Derby Day (18 page)

‘Well – perhaps not. The important thing, I think, is that he should be kept content and not over-exert himself. There’s port here if you would like it.’

‘I never drink port wine in the evening,’ said the Honourable Major Stebbings. But calling on his mother on the following afternoon, and seated in her drawing room, which was full of the gayest ornaments and decorations, out of which Lady Stebbings’ worn old face peered incongruously, he conceded that he might have done Mr Happerton an injustice. ‘I daresay he is not very gentlemanlike, and there are those dreadful pins he wears, and I gather he is making a fool of himself over some horse, but, really, I think my cousin could have done worse.’

‘And how is my brother-in-law?’ Lady Stebbings wondered.

‘He is not very well, I daresay. But then, he is rather old.’

‘Oh, horribly old,’ said Lady Stebbings, who considered herself a blooming girl still. ‘And how is my niece Rebecca? Does marriage suit her?’

‘I thought her deuced cross,’ the Honourable Major Stebbings said.

‘I’ve no patience with those Greshams,’ Lady Stebbings said, and went back to looking at her milliners’ samples.

‘Your cousin seems a very well-informed man,’ said Mr Happerton to his wife, after the Honourable Major Stebbings had taken his leave and they sat together in the empty drawing room, with the candles burning low.

‘Those military men always give themselves airs.’

Mr Happerton stared at his wife. She was sitting in an armchair, with her head set back against the antimacassar, as young ladies are advised to sit in etiquette books, eating grapes from a bowl on her lap, but with a decorum and in a silence that would have had the compilers of the etiquette books nodding in approval, and she looked sandier-haired and greener-eyed than ever. And again Mr Happerton wondered at her. He had tried respectful attentiveness, and this had failed. He had tried brusque jocularity, and thought that this had failed too. He did not quite know how to induce his wife to respond to him, but he knew that her glacial consumption of the grapes rather scared him. But Mr Happerton prided himself on his thick skin, so he told himself that for once he would be matter-of-fact, let the consequences be what they might. Waiting until all the grapes had been eaten up, he said:

‘Now look here, Becca. There is something I want to tell you. You know that I have bought this horse, Tiberius.’

‘Certainly I know it.’ She was looking at him stealthily, with her great green eyes flashing.

‘It will wear your colours when it runs.’ Privately Mr Happerton wondered what these colours might look like – he had never seen a horse run in sea-green and sandy red. ‘Is that not something?’

The look in her eye said that it was something. ‘Where is the horse?’

‘In Lincolnshire. The man I bought it from still has it. It may be convenient to keep it there. I don’t just know the best thing to do at the moment.’

‘Perhaps Captain Raff can advise you.’

‘Captain Raff could not advise me where to eat my dinner,’ Mr Happerton pronounced in his briskest manner. ‘Let’s not have any shilly-shallying about this. I am engaged on a little scheme that may make our fortunes.’

‘If you want more money from Papa you had better say so, and I shall ask him.’

‘Well then – ask.’

He was surprised at how easily the business was conducted. He reached out to draw her to him, and she snatched his hand away and grasped it between her fingers so violently that he whistled.

‘Gracious, Beck, you’ll break a fellow’s wrist if you go on like that.’

‘Shall I? I wonder.’

Later, as he lay in bed, a foot or two from the sea-green eyes, now closed, and the sandy hair, now done up under a nightcap, he thought about the other part of his scheme. It was, as Captain Raff had deposed, extremely risky. There was every chance that it would not work. But then, he thought, even if it did not work, he could not see how the trail should be traced back to him. And the capital it might realise would transform his modest resources into a cataract of money. It was about midnight now, and Mrs Rebecca slept soundly on, but Mr Happerton was not in the least tired, and so he lay awake, listening to the sound of her breathing, and musing on his opportunities, on Scroop Hall and its great wild garden, and the black horse in its stable, as the wind blew over the Belgravia rooftops and the sound of the policeman’s tread echoed in the street below.

