Derby Day Read online

  *

  Whatever Mr Gresham may have written to Mr Happerton, and however Mr Happerton may have received it, a further letter was sent by messenger two days later to Miss Gresham at the house in Belgrave Square.

  Papa is a great deal less cross. I shall call in the morning. Your own G.H.

  *

  ‘So it is to come off then, is it?’ Captain Raff said to his friend over luncheon. They were sitting once more in the library of the Blue Riband Club, which looked more forlorn and melancholy than ever, and where a stone, flung from the street below, had cracked up one of the window panes. ‘And I suppose I’m to be best man?’

  ‘Well – as a matter of fact you aren’t,’ Mr Happerton told him.

  ‘Not to be groomsman?’ Captain Raff’s look as he said this was quite piteous. ‘What, a fellow that has stood by you all this time? That has done – done all kinds of things, you know. Why, I never was so insulted.’

  ‘That’s all gammon, Raff, and you know it. The fact is, this is a respectable affair, and has to be done right. I ain’t saying you would shame us –’

  ‘I suppose you’ll have one of those West End fellows that act as though they were at a public meeting?’

  ‘That’s about the ticket. It is horses for courses, you understand.’

  ‘You must stick by me,’ Captain Raff said, very seriously. ‘You must stick by me, do you hear? I haven’t come this far with you, Happerton, to see it all flung away from me.’

  ‘Oh I’ll stick by you all right,’ Mr Happerton said, not seeing the look on Captain Raff’s face. He was thinking of what Miss Gresham had said to him that morning, and what Mr Gresham had written to him in his letter. ‘Only I’ll not have you hanging on my arm on my wedding day. Now, when shall we send Lythgoe to Boulogne and what shall we tell him to say?’

  And so Captain Raff advised him as to when they might send Lythgoe to Boulogne, and what he might say, and nothing else was said about the question of Mr Happerton’s best man.

  *

  All this happened around the end of November. Mr Happerton’s marriage to Miss Gresham took place in the early part of February. If it was not the most fashionable wedding party ever to have set off from Belgrave Square, then it was generally agreed to have done Mr Gresham and his daughter the greatest credit. There were half a dozen bridesmaids – rather cold in their light dresses – a marquis’s daughter to receive the bride’s bouquet as she stood at the altar, and the Honourable Mr Caraway to act as groomsman. Captain Raff skulked at the back of the church. It was thought that the morning coat he was wearing had been bought for him by Mr Happerton.

  It is very often said that a man who is to be married spends the time before his wedding day sloughing off some of the affiliations of his bachelor life, and certainly Mr Happerton had made one or two gestures in this direction. In particular, a day or so before the ceremony he had taken a cab to a notably obscure part of the City to the rear of Shoreditch railway station and spent a few minutes in a dingy little office squeezed in between a ship-chandler’s and a defunct watchmaker’s. The man he came to see was called Mr Pilkington and there was no clue at all as to what business the office transacted, whether it lent money or speculated in guano or bought up land in Putney and built villas on it, but Mr Pilkington, who despite his name was a foreign-looking gentleman, welcomed him onto his premises and poured him a glass of sherry.

  ‘So,’ he said, when Mr Happerton had settled himself in his chair, ‘you’re to be married, I hear? Is it that Miss Casket, the brewer’s girl?’

  ‘No it is not,’ Mr Happerton said. He was very polite with Mr Pilkington. ‘It is Miss Gresham.’

  ‘Well I congratulate you,’ Mr Pilkington said, in what might have been a sardonic tone. ‘Fifty thousand there if there’s a penny. And so it’s goodbye to the old shop, is it?’

  ‘The capital’s paid up, I believe?’ Mr Happerton said. ‘There’s nothing to complain of, is there?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I did hear that Lord Maulever had a bill for two thou he was desperate to accommodate. Would take seven for it, or even six.’

  ‘That’s all finished,’ Mr Happerton said.

  ‘Old Gresham don’t want a bill-discounter for a son-in-law. Is that it?’

  Mr Happerton gave a little shake of his head. He was not very talkative with Mr Pilkington.

