Christmas at Candleshoe Read online

  ‘I don’t find it all that striking, momma. And that house, if you want to know, must be Candleshoe Manor.’

  Mrs Feather consults her guidebook. ‘This says nothing about it. Yet I’m sure it’s Jacobean. It may even be Elizabethan.’

  ‘And good Queen Bess herself may have slept here?’ Grant moves back towards the car. ‘Well, if it isn’t mentioned, it can’t be on show. So we may as well move on.’

  ‘But, Grant, that means we’ve practically discovered it.’

  ‘Nonsense. There will be some big county history with screeds about it. But that doesn’t mean that the folk who live here want inquisitive trippers poking round.’

  ‘Perhaps nobody lives here. They say a lot of these places are deserted and going to rack and ruin. Would that be some sort of drive fifty yards down the road?’ Mrs Feather sets off at a brisk pace as she speaks. ‘I believe it is. And there’s a lodge.’

  Resigning himself to the situation, Grant steps out beside her. The road appears wholly unfrequented, and he recalls that he has seen no other vehicle since branching off on it. The boy – according to his mother, the oddly dressed boy – is the only sign of life that has appeared. And the lodge, when they come up to it, is clearly deserted; the windows are boarded up and a hole gapes in the roof. Even his mother acknowledges it to be a nondescript of no antiquarian interest; she opines that it is a nineteenth-century affair, built when some secondary approach to the house was constructed by a prosperous owner. On each side of the drive itself a masonry column of undistinguished proportions attests to a sort of perfunctory grandeur; one is topped by a meaningless stone ball and from the other an identical ball has toppled and lies half-buried in grass. Rusted hinges show that there must once have been a pair of iron gates. But these have vanished and there is open access to a cart-track – it appears little more – that presently takes a twist among the beech-trees and vanishes. The house can no longer be seen.

  ‘We’ll just look what’s round that bend.’ Mrs Feather is still briskly resolved. But in response to the silence that seems to be gathering round them she has unconsciously lowered her voice. A rabbit not twenty yards ahead nibbles undisturbed, and for a moment the intruders find themselves standing quite still in tingling expectation. It is a drift of primitive feeling that has worked its way up wards into their eminently civilized consciousness; were it to break in on a more substantial scale they would experience panic, and the god himself might catch and claim them as they bolted for their car. But this passes; they set off up the neglected avenue; the rabbit vanishes; Mrs Feather gives a moment’s attention to the commonplace business of finding half-a-crown.

  ‘Probably it is deserted. But there may be a caretaker, and he will be glad enough to show us round. There will be quite enough daylight, although it is already dusky here in the trees.’

  Grant says nothing. He sees only cold corned beef, watery salad, blancmange, and the crowning horror known as ‘jelly’ between himself and bedtime. These will be served in penitential conditions by an obtrusively promoted scullion in an empty dining-room depressingly ‘laid’ for breakfast.

  They have reached the bend and rounded it. A few yards ahead a tree-trunk sprawls dead across the drive; it is a barrier which they must scramble over if they are to go further. Grant supposes that it must have been brought down by a storm, but when his eye travels to its base he sees that this is not so, and that it has been expertly felled to lie as it now does. He and his mother both come to a halt; as they do so there is an odd twang in the air somewhere to their left, and they are looking at the shaft of an arrow quivering in the obstacle before them.

  ‘That’s your boy with the queer cap.’ Grant is at once clear-headed about this surprising occurrence. ‘And it has a message.’ He advances to the tree-trunk and takes hold of the arrow. It is homemade, powerful, and correctly feathered; it pierces and has carried a twist of paper. Grant tears this off and unfolds it. They are looking at a single word scrawled in pencil:

  Avaunt!

  ‘An inhospitable boy.’ Mrs Feather frowns. ‘But where would a village child come by a word like that?’

  Grant laughs. ‘From a five-cent story of Robin Hood and his merry men, I’d guess. And I don’t suppose it’s meant to be ambiguous.’

  ‘How could it be ambiguous?’ Mrs Feather turns colloquial. ‘Don’t it just mean “Git”?’

