Derby Day

by D. J. Taylor

  Remembering what her papa had said, Miss Ellington resolved that she should make a study, and the things she should make a study of would be their guests, Mr Happerton and Captain Raff. Miss Ellington wondered a little at the propriety of this, but then remembered that we were all of us subject to the observation of those we move among, and were not, she thought, much wounded by it. Besides, what was she to Mr Happerton and Captain Raff, who were London visitors – as different to the people in Lincolnshire as a dish of peas was from one of the mangel-wurzels that lay in Mr Davenant’s fields – who were concerned only with Tiberius, and when they quitted Scroop, which Mrs Castell said she believed they would do next week, would bear not the faintest recollection of us back to the metropolis with them?

  Of the two, she preferred Captain Raff the less. Mr Glenister, who was amused by him, she thought, said he was an ‘old buck’, an expression Miss Ellington had never heard before. Why did she not like Captain Raff? Because he fidgeted over his dinner, and swallowed his wine in great gulps, and gave the maids very knowing looks (indeed Hester said she had boxed his ears for some familiarity, and certainly there was a great red weal on the side of Captain Raff’s face). To be sure he was very civil to her, raised his hat – a very dirty hat that any other gentleman would have had cleaned – when they met about the place, called her ‘Miss Ellington’ and so forth, but she did not believe the civility well-meant.

  There was a particular conversation that she had with Captain Raff once when they met by chance at the side gate of the house.

  ‘Why, Miss Ellington, you are looking uncommon fresh today. You will think I am waiting here on purpose, I daresay.’

  ‘I think nothing of the kind, sir.’

  ‘A doosid warm day I call this.’ (In fact there was a great wind blowing in from across the wold.) ‘What do you say to a turn about the garden?’

  ‘It is very cold, Captain Raff, and I am on my way to the schoolroom.’

  ‘Ah, I daresay you think I’m a sad sort of man, Miss Ellington.’

  ‘I think nothing of the kind, sir.’

  At which Captain Raff gave an extraordinary wink, like Mr Punch at the seaside immediately before the stick is brought down upon his head, and skipped off along the path in his dirty little boots, so that she almost wished she had a stick herself with which she might belabour him.

  Mr Happerton, meanwhile, had won what Miss Ellington’s papa, talking of his Oxford days, would have called ‘golden opinions’. He quite melted Mrs Castell’s heart by presenting her with a box of preserved fruits, and when he sat in the drawing room reading the newspaper Hester and Dora listened out for his bell as if the Prince of Wales himself were quartered there. His letters were brought in ever so humbly on a salver, and there was a special bottle of port in the cellar which he was most insistently urged to try of an evening. For herself, Miss Ellington thought Mr Happerton a loud, cheerful kind of a man, very appreciative of all that was done for him, very civil to those around him, and yet, she thought, rather calculating. He had a trick of reckoning them up which was not wholly agreeable, like a shopkeeper pricing up a turtle for his window: a glance at Mrs Castell; a glance at Evie; a glance at Hester as she balanced the dinner plates on her arm. He had a way of looking at things as if they were not to his taste and he wished to alter them: a glance at the stable yard and the midden that lies beyond it; a glance at the apple trees in the orchard by the kitchen garden; a glance at Mr Davenant’s ancestors in their frames.

  Miss Ellington’s papa would have said that he was not a gentleman, and yet there was, she thought, no general agreement as to of what gentlemanliness consists, and a man might drop his aitches and sit altogether woodenly at the dinner table with his mouth open and still be very highly regarded.

  Every day or so the post brought a letter to Mr Happerton which was thought to be from his wife, which he read very attentively and then made a spill of it for his cigar or threw it straightaway into the fireplace, where sometimes it was not wholly extinguished by the flame. At these moments Miss Ellington sometimes had a great urge to gather up the fragments and examine them. He was always striding about the place, pacing the garden, putting his nose into the bins that were kept for the pigs, or strolling over to the church to talk to the sexton as he stood digging, or walking into the village on some private errand that was never revealed.

