Christmas at Candleshoe (15 page)

Arthur gave the connoisseur an unceremonious prod – without discernible effect. ‘Heavily, it seems. Perhaps he’s unused to whisky – eh?’

‘Had we better rouse him and take him along?’ Lord Scattergood consulted his librarian. ‘Would he be useful with the old girl?’

The sage nodded. ‘Not perhaps with the old girl – but conceivably with the Old Master.’

‘What’s that? James Candleshoe died years ago.’

‘You misapprehend me, my dear Marquess. I refer to Titian.’

‘To be sure. And what a deuced mysterious business this is! But I believe, my dear Archdeacon, that you already see some light in it.’

The librarian, who was re-enveloping himself in an ancient Inverness cape, paused to consider this. ‘I think I may say that I see some possibility of presently advancing upon a working hypothesis.’

‘By jove! is that so?’ Lord Scattergood was impressed. ‘Had I better bring a gun?’

‘My dear Marquess, all we need take is authority and a clear head. It is a situation in which we ought to have no difficulty in effecting a convenient division of labour.’

Candleshoe has ample cellarage, and parts of this are distinguishably of far greater antiquity than is the house. It is supposed that when Robert Candleshoe built his ambitious new dwelling he incorporated in its foundations the substructure of some immemorial building acquired by the family upon its first coming to prosperity. It is here only that the ghosts walk – a circumstance which would seem to argue the very high antiquity of these apparitions. There can be little doubt that the ghosts look upon Candleshoe as Candleshoes look upon Spendloves. When these spirits were incarnate, William of Normandy had not yet come to England.

It is at this lower level that Grant Feather and the boy Robin have been readmitted to the beleaguered house. The children themselves are as pale as ghosts. But Jay, who leads them, is less like a ghost than a flame. Crisis has come, and he has kindled to it.

Grant now realizes that the place is actually under some sort of threat from an unknown number of rascals gathered outside it. These can hardly be intending assault and violence for its own sake. They can scarcely, for instance, be prosecuting any species of blood-feud with Miss Candleshoe or old Mr Armigel. Robbery must be their motive – although it is hard to see what in this poverty-stricken mansion can be worth removal. Still, theft alone can be their object; and this is a circumstance slightly alarming perhaps, but prosaic enough. Over against it is the other and disproportionate fact of these children’s emotional state, of their dangerous weapons and resolute bearing; of an exaltation in their leader for which Grant obscurely feels there is an ominous word. He is acutely conscious that the situation must be controlled. Fate, in tumbling him into Candleshoe on this particular evening, seems to have handed him out this assignment and to be watching with an unwinking eye how he measures up to it. Grant walks up to Jay, puts a hand on his shoulder, and repeats what he has just said. ‘You must tell me the whole thing.’

‘Come upstairs.’ This from Jay may be either a request or an order. The boy speaks rapidly to Robin – he seems constantly to be redisposing the small force at his command – and then turns and strides away. Grant follows. It is a narrow passage, stone-vaulted and flagged, and their footfalls have an exaggerated resonance, like an effect for radio. Jay carries a lantern; its light glints on something richly figured in the outlandish old clothes which he wears with so sombre a grace. ‘Fey’ is the ominous word that might be applied to the boy; it is conceivable that as the climax of this nonsense he is expecting to die.

Grant feels the necessity of saying something commonplace. ‘Jay,’ he asks, ‘what’s my mother doing? I’d better have a word with her and explain how we’re held up. And Miss Candleshoe will be wondering why we don’t clear out.’

‘The women must wait.’ Jay makes this pronouncement without turning round, but as they are now ascending a spiral stone staircase his features are just visible in profile, lit up from below by the lantern he carries at his knee. Seen thus, he looks calmer and older; desperate as the situation may be, he is conscious of having a masculine grip on it; the words he has just spoken come from him perfectly naturally.

