Christmas at Candleshoe (10 page)

The undisciplined fantasy ends abruptly. For the second time at Candleshoe the Feathers are startled by the sudden pealing of a bell. This time it is from somewhere high overhead, and its character is not that of a summons to prayer but of a tocsin. The loud urgent clangour of the thing seems to crash down through the ancient building like a cataract and flood the hall. Jay drops his dish of apples and runs. The children at the farther end of the table follow him. Only Tib is left. The uproar delights her, and she laughs unrestrainedly.

Mrs Feather supposes that the place must be on fire, and the irony of Candleshoe’s thus eluding her assails her vividly. She turns to Miss Candleshoe, whom she expects to see aghast, and who may well claim her succour on this dire occasion. But neither the old lady nor her chaplain are at all discomposed. Mr Armigel indeed has stood up and is reaching for the abandoned apples. The bell stops and he can be heard speaking. ‘Jay’s friends must have gone off to play at hide-and-seek. I am afraid they are a little noisy at times, but children ought not to be checked unduly.’

Miss Candleshoe nods in support of this liberal sentiment. ‘Very true. And Candleshoe is an excellent place for sports of that kind.’

Mrs Feather supposes that this must be true. Voices can now be heard from various parts of the house, but they do not strike her as being congruous with a game of hide-and-seek. ‘All these children,’ she asks, ‘–do they sleep here?’

‘Sleep here?’ It is one of the points upon which Miss Candleshoe is entirely vague. ‘I hardly suppose so. But Jay makes his own arrangements. His friends assist him in various ways.’

The voices have now ceased and Candleshoe is completely silent. Grant Feather rises and slips from the hall. The bustle just concluded has spoken to him quite clearly. It has been occasioned by a garrison responding to an alarm and taking up its station. Hide-and-seek is no doubt a sufficiently accurate general term to cover the make-believe involved. But something prompts Grant to see if he can join in the game.

Beyond the screen the house appears to be in darkness, and Grant hesitates for a variety of reasons. By any standards it is a shade casual to quit one’s hostess at dinner for the purpose of wandering about her mansion; and on this sort of thing it is very likely that Miss Candleshoe holds strict views. Again, he has really no business thrusting himself upon the amusements of this gang of kids. They have evolved, he can see, some large and sustained fantasy of medieval warfare. For them, Candleshoe is a good many centuries older than it actually is, and under the captaincy of Jay they are acting out imagined episodes of the Barons’ Wars. There is no harm in that.

But may there not be the possibility of harm? A game played so intensely as this may turn, Grant knows, into a species of mass hallucination. And this tells him of another reason why he is thus hesitating in the darkness of the outer lobby. Let him once start groping about – a large dim figure discernibly not one of the crowd – and it will be scarcely surprising if some ancient mace or battle-axe is brought down with a crack on his skull. He remembers the warning arrow passing his head with no more than a discreet margin of safety that afternoon. Sooner or later these children must experience a misadventure. Their game, he has divined, has intensity as its hallmark, and such violent delights have violent ends. This great mouldering house is more dangerous than a ruin. It is a brick and-stone shell encasing tons of perished plaster and decayed timber – and the children go charging about it in the dark, bearing the actual weapons of its earliest time.

Grant laughs aloud. He would like to convince himself that he has lapsed into grandmotherly absurdity. But he is struck again by the queerness of the place. Its effective inhabitants are the children. Beside them, Miss Candleshoe and her chaplain are only ghosts – ghosts with a little grey matter still in the skull, but ghosts all the same. The children ought presently to be in bed – but who is to see to that? Besides Jay and Robin there are at least half-a-dozen of them. Presumably they all have homes in the village, and if they are found to be absent at ungodly hours rustic parents will bring to the irregularity the simple discipline of a strap. But there is no sign that the game is breaking up. Candleshoe is so quiet not because the children have departed, but because each is silent and tense at a station. Grant is sure of this in a general way, and as he himself stands taut in the darkness he tries for a more precise picture. At each end of the house a staircase winds upwards through a square tower; at the top of each there will be a ladder and a trapdoor leading to the open air. Grant can see, as surely as if he had made the climb, an inviting intricacy of leaded roof, with that long scrollwork inscription by way of parapet. He can see a score of places where the finely cut stone has split and flaked long ago, and been cobbled up with iron bands which are themselves rusted away by a century of English weather. It is a wonderful eyrie, with vantage points at a score of places. By day – and even by night if there is a moon – one can command the gardens, the line of the drive and the stream, every break in the beech-trees, much of the farther country. And to sweep the terrace one has only to lean forward –

