by D. J. Taylor
‘They are looking after you, I hope?’ he said as he came into the room. He could hear Mrs Martin clattering the dishes in the kitchen, and a part of him wished he could be there with her.
‘Mrs Martin is very kind,’ Mrs Rebecca said, with a little tug of her mouth at a strand of hair that showed signs of escaping. ‘Indeed, I think I know every inch of Marylebone High Street and the contents of every shop window in it.’
‘You will not credit it perhaps,’ Captain McTurk said, ‘but I knew you when you were a child. That is – I used to call at your house, when your papa and I had business. Do you recollect it?’
‘No, I do not recollect it. Papa knew so many people.’
And Captain McTurk knew that he had made a mistake. He had tried to introduce a personal note into his dealings with Mrs Happerton and it had been thrown back at him. And, thinking this, he remembered the young Miss Gresham, whom he had thought spoiled and captious. That was the end of any sentiment, he thought.
‘Tell me about the money your father gave to Mr Happerton,’ he proposed. ‘The seven thousand pounds from the account at Gurney’s bank.’
‘The money was lent, I believe,’ Mrs Rebecca said, very coolly.
‘And what condition was your father in when he lent it, I wonder?’ Captain McTurk asked. ‘Did he know what was going into his milk?’
‘There was nothing went into his milk but arrowroot,’ Mrs Rebecca said. Captain McTurk looked at her face, but it was quite without expression. ‘Or if there was, I cannot say how it got there. I cannot answer for Mr Happerton.’
Captain McTurk thought that he had never seen anything so disagreeable as the way Mrs Happerton chewed at her hair.
‘You realise that this is very serious? Your father is very unwell. There is a man dead in Lincolnshire, and half a dozen bills forged that helped to kill him. It is very probable that you may be charged as an accessory.’
‘Everything is very serious,’ Mrs Rebecca said. ‘I am always being told that. Marriage is very serious, and yet gentlemen don’t seem to think it so. Living in a house in Belgrave Square and being driven in a carriage in the park is very serious, or so I was always led to believe, and yet it makes me laugh. So many things make me laugh. Half a dozen gentlemen ruining themselves over a horse, and Captain Raff cutting his throat because his life isn’t to his liking. I should like not to be serious. I should like to please myself. I should like to drive my own carriage, and not have anybody to wonder where I go and when I should return. I should like to live my own life, and not to be at anybody’s beck and call except my own. And I have been an accessory to nothing, unless it is to my own humiliation. Poor Papa,’ she added.
It was that ‘Poor Papa’ that convinced Captain McTurk that some game was being played with him. Until then he had listened with a sense of something very near wonder – he had never heard a woman speak like that before, and scarcely ever a man. But the mention of Mr Gresham, which Mrs Rebecca could not quite carry off as she had done the earlier part of her speech, made him suspect that she and Mr Happerton had been confederate together – the transfer of the seven thousand pounds could not have taken place without some collusion – but that Mrs Rebecca meant to throw her husband over while saving herself. In these circumstances the ‘Poor Papa’ struck him as highly duplicitous, but he was anxious above all things – Mr Happerton’s lawyers were very pressing – to secure a conviction. And so, going back to the room above the stable yard in Northumberland Avenue, he wrote Mrs Happerton a letter setting out what she might testify to in court, and what she might not, and what the consequences of these admissions, and refusals, might be. To this, a day or so later, Mrs Happerton replied.
‘What does she do with herself?’ he asked Mrs Martin again at about this time.
‘Do with herself?’ Mrs Martin repeated. ‘Why, nothing now. Nothing at all. Sits in the parlour and twists her hair. That Major Stebbings as is her cousin called again and she wouldn’t see him. There was an afternoon the other day when I thought I heard the sound of her crying to herself, so I went in to see her, thinking that she might take a morsel to eat – for she has had nothing this past week, to speak of – and she was sitting in that chair straight as a ramrod, and said to me: “Mrs Martin, ma’am, I’ll thank you to come into this room only when a bell is rung for you and not before.”’
And Captain McTurk shook his head and thought once again that he did not envy Mrs Martin her task.
