Don’t be silly. I shall jump when I think it’s a good idea myself.” Judith was taking off her shoes. “And if it’s me who falls in–”

  They both jumped in safety. Appleby, rolling over and sitting up in the snow, was in time to see the Raven carriage veering out towards mid-stream. Then he turned to Judith; she was standing on one leg, slipping on a shoe again. “Look here,” he said, “where the deuce is your coat?”

  “Left it on board. Too heavy and flappy to risk jumping in.”

  Appleby took off his overcoat. “Here,” he said, “put it on.”

  Judith shook her head. “If you turn out to be the chivalrous type of policeman I shall bite.”

  “Put it on.”

  “Nonsense. Once I get walking briskly–”

  “Do you think that I propose to be found roaming the countryside with a – a disrobed girl? Put it on and let’s tramp, for the Lord’s sake. Why I didn’t choose Brettingham What’s-his-name’s pigs–”

  They tramped – uncertainly up a long snow-covered selion through ploughland. They climbed a gate and were in what was probably a green-bottomed lane between hawthorn hedges. They trudged down this. “Take it back about the pigs,” Judith said. “Take it back and I’ll give you some chocolate.”

  They munched chocolate. “I suppose you can find your way?” Appleby said.

  “Of course. At least, I think so. The country certainly is oddly unfamiliar by moonlight.”

  “Will it be better in the dark? For there isn’t going to be much more moon. But at least there’s going to be no shortage of snow.” Appleby halted suddenly. “On the other hand, there’s rather an absence of hedge.”

  Judith stopped. “What do you mean?”

  “Aren’t we meant to be walking between hedges? Well, they’ve gone.” Cautiously Appleby explored a dozen paces around them. “Clean vanished. We’re standing in the middle of nothing.”

  “Oh, dear! We must have got out on the down.”

  “No doubt. There’s a perceptible slope. Would you like to slither or climb?”

  “Better slither. More shelter down below – and most of the lanes are on the low ground. I’ve no doubt we’ll come to a cottage presently, and they’ll put us right.”

  They slithered. “Murcott’s Farm,” said Appleby darkly. “Or young Shrubsole, or the Sturrock family at Great Tew.” The snow was driving suffocatingly against them; it was like poking their noses into a strangely icy feather bed.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Judith expended breath that would have been better kept to contend with the elements. “I think this is a perfectly idiotic exploit. Gosh! – there’s a house. Down there on your left.”

  Again Appleby explored – and the effort took him through a snowdrift. “There’s a fence,” he reported, “which is something. But it’s not a house. It’s a haystack. I suppose that means there must be a house of sorts near. We’ll follow the fence.”

  But Judith didn’t budge. “I say,” she said. “I’ve been told that haystacks are most frightfully snug. Escaping prisoners always sleep in them.”

  “No doubt. But we’re not escaping prisoners. Come along.”

  “One takes off one’s wet clothes and burrows in. At first it’s extremely prickly. But presently a delicious warmth–”

  “I don’t believe a word of it.”

  “–a delicious warmth steals through one’s every limb. Come on. Let’s try.” Judith was climbing the fence.

  Appleby followed. He had the impression that Judith was discarding further garments and he played his last card. “There’ll be rats,” he said.

  “Rats.”

  “Yes – rats. Place teeming with them.”

  “And I said rats.” Judith was laughing in the darkness. “I believe you consider it improper. No doubt a policeman–” She stopped suddenly. “But I can’t get in!” she cried indignantly. “It’s like a brick wall.”

  “Naturally. Think of the weight. You could get in only near the top. So put that coat on like a good girl and–”

  “But I’ve found a ladder!” Judith was triumphant. “And I’ve no doubt the rats will stick to the lower storeys. I’m climbing.” Her voice came from somewhere above his head. “Shall I draw it up after me?”

  “Leave it where it is,” Appleby said.

  5

  Were the Assistant Commissioner to hear of all this, Appleby’s End would be an affair of a shattered reputation. But of the merits of hay there could be no doubt. The escaping prisoners were entirely right. For some time Appleby had been deliciously warm. Had he even, perhaps, been asleep? He rubbed his eyes.

