‘How do you do?’ Miss Candleshoe advances with the aid of her ebony stick. She has always been what her generation would have called petite, and now she is so stooped – virtually, Grant thinks, into the form of an inverted capital L – as to bear the appearance of something indecisively quadrupedal moving about near the floor. But out of this posture Miss Candleshoe manages to extract more of dignity than pathos. And although doubtless a dotty old thing, she contrives an upward glance of considerable penetration from a pair of very clear black eyes which frame a powerfully hooked nose. Admiral Candleshoe, Grant remembers, has the same nose. Perhaps, before his translation into Gerard Christmas’ stony immortality, he had the same eyes too.
‘How do you do? Mr Armigel and I were gratified that you joined us at service. And you now add the further kindness of a call.’ Miss Candleshoe raises a hand above her head and shakes hands with Mrs Feather. ‘It is particularly good of your grandson to come. Youth has many calls.’
‘Grant feels, as I do, that it is a privilege to see Candleshoe.’ Mrs Feather declines to find malice in her hostess’ disposition to treat her as a contemporary. ‘It is just such a house as I have dreamed of for a long, long time.’
Grant Feather grinds his teeth. But neither Miss Candleshoe nor Mr Armigel notice this, since they are engaged in accommodating the visitors with tightly upholstered chairs, massively rich plum-cake, and glasses of wine. Grant suspects that this last may be distilled from cowslips; he sips it and discovers it to be Madeira of a sort superior to that commonly available to junior members of the University of Oxford. Perhaps Madeira lasts forever, and this was laid down in the eighteenth century. It may have been about then that the cake was baked.
‘You must not be anxious about the horses.’ Miss Candleshoe herself takes a large slice of plum-cake. This however proves to be for the wolfhound, who has taken up a posture rather like that of the Prince Consort in the engraving above him. ‘My people will see to your carriage, and look after the animals very well.’
Mrs Feather is delighted. ‘That is very kind of you. As a matter of fact–’
‘Although naturally, since the death of my brother Sir James, we have a trifle retrenched in the stables. I do not myself hunt. Nor does Mr Armigel care to do so, although it is a customary and very proper diversion for the clergy. Of cock-fighting I do not approve. Nor should a clergyman – I speak, of course, of the Established Church – attend bouts of fisticuffs.’
‘In this, fortunately, we are of one mind.’ Mr Armigel appears to find nothing out-of-the-way in the sequence of his patroness’ thoughts. ‘But I regret the desuetude of the bowling-green.’
‘The gardeners must see to it.’ Miss Candleshoe pauses and sips Madeira. ‘If there are any gardeners, that is to say. Since my brother Sir James died several years ago we have been obliged a little to cut down on one side and another. But the topiary, at least, is in tolerable order. The children, I am told, see to that.’
Here is something about which Grant wants to know. ‘Then you do have kids living here?’ he asks.
‘At the moment, only a solitary goat.’ Mr Armigel seems to offer this reply in perfectly good faith. ‘But the poultry are very flourishing, I am glad to say.’
‘Only this morning, indeed, we had boiled eggs for breakfast.’ Miss Candleshoe makes this announcement with an innocent triumph somewhat at odds with her grande dame manner. ‘If we had a cow we might have some butter – in which event scrambled eggs would become a distinct possibility. Unfortunately the death of my brother Sir James made it necessary to dispose of the home farm.’
‘Living in this wonderful old house has its inconveniences for you?’ Mrs Feather is all sympathy.
Miss Candleshoe may be observed as giving her visitor a very penetrating glance indeed. ‘The times are indubitably adverse to the landed interest. My brother Sir James tells me – has told me, I ought to say – that much of the blame must be attributed to Mr Gladstone. I am surprised. I had understood Mr Gladstone to indulge a taste for arboriculture, a pursuit very proper in a country gentleman of the soundest principles. But it appears that his activities were rather those of a woodcutter – or what you, doubtless, would term a lumberjack. Little good will come of a man who murders trees.’