There was by this time a Happerton party – not much of one, perhaps but vociferous, and consisting of a few gentlemen from the Blue Riband Club, who maintained that the whole thing was a plot contrived by Mr Happerton’s enemies in the sporting world to discredit him. There was also, it goes without saying, a movement for Mrs Rebecca, genteel, and more vociferous still, which held that she had been badly treated, coerced and browbeaten by the man in whom she had placed her trust and was as innocent as the driven snow: driven snow is always thought to be innocent, and yet it takes the dirt like anything else. All this naturally gave Mr Happerton’s trial, which began in the first week of September, an unusual piquancy. He was arraigned on two counts – the forging of Mr Davenant’s signature on bills, and the administration of poison to old Mr Gresham in pursuit of pecuniary advantage. There was no mention of Mr Pardew, or the robbery at Mr Gallentin’s shop, or indeed of Mrs Rebecca, and one or two people thought that Captain McTurk was playing a dangerous game, and that there were weaknesses in the case which Mr Carker, whom Mr Happerton’s friends had engaged on his behalf, might very well exploit.
The first two days of the trial were very dull. Serjeant Daniels, the Crown prosecutor, produced the sheet of facsimile signatures from the study at Scroop and handed it round to the jury. Mr Silas was brought to the witness stand to give his account of the despoliation of Mr Davenant’s estate. A Sleaford hay chandler testified that a bill in his name with Mr Davenant’s signature on it was a forgery. A medical man was brought in to quantify the hurt done to old Mr Gresham by the administration of the sedative powder, and a representative of Messrs Gurney to confirm the transfer of the seven thousand pounds into Mr Happerton’s account. Mr Happerton, very soberly dressed in a subfusc suit and with not an equine pin upon him, denied each calumny that was attributed to him, and Mr Carker was judged to have been very clever. He put a question or two to Mr Silas about the legal procedure for collecting a debt that entirely flummoxed him, and the little homily he pronounced on the value of sedative medicines and the possibility of honest confusion by those who administered them was thought to have tied Captain McTurk’s medical man up in knots. He interrogated Mr Glenister to such effect that an observer might have thought him entirely motivated by spite against Mr Happerton rather than affection for his dead friend. A sample of the powder which had been used to quieten Mr Gresham was brought onto the stand, and Mr Carker positively snapped his fingers and said it could have been got from anywhere, and never had a solicitous son-in-law been so unfairly stigmatised, and was shushed by the judge for his impertinence. Captain McTurk, watching from the gallery, was almost in despair.
But the arrival of Mrs Rebecca at the witness box on the third day caused a sensation. Quite whether Captain McTurk had had a hand in her costuming was uncertain, but it was noted by the reporters present that she appeared in a dress of the deepest black, as black as widows’ weeds, and that this, combined with the pallor of her face, produced a very striking impression. There had been a rumour in the newspapers that old Mr Gresham was very near death, and this created an additional sympathy for her, and the judge ordered that a chair be brought and asked: would she have a glass of water? When she spoke it was in a low voice with her head sunk down upon her breast, and her green eyes were very subdued. Serjeant Daniels was, of course, very gentle with her. She had married Mr Happerton less than a year before, had she not? And Mrs Rebecca nodded her head very meekly and said that she had. And what had been her impression of the gentleman who – Serjeant Daniels was a very polite man
and made a little bow as he said the words – won her heart?
And very timorously at first, with frequent shy glances at judge, jury and a stout woman who sat upon the public benches and was assumed to be her particular friend, but was later found to have no connection with her at all, she told the story of her husband’s pursuit of Tiberius, his descent upon Mr Davenant’s estate at Scroop to claim his prize, his desire to obtain his father-in-law’s money and the manner in which this assistance had been procured. Asked by Serjeant Daniels whether she believed that the powder given to her father – her own father, as Serjeant Daniels sternly reminded the jury – was injurious, she was observed to bite her lip, give a sad little twist to a tendril of hair that had escaped from her chignon and remark that she believed it her duty as a newly married woman to obey her husband’s instructions in all things. Did she know anything of the forged bills? Mrs Rebecca put her head on one side and said, with what appeared to be the greatest reluctance, that she did.