  ‘It might mean “Advance”.’ Grant is on ground where his education excels his mother’s. ‘Spenser uses it that way in the Faerie Queene.’

  ‘I never heard of village boys reading the Faerie Queene.’

  ‘This mayn’t be a village boy. It may be the young lord of the manor, amusing himself in a mildly alarming way at our expense. The way they said “Trespassers will be prosecuted” in Sherwood Forest long ago.’

  ‘We’ll take it to mean the other thing, and go right ahead.’ Mrs Feather’s resolution is mounting. She climbs over the tree and walks on.

  Twang!

  This time the arrow gives the impression of having travelled uncomfortably close to their ears. But its mark has been at a discreet distance ahead; Grant goes forward to the standing tree in which this time it has lodged, and again finds a message. He twists it open and reads:

  ‘Enter these enchanted woods,

  You who dare!’

  ‘Meredith.’ It is apparent that in the way of English poetry Grant Feather knows all the answers. ‘And this time I’d say it is ambiguous – a kind of challenge. But will it be safe to accept?’ Grant looks at his mother as whimsically as he can. In fact, he is uneasy. He knows that the bow and arrow at work are not the sort with which a child plays in a suburban garden. The thing could be lethal. And the child may be cracked. He does not want this Robin Hood ballad stuff to turn into a Cock Robin nursery rhyme to his mother’s personal hazard.

  Mrs Feather divines that her son is feeling protective. This amuses her, but she is diplomatic. ‘We can risk it. The boy has certainly gotten a powerful bow. But a challenge like that doesn’t come to the mind of anyone who is going to shoot you in the back. We’ll go straight ahead.’

  Strictly, this is not a feasible programme, for the drive, such as it is, pursues a winding course. Perhaps it was originally constructed in this way in order to give a false impression of distance; it is twisting about in the beech wood so as to make the most of it.

  They move forward. No more arrows are fired. Mrs Feather has taken the second message from her son, and now she glances at it. ‘Grant – can you remember any more of this poem?’

  ‘Quite a lot.’ He is aware that his voice has gone self-conscious in what they feel as a deepening circumambient silence. But he firmly begins to quote:

  ‘Enter these enchanted woods,

  You who dare.

  Nothing harms beneath the leaves

  More than waves a swimmer cleaves.

  Toss your heart up with the lark,

  Foot at peace with mouse and worm,

  Fair you fare.’

  Mrs Feather listens attentively as she walks. ‘It’s an odd sort of poetry to appeal to a boy.’

  ‘Didn’t you say he was an odd sort of boy?’ And Grant Continues to recite:

  ‘Only at a dread of dark

  Quaver, and they quit their form:

  Thousand eyeballs under hoods

  Have you by the hair.

  Enter these enchanted woods,

  You who dare.’

  ‘I see.’ Mrs Feather is appreciative. ‘The whole poem is a kind of challenge. Perhaps Candleshoe Manor will be that too.’ She pauses, as if aware that in this remark there is a flavour of vagueness alien to her normal personality. ‘How very still the place is! One can imagine there is never a sound in this wood from dawn to dusk.’

  ‘But plenty from dusk to dawn?’ And Grant, who wants to show off his stock of poetry, begins to quote again:

  ‘Sudden will a pallor pant

  Chill at screeches miscreant;

  Owls or spec
tres, thick they flee;

  Nightmare upon horror broods;

  Hooded laughter, monkish glee,

  Gaps the vital air.

  Enter these enchanted woods,

  You…’

  Grant breaks off abruptly. The notable silence into which he is declaiming has been as notably broken. Somewhere quite close at hand a bell is tolling – a small, cracked bell.

  3

  The bell is cracked and insignificant. But unlike the majestic bell at Benison its tintinnabulation is unmistakably a call to some religious observance. It is at once authoritative and domestic – first cousin to a dinner-bell and yet indubitably of the Church. It speaks of a parson tugging at a rope with one hand while stuffing away his pipe and reaching for his surplice with the other. Mrs Feather, whose historical imagination has been so inadequately gratified in the course of the afternoon, suddenly feels that she has heard the very heartbeat of England. Her eyes fill with tears, and she has to cope with these before taking a glance at her son. Is he at all impressed? At Oxford he is exposed to quite a lot of bell-ringing, and if he returns there in thirty years’ time the sounds will move him unspeakably. But this he may feel to be only an ugly little clamour. Mrs Feather cannot tell. She rounds another bend, and finds a miniature church or chapel before her. Like the lodge it is in disrepair, with windows for the most part boarded up and a hole in the roof. Nevertheless something is going on in it. In a little belfry the small jangling bell is just ceasing to swing.