  ‘Ah well, you had better take yourself off to Belgrave Square,’ Mr Pilkington said. ‘And I’ll see what can be done about Lord Maulever.’ After which Mr Happerton drank another glass of sherry and the two men shook hands. ‘And yet he may find he wants me again sooner than he thinks,’ Mr Pilkington said to himself as Mr Happerton’s top-boots went tapping off across the yard.

  There were some errands that were too private even for Mr Happerton. And so Captain Raff found himself instructed to take a £10 note in an envelope to the little back bedroom of a dilapidated house near the back parts of the Drury Lane Theatre. Captain Raff was not much shocked by the task – he had executed one or two commisions of this kind for Mr Happerton before – but he thought, as he made his way to the dusty staircase and looked out of the smeary windows at the unkempt yards beyond, that his good nature was being abused. The woman who opened the door knew why he had come, stared furiously at him and would have declined the gift. ‘You’ll have to give it up, you know,’ Captain Raff told her, standing in the doorway in what he imagined to be a masterful manner – the room was done up in the French style, but the paper was coming off the wall and there were a couple of cabbages on the dressing table next to the pots of rouge – ‘that is – there is no way of proving it’, and in the end the note was accepted, and the door shut and he went back down the staircase thinking that Mr Happerton could have managed the visit himself.

  ‘A bad business,’ Captain Raff said to himself as he came out into Drury Lane. It was not that he sympathised with the woman in the room, with her cabbages and her rouge pots and her theatrical costumes hung up on the dresser with the saucepans – Captain Raff knew better than that – merely that he thought the commission horribly symbolic of the relation in which he now stood to Mr Happerton. There had been a time two or three years ago when Mr Happerton had deferred to him, he thought, and sought his advice. Now he kept things secret from him and sent him with £10 notes to shabby-genteel back bedrooms in Drury Lane.

  There was a short interval between the wedding breakfast and the departure of the bride and groom, and Mr Gresham thought that he ought to occupy the time by addressing at least some words to his daughter. The house at Belgrave Square was in chaos, with servants hastening along the corridors and luggage piled up in the hall – and at first he did not know where to look. In the end, though, he found her in her bedroom, changed out of her wedding finery into a travelling dress, very cool and composed and examining the set of her bonnet with the aid of a looking glass. Mr Gresham saw himself in the mirror as he came towards her and thought that he looked old and worn and dissatisfied. There had been speeches at the wedding breakfast. Mr Caraway had spoken, and been gracious in his compliments. Mr Happerton had spoken, and said that he had been made happy. Mr Gresham had been conscious that his heart was not in it. But he was a conscientious man, and the sight of the mirror and the memory of the speech did not deter him.

  ‘So, my dear,’ he said, with an attempt at a smile, ‘you are a married woman now.’

  ‘As to that, Papa, I’m sure a hundred girls in London were married this morning.’

  ‘They say Rome’ – this was the destination of the wedding tour – ‘is very cold at this time of the year. I hope you won’t find it so.’

  ‘I daresay we shall find it very comfortable, Papa.’

  Mr Gresham looked round the room, trying to find some hook on which to hang the words he had come to say, but found only a little case of books and a reproduction of Mr Frith’s painting of the seaside. He was conscious that his daughter had not been all to him that she should have been, and that he had not been al
l that he might have been to her. Thinking that the fault was probably his own, he determined to make some reparation.

  ‘My dear,’ he said again.

  ‘Yes, Papa.’ He was struck again by her composure. He thought that another girl, about to depart on her wedding tour, might not be so matter-of-fact. He realised that he had often, in the past, thought of this very day, thought, even, of this very conversation, and he was aware of the gap between his imaginings and the reality of the moment. From below he could hear the sound of the hired men crashing among the tables. What he wanted to say was: There is no warmth in you, and little in me. How are we to restore it? Or was it never there? But he knew he could not say it. In another five minutes the carriage requisitioned to take the newly married couple to Charing Cross Station would be at the door.

