Christmas at Candleshoe

by Michael Innes

  ‘My name is Feather – Alice Feather – and this is my son Grant. Do you live here, Mr Armigel?’

  ‘Assuredly – most assuredly.’ The ancient clergyman pauses while Grant, who has been obliged to take a pinch of snuff, gives a sequence of sneezes that ring out startlingly in the bare chapel. ‘Rupert Armigel, madam – domestic chaplain to Miss Candleshoe.’

  Mrs Feather gives a cry of delight – presumably at discovering that a Candleshoe still lives at Candleshoe. Grant’s embarrassment returns, and he edges away towards Gerard Christmas’ monument. The foundering admiral, he realizes, bears an unmistakable family likeness to the old lady who, a few minutes before, has been worshipping here. But there is something else – some further likeness – that eludes, puzzles him.

  ‘You judge it appropriate?’ Mr Armigel is at his elbow, and now all three are confronting Admiral Candleshoe’s memorial.

  ‘It’s very handsome.’ Grant hopes that he has hit on the right epithet.

  ‘I agree with you. Both as an artist, which was my first profession, and as a very old friend and – um – adherent of the Candleshoe family, I am entirely pleased with it. Moreover Miss Candleshoe herself, I am glad to say, considers that Christmas has done a very good piece of work. She considers that the thing will serve very well.’

  Grant, not without satisfaction, sees something like alarm momentarily visit his mother’s features. ‘Has Christmas done anything else here?’ he asks.

  ‘Decidedly – most decidedly. You will see a work of considerable interest in the house itself. And that reminds me that I have been remiss – most remiss. Miss Candleshoe has desired me to invite you to take a glass of wine. I hope there is some wine. And perhaps we had better wait on her now.’

  The Feathers make modest protestations, but Grant knows that his mother is jubilant. Once more he takes refuge in the monument – this time peering at an inscription low down on the right. The light is bad; he fails to decipher it; and Mr Armigel comes to his rescue.

  ‘An addition, Mr Feather. A copy of modern verses which, although not inappropriate to their subject, strike, to my mind, a jarring note. Modern poetry is out of place, surely, in connection with the Islands Voyage.’

  Grant has knelt down and can now read the lettering. It is incised in an ancient character and still faintly gilt. For the second time that evening he gives himself to declaiming English verse.

  ‘Aye me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas

  Wash far away, where’er thy bones are buried;

  Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,

  Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide…’

  Grant breaks off. ‘Say! But that’s Milton. I thought you said–’

  Mr Armigel nods placidly. ‘Quite so – precisely so. An elegy called “Lycidas”, Mr Feather. Beautiful in itself. But modern poetry is not suitable on Admiral Candleshoe’s monument.’

  Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare… It comes home to Grant with marked force that about Candleshoe Manor there is something a little out of the way. Perhaps the ether wobbles. Conceivably there is a kink in space. Time – at least within the consciousnesses of the residents – is far from behaving as it should. Grant gets rather hastily to his feet. Mr Armigel may be mad. Miss Candleshoe’s wine may be a magic potion calculated to turn respectable pilgrims from Massachusetts into Sleeping Beauties or Rip van Winkles.

  ‘Haven’t I seen that coat of arms before?’ Mrs Feather, uninterested in Milton, is pointing to the upper part of the monument.

  Grant follows her gesture. He remembers that he, too, has had the same impression. And suddenly he can account for it. ‘The flag, momma – the Spendlove standard, flying above Benison.’ He turns to Mr Armigel. ‘Are the Candleshoes connected with the Spendloves, sir?’

  Mr Armigel finds this amusing. He contrives the odd feat of laughing and taking snuff simultaneously. ‘My dear Mr Feather, your conjecture is at once correct and preposterous.’

  ‘I don’t get that.’ Grant is now sure that the old gentleman is crazy.

  ‘Correct but upside-down, topsy-turvy, the wrong way round. The Spendloves are connected with the Candleshoes.’

