The Bloody Wood

by Michael Innes

  ‘I’ve a quite intimate knowledge of it.’ Judith walked to the verge, laughing. ‘Yes – it was just here. I tried to ride my pony through it. There was an awful row. I wonder what the little fish are? It seems nonsense to me.’

  ‘What seems nonsense?’

  ‘That Bobby and Martine should be excluded because not precisely right.’ Judith turned away from the pool, and walked on. ‘They might make do – and that’s the wise and human thing to be content with.’

  ‘I rather agree. But Grace is a very sick woman, and the judgement of sick people is sometimes not like ours. I suspect the real point to be that she has borne Charles no children. It imposes some burden of irrational guilt upon her. So she wants to go, before it’s not too late. But on her own terms. The sponge is to be passed over the slate–’

  ‘Did Martine say all this?’

  ‘No, but I’ve no doubt she understands it well enough. The second Mrs Martineau, formerly Mrs Gillingham, is to bring Charne an heir. And Charles may well live to see his son into his majority.’

  ‘But, John, surely that would be to cheat Martine a little – and to cheat Bobby a great deal? Charles would never do it.’

  ‘His wife’s wish – Grace’s wish – might be sacred to him. I believe that’s the phrase.’

  ‘I think it’s morbid rubbish. And I can’t imagine that Charles himself has an inkling of the plan – if it really is a plan.’

  ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps it is going to be communicated to him this evening or the next, in one of those revived chats between the Martineaus in this belvedere we’re climbing to. Then, of course, there is Mrs Gillingham. We don’t know whether she knows. She may yet have to be squared too – if that’s the word.’

  ‘It’s decidedly not the word. And, on consideration, I think there’s a certain nobility in Grace’s feeling the way you are suggesting she does.’

  ‘I don’t agree.’ Appleby was suddenly obstinate. ‘If you and I had no children, and I found you making such a plan, I’d be very angry with you.’

  ‘We don’t own Charne.’

  ‘If we did, I’d like it even less. I can understand setting a more or less mystical value on perpetuation through progeny – although I hope I’d be sensible enough to see that the world is never likely to go short of young men and women hard at work feeding the sacred flame. But Charne isn’t a sacred flame. It’s just a great big house, and a dozen farms in process of disappearing beneath a rash of little dog-kennelly villas, and a great deal of money, no doubt, in stocks and shares. I see no virtue whatever in a particular accumulation of material wealth going to a son rather than to a nephew, or for that matter to a nephew rather than to a cat-and-dog home.’

  ‘John, how very strongly your early radicalism is bubbling up in you again. You’re little better than a bolshevik. They ought never to have given you that K.’

  ‘I took it only to have a Ladyship about the house.’

  ‘Here’s the belvedere. Let’s take a look inside.’

  The small building before which they now stood was circular in shape. It might have been described as an elongated stone drum, surrounded by Ionic pillars and crowned with a low dome.

  ‘I suppose it’s elegant,’ Appleby said. ‘But I don’t see much sense in it. Why call a thing a belvedere when it’s impossible to see anything from inside? There’s not a window in the whole building.’

  ‘There’s the big door. You can keep that open, and it faces down the main vista. Or you can sit between the pillars, and look out any way you please.’

  ‘I seem to remember it isn’t dark inside, although it ought to be. But I don’t recall why.’

  ‘There’s a circular hole in the roof. Like the Pantheon. I think it’s called an eye.’

  ‘And the sky peers through the eye. I, God, see you. Yes, the belvedere is certainly elegant. But it seems to me to be designed to look at rather than to look from. The Italian word is ambiguous, come to think of it. The Germans are much more definite. They’d call such a place an Aussichtspunkt. No ambiguity about that.’

  They had now mounted the three or four steps leading to the door of the building, and they turned for a moment to glance at the view. A small outcrop of rock had been used to perch the belvedere on, so that one looked directly out into a middle distance. Round the base of the rock ran a narrow path, protected here by a rustic hand-rail from a farther miniature precipice beyond which the trees thickened again.