  ‘Marriage is a very serious thing, Rebecca. I hope you will be happy.’ What he meant to say was that he hoped she would think of him, and that he would think of her, but somehow he could not. Something of his indecision showed in his face and she looked at him curiously.

  ‘What is it, Papa?’

  ‘It is just … I hope you will be happy, Rebecca. And that in your new life, with your husband, you will remember your old life with me.’

  ‘I am sure I shall, Papa. I believe that’s the carriage at the door.’

  Mr Gresham, as he put his arm round his daughter’s shoulders and kissed her forehead, saw himself again in the mirror and thought that he looked very old and worn.

  And so the carriage came and took Mr and Mrs Happerton away on the first stage of their journey to Rome. Two things were noticeable about these preliminaries. One was that Mr Happerton was very keen to supply Captain Raff with the means of communicating with him during his absence. The other was that he took with him the picture of Tiberius, had it placed in his travelling bag for the train and seemed far more anxious for its safety than a man setting off on his wedding tour with a newly married wife at his side ought to be.

  IV

  Scroop Hall

  Towards noon we began to pass through some of the villages that lie on the road to Lincoln – sixteen miles as the crow flies, and the crow is welcome to it, seeing that the potholes are so bad. Scroop I liked particularly – a meek little cluster of old houses drawn up on an ancient green, with the wolds behind it and the sun hanging low over the meadows, and yet this is a bare country, where the wind sweeps in over insufficient hedgerows and the sheep stand shivering in the fields. Scroop Hall a quaint, tumbledown pile, with an army of rooks lodged about its chimneys, dimly visible through the trees …

  W. M. Thackeray, ‘A Little Tour Through Lincolnshire’, 1859

  IT USED TO be wondered how Mr Samuel Davenant had come by his champion horse Tiberius, which won the Epsom Two Year’s Old Plate, altogether ran away with the Trial Stakes at Abingdon and absolutely tied with the Duke of Grafton’s Creditor for the Middle Park Plate. Some people said that Mr Davenant hardly knew himself. Owners of racehorses are always supposed to be wealthy sporting men, with strings of thoroughbreds to their name and broad acres to run them over, but Mr Davenant was a country squire who lived in a small way in Lincolnshire, owned no other horses but a pair of ancient hunters and an old cob, and whose name had previously been as absent from Bell’s Life and The Field as Tennyson’s or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s. When know ledge of Tiberius reached the sporting intelligence, they turned fanciful and said that Mr Davenant had simply found the horse wandering in one of his meadows or bought him from a Gypsy at Louth Fair.

  But this was a falsehood, for Mr Davenant had merely acquired him as one of a number of items ceded by a country neighbour who owed him money. There might have been some mystery as to how the country neighbour had come by him – he was supposed by one school of sporting opinion to have been got by Mr Fortescue’s Tantalus out of Lord Faringdon’s brood mare Belladonna – but at any rate that was nothing to do with Mr Davenant. Even then the horse might have lived out its life in the obscurity of the Lincolnshire wolds, but if Mr Davenant was not a sporting man himself he had friends who were, and when they advised him that he ought not to keep in his tithe barn a horse whose true stamping ground was Newmarket Heath, he took the hint. So a sporting man was brought in to manage the business, and Tiberius was shown at a couple of race meetings at Stamford and Lincoln, with which he duly ran away, was talked of for the Two Thousand and the Derby and, rather to his surprise, Mr Davenant found that he was a figure of remark in a world of which he had hitherto taken scarcely any notice.

  As to what Mr Davenant thought about this, nobody knew. But then hardly anyone knew anything about Mr Davenant. He was a man of about forty, who had lived in Lincolnshire all his life and whose father and grandfather had done the same, very proud of the hundred acres which he and his tenants farmed, but with no particular interest in how his yields might be improved or his rents better remitted. He was a widower, which people said had made him melancholy, and he had a backward daughter, a girl of about fourteen with white hair and a big moon face, which people said had made him more melancholy still. Lincolnshire is rather a shy place, but even so Mr Davenant was not conspicuous in it. He had never sat as a magistrate; he took no interest in politics; he was never likely to be Lord Lieutenant. He liked going to church on Sunday, sitting in the family pew and thinking of his ancestors who had sat there, and running his dogs over the wolds, and dining with the very few friends he had in the neighbourhood, and so people said he was odd, and reclusive, that he lived only for his house, and that the dead wife and the moon-faced child were a judgement. It had rained on the morning of Mrs Davenant’s funeral, which took place on St Andrew’s Day, and it was said that Mr Davenant, with his white face and his hair all askew, and the mud on his hands from bearing the coffin, looked as if he had but lately risen from the grave himself.