  ‘It seems to be joined on.’ Grant is pointing vaguely ahead. A tall hedge – it may be either box or yew – interposes between them and the main building beyond, and in the fading light the character and topography of the place are alike hard to determine. But on the far side of the chapel some sort of covered way may be descried, and it is to this that he is pointing.

  ‘Almshouses!’ Light comes to Mrs Feather. ‘One of those immemorial charities. And the poor old almoners – isn’t that the word…?’

  ‘It certainly is not. Inmates – or beadsmen.’

  ‘The poor old beadsmen have to attend chapel twice a day and pray for the soul of the founder.’

  ‘Would they be allowed to do that in an Anglican church?’ Grant is interested. ‘I mean, if it had been laid down when the charity started in Catholic times?’

  ‘We can go in and find out. The old people must be there now.’

  ‘Say – we can’t do that!’ Grant is horrified. ‘It’s no business of ours.’

  ‘Public and corporate worship is anybody’s business.’ As Mrs Feather delivers herself of this pious if convenient sentiment she is already on the march again. ‘I expect there are old women too. And no doubt strangers may attend and contribute. There will be a box. Now, what did I do with that half-crown?’

  Recollection comes to Grant. ‘It can’t be almshouses. The map says–’

  He is too late. Mrs Feather, whom he still follows obediently, has reached the little chapel, found an open door, and marched in. Some sort of service is indubitably going forward. Grant is aware that his mother, with unusual precipitancy, has sat down, and that he himself is perched beside her on a hard bench of quite inadequate breadth. He is aware too of a high quavering voice speaking of the absolution and remission of sins. He knows that he is attending Evening Prayer according to the form of the Church of England. He takes a deep breath and looks about him for the almsfolk of his mother’s imagining, although with small hope of finding them. And of course he is right. It is a private chapel. He has never been in such a place before. But he recognizes it in an instant.

  At Benison the chapel is by Wren and there is a statuary group by Roubiliac. This is different. It is like the smallest and most unassuming parish church in a Decorated style – ‘Decorated’ only in the technical sense, since the actual effect is bare enough. There is a single monument – and at a first glance it appears to be of the order described in Mrs Feather’s guidebooks as ‘rude’. Grant studies it; he has a hunch that it is the least embarrassing thing available for study. A gentleman with flowing locks and a completely composed demeanour is raising himself from a stony ocean and grasping the prows of a vessel which appears to be in the act of foundering. Upon this watery scene two younger gentlemen standing on either hand are about to lower a pair of marble curtains. Crowning this is a coat of arms, decorated in faded gold and colour – and this Grant, although without much learning in such matters, feels to be obscurely familiar.

  And now he lets his glance stray further afield. Along one wall the chapel contains two benches such as one might find in a village school, and it is on one of these that he and his mother are sitting. The rest of the furnishing consists of the altar, a lectern, and three mouldering upright chairs upholstered in ragged leather. Before each chair is an ancient and crumpled hassock upon which either long practice or an abnormally good sense of balance might make it possible to kneel. Only one of the chairs is occupied – by a diminutive lady of great age. Dressed in black silks of an answering antiquity, and with a black lace cap set upon snow-white hair, she is delivering herself of responses in what Grant supposes to be a provincial accent. Mrs Feather, who has been exposed to intermittent contact with the English since childhood, knows that it belongs not to any specific region but to the past – to a past, she further guesses, quite surprisingly remote. The officiating clergyman, too, suggests an earlier time – but this less by his voice than by his attire. Memories of some illustrated edition of Jane Austen float through her head; as she listens to the Collect for Aid against all Perils she finds herself surprised that the person offering this petition wears his own hair – or a wispy remnant of that – rather than a powdered wig. She perceives that her sense of time is becoming confused, and supposes it the effect of some delayed shock from the archery display to which she has lately been subjected.