  Grant sees the difference. He glances again at Admiral Candleshoe and experiences a shock of discovery. Here is the other similarity that has worried him. The expiring sailor is not only like the present Miss Candleshoe of Candleshoe Manor; he is the split image of Lord Scattergood of Benison Court.

  ‘The Spendloves are Candleshoes – but of a very junior line.’ Mr Armigel, pleased to find Mrs Feather evidently entranced, appears about to embark upon genealogical disquisition. But he checks himself. ‘Miss Candleshoe is waiting to receive you. She is most interested in your visit, and it will be a kindness if you will make a short call. Let me lead the way to the house.’

  The Feathers, with polite murmurs, prepare to follow Mr Armigel. All three turn towards the door of the chapel, and all three pause. Framed in it, as if to bar their way, stands a boy. He is dressed in what may be Tudor costume. And he carries a bow.

  4

  Abruptly the boy vanishes. Together with accurate archery, it seems to be his main accomplishment. For a moment the effect has been as of some ancient portrait; now the arched doorway of the chapel is like an empty frame, and behind it is only mild evening sky. Grant Feather frowns for a moment into this immensity, and then takes a glance back at Admiral Candleshoe. That distressed mariner has all the timelessness and immobility which the best authorities pronounce to be desirable in sculpture. He does not propose really to drown, nor on the other hand has he any genuine mind to be rescued. It is conceivable that when the chapel is void of spectators the attendant effigies will lower their marble curtains on the scene and go off duty for the night. But this fancy can be entertained only in defiance of the most powerful suggestion to the contrary. These supporting figures are frozen into the same permanence as the Admiral between them. In the first days of their existence, while Gerard Christmas was still tidying up his chisels and superintending the gilding, they must already have had the appearance of centennial vigil. Infants christened beneath their impassive gaze have come rejoicing to the command of bow and arrow and angling-rod and fowling-piece – and have returned to their presence in the end, while some predecessor of Mr Armigel’s has addressed himself to the burial service.

  From somewhere outside comes a sudden hubbub of young voices; it recedes, as if a bevy of children are racing and tumbling into the distance. Mr Armigel occupies himself with a bunch of keys; Mrs Feather takes the opportunity of slipping her half-crown unobtrusively back into her bag; Grant finds small comfort in this, for he suspects his mother of nursing an atrocious purpose. The coin may not be produced again at Candleshoe. But what about its near companion, Mrs Feather’s cheque-book? The Spendloves at Benison are lords. But Mrs Feather’s forebears for several generations have been princes – merchant-princes – and she has inherited an instinct for brisk and open commerce. Had the impulse moved her, she might have offered Lord Scattergood in his own octagon room a round figure for everything within sight. She would be capable of doing the same thing – Grant reflects with a fine imaginative flight – while being shown the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London. And she believes that she has discovered Candleshoe. Horridly pat, like an actor taking a heavily signalled cue in some banal play, the place had peeped out from behind its beech-trees in the very instant that the good lady was discoursing on the satisfaction of rescuing a period piece from oblivion.

  Grant does not at all object to his mother’s buying a derelict English manor-house. What he has glimpsed of Candleshoe pleases him, and he knows that his sisters would adore it. But Oxford, although he is doubtless to derive large benefits from his residence there in the end, has rather muddled him for the time, and he has a morbid fear that his mother is going to do something crude. How is he to circumvent this? There comes to him the inspiration that he must be crude himself – so crude that his mother will at once be al
l reaction. So he turns to Mr Armigel. ‘Say,’ he offers conversationally, ‘what sort of sanitation do you have here?’

  They are walking down a short covered way of no great antiquity, and the house is in flank before them. Mrs Feather nearly drops her bag – half-crown, cheque-book, and all. She remembers that it was very hot in the gardens at Benison, and wonders anxiously if Grant has suffered a sun-stroke. Mr Armigel however appears to take the inquiry entirely in good part.

  ‘Now, that is an interesting question – a very interesting question, indeed. Only, I think you use rather a grand word, if I may say so, for anything of the sort at Candleshoe. We never have had anything that you could quite term that.’

  ‘Is that so, sir?’

