Christmas at Candleshoe (11 page)
Yet that won’t do either; won’t do for the sufficient reason that the job on the car has been a knowledgeable one. Grant begins to see why he is acting queerly. And he is acting queerly. He has got on the shadowed side of a yew-hedge, long since grown wild and cliff-like, and he is listening intently. He wants to locate Robin, now on his scouting expedition, and get him back to the house. For his own imagination is working. Just as, a little time ago, he could not bear the mental image of some tense child leaning far out over the crumbling masonry of the roof, so now he finds he can’t comfortably take the image of Robin prowling these deserted gardens in a sliver of moonlight.
Grant tries to catch himself on a rebound from all this; tries to see it as darn nonsense. But the more he goes after such an attitude the less can he manage it. There must be some reasonable link between the extravagant fancies of Jay and friends and the hard fact that somebody has scotched the ignition of his, Grant Feather’s, car. But instead of any reasonable supposition only rubbish comes into his head. The children are convinced that Candleshoe is beleaguered; that an enemy is closing upon it. Can a conviction like that, vividly held by a closely integrated group of young minds, set odd things happening in the physical world? A single hysterical girl is often pointed to as the source of poltergeist phenomena – of pictures falling from the wall and china hurtling across the room. Why should not a poltergeist of a modern mechanical bent get under the bonnet of a Packard and have no end of fun?
Grant finds that while his mind is spinning this poppycock his body is behaving with great deliberation and discretion. It has taken him silently to a gap in the high yew-hedge from which he can gain, as his eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, a faint but intelligible visual impression of a further reach of the gardens. The house is over on his left; the moon rides behind it; written as if with a heavy pencil against the dimly luminous sky he can distinguish in the balustrade a single Latin word:
Nisi
. Grant looks back to the garden. Out of the tail of his eye he thinks he has just caught a flicker of movement. He watches and is sure of it. Robin is flitting from shadow to shadow in a wide circle round the house. Grant breaks cover and goes in direct pursuit of him. At once his mind starts putting up a better show.
Suppose that Miss Candleshoe is a miser, and that the apparent poverty of her household is the consequence of this. Suppose she has mattresses stuffed with banknotes and old trunks heavy with guineas and sovereigns and jewels. It isn’t terribly likely, but at least it is a rational supposition. It is bruited abroad that to rifle Candleshoe would be to possess oneself of great wealth. Professional thieves take on the job. They reconnoitre the place – perhaps make some unsuccessful assault upon it. They lurk around, are seen in the nearest villages, withdraw for a time until any suspicions are allayed, return to further reconnaissance. And all this of cold criminal fact and intent collides with something quite different – the fantasy-world of Jay and Robin and their companions. Almost without realizing the change, the children have turned from engaging imaginary enemies to engaging real ones. And then –
Grant finds that he has fallen flat on his face, and that his face is most uncomfortably tingling. He remembers that bramble and nettle proliferate around him, and he proceeds more cautiously. Perhaps he should give a shout and summon the boy. It may be true that criminals surround them, but, even so, the best plan is probably to behave with the greatest boldness. In nine cases out of ten, surely, detected thieves and burglars cut their losses and run.
Following this line of thought, Grant is about to bellow out Robin’s name when he remembers the car. It comes to him, obscurely but powerfully, that there is some sort of warning in it. Somehow the treatment it has received seems to speak of rather desperate villainy, and he wonders why. Jay would gladly be rid of the Feathers; would like to see them trundling over the cart track back to the high road. Why should not the lurking criminals – if criminals there are – feel the same? If they propose to break into Candleshoe this very night, why are they not more than willing to see the departure of the evening’s altogether unexpected accession to its garrison? There is only one reasonable answer. With one or two more people on the spot they feel that they can effectively deal. But they are taking no chances of the visitors’ getting away with any inkling of what is going forward and the disposition to raise an alarm. Grant’s car has been immobilized for the same reason that a telephone-wire would be cut, supposing Candleshoe to boast anything so new-fangled as a telephone: effectively to isolate the place while a projected assault is carried through.