Grant shuts his eyes – and is aware of a play of light upon their closed lids. He opens them and sees that he is held in the beam of a torch. A moment later Jay and Robin are standing beside him; Robin opens what appears to be some species of dark lantern; and in the light of this the boys look at him silently. Then Jay speaks. ‘Did you – did your mother – know anything about Candleshoe before you drove up this afternoon?’

‘Nothing at all.’

The two boys glance at each other swiftly. This time it is Robin who utters. ‘But you are very interested in it now?’

Grant shakes his head. ‘I don’t think I am. All you people interest me quite a heap – the things you like doing, and what you are busy about right now. But the place is nothing special to me. It’s your place, I reckon – not mine.’

‘But your mother wants it?’ Jay’s voice is at its most peremptory. ‘She would buy it for a great deal of money from Miss Candleshoe?’

‘Maybe so.’ Grant tries to be easy. ‘But nothing will come of it, I guess. My mother is always taking a fancy to buy places. But most times it remains just a fancy.’

‘Do you want her to buy Candleshoe?’

‘I certainly do not.’ Grant is relieved at having it in his power to be unquestionably sincere about this. ‘My mother is romantic, and sometimes she doesn’t see how a thing wouldn’t do.’

‘A person ought not to come to a strange place without being asked and offer money for it.’ Jay enunciates this rule of conduct with grave courtesy.

Grant, although not prepared to criticize his mother, feels unable to dispute the general proposition. So he says nothing.

‘When a place is for sale – really for sale – boards are put up, and there are advertisements in the newspapers.’

‘That’s right.’ Robin backs up his leader. ‘And my father says only a lunatic would buy Candleshoe, because it’s dangerous and unhealthy and inconvenient.’

‘These are things which you should explain to your mother.’ Jay is apparently unoffended by his lieutenant’s revelation. ‘And please say that Robin’s father is a doctor, who ought to know.’

‘And the place is haunted.’ Robin is now eager. ‘There are two ghosts. And each is of a very specially terrifying sort.’

Jay seems at once to recognize this as a false cast. He silences Robin with a look. ‘Probably your mother would like to buy the ghosts too?’

‘Probably she would.’

‘Ghosts can’t be bought. It’s a vulgar error to think they can.’

Grant receives this censure submissively. It is his inward opinion that Jay is right. The Candleshoe ghosts will in all probability not ‘go with the house’. They are much more likely to accompany Miss Candleshoe and Mr Armigel to Constantinople or Crim-Tartary.

‘May your mother be offering Miss Candleshoe the money now?’

‘I guess not.’

‘But soon?’

‘She might.’

‘Then don’t you think you had better go?’ Jay says this terribly quietly; he may fire minatory arrows at strangers, but he knows what it is to ask a guest to leave; he has strung himself up to it.

‘Maybe we better had.’ Greatly daring, Grant puts out a hand and gives Jay’s arm a friendly pat. ‘I’ll slip out and see to starting the car. But as we’ll have to go by the fields again, I’m afraid we’ll need a pilot. Perhaps I could give some of your friends a lift home?’

The two boys confer in whispers. Grant remembers that the threat constituted by his mother is no more than an additional and unexpected danger at Candleshoe. Such as it is, it is a real danger; but in the minds of these strange children it is secondary to some more exciting peril of their own invention. It is on this that they are taking counsel together now.

‘There is an enemy approaching the house.’ Jay turns back and speaks in his most level tones. ‘We have had a message flashed from our sentry at the end of the drive. That is why the alarm-bell went.’

‘I thought it was something like that.’ Grant is surprised to feel an uncomfortable pricking down his spine. The children’s proceedings, he must finally acknowledge, cannot by any stretch of language be called a game. He is not in contact with make-believe, but with illusion – with fiction held as fact. He knows that learned persons would deny the difference; would declare that children are still playing when the suspension of their disbelief is entire; that they can be at once actors and spectators in a theatre where illusion is unflawed. But Grant feels this uncomfortable pricking, just the same. He would like to give the two boys a shake and say, ‘That’s enough for tonight.’ Instead he asks, ‘What sort of enemy?’

