Read Online Christmas at Candleshoe by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page B

turns and gives her guests a swift glance of stony irony. ‘If there is a housekeeper, that is to say.’
    She goes out. Towering over her, the wolfhound follows.

 
     
6
    ‘As a matter of fact there is no housekeeper.’ Mr Armigel, conducting Grant to the drive, becomes confidential. ‘All that sort of thing became very difficult during the war.’
    ‘The women went into munition factories, and so on?’
    Mr Armigel looks doubtful. ‘I don’t know that I ever heard of that . But it was unsettling – decidedly unsettling. Women adore a red coat.’
    ‘A red coat?’
    ‘Precisely. You recall the relief of one of those places – was it called Mafeking? Both our cook and kitchen-maid, I am sorry to say, subsequently proved to have celebrated that occasion in a manner that cannot be described as virtuous. I remember reflecting at the time how distressed Colonel Baden-Powell would have been to hear of it. He cannot have intended that his gallant defence of the place – which was probably by no means worth defending – should result in lax sexual behaviour among the lower classes. You agree with me?’
    ‘I surely do.’ Grant sometimes encounters persons of mature years for whom ‘the war’ means a conflict beginning in 1914. Mr Armigel, going fifteen years farther back, takes him entirely out of his depth.
    ‘Moreover two of our housemaids left soon after. Their lovers were hanged in the county gaol. It is an astonishing fact, but one well-attested in our poetry, that a high proportion of soldiers returning from the wars at that time were hanged in county gaols. But these girls were very upset, all the same. In fact they took a decided dislike to the district, and went away to places like Australia and the United States. We have never recovered – never quite recovered – on the domestic side. There is, as I say, no housekeeper. But at least there is a housekeeper’s boy.’
    ‘You mean somebody that runs about for a housekeeper who isn’t there?’
    ‘I ought to have said the housekeeper’s boy – our late housekeeper’s son.’
    ‘Is he good with a bow and arrow?’
    ‘Decidedly good. When our last shot-gun went – and it blew itself to pieces in my own hands, my dear sir, a circumstance somewhat alarming at the time – when our last shot-gun went, Jay developed considerable efficiency with a bow. At this moment I have a rabbit-pie in the oven–’
    ‘Say, do you do the cooking?’
    ‘Certainly. Jay and I largely divide the labour. He provisions the larder, and I make what I can of it.’
    Grant considers. ‘Is this Jay what you would call a strange boy?’
    ‘Dear me, no.’ Mr Armigel is somewhat anxiously emphatic. ‘He is a very practical boy. We rely upon him in all our more prosaic and humdrum affairs. He could not, I fear, be called an imaginative lad, but he commonly has a sensible solution to any casual mundane exigency.’
    ‘But he likes going about in fancy dress?’
    ‘I cannot say that I have noticed anything of the sort. It is true that he is very good in contriving to dress himself in whatever he finds about the place, so his appearance may be a trifle outmoded now and then. I would not know. But I should not like to feel that his frugality in that regard was likely to lay him under any reproach of singularity with his fellows.’
    Grant finds that Mr Armigel’s remarks regularly require a little decoding. This slows things down. ‘Then Jay’, he asks presently, ‘has fellows?’
    ‘He has made friends with several other lads at the village school. Miss Candleshoe, who is fond of children, is very willing that they should play about together.’
    ‘And fell trees?’ Grant has remembered the obstacle laid across the avenue down which he and his clerical acquaintance are now walking. That Jay is responsible for it he has very little doubt. And it means that he cannot, in fact, drive the car up to the house.
    ‘Certainly not! I am sure they would not dream of such a