Derby Day (7 page)

‘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 all 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.

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.’

‘It is all on account of that horse, I suppose?’

Mr Davenant passed his hand over his face to remove some of the water that had dripped there from the brim of his hat. ‘That horse. That law business. A dozen things,’ he said bitterly. They had begun to walk down from the knoll to a pathway that led to the gravel drive which abutted the front of the house. ‘As for the horse, there wasn’t a man in the county wouldn’t have counselled me to buy him. Curbishley’ – Curbishley was the sporting gentleman Mr Davenant employed – ‘said the same. And then he went at that fence as if he meant to eat it and destroyed himself. It is very hard.’

‘It is very hard – certainly,’ said Mr Glenister, who had two thousand a year from his estate and never spent the half of it.

‘And then there was that lawsuit. I don’t think a man was ever more infernally used. Everyone knew that Scratchby was taking the sand. Why, his counsel admitted as much himself. And here am I to pick up the bill.’

By this stage they had reached the front of the house where the gravel drive curved around a patch of grass in the midst of which a disreputable caryatid balanced above a stone fountain. Mr Glenister looked up at the eaves and the distant chimneys, black and smoking beneath the lowering sky, and felt that they oppressed him. He felt, too, that there was an almost piteous tone in his friend’s voice that he had not heard before. In the distance they could hear the noise of the gig beginning to crunch up the gravel at the further end of the drive.

‘They have made good time, I think.’

‘It’s that Macadamed road I subscribed twenty guineas to,’ Mr Davenant said. ‘I tell you what, Glenister, I should have kept my money – and the potholes, too – and let them break their necks in a ditch.’

‘Very gratifying to you, no doubt, but it don’t stop an execution. Well, here they are – you had better talk to them.’

‘I suppose I better had … Damnation! It is that fellow Silas.’

‘He does not look so very terrible to me. What is the matter with him?’

What Mr Davenant said in reply was drowned out by the noise of the gig grinding up the stones of the driveway as it came to rest a yard or so from where they stood. Certainly Mr Silas, the Sleaford attorney, did not look so very terrible as, taking care of his coat, trousers, bag and feet, he climbed out of his equipage. He was a small, neat, demure little man, whose hat sat very solemnly on his head and whose spectacles oddly diminished the size of the eyes behind them, so that they looked like pebbles lying very far away on the beach. There was a clerk with him to deal with the driver, who now rattled off in the direction of the stables, and certain other cases and account books that were unpacked from the gig, and it would have been apparent to the smallest child from the look that Mr Silas gave him that he loved the clerk for the deference he showed.