Derby Day Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by D.J. Taylor

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  I: The Conversation in Clipstone Court

  II: Belgrave Square

  III: An Addition to the Family

  IV: Scroop Hall

  V: Marriage à la Mode

  Part Two

  VI: A Situation in the Country

  VII: Boulogne-sur-mer

  VIII: What The Sportman’s Magazine thought about it

  IX: Mr Happerton’s Haunts and Homes

  X: Shepherd’s Inn and elsewhere

  XI: London and Lincolnshire

  XII: What Bell’s Life thought about it

  XIII: An Evening in the City

  Part Three

  XIV: Hounds upon the Scent

  XV: Captain McTurk Takes Charge

  XVI: What The Star thought about it

  XVII: At Home and Abroad with Captain Raff

  XVIII: The Triumph of a Modern Man

  XIX: Visitors

  XX: More from Bell’s Life

  XXI: The Governess’s Tale

  Part Four

  XXII: Mist

  XXIII: Stratagems of Captain McTurk

  XXIV: Mount Street and beyond

  XXV: Inside Information

  XXVI: Derby Day: Begun

  XXVII: Derby Day: Concluded

  XXVIII: Afterwards

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  As the shadows lengthen over the June grass, all England is heading for Epsom Downs – high life and low life, society beauties and Whitechapel street girls, bookmakers and gypsies, hawkers and acrobats, punters and thieves. Whole families stream along the Surrey back-roads, towards the greatest race of the year. Hopes are high, nerves are taut, hats are tossed in the air – this is Derby Day.

  For months people have been waiting and plotting for this day. Even in dark November, when the wind whistles through the foggy London courts, the alehouses and gentlemen’s clubs echo to the sound of disputed odds. In Belgrave Square old Mr Gresham is baffled by his tigerish daughter Rebecca, whose intentions he cannot fathom. In the clubs of St James’s rakish Mr Happerton plays billiards with his crony Captain Raff, while in darkest Lincolnshire sad Mr Davenant broods over his financial embarrassments and waits for his daughter’s new governess. Across the channel the veteran burglar Mr Pardew is packing his bags to return, to the consternation of the stalwart detective Captain McTurk. Everywhere money jingles and plans are laid. Uniting them all is the champion horse Tiberius, on whose performance half a dozen destinies depend.

  In this rich and exuberant novel, rife with the idioms of Victorian England, the mysteries pile high, propelling us towards the day of the great race, and we wait with bated breath as the story gallops to a finish that no one expects.

  About the Author

  D.J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is a novelist, critic and acclaimed biographer, whose Orwell: The Life won the Whitbread Biography prize in 2003. His most recent books are Kept: A Victorian Mystery (a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year), Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940, and the novels Ask Alice and At the Chime of a City Clock.

  ALSO BY D.J. TAYLOR

  Fiction

  Great Eastern Land

  Real Life

  English Settlement

  After Bathing at Baxter’s: Stories

  Trespass

  The Comedy Man

  Kept: A Victorian Mystery

  Ask Alice

  At the Chime of a City Clock

  Non-fiction

  A Vain Conceit: British Fiction in the 1980s

  Other People: Portraits from the ’90s (with Marcus Berkmann)

  After the War: The Novel and England Since 1945

  Thackeray

  Orwell: The Life

  On the Corinthian Spirit: The Decline of Amateurism in Sport

  Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940

  Felix’s

  Derby Day

  D.J. Taylor

  … I felt sure that if I could find a theme capable of affording me the opportunity of showing an appreciation of the infinite variety of everyday life, I had confidence enough in my power of dealing with it successfully; but the subject – then, as now and ever, the chief difficulty – where was I to find a scene of such interest and importance as to warrant my spending months, perhaps a year or two, in representing it? Until the year of which I write – 1854 – I had never seen any of the great horse races for which England is so famous, and my first experience of the modern Olympian games was at Hampton; when the idea occurred to me that if some of the salient points of the great gathering could be grouped together, an effective picture might be the result …

