Christmas at Candleshoe by Michael Innes Page B

Rupert; and he alone got nothing at all, except a little Latin and much fustigation from a resident tutor grown grey in the purveying of these amenities to elder brothers. Nobody disliked Rupert, or indeed much noticed him; and when at fifteen he was eventually packed off to apprenticeship in the city, the action was motivated only by the plain fact that there was nothing else to do with him. As it happened, young Rupert disliked his master, a highly respectable goldsmith with a technique of fustigation much in advance of the ageing tutor’s; and the boy with great good sense almost immediately ran away. Being reduced in consequence to a somewhat hungry tramping of the London streets, he recalled the origins of his family’s former prosperity in malmsey and sack, and betaking himself to the appropriate quarter of the town he accepted employment without articles in the establishment of a wine-merchant carrying on a large trade with the citizen classes. Being here set to the business of improving his firm’s commodities by the judicious admixture of resins, molasses, red clay, salt-petre, and rainwater, he laboured so successfully at these mysteries as to become a person of much consideration in the city, and eventually its Lord Mayor. Rupert’s son William inherited both the wealth and the address of his father. Marrying a certain Lady Elizabeth Spendlove, and acquiring her considerable fortune for his children on condition of taking her name, he further improved matters by disposing of her person to his sovereign, with the result that Charles the Second, shortly before his death, created the Lord Mayor’s son first Baron Spendlove. After this the family, in the vulgar phrase, never looked back. Within a century of this well-deserved ennoblement, a certain Rupert Spendlove, son of that William, first Earl of Benison who built Benison Court, was created the first Marquess of Scattergood. A wit and a philosopher, the patron of Gay, and the friend of Bolingbroke and Swift, the first Marquess derived urbane amusement from his relationship with a neighbouring squire, and the Mr and Mrs Candleshoe of the time were occasionally invited even to the very grandest Benison occasions. Throughout the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries, indeed, young Candleshoes in quest of either a clerical or a military career would be given an amiable upward kick from Benison. One of them, a lad of parts, eventually became a bishop. In those days a marquess could do a great deal.
     
    All this – or nearly all this – the Reverend Mr Armigel, domestic chaplain to Miss Candleshoe of Candleshoe Manor, has now expounded (by way of supplement to dabs of iodine, strips of adhesive plaster, and commiserating chuckles) to Grant Feather. Mrs Feather has meanwhile received a sufficient modicum of the same historical intelligence from her hostess to be more enchanted than ever. She takes a just pride in her ability to understand the complexity of the social system involved. The Candleshoes are confessedly bankrupt, and they are intermittently patronized by the Spendloves, whose bankruptcy is only to be conjectured, and who belong to a rank of society (Mrs Feather is quite clear about this) only just below the dukes and duchesses. But in the high dry light of genealogical science the Candleshoes, although far from shining with the first brilliance, shine distinguishably brighter than the Spendloves. An inconsiderable Candleshoe became a Spendlove, and Spendloves subsequently acquired sundry territorial tags, as of Benison and Scattergood. Is the present Miss Candleshoe in a sense the head of the family to which the present Lord Scattergood belongs? Mrs Feather confesses to herself that on a question so recondite as this she is frankly at sea. But she is at least aware of the question, and there is merit in that. She is aware too of a possible high significance attaching to the fact that the present proprietor of Candleshoe is an unmarried lady.