Derby Day (40 page)

‘A terrible business,’ he says suddenly, out of his nest of papers. ‘I take it there’s no doubt that the poor gentleman … did away with himself?’

‘Every doubt,’ Mr Glenister tells him, who privately has none, but is not prepared to allow this point, ‘with a bank as steep as that. A regiment of dragoons could have tumbled down there in the dark and not climbed back again.’

Mr Silas has his own ideas about the river bank, which not even his respect for Mr Glenister can subdue. ‘And then that Mr Happerton. He’s a low fellow, that one, bringing a London attorney up to settle the affair when any one of us could have done service.’

‘I think it is only that gentlemen prefer to use their own men of business,’ Mr Glenister demurs.

‘In case questions are asked that can’t be answered. I’ve no doubt you’re right, sir,’ Mr Silas says. ‘I suppose there’s no doubt about the bill of sale?’

‘None. It was all laid out in the usual way, I believe. Mr Statham’ – Mr Statham sits in the House for the county – ‘was one of the witnesses.’

‘A nasty Liberal, that never should have been set over us … Well, I have done what you asked, sir, and here is the result, sad as it is. But perhaps you would like to see a schedule?’

Sometimes the ghost horse of the
Gesta
carries a warrior in black armour. At other times he is riderless. Some antiquaries have identified this figure with the Norse god Tyr. Others think it a fanciful tribute to Offa, the Mercian king.

‘No indeed,’ Mr Glenister says. ‘I should like to hear anything you have to tell me.’ There is a fire bursting up in the grate for all it is May, whose red coals would do for the ghost horse’s eyes. Mr Silas moves his hands out in front of him like a pair of pincers, looks for a moment as if he will seize up the ink-bottle on Mr Glenister’s desk, but in the end merely presses the tips of his fingers together. He is quite in his element again.

‘Well, sir. There was a great deal of debt. But you know that. None of it considerable in itself, perhaps, but a terrible amount when put together. There was money owing to the lawyers. Half a dozen tradesmen in Lincoln and elsewhere too. Now, in the normal course of things a shopkeeper that knows his man and has a bill will keep that bill going – take his interest, have it renewed, that kind of thing. And country gentlemen’s the best kind to have the paper of, sir. There may not be ready money, but there’s property. Two acres with a dozen cows in it’s worth far more to a man with a bill than a grand pianner or a wardrobe of Dresden silk. But that London attorney of Happerton’s, he went around buying up debt. And he did it a-purpose. Times he’d pay pretty near all that was owed on a bill – 80 or 90 per cent – just to get his hands on the paper. There was a bill owing to Edric, the Lincoln corn chandler, which Edric, to give him the credit, didn’t want to give up, out of respect to Mr Davenant whose father helped set up his father in his shop, which he paid face value for, and that’s not natural, for there’s no profit in it.’

‘You are saying that Mr Happerton deliberately set out to ruin my friend Mr Davenant?’

‘I don’t say that, sir. Bill-broking’s a free trade. Any man can set up in it if he wants and pay what he likes for such paper as comes his way. Who’s to say what’s the value of a thing? If we all knew that we’d be as rich as Dives. What I’m saying is that Mr Happerton went to a deal of trouble to get his hands on Mr Davenant’s property, which he did by bringing all the debt together, so there was only one creditor. And then …’

‘And then what?’

Mr Glenister is still thinking of the
Gesta
, in which the ghost horse with the pack of hounds yammering at its tail has been replaced by Tiberius, with the figure of Major Hubbins clinging to his back. He will go and see Tiberius at the Derby, he decides, in the hope that it was something his friend would have wanted. He wonders what extremity of passion it was that inspired Mr Davenant to attack the horse in its stall. But then there is no knowing what a person may do when afflicted by circumstance. There is a man whom Mr Glenister once knew – he is in the Hanwell asylum now – who, when a young lady wrote to him breaking off their engagement, severed his own finger at the knuckle and sent it back to her in a bloody envelope by way of reply. No, there is no knowing what a person may do.

‘Well, when a man’s in debt and signing his name to paper all the time there comes a day when he don’t know what he’s signing. Or when what’s signed isn’t his, if you take my meaning.’

‘You mean that some of the paper wasn’t Davenant’s, but it had his name on it?’