  ‘Why is it’, Miss Ellington asked once of Mr Glenister, as they sat in the schoolroom, where he had come to bring Evie a bag of sugarplums that he had bought in Lincoln, ‘that Mr Happerton should wish to make copies of Mr Davenant’s signature?’

  ‘Is that what he has been doing?’ Mr Glenister demanded, with a sharpness of tone she had not previously noticed in him.

  So she explained about her coming upon him in the study, his being called away, the piece of paper that lay on the desk, &c.

  ‘Well, he is a sly one,’ Mr Glenister remarked, laughing as he did so, but not, as Miss Ellington thought, without some dissimulation, and she laughed too, though not quite knowing why she did so.

  And then came a very strange and peculiar incident, which Miss Ellington thought would exercise them far more than whether they liked Mr Happerton and if he sat in the study copying Mr Davenant’s signature.

  *

  The noises came from outside in the stable yard: a high-pitched cry of anguish; the slam of a door; feet moving rapidly over stone. Then came other voices and other doors banging in their wake. There was someone coming rapidly up the main staircase, and Mr Happerton, who had kept at his toilet, and was now calmly dipping his razor carefully into his shaving-water, was not at all surprised when the feet stopped before his bedroom door, the door was thrown open and Captain Raff, his coat even more dishevelled and his face turned scarlet from the unwonted exercise, fairly flung himself onto the carpet at his feet.

  Though he knew that nothing short of an earthquake would have induced Captain Raff to invade his sleeping quarters at ten past eight in the morning, Mr Happerton’s first response was that of anger.

  ‘What the devil do you mean, Raff, bursting in here like a dervish? What on earth is the matter?’

  ‘Cut!’ Captain Raff pulled himself up from the carpet, where he had come to rest almost on his knees, and repeated the word two or three times. ‘Cut!’

  ‘Cut? What is cut? I very nearly cut myself with this razor when you came crashing in. What do you mean?’

  ‘The horse,’ Captain Raff gasped, like a fish hauled out onto the towpath. ‘Cut. Stabbed. Slashed.’

  And then Mr Happerton put down his razor, threw on his jacket, and with the lather from his shaving preparation still clinging to his jaw ran out of his room, down the staircase and through the back parts of the house to the stable yard, with Captain Raff – now very much out of breath and quite wild-eyed – following behind him.

  In the stables all was confusion. The rail that stood before Tiberius’s stall was half thrown down and the horse stood quivering behind it with his hoofs stamping nervously on the straw. A lamp had been turned over and was leaking oil onto the floor. Jem the stable boy stood half-in and half-out of the stall, not liking to approach any nearer, such was the horse’s agitation, but making placatory gestures with his hand.

  ‘Here, maister,’ Jem shouted, giving Mr Happerton a nod. ‘I’s’ll not come close if I were you. There ain’t no knowing what he might do. Look, he have kicked half his stall away already. Hand us that blanket, will ye, that’s on the straw there.’

  Mr Happerton’s gaze took in the quivering horse, the spilled oil and the raised arm all in a moment. He was horribly afraid – afraid of the blood on the horse’s flank, and the terror in his eyes, but a part of him felt also an inexpressible relief. Whatever might have happened, Tiberius was at any rate not dead. ‘What on earth has been going on? What is the matter with Tiberius?’

  Jem had begun gingerly to pat the horse’s flank with the blanket-end, which Tiberius suffered him to do.

  ‘Someone hav
e broke in through the side door in the night – see there how the bolt is forced and the straw all thrown about. Whoever it was has cut Tiberius on the flank, and – here again – on the foreleg. It’s my belief it were done lately, too, for when I came in here ten minutes since I heered a noise of broke glass very like a lamp being turned over.’

  All this time Captain Raff had been edging forward at Mr Happerton’s side, like a terrier anxious to get at a rat. ‘The confounded villain,’ he now yelled. ‘We must search the estate, find him and have him hanged.’