  W. P. Frith, ‘The Derby Day’

  My Autobiography and Reminiscences (1887)

  Part One

  I

  The Conversation in Clipstone Court

  A foreign gentleman, who had run horses with great success on the plains of Bremen, once enquired of me: ‘Where is it that the sporting men of England may generally be found?’ ‘My dear sir,’ I told him, ‘this is a universal passion, its devotees are everywhere, and of all sorts and conditions. A gentlemen’s club in Mayfair; the humblest inn in a Whitechapel rookery; the most somnolent village in Barsetshire, but that it has a meadow and a rail for jumping; anywhere and everywhere – these are the places where the sporting men of England are generally to be found.

  The Modern Sportsman: His Dress, Habits and Recreations (1865)

  SKY THE COLOUR of a fish’s underside; grey smoke diffusing over a thousand house-fronts; a wind moving in from the east: London.

  Clipstone Court lies on the western approach to Tottenham Court Road, slightly beyond Goodge Street, and is not much visited. There is a cab rank at which no cab was ever seen standing, and a murky tobacconist’s over whose lintel no customer in search of enlightenment from the copies of The Raff’s Journal and The Larky Swell that hang in the window was ever known to tread. An occasional costermonger, thinking to forge a path into Cleveland Street – only the way is barred – drags his barrow through the dusty entry, notes the silence and desolation of the place, and gladly retires. There is also a pump, which nobody ever uses – the quality of the water being horribly suspect – the Clipstone Arms, Jas Fisher, prop., out of whose aquarium-like lower windows a face can occasionally be seen dimly staring, and a kind of rubbish heap made up of ancient packing cases and vegetable stalks which a furious old man who lives up six flights of stairs in a tenement building hard by is always defiantly rearranging in the expectation that it will be taken away, only it never is. All of which gives the place a rather dismal and moral air, as if great truths about human nature could be extracted from it if only you knew where to look.

  It was generally agreed that three o’clock in the afternoon – the lunch hour long gone, the evening an eternity away – represented Clipstone Court’s lowest ebb, and that if anyone was going to hang himself there, this would be the time to do it: the cab stand vacant, the tobacconist’s shop murkier than ever, and a breeze coming in over the rooftops to send the packing-case frames and the vegetable stalks flying over the greystone surround like so much flotsam and jetsam on the seashore. All this the two men in the downstairs bar of the Clipstone Arms saw and no doubt appreciated, but for some reason they did not seem cast down by it. They were sitting at a table in the window, very comfortably ensconced behind a strew of empty pewter pots, and not seeming to care that it was November, so that even now the light was beginning to fade across the cour
t and one or two flakes of snow were drifting in to mingle with the soot on the peeling window sills. A visitor to the bar – and it was otherwise empty – might have thought that there was some mystery about these men, and that the mystery lay not in their outward appearance – they were identically dressed in shabby suits, dirty collars and billycock hats – but in the way they regarded each other: that one of them, taller and perhaps older, imagined himself to be a figure of consequence, and that the other, smaller and perhaps younger, was happy to support him in this belief.

  ‘But you ain’t told me yet,’ the taller man was saying, looking into the pewter pots one by one to see if they contained any liquor, ‘just how you’re placed right now.’

  ‘That’s so, Mr Mulligan,’ the smaller man replied, tapping the underside of his pipe on the table with an extraordinarily dirty hand. ‘Well – the fact is, I does run – well – errands for Mr Whalen that keeps the Bird in Hand in Wardour Street, and he lets me – well – make up a book sometimes.’

  Mr Mulligan was grimly pouring the dregs from four of the pewter pots into the fifth.

  ‘It ain’t a genteel house, the Bird in Hand,’ he pronounced.

  ‘No it ain’t.’ The look on the smaller man’s face was quite wonderful to see. ‘Dreadful lot of riff-raff they has in there. Irish, too. Never more than a shilling a time. But beggars can’t be choosers.’

