Derby Day (13 page)

But if they were modest and quiet, did not tend their garden, and spent their money on penny pin-packets, they were not, Miss Ellington discovered, without their resources. On the contrary, they had a consuming interest that lay beyond any human association or social prospect, for all that it resided in a stable, slept on straw, lived on hay and had its water from a bucket. What did they talk about there in Lincolnshire? Why Tiberius. Nothing but Tiberius. Dora said when the Derby was confirmed – which everyone supposed it should be – she would wager the money she had in the National Savings Bank upon him. Hester had a little keepsake book full of pictures of him cut out of
Bell’s Life
and
The Sportsman’s Magazine
.

There came a day when, such was the volume of chatter about this Lincolnshire Pegasus, that Miss Ellington determined to see him for herself, borrowed a pair of pattens that lay on the block by the kitchen door and set off across the stone yard to the stables. She did not quite know what she expected to see there, being unable to tell a thoroughbred from a carthorse, but Tiberius, she thought, was decidedly slim: a lithe black horse that stood all alone in the corner of the stables, would not be petted and stamped his feet very violently if anyone came near. She remarked to Jem Claypole, the stable boy who stood nearby, that he seemed a very nervous animal, and this Jem confirmed: ‘It’s twice he have run away wi’ the maister, for all a whip were taken to him.’ And then just as she was about to return to the house, finding the smell of the beasts, and other things, not to her taste, a curious thing happened. A small, dark-faced man stuck his head in at the door and, seeing them there, hastily withdrew it, but not before the boy made an angry gesture at his retreating figure and indeed seized up a pitchfork that stood against the rail and would, she thought, have actually assaulted the man had he come nearer. ‘Who is that, that you should wish to take a pitchfork to him?’ she enquired, whereupon he said that it was John Wilkinson, who had been dismissed by the master but would keep a-coming back and a-spying on the house, and maister had given instructions for him to be druv away.

All of which confirmed Miss Ellington’s opinion that Scroop was a remarkable place, and its inhabitants yet more remarkable still. She asked Mrs Castell once – remembering the pleasant recreations of Warwickshire – if the servants ever went anywhere, and the housekeeper said that once a year, on the May holiday, Mr Curbishley hired a wagonette and drove them to Lincoln for the fair. In the dark evenings Dora and Hester played spillikins together, while Mrs Castell read at
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
with a very dreadful expression. There was talk of ghosts and spectres, of a path in the woods where not even Mr Davenant would go in broad daylight and a parlourmaid that drowned herself for love and stalks the lower field, beseeching the Gypsy who betrayed her; talk, too, of the master and how he was a broken man and would not bear the shame of being sold up, and of there no longer being Davenants in a place where Davenants had always been.

Patchwork of ivy and scrollwork of fern!

And so the days passed, with such an undifferentiated regularity that the smallest trifle took on a momentous significance, a letter to Hester from her cousin in Leicestershire became a great event and a walk in the woods or the fields beyond a grand excursion. As for Evie, the poor child was very backward in her little intellects, stared blindly at the words printed on the page before her and was quite deficient in sensibility. Thinking to amuse her on their first day in the schoolroom Miss Ellington took down an almanac which she had found on the library shelf showing ladies and gentlemen in costumes of olden time – a knight tilting at the quintain, Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers at Tilbury Dock – but from this she shrank, saying that they frightened her. Miss Ellington asked her what there was that did not frighten her, and that she liked, and she said the cat, and a ride in a carriage, and her papa. And yet she was an affectionate thing, would smile and chatter if you did not tax her, and gave great longing looks out of the window into lands that none could see save she herself. Miss Ellington had her story from Mrs Castell, which was that she was born early, being then so inconsiderable a scrap that she must be kept in cotton wool in her father’s cigar box and fed milk through a straw.

And this, Miss Ellington found, was the limit of their life there in Lincolnshire. Mr Davenant sat in his study or took his dogs out a-coursing; Tiberius stamped in his stable; Dora and Hester went whispering by on the stairs; the wind murmured in the reed-beds; the cut logs mouldered by the barn.