  But there were other matters in which it seemed that the fates had conspired against Mr Davenant. Tiberius had certainly made his owner’s reputation – the Marquis of Loudon had sent a letter in his own hand positively entreating that he be allowed to cover his mare Miranda – but he had very nearly ruined him too. Thinking that where one animal had gone others might follow he had bought more horses, and they had not served him so well. One had broken its foreleg and had to be destroyed. Another had disgraced itself so thoroughly in its debut that it had never been shown again. And then Mr Davenant had done a very rash thing. He had begun a lawsuit with a neighbouring squire who, he alleged, had dug up part of his land for a quarry, and the neighbouring squire had defended himself and won. And people said that although Tiberius remained in his stable, and was already being spoken of in connection with the Derby, Mr Davenant scarcely had the hay with which to feed him.

  Mr Davenant lived at Scroop Hall, near the village of Carlton Scroop, about sixteen miles from Lincoln, and somehow this increased the air of melancholy that hung over him. It was a big, old, rambling house, stoutly built and with comfortable rooms, but one of the wings was shut up, with the furniture hidden under blankets and brown paper. One or two of the guidebook compilers had passed that way, and said civil things, but somehow the public had never followed them: the place was too grim and too remote, too Gothick people said, who had read Mrs Radcliffe’s romances. There was a pretty garden leading onto a picturesque wood, but the wind off the wolds blew the trees and the shrubberies into fantastic shapes and the entrance to the wood was guarded by a gamekeeper’s gibbet, and the ladies did not like it. It had once or twice been suggested to Mr Davenant that the guests who walked about his grounds would have benefited from a bank of fir trees as cover, and the absence of half a dozen stoats’ hindquarters and a badger’s brush staring at them from the gamekeeper’s rail and a pool of blood beneath it, but Mr Davenant had shaken his head. He liked the great wild garden with the wind careening over the grass, and the stinking gibbet, just as he liked sitting in the family pew, and the wolds where he coursed his dogs, on the grounds that they had always been there, an immovable
rock to set against the shifting sands on which so much of his life seemed to founder. This was the history of Mr Davenant, Scroop Hall and Tiberius.

  *

  If Mr Davenant was rated odd and melancholy, he was not without allies. He had a particular friend called Glenister – owner of some of the fields that backed onto his wood – who had stuck with him during the business of the lawsuit. Mr Glenister was a bachelor and wealthy enough to employ a bailiff, so his time was his own and much of it was spent at Scroop. Just now he and Mr Davenant were standing on a little point of raised land – the only point of raised land for several miles around – set to the north of the house and commanding the road into the village. It was a dull, wet day in the later part of February, with no sound except the noise of the hedgerows dripping water and the scrape of boots on the turf, and yet full of movement. A flock of black birds was in sharp flight eastward, sheering away over the ploughed fields and the ancestral turf. Beneath them, a small carriage moved rapidly into view along the road.

  ‘Do you know who is in that gig?’ Mr Davenant suddenly demanded.

  ‘I can’t say that I do.’

  ‘Two attorneys from Sleaford. I had word of their coming. It is very possible there will be an execution in the house.’

  ‘Gracious!’ Mr Glenister whistled through his teeth and manoeuvred his boot at a clod of earth with sufficient force to send it rolling down the slope. ‘I did not know things were so bad.’

  ‘They are bad – very. There is a governess coming this afternoon – to see to Evie – my sister, Mrs Cantrip, advised it – and it’s likely I shan’t be able to pay her salary.’