  Not that it would really do to settle in for the night. Their predicament next morning would be highly ridiculous, for they would have to emerge from their burrow and confront a zealous countryside already preparing to comb the downs and drag the river. Moreover – and Appleby looked at the luminous di
al of his watch – although their adventures appeared to have occupied aeons of time and compassed a considerable area of the earth, the home of the Ravens could not really be very remote, and the night was still comparatively young. Some species of dinner or supper remained a possibility, as did a night’s repose between sheets securely walled off, for a time, from this impetuous girl. “We’ll start again in an hour,” Appleby said into the darkness. “Quite likely there’ll be a bit of moon again by then.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “I think we’d better. It would be awkward to wait till daylight and be found by the bull.”

  There was a rustle in the hay. “The bull?”

  “Somewhere in this field. I’ve heard it snuffling round. And listen! There it is bellowing somewhere near the other side.” It was certainly true that through the falling snow a dull lowing could be heard.

  “I don’t call that a bellow. It’s a moo.” Judith Raven’s voice was faintly uncertain.

  “It’s the sort of subdued noise,” Appleby said, “that bulls make at night.”

  “What utter rot.” Judith was now thoroughly alarmed. “You’re simply preying on my irrational fears.”

  “Perhaps. But during the next sixty minutes” – Appleby spoke dispassionately – “your irrational fears will grow. In the end they’ll be positively nightmarish. And then we’ll quit. Meantime you can tell me another story – just to distract your mind.”

  “I don’t want to tell you a story. I’m sleepy.” Judith suddenly spoke in a massively sleepy voice. “Very snug.”

  “Then tell me what on earth should put it into your head that I was proposing to investigate the mouldering skeletons in the Raven family cupboards.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about. Comfy now.”

  “And I’ll tell you about a Spanish sculptor – an anarchist – who built a time-bomb into a colossal group representing the Triumph of Benevolent Autarchy.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “And I don’t believe your cupboards have any skeletons at all. Except of mice and bats and spiders – if spiders have skeletons.”

  “Our cupboards have got skeletons.”

  “They have not.”

  “Very well. Listen.” In Judith Raven’s voice, Appleby thought, there was an odd hint as of sudden resolution. “I was born on the thirtieth of July, nineteen hundred and dash.”

  “What do you mean – and dash?”

  “Isn’t that the way stories begin? Ranulph’s always did. Nineteen hundred and dash, in the village of dash in dash-shire.”

  “But this isn’t one of Ranulph’s stories. It appears to be your own.”

  “As a matter of fact, it’s a bit of both: Ranulph’s story and mine. Although I’m not thirty–”

  “I’d be surprised if you were twenty-two.”

  “–and Ranulph died in 1898. There’s a real date for you. Shall I go on?”

  “If you really have a story to tell – which I altogether doubt – for goodness sake do.”

  “You must understand” – Judith Raven’s voice as she began her story took on a measured narrative tone – “that my brother Mark and I have lived at Dream ever since we were children. Our parents were dead, you see, and there was only Grandfather Herbert, and he lived there too. He had grown tired of the Foreign Office, or perhaps they had turned him out because he was old, so he lived on his nephew Everard, Ranulph’s eldest son, and still did madrigals and things after breakfast. Of course he was ever so much younger than his brother Ranulph. There was the bishop and several sisters and other brothers in between. I rather liked grandfather Herbert. He was dirty but terribly distinguished. I used to do him in plasticine – the grey kind, so the dirt wouldn’t show.

  “Well, Mark and I were kids, and Ranulph, of course, had died twenty or thirty years before, and nobody thought of him – or so you would think. Certainly nobody bought his books any more, and he’d blued all he ever made out of them, and there were heaps of Georgian and Victorian Ravens who had been distinguished in weightier jobs than romance-writing – so why should anyone bother? You can’t even see his remains at Dream unless you go poking about bookcases and cupboards and bureaus; whereas the Ravens who painted and the Ravens who sculpted and the Ravens who collected rocks and fossils and stuffed animals and mediaeval armour have all left their possessions lying quite obtrusively about – as I shall do in my turn, I suppose. Well, that was how it was. So it was quite a time before Mark and I found out there really was a Ranulph Raven legend – what you might call a popular legend. The first we heard of it was from the blind old man who came tap-tapping over the bridge with a stick.”

  “Ah,” interrupted Appleby. “And delivered a Black Spot. And was later ridden down by horsemen in the night. I do think when you start spinning a yarn you should keep off Treasure Island.”