‘Who’s to say, sir? But if a man’s signed twenty bills, he may not jib at the twenty-first. There’s nothing more lowering than a mound of paper. Now, take a look at this. I got it – well, I’d best not say how I came by it – but you’ll see the promise is to Lovegrove, that saddler, which between ourselves is not an honest man. Did Mr Davenant have dealings with Lovegrove? May very well have done. Who’s to say? But here’s his name on Lovegrove’s bill.’

‘But surely all Mr Davenant’s bills were bought up by Mr Happerton?’

‘Well then this one was overlooked. Put to one side and forgot. You’d be surprised how often that happens. Why, I knew a house once that was about to be sold – new owner had his cows already grazing on the meadow, and measuring up the sash window that he wanted took out – when they found the place was entailed and couldn’t be sold at all.’

‘I should give a great deal,’ Mr Glenister says, ‘to have that bill.’

‘I can’t let you have it, sir. Indeed I can’t. It should be in our safe, that’s where it should be.’

The mist is receding now, and there are rooks out on the grass. Again, a part of Mr Glenister’s mind is wondering what plans Mr Happerton has for Evie and Miss Ellington. He will do what he ought, he thinks, for this is what he has always done.

‘By the way,’ he says, ‘there is sad news of Lady Mary Desmond.’

‘I am sorry to hear that, sir. Truly. What is the matter with her ladyship?’

‘Well – it is all very delicate. I fear she has quarrelled with the Reverend Toms at St Julian’s. A rather high establishment, I should say.’

‘As high as they come, sir,’ Mr Silas agrees. ‘Why they’d lower down a stuffed dove on Whit Sunday if they could get away with it. It’s not a place I ever visit, but they do say that you can scarce see the altar for smoke.’

‘Exactly. And Lady Mary, as you doubtless remember, was raised a Quaker. Of course it is early days, but I have heard that she was speaking very favourably of your congregation.’

‘Was she, sir? Well, we shall be very glad to welcome her. And the old Earl, too, if he’s a mind.’

A moment later and the saddler’s bill is in Mr Glenister’s hand. Again, he thinks of his father. The Canon of Christchurch would have disdained these subterfuges. But then he did not live in such an age as this, Glenister thinks. We must adapt ourselves to the world we inhabit, or we are lost. The signature on the bill is like Mr Davenant’s, but in some way curiously unlike it.

‘Now look at this,’ he says, drawing out of his desk the sheet of paper that Miss Ellington retrieved from Mr Davenant’study. For some reason the memory of Mr Davenant’s face staring up from the rail is very vivid to him: white, sightless and curiously indistinct – as unfathomable, Mr Glenister thinks, as the signature on the bill.

‘What’s that then?’ Mr Silas asks. He looks thoroughly animated, even more so than at the prospect of Lady Mary Desmond visiting his red-brick chapel and sitting next to the pink-cheeked tradesmen’s wives in their Sunday bonnets.

‘An attempt at Mr Davenant’s signature, I should say,’ Mr Glenister tells him. He puts the saddler’s bill face down on the desk. ‘Let us see if any of them tally.’

‘The third, maybe,’ Mr Silas says. He is breathing heavily, like Tiberius, or perhaps the ghost-horse as it gallops the night sky.

‘The fourth, I should say,’ Mr Glenister corrects him. ‘Look how the line drops down under the “D” in “Davenant”.’

And Mr Silas looks at him in admiration.

*

Not more than a hundred miles away Captain Raff wakes up in an attic bedroom looking out over a series of low, grimy rooftops. The dome of St Paul’s looms over the skyline. The sun shines uncomfortably through the open window. There are no sheets on the bed and the mattress is yellow with age – and other things – but Captain Raff is more concerned by the absence of the water jug which has vanished mysteriously during the night. He suspects that the landlord of the premises, to whom he is beholden, has taken it in spite. For a moment he stares around the room in search of it, looks at the bare floorboards and the solitary chair that supports his clothes, but there is no sign. Of all things in the world, aside from Baldino’s victory in the great race, the receipt of his £300 and his revenge on Mr Happerton, Captain Raff thinks that he desires a glass of water the most. A mouse runs over the boards towards the wainscoting and he watches it slide itself, with furious motions of its paws, into an aperture that the naked eye would not have known was there. The thought strikes him that he, too, is a species of mouse and this is his hole.

