Derby Day Page 43

  She should be a burden to him, she protested to Mr Glenister, as they walked that afternoon in the meadow, and it was not her place to live at Glenister Court and be its mistress, and Mr Glenister said that she should not, and that it was, that no one knew their places in life until they came upon them and saw that they fitted them. And thinking of this, it was as if Miss Ellington’s head was filled with a series of pictures, so sharp and lifelike that she could not comprehend what had driven them there – Tiberius in his stall, Mr Davenant’s face upon the rail, the rooks soaring above the elms, Mr Silas’s gig grinding up the gravel in the drive – and she took Mr Glenister’s arm, who smiled at her, she thought, very winningly, and walked off across the green grass, and was, she thought, so very happy.

  *

  Nobody quite knew how Mr Synnot had come to Baden. The railway had certainly not brought him there, and the coaching office had no knowledge of him. Despite the enigma of his arrival, there was no mystery about his intentions, for Mr Synnot was plainly in Baden to enjoy himself. He put up at the Imperial Hotel, spent a little money at its gaming tables, loitered among its garden statuary, and could be seen in the establishment’s public rooms, reading newspapers, demanding cups of tea and conversing with such English tourists as came his way. Mr Synnot said that he was an Englishman and, like many Englishmen en route through Europe, he was certainly very knowledgeable. He knew when the gaming rooms were open and who was likely to frequent them; he knew the dates of the public balls; where Galignani could be obtained and the price of hiring a carriage from the livery stable. All this made Mr Synnot an agreeable addition to that part of English society that settles itself in Baden over the summer. He was at all times ready to escort a party to a distant pleasure garden, to play at écarté after dinner or recommend a church worth the visiting, and for this the ladies were disposed to forgive even his red complexion, over-large hands and pronounced Hibernian accent.

  Above all things Mr Synnot loved to sit at a table on the terrace. He had cups of coffee brought out to him there, and he read at copies of The Racing Calendar under an umbrella while the summer rain dripped off his hat-brim. An old lady – one of the old ladies he gallantly escorted to picturesque ruins or to early service – had taught him a patience. But best of all he liked to sit and observe the people as they came and went: the English papas sauntering by with their children and nursemaids; the German bankers lazily recruiting themselves in the sunshine; odd, polyglot women jabbering to each other in languages come from beyond the Rhine. French, German, Italian, Spanish: Mr Synnot could order a meal in any of them, and summon a waiter without using any words at all.

  On the first two or three occasions that he amused himself in this way he became aware of an English lady sitting on her own, at the farthermost part of the terrace, somewhat apart from the other coffee-drinkers and newspaper-readers. At first he was not conscious of her singularity: then, almost without registering his interest, he began to remark her. She was a slim, sandy-haired woman with remarkably green eyes, always dressed in the height of fashion, with a pretty little foot that peeped out of her skirts as if it knew it should not be there, yet horribly demure and with her head nearly always bent over a book. When a waiter brought her a message or a note on a tray, or a visitor to the hotel passed by her table – one of the English papas, perhaps, with a Continental Bradshaw under one arm and a child on the other – she spoke to them civilly but seemed anxious that their conversation should not be prolonged. She read a great many books. They were mostly in French, but once Mr Synnot thought that he saw a volume of Mr Thackeray’s Philip. ‘She is one of those d——d bluestockings, I daresay,’ Mr Synnot said to himself, but still he continued to watch.

  There came a time – it was getting on towards September now, and the English confraternity was breaking up – when this watching was not enough, and he applied to the friends he had made at the hotel for information. ‘She is called Mrs Happerton, I believe,’ said the old lady who had taught him the patience – the old lady was in the midst of packing her trunks and had not much time for Mr Synnot – ‘but there is some mystery about her.’ ‘She is very disreputable, I daresay,’ said a stout mamma whose four daughters he had taken by britzka to a romantic castle in the hills. ‘And now, Mr Synnot, will you not join us on our picnic tomorrow, for it is nearly Michaelmas full-term and Mr Davies must be back at chambers within the week?’ But Mr Synnot did not want to go on the picnic. He preferred to sit on the terrace and stare. He wondered if the Englishwoman was one of those ladies who frequent the great hotels of Europe in season and out of it and are, perhaps, no better than they should be, but then one night he saw the bow that the maître d’hôtel of the Imperial gave her as he brought her a glass of hock on a salver, and told himself not to be a fool.