*

Mr Glenister’s visits were as regular as the rain. Mr Glenister who, with his bailiff and his estate and his £2,000, was, as Mrs Castell put it, ‘as neat a catch as ever a young woman put out a hook for’. The difficulty, alas, was that there was not a single spinster lady in the parish, excepting the rector’s sister, Miss Trafford, who could not be less than sixty-five years of age, and Miss Trimmington of Scroop Parva, who never left her bed on account of some deformity of the spine. For herself, Miss Ellington thought Mr Glenister, who was certainly tall and nice-looking, somewhat supercilious, for when they first met he made an allusion to one of Mr Browning’s poems and seemed surprised that she recognised it, and said that she was no doubt a great bluestocking.

There was another singular thing about Mr Glenister, Miss Ellington discovered, and that was his affection for Evie. The interest was reciprocated, for she ran towards him whenever she saw him, and altogether delighted in the things he told her, though Miss Ellington doubted that she understood the half. They were sitting in the schoolroom one morning, with the cat between them and a slate on which Evie had scratched a few hieroglyphics of her own devising cast aside on the carpet, when, having come into the room and let fall a few pleasantries, he looked very fondly at Evie, who had now turned her attention to the cat, and said:

‘She is a dear good girl, is she not?’

Miss Ellington said what she truthfully believed, that she thought she had a most affectionate nature, whereupon he smiled very courteously and continued: ‘And yet it seems to me, Miss Ellington, that there are times when you are sharp with her. I make no criticism of you, you understand, for I know the poor girl would try a saint’s patience, but it pains me to see it.’

This was so nearly the truth that Miss Ellington did not like to dispute it, but said merely that she should do her best not to be vexed, &c., her cheeks crimson all the while, whereupon he smiled and said that she should have to find someone else to bluestocking, for it could not be poor Evie.

‘Who is this Mr Happerton of whom everyone talks?’ she asked, the next time that she saw him.

‘Mr Happerton?’ he said – they were sitting in the schoolroom again, with the cat prowling between them and Evie teasing it with a ball of darning wool. ‘Who has been talking of Mr Happerton?’

‘Not I, for one,’ she said, thinking that he was vexed by the question. ‘But Dora and Hester have spoken of him, and Mrs Castell supposes that he will be coming soon.’

‘There never was a secret to be kept in a country house,’ Mr Glenister said, more amused now than irked. ‘Mr Happerton is a gentleman with whom you will very shortly have some acquaintance. Indeed, it would not surprise me if he were here within the week.’

‘But who is he?’ Miss Ellington wondered. ‘And why should he come to Scroop? Has Mr Davenant sold his estate?’

‘Not that,’ Mr Glenister said. ‘Rather, he has sold Tiberius.’

‘Tiberius!’ she exclaimed.

‘The very same,’ Mr Glenister went on. ‘Mr Happerton has bought him, but he has no property of his own and, so far as I understand, wishes to have the horse kept here until some better prospect offers itself.’

‘Will that not be …’ – she hesitated to find the correct word – ‘inconvenient for Mr Davenant?’

‘It will be more than inconvenient,’ Mr Glenister said, who had a trick of smiling in a very quizzical way. ‘I should say that it will eat into his soul. It is not that he cares so very much about horses, simply that to lose it would be like having his wood grubbed up. But Evie’ – raising his voice – ‘you must not persecute that cat. It has done you no harm, and its ears are its own, surely?’

And so it became known in the house that Mr Davenant had sold Tiberius, his pride and joy, and that Mr Happerton, whom nobody knew anything of, and as Dora said could not in the nature of things be a gentleman, would be coming to claim him.

*

Scroop possessed a cat, to which Evie was violently attached. Indeed it was sometimes thought that she preferred Pusskin – this was the animal’s name – to any of the human company she saw around her. But this is by the by. It was a clear April morning, not much more than a day or so after Miss Ellington’s conversation with Mr Glenister, and they had not been long at the breakfast table, when it was discovered that Pusskin was not in the house. Generally this would not have excited any remark, for Pusskin came and went, was devious in his ways and promiscuous in his associations, but by the luncheon hour, when he had still not returned, a search was instituted, the barns looked into, the dairy investigated to see if he had not been locked in among the cream-pots, &c. Still there was no sign, and Evie, who had been assured that all would be well, grew quite disconsolate and would have blundered through every room in the house had she not been prevented. So the afternoon progressed and, being for a short while at liberty, Miss Ellington decided to take a walk in the gardens, not absolutely in search of their absent friend, but with the thought that she might, as she went, look out for him, call his name and so forth.