  ‘In fact, all that I can recall at the moment, are two or three quite small and nasty affairs.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And, of course, that sort of thing has fallen more and more out of favour in England. We have lost the taste for it. In your country, I understand, the posture of affairs is somewhat different. The thing keeps on cropping up.’

  ‘Well, yes, sir.’ Grant is rather at a loss. ‘In fact we just aren’t happy without it.’

  ‘Deplorable!’ Mr Armigel shakes his venerable head, and for the first time speaks with some severity. ‘But I should be happy to tell you our own experiences, if your interest runs that way. They are, I fear, malodorous. And underground.’

  At this Mrs Feather stops in her tracks. ‘It just occurs to me’, she says, ‘to inquire what you suppose my son to be talking about?’

  Mr Armigel turns to her courteously. ‘Assassination, madam. The topic is an interesting if repulsive one. And as it is commonly applied in England only to homicide of some political or large public significance, I have remarked that it is not quite an appropriate word in a quiet place like this. But we have had our bloodstained pages, 1 am bound to admit.’

  Grant wonders whether Mr Armigel is really a little deaf. Meanwhile they have turned aside into a ruined garden, perhaps that they may approach the house by way of its main façade. The garden is like the faded and shrunken ghost of something at Hatfield or Longford – intricately formal within a great rectangular hedge grown wild and ragged, and with all its ordered elaboration of arabesques and knots overgrown and only in part distinguishable, like a schoolchild’s geometrical drawing largely obliterated by the sweep of an India rubber. At the far end is a small pool covered with duckweed, and in the middle of this an eroded Nereid patiently clasps a lichened shell from which water has ceased to issue a long time ago. Grant recalls the gardens at Benison and their great jet d’eau. Presently, he thinks, time’s impatient India rubber will reach that too.

  Mr Armigel discourses on certain passages of violence in the history of Candleshoe. From generation to generation the place itself has slumbered, and its owners with it. But the chronicle shows an intermittent streak of wildness among its younger sons. It is two or three of these who have, upon certain unedifying occasions, streaked the page with blood. Others have taken their waywardness to sundry remote corners of the globe, and among these – Mr Armigel intimates – an equal rashness has produced rather more that is laudable.

  Mrs Feather inquires about the present heir. Grant compresses his lips, reading into this a clear proof of his mother’s intention. Mr Armigel replies that the air is generally accounted wholesome, and the exposure of the mansion particularly well adapted to making the best of the winter sunshine. Grant decides that this is a cunning old man. He even suspects that there may be some plan to put Candleshoe on the market, and that any persons of evident substance straying within its policies are liable to be conducted to the owner and entertained with an eye to possible business. This however scarcely allays his anxieties about his mother’s conduct. Her mind may be moving in the same way. And if they are both wrong, some humiliating situation may ensue.

  But now the house is squarely before them. It is undoubtedly a gem. The plainness of the front is relieved by a central and two flanking bays, and the fine proportions of the whole are accented by the weathered stone with which the mellow brick is bonded at the major perpendiculars. There is a terrace with a crumbling arcade and a flight of steps leading down into the gardens; above the main entrance is a great dim sundial with its gnomon gone, like a battered pugilist; crowning the whole is a lettered balustrade carrying some pious Latin inscription the whole length of the building. They climb the steps, finding the broken treads only uncertainly amid weeds and moss; the main doorway is narrow, and its sides are polished by the friction of centuries of broad shoulders and hurrying elbows; on their left is a buttery hatch and on their right a high carved screen with a little staircase leading to a gallery. They pass through an opening in this screen hung with a curtain so ancient that it seems woven of dust, and find themselves in the great hall of Candleshoe Manor.

  The greatness is relative. Lord Scattergood’s octagon room could digest the place without noticing. But it remains a big hall, with a dais and a lofty bay window at the far end, a fireplace with a massive dog-grate, and a ceiling of elaborately moulded plaster. On the oak-panelled walls a variety of pictures – portraits and mythological scenes that have alike retreated behind a brown haze of varnish – jostle with boars’ heads, foxes’ masks, pikes, shields, and muskets.