  ‘You’re a poor fish, McIvor, that’s what you are’ said Mr Mulligan. ‘You’d have been better placed a-sticking to Mr Cheeseman that I put you in the way of.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew about it, Mr Mulligan. Why, if that Cheeseman is worth a ten-pound note nowadays, that’s all he is worth.’

  Mr Mulligan put the pewter pot down upon the table and examined his fingers, as if they were a row of saveloy sausages he might very soon begin to eat.

  ‘You aren’t telling me, McIvor, that Cheeseman is light on the tin? A man as had his own carriage in the ring at Epsom only this May past.’

  ‘It was the St Leger that did for him, Mr Mulligan. Took seven hundred pounds on Duke’s Delight at threes, laid most of it off on Antimacassar – Lord Purefoy’s horse, you know – and the animal, which everyone knew was a certainty, never came out of the ditch at the thirteenth.’

  ‘Seven hundred pounds at threes!’ Mr Mulligan shook his head, stuck his thumb into his mouth and bit off a piece of skin near the nail. ‘Couldn’t he have placed no more side-bets?’

  ‘Antimacassar was so mortal ’igh among the fancy, Mr Mulligan. He’d had Lord Purefoy’s man sending him intelligence from the stables, and you can’t say fairer than that.’

  Mr Mulligan inspected his fingers again, but he knew that the beauty had gone out of them. The snowflakes had stopped falling and the wind was whirling a little pile of dirt around the nearside corner of the court like a dervish.

  ‘These are bad times, McIvor,’ he remarked. ‘Confounded bad. ’Ow a gentleman is to make an honest penny out of the game I hardly know. Why, there’s some publicans’ll split if they so much as sees a slip passing hands. And that McTurk has such a down on us.’ Seeing a look of enquiry in his companion’s eye, he went on: ‘The p’liceman. Regular down he has. Why, there was half a dozen peelers went into the Jolly Butcher in the Kennington Road the other night, and bless me if the landlord ain’t been summonsed. Lose his licence, most probably, poor feller.’

  ‘They’re terrible hard, them magistrates,’ Mr McIvor said, who may have had some dealings of his own with the bench. ‘But tell me, Mr Mulligan’ – this was said with an extreme deference – ‘what is it that you’ve been engaged upon since you last did me the honour of tendering some advice?’

  ‘What have I been engaged upon? That’s cheek, McIvor, and you know it. But seeing that you’re a respectful young feller – yes, I will ’ave another go of this porter if you’ll be so kind – I’ll tell you. Fact is, I’ve been working for Mr Newcome that has the Three Bells in Shoreditch.’

  ‘I’ve had dealings with Newcome,’ said McIvor, with perhaps the very faintest note of asperity, ‘and he never said anything about it.’

  ‘No more he would. You don’t think a man as employs a private detective to spot his wife in the crim. con. goes and advertises the fact, do you? No, I never come into the Three Bells. Leastways, not when there’s anyone there. Just this last month now, I’ve been up in Leicestershire.’

  ‘No meetings anywhere there this month, surely?’ McIvor countered.

  ‘No more there aren’t. But it’s where Mr Mahoney’s place is – he that ran Tarantella in the Oaks – and that’s where I’ve been.’

  ‘And what did you do there?’

  ‘I ain’t proud’ – in fact the expression on Mr Mulligan’s face suggested that he was as proud as Lucifer. ‘I can shift a load of muck with the best of them. No, I’ve been working in the stables.’

  ‘What – and picking up gen?’

  ‘That’s about the strength of it.’ Two fresh pots of porter, signed up to Mr McIvor’s account, had now appeared on the table. ‘Your very good health.’

  ‘Why aren’t you there now?’ McIvor wondered.

  ‘If we was brothers, I’d tell you. Seeing as we’re not, I shan’t. Besides,’ Mr Mulligan added grandly, ‘there’s nothing to do in Leicestershire save chase foxes. You wouldn’t catch me living there if I was made a present of forty acres. But see here’ – and he leant across the table, speaking in a more confidential tone – ‘this ain’t buttering any bread. I take it you think I’m tolerably downy, McIvor?’

