On a silver dish the Christmas pudding reposed in all its glory. A large football of a pudding, a piece of holly stuck in it like a triumphant flag and glorious flames og blue and red rising round it. There was a cheer and cries of 'Ooh-ah.' Hercule Poirot merely surveyed the portion on his plate with a rather curious expression on his face. A result, no doubt, of finding a cryptic note in his bedroom which had read: DON'T EAT NONE OF THE PLUM PUDDING. ONE WHO WISHES YOU WELL.
by Agatha Christie
This book of Christmas fare may be described as "The Chef's Selection." I am the Chef!
There are two main courses: The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and The Mystery of the Spanish Chest; a selection of Entrées: Greenshaw's Folly, The Dream, and The Under Dog; and a Sorbet: Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds.
The Mystery of the Spanish Chest may be described as a Hercule Poirot Special. It is a case in which he considers he was at his best! Miss Marple, in her turn, has always been pleased with her perspicuity in Greenshaw's Folly.
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding is an indulgence of my own, since it recalls to me, very pleasurably, the Christmases of my youth.
After my father's death, my mother and I always spent Christmas with my brother-in-law's family in the north of England — and what superb Christmases they were for a child to remember! Abney Hall had everything! The garden boasted a waterfall, a stream, and a tunnel under the drive! The Christmas fare was of gargantuan proportions. I was a skinny child, appearing delicate, but actually of robust health and perpetually hungry! The boys of the family and I used to vie with each other as to who could eat most on Christmas Day. Oyster Soup and Turbot went down without undue zest, but then came Roast Turkey, Boiled Turkey and an enormous Sirloin of Beef. The boys and I had two helpings of all three! We then had Plum Pudding, Mince-pies, Trifle and every kind of dessert. During the afternoon we ate chocolates solidly. We neither felt, nor were, sick! How lovely to be eleven years old and greedy!
What a day of delight from "Stockings" in bed in the morning, Church and all the Christmas hymns, Christmas dinner, Presents, and the final Lighting of the Christmas Tree!
And how deep my gratitude to the kind and hospitable hostess who must have worked so hard to make Christmas Day a wonderful memory to me still in my old age.
So let me dedicate this book to the memory of Abney Hall, its kindness and its hospitality.
And a happy Christmas to all who read this book.
"I regret exceedingly..." said M. Hercule Poirot.
He was interrupted. Not rudely interrupted. The interruption was suave, dexterous, persuasive rather than contradictory.
"Please don't refuse offhand, M. Poirot. There are grave issues of State. Your cooperation will be appreciated in the highest quarters."
"You are too kind," Hercule Poirot waved a hand, "but I really cannot undertake to do as you ask. At this season of the year..."
Again Mr Jesmond interrupted. "Christmas time," he said, persuasively. "An old-fashioned Christmas in the English countryside."
Hercule Poirot shivered. The thought of the Christmas countryside at this season of the year did not attract him.
"A good old-fashioned Christmas!" Mr Jesmond stressed it.
"
"Ah," said Mr Jesmond, "but Christmas in England is a great institution and I assure you at Kings Lacey you would see it at its best. It's a wonderful old house, you know. Why, one wing of it dates from the fourteenth century."
Again Poirot shivered. The thought of a fourteenth-century English manor house filled him with apprehension. He had suffered too often in the historic country houses of England. He looked round appreciatively at his comfortable modern flat with its radiators and the latest patent devices for excluding any kind of draught.
"In the winter," he said firmly, "I do not leave London."
"I don't think you quite appreciate, Mr Poirot, what a very serious matter this is." Mr Jesmond glanced at his companion and then back at Poirot.
Poirot's second visitor had up to now said nothing but a polite and formal "How do you do." He sat now, gazing down at his well-polished shoes, with an air of the utmost dejection on his coffee-coloured face. He was a young man, not more than twenty-three, and he was clearly in a state of complete misery.
"Yes, yes," said Hercule Poirot. "Of course the matter is serious. I do appreciate that. His Highness has my heartfelt sympathy."
"The position is one of the utmost delicacy," said Mr Jesmond.
Poirot transferred his gaze from the young man to his older companion. If one wanted to sum up Mr Jesmond in a word, the word would have been discretion. Everything about Mr Jesmond was discreet. His well-cut but inconspicuous clothes, his pleasant, well-bred voice which rarely soared out of an agreeable monotone, his light-brown hair just thinning a little at the temples, his pale serious face. It seemed to Hercule Poirot that he had known not one Mr Jesmond but a dozen Mr Jesmonds in his time, all using sooner or later the same phrase — "a position of the utmost delicacy."
"The police," said Hercule Poirot, "can be very discreet, you know."
