Christmas at Candleshoe
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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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.
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
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.’