Read Christmas at Candleshoe for Free Online

own hair – or a wispy remnant of that – rather than a powdered wig. She perceives that her sense of time is becoming confused, and supposes it the effect of some delayed shock from the archery display to which she has lately been subjected.
    The service is over. The little old lady rises, speaks briefly to the clergyman in inaudible tones, turns, and moves from the chapel, supporting herself on a silver-mounted ebony stick. As she passes the Feathers she bows. The weight of years has already so bent her figure that the effect is alarming. Moreover the gesture is unaccompanied by any play of feature, and without pausing the old lady walks on and disappears. The clergyman vanishes somewhere at the back.
    Mrs Feather finds that she is still clutching her half-crown. She looks about her, not quite prepared to abandon the obscure hope of paying her way. ‘There may be a box saying “General Expenses”,’ she suggests. ‘Or “For the Fabric”. There so often is.’
    ‘Would you keep such a thing in your bathroom?’
    ‘In my bathroom, Grant?’ Rather feebly, Mrs Feather affects bewilderment.
    ‘Sure. This chapel is just as private to the old lady as your bathroom is to you. Different kinds of cleanliness are in question, no doubt, in one and the other. But the idea of privacy attaches to each.’ Grant makes this speech with some severity. His hopes of anything resembling a satisfactory dinner are now remote.
    ‘Well, Grant, it did look like almshouses–’
    ‘Nonsense, momma. It’s just that you will keep walking on, and opening doors, until you’re stopped.’
    ‘Grant, I was opening doors in this country, and having them opened for me, I’d like to add, before you–’
    ‘Good evening.’
    The Feathers, caught in a moment of some indignity, turn round. For a second they suppose themselves to be addressed by a venerable upper servant. They then see that it is the clergyman. He has abandoned his outmoded sacerdotal habiliments for equally outmoded garments inescapably suggestive of a superannuated butler. He is however a gentleman – a very old gentleman – and he is himself now engaged in a process of social appraisal through steel-rimmed spectacles balanced precariously on the end of his nose.
    ‘And what a beautiful day it has been. It is pleasant to think of visitors touring the country in such ideal weather. No doubt you have been to Abbot’s Benison, and have come on upon hearing that we too have a fine Christmas.’
    ‘A fine Christmas?’ Mrs Feather is only momentarily at a loss. ‘But yes, indeed! And is that your Christmas?’ She advances upon the monument which Grant has already studied. ‘I know some of his work in Buckinghamshire. That’s the county one of my ancestors left in 1620.’
    Whether or not he makes anything of this august date, the clergyman smiles benignly. ‘You may be thinking in particular of the Clarke monument at Hitcham. But there, my dear madam, caution is necessary – caution is undoubtedly necessary. The affinity with our own monument is pronounced – you have only to glance at those figures holding the curtains to acknowledge it. But the authenticity is less well attested. We, as you may know, have the actual accounts, with a discharge in Christmas’ own hand.’
    If Grant were not a well-bred young man he would audibly groan. Local antiquarianism dispensed by a clerical dotard amid deepening shades of evening makes a close to the day even more depressing than corned beef and blancmange. But Mrs Feather is now in her element. ‘It is a monument’, she is asking, ‘to a former lord of the manor?’
    ‘Certainly – most certainly.’ The ancient clergyman takes off his glasses, breathes on them from lungs still professionally robust, polishes them, and returns them to his nose upside-down. ‘Admiral Candleshoe. We lost him, I am sorry to say, on the Islands Voyage. That would be – let me see – in 1597. It was a bad business – a very bad business. To