Christmas at Candleshoe (18 page)

The light comes from nearly a dozen small electric torches, jettisoned by the children in the course of the current mêlée, and now being rolled and kicked about the floor as an unnoticed by-product of the same titanic struggle. They add to the insecurity of anyone who manages to get momentarily to his feet; and so too does the circumstance that the terrain is littered with books that have been swept from their shelves in some earlier phase of the conflict.

In the wall facing Grant are three tall windows. Those on either flank are shuttered and bolted; the shutters of the middle aperture are drawn back, and what appears to be a French window beyond them has been wrenched open; it is here, Grant realizes, that his mother has so fatally tampered with the efficiency of Jay’s defences. But the force which has entered as yet through this breach seems to be restricted to a single individual now momentarily submerged beneath an ominously heaving heap of children. Grant sees that it would be a good idea to get the fatal shutters firmly closed again. He has little doubt that the enemy can muster a considerably larger power than this.

And then Grant sees that what is going on is in fact a struggle for the open window. The library has a system of bays constituting a bottle-neck which the struggling children are trying to force; their enemy is endeavouring to hold them at bay in order to cover the species of beach head behind him. But why has he not been supported through this established breach already? As Grant asks himself this he sees a wavering light in the outer darkness framed by the open window – and a moment later he hears, from somewhere close above his head, a
twang
already familiar to him at Candleshoe, and this is immediately followed by a warning shout from outside. Grant turns and glances upwards. Uncertainly behind a cloud of dust which is almost as thick as a curtain he can just distinguish the boy Robin, perched on the cornice of a massive bookcase, steadying himself against some bust of the classical variety conventionally proper in such places, and with his bow still quivering in his outstretched hand. While the main body of Jay’s supporters has been fighting its way towards the window, Robin has been covering it from this point of vantage. Grant, remembering that the invasion of the library has been a wholly unexpected turn in the siege, has to admit that the deployment of the defenders has been a triumph of general preparedness.

‘Last arrow fired. Two men coming.’ It is Robin’s voice from above; he speaks loudly and rapidly, but nevertheless with the impassivity of a player making some necessary announcement in the course of a game. Grant sees that it is the moment of crisis, squares his shoulders, and prepares to charge. There is just a chance that he can burst through the scrum and make fast those shutters in time.

‘Stop!’ It is Jay who is beside him. The boy has tugged a tall library ladder from the wall, and now thrusts it into Grant’s hands. ‘Hold on till I say “Shove”. And then send it straight over them.’

‘Sure.’ Grant feels that he can be as reliable a lieutenant as Robin at a pinch. He holds the ladder pointing at the ceiling; Jay swarms up it like a circus child doing some perfectly familiar turn, and at a word Grant gives a shove; with gathering velocity Jay describes a curve in air, and lands like a cat by the window while the ladder comes down with a nasty thud on the backs of the milling supporters now behind him. As a commander Jay has his decidedly ruthless moments. But he has slammed to the shutters and bolted them just as a heavy body crashes against them from the outside.

It looks like victory. Somebody, seeing this, gives a shout of triumph. The effect is unfortunate; it distracts the children and fires their isolated and virtually captive enemy to a last effort. The man staggers to his knees and then to his feet. He kicks out viciously and then, still clutched by tenacious hands, hurls his full weight against the nearest library bay. From the lower shelves of this the books have already been swept, and it is top-heavy; it tilts and a further half-dozen tiers of massive volumes come showering to the floor; it tilts further and falls with a crash, the force of which is fortunately in part taken by the mass of material it has just discharged. Dust for a full half-minute reduces visibility to nil, and nobody in the library has power to do anything but choke and gasp.

