The Bloody Wood
The Bloody Wood
First published in 1966
© Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1966-2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of
Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,
Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.
Typeset by House of Stratus.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 0755120876 EAN: 9780755120871
This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.
Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.
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Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.
After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of
Florio's
translation of
Montaigne's Essays
and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.
By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel,
Death at the President's Lodging
. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.
After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the
Oxford History of English Literature
.
Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.
His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.
T.S. ELIOT
… And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
Husband and Wife
‘Do nightingales eat apples?’ Bobby Angrave asked idly. He was a small, dark and handsome youth, in his second year at Oxford.
‘Why should they be supposed to?’ Stirred to interest, Mrs Martineau leant forward in her enveloping shawl. Her eyes, glittering in the near darkness, seemed to light up the waxen skin which was drawn so fearfully tight over her beautifully modelled face.
‘It’s the meaning of the Greek word, more or less. Philomel – lover of the apple.’
‘I thought,’ Charles Martineau said, ‘that it meant lover of melody. Isn’t there a little poem? “Philomel with melody, sing in our sweet lullaby” – something like that.’ He spoke absently. Like his wife, he was listening for the next burst of song from the wood.
‘Perhaps it does. But take it that way and you’re in trouble between μελος and μηλον. You have to suppose some lengthening of the vowel.’
A moment’s silence followed this learned communication by Bobby. He had lately taken a First in Classical Moderations, and was understood to be devoting this part of his vacation – dutifully spent with his uncle and aunt – to the composition of a prize poem in some ancient language. Bobby was undoubtedly very clever.
‘And still they gaz’d, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.’
It was Diana Page who had broken the silence with this. It appeared to be her role to tease Bobby Angrave. But this time – or so Sir John Appleby thought, as he studied what could be distinguished of the company in the dusk – she had come up with her joke a little belatedly. The child – for Diana could be no more than eighteen or nineteen – was for some reason less than happy. Of course there was constraint abroad in the place. Their hostess, Grace Martineau, was very ill: she had passed beyond the point at which a woman might be expected to summon even a small and intimate house party around her. And the young do not take kindly to the spectacle of human dissolution. Perhaps it was nothing more than this that accounted for the glint of something like panic in Diana. And Diana was the greatest stranger present. She was here simply as the friend of Martine Rivière, Grace Martineau’s favourite niece.
‘There!’ Martine said softly.
From the heart of the wood the tremendous song was rising again.
Eternal passion
– Appleby thought –
eternal pain
.
Charne was a plain four-square Georgian house – about the right size, as Judith Appleby put it, for a Jane Austen baronet of ten thousand a year. Charles Martineau, although not a baronet, had presumably a good deal more than that. Martineaus had lived at Charne for generations, but Charles was the first of them to have slipped out into the world and brought back a fortune, as fortunes now go. The fortune wasn’t made greatly to appear – although when one took a good look round one saw that everything was unobtrusively perfect. Judith Appleby liked coming to Charne. Her people, the Ravens, held some sort of relationship with the Martineaus, as they seemed to do with a lot of people of the same sort. Charles Martineau commonly called her ‘cousin Judith’ – a form of address which was surely coming to take on an old-fashioned air. John Appleby, who hadn’t been bred to such places, liked coming to Charne too. This was chiefly because he liked Martineau. He seemed so utterly gentle a man that the fortune he had made presented itself as a puzzle. It is usually rather tough characters who come by anything of that sort. Perhaps Charles’ nature changed when he left Charne behind him.
‘Do nightingales sing only at night?’ Diana asked. ‘Poems and things make it seem like that.’
‘Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!’ Bobby Angrave produced this with a faintly ironical effect. It was a quotation, Appleby reflected, from the poem that had been running in his own head.
Again – thou hearest! Eternal Passion! Eternal Pain!
‘No, my dear.’ Mrs Martineau seemed almost shocked by Diana’s ignorance. ‘Where there are nightingales, and one listens carefully, one may hear their notes all through an afternoon.’
‘But it’s in the evening that they rev up,’ Martine said.
‘That is true. And the other birds make so much noise by day. This nightingale – our nightingale – we have heard only by night.’
‘O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray
Warbl’st at eve, when all the woods are still.’
This was Bobby again, and it ought to have been harmless and agreeable. But it wasn’t, Appleby thought – or not quite. Grace Martineau could be sensed as stiffening in displeasure, as if she felt Bobby – her husband’s nephew – to be guying this new poem, and so guying the bird. And it was quite possible – one suddenly perceived – that Grace didn’t much like Bobby, anyway.
And Diana Page, too, seemed not pleased, for she launched another attack on the young man.
‘Fancy spouting poetry about the nightingale,’ she said, ‘when one can sit still and listen to it! And it isn’t even difficult. Anybody could go on producing nightingales till bed-time.’
‘Try,’ Bobby said. He seemed nettled by this juvenile assault.
‘Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake.’
‘Try again.’
‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird.’
‘And again.’ Bobby was now mocking.
There was a moment’s silence, as Diana hesitated. Mrs Martineau, barely visible, made a faint gesture of displeasure.
‘He sings each song twice over,’ Diana said, ‘lest you should think–’
Bobby interrupted with a shout of laughter – a sound too loud for the hour and place.
‘You silly goose,’ he said, ‘that’s the thrush.’
‘Well, I think it’s true of the nightingale as well. This one has sung tonight exactly as he sang last night. So there!’
Bobby Angrave stood up – deftly capturing, in face of this apology for an argument, the air of one who tactfully breaks off conference with a petulant child.
‘I think I’ll go and have a chat with the bird,’ he said. And he strolled off into the darkness.
There was another burst of song, to which they listened in silence. The nightingale seemed to have its station at some distance from the house. The glazed loggia in which they were sitting had been added to the east pavilion – one of two small Palladian structures which served to modify the cube-like severity of the house. In front of them – which was to the south – lay a broad terrace beyond the balustrade of which the ground dropped down shallow flights of steps to the ghost of a formal garden. You could see – or in daylight you could see – the outlines of intricately patterned flower-beds. Now, except for two great stone basins – and these were dry – the whole space was grassed over. It wasn’t untended; it had merely been thus simplified, you guessed, as the consequence of some instinct on Charles Martineau’s part to seek out the spirit of the time. It wasn’t possible to doubt that he could have had gardeners working about the place by the score. Indeed, you saw as you strolled plenty of evidence of activities beyond the scope of, say, an old man and a boy. But the immediate prospect from the front of the house was like this. If you looked down from an upper window, the forsaken garden might have suggested the obscure activities of prehistoric men, which the passing of millennia had all but obliterated. But perhaps it was designed to speak rather of the future. It was what Charne, a proud and elegant façade, was fronting and sailing into. That, roughly speaking, might be the idea. It wasn’t very obtrusively asserted. The great expanse of grass, if not shorn, was controlled by expensive machines. There were gravel paths, so that in walking around you would be as secure as the baronet’s wife and daughters would have been against getting your feet wet. If you peered, it would probably be to see that the gravel was very nicely raked.