A Shilling for Candles

by Josephine Tey

This was the England he knew and loved. Fashions might change, dynasties might fall, horses’ shoes in the quiet street change to the crying of a thousand taxi-hooters, but Stacey and Brackett continued to make clothes with leisured efficiency for leisured and efficient gentlemen.

“This is nice,” she said. “They’re not very high, but I hate walking in them.” “What are?” “My shoes.” She held up a foot and exhibited her very modest cuban heel. “Nannie thinks they are the right thing to wear in town, but I feel dreadful in them. Teetery.” “I expect one gets used to them in time. One must conform to the tabus of the tribe.” “Why must one?” “Because an unquiet life is a greater misery than wearing the badge of conformity.”

His own thoughts were not in Galeria but in Westover. So he had done it, that good-looking emotionalist! He had screwed a ranch and five thousand out of his hostess and then made sure that he would not have to wait for it. Grant’s own inclination to like the boy died an instant death. From now on Robert Tisdall would be no more to him than the bluebottle he swatted on the windowpane, a nuisance to be exterminated as quickly and with as little fuss as possible.

Erica Meir Burgoyne.

Meir???? Head canon: Meir was her mother's maiden name. She's also probably the only really interesting character in the entire book.

Hunger gave wings to Erica’s imagination. By the time she was in sight of Dymchurch she had, thanks to modern methods of hitch-hiking and old-fashioned methods of stowing away, placed the coat on the back of a clerk in the office of the Mayor of Bordeaux. He was a little pale clerk with a delicate wife and puny baby, and Erica’s heart was sore at the thought of having to take the coat from him, even for Tisdall.

You cannot ask questions about a vague tramp who, you think, may have stolen a coat. But to look for a china-mender is quite a legitimate search, involving no surprise or suspicion in the minds of the questioned.

“I’m desperately in love with him,” Erica said, in the tone in which one says: “And a box of matches, please.” At school theatricals Erica had always had charge of the curtains.

The week had been a long purgatory. The thought of sitting down to a meal in a quiet room among leisured people was like regaining some happier sphere of existence that he had known a long time ago and half-forgotten about.

She had been going to have a luncheon for Christine: a luncheon that would make her the most envied hostess in London instead of a rather tiresome back-number; and Christine had gone and died on her.

How rude.

is. I’ve seen some funny things happen in the village where I was born. Witchcraft and that. No accounting for any of it by any natural means. Makes you wonder.” “Where was that?” Jason looked suddenly startled for the first time that afternoon. “East of Europe,” he said abruptly.

Does he mean Eastern Europe?

(What did they shut out? Grant wondered. Life? Or were the bars to keep straying wills indoors?)

All the others in that little chapel had been types that fitted easily into recognised niches in the everyday world: the principal to a bishopric, this one to a neurologist’s waiting-room, this to a depot for unemployed. But where did that last one fit?

How can he single the guy out by looking at his face?

“Oh, I’m so glad for you!” she said. “For me?” “Yes, it must have been awful for you.” And it was only then that Grant realised quite how awful it had been. That continual pushing down of an unnamed fear. What a nice child she was.

Erica for the win!