  ‘That’s where the clock goes by,’ Judith said, pointing to the path.

  ‘The clock?’

  ‘Friary. Don’t you remember? On his punctual return from the village. The Martineaus sit up here, and Friary goes by, quite unaware of them, more or less at their feet.’

  ‘It doesn’t really seem to me much of a place to come and sit in of an evening. Chilly, for one thing.’

  ‘Open the door. You’ll find it quite snug, in spite of the eye in the roof. Electricity laid on, and one or two thoroughly comfortable chairs.’

  ‘The door won’t open.’ Appleby had tried the handle, and was now turning away. ‘Charles must keep it locked.’

  ‘How very odd! It never used to be like that. It’s probably only stuck. Give it a good shove.’

  Vigorously, if not particularly pertinaciously, Appleby did as he was told. His efforts produced only a hollow reverberation from within.

  ‘No good,’ he said. ‘Shall we walk downhill again?’

  ‘I think we might climb to the very top first. Or at least to where the stream starts. There’s one of the grottoes just there. It’s odd that a stream should emerge almost at the summit of a hill.’

  They continued to move at leisure through the wood. There was no wind, and one would have been inclined to say that the only sound was the murmur of the stream and the growing hum of insects beginning to respond to the warmth of the day. But, behind this, it was possible to hear the intermittent noise of traffic which spoke of the encroaching town.

  ‘Has Charles sold any land?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘I don’t think so. He’d be very unlikely to do anything of the sort, of his own free will. As the city spreads, I suppose he might find himself up against some power of compulsory purchase one day.’

  ‘Bobby might sell – if he inherited the place.’

  ‘I don’t see why. There’s a lot more than the house and the estate. He wouldn’t be likely to need money.’

  ‘He might do it by way of being what he calls rational.’

  ‘If Grace saw the possibility of that, it certainly wouldn’t put Bobby in her good books.’

  ‘He’s not there as it is. Hullo!’ Appleby had come to a halt. ‘Here’s the first grotto – the Chinese one, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s by the elder Halfpenny.’

  ‘Halfpenny?’ Appleby looked at his wife suspiciously. ‘He sounds most implausible.’

  ‘He’s entirely authentic. William Halfpenny – and he had a son called John. He published Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste, bang in the middle of the eighteenth century.’

  ‘Well, at least a grotto in the Chinese taste is an absurdity. The Chinese don’t have grottoes. How could they? China consists exclusively of large rivers, wandering through rice fields and mud flats.’

  ‘But they have a Great Wall – so there must be plenty of stone somewhere.’

  As they conducted this absurd conversation, Appleby and Judith had come to a halt in front of the grotto. It had been created partly by excavation and partly out of stone heaped up in artful disorder and carved to simulate water-worn rock. A couple of rather sheepish dragons guarded the entrance; their tails rose to support a sculptured trophy, vaguely oriental in suggestion, of conglomerated helmets, spears and shields; a cold breath blew out of the place, and there was a sound of rapidly dripping water.

 
; ‘It was designed that there should be a cascade inside,’ Judith said. ‘But Halfpenny never got round to the machinery. The whole affair was to have been quite elaborate. You can see how the walls are plastered with rock crystal and shells and what used to be called fossile bodies. But, although they dug some way into the hill, it never came to very much.’

  ‘Delusions of grandeur,’ Appleby said. ‘Let’s move on.’

  ‘But look!’ Judith was pointing upwards. ‘Violets – right at the top. It’s late for them to be in flower still. I’d like to take some to Grace. Do you think we could gather a bunch?’

  ‘I suppose I could scramble.’ Appleby was regarding the sides of the grotto rather doubtfully. ‘It’s all made to look more precarious than it is.’

  ‘Of course it is. All these chunks of oddly perched rock have been there for a couple of centuries. They must be bedded in cement, or something. We’ll both climb.’

  They climbed – for the violets had niched themselves almost at the apex of the roughly formed arch which constituted the entrance to the grotto. Appleby gave Judith a final hand to the top, and watched her as she gathered a small bunch of the flowers. Then he looked round about him.

