Christmas at Candleshoe (6 page)

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 is 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.

‘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.

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 fustigation 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.