Shepherd’s Inn and elsewhere

Bred up, like a bailiff or a shabby attorney, about the purlieus of the Inns of Court, Shepherd’s Inn is always to be found in the close neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and the Temple. Somewhere among the black gables and smutty chimney-stacks of Wych Street, Holywell Street, Chancery Lane, the quadrangle lies, hidden from the outer world …

W. M. Thackeray,
The History of Pendennis
(1850)

SHEPHERD’S INN IS generally owned to be rather an obscure locality. Chancery Lane is only two minutes distant, and the shops and the taverns of Oldcastle Street hard by, but somehow the Inn has detached itself from the bustle of their traffic and the old porter who sits in a chair before the lodge gate can sleep for hours at a time without anyone disturbing him. Fifty years ago the Inn was full of Chancery lawyers and black-coated attorneys’ clerks, but the lawyers have all gone now and the place is given over to black-lead companies and commission agents and persons so enigmatic as not to advertise their existence, and the brass plates on the doors change hands at three-month intervals. Mr Crutwell, the celebrated divorce lawyer, has chambers here, only he never visits, and Mr Abrahams, who lends money to the nobility and whose wife has a ‘drawing room’ in Portland Street, keeps an office somewhere nearby. But the private residents are all rather retiring: middle-aged gentlemen in threadbare coats who stalk in and out of the arch as if they really had somewhere to go; young men in shirtsleeves who never seem to have any work but are always about the place smoking cigars and chaffing the porter. Very occasionally a carriage or a gig stops at the gate and a visitor walks over the gravel paths, past the statue of the shepherd’s boy behind its iron palings, to search for someone who will most likely have moved out six months before, but this is still a great event in the life of the Inn, where the pattern of the days is altogether less conspicuous.

It was here in Shepherd’s Inn, on the top floor of a house set at right angle to the lodge gate, that Mr Pardew and the lady who called herself his wife had come to rest. The inhabitants of these dwelling places do not generally take much notice of each other, but anyone who took an interest in Number 3 would have seen that its latest set of tenants seldom left their chamber, that the gentleman, in particular, only came out very late at night or very early in the morning, that the blinds in the windows were usually pulled down, and that scarcely anybody, least of all the postman, came to call. For his own part, Mr Pardew thought that he had a very comfortable lodging, where nobody cared who he was or what he was about and where he could probably have set up as a resurrection man, robbing corpses out of the graveyard at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, without anyone taking the slightest notice.

It was about three o’clock on a spring afternoon – a raw afternoon with rain desultorily falling – and Mr Pardew, with a mackintosh drawn up to his chin and a scarf wound very tightly around the lower part of his face – was coming back through the archway. In one hand he held his stick, and in the other a provisions basket, and the porter who sat, not in his chair, but behind the smeary glass of the lodge-gate window, noticed that as he reached the arch he turned very deliberately on his heel and looked back the way he had come. A fat woman dressed in black with a put-upon expression on her face came waddling towards him over the stone flags and he stood aside to let her pass by before making his way to the open door of Number 3 and proceeding stealthily up to the third floor. There was a faint smell of meat roasting and a woman’s voice softly singing, and Mr Pardew stood on the mat for a moment considering them before producing a latchkey, twisting it in the lock and stepping inside. Here the suspicion that had occurred to him during the walk from the lodge was confirmed by the sight of a tray containing a teapot, a milkjug and a second, incriminating cup.

‘Why have you had that person here?’ he demanded, very sharply, as Jemima came into the room to greet him.

‘It is only my sister, Richard. I don’t suppose you would wish me to turn her away.’

‘I should have turned her away, and all the rest of that d——d family of hers, too.’ Mr Pardew’s expression as he said this was very striking. ‘What does she want?’

‘It is a pity a woman can’t see her own flesh and blood after two years away from them.’