  Finally there came an evening – it was in the second week in September, and most of the English families were gone – when Mr Synott thought that he could bear it no longer. The terrace was almost empty apart from the English lady and himself, and a breeze had got up to stir the first of the fallen leaves. Emboldened by the solitude, the first faint chill of the autumn and the thought that he should not perhaps be in Baden for very much longer, Mr Synnot seized his coffee cup – the coffee had gone cold an hour ago – and the Racing Calendar he had been affecting to study and made his way to the terrace’s farther end.

  ‘I hope,’ he said, as he drew level with her table, ‘that I do not intrude.’

  The woman put down her book – it was M. Zola’s Thérèse Raquin – and looked at him steadily for a moment. ‘I do not think,’ she said, ‘that there is any law that forbids a gentleman to walk over to a lady’s table. Will you sit down?’

  He sat down, and the wind blew a little storm of leaves against his legs. A number of brilliant observations had occurred to him as he made his way across to her, but now they had all vanished from his mind. ‘I always say,’ he declared, ‘that English people who find themselves in foreign parts should stick together.’

  ‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘English people. And Irish people, too.’

  He began to wonder if he had made a mistake. The evening was setting in fast, he noticed. Soon she would be going inside.

  ‘A wonderful sunset,’ he went on, indicating that marvel of nature with an outflung arm. ‘They seem to get them uncommonly fine down here. I wonder why that should be?’

  ‘I have often wondered it too,’ the lady said. If there was an irony in her tone, he did not notice it. ‘Mr …?’

  ‘Synnot,’ he said. ‘Synnot is the name.’ There was something in those green eyes that made him horribly nervous, he discovered. ‘You’ll be returning to London soon, I take it?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘I never go to London. Or even to Dublin,’ she added.

  He knew now that he had made a terrible mistake, but still he thought that a little jocularity might carry it off.

  ‘Have you a down against the Irish then, Mrs …’ he began, with considerably more of a lilt in his voice that he had ever allowed himself in the presence of Mrs Davies the Lincoln’s Inn barrister’s wife and her four daughters.

  ‘My name is Happerton,’ the woman said. ‘Do you know who I am?’ She saw the Racing Calendar under his arm and gestured at it with her hand. ‘The wife of the man who owned Tiberius that won the Derby. Does that not mean anything to you?’ But Mr Synnot was blinking like a fish hauled out onto the towpath of the River Wensum and awaiting despatch with the end of a hammer. ‘I never go to London,’ Mrs Happerton said, ‘for I find the climate doesn’t agree with me. And neither do the people. But the weather in Dublin is very agreeable, I believe.’

  But Mr Synnot had not stopped to answer. He had the look on his face of a man who has trampled on a nest of vipers by mistake, and was in piteous retreat across the terrace.

  The darkness was welling up across the terrace gardens; from the windows of the hotel dining rooms, lamplight flickered. Somewhere in the distance a band was playing. And
Mrs Happerton threw back her head and did something that she had never done in her father’s house in Belgrave Square, in Venice on her wedding tour, at Mrs Venables’ luncheons in Redcliffe Gardens, or in any other compartment of her adult life – she laughed.

  Acknowledgements

  I SHOULD LIKE to acknowledge the influence of W. P. Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences (1887), Christopher Wood, William Powell Frith: A Painter & His World (2006), Alan Macey, The Romance of the Derby Stakes (1930), Sir George Stephen, The Guide to Service: The Groom (1840), Gustave Doré and Blanchard Jerrold, ‘The Derby’ in London: A Pilgrimage (1872), Nicholas Foulkes, Gentlemen and Blackguards (2010) and Donald Thomas, The Victorian Underworld (1997). Much of the detail of the race-day itself is taken from George Moore’s novel Esther Waters (1894), which is also an invaluable guide to the protocols of off-course betting in late-Victorian London. Certain other fragments have been robbed from A. E. Coppard’s short story ‘Weep Not My Wanton’.

  ‘Shepherd’s Inn’ is borrowed from W. M. Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (1850). There is a Scroop Hall sixteen miles from Lincoln, but it was built in 1885 and could not have been lived in by Mr Davenant and his ancestors. I am grateful to its current owners, Michael and Jilly Worth, for their kind permission to make use of its name and location. I should like to express my gratitude to Tim Cox of the Cox Library who very kindly read the novel in manuscript and made many valuable suggestions.

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