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  Copyright & Information

  Christmas At Candleshoe

  First published in 1953

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1953-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755120906 EAN: 9780755120901

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Biographical Quote

  CHRISTMAS, GERARD (d. 1634), carver and statuary; carved funeral monuments; carver to the navy, 1614-34; designer of figures for several lord mayors’ shows between 1611 and 1632.

  The Concise Dictionary of National Biography

  1

  We are looking at an English rural landscape on a summer afternoon. Most of us are urban folk – we come from New York and London and Birmingham and St Louis and our principal sensation is the comfortable one of getting our money’s worth. The Englishness is unchallengeable, the rurality unflawed, and the whole effect a landscape in the fullest sense of the word. This last circumstance, indeed, makes a few of us obscurely uneasy.

  Delimiting the foreground, beyond a broad expanse of lawn, is a low and unassuming stone wall. Our eye lingers upon it, and we wonder why. Well, diagonally upon it falls another line – that of a small clear river flowing away into the middle distance. And it so happens that, in the picture-space we are contemplating, the one line cuts the other in a ratio which artists call golden section. Moreover the diagonal line of the river is balanced by an answering diagonal in the long slope of an adjacent hill, and we are further aware that to left and right, just comfortably within our peripheral vision, grove nods to grove and wood advances upon wood as in the sinuous symmetry of some sophisticated dance. Knowing that nature never contrives precisely such effects, we realize that the river has been diverted, the hill manufactured, and the circumambient forest persuaded to approach and take up a station in consonance with the general effect. We are studying a work of art.

  More, we are the heirs of all the ages. Whate’er Lorraine light-touched with softening hue, or savage Rosa dashed, or learned Poussin drew has gone to build up this picture; the Gothic is present in a durably constructed ruin partly screened by Druidic oaks; and across the lawn stretches the shadow of an intricate and enormous object, presently to be explored, which could never have been thought of but for the lucidity of Greece and the grandeur of Rome. If in the course of the past few weeks we have been doing things in a really big way – perambulating, perhaps, the picture-galleries of the continent, pausing for appropriate minutes before three-starred canvasses, and refraining from any culpable lingering before inferior productions – if we have been doing this sort of thing we may feel that some optical trick is now being played on us; that effects properly to be contrived as a mild illusion upon a demonstrably flat surface have here been made ingeniously stereoscopic; and that by pressing a button or removing a pair of cunningly contrived spectacles we shall cause all the mass and roundedness to vanish, and be looking at nothing more out-of-the-way than a good canvas by Richard Wilson.

  But there is the sky. Small clouds are actually moving across it, and light and shade play over the scene. On the lawn, beyond the farthest tip of the great still shadow, something – a further shadow – flutters. We turn, craning our necks upwards. High above the vast complicated building flies a small complicated flag. As the breeze catches it and flattens it out it becomes – we vaguely conjecture – generously and awesomely informative. If we knew a griffin from a wyvern, and could name when we saw them gules three pales vair and a chief gold, this fluttering scrap might largely if somewhat imaginatively instruct us in a substantial corner of English history. As it is, we may be content with the thing’s simpler advertisement. The Marquess of Scattergood is in residence at Benison Court.

  Lord Scattergood is entertaining guests. Groups of them are on the lawn with us now, and others are strolling in remoter parts of the gardens. The jet d’eau has been turned on and evokes admiration; the water-steps – so charmingly reproduced in miniature at Chatsworth – are agreeably cool; the Neptune fountain, with its circling and spouting dolphins and its diving Nereid, is accounted a marvellous toy. The palm houses and orangeries please some; others in two stately gondolas venture upon the surface of the south lake; smaller parties explore the temple of Artemis, the hermit
’s grotto (disused), the ice house, the sixth marquess’ improved milking-parlour in the Chinese taste. Most however are indoors, and so too is Lord Scattergood himself. The state apartments are open, and large numbers move about in them, Lord Scattergood, in the middle of a small group (thus highly if somewhat randomly privileged), dominates the octagon room, full of affability. He had good reason to be delighted. It is a peak hour and the place is doing well. In the great courtyard the turnstiles never cease to click, and the park is alive with chars-à-bancs, like enormous beeves at pasture. Everybody has paid either three shillings for the house, or half-a-crown for the gardens, or five shillings for both.

