Appleby's End (7 page)

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.”

“But he didn't. What came over his face was the most unmistakable and ghastly disappointment. ‘Then a curse on him and on you!' he cried. And without another word he turned round and went tap-tapping back across the bridge. We never saw him again.”

“I see. And
is
there a Ranulph Raven story about–”

“There is not. We found out afterwards that there isn't, as it happens, a single blind person in the whole Ranulph
oeuvre
.”

“Well, well! By the way, this doesn't happen to be true?”

“My dear man, it's merely the beginning of something I happen to have decided to tell you about. So just go on listening. By the way, is it still snowing? I'm all cuddled up in the dark.”

Appleby peered out. The snow had stopped falling and overhead, where the moon rode high, the clouds could be seen as clearing; already it was possible to see the contours of the downs and to interpret something of their nearer surroundings. “No more snow,” he said – and continued to stare across the uncertain countryside, perplexed.

For what was to be made of this queer tale – pitched at him, whether through impulse or calculation, by this decidedly intelligent girl as if to crown an evening's queer adventures? The incident described had happened long ago; and when it happened its dominant feature had been the cropping up of something already remote in time. But if anything was clear about Ranulph Raven it was this: that his oblivion was now as complete as his success had once been extensive. He was not even one of those prolific writers, for the most part long unread, whose fame yet survives in two or three familiar titles. Ranulph had left no
Moonstone
– nor even an
Uncle Silas
. Literary immortality he had none. How then could his legend haunt a countryside, as Judith had declared – and his name stir fears and passions in an old, blind man?

Appleby roused himself. “In half an hour we shall be strolling gently home,” he said. “Go on with your yarn.”

“That was the first time I heard of the Ranulph legend. And in a way it was the last – or the last for a long time. For though I discovered quite a lot more about it not much more
happened
while we were kids. It became a matter of historical investigation, you might say. Mark and I made a game of it. We discovered that the – the ramifications had been pretty extensive.

“Apparently that sort of thing does occur. Legends about literary folk and other queer fish often circulate in the districts where they've lived, and are even carried about the country. Tramps carry stories just as chapmen used to carry ballads and broadsheets. Everard says that Branwell Brontë is a legendary figure quite far west into Lancashire and north right up to Northumberland.”

To Judith Raven's voice, disembodied in the darkness, it was pleasant to listen. And if she were something kept in a glass case one would be willing to contemplate her almost indefinitely. Indeed, to all the senses, whether in isolation or combination, the reports she would yield could be nothing but satisfactory – in an extreme. “Northumberland?” said Appleby absently. “You surprise me. I never heard of that sort of folklore before.”

“Not many policemen have – except, perhaps, the quite uncultivated and ordinary ones.” Judith laughed in the darkness. “It's only among the simple that such stories run. And, of course, it is surprising. Particularly about Ranulph, because with him it's really
queer
. You see, he had the reputation of being a sort of Sibyl.”

“Sibyls were girls.”

“I know they were, silly. Do you know the Sistine Chapel? I like the Delphic Sibyl best. But not so much as Jonah. Jonah's lovelier even than Adam, if you ask me.” Judith's pleasant voice was suddenly grave and beautiful – and the effect of this was to suggest some increasing dissatisfaction with the mysterious narrative upon which she was engaged. “Why did Michelangelo make Jonah like that? I thought he was an old man with a beard.”

The clouds were clearing rapidly and behind them was the cold glitter of Orion and the Bear.
Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars…
“Judith,” Appleby said – for obscurely some decision had come to him – “Judith, if you must tell a story, tell it and don't interrupt with a lot of culture-patter.”

“Though fancy a sculptor wasting time on all that paint! But some of those nude youths–”

“Look here, I'm the next thing to a nude youth myself and most horribly prickled. Whoever heard of talking about Michelangelo in a haystack? Get back to Ranulph.”

“I don't see that Ranulph is any more appropriate, for the matter of that. But, as I was saying, Ranulph had a reputation among the rude peasantry for having possessed prophetic powers. That's what Mark and I found out. For instance, we found out from Everard's old housekeeper – who's dead now – that in Ranulph's time people used to come and consult him about the future, just as if he were an old woman with earrings sitting in a tent.”