Derby Day Read online

  ‘Do they?’ Major Hubbins shook his head. ‘People always say such things. It was said of Cupid’s Delight that Mr Poplar was offered £5,000 not to run – you recollect how they took the linchpins off the box in which he went to Epsom? – and yet he beat Kingmaker by a couple of lengths.’

  ‘That’s what I thought myself, sir. And in any case, as a gentleman who was in the bar the other evening said: Why, if Mr Happerton don’t want him to win, he’d not have picked yourself to ride him.’

  Major Hubbins smiled again, a little more wanly than when he had thought about his dead wife, and the landlord retreated. Though liking his comfort, his two hundred pounds in the bank and the flattery of sporting gentlemen, Major Hubbins was not a fool. He, too, had heard the rumours and in the considerable leisure allowed to him had turned them over in his mind. That the odds on Tiberius had first shortened and then lengthened, he did not think particularly significant. A man can place a thousand pounds on a horse at a whim. He remembered a noble acquaintance of his offering 30,000 to 1,000 against Hecuba in the Oaks six times over, for no other reason than the excitement of the wager. He had ridden Tiberius a dozen times now and knew him to be a good horse, certainly a horse that with a fair wind behind him, and barring accident, would stand as good a chance as any of winning the race.

  And yet, turning the matter over in his mind again, he acknowledged that if Mr Happerton did want the horse to fail, then the instrument of that failure could only be himself. Again, Major Hubbins’ fondness for the good things in life did not preclude his being a realist. He knew that men of his age were not often asked to ride champion racehorses. At the same time, in asking him to execute the commission, Mr Happerton had made much of him, told him that Jones and Robinson, and other leading jockeys of the day were as nothing compared to him. This Major Hubbins had been glad to hear. But a small part of him wondered now if he had been made a fool of.

  Major Hubbins greeted this suspicion with the equanimity that he brought to every compartment of his life. When he had finished his negus, smoked a cigarette and glanced at a French novel he had lying by, he went down to the Brood Mare’s dining room and had his midday meal in great comfort, and to the delight of the sporting gentlemen who sat nearby entertained them with accounts of Lord Zetland’s Vortigern and how he won the Doncaster Cup, and Priam that lost his syndicate £12,000 in ’34 and other reminiscences from the old king’s day. And yet afterwards, when he stepped down to the stable, it was noted that he cursed the stable boy – something he had never been known to do in his life before – and that Tiberius, whom he had engaged to take for a gentle canter on the Downs, came back with a wild eye and the sweat pouring off his coat. ‘Lor’ bless you, Major,’ the groom had said. ‘The race ain’t until Saturday, you know, not this afternoon,’ and Major Hubbins had given a laugh, which may have signalled to anyone who heard it that, in the matter of the Derby, he was very much in earnest.

  *

  Captain Raff went south along the Brighton Road. It was about three o’clock in the morning of the day before the great race, but the lateness of the hour had not occurred to him. He supposed that he had been walking all day. He had a dim memory of waking up in a lodging house in Whitechapel and staring very acutely at a man who lay dead drunk on the floor beside him, but he could not have said how he came to the house, nor who the man was. There was a great deal which Captain Raff did not know. He did not know why he walked south along the Brighton Road – there were street signs every now and then which told him that he was not so very far from London – but the walking comforted him, and the noise of his footsteps set up a little rhythm in his head which he rather liked. He did not know if he was aimed for Brighton or some other place. Sometimes the things he saw were the things around him – the houses by which he passed, wide village greens with the water lying black and cold under the moon – and sometimes he saw the things in his head, which were more ominous. Sometimes it seemed to him that he wandered underground, and that the shutting-off of the light would altogether extinguish him. At other times he seemed to traverse some high point, where cold night air hung upon his shoulders and the wind plucked at his forehead. The things in his head fascinated him. It would not have been correct to call them visions, for they had no substance. Rather, they were intimations, hints of other things: a slither beneath a rock; a glint of light on a nest of serpents seething in the darkness; a hatchet-blade descending on a chicken’s neck; a horrible lidless eye with a little nictating membrane at its corner; odd flutters of chill breath and sinister movement.