  ‘I should think you ought to know what o’clock it was, if anyone should,’ said Mr McIvor admiringly, who had been very impressed by the excursion to Leicestershire.

  ‘Well then, here’s a dodge that might serve us. Seventy–thirty split, mind. And you’d have to do the work.’

  ‘It ain’t taking a shop for some auctioneer’s leavings?’

  ‘No indeed. Just opening letters. And sending ’em too. A child could do it. But the trick is pulling ’em in. Once you’ve got them you’re safe. And no one any the wiser. Now, you’ve a tip or two in your head, I suppose?’

  ‘Everyone has tips.’

  ‘Maybe they do. And there are fools out there willing to pay for them. But it’s hartistry as counts. Widder with three orphan children in her care has sporting intelligence to communicate – that kind of thing. And colours. Always mention the colours. There’s folk sets great store by them. Now, let us have pen and paper and set to work.’

  These articles having been procured from the landlord, together with two more pots of porter, for which McIvor again paid, or rather said that he would do so, Mr Mulligan bent his head over the table top. Outside the shadows were crawling yet higher up the walls of Clipstone Court and the furious old man had rushed down his staircase and was angrily gathering up the packing-case fragments.

  ‘Shy kind of place, ain’t it?’ Mr Mulligan said. Plainly the act of composition did not come easily to him. First he scratched negligently with his pen at the foolscap sheet before him, only to obliterate what he had just written. Then he took heart again, dashed off a sentence, looked at it sadly and then drew his nib carefully through at least half the words. McIvor stared out into the court and amused himself by looking at an engraving of the Battle of Waterloo that hung above a poster saying that Jack Dobbs the Rottingdean Fibber’s benefit was coming off at John Dawdsey’s shop, the Horseferry Road, and all sporting gentlemen were respectfully entreated to attend. In ten minutes, and with several rendings of the foolscap sheet, the business was done and Mr Mulligan held up the surviving fragment of paper proudly to the light.

  ‘Here we are then. A widowed lady, relict of a gentleman long esteemed in some of the highest sporting establishments in the land, is in possession of information pertaining to this year’s Derby race, which she will gladly divulge in exchange for the sum of one half-crown, to be remitted to Mrs Faraday, Post Office, Drury Lane, London W. Reads well, don’t it?’
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  ‘I should say it does,’ said Mr McIvor, who had been very impressed by the word ‘pertaining’. ‘But what do we do when folks start sending their money in?’

  ‘What do we do? Why, we send them the name of an ’oss. Mind you, it’s to be a good one, for if it succeeds, why, we can try the dodge again. That’s the beauty of it.’

  ‘What about Broomstick, Lord Mountfichet’s bay, that was of Tanglewood by Saracen?’

  ‘Gammon! They’ll be turning him into dog-meat come next Michaelmas, if what I hear’s true.’

  ‘Mariner, then, that did so well at Doncaster.’

  ‘Ah, but he’s no staying power, has he? And they say that Mr Ticklerton don’t care for the sport since his wife died. No, I say we go for that horse in Lincolnshire.’

  Seeing from the look on McIvor’s face that he had never heard of any horse in Lincolnshire, he went on:

  ‘Tiberius. Mr Davenant’s horse. The one that ran five furlongs in a minute and five on Newmarket Heath last spring, and that Joey Bailey would have rode in the Ascot New Stakes if he hadn’t broke ’is collar-bone the week before. Was a feller talking of him no end in Post and Paddock the other month. I remarked it at the time. Mr Newcome is already offering tens on him, and nobody knowing whether he’s to run or no.’

  McIvor said he was sure that Mr Mulligan was right; the piece of paper was folded up and secured in the back pocket of Mr Mulligan’s shabby suit, later to be conveyed in a dirty envelope to the offices of the Holborn & St Pancras Journal in Gower Street, two more pots of porter were called for, a few more flakes of snow drifted down over the sooty window-fronts, the gloomy doorways were gathered up in blackness, and evening came to Clipstone Court.