Christmas at Candleshoe by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

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 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