Grant reflects that his mother has little sense of time, Miss Candleshoe much less, and Mr Armigel demonstrably none at all. He had better not bother about them, therefore, until he has won Jay’s confidence – as there seems at least to be a chance of doing. They have emerged on the ground floor, crossed a lobby, and are now climbing a broader staircase with shallow wooden treads. It goes up and up by short flights round a rectangular well, and on several landings they pass without pausing high closed doors that must give upon apartments of consequence long ago. The perishing timber creaks beneath their feet; dust lies on the dull surfaces of ancient chests and cupboards in the window-embrasures; thick dust swims in the beam of Jay’s lantern. The whole place smells of decay – of the slow inoffensive decay of dry panelling and crumbling leather and tindery hangings and innumerable stuffs and fabrics long since laid carefully away.

A slight sound behind Grant makes him whirl round in a flash. There is nothing there except his old antagonist the wolfhound. Jay turns too. ‘Don’t mind Lightning – even if he did take a nip at you before. He usually follows me round.’

‘Certainly I shan’t mind Lightning.’ Grant realizes from the speed of his own reaction how much he is keyed up. ‘Are we going right to the roof?’

‘No – only to the gallery. If you are to know, you may as well be shown, I think.’ Suddenly Jay stops, turns, and raises the lantern high in air, so that Grant is full in the light of it. ‘Do you give me your word that you haven’t come here because you
do
know?’

‘I didn’t come here as a result of knowing anything, Jay. My mother simply saw an old house and followed her nose to it which is a way she has. I just don’t have an idea of what you’re talking about. But I suppose it must be whatever those crooks outside have come after. And we’re going to stop them.’

‘Then I’ll tell you. It’s the Christmas box.’

‘The Christmas box? Isn’t that a sort of present you give the letter-carrier and the ash man?’

Jay shakes his head. ‘Not here. Our Christmas was a man.’

‘Of course he was,’ Grant has remembered. ‘The sculptor who made the monument to Admiral Candleshoe in the chapel. And Mr Armigel said he made something for the house as well. Is that the box?’

‘Yes – and you’re going to see it – what can be seen of it, that is – now.’ Jay turns and climbs again.

‘And those fellows want to steal the box?’

‘It’s stranger than that.’ Jay stops and opens a door. He continues to stand still for a moment, so that Lightning slips past and vanishes into darkness. ‘You understand about the Long Gallery of a house like this? We’re there now. But you must stay here at the door, please, until I get more light. The floor is bad.’

Grant, left waiting at the top of the stairway, finds that he is listening intently for sounds from the house below. It comes into his head that the enemy may have one of their number already concealed within, who is even now creeping to unbar some postern and admit his fellows. It would be possible, surely, for a patient ruffian to lurk undetected in a corner of Candleshoe for days – and may not such a one, therefore, have entered long before the present crisis aroused the extreme vigilance of the children? Or again, there are the two crazy old folk who are the house’s only adult inhabitants. May one or the other not be tricked at any moment into answering a knock, a call? He realizes that these and a score of other questions which he himself is without the knowledge to formulate can never be out of Jay’s head; they form the weight of public care that hangs on the boy’s brow. Bows and arrows are very well – but Grant wishes he had a gun. Surely there must be at least a shotgun, a sporting rifle, in the house? He remembers Mr Armigel’s having said something about the last such weapon blowing to pieces in his hands.

Once more he listens intently – listens for a stealthy footstep on the dusty treads below him. There is no sound, and he crosses to the door of the Long Gallery and looks in. Jay is only halfway down, but in the murky perspective of the place he seems already a long way away. He is lighting a row of candles that stand in rusty sconces along the right-hand wall. Lightning stands beside him, his ears pricking into the darkness beyond. Jay turns and beckons. Grant takes another quick look behind him – he scarcely knows whether his behaviour is rational or panicky – and enters. Here and there the floorboards have decayed and vanished. He treads carefully, and sees little of the gallery until he is standing beside the boy in the middle of it. Jay motions him to stand still, then moves on and lights more candles. As he nears the far end of the gallery something wholly bizarre becomes first faintly and then more clearly visible. It is as if the gallery were a tunnel ending in open air. Grant is looking into a little nocturnal glade between over-arching trees.

