Read Online Appleby's End by Michael Innes - Free Book Online

bellow. It’s a moo.” Judith Raven’s voice was faintly uncertain.
    â€œIt’s the sort of subdued noise,” Appleby said, “that bulls make at night.”
    â€œWhat utter rot.” Judith was now thoroughly alarmed. “You’re simply preying on my irrational fears.”
    â€œPerhaps. 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.”
    â€œI don’t want to tell you a story. I’m sleepy.” Judith suddenly spoke in a massively sleepy voice. “Very snug.”
    â€œThen 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.”
    â€œDon’t know what you’re talking about. Comfy now.”
    â€œAnd 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.”
    â€œI don’t believe it.”
    â€œAnd I don’t believe your cupboards have any skeletons at all. Except of mice and bats and spiders – if spiders have skeletons.”
    â€œOur cupboards have got skeletons.”
    â€œThey have not.”
    â€œVery 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.”
    â€œWhat do you mean – and dash?”
    â€œIsn’t that the way stories begin? Ranulph’s always did. Nineteen hundred and dash, in the village of dash in dash-shire.”
    â€œBut this isn’t one of Ranulph’s stories. It appears to be your own.”
    â€œAs a matter of fact, it’s a bit of both: Ranulph’s story and mine. Although I’m not thirty–”
    â€œI’d be surprised if you were twenty-two.”
    â€œâ€“and Ranulph died in 1898. There’s a real date for you. Shall I go on?”
    â€œIf you really have a story to tell – which I altogether doubt – for goodness sake do.”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œWell, 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