As the air begins to clear it becomes evident that the situation has sharply deteriorated. The invader is behind the barrier of the fallen bookcase. In one hand he has a torch with which he is exploring the disposition of the defenders. In the other hand he has a revolver. Grant looks hard at this and cannot persuade himself that the thing is a toy or a fake. Even so, it may not be loaded. And, even if indeed loaded, the probability is that the fellow has very little disposition to murder. He may be prepared to use the weapon if it is a question of avoiding capture; he may be unprepared to use it in the face of mere passive resistance and an injunction to clear out. Grant tries to apply these considerations to the single problem before him: the safety of this crowd of excited children. And for the same purpose he tries to size up the man. He has not the appearance of a successful gangster. Even before this rough house began he must have cut a shabby figure, and now he looks as if he had been tipped out of an ash-cart. Partly because he has had most of the breath knocked out of him, and partly – Grant guesses – because he is scared stiff, the gun and the torch both tremble in his hands. But, if the gun is really loaded, there is very little comfort in the supposition that he may be terrified and barely in control of himself.

The children stand immobile, fascinated. The man’s glance travels over them and pauses on Jay. He licks his lips and speaks in a voice that betrays the same tremor as his hands. ‘Open those shutters.’ Nobody stirs. He swings his gun round until it is levelled at the boy. ‘Open them – quick!’

‘You are our prisoner. Put that thing down.’ Jay speaks and makes no move.

‘Open those shutters, or I fire.’

‘Put it down, or I shall come for it.’

The air is clearer now. Grant can see enough of the man’s face to dislike it. He dislikes a twitch at the mouth. He decides that there is just enough take-off to give him an outside chance of clearing the bookcase at a straight on jump. He decides too that the thing must be fought out at whatever risk to the defenders – this simply because Jay has no thought of anything else.

‘I’m coming now.’ Jay looks straight at the man and walks deliberately forward. From his standing start Grant hurls himself into the three paces he can afford before taking off. At the same moment some sort of thunderbolt crashes down on the man with the gun and sends him sprawling. It is Robin who has launched himself from his bookcase. He has been the forgotten factor in the affair.

Jay is sitting on the floor, and Grant guesses that he is wondering if he is going to be ingloriously sick. Courage must sometimes be paid for in humiliating ways. Robin, who ought to have broken both his legs, is only badly winded; even so, he manages to gasp out orders that have the effect of covering his leader’s temporary withdrawal from the direction of affairs. Robin must be one of the supreme lieutenants of all time. And both these boys must own a demon. Nothing else can account for the morale of the small and absurdly juvenile force at their disposal. The children are now dispersing to their former action stations with the phlegm of a crack division deploying under fire.

Grant takes a look at the vanquished enemy. He lies motionless on his back – horrifyingly helpless and deflated and dirty. His complexion is as grey as the dust that coats it and there is blood coming from his nose and mouth. Jay gets rather shakily to his feet and joins Grant. ‘Do you think’, he asks carefully, ‘that this man is dead?’

‘He’s some way from that. But he’ll be senseless for quite some time. And something rather nasty may have happened to his skull.’

‘Ought we to shove him out, so that they can get him to a doctor? There’s Robin’s father.’

‘I don’t know that they would think their casualty all that important, Jay. And the right person to get to Robin’s father is Robin.’

Jay swings round. ‘Robin isn’t hurt?’

‘Strangely enough he doesn’t seem to be. But I don’t mean that. I mean that somebody – somebody who knows the ground, I’m afraid – must get out of this and through to your nearest village. If that’s where Robin lives, let Robin make for home, and get his father to call out all the police he can. You see, this must stop.’

‘I don’t know that I do see.’

‘Be honest with yourself, Jay, and you will. This is a siege. It’s our business to hold out. But we must also plan to be relieved as soon as may be. That’s just plain sense.’

Jay nods. His decisions are always rapid. ‘Very well. Robin, will you go?’

‘Of course I’ll go if you ask me to.’ Robin, who has got his wind back, is as matter-of-fact as ever. ‘It’s just a matter of getting clear.’

‘I think I can fix that. It’s a diversion that’s required, and that will be my part of the affair.’ As he speaks, Grant stoops and picks up the unconscious man’s revolver. He knows in an instant that it is unloaded. The crooks, as he had half-guessed, have not trusted so jittery a member of their body with the live thing. He slips the weapon casually into his pocket. ‘Yes – I can do quite a lot in the way of a diversion, I reckon. Particularly now that I’ve gotten a gun.’

