The Bloody Wood Read Free Page A

casual wave.
    But, of course, nothing of the sort occurred. With his gaze decorously averted from his distant employers and their guests, Friary turned right, and disappeared round the back of the house.

 
     
2
    The nightingale had ceased, and somewhere in the wood an owl was hooting, as if issuing a challenge to one of those feathered débats or wordy wrangles so tediously reported by medieval poets. If so, the nightingale was not taking it on, but now remained obstinately mute. One had to suppose that, belying its reputation for night-long activity, it had tucked its head under its wing and gone to sleep.
    This might have been judged the more perverse in the nightingale in that the setting was steadily becoming apter for the exhibition of its prowess. The moon had risen behind the wood, and in the park which lay beyond the forsaken garden not one but half a dozen moonlit cedars were invitingly untenanted. But only the owl hooted again; it was possible to hear a faint splash of water from the stream; it was possible to imagine that one heard, fainter still, a murmur which might have come from waves on a distant beach, but that in fact must come – if indeed it was there at all – from the encroaching city. And into the sky the city cast a dull red glow which the moonlight was now engaged in combating. Charne was a wholly man-made place; within sight of the house nothing more than an occasional weed or shrub or small sapling grew where it hadn’t been told to. Yet everything was sufficiently mature to approximate it to the order of nature – and this order the moonlight might now be felt as championing. It was with a sense of victory that one watched the hot red glare of urban life beaten back in the eastern sky. And already, except in shadowed places, it would be possible to see one’s footing clearly. Appleby, marking this, felt the attraction of the night. He was about to get up and stroll away, when Mrs Martineau broke the silence.
    ‘I am afraid I took no part in your game,’ she said. Her voice held a note of apology. ‘You must forgive me. My thoughts sometimes go far away.’
    ‘Our game, Grace?’ It had been after a baffled moment that Charles Martineau said this questioningly.
    ‘Remembering what the poets have said about the nightingale.’
    ‘Yes, of course.’ Judith Appleby said this. She had not spoken for some time. ‘Bobby and Diana were playing a game like that.’
    ‘And now I recall something I could have joined in with.’ Mrs Martineau’s voice could just be heard. Her strength nowadays seemed to come and go, and at times seemed barely sufficient for articulate speech. ‘I think it is from Keats,’ she said. ‘Didn’t somebody quote from Keats?’
    ‘I did,’ Diana said. ‘Before I got snubbed. It was the bit about “immortal bird”. I know that was right, because we did it at school. Keats wrote a whole poem just about a nightingale, didn’t he?’
    ‘Yes, dear, I think he did.’ Mrs Martineau spoke indulgently – as nearly everybody except Bobby Angrave did to Diana, who was undeniably not clever. ‘Only, my lines don’t come from that poem. I’m not sure where they come from.’
    There was a moment’s pause. For some obscure reason, nobody seemed eager to prompt Mrs Martineau to go on. But presently she did so of her own accord – and so quietly that she somehow gave no effect of quoting verse.
    ‘It is a flaw in happiness,’ Mrs Martineau said, ‘to see beyond our bourne. It forces us in summer nights to mourn. It spoils the singing of the nightingale.’
    This produced silence. It was a silence lasting until Diana spoke again – and with all the rashness of ignorance.
    ‘What’s a bourne?’ Diana asked.
    ‘Well, dear, it can be several things, I believe. For another of the poets, Shakespeare, it is that from which no traveller returns.’
    ‘Uncle Charles, I think I heard a car. Are we going to have visitors?’ Martine Rivière, a girl at once alert and