  It was not in the nature of things that Captain Raff’s progress should go unobserved. A policeman watched him stutter down a village street, but, seeing that the shop windows and the door-fastenings that he passed were of no interest to him, allowed him to proceed. Three drunk men rose up out of a hedge, capered around him and would have claimed him as one of their own, but there was something ominous and detached in Captain Raff’s eye that deterred them and they stole away. At about four, just as the first streaks of dawn were showing over the horizon, it began to rain and he took shelter in a grim old churchyard under a canopy of dark, ivy-clad trees, where the moonlight glinted off the flints in the tower and the ferns grew up under the darkling windows. The inscriptions on the graves interested him very much, and he stood staring at them as the rain dripped off his hat and onto his forehead, wondering what, if he were to die, anyone might say about him. The dawn was showing blood-red now, and something cried out brokenly in the hedgerow near by and then fell silent. There was an old man curled up in the church porch who, when he saw Captain Raff among the stones, came out from his lair and began to talk to him, and Captain Raff grinned horribly back, saying nothing, until the old man shook his head and went away. There were shadows moving through the mist beyond the elms, cows huddling together for shelter, and he examined them placidly for a while as if he had never seen a cow before and could not imagine what function in nature it might perform. He had a sudden vision of himself as a figure of antlike insignificance crawling across a stone ledge set at angles to the wind, from which the breeze might soon dislodge him.

  And so, as the rain moved off towards the Surrey hills, he went on: through tiny villages asleep in the mist, past ploughed fields full of glistening stones that fell away into the pale aura of the horizon, where scarecrows hung, as it seemed to him, like dancing men on gibbets, by meres and streams and thickets of sedge, very dark and cool in the early light, the original silence of the world ever more prey to noise and disturbance, the ring of a horse’s hoofs on a metalled road, the wheels of a gig rattling towards him, a train’s whistle sounding across the fields, moving on, past the wide, double-fronted gates of great houses facing onto the road, past a workhouse made of neat grey bricks with a double row of bleary porthole windows and a porter yawning at the door, past endless hedges twisted about with loosestrife, past rows of cottages with thatch roofs gleaming with dew and spiders’ webs stretched out across their porches, but all the time with a curious sense of apprehension – doom, destiny, design, a terrible, irremediable fate – that he could not quite fathom, drawing closer to Epsom and the downs that ran beyond it, where something waited for him whose outlines, try as he might, he could not discern.

  *

  For some reason the vicinity of Epsom Downs on the day before the Derby is the quietest place in the world. The horses are in their stalls, being fed up on oats and fresh hay. Their owners keep to their hotels and lodging houses, dine frugally off porridge and a plate of sprats with only a little brandy-and-water to wash it down, and send anxious messages via their aides-de-camp. The landlords are in their cellars reckoning up the number of beer barrels, hogsheads and so forth, their wives are counting out knives and plates, Epsom High Street is as empty as Charterhouse School on the first day of the holidays, and a coach-and-pair rattling down it in the middle of the afternoon is seen as the height of vulgarity. There are a dozen people at Evensong, and the little whist club at the t
own reading room sickens and dies for want of custom. One or two young men in loud jackets and top-boots attempt to get up a song at the bar of the Dancing Pony and are quickly shushed. There will be plenty of time for that, the landlord advises them, when the race is done.

  *

  How many millions of people, preparing for bed on the evening of the great race, are affected by the thought of what the morning may bring? In Epsom everything is in turmoil, with ten thousand visitors crowded into a town that usually holds eight hundred. The inns are crammed to the rafters and there are people sleeping in the fields beyond Cheam and Ewell village. In London and its surround a hundred thousand go to sleep with the thought that at four, five or six o’clock they must rise up and make haste for the railway station, or the cab stand, or the road. Beyond this – beyond the Home Counties, beyond England even – there are sportsmen making uneasy calculations about the procurement of evening newspapers and their proximity to telegraph offices. The court knows about it. Half of parliament at least will be attending it. The bench of bishops will not go unrepresented, and the diplomatic embassies cannot be kept away. M. Dubois, the French ambassador, has announced his intention of being present at the race. The Mayfair dinners and the Belgravia routs have been aflame with it for weeks. A radical politician has condemned it, and a Methodist divine preached against it, but one might think that something which unites a widow in Kensington Square, an apothecary in St John’s Street and the wife of a Hoxton chandler is more democratic than the reverse. Chelsea is going, in carriages and coaches-and-four. Clapham is going in tax-carts and bang-up ponies. Kennington and Brixton are going by way of the Southern Railway or a succession of omnibuses, and Whitechapel and Poplar will be arriving on foot, for what is a sixteen-mile journey under the June sunshine when there is Saturnalia in view?