Lord Arthur Spendlove, although a well-built man in good condition, had some difficulty in heaving that distinguished Roman connoisseur, Dr Rosenwald, into the ancient, powerful, and capacious car that he had chosen for the purpose of the expedition to Candleshoe. Even when this had been managed there was some further delay, since Mr Archdeacon had vanished in search of what he called – somewhat enigmatically – the relevant documents. Lord Scattergood, still not altogether convinced that firearms might not come in handy if a working hypothesis was sighted, muttered gloomily that his somnolent guest stank like a taproom. Brown, who alone bore the responsibility of seeing the party off, seemed to be of a similar mind, since every now and then he took a short walk into middle distance as if in quest of purer air. When Mr Archdeacon at length appeared, Brown bade him an affectionate farewell and at once withdrew into the house. It would have been possible to feel that, in Brown’s view, a certain lack of aristocratic poise marked this nocturnal hue and cry after a couple of missing canvasses.

The moon, now riding high in a clear sky, gave to Benison itself and all its policies something the air of a vast canvas, cycloramically disposed. The main façade, with its long march of Ionic columns diminishing in either direction into distance and its broad flights of shallow steps descending from terrace to terrace amid an ordered profusion of sentries – Amazonian for the most part – in marble and bronze, seemed at once as insubstantial and as prodigal as an illusion conjured up out of paint-pots of the largest size. When Arthur let in his clutch and the car moved forward, it might have been this whole inordinate ostentation that was trundling by on rollers, after the fashion of that gorgeous species of visual entertainment which has been so unhappily superseded by the cinema. The West Pavilion, the Orangery, the Water Steps, the Temple of Ancient Virtue, the Neptune Fountain: all these flowed successively past – and each with the air of claiming that burst of applause reserved by the informed audience for some undoubted
chef d’œuvre
of the scene painter’s art. And on all this theatrical traffic the moon, like limelight expertly manipulated from somewhere up in the gallery, shed a soft radiance exactly tinted to make the very most of the bravura nature of the spectacle.

The car had gained the park, and was running past the sixth marquess’ improved milking-parlour in the Chinese taste, before anybody spoke. Then Arthur addressed Mr Archdeacon, who was sitting beside him. ‘I think you would say we want to mind what we’re about?’

‘Most decidedly. You will recall that almost my first observation was to the effect that this matter stands in a posture of some delicacy. In this, reflection now confirms me.’

‘If I remember anything of old Miss Candleshoe, she won’t stand for very much.’

‘Precisely. Indeed, my dear Lord Arthur, your remark can be described only as a meiosis. Miss Candleshoe is unlikely to stand for anything at all. Caution will be necessary in addressing her. I am disposed to wonder, however, whether we shall in fact be the first persons to approach her on the subject of the missing Titians.’

‘What’s that?’ Lord Scattergood, who had resigned himself to making this perplexing journey by the side of the slumbering Rosenwald, thrust forward a head which – perhaps with some dim memory of what is appropriate in a person engaged upon detective investigation – he has encased in an ancient deerstalker hat. ‘What is that, Archdeacon, about other people being after the Titians?’

‘I have been visited by a disturbing memory. Or rather’ – and Mr Archdeacon produced simultaneously his pipe and his best metaphysical manner – ‘I have been visited by a memory, trivial in itself, which our present exigency renders susceptible of a disturbing, if not indeed of a positively sinister, interpretation. Do I make myself clear?’

‘Something fishy – eh?’ Long practice had enabled Lord Scattergood to keep up wonderfully with his learned librarian.

‘Exactly. As you know, I am one of those who take parties round Benison on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.’

‘And very nice of you too, my dear fellow.’ Lord Scattergood, although himself at present engaged in this monotonous occupation every day of the week, was clearly conscience-stricken that the family oracle should have to retrench his meditations in the same interest.

‘Not at all. There is much food for thought in both the bearing and the conversation of our visitors. Volumes could be written upon them.’

‘That’s very true.’ Lord Scattergood cheered up on being presented with this elevated view of the matter. ‘And I hope you’ll bring out something of the sort with a good publisher. Sermons in stones, and all that – what?’