‘I just adore trees.’ Mrs Feather is unblushing. ‘But perhaps there is some smaller and more convenient house on the estate, which might, with a little capital–’
Grant, with great presence of mind, gives a vicious but unobstrusive kick at the wolfhound’s behind. The brute leaps up, contrives a deft outflanking movement, and bites Grant firmly in the corresponding part of his own person. There is a good deal of confusion. But this it would be tedious to retail. We may take advantage of the interlude for a necessary retrospective glance over some centuries of English history. We shall then be in a position to meet Jay Ray, the boy with the bow, and the hero – after a fashion – of this story.
5
It cannot be maintained that Queen Elizabeth the First slept at Candleshoe Manor. The present house, replacing one of unknown appearance and uncertain antiquity, was completed only in the year of her death. But her successor, the canny James of Scotland, on his journey south condescended to pause there for a bever or light refection. This illustrious and somewhat expensive occasion was without consequences of any kind; neither royal favour nor royal disfavour ever visited Candleshoe again; as the house settled firmly upon its foundations it settled too into the comfortable security of near-oblivion.
Three centuries had been required for the Candleshoes to reach the modest magnificence which the place represented. When in the year 1367 a younger son was born to the Black Prince, it is upon record that the vessel bearing the news from Bordeaux belonged to one Roger Candleshoe, a vintner of Cheapside – ‘long-time well-reputed’, we are told, as an importer of the red wines of the Gironde. Forty-three years later, when the royal infant thus heralded met the fate of a deposed king at Pontefract, Roger’s son William had added to the family trade a profitable importing of the wines of Spain – described by an expert Customs official, Geoffrey Chaucer, as of considerably greater ‘fumosity’ than their northern neighbours. It was when one of William Candleshoe’s novelties known as sherris sack was acclaimed by a leading connoisseur of the day that the modest Candleshoe fortunes became secure. Candleshoe Manor, in fact, would never have been built had not an early fifteenth-century Candleshoe enjoyed the lavish custom and earned the generous approbation of Sir John Falstaff.
It would appear to have been not long after the death of the good Sir John that the family acquired those lands upon which, as we may presume, they had originally laboured for others. By the close of the sixteenth century their connexion with the wine-trade had disappeared. When in the year 1600 Robert Candleshoe decided to demolish what must have been for many generations his family’s home and erect in its place a more commodious mansion in the refined taste of the time, it was to his resources as landowner that he looked to defray the cost. His calculations may not have been unsound in themselves, although it is notable that he was a younger son, entered upon the inheritance only as a consequence of the death by drowning of his brother the Admiral, and committing himself to the ambitious project within three years of that melancholy circumstance. But if not a rash builder, he was certainly an injudiciously fond father; and the over-lavish provision which he endeavoured to make for most of his twelve children in fact crippled the estate to an extent from which it was never to recover.
Of these children the youngest was called Rupert; and he alone got nothing at all, except a little Latin and much fustigation from a resident tutor grown grey in the purveying of these amenities to elder brothers. Nobody disliked Rupert, or indeed much noticed him; and when at fifteen he was eventually packed off to apprenticeship in the city, the action was motivated only by the plain fact that there was nothing else to do with him. As it happened, young Rupert disliked his master, a highly respectable goldsmith with a technique of fustiga
tion much in advance of the ageing tutor’s; and the boy with great good sense almost immediately ran away. Being reduced in consequence to a somewhat hungry tramping of the London streets, he recalled the origins of his family’s former prosperity in malmsey and sack, and betaking himself to the appropriate quarter of the town he accepted employment without articles in the establishment of a wine-merchant carrying on a large trade with the citizen classes. Being here set to the business of improving his firm’s commodities by the judicious admixture of resins, molasses, red clay, salt-petre, and rainwater, he laboured so successfully at these mysteries as to become a person of much consideration in the city, and eventually its Lord Mayor. Rupert’s son William inherited both the wealth and the address of his father. Marrying a certain Lady Elizabeth Spendlove, and acquiring her considerable fortune for his children on condition of taking her name, he further improved matters by disposing of her person to his sovereign, with the result that Charles the Second, shortly before his death, created the Lord Mayor’s son first Baron Spendlove. After this the family, in the vulgar phrase, never looked back. Within a century of this well-deserved ennoblement, a certain Rupert Spendlove, son of that William, first Earl of Benison who built Benison Court, was created the first Marquess of Scattergood. A wit and a philosopher, the patron of Gay, and the friend of Bolingbroke and Swift, the first Marquess derived urbane amusement from his relationship with a neighbouring squire, and the Mr and Mrs Candleshoe of the time were occasionally invited even to the very grandest Benison occasions. Throughout the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, indeed, young Candleshoes in quest of either a clerical or a military career would be given an amiable upward kick from Benison. One of them, a lad of parts, eventually became a bishop. In those days a marquess could do a great deal.