  With such a profusion of people comes, inevitably, a scarcity of resources. There is not a pig or a sheep or a fowl to be purchased anywhere in Cheam or Dorking, for the publicans and the cook-shop proprietors have bought them all. Likewise tea, butter, flour and dried fruit for the delicacies known as ‘Derby Buns’, which every cottage on the road offers to passers-by. What sugar remains in the grocers’ shops on Epsom High Street has been carefully sanded, and the lake of beer distributed among its hostelries stealthily watered down. A newspaper has made a computation of the thousands of loaves, pies and sweet biscuits that will be eaten on the course and the hundreds of thousands of glasses that will be emptied in its near vicinity. A Dissenting chapel has announced that it will be throwing open its door to repentant sinners, but no one much is expected to come. It is as if, all across Surrey and beyond, a great play is in the process of being put together, and although the actors have yet to arrive the scenery lies everywhere about. Five score Gypsy caravans and their owners are camped up on the Downs and have been there a week. So has the fairground with its cockshies, its carousel, its sealed booths advertising werewolves, the corpse of a two-headed baby in a formaldehyde jar, and a pair of young ladies able to recite the multiplication table and speak the French language but joined together at the hip. There are a dozen artists and illustrators from the pictorial papers lodged in Epsom with instructions to take the race, or some part of it, off, and forty or fifty newspaper-writers ready to transmit something of its splendour to the world beyond. There are also three hundred policemen installed in a makeshift barracks at Cheam and a temporary magistrate’s court set up in the corner of the Grandstand for dispensing summary justice.

  *

  Among those gentlemen of the press came Mr Pritchett of the Pictorial Times, who had taken the precaution of going down to Epsom by train the night before and reserving rooms at the Perch, Ewell, three months previous.

  ‘It’s a thing I always do,’ he explained to his assistant, who sat meekly at his side as the train rattled through the Surrey twilight. ‘Why, there was one year when that Priestley of the Illustrated came at the last minute, found every room taken, had to spend the night under a hedge on Banstead Common and turned up with loosestrife in his hat.’ The train was rather full of people – gentlemen in black-cloth suits on their way home from the City, other men clearly bound for the racecourse with mysterious packages under their arms – and Mr Pritchett regarded them with a caustic eye. ‘Now’, he instructed the meek assistant, ‘there will be a great deal for us to do and you had better listen carefully. First you must call at Mr Dorling’s house for a copy of the racecard. They’ll tell you it ain’t ready, I daresay: if that’s the case, say that Mr Pritchett of the Pictorial Times wants one special. Then you’re to go to Pickering’s stables at Cheam village for word on Septuagint. If the place is shut up, well, it can’t be helped. As for tomorrow, here’s my instructions. If anyone from the Illustrated wants to know where I am, you ain’t seen me and can’t tell. And look out for impostors. There was a chap came up one year, said he was Lord Mancroft, the owner of Zebedee and had a tale to tell, and would you believe he wasn’t Lord Mancroft at all? Don’t go near the card tables or the refreshment tents under the hill – you’ll have your wallet taken and it shan’t be me that fills it again – give the fellows at the grandstand gate a shilling when you come to fetch me after my luncheon and if anyone gives trouble say you are on a particular errand for Mr Pritchett of the Pictorial Times, and see how that suits …’

  *

  As for the principal players in this drama, they are still widely dispersed. Mr Dorling sleeps soundly in his bed, leaving the last preparations to his subordinates, although Mrs Dorling is still hard at work making curl-papers for her daughters and granddaughters. The owners, and part-owners, and the vague-eyed men who have what is known as an ‘interest’, are dining at their inns, rather subdued and querulous and liable to argue their bills. Their jockeys are smoking pipes in stable yards, exchanging final words with grooms and attendants and setting out their gear. Mr Happerton has forsaken both dinner and the society of Mr Mountstuart and sits alone in his room making calculations with an ink-pen on the back of an envelope: such is his air of zealous concentration that the cigar between his fingers keeps going out and has to be relit from a spill kept ready on a saucer. Major Hubbins is at the Brood Mare, very comfortable with a glass of sherry, some devilled chicken and a biscuit. Rosa is in Mount Street setting out her things for the morrow. Very lavish and fine they look, lying on the coverlet of Rosa’s dainty bed, and Rosa’s maid thinks that she never saw so much silk and muslin and convent lace in her life.