Naturally Mr Carker could do nothing with her. When he hinted – it was not something he could decently say – that she was determined to betray her husband because of some personal slight that had no bearing on the case, there was a cry of ‘Shame!’ from the public gallery. When he implied that she was not telling the truth, she stared at him in such a sorrowful way that even the defence barristers began to look uneasy and wonder whether Mr Carker had overreached himself. There was an attempt to prove her an accessory – ‘a vixen determined to play upon a fond parent’s partiality’ as Mr Carker rather forlornly put it – but Mr Happerton’s defence had by this time collapsed into ruins, and he was very soon after this found guilty on both counts.
*
Mr Happerton was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He is not much mourned, save by a very few cognoscenti of the Blue Riband Club. Rosa, now living in Wardour Street, Soho, and perhaps not so well situated as she might be, says he is the most odious man who ever lived.
The election for the Chelsea Districts took place in due course, and despite Mr Dennison’s best efforts was lost by Sir Charles Devonish to that hot radical Mr Cartwright, formerly the member for Stepney.
After old Mr Gresham’s death, which was attributed by his doctor to pneumonia, six months after the trial, Mrs Happerton retired to Bath, where she lived in a house on the Crescent, attended tea-parties and was fêted by the Bath ladies as the pitiable victim of gross male subterfuge. But somehow Bath and the Bath ladies did not suit her, and within a year she had removed herself to the continent, been seen in Paris, and supposed to have come to rest in Baden-Baden. Certainly a lady answering her description was seen at the tables there, spending a great deal of money, and it is said that a share prospectus issued on behalf of the Baden-Baden Peruvian Mining Company bore the name of Messrs Schickelgrubers’ bank acting as her proxy. Mrs D’Aubigny, who wrote to her once, got no reply. Mr Fop, the great dandy, dined at her hotel once on one of his European tours, but he never went there again. It is thought that Mrs Happerton – she still calls herself Mrs Happerton despite her husband’s disgrace – may be supported in her new vocations by Miss Nokes, who has certainly not been seen in the Belgrave region or at the Bag o’ Nails for many a month.
Mr Pardew was never seen again. A man answering to his appearance was arrested at a lodging house in Vienna, but when questioned was able to supply such convincing proofs of his identity and bona fides that he was released, to the infinite disgust of Captain McTurk, who found out about it a week later.
Jemima is living with her sister in Islington. It is said that this lady, to spite her, produced a Peerage and challenged her to find Lord Fairhurst’s name in it.
Major Hubbins, retiring from his profession in glory, accepted an invitation from his friend the Earl of Ilchester to supervise his stud. He lives in Hampshire, has grown stout, and is very comfortable.
There was some doubt as to what might happen to Tiberius. One legal argument held that as he had been fraudulently acquired, he did not now belong to Mr Happerton. In the end, though, he was put up for auction in a sale of Mr Happerton’s effects (otherwise inconsiderable) and sold to a sporting syndicate. His subsequent career may be followed in Ruff.
Miss Kimble, Mrs Happerton’s cousin, married the Captain Powell who always spoke to her so politely in the park – Mrs Venables lent her drawing room for the reception – and is now living, more or less happily, in Bayswater while the captain, having sold out of his regiment, looks for something more suited to his accomplishments and aptitudes.
The Honourable Major Stebbings is still much exercised by the question of army reform.
The house in Belgravia is shut up, with brown paper over the chandeliers and the old housekeeper living on board wages. Mr Happerton’s – or rather Mr Gresham’s – study is as left, with the portrait of Tiberius still staring from the wall.
Anstruther, RA’s ‘Head of an Officer’ came up for sale at Mr Fitch’s auctioneering rooms only the other day, and was knocked down for ten guineas. No one knows who bought it.
Mr Delaney gets by.
The Blue Riband Club is in a very flourishing state.
Mr Glenister went back to Lincolnshire after the trial, where it was thought that he was to be married.