Robin has crossed a stretch of garden already familiar to Grant, who recognizes the dull gleam of a pool and in the middle of it a patch of shadow that is the small crouching Nereid with the empty shell. There is a criss-cross of paths beneath his feet, but they are overgrown and in the faint light largely indistinguishable. The surrounding hedge, gapped and irregular, shows as a mere silhouette; it might be a scattered crowd standing immobile round some nocturnal ball game. Through one of the gaps Robin vanishes and Grant follows. For a moment he distinguishes nothing but blobs of deeper darkness in a general gloom; for another moment he is startled by a sense of living presences all about him; and then it suddenly comes to him that his whole adventure must be a dream. It is a new solution, simple and comprehensive, and he is massively surrounded by evidence not otherwise to be interpreted. He has come to a halt beside an elephant; a hippopotamus is facing him; and beyond that looms a motionless giraffe. The forms are exaggerated and monstrous, but there is no mistaking them; his dream has brought him to a circus or menagerie, and in a moment he will wake up. Grant stretches out a hand to the elephant’s trunk and finds that he is grasping leaves. He is in the topiary garden which – as Miss Candleshoe has explained – the children care for; they have transformed the shapes prescriptive in such a place into creatures that more engage their juvenile fancy. The notion of a dream must be abandoned. Here, in a special sense, is an enchanted wood, a grotesque metamorphosis of the plants. And amid these slumbering vegetable monsters or beyond them, it is his business to find the boy called Robin.
Grant advances. The creatures about him are mere roughly shaped masses. But they are done with the sure sense possessed by children for the nature of material and for essential form; and in the darkness this makes them entirely alive. No doubt the obscure presence of danger helps.
In the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear !
But here bushes
are
bears. Shakespeare slips into Grant’s head only to slip rapidly out again – for suddenly he grasps a new fact. Endeavouring to follow Robin, he is himself being followed. He cannot tell by what sensory channel this knowledge comes to him. But he is suddenly so vividly possessed of it that he swings round like a man expecting a blow. Only the absurd menagerie is to be seen, its members standing improbably at gaze each with another.
Mythology has been admitted, for Grant finds himself looking at a centaur. The upper part of the centaur moves. It is some common four-footed creature, with a man slinking away from behind it. As Grant marks this, he feels a hand pluck at his sleeve and hears a low warning hiss. Robin, while making his own reconnaissance, has been keeping an eye on Jay’s dubiously useful recruit. Grant sees that this is the situation, and he lets himself be guided silently from the topiary garden and into a narrow walk between high hedges.
‘They’ve come, all right.’ Robin whispers this grimly but with distinguishable satisfaction. ‘We’d better cut back to the house.’
Grant agrees. He has left his mother to the sole companionship of childhood and dotage in what has turned out to be, really and truly, an unknown degree of hazard. The first thing to do is to rejoin her in the security of Candleshoe. For the house does, he feels, represent security – at any rate in some degree. It is a rambling and tottering old place, but he has little doubt that Jay has given much thought to constituting it a fairly effective fortress.
There is turf beneath their feet and they break into a run; at the end of the alley they plunge into a shrubbery and move forward warily. Grant guesses that they have rounded the house and are approaching it by the rear; he sees that, as they move, Robin is thinking out a route that shall keep them steadily in shadow.
He feels his arm gripped. The boy has come to a halt and is pointing – is pointing out into clear moonlight. Grant sees a small overgrown terrace beyond which the ground seems to fall away. On this a man is standing, facing away from them. He holds an electric torch at arm’s length above his head and lets its beam circle slowly in air. The movement irresistibly suggests a summons, a command to gather. Grant likes it less than anything he has yet seen.
They have moved on, and a moment later the house looms before them. They skirt a wall, are in some cold, sunken place, have come to a halt in almost complete darkness. Grant hears the boy beside him tap cautiously on a wooden surface. A moment later there is a creak somewhere overhead on their left. He guesses that a window has softly opened, glances upward, and sees or imagines he sees the glint of an arrowhead, the gleam of a drawn bow.
‘Christmas at Candleshoe.’