  There is a great deal of stuff lying about. This – Grant sees at once – makes the real point of contrast with the octagon room. That room – although very conceivably whole bevies of Spendloves smoke their pipes in it after business hours – has taken on the air of a museum; there is a great deal of stuff there too; but it is ranged and ordered, so that on each object one expects to see a little label. Here, if you are not careful, you will trip over things or bump your head. There is a lot of armour tumbled about in one corner, as if a knight in haste to get into the lists has been rummaging for a hauberk with a good snug fit. Near this a tall armoire stands open. It has been adapted – perhaps two hundred years ago – to the purposes of a wardrobe, and it contains an odd jumble of doublets and riding-cloaks and breeches, mud-bespattered and antique of cut. On the dais is a long refectory table. One end of this, extending into the bay window, catches the last warmth of the day and is laid with some elaboration for two, with silver plates and tankards, and apples in a great silver-gilt bowl. Then comes a salt-cellar – an immemorial affair of silver and horn – and below this several further places have been laid, with horn spoons and pewter mugs and great platters of polished wood.

  So Miss Candleshoe is crazy. Grant Feather feels a sense of relief at being able at length to ‘place’ this whole queer set-up. And relief makes him charitable. ‘Crazy’ is perhaps an unimaginative way of putting it. Conceivably Miss Candleshoe is the last of the major English eccentrics, about whom Dr Edith Sitwell wrote so engaging a book. Grant is for some reason sure that his mother will behave impeccably in the presence of a positive strangeness of this sort. He therefore cheers up, and is about to make some polite remark when a voice speaks – or hisses – behind him.

  ‘Strangers – beware!’

  Grant looks over his shoulder. An animal of alarming proportions – he takes it to be a wolfhound – has come through the carved oak screen behind him and is regarding him with disfavour. For a moment it seems necessary to return to the magical hypothesis and suppose Miss Candleshoe to be the mistress of some species of Circean enchantment. The dog however offers no further observation, and it occurs to Grant to look upwards. The screen, as he has noticed, supports a small minstrels’ gallery. This is now shrouded in gloom, but just perceptible in it are several pairs of bright eyes. Grant raises an arm and waves to them, since this strikes him as the amiable thing to do. They vanish. The archer, it appears, commands auxiliary forces as nimble as himself.

  Mr Armigel and Mrs Feather have walked on. Their goal appears to be some farther room beyond the hall, and Grant remembers that in an Elizabethan mansion the private apartments lie in that direction. The other side of the house i
s for the servants, and at each end a staircase will rise through the several storeys of the edifice to the long gallery which must run its full length at the top. Grant sees his sisters wanting to hold a dance in the long gallery, and being told that under the weight of such a proceeding the floor will certainly collapse and bring the greater part of the house down with it. They will demand that architects and builders be brought in. And presently the whole county – which is what, if you are grand enough, you must call your neighbours – will be laughing at the antics of the folk that have bought out the Candleshoes. Grant relapses into gloom. In this mood he follows his mother into Miss Candleshoe’s drawing-room.

  Miss Candleshoe may worship in eighteenth-century style, dine in a fashion notably feudal, and suffer armour to lie about as other untidy people do ulsters and gumboots and shooting sticks. But when she withdraws from these occasions it is into a privacy that is wholly Victorian. There is a tartan carpet which Grant finds baffling, but which Mrs Feather is able to date as shortly after 1868, the year in which was published an illustrated edition of Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands. There is a further testimony to the same influence in an engraving after Landseer, depicting Prince Albert in the pose of a successful lion-hunter, standing beside a shot stag. An upholstered sofa, even after nearly a century of use, is like a fat boy in imminent danger of bursting all his buttons. On sundry small round tables, under inverted glass bowls, repose heaps of strawberries ingeniously manufactured from felt and peaches blushing in scarcely faded plush. Viewed in this setting Miss Candleshoe, who now rises to greet her guests, swims at last into something like plausible chronological focus. She is simply a very old lady who carries her own period about with her. Perhaps, like her chaplain, she drops in, as it were, on other periods from time to time. But that is a privilege of the very old.