  ‘You’re the bravest fellow that ever there was, Raff, and I always said so,’ Mr Happerton remarked, almost wearily, and then, addressing himself to Jem Claypole: ‘He seems quieter now. See if you can get that bridle around his neck. There, old fellow’ – this to Tiberius – ‘I shan’t hurt you, even if some other scoundrel has.’

  Captain Raff looked as if he would like to make another rush, but Mr Happerton pushed him away, went over to the horse, and, taking great care – for the animal reared up at his approach – made a close inspection of his injuries, which were as Jem had described them. There was a great gash on the horse’s flank, from which blood oozed forth, and another, lesser, mark somewhere above his forehock.

  ‘Very well,’ Mr Happerton said. ‘Jem Claypole, I am obliged to you. Heaven knows what might have happened had you come a moment later. Now, you should have the property searched and send someone for the constable.’ As Mr Happerton pronounced these instructions, his eye fell on incidentals: a mouse creeping through the dirt a dozen feet away; a line of ancient horse-brasses that hung on the mouldering plaster; a splash of bright blood upon the straw. ‘As for you, Raff, you had better ride into Scroop as fast as you can and bring the vet back with you.’

  ‘I should like to take a knife to the d——d villain that did it,’ said Captain Raff stoutly. But he consented to saddle up a horse and gallop off into Scroop as he was bidden. Jem Claypole went off to execute his commissions. Mr Happerton, with another glance at Tiberius, whose nervous terror seemed somewhat to have abated, went back into the house to complete his toilet.

  *

  There is rather a gash in his flank, Mr Happerton wrote to his wife, and no one save Curbishley cares to go near him, but I think he will do. Raff is being very martial and belligerent, saying it is all a plot, and ready to fight a duel with anyone who says otherwise. If you have a moment, you might tell Mr Gaffney that all is well – or nearly well – as I know this is an affair in which he takes an interest. My regards to your father, and tell him I hope that he is comfortable, and that I shall see him before very long.

  Your affectionate husband

  G. Happerton

  *

  ‘There is some mischief about the horse,’ Mrs Rebecca said to her maid as she looked at the letter next morning in Belgrave Square.

  ‘You don’t say, ma’am,’ Nokes remarked, continuing to buff away at an area of the mahogany sideboard that did not in the least need polishing.

  ‘Mr Happerton says that someone has broken into the stables and tried to injure him with a knife!’

  ‘Indeed, ma’am,’ Nokes went on, demurely polishing, but it is a fact that half an hour later she retrieved the letter from the bureau in which her mistress had placed it. And then a dozen hours later the landlord of a public house on the northernmost side of the park could be heard advising his customers that Tiberius, that everybody thought was such a certainty, had – had his throat cut, been found dead in a ditch, had had all his limbs broke, and whatever he did, alive or dead, would certainly not be competing in the Derby.

  Mrs Rebecca, as anyone who has so far considered her character will admit, was a shrewd woman. If the importance of Tiberius to her husband and to the world in general had not previously been apparent to her, then in the next few days it became abundantly clear. A report of the incident appeared in the Morning Chronicle. Sporting gentlemen talked about it at their clubs. The Blue Riband was wild with excitement, and half a dozen of its members seriously proposed to hire a chaise and drive instantly to Scroop to hear the story from the horse’s – or rather Mr Happerton’s – mouth. Mr Gaffney, having heard the news, came straightaway to tea, was shown the letter, patted Mrs Rebecca’s hand and went away reassured. Neither was Tiberius the sole topic by which the sporting world now declared itself to be animated. It was one of those times – nobody quite knows how they come about, and can only register the fact of their coming – when the public decides to take a more than usual interest in the Turf. A sporting baronet had been found dead in his dressing room with his brains blown out and a piteous note at his side, and it had been suggested that this tragedy was the result of his owing ever so many thousands of pounds to Mr Macready, the society bookmaker. The police had raided several public houses in the Fitzrovia district and confiscated betting slips sufficient, as one newspaper put it, to paper a drawing room.