The words are breathed in darkness, bolts are drawn back, and he and Robin tumble into a flagged lamplit passage. Archers face them as Jay closes the door and shoots the bolts back home. Jay’s pallor is greater than before; his lips are compressed; his dark eyes blaze with excitement. ‘They’ve come?’
Grant answers. ‘They’ve come all right – whoever they are. And now you must tell me, Jay. You must tell me the whole thing.’
It was the custom of Lord Arthur Spendlove when stopping at Benison Court to reclaim from time to time what had been an important privilege of childhood – that of climbing to the roof at sunset and lowering his father’s standard from its staff. On our particular evening – for the narrative upon which we are engaged will not carry us on to another – it was at a somewhat earlier hour than usual that he addressed himself to this mild ritual performance. The day had been a bumper one; they were still counting the stacks of notes and piles of silver at the turnstiles; presently a grand total would be arrived at and conveyed with some ceremony to the Marquess. From this and from the locking-up of the ‘takings’ – the word delighted his father – Arthur Spendlove found that he was willing to dispense himself. So he made his climb to the leads not long after the last
char-à-banc
had departed, and prepared to spend a contemplative half-hour with the face of nature as it appeared from that lofty station.
But from the roof of Benison the natural world shows much as does the Atlantic ocean from the deck of the
Queen Mary
. It is there – but at some remove, and with every appearance of respectful subjection. This appearance may be in both cases delusive; and Arthur Spendlove’s consciousness of something of the sort made him frown as he glanced over the bleak immensity of Benison as this aspect revealed it. At some time or other an idle marquess had made a half-hearted attempt to ornament this sterile world of slate and lead, and had set up a proliferation of large stone objects – compounded, it might seem, from the mingled ideas of the urn, the acorn, and the pineapple – wherever an adequately supporting surface could be achieved. These meaningless embellishments, which a score of masons must have chipped at for a livelihood for months on end, jostled with chimneystacks, skylights, trapdoors, and a complicated system of wooden ladders and guide-rails which had been run up for fire-watching purposes during the war. Round the perimeter of the building it was possible to take a brisk walk of just under half-a-mile, varied by occasional climbs from one level to another. This form of exercise Arthur Spendlove no longer favoured, but he did upon this occasion stroll some way down the east wing, pausing eventually to gaze with whimsical concern at a long line of concealed attic windows thus exposed. They represented the last addition ever made to Benison, and were just under fifty years old. For it had been Arthur’s grandfather who, in a fit of eccentric benevolence, had presented his twenty senior maidservants with windows instead of skylights – and even with a bathroom to share between them. The windows remained, but the rooms behind them were uninhabited – unless indeed it were by ghosts too undistinguished to be mentioned to his father’s tourists. Arthur liked to take a glance at these windows – forlorn and vain concession to the march of time – before turning to gaze at the unchanging lineaments of rural England.
He gazed now. The scene was not, after all, quite unchanged. Straight in front of him his mother’s flourishing poultry-farm spread over the broad paddocks once reserved for the hunters. Since the western arm of Benison Wood had gone, more could be seen of Benison Magna – and there was more of it to see, a rash of small red buildings on the higher ground beyond the old town. Benison Parva had always been full in view; you could make out the village school to which his grandfather, in another spasm of democratic feeling, had despatched his father every day for a whole month – with a footman and a groom in attendance. Arthur Spendlove let his eye travel here and there. There was little ground, in the nearer prospect at least, of which he did not know every yard. And even in the farthest distance he knew just where the villages, the manor houses, the farms lay. For a minute longer he stood beside the flagstaff, naming the places one by one. Kerpen House was still shut up: those people clung to London like Cockneys. You could see that old Colonel Riskey had given his little box of a place a coat of white paint. The gable east of the low church-tower of Abbot’s Benison belonged to the house built by what’s-his-name – a draper or ironmonger, surely, and now the local MP. And on the other side, just distinguishable… Arthur Spendlove frowned, then chuckled. How ever could he forget that? Candleshoe, of course – the cradle of the family. He must ask his father if the rum old lady was still alive.