  The service is over. The little old lady rises, speaks briefly to the clergyman in inaudible tones, turns, and moves from the chapel, supporting herself on a silver-mounted ebony stick. As she passes the Feathers she bows. The weight of years has already so bent her figure that the effect is alarming. Moreover the gesture is unaccompanied by any play of feature, and without pausing the old lady walks on and disappears. The clergyman vanishes somewhere at the back.

  Mrs Feather finds that she is still clutching her half-crown. She looks about her, not quite prepared to abandon the obscure hope of paying her way. ‘There may be a box saying “General Expenses”,’ she suggests. ‘Or “For the Fabric”. There so often is.’

  ‘Would you keep such a thing in your bathroom?’

  ‘In my bathroom, Grant?’ Rather feebly, Mrs Feather affects bewilderment.

  ‘Sure. This chapel is just as private to the old lady as your bathroom is to you. Different kinds of cleanliness are in question, no doubt, in one and the other. But the idea of privacy attaches to each.’ Grant makes this speech with some severity. His hopes of anything resembling a satisfactory dinner are now remote.

  ‘Well, Grant, it did look like almshouses–’

  ‘Nonsense, momma. It’s just that you will keep walking on, and opening doors, until you’re stopped.’

  ‘Grant, I was opening doors in this country, and having them opened for me, I’d like to add, before you–’

  ‘Good evening.’

  The Feathers, caught in a moment of some indignity, turn round. For a second they suppose themselves to be addressed by a venerable upper servant. They then see that it is the clergyman. He has abandoned his outmoded sacerdotal habiliments for equally outmoded garments inescapably suggestive of a superannuated butler. He is however a gentleman – a very old gentleman – and he is himself now engaged in a process of social appraisal through steel-rimmed spectacles balanced precariously on the end of his nose.

  ‘And what a beautiful day it has been. It is pleasant to think of visitors touring the country in such ideal weather. No doubt you have been to Abbot’s Benison, and have come on upon hearing that we too have a fine C
hristmas.’

  ‘A fine Christmas?’ Mrs Feather is only momentarily at a loss. ‘But yes, indeed! And is that your Christmas?’ She advances upon the monument which Grant has already studied. ‘I know some of his work in Buckinghamshire. That’s the county one of my ancestors left in 1620.’

  Whether or not he makes anything of this august date, the clergyman smiles benignly. ‘You may be thinking in particular of the Clarke monument at Hitcham. But there, my dear madam, caution is necessary – caution is undoubtedly necessary. The affinity with our own monument is pronounced – you have only to glance at those figures holding the curtains to acknowledge it. But the authenticity is less well attested. We, as you may know, have the actual accounts, with a discharge in Christmas’ own hand.’

  If Grant were not a well-bred young man he would audibly groan. Local antiquarianism dispensed by a clerical dotard amid deepening shades of evening makes a close to the day even more depressing than corned beef and blancmange. But Mrs Feather is now in her element. ‘It is a monument’, she is asking, ‘to a former lord of the manor?’

  ‘Certainly – most certainly.’ The ancient clergyman takes off his glasses, breathes on them from lungs still professionally robust, polishes them, and returns them to his nose upside-down. ‘Admiral Candleshoe. We lost him, I am sorry to say, on the Islands Voyage. That would be – let me see – in 1597. It was a bad business – a very bad business. To be quite frank with you, we were displeased with the conduct of the Earl of Essex.’

  ‘You were displeased with the conduct of the Earl of Essex –Elizabeth’s Essex?’ Mrs Feather is uncertain how to take this.

  ‘Yes, indeed. But they needn’t have chopped his head off four years later, all the same. By the way, my name is Armigel – Rupert Armigel.’ The ancient clergyman has produced a snuff-box and is tapping it. Grant sees that because he himself carries no snuff-box there is going to be a hitch in some ritual of introduction that the old gentleman is proposing. This embarrasses him acutely; he blushes; and his mother has to come to his rescue in this matter of names.