  All this, unhappily, had led to an outpouring of moral sentiment. A slum missioner, whose duty directed him each day to the rookeries of Whitechapel and Jago Court, maintained that half the population of the East End spent the greater part of their wages on gambling. A bishop inveighed against it in the House, a dozen provincial pulpits allowed his case, and Punch was very satirical, both about the proscribing clergymen and the recreation they presumed to condemn. All this Mrs Rebecca saw and wondered how she could make redound to her advantage. Meanwhile, she wrote the most dutiful letters back to Mr Happerton in Lincolnshire, said that she was very sorry to hear about the poor horse, hoped that Captain Raff was not continuing to make a fool of himself, and remained his affectionate wife, R. Happerton. All of which Mr Happerton looked at very keenly and by which he was briefly consoled.

  *

  The course at Louth is not particularly extensive. If truth be known it is not much more than a large field to which the addition of various posts and barriers has contrived a circuit perhaps half a mile in length, for the sporting gentlemen of Lincoln generally take their horses to Leicestershire or even further afield. There is a little grandstand and a couple of rails for the communality, and a paddock, and it was here that Mr Happerton and Captain Raff stood watching Mr Curbishley exercising Tiberius on the greensward.

  ‘Looks a trifle stiff,’ said Captain Raff gloomily. The spring sun was making his eyes water. ‘See how he is putting his right foreleg down. Just where that d——d villain stabbed him. The police have no idea who it was, I suppose?’

  ‘None at all.’

  ‘That fellow Abernethy who owns Pendragon is as great a scoundrel as I ever met. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he sent a man up here to do it.’

  ‘What nonsense you talk, Raff,’ said Mr Happerton, not quite as good-humouredly as he sounded, who knew Mr Abernethy to be the meekest little man in Christendom, bullied by his children and seen in the West End running errands for his wife’s mama. ‘Abernethy would have to be mad to do such a thing.’

  ‘Mad or not, he should be hanged for it,’ said Captain Raff fervently.

  The horse having now described a circle and returned to the place from which it had originally set off, Mr Happerton called up: ‘Well, Curbishley, how do you find him?’

  ‘Well enough, I think,’ Mr Curbishley said. He was a lean, strong man with the additional advantage of riding under ten stone. ‘There is no one to touch him here, I should say. Have you seen the card?’

  ‘Nothing I ever heard of in my life before. Mr Jenks’s “Calliope” is a nice little mare, I heard a fellow say. Who is he?’

  ‘Oh he has good horses enough,’ Mr Curbishley said. He sat up in the saddle, feet balanced on his stirrups, staring out across the paddock and the pale horizon beyond it. ‘But he don’t race ’em so much, you know.’

  ‘Well then, I should go at it gentle-like,’ Mr Happerton advised. ‘Don’t be afraid to pull up if, if – well, you know what I mean.’

  Mr Curbishley said he knew what he meant, brought the point of his whip up to his chin, g
ave a little smile – as a sporting man, his attitude to Mr Happerton was one of complete neutrality, and if Beelzebub had bought Tiberius he would have taken orders from him quite as happily – and began to trot once more towards the paddock’s edge.

  Mr Happerton, meanwhile, had his eye on the racecard, a little slip of paper, villainously printed. ‘“The Tin Man: Mr Flaherty. Servitor: O. Jermy Esq.” Heavens, Raff. What is the matter now?’

  ‘It is that Curbishley,’ Captain Raff complained. ‘He will pull so, you know. The beasts can’t stand it.’

  Mr Happerton found increasingly that there were certain things he could not stand, and that Captain Raff was one of them. For all the mildness of his temper – he had been mild all morning, mild in the carriage that had taken them from Scroop, very mild in the tavern where they had taken luncheon, milder still in his negotiations with the clerk of the course – he was deeply uneasy. Should the race not go according to plan, he knew that a scheme in which he had invested a great deal of time, money and ingenuity would be damaged beyond repair. It might even be doubted how he could refashion his career, should Tiberius fail him. These anxieties burned in his head quite as much as the cries of the old women selling sherbet outside the beer tent and the shouts of the Lincolnshire bookmakers.