  ‘There’s a bit of a view from up here,’ he said. ‘You can see the belvedere again.’

  ‘So you can. And there’s a glimpse of the roof of the house. But look!’

  From where they stood they could just see, at an oblique angle, one leaf of the broad door of the belvedere. It had opened as Judith spoke, and the figure of a man had come out of the building. He stood for a moment, seeming to look carefully – even rather warily – about him. He turned round, and they could see that it was Charles Martineau. He closed the door gently, and appeared to lock it. Then he took another glance around him, slipped something into his pocket, and walked quickly away.

  ‘But how strange!’ Judith said. ‘Charles must have been in the belvedere when we tried the door a few minutes ago. I don’t see how he can have failed to hear us.’

  ‘He lets his own people wander about the wood. And the villagers too, I expect. They’re his tenants, I suppose. He probably thought we were inquisitive children making a nuisance of themselves.’

  ‘We must ask him.’

  ‘Must we?’ Appleby was frowning. ‘Perhaps we oughtn’t to be spying around.’

  ‘What an extraordinary idea!’ But Judith was frowning too. ‘You’re not hunting after a mystery, are you?’

  ‘Of course not. But Charles had shut himself in. If he wasn’t asleep, which seems improbable, he must have heard and recognized our voices. So my notion of his taking us for children or strangers won’t do. He simply didn’t want to be disturbed. And he might rather the thing weren’t referred to.’

  ‘But it’s awkward. He heard us, and now we’ve seen him. Just to keep mum–’

  ‘Well, yes. But remember that he and Grace occasionally come up here of a summer evening – and in rather a nostalgic way. Charles sometimes comes up by himself and thinks about things. Put it like that. He heard us and didn’t want to be bothered with us. If we’d thought, we might have concluded it rather oafish to go near the place at all, just at present. So we’ll simply keep quiet.’

  ‘You’re perfectly right.’ Judith had arranged her violets, and was preparing to begin the scramble down from the top of the grotto. ‘But didn’t you think there was–?’

  ‘Yes. Charles came out of the place in a fashion I can’t quite account for. But it’s not my business to try.’ Appleby laughed as he led the way down to the path. ‘It’s something I seem to be telling myself regularly, just at present.’

  ‘I think I hear a car on the drive. We can at least speculate about that. Perhaps Bobby Angrave has got back. He drove off to town in a great hurry immediately after breakfast. I asked him why he was doing without a second cup of coffee, and he said he had an immediate duty to visit the good poor. Bobby has rather a freakish sense of humour.’

  ‘Yes. But the car is just as likely to belong to my touchy friend, Dr Fell. I’m afraid he has to turn up pretty frequently now. Or it may be the enigmatical Mrs Gillingham.’

  ‘Let’s go down and see,’ Judith said. ‘And we can do as much guessing about her as we please.’

  7

  It was certainly not Dr Fell’s car. It might be Mrs Gillingham’s, if the sprightly character of that lady’s widowhood included driving around in a very grand limousine indeed. The Aston Martin DB5 formerly owned by that hapless expatriate Tim Gorham, Appleby reflected, could be shoved into the inside of this monster without anybody noticing it. And this extravagant calculation reminded him of something.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, as he and Judith moved towards the house, ‘did I see you trying to get some sense out of Diana Page just before we went to bed last night?’

  ‘Almost that. I did have a slight impulse to busy-body.’

  ‘So had I, just a little earlier. Have you a feeling she has done something foolish?’

  ‘Well, either that she has done, or that she may be about to.’

  ‘I thought her quite lively at first.’ Appleby broke off. ‘That car, by the way, is the Pendletons’. I’ve just recognized it.’

  ‘Of course. Top surgeons have to parade such things. What an odd hour to turn up.’ Judith stopped in her tracks. ‘John – Edward Pendleton wouldn’t be here professionally?’

  ‘It hadn’t occurred to me, but I suppose he might. Or semi-professionally. One makes desperate, groping gestures in Charles’ position. He may have told Fell he’d just like his very old friend Edward Pendleton around. But I imagine that surgery is a thing of the past with Grace.’

