Derby Day (11 page)

‘As to that other affair,’ Captain Raff said. ‘I think it should take a couple of thousand.’

‘Don’t forget,’ Mr Happerton said, somewhat mysteriously, ‘that we have Mr Arbuthnot to consider too.’

‘I ain’t forgetting that. But it is all deuced uncertain.’ Captain Raff looked rather anxiously around the room, at the open door, at the shabby curtains that billowed in the breeze and at the picture of Tarantella winning the Oaks that hung from the adjoining wall, but found nothing to alarm him. ‘You’re sure you want to go on with it? We shall have enough to settle with, surely, as it is.’

At this Mr Happerton murmured something about ‘having great hopes of the old gentleman, but not so great as that’. Presently he took his leave – Captain Raff went off to play billiards, which he did with a facility that was rather alarming to watch – and walked in a leisurely way to Holborn Circus and then northwards to a little street that led away from the further end of Hatton Garden. Moving easily between the costers’ barrows and the dry-goods shops, and keeping his boots well clear of the steaming gutter that ran through the middle, he turned eventually into a tiny court, not much bigger than five yards square, and struck his hand on a dirty wooden door whose paint had perhaps been last renewed at the time of the Coronation.

‘Well, Solomons,’ Mr Happerton said, when the door was opened and he was standing in the quaint and almost furnitureless room that lay beyond it, ‘what have you got for me today?’

Mr Solomons was a Jewish-looking gentleman of about sixty, with a hooky nose and very bright eyes, who clearly did not leave his premises very often, unless it was that he was accustomed to go walking off down Hatton Garden in his dressing gown and slippers. Seeing Mr Happerton, whom he recognised and winked at, he went over to a battered desk in the corner of the room and did a great deal of riffling about, during which he was careful to interpose his body between the contents of the drawer and Mr Happerton’s view of them, and came back with a couple of dirty brown envelopes clasped between the thumb and finger of his right hand.

‘There’s these. I had a deal of trouble finding them, as you’d expect, and they ain’t cheap.’

Mr Happerton inspected the first of the papers, a bill in which Samuel Davenant Esq., of Scroop Hall in the County of Lincolnshire, promised to pay Messrs Barstead, saddle-makers, of Sleaford, the sum of £300 on the 30th of June 186–. He knew, as soon as he saw it, that it was a document he burned to possess, but he was anxious not to betray this enthusiasm to Mr Solomons.

‘Well yes,’ he said, casually, looking at the cracked plaster of Mr Solomons’ ceiling and his smeary windows. ‘This is certainly one of Davenant’s. How much do you ask for it?’

Mr Solomons hesitated. He, too, had his schemes. ‘Ah well,’ he began, in what might have been intended as a humorous tone, yet sounded anything but. ‘You’re a sly one, Mr Happerton, indeed you are. If I didn’t know you better, I’d be wondering what you wanted this bill
for
. There’s no chance of getting it renewed, or selling it on, no indeed. Mr Davenant’s a ruined man, as everybody knows, and there’s not everybody wants his paper.’

‘In that case you can’t have paid so very much for it,’ said Mr Happerton, who thought that he detested Mr Solomons and would never walk up Hatton Garden again.

‘And yet there’s some people that does want it – very badly, it seems. There’s you, and there’s that Mr Christopherson. Perhaps it’s that hoss of his you wants. I’m sure I don’t know,’ Mr Solomons said, failing to disguise a suspicion that he did know very well.

‘I’ll give you a hundred and twenty,’ Mr Happerton said.

‘It can’t be done, sir. Can’t be done. Not with Mr Christopherson being so very pressing. And there’s this, too, sir.’

Mr Happerton picked up the second bill, which was lying in the palm of Mr Solomons’ outstretched hand, and stared at it.

‘Great heavens, man! The signatures don’t even tally. Look how the “a” slopes down over the page. Not that it mightn’t be useful. A hundred and fifty for the two.’

‘It can’t be done, sir.’

There was some further discussion, during the course of which Mr Happerton twice put his hands in his pockets and glanced at the door, whereupon Mr Solomons conceded that it might possibly be done after all. Mr Happerton offered his own bill at three months by way of payment, was stoutly repulsed, and eventually produced fifteen ten-pound notes from the breast pocket of his coat. ‘Cash, sir. Cash is how I likes to deal,’ Mr Solomons said sententiously as he stowed the money away in the folds of his dressing gown. By the time he looked up, Mr Happerton was gone.

That evening, after Mr Gresham had drunk the milk-and-arrow-root that his son-in-law had brought him and been escorted up to bed, the Happertons held a conference before the drawing-room fire. It is always said that young women are changed by their marriage, that certain qualities in them are brought out, while certain other qualities recede into shadow, but Mrs Happerton was not at all changed – except that perhaps her hair seemed a little sandier and her eyes a little greener, and that she was a little quieter and a little more reflective. She had read many novels, she had been taken to Astley’s and the theatre, she had watched the preparation of the milk-and-arrowroot and made one or two sharp little remarks. But still there was a way in which she had become intimate with her husband – not perhaps in any open displays of affection, but in the conversations Mr Happerton initiated about the progress of his business affairs. Hearing him talk with old Mr Gresham over the drawing-room fire, watching him as he administered the hot-milk-and-arrowroot – he made a joke, sometimes, of the patient’s duty to finish it all up – she would sometimes cast him a look of sudden interest. Mr Happerton noticed the looks and was comforted by them. He thought he and his wife were getting on.

‘Your father seems very tired,’ Mr Happerton began comfortably. ‘He will go to sleep at the table one of these days. What does Mr Morris say?’ Mr Morris was the Greshams’ doctor.

‘I don’t know Mr Morris says anything other than that he should not exert himself.’