‘We can’t tell you that now,’ Jay answers as he and Robin move through the lobby to the outer door of Candleshoe. ‘But if we believe you when you say your mother won’t really buy this house, and if we accept you as a friend, will you do something for us?’

‘I’ll do anything that doesn’t strike me as dangerous and foolish.’ Grant is guarded.

But Jay frowns, finding this a poor reply. ‘It is dangerous.’

‘Is it entering these enchanted woods?’

‘Yes.’

‘I said “dangerous and
foolish
”. The woods aren’t that. So go ahead.’

‘Will you please take the torch, and go out of the house with a bit of a row when I unbolt the door? And then go and have a look at your car and come back – all in a very open sort of way? When you want to come in again you must knock’ – Jay pauses and glances round him warily – ‘and say
Christmas at Candleshoe
.’

‘Is that the password?’

‘It’s the password for tonight. Will you do it?’

Grant nods. ‘Sure. But what’s the big idea – distraction technique?’

This puzzles Jay – but Robin gets it and nods back. ‘I’m going out to scout around. I’ll slip along the terrace while you attract attention to yourself and your car.’

‘Very well. I’ll start the engine and race her. Only, let’s hurry – for my mother and I must honestly be off fairly soon.’

Jay whistles on a rising note. It is a sound Grant has heard before. Two boys and a girl glide out of the buttery and take their stance at the back of the lobby. All are deadly serious, and all are armed with bows. They stand with arrows notched, facing the door. The set-up, Grant realizes, is genuinely lethal. Sooner or later there
will
be a misadventure. Jay has drawn the bolts. Before he knows it, Grant is outside, flashing the torch before him and whistling. The door bangs to behind him. As he takes a second cautious step down from the terrace he can just hear it softly opening again.

There is a clear sky and a sickle moon. After a few minutes in the open it would just be possible to get about without a torch. Driving will be pleasant – but Grant glances at his watch and wonders at what unearthly hour he and his mother will finally make a decent hotel. He wants to get away from this place. And, once away, he is quite sure that he is not coming back. If his mother really succeeds in bringing the crazy old dame to a deal he will go in and veto it. Once in a way, his authority with his mother will stretch to that. Let Jay run Candleshoe, hallucinations and all, until one morning its owner is found stiff in her bed. And then let family lawyers descend on the place and clear it all up. Let them, at a pinch, burn Jay’s bows and send his forces packing and set him to a useful trade. It will be better for him in the end than getting the boundaries of fact and fancy so dangerously confused.

In this mood of impatience Grant comes to his car. He climbs into the driving-seat and switches on a light. His mother’s guidebook, with its fatal promise of long-and-short work at Abbot’s Benison, lies open on the floorboards. He picks it up and then switches on the ignition. He has promised to make a row, and he will. But perhaps he is no friend to the children in encouraging a mass of obsessive nonsense that has plainly gone too far. He tugs the self-starter. Nothing happens.

He tugs again – although already he knows that there is something wrong. After a minute he gets out, swings up the bonnet, and flashes his torch on the engine. One look tells him enough. The car will not move that night.

He finds himself acting in an extraordinary way. He flicks off the torch, reaches into the car and switches off the light, turns, and walks swiftly and quietly into shadow. It needs thinking out.

He has no impulse to suspect the children. This is intuitive and immediate, and only seconds later does he see that it is backed by logic. For the moment Jay is putting up with him, and has even pressed him into service. But the boy wants nothing more than to be rid of him – or at least to be rid of his mother. Jay has no motive for doing this thing. Moreover – ruthless as one may feel him to be – this can be guessed as something he would not do even to the most unwelcome visitor who had once received the hospitality of Candleshoe.

There is a possible explanation in insubordination and stupidity. Robin is certainly not a lieutenant to display either of these weaknesses. But there is a whole bunch of other kids, and it is unlikely that Jay has been able so to handpick his forces that one or two young blockheads are not among them.