  In Belgrave Square Mrs Happerton goes to bed early, having tucked old Mr Gresham away earlier still. Nokes is nowhere to be seen. Captain McTurk is still in his eyrie above Northumberland Street, and Mr Masterson with him, although candles have had to be called for. Mr Hopkins the secretary has fallen asleep in his chair, although on this occasion quite naturally, and there is fresh information, just arrived, which may have some bearing on tomorrow’s affairs. Mr Glenister is at his lodgings wondering what costume might be thought suitable for a racecourse and settling in the end for a linen coat and a soft hat. In Lincolnshire, where the rains have started up again, Miss Ellington stands at the window staring out into the warm, sodden night. Captain Raff is – who knows where Captain Raff is? Captain Raff does not know himself. In Richmond Jemima has long since retired to her fragrant pillow, but Mr Pardew still sits in front of the empty fireplace, hands pressed down against his great knees, musing on his opportunities. The stick rests a foot from his side.

  XXVI

  Derby Day: Begun

  The most astonishing, the most varied, the most picturesque, and the most glorious spectacle that ever was or ever can be, under any circumstances, visible to mortal eyes.

  Illustrated London News, 1863

  THE DAY DAWNS bright and clear, more or less. The grey clouds that have hung over Dorking and Reigate pull away northwards and the land opens up: field upon field, like the squares in a patchwork quilt. Over Charnwood the mist gently disperses in little wisps and eddies, like spun sugar borne on the air
. From this height – the Hogsback say, from which it is possible to see all the way to London – everything resembles something else. The little villages – Banstead, Coulsdon, Ewell – look as if they were made with the bricks from a child’s nursery. The rivers are thin blue lines. The Queen of Brobdingnag, were she paying a call in Epsom High Street, would be an ant. And across the land, even at this hour, move occupying armies. There are caterers’ wagons out over the edge of the concourse and a forest of tents to accompany the pastrycooks and beer-sellers and roast-beef providers that Mr Dorling has seen fit to accommodate there. Early carriages are joined up axle to axle, with gentlemen in loud waistcoats and cockades in their hats breakfasting off sandwiches and boiled eggs covered up in handkerchiefs. There will be no racing for seven hours, but the visitors are unabashed.

  A gentleman can do a great deal on Epsom Downs if he has a mind. He may go and lose his money at thimblerig, or he may go and drink rum shrub at sixpence the half-pint. He may stop and admire the acrobats and the tumblers and the sellers of prints of famous horses, or he may purchase a tract from one of the serious-looking frock-coated men and read about the Angel Gabriel’s flaming sword and Lot’s Wife, the implication being that Epsom is a modern Gomorrah with all its patrons ripe to be turned into pillars of salt. He may go and ogle the ladies in the carriage ring – there are not so many of them yet, as the morning is rather young – or he may go and see what the Old Firm, William Latch, The Black Swan, Shoreditch, has to offer him in the way of odds. There are a score of bookmakers and their clerks here already, and more arriving every moment to jostle for places on the hill, all of them highly picturesque – dressed in suits of violent check, with ties made out of yards of flaring green silk, field glasses slung over their shoulders and boots with heels three inches high. The policemen, walking two by two among the multiplying crowd, are tolerant. A man has to be very outrageous, or drunk, or vicious, to get himself arrested on Derby Day. Somewhere on the edge of the crowd there are trumpets sounding. A carriage with a ducal coronet on the door rolls by, past a banner announcing that, in a tank specially designed for the purpose, Miss Delavacquerie, whom the illustrated papers have been admiring this past fortnight, will dive for soup plates at twelve o’clock sharp. The sun continues to rise into the summer sky.