  ‘Yes,’ Judith said, and for a few moments they walked in silence. ‘Why did you think Diana lively?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, she sometimes teases Bobby Angrave quite effectively, if in rather a childish way. Bobby says she’s thick, and I suppose he’s right.’

  ‘Dangerously thick, almost. She would be terribly easy to take in.’

  ‘Do you know anything about her people? Are they wealthy?’

  ‘I’ve hardly heard anything about them. Diana tags around with Martine, and nobody else seems much to bother about her.’ Judith considered for a moment. ‘I had a notion last night that, if we hadn’t just been in a corner of the music room before bed-time, and with people drifting around, Diana might have come out with something. My guess about her is a broken home, divorces, wardships, trustees and so on – all against a background of considerable affluence.’

  ‘Her conversation suggests assumptions that go with that, poor child. By the way, Fell’s car is down there too. He’s tucked it away rather discreetly, but I can just see it in a corner of the stable yard. Let’s go round that way. We may meet him coming out.’

  ‘You want to meet him?’

  ‘Well, yes. I was inept with him, you know, last night. He looked oddly under the weather, and I said something stupid about what it takes to be a GP. So I’d like to be civil now.’

  ‘Very well.’ Judith sounded resigned. ‘But what you really mean is that the man has stirred your curiosity.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ Appleby said.

  Sure enough, Dr Fell emerged from the west door just as he had done the evening before. Daylight was doing nothing to improve his appearance. There was something haggard about him, and almost hunted. Nor did he seem conversable, for although he now stopped to talk it was with a detectable air of doing so only because the Applebys were planted squarely in his path.

  ‘Good morning,’ Appleby said. ‘I don’t know that you have met my wife? Judith, this is Dr Fell.’

  Dr Fell responded to this introduction correctly but without enthusiasm, so that there was an awkward moment in which conversation failed to happen.

  ‘Do you know,’ Judith said, ‘that there are still violets in
Charne Wood? We found a great clump on the top of the Chinese grotto, and I have brought these for Mrs Martineau.’

  ‘But she still walks there from time to time, doesn’t she?’ It was not very felicitously that Dr Fell produced this; he might have been suggesting that Judith’s proposal was a tactless one.

  ‘She would hardly scramble to the top of the grotto.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Dr Fell now seemed to be producing an equally clumsy retraction. ‘It’s remarkable that she gets around at all.’ For a moment he studied the bunch of flowers in Judith’s hand with gravity. They might have been something under a microscope that spoke sharply of mortality. ‘I know that you are old friends of the family,’ he said suddenly. ‘I suppose you realize that these are the last violets my patient is likely to see.’

  ‘Yes, I think we realize that.’

  ‘They are very lovely.’ Unexpectedly, Dr Fell put out a hand in what – although it revealed a gross tremor – was an oddly sensitive gesture. He touched one of the leaves in which the violets were cradled. ‘Somebody speaks of them as, “uttering the earth in magical expression”. But I suppose it is what we all do, flesh and grass alike, for a time.’

  This – being what the eighteenth century would have called a Serious Thought – produced a moment’s silence. Fell had spoken quite unaffectedly. He wasn’t, Appleby found himself thinking, at all a commonplace person.

  ‘Will you allow me to say something that may sound uncivil?’ Fell turned from Judith to Appleby to say this. ‘The sooner you all go away, the less unhappy I shall be.’

  Whether this was uncivil or not, it was notably inoffensive. Although he had his curiously awkward moments, Dr Fell decidedly understood the conversation of gentlemen. At least, Appleby thought, that was how Judith’s uncles – inveterately old-world characters – would have expressed the point. A less antique judgement might say simply that there was nothing provincial about Dr Fell. He carried around with him a certain ease and authority which seemed to come from a larger world.

  ‘What you say doesn’t surprise me,’ Appleby said. ‘My wife and I have talked about the thing. But we are all here, you know, by Grace’s wish. It’s something that – more than ever at the moment – she has a right to.’