All this – or nearly all this – the Reverend Mr Armigel, domestic chaplain to Miss Candleshoe of Candleshoe Manor, has now expounded (by way of supplement to dabs of iodine, strips of adhesive plaster, and commiserating chuckles) to Grant Feather. Mrs Feather has meanwhile received a sufficient modicum of the same historical intelligence from her hostess to be more enchanted than ever. She takes a just pride in her ability to understand the complexity of the social system involved. The Candleshoes are confessedly bankrupt, and they are intermittently patronized by the Spendloves, whose bankruptcy is only to be conjectured, and who belong to a rank of society (Mrs Feather is quite clear about this) only just below the dukes and duchesses. But in the high dry light of genealogical science the Candleshoes, although far from shining with the first brilliance, shine distinguishably brighter than the Spendloves. An inconsiderable Candleshoe became a Spendlove, and Spendloves subsequently acquired sundry territorial tags, as of Benison and Scattergood. Is the present Miss Candleshoe in a sense the head of the family to which the present Lord Scattergood belongs? Mrs Feather confesses to herself that on a question so recondite as this she is frankly at sea. But she is at least aware of the question, and there is merit in that. She is aware too of a possible high significance attaching to the fact that the present proprietor of Candleshoe is an unmarried lady. To obtain further information here, however, requires some delicacy of approach. She waits until her hostess, with a solicitude incumbent upon the owner of the peccant hound, makes further reference to the absent Grant. She then embarks upon some general observation about her son.
‘Grant won’t at all mind that mite of attention from your dog – certainly not from a fine dog like that. Grant can take some hard knocks without complaining. He’s an open-air boy, although fond of his books as well. Grant has a fancy to be a writer. And I’m prepared to back him in that. Only I do wish I had another son to take control of some of the family concerns.’
‘ Some of the family concerns?’ Miss Candleshoe is gratifyingly interrogative.
‘Not perhaps the railroad interests. Nor even the oil. But I did have a fancy he might spend a year or two looking after the ranches. The Feathers have always enjoyed raising cattle. They pack more of it than most other folk, but they’ve always preferred to deal with it when still on the hoof. Coming myself from people who have never gone outside steel, I find that attractive. When my husband was alive, we used to spend weeks in the saddle, getting round one place or another.’
Miss Candleshoe’s glance goes to the decanter. She is conceivably reflecting that her visitor is worth another glass. But she contents herself with regretting her own lack of acquaintance with the American colonies.
Mrs Feather accepts this as an entirely gracious observation. ‘And until this present generation there always have been Feathers to take over. And that’s a great thing. Property – landed property, say – must always mean less when there isn’t an heir.’
Miss Candleshoe remarks that commonly there is an heir somewhere. When an heir seems to be lacking in England, one generally turns up from across the Atlantic. Persons of rustic or menial conditions have been known so to turn up – she believes from what Mrs Feather would call the prairies – and make successful claims on earldoms and baronies. But such episodes, which are on the whole to be deprecated, rarely occur among the landed gentry. It is clear to Mrs Feather that Miss Candleshoe takes a poor view of the nobility. Mrs Feather makes a note to suppress her own devious connection with an Irish peerage – a circumstance upon which she has at times found it advantageous to touch – and to bring in the Buckinghamshire squires when opportunity offers. Meanwhile she sets out upon a further exploratory movement. ‘I do know, of course, how things are very different over here. I mean with the sale of family properties and matters of that sort. Some of our lawyers reckon to be pretty good at tying things up, and there are more trusts and the like in our family than I’d care to count. But here these matters are still on a feudal basis, and a lot of your places are pretty elaborately entailed. I’ve heard that even when two generations see eye to eye in such a business a really strict entail can be hard to break.’