The thing gives him what the topiary garden gave: a brief moment of extreme strangeness. Then he sees that this is another ghost – the ghost of some departed modest revelry, a tattered remnant of stage décor. Perhaps it was Miss Candleshoe’s brother Sir James who had a taste for private theatricals; perhaps it was Sir James’ great-grand-father. But for its split second of illusion the thing has had Grant gaping – and this the boy has seen. Surprisingly, lithely, he vaults to the little stage and strikes an attitude; then his clear voice rings down the gallery:

‘A fool, a fool! I met a fool i’ the forest,

A motley fool; a miserable world!

As I do live by food, I met a fool…’

Jay’s inky clothes are surely Hamlet’s. But they do very well for Jaques – and for a moment the boy holds his pose before he jumps down from the stage. He is laughing at Grant. It is a queer carefree interlude, the appearance for a flash of a Jay troubled by no problems of generalship. Then, grave again, he is pointing over Grant’s shoulder. ‘There!’

Grant turns round, making a quick survey of the whole place as he does so. It is panelled and has a plaster ceiling parts of which have come down; the height is inconsiderable, and except for two deep bays near either end the gallery cannot be more than six or seven yards broad. But it is at least fifty yards long, and the immense promenade which this permits of must have been the prime pride of Candleshoe once upon a time. The central floor-space is vacant – indeed little could now be set down there with safety – but along either wall there is an uninterrupted jumble of junk which makes the great hall downstairs appear a very orderly sight indeed. A few of the objects can be scarcely a century old: a weighing-machine, for instance, and a mechanical horse, and a variety of culinary and other domestic engines plainly of the Victorian age. But most of the stuff survives – after a fashion – from far earlier times, and some of it must represent the original furnishings of the gallery.

The two deep bays are in fact great windows, and opposite each is an elaborately carved fireplace. Or so Grant for a moment thinks. Then he sees that one of them (it is to this that Jay is pointing) is not a fireplace at all. It is Admiral Candleshoe’s monument, done all over again. Grant positively rubs his eyes. He then sees that, this time, Gerard Christmas has done his work with a difference. It is the Admiral’s monument once more – but this time the Admiral himself is missing. The flanking figures have lowered their curtains upon the watery scene. Between the spectator and the Admiral – if he is really there – are two massive slabs of marble, chiselled into heavy folds.

‘There,’ Jay repeats. ‘That’s the Christmas box. It has been called that always.’

Jay has slipped away to listen at the head of the staircase. Grant is left staring. Lightning, aware that the monument – if it may be called that – is a focus of interest, goes up and sniffs at it. Perhaps for some sinister reason, perhaps merely because a cold draught from its crevices has tickled his nose, the hairs of his neck bristle. Jay returns and Grant speaks. ‘I don’t see any sense in it.’ He is aware that this is a prosaic and inadequate reaction. But the thing can only be some sort of joke, and he is offended by the notion of a joke which must have entailed a great deal of human labour.

‘That’s because you don’t know the story.’ Jay takes Lightning by the collar and makes him lie down. ‘Thomas Candleshoe was various things.’

‘The Admiral?’

‘He was that in the end. But he was only a captain when he sailed with Drake against the Armada. And although he was to inherit this house from his father, he was quite a poor man. Then he disappeared.’

‘Disappeared? But didn’t he go on something called the Islands Voyage?’

‘That was nearly ten years later, and he was drowned on it. But what do you think he did in between?’

‘Turned pirate, perhaps.’

Grant has spoken idly, saying merely what appears to be the appropriate thing. But Jay looks at him with swift distrust. ‘So you
do
know something?’

‘Nothing of the kind, Jay. I’m just taking a guess.’

‘Well, he did. But it isn’t really known. It’s in an old book in the library – one that was printed just for members of the family. The first page says “Privately Printed in 1823”.’

‘It tells about Admiral Thomas having been a pirate?’

‘Yes – and the legend of the Christmas box.’

‘I see.’ Grant looks at the heavy marble affair before which they are still standing. ‘Do you know what a legend is?’

‘Of course.’ Jay’s pale cheeks flush faintly. It is plain that he would quickly resent any rash reference to his circumscribed education. ‘But a good many legends are – are founded in fact.’

‘Is there treasure in this legend?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the treasure was hidden in the Christmas box – perhaps is there still?’

‘Yes.’ Jay is very pale again. Here is the core of some immense fantasy within which he lives. He fears incredulity far more than he fears the men now prowling outside Candleshoe.