‘A pity! It is a pity you ever wrote to her at all. I shan’t have her here. She will –’ Mr Pardew very nearly said ‘betray us all’ but stopped himself. In fact the possibility of someone betraying him was not one he thought at all likely. He had been here a fortnight now, living very inconspicuously, revisiting none of his old haunts, and he fancied that he was no danger. To be sure, there had been an occasional fright. He had been smoking a cigar once in a shilling divan when a man had addressed him by name, but he had kept his head, produced a card that said his name was Abernethy, received an apology and gone on with his cigar. Another time a policeman had looked very hard at him as he walked down Cursitor Street, but Mr Pardew had assured himself that policemen sometimes do look very hard at the most innocent passers-by and continued on his way. Apart from this, in his wanderings around London, he had gone unmolested.

‘I shan’t ask her again, if you wish it,’ Jemima said, very meekly, and Mr Pardew looked at her fresh complexion and the neat little apron she had round her waist and was mollified. A top-floor set in Shepherd’s Inn is not perhaps the easiest lodging to render cheerful, but somehow Jemima had made it so. There was a bright little screen in the far corner and a picture or two fixed to the walls along with the smell of the roasting meat.

‘You will never guess,’ he said, pulling off his gloves and talking in a more companionable manner, ‘who I saw today?’

‘Who was it?’ Jemima wondered, half in and half out of the kitchen.

‘Well – in point of fact I walked round to see Lord Fairhurst at his club.’ In fact, Mr Pardew had gone nowhere near Lord Fairhurst or his club, but he was determined to make up for his bad temper.

‘Gracious,’ said Jemima, who, as Mr Pardew knew, loved talk of this kind. ‘How was his lordship?’

‘Well – I have seen him better. A touch of the gout, I should say.’ No one who saw Mr Pardew’s face could have doubted that he had sat in Lord Fairhurst’s club and taken tea with him. ‘They say that his uncle, who owns half of Hampshire, made him his heir on condition he gave up drinking port. But all that was a long time ago.’

‘There was a gentleman called while you were out,’ Jemima now said.

‘What sort of a gentleman?’

‘Well – he said that you would know him, and why he called.’

Mr Pardew set down the cup of tea that had just been brought to him – very fragrant tea it was, in the most delicate little cup – and walked over to the window, whose blind for once was raised. Down below in the courtyard a man in a shabby coat with his hands plunged deep into his pocket was walking nervously back and forth, casting sharp, uneasy glances at the archway and the porter’s lodge.

‘Is that the man?’

‘Yes – that is him.’

Mr Pardew continued to stare for a moment or so, drank some more of his tea – it seemed less fragrant to him now – and then went yet more stealthily back down the staircase. Captain Raff met him just beyond the outer door.

‘Why, Pardew, there you are. How I missed you coming back to your rooms I can’t imagine.’

‘And yet somehow you did,’ Mr Pardew said. ‘Here, you’d better come upstairs.’

The sitting room was empty on their arrival, a fact that Captain Raff seemed greatly to regret. Plucked from the courtyard, and safe behind a locked door, he seemed less ill at ease.

‘Ain’t your wife going to join us, Pardew? Deuced pretty woman, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

Mr Pardew looked as if would have liked to kick Captain Raff back down the stairs whence he had come. Instead he picked up the stick, which he had put down when first returning, and weighed it in his hand.

‘Perhaps I do mind your saying so.’ Mr Pardew thoroughly despised Captain Raff. ‘But never mind. I take it you’ve brought the twenty pounds.’

‘Twenty! You’ve had fifty already.’

‘Fifty. Seventy. A hundred. These things don’t come cheap, Raff, as well you know.’

‘I daresay they don’t,’ Captain Raff conceded. He had seen the stick now – it was an inch thick, at least, around the middle – and was becoming uneasy again. ‘But, well – twenty pounds, you know.’

‘You’ll make fifty times that if it all comes off.’

‘Ah, but that’s the question, ain’t it?’ said Captain Raff, who seemed delightfully unaware of how much Mr Pardew disliked him. ‘When will it come off, eh?’

‘When will it come off? I’ll put an advertisement in the
Gazette
if you like. Should that suit?’