Christmas at Candleshoe by Michael Innes Page A

me, I ought to say – that much of the blame must be attributed to Mr Gladstone. I am surprised. I had understood Mr Gladstone to indulge a taste for arboriculture, a pursuit very proper in a country gentleman of the soundest principles. But it appears that his activities were rather those of a woodcutter – or what you, doubtless, would term a lumberjack. Little good will come of a man who murders trees.’
    ‘I just adore trees.’ Mrs Feather is unblushing. ‘But perhaps there is some smaller and more convenient house on the estate, which might, with a little capital–’
    Grant, with great presence of mind, gives a vicious but unobstrusive kick at the wolfhound’s behind. The brute leaps up, contrives a deft outflanking movement, and bites Grant firmly in the corresponding part of his own person. There is a good deal of confusion. But this it would be tedious to retail. We may take advantage of the interlude for a necessary retrospective glance over some centuries of English history. We shall then be in a position to meet Jay Ray, the boy with the bow, and the hero – after a fashion – of this story.

 
     
5
    It cannot be maintained that Queen Elizabeth the First slept at Candleshoe Manor. The present house, replacing one of unknown appearance and uncertain antiquity, was completed only in the year of her death. But her successor, the canny James of Scotland, on his journey south condescended to pause there for a bever or light refection. This illustrious and somewhat expensive occasion was without consequences of any kind; neither royal favour nor royal disfavour ever visited Candleshoe again; as the house settled firmly upon its foundations it settled too into the comfortable security of near-oblivion.
    Three centuries had been required for the Candleshoes to reach the modest magnificence which the place represented. When in the year 1367 a younger son was born to the Black Prince, it is upon record that the vessel bearing the news from Bordeaux belonged to one Roger Candleshoe, a vintner of Cheapside – ‘long-time well-reputed’, we are told, as an importer of the red wines of the Gironde. Forty-three years later, when the royal infant thus heralded met the fate of a deposed king at Pontefract, Roger’s son William had added to the family trade a profitable importing of the wines of Spain – described by an expert Customs official, Geoffrey Chaucer, as of considerably greater ‘fumosity’ than their northern neighbours. It was when one of William Candleshoe’s novelties known as sherris sack was acclaimed by a leading connoisseur of the day that the modest Candleshoe fortunes became secure. Candleshoe Manor, in fact, would never have been built had not an early fifteenth-century Candleshoe enjoyed the lavish custom and earned the generous approbation of Sir John Falstaff.
    It would appear to have been not long after the death of the good Sir John that the family acquired those lands upon which, as we may presume, they had originally laboured for others. By the close of the sixteenth century their connexion with the wine-trade had disappeared. When in the year 1600 Robert Candleshoe decided to demolish what must have been for many generations his family’s home and erect in its place a more commodious mansion in the refined taste of the time, it was to his resources as landowner that he looked to defray the cost. His calculations may not have been unsound in themselves, although it is notable that he was a younger son, entered upon the inheritance only as a consequence of the death by drowning of his brother the Admiral, and committing himself to the ambitious project within three years of that melancholy circumstance. But if not a rash builder, he was certainly an injudiciously fond father; and the over-lavish provision which he endeavoured to make for most of his twelve children in fact crippled the estate to an extent from which it was never to recover.
    Of these children the youngest was called