Christmas at Candleshoe by Michael Innes

later these children must experience a misadventure. Their game, he has divined, has intensity as its hallmark, and such violent delights have violent ends. This great mouldering house is more dangerous than a ruin. It is a brick and-stone shell encasing tons of perished plaster and decayed timber – and the children go charging about it in the dark, bearing the actual weapons of its earliest time.
    Grant laughs aloud. He would like to convince himself that he has lapsed into grandmotherly absurdity. But he is struck again by the queerness of the place. Its effective inhabitants are the children. Beside them, Miss Candleshoe and her chaplain are only ghosts – ghosts with a little grey matter still in the skull, but ghosts all the same. The children ought presently to be in bed – but who is to see to that? Besides Jay and Robin there are at least half-a-dozen of them. Presumably they all have homes in the village, and if they are found to be absent at ungodly hours rustic parents will bring to the irregularity the simple discipline of a strap. But there is no sign that the game is breaking up. Candleshoe is so quiet not because the children have departed, but because each is silent and tense at a station. Grant is sure of this in a general way, and as he himself stands taut in the darkness he tries for a more precise picture. At each end of the house a staircase winds upwards through a square tower; at the top of each there will be a ladder and a trapdoor leading to the open air. Grant can see, as surely as if he had made the climb, an inviting intricacy of leaded roof, with that long scrollwork inscription by way of parapet. He can see a score of places where the finely cut stone has split and flaked long ago, and been cobbled up with iron bands which are themselves rusted away by a century of English weather. It is a wonderful eyrie, with vantage points at a score of places. By day – and even by night if there is a moon – one can command the gardens, the line of the drive and the stream, every break in the beech-trees, much of the farther country. And to sweep the terrace one has only to lean forward –
    Grant shuts his eyes – and is aware of a play of light upon their closed lids. He opens them and sees that he is held in the beam of a torch. A moment later Jay and Robin are standing beside him; Robin opens what appears to be some species of dark lantern; and in the light of this the boys look at him silently. Then Jay speaks. ‘Did you – did your mother – know anything about Candleshoe before you drove up this afternoon?’
    ‘Nothing at all.’
    The two boys glance at each other swiftly. This time it is Robin who utters. ‘But you are very interested in it now?’
    Grant shakes his head. ‘I don’t think I am. All you people interest me quite a heap – the things you like doing, and what you are busy about right now. But the place is nothing special to me. It’s your place, I reckon – not mine.’
    ‘But your mother wants it?’ Jay’s voice is at its most peremptory. ‘She would buy it for a great deal of money from Miss Candleshoe?’
    ‘Maybe so.’ Grant tries to be easy. ‘But nothing will come of it, I guess. My mother is always taking a fancy to buy places. But most times it remains just a fancy.’
    ‘Do you want her to buy Candleshoe?’
    ‘I certainly do not.’ Grant is relieved at having it in his power to be unquestionably sincere about this. ‘My mother is romantic, and sometimes she doesn’t see how a thing wouldn’t do.’
    ‘A person ought not to come to a strange place without being asked and offer money for it.’ Jay enunciates this rule of conduct with grave courtesy.
    Grant, although not prepared to criticize his mother, feels unable to dispute the general proposition. So he says nothing.
    ‘When a place is for sale – really for sale – boards are put up, and there are advertisements in the newspapers.’
    ‘That’s right.’ Robin backs up his leader. ‘And