‘Well, he is certainly following his instructions then,’ Mr Happerton said, a little less comfortably. ‘Has he said anything about returning to chambers?’

‘No, he has said nothing.’

‘Nor of … of that business affair I asked you to mention to him.’

‘He said, when I asked him, that he was not disposed to give you any money. He said’ – Mrs Happerton’s expression as she said this was quite horribly demure – ‘that gentlemen who wanted a thing should find the means of paying for it.’

Mr Happerton stared into the fire. He was not cast down by this information, for he fancied that his position with regard to Mr Gresham was growing stronger by the day.

‘There would be nothing quite so advantageous,’ he began again, ‘as two thousand pounds in my account at Overend & Gurney. Of course, if the money is not forthcoming then the plan will have to be given up. You might tell your father that.’

‘Certainly I shall tell him.’

‘And now – well, you could come and sit beside me here if you liked, you know.’

Mrs Happerton went and sat beside him, to the slight disarrangement of her dress. The tall footman, coming into the room for the tea things, saw them from the doorway and went away again. What she said to her father next morning, is uncertain, but two days later a cheque for £2,000 drawn in favour of George Happerton, Esq., and signed by Mr Gresham was presented to one of Messrs Overend & Gurney’s tellers in Lothbury.

Not long after this, one of the sporting newspapers carried a paragraph that assured gentlemen of the racing fraternity that they would be delighted to learn that TIBERIUS, the champion horse formerly owned by Mr Davenant, had been purchased by that well-known sporting gentleman Mr Happerton, known to all patrons of the turf as one of its most doughty supporters, etc.

‘So he has brought it off,’ Captain Raff said to himself, reading the paragraph at the Blue Riband. ‘See here,’ he said to the young man with whom he was playing billiards. ‘There is my friend Happerton coming out for that fellow Davenant’s Tiberius. Let us hope he has the bargain he thought, eh?’

Part Two

A Situation in the Country

It may sometimes happen that a young woman, though of good education and an amiable temper, garlanded with every golden opinion that long exposure to the best families can procure, may find herself not so conveniently situated as she might wish. In these circumstances she will apprehend that her accomplishments, her disposition and her good humour are of little moment, and that only fortitude will see her through
.

The Young Lady’s Infallible Guide and Companion
(1867)

AND SO IT was settled, and she was to go to Lincolnshire, and be governess to Mr Davenant’s daughter, and live in a great windy house that looked out over the wolds where there were more rooks than Christian folk: that was what Eliza said when Miss Ellington told her, although naturally she meant only to be kind. And when the letter came for her, although she had long expected it, Miss Ellington went out into the garden and was so very sad, thinking that she should never see the dear friends she had made there again, until Mrs Macfarlane seized her hand, and told her not to be a goose, as there was nothing here for her to do. Seeing the sense in this – for Eliza was to be married, and Jane to go to Miss Brotherton’s at Warwick and the schoolroom all emptied – and remembering what her mama had always told her, that she should be brave, Miss Ellington went inside and busied herself, played at ombre and read to old Mrs Macfarlane out of the newspaper, and Mr Macfarlane, coming in from his business, told her that she was a
dear good girl
and that they
never should get along without her
, and that a bedroom should be kept ready against her return, so that she altogether broke down, in spite of her best resolves, and shed tears all over the
County Chronicle
as she read.

‘You will be a country girl now, you’ll see,’ Eliza said, ‘with nothing to stir you but sheep and mangel-wurzels,’ and Miss Ellington said she could not see the difference, as they were very quiet and genteel here, and saw almost no one. ‘In any case it is not for a fortnight,’ Jane said, thinking to cheer her, ‘and we can be very jolly in that time.’ Yet Miss Ellington had to allow that the two weeks hung heavy on her hands, and though countless small recreations were proposed for her – a visit to Kenilworth, an excursion in Mr Murray’s carriage, he that was to marry Eliza – and though she professed to enjoy them, her heart was not in the business. She supposed it was always so, and that the soldier who is to be posted to India gets no pleasure from his furlough. She knew she got no pleasure from hers.

‘You are a sad girl, Annie, for all that you profess to be gay,’ Eliza had once told her, and Miss Ellington supposed that she was right. Certainly there was a moment as she sat in her room assembling her things when she was almost overcome with melancholy, for each had some pleasant association: the
Christian Year
that Mr Atherton had given her when she made her first Communion, and Macaulay’s essays that had been her father’s, a comforter that Jane worked for her one December and everyone thought was for Mrs Macfarlane. But then, having stowed these articles away, and reflected on her circumstances, she felt suddenly more bold and thought that there were other places in the world than Warwickshire and other folk than the Macfarlanes, for all their kindness, and that it would be a relief to get away from that odious Mr Murray, who had once taken her hand and tried to kiss her. She determined that she should make a list of her accomplishments, which her papa always said was the sovereignest way of inspiring confidence in a young woman.

Of my appearance I perhaps ought not to speak, other than to say that I am twenty-three years old, five feet four inches in height (‘a maypole’ Mama used to say in jest, who was only four feet ten) and with hair that ill-natured people would call red but I should style chestnut
.

Of my capacities, I might say that I have a sound knowledge of English grammar, and its peculiarities, an undoubted proficiency in the languages of France and Italy, and a little, a very little, Latin
.

That I have studied English history from the date of the Saxon invasions to the Restoration of his Majesty in 1660
.

That I have travelled in mathematics to the
pons asinorum
and beyond it
.

That I am generally considered to have a fair contralto voice, can sing rounds and glees, accompany at the pianoforte, play at
ombre,
preference and other games
.

That I lived fifteen of my years in Thirsk, where Papa had his practice, two in Leicester at Miss Engledow’s establishment, and the rest in Warwickshire
.