Miss Candleshoe now definitely reaches for the Madeira. Her own property, she offers, is an instance in point. Although not extensive, nor at all certainly associated with the Candleshoes until after the Norman Conquest, its tenure is believed to be a matter of the most amazing intricacy. Her brother Sir James – who reluctantly accepted the convention of knighthood on becoming Solicitor-General – used frequently to discuss it in her hearing with fellow lawyers deeply versed in conveyancing. Miss Candleshoe believes that if the property were to be disposed of there would certainly be a question of Crown prerogative. Moreover she positively knows – what is very vexatious – that she has mislaid the deeds of both home paddocks. But neither of these obstacles, perhaps, would prove insurmountable should sufficient – abundantly sufficient – occasion be presented for tackling them.
Mrs Feather, who is far from an artless lady, feels that this exploratory skirmish has gone far enough. As soon as Grant returns it will be time to bring the visit to a close. She gives her hostess a preliminary indication of this by picking up and smoothing her gloves. Miss Candleshoe, who is perhaps not an artless lady either, drops the stopper into the decanter and inquires if Mrs Feather is comfortably accommodated in an hotel. The Benison Arms at Benison Magna is said to be disagreeable, largely because flooded with sightseers, who are said to pay money to go gaping round Benison Court. Mrs Feather will recall that the servants of poor Dean Swift in his last years used to show their bizarrely demented master in return for half a-crown. Miss Candleshoe confesses to a belief that showing one’s ancestral home for a like consideration is an action of very comparable sort. But the Spendloves have not perhaps been at Benison long enough to develop any very nice feelings in such matters.
At this moment Grant and Mr Armigel return to the room. Mrs Feather, remembering the half-crown which she herself had been clutching in Miss Candleshoe’s private chapel, has felt herself on the verge of blushing. She is therefore glad of the diversion. Grant and Miss Candleshoe exchange civilities about the injured part of Grant’s person, which Miss Ca
ndleshoe roundly describes as a buttock. Mrs Feather gloves her left hand and rises. Miss Candleshoe makes Mr Armigel a sign which can only be interpreted as an instruction to ring the bell. Mr Armigel accordingly advances to the fireplace and gives a tug at a long silken rope, about the thickness of a ship’s cable, that depends from the gloom of the ceiling. Perhaps because it is quite evident that nothing happens or can happen as a consequence of this ritual, Mr Armigel gives a second tug with rather too much vigour. The rope falls to the floor, together with a long coil of wire and about a barrow-load of plaster. The wolfhound, which appears to be peckish again, falls upon the rope and savages it. It is apparent that the designed ritual has wholly broken down. There is no means of summoning a servant; in all probability there is no servant to summon; the visit of the Feathers to Candleshoe Manor looks like being, of necessity, indefinitely prolonged.
Grant Feather is rather disposed to turn and run. His mother advances upon Miss Candleshoe in good order, determined upon farewells. Whereupon Miss Candleshoe, with much formality and to the evident consternation of her chaplain, presents her visitors with an invitation to dine.
Mrs Feather has managed to get her back to the most recent evidence of the house’s extreme dilapidation; although the air is thick with dust and powdered plaster she contrives not to cough. She sees – being a woman of precise and rapid social discernment – that in the circumstances Miss Candleshoe’s utterance is in fact less an invitation than a command. Hesitation must suggest a hint that the present resources of Miss Candleshoe’s establishment may be severely taxed by an unexpected accession to her board. Mrs Feather has a very good idea how limited these resources are. Is she not, indeed, planning in the light of that knowledge? And here Miss Candleshoe is conceivably not without a fairly full insight into her visitor’s mind. All this renders necessary the preservation of a very high decorum. Mrs Feather accepts – charmingly but without effusiveness. Grant must do something about their car – it can scarcely be left on the roadside while darkness falls – but that need take no more than fifteen minutes. Mrs Feather hopes that this interval will not conflict with Miss Candleshoe’s customary domestic arrangements.
Christmas at Candleshoe Page 5