For a week or more, Captain Raff has been lying low. He has lain low in Soho, and he has lain low in Fulham. Just now he is lying low in Clerkenwell. The state of Captain Raff’s linen and his personal appearance is a testimony to this concealment. There is a fragment of mirror balanced upright on the chest of drawers which is the room’s only other ornament and while he dresses Captain Raff stares into it. As he stands twisting his greasy black neck-tie in his fingers there is a commotion on the staircase beyond the door and an old woman in a black dress whose lower fringes are quite encrusted with dirt, as if she were a kind of market garden, puts her head in the door and says, with a dreadful mock-solicitude:

‘I suppose you’ll be wanting your breakfust, Capting?’

‘Breakfast? Of course I shall be wanting breakfast,’ says Captain Raff, whose haughty tone is quite wonderful to hear. ‘What on earth is the time, anyhow?’

‘It’s jest gorn about half past eleven.’

Try as he may, Captain Raff cannot account for the last fourteen hours. He knows that some of them have been spent in the sheetless bed with its views of the grimy rooftops, but of at least half that time there is no trace. As he pulls on his boots, which are even dirtier than ever and are missing a heel, a thought strikes him.

‘Has anyone – has anyone called for me?’

For on the previous afternoon, growing tired of his solitude and wanting fresh information about the race, Captain Raff had sent a message to Mr Delaney.

‘No one’s called. If they had, I’d have sent them up. This ain’t Buckingham Pallis, where folks sits about at levvys.’

‘Wait there – wait I say,’ Captain Raff shouts out, but the old woman is already halfway back down the stairs. There is a purse in the captain’s pocket which, unearthed and shaken out onto the mattress, produces a groat, two silver threepenny pieces, a farthing, a piece of sealing wax and the ticket which will either settle his debts or send him to perdition. As he stares at these miscellaneous items a scheme springs into his mind that will allow him to eat the breakfast and avoid paying for it. But all this is suddenly cast aside – blown away – quite banished from his head – by the realisation that once he has paid his bill in Clerkenwell, there will be no money to take him to Epsom. ‘Hang it all,’ Captain Raff says to himself, with an attempt at jauntiness, ‘fellows have got to the Derby before without an omnibus to take ’em, and there’s a week to make the trip.’ But somehow the fight has gone out of him and the legs that go tottering down the staircase to a back-kitchen where what smells very like a haddock is being broiled up are surmounted by a face that anyone who saw might have thought to have resembled that of one of the condemned men, who steps up to the block at Snow Hill, where Mr Ketch, or his successor, can supervise his passing from this world to the next.

XXIII

Stratagems of Captain McTurk

We are not, heaven knows, an advocate of female suffrage, but there is one sphere in which feminine influence should be paramount: we refer, of course, to the domestic. If a newly married young lady cannot command her establishment, choose her callers and entertain the guests of her own desiring, then what, it may be asked, can she command?

A New Etiquette: Mrs Carmody’s Book of Genteel Behaviour
(1861)

IN BELGRAVE SQUARE Mrs Happerton was entertaining a visitor. He was a rather unusual visitor for Belgrave Square and indeed he had almost been repulsed by the butler and brought back only at Mrs Rebecca’s urgent insistence. But still, there he was in old Mr Gresham’s drawing room cracking his knuckles as the parlourmaid brought him his tea, looking eagerly about him, and by no means discountenanced by the ambiguity of his reception. This gentleman was Mr Dennison, whom the political world esteems so much but whom the old butler, knowing nothing of the way in which aspiring Treasury lords are brought to their electors, had very nearly cast out into the street.

Mr Dennison was a short, sallow man of perhaps fifty-two or fifty-three with very black hair cut close on the top of his head who worked as an attorney in the Borough. This, however, was not his chief distinction. His singularity lay in the fact that he was the Conservative Party’s leading source of intelligence, influence and manipulation in those parts of the capital where Conservative candidates – successful Conservative candidates, that is – are not generally to be found. Modest in his demeanour, frowned on in polite drawing rooms for that irrepressible habit of knuckle-cracking, Mr Dennison was nonetheless a titan in his way. Had he not taken Mr Carstairs – a man whose candidature had previously been despaired of – to within thirty votes of victory at the last election? And had he not unleashed such a volley of insinuation against the Liberal candidate in Limehouse that this gentleman had absolutely retired from the fray? People said of Mr Dennison, if they wanted to praise him, that he was not perhaps a nice-looking man but that he knew his business.