*
It had been a very quiet autumn in Lincolnshire, so quiet that Mr Jorkins arriving in his cart to bring the Grantham Intelligencer was a great event and the sound of the Scroop foxhounds out in the lanes beyond Edgard Dyke a Saturnalia that had them talking for a week. And yet Miss Ellington had not been idle, for there had been Evie to tend, and her Christian Year to read at, not to mention sheets to turn and restitch – there being no one else to sew them – and a multitude of tasks to perform which would be thought inconvenient for a staff of ten, next to whom Hester, Mrs Castell and she were but the merest makeweights. And so, however precariously, the routines of their existence were preserved. The lamps were still lit, and the stair carpet swept. The windfall apples were gathered up from the orchard floor, and Evie’s muslins set to dry on the currant bushes, and they were an example to each other, if not to anyone else, for all that Mrs Castell said she was a fool to stay, and that Hester would be lucky to get her wages paid on December quarter-day.
A visitor who came to Scroop each November to stand on the gravel drive and look at the mullioned windows would no doubt have found it unchanged. The water still dripped out of the eaves; the rooks still flew up at the least interruption; the caryatid still sat in lonely splendour on her fountain-rock; the wild garden still ran down to the wood where Mr Davenant had kept his gibbet. But beyond that all was in flux. There were no horses in the stable, for they had all been taken away; the logs that lay in the stable yard had been sold to the Lincoln timber-merchant; and there was no more milk creamed up in the dairy. Indeed, on the days when Evie and Miss Ellington put on their cloaks and bonnets and went out wandering in the spinneys it was as if they were a pair of ghosts, bred by an age that had passed away and would never come again. There was no money, Mr Glenister said, and would not be until Mr Davenant’s affairs were truly gone into and settled by the lawyers, and if Miss Ellington did not turn and restitch the sheets there would be no bed for her to lie on.
And yet if they had been quiet, and secluded, and if the rain had vexed them beyond endurance, they had not lacked diversion. Mr Happerton’s trial interested them greatly. The newspapers which reported it were handed about at the breakfast table and discussed among them as they went about their work, and Mr Glenister’s account of it, when he returned from London, they listened to as if it were a fresh instalment of the Scriptures brought down that morning from Sinai. Hearing what had taken place in the courtroom, Hester flew into a passion and said that Mr Happerton should hang, but that his wife was worse, because she had not stood by her husband, which was a wife’s duty, and she should be put in the stocks to be pelted. For herself, Miss Ellington looked at the portrait of Mr Happerton and, considering what he had done, regretted that she h
ad been so foolish as to esteem him or be flattered by the civility of his address. But as Mrs Macfarlane used to say, Lucifer has many disguises and could be found under the fairest countenance. There was a picture of Mrs Happerton, too, which Miss Ellington looked at and thought that she did not understand the world or the people in it, that she was a country mouse who had best keep to hedgerows and hay-wains where she might be safe from peril.
One day in November the establishment had a visitor. This was Dora, or Mrs Jorkins as they were now to call her, brought over by Mr Jorkins in his cart, and so beribboned that, as Mrs Castell said, it was as if she intended herself as a maypole. She said that Jorkins was the meekest old man in Christendom, and was very happy, and they were very comfortable together. ‘And you, too, Annie,’ she said, ‘I hope you will be happy.’ Which embarrassed Miss Ellington very much, not thinking her circumstances widely known, and not liking attention to be drawn to it, which old Mrs Macfarlane said was the sovereignest thing for going to a girl’s head and spoiling her chance. But then, when Dora had gone, she repented of her anger, realising that she meant only to compliment her, and wish her well, and gathered up Evie in her arms, to whom she was reading, and made her do as proxy.
Who has a tortoiseshell cat, now, called Arabella, that she torments.
Who sits sometimes in terror beneath the portraits of her ancestors as if they were real people who might jump out of their frames into her lap.
Whom Miss Ellington acknowledged that she did not love, but should do her duty by always.
Evie should be sent away, Mr Glenister said, if Miss Ellington wished it. But she did not wish it, and told him no.