It was a bright, sunny afternoon – the first such, Miss Ellington thought, since she came there – and having reached the limit of the garden, it was a small matter to press on into the wood. Here, she knew, Mr Davenant kept his gibbet, with all the vermin of the estate hung up by their forelegs, but such was the promise of the day that she thought: I could bear even this. Imagine her horror, then, when, approaching the block, she found strung up on it nothing less than the body of Pusskin, stone dead, with a great nail driven through his neck into the wood beneath. So startled was Miss Ellington by the sight that she gave a cry of terror and ran back into the kitchen and, such was the pitch of her sobbing, could tell no one what had happened until Mrs Castell made her plunge her face into a tub of water and drink a glass of cherry brandy.

Subsequently – the whole house by now being in uproar – an investigation was made. Mr Davenant himself went down to the gibbet and retrieved the body of Pusskin, whom he interred beneath the hawthorn tree, but as to how he had come there and who had played this cruel trick, there was no clue. The keeper knew nothing, said that he had left the rail almost bare the previous night with nothing on it but a pair of polecats, and Mr Davenant swore that any man in his employ who could be proved to have done it would be instantly dismissed, which could not be, as the stable lads valued Pusskin as a mouser, and Mr Curbishley said that he liked nothing more than a sight of a fine, proud cat. And so they had another puzzle to add to the mystery of Mr Happerton, and how he had come by Tiberius, and who could tell which should be the more readily solved?

*

‘And who lives here, I wonder,’ Mr Happerton remarked as the carriage swung along the road from Scroop at great peril to its springs. ‘Bluebeard and his wives?’

‘Don’t seem much of a shop,’ Captain Raff observed – he was sulking because Mr Happerton had declined to stop at Lincoln for lunch. ‘Doosid lot of timber all over the place.’

‘All gone to seed, too,’ Mr Happerton observed. ‘Five years since it was cut down, I’ll be bound. And see how that field next to the fence posts is taking the water. A man who took an interest in the place would have the thing drained.’ The carriage was in sight of the disreputable caryatid and a cloud of rooks went swarming up into the dull grey sky. ‘Now, who is there to open the door?’ Mr Happerton mused. ‘No butler these days, I daresay. Well, we shall have to make do with Mrs Castell.’

‘Mrs Who?’ Captain Raff wondered, as that lady appeared on the step with a white-faced maid behind her.

‘Housekeeper,’ Mr Happerton remarked, who seemed remarkably well informed about Scroop and its retainers. ‘Been here since the old king died. Thirty pounds a year and that kind of thing. How do, Mrs Castell? No, I didn’t come in Jorkins’ cart. Don’t know Jorkins. Found a carriage from the livery stable more convenient. Tell the boy – if there’s a boy – to put it up somewhere, would you, and I’ll just step down. Mr Davenant here? No? Well, tell him I look forward to waiting upon him, would you?’

And with Captain Raff to support him, and Mrs Castell casting anxious glances at the carriage – which was not quite a barouche but something very similar to it, the like of which had not been seen in that part of Lincolnshire for half a dozen years – and the rooks soaring into the leaden sky, Mr Happerton jumped down and took his first steps – very confident steps they were too – into Scroop Hall.

*

It was generally agreed that Mr Happerton came to Scroop as if he meant business. As well as Captain Raff he brought with him a carpet bag, apparently cut from the same cloth, as both were left to kick their heels in the hall while Mr Happerton went on a tour of the premises. Mr Davenant saw him come from the study window, where he sat with the bills on his desk, heard the loud voice in which he addressed Mrs Castell and ground his teeth in shame. He heard Mrs Castell ask ‘Would the gentlemun take a glass of wine?’ and Mr Happerton remark that no, dammy, a cup of tea would do for him, and somehow the shame was redoubled and the bills stared up at Mr Davenant from the desk like little white lozenge-stones in a graveyard.