  Lord Scattergood feels, very properly, that he owes rather more to all these people than if they had paid nothing at all. So he leads his group around and is prodigal of information. Much of it is inaccurate, since it has been Lord Scattergood’s habit to take his possessions for granted and revere them less in detail than in the mass. Even his elderly younger son, Lord Arthur Spendlove, who is also acting as cicerone, gets fewer of the dates wrong and is less apt to muddle the rebuildings and restorings and royal visits. But then one cannot have everything, even for five shillings. It is something to be done the honours of Benison by a Spendlove, and particularly by a Marquess of Scattergood himself. And Lord Scattergood’s manners are so nice that we can feel quite at home. It is true that the elder statesmen who stroll up and down in a detached way through these large vistas are detectives. But they would be here, just the same, if Lord Scattergood was giving a party strictly confined within the limits of the peerage. Were he giving a large-scale family party, it would be his impulse to have them doubled. But this is something you would never guess as you look at him. He has all the appearance of reposing in utter confidence within his own inviolable caste. His present affability has its first and cardinal condition in that.

  ‘I ought to begin, you know, by explaining that my people have lived here at Benison for quite a long time. I don’t mean, of course, that the place is frightfully old. As you can see for yourselves, it quite definitely isn’t. From the look of it’ – and at this Lord Scattergood glances about him with all the appearance of a freshly appraising eye – ‘from the look of it, I should say it was run up long after Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare and Cromwell and all that thoroughly historical crowd. It’s no good coming to Benison for the feel of that sort of thing. In Scotland I have a place called Corbies – my eldest boy lives there at present – where you get much more of all that. Dungeons, I mean, and a drawbridge, and deuced primitive drains.’

  ‘Would your family ghost be there?’

  It is an American lady who in all boldness and innocence asks this question. There is a ripple of embarrassed laughter. A small man clutching a child in either hand – he is a greengrocer from Nottingham – blushes painfully: his delicacy is outraged. But Lord Scattergood has had this one before and is delighted. ‘Certainly. The family ghost has never come down here, I am glad to say. Not that he is in any way really tiresome. Only’ – something new and pleasing flashes into Lord Scattergood’s head – ‘only whenever he appears he is accompanied by a skirl of bagpipes – and that, of course, can be disturbing in the middle of the night. But I was remarking that one doesn’t come to Benison, don’t you know, for the medieval side of things. The Henrys, and all that. When I was a lad my father packed me off to a big school near Windsor – and there, if you understand me, there is much more that takes you back to chain mail, and the Crusades, and those Wars of the Roses in which so many people you meet got badly cut up. But here at Benison we are seventeenth-and eighteenth-century, and we have got along in a very orderly way on the whole. Those carvings’ – and Lord Scattergood abruptly extends a finely tapering finger as he makes this transition from the general to the particular – ‘those carvings above the doorway are by a fellow called Grinling Gibbons. Or was it Edward Gibbon? I remember my grandmother telling me they were both little men who came down and worked here from time to time.’

  Lord Scattergood, conscious of being a shade vague, pauses to collect himself. The little group gazes around and talks in whispers. The whispering is something they feel to be polite; it is not the issue of timidity. People are impressed but not overawed. They have just been told, it is true, that such and such paintings are by Titian and such and such by Velasquez; that here is a casket by Cellini and there a wax figure by Michelangelo. But are they not, after all, familiar with super-cinemas? And has not the cinema-screen itself conducted them in the course of historical films through palaces more gorgeous than this? Obscurely but quite confidently, the English feel that things have happened which make them, in a sense, joint-owners with the Marquess both of Benison itself and of all its treasures. They are in the same boat with Lord Scattergood; they will sink or swim together; on this sunny afternoon it is pleasant to have been invited to climb to the bridge. Their five shillings are forgotten; they are well-disposed and well-behaved guests; it will be tomorrow before some of them recall that they have peeped into a fantastically remote and still obstinately privileged world.

  The Americans are different. They are keeping the full measure of their awe for the Tower of London, the crypts of the great cathedrals, the birthplace of Shakespeare in Stratford, the cradle of the Washington family at Sulgrave Manor. That the owner of Benison Court should confess the place to be of no great antiquity impresses and pleases them; they see in it the high standard of personal honour which the English aristocracy – they believe – manages to combine with the utmost of Machiavellian duplicity in the political and diplomatic sphere. At the same time a few of them are looking at their watches, and presently one of them asks the question that is in all their minds. He is a bald pale person from Buffalo, where he carries on the profession of mortician. Conceivably by way of reaction from this sombre calling, he now wears a lemon-coloured suit and an extraordinary tie – a tie as complicated as the flag now fluttering above Benison, and akin to it – we may feel – as a gesture of naïf ostentation. The mortician has a camera slung at the ready just above the bulge of his stomach, and this gives to the most prominent part of his person the appearance of a large Cyclops-face set directly upon two short legs. He swings round and faces Lord Scattergood with the camera’s single staring eye. ‘What’, he demands, ‘is the oldest thing you have here?’

