Christmas at Candleshoe Read Online Free PDF

hazard.
    Mrs Feather divines that her son is feeling protective. This amuses her, but she is diplomatic. ‘We can risk it. The boy has certainly gotten a powerful bow. But a challenge like that doesn’t come to the mind of anyone who is going to shoot you in the back. We’ll go straight ahead.’
    Strictly, this is not a feasible programme, for the drive, such as it is, pursues a winding course. Perhaps it was originally constructed in this way in order to give a false impression of distance; it is twisting about in the beech wood so as to make the most of it.
    They move forward. No more arrows are fired. Mrs Feather has taken the second message from her son, and now she glances at it. ‘Grant – can you remember any more of this poem?’
    ‘Quite a lot.’ He is aware that his voice has gone self-conscious in what they feel as a deepening circumambient silence. But he firmly begins to quote:
     
    ‘Enter these enchanted woods,
    You who dare.
    Nothing harms beneath the leaves
    More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
    Toss your heart up with the lark,
    Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
    Fair you fare.’
     
    Mrs Feather listens attentively as she walks. ‘It’s an odd sort of poetry to appeal to a boy.’
    ‘Didn’t you say he was an odd sort of boy?’ And Grant Continues to recite:
     
    ‘Only at a dread of dark
    Quaver, and they quit their form:
    Thousand eyeballs under hoods
    Have you by the hair.
    Enter these enchanted woods,
    You who dare.’
     
    ‘I see.’ Mrs Feather is appreciative. ‘The whole poem is a kind of challenge. Perhaps Candleshoe Manor will be that too.’ She pauses, as if aware that in this remark there is a flavour of vagueness alien to her normal personality. ‘How very still the place is! One can imagine there is never a sound in this wood from dawn to dusk.’
    ‘But plenty from dusk to dawn?’ And Grant, who wants to show off his stock of poetry, begins to quote again:
     
    ‘Sudden will a pallor pant
    Chill at screeches miscreant;
    Owls or spectres, thick they flee;
    Nightmare upon horror broods;
    Hooded laughter, monkish glee,
    Gaps the vital air.
    Enter these enchanted woods,
    You…’
     
    Grant breaks off abruptly. The notable silence into which he is declaiming has been as notably broken. Somewhere quite close at hand a bell is tolling – a small, cracked bell.

 
     
3
    The bell is cracked and insignificant. But unlike the majestic bell at Benison its tintinnabulation is unmistakably a call to some religious observance. It is at once authoritative and domestic – first cousin to a dinner-bell and yet indubitably of the Church. It speaks of a parson tugging at a rope with one hand while stuffing away his pipe and reaching for his surplice with the other. Mrs Feather, whose historical imagination has been so inadequately gratified in the course of the afternoon, suddenly feels that she has heard the very heartbeat of England. Her eyes fill with tears, and she has to cope with these before taking a glance at her son. Is he at all impressed? At Oxford he is exposed to quite a lot of bell-ringing, and if he returns there in thirty years’ time the sounds will move him unspeakably. But this he may feel to be only an ugly little clamour. Mrs Feather cannot tell. She rounds another bend, and finds a miniature church or chapel before her. Like the lodge it is in disrepair, with windows for the most part boarded up and a hole in the roof. Nevertheless something is going on in it. In a little belfry the small jangling bell is just ceasing to swing.
    ‘It seems to be joined on.’ Grant is pointing vaguely ahead. A tall hedge – it may be either box or yew – interposes between them and the main building beyond, and in the fading light the character and topography of the place are alike hard to determine. But on the far side of the chapel some sort of covered way may be descried, and it is to this that he is pointing.
    ‘Almshouses!’ Light comes to Mrs Feather. ‘One of those