  “He was very old and he came tapping over the bridge below the long meadow – which means that he must have come from somewhere round about Great Tew. There was a man working in the ditch, and the blind man must have heard him, for he called out to him and they talked. And then the man who was ditching gave a shout and a wave at us where we were playing Indians or something in the grass, and we ran up to see what it was about. The blind man leant over a gate and talked to us – or rather talked in our direction in a cunning, fearful sort of voice. He was a horrible old blind man, and it was very horrid – more so because the man who was ditching for some reason climbed out and went away.

  “‘Come here, young lady and gentleman,’ he said; ‘come here, my dears, and let me talk to you.’ It was just like the beginning of something sinister in a story. And so, in a sense, it was.”

  Appleby rustled in his hay. “You’re not a bad hand at this. Only atmosphere and pace a little lacking. The great art, I’ve been told, is to get both at once.”

  “‘Master Raven, young sir,’ he said, ‘and Miss Raven, my young lady’ – so we knew the ditcher had told who we were – ‘very proud of your famous grandfather you must be, my dears.’ Well, of course Herbert was our Raven grandfather, and we were well enough up in that sort of thing to know nobody could call Herbert famous. Madrigals just don’t take you all that way. So we guessed the nasty old person had got things mixed and probably meant our great-uncle the bishop, or his kinsman the Pre-Raphaelite, or one of the others. As for Great-uncle Ranulph, he just somehow didn’t come into our heads.

  “The blind man rambled away, and offered us a bag of sweets he seemed to have brought on purpose, and Mark had to hold on to them though they looked very nasty, because he was afraid the man would hear if he chucked them in the ditch. We wished we’d had the dogs with us.

  “‘And great scholars you must be,’ the blind man said, ‘with all these grand book-learned folk in your family. Latin you’ll have learnt, and Hebrew, and French too it’s not unlikely. Bless your sweet, well-educated heads.’ Mind you, I don’t say he said just that. I’m no good at dialect, and he’s beginning to sound like an Irishman, which he wasn’t. But that was the general effect.”

  Judith Raven paused. Far away in the night the sound of a motor engine could be heard, labouring up a hill. The note dropped with a change of gear and the sound ebbed rapidly away.

  “Quite so,” said Appleby. “After twelve years or so you can’t be expected to give the police a verbatim report. Go on.”

  “And then he sheered off that, as if he was scared of something, and he rambled for a bit and yet somehow we couldn’t get away. It was as if we knew there was something really odd to come; we were rather like the Wedding Guest before the Ancient Mariner told him of the albatross, you may say. And then he got back to our supposed learning. ‘You’ll have read all your dear grandfather’s fine books, I don’t doubt,’ he said. I doubt if either of us had read anything of Ranulph’s; and, as I’ve said, Ranulph wasn�
�t in either of our heads, anyway. But Mark made a sudden grab at my arm, which I knew was instead of that loopy great laugh of his–”

  “Did he have that as a boy?”

  “Mark has always been exactly like Mark. And he said, ‘Oh, yes. We read them all through once a year aloud. That and the novels of his friend, Sir Walter Scott.’

  “‘So there couldn’t,’ said the blind man, ‘be a story of his put in print and you not know it?’

  “‘Dear me, no,’ Mark said. ‘We know the whole lot as well as we know our Bibles.’

  “‘That’s two good children,’ said the blind man, and he gave a relieved sort of sigh. ‘Always be at your Bibles, the same as I am.’ And he rolled his eyeballs – which looked awful – up to heaven in what was evidently meant to be a pious way. ‘And now,’ he said – and he leant forward as if to make a clutch at us, and there was something eager and ghastly in his voice – ‘and now, will you tell me this: did your dear grandfather ever write down the story of the blind lad that killed his brother?’

  “It was a nasty shock, even though, of course, we couldn’t make head or tail of it. And I suppose we just stared at him for a bit, and then he spoke again and his voice was trembling. ‘Did he?’ he asked. ‘The blind lad who hated his brother for what he’d taken from him – and knew he always would hate him?’

  “I was scared and I think Mark was scared too. But scare just puts the devil in Mark. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said – as loud as if the blind man were deaf as well. ‘That’s one of the most famous stories grandfather ever wrote.’”

  Judith Raven broke off and there was a moment’s silence. “Now tell me,” she said. “How would you expect the blind man to react?”

  Appleby, who found he had been listening with a good deal of attention, answered at once. “I should expect him to show panic or alarm.”