  The mortician is paying Lord Scattergood a compliment, is acknowledging him to be the sort of man who will take and deal with a straight question. And Lord Scattergood is once more delighted. The vocation of Edward Gibbon, although he must have learnt it when at the large school near Windsor, has long ago passed out of his head. But he knows how to answer the mortician. ‘Well now, talking of that, I can show you rather a jolly thing.’ On long loose limbs he strides out of the octagon room; from the back he might be a youth of twenty; the tourists puff and shuffle after him, their foothold uncertain on the great polished floors. They file between rows of portraits, a complexity of mirrors, cliffs of books; they descend a broad cold staircase hung with enormous canvases of conjectural Spendloves prancing upon badly foreshortened horses. Presently they are peering into a chill and musty gloom, while their guide fumbles for an electric switch. ‘There you are. Rather fun – what?’

  With a flicker and a ping a bar of fluorescent lighting has snapped on. Lord Scattergood’s party takes on an unhealthy tinge and the mortician might be a piece of bad embalming. Only Lord Scattergood’s own complexion is so florid as to be indestructible. He watches with amusement as his guests peer doubtfully into the great wedge-shaped space beneath the last flight of stairs. It is the corner into which, in a suburban house, one pushes the pram. And now Lord Scattergood’s guests, as if they were Gullivers in a Brobdingnagian semi-detached villa, are looking at an enormous baby-carriage, elaborately painted and carved. The greengrocer’s younger child becomes excited and utters cries.

  ‘Constructed for the children of the Swedish Countess in 1722.’ Lord Scattergood embarks somewhat uncertainly o
n an explanation of how this lady found herself a Spendlove. ‘But, as you can see, it is really a sledge. She is said to have had reindeer brought over, and in winter her children went bowling about the park.’

  ‘Did you have more snow in those days than you have now?’ The American lady who inquired about the ghost has put this question with an air of much acuteness. Lord Scattergood, cheerfully accepting the character of a Methuselah, replies that the winters were decidedly more severe then than now.

  Meanwhile the sledge is being a great success. It is pronounced to be cute and sweet. A young female from Sydney, who is mostly bare legs and an enormous rucksack, declares it to be dandy. The greengrocer’s younger child starts shouting. Only the mortician from Buffalo remembers the motive behind this inspection. With professional deftness he applies a scraping fingernail to a leather surface. ‘I don’t get this,’ he says. ‘1722 isn’t so very old. And it don’t look old, either.’

  ‘Ah – you misunderstood me.’ Lord Scattergood glances amiably round, collecting the attention of his auditory. ‘It’s not the carriage itself that is at all notably old. I’m not sure that the fellow Gibbons I was mentioning didn’t have a hand in it. But the sledge-runners are quite old – and fine pieces of timber, as you can see. Cedar wood. They came from the Middle East.’

  ‘The Middle East?’ The mortician is suspicious.

  ‘Yes – brought back by an ancestor of mine – quite an enterprising fellow – from the top of Mount Ararat. Ship’s timbers, he decided they were. And he was a sailor, so he ought to have known.’

  The more mentally alert of Lord Scattergood’s hearers giggle or gasp. An explanatory voice at the back, unconscious of offence, says, ‘Blessed if the ol’ bastard doesn’t say ’e’s got Noah’s ruddy Ark.’ The greengrocer’s second child, thus hearing mention of this object of juvenile enchantment, breaks loose, rushes forward, trips, grazes a knee, and howls. The greengrocer’s wife, deeply mortified, seizes the child, rights him, and is about to administer the alarming if innocuous shaking with which in England the simpler classes are accustomed to admonish their young. But Lord Scattergood is before her, whisks the child to his shoulder, and marches off with brisk talk of warm water and sticking-plaster. The greengrocer, his wife, and his elder child follow. They are really awed now. Lord Scattergood pauses until they catch up. He has forgotten his damned tourists and the turn he puts on for them. The child has casually attracted him, and for five minutes he will chat to the parents just as he would do to any of his great neighbours in the county. He believes that they will go away with the unspoken knowledge that one does not shake small children.