Derby Day (14 page)

It was also generally agreed that no one at Scroop had met anyone like Mr Happerton before. He was what is known as a fashionable sporting gentleman, which is to say that he wore a pair of top-boots, and a cutaway coat, and a white stock, and was decorated with more pins and brooches, all of them in some way describing the shape of a horse, or a bridle, or a pair of spurs, than would generally ornament a pincushion. Certainly, they never had anything like him in Warwickshire. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, thrusting kind of man, rather red in the face, lately married – there was apparently a Mrs Happerton left behind at her father’s house in Belgravia – and very inquisitive. Jem, who accompanied him on his tour, said that he looked into everything, peered into the bins where the bran was stored, inspected the whips and the curry-combs, asked Mr Curbishley what he thought about a dozen things, all in the space of five minutes, while Captain Raff walked about in the yard, asked where the dairy was and was later observed to put his thumb in the cream.

Curiously enough, when they convened later that evening in the servants’ hall, with the door shut and the gentlemen drinking port in the dining room, they agreed that, of the two, it was Captain Raff that they did not like – ‘a nasty, sneaking kind of a body’ Mrs Castell said, and Hester wondered that he could not find somebody to brush his coat for him. As for Mr Happerton, although they were startled by his dress and his demeanour – for he was somewhat loud as well as talking incessantly of horses – they thought that he meant no harm. He had heard something of Evie, too, talked to her and asked her how she did, and this, too, was noted and approved of.

And yet Miss Ellington acknowledged that it was Mr Davenant that she wondered at most, who roamed about the place like a ghost, who sat very miserably at dinner while Mr Happerton made his little jokes and Captain Raff cracked filberts into a saucer, and who closeted himself very comfortlessly in his study to hear whatever it was that Mr Happerton had to say to him. There was a particular morning when Mr Happerton saddled up Tiberius, and with Captain Raff following on an old cob, cantered off across the wolds to ‘put the horse through his paces’, as he said, and the look on Mr Davenant’s face as this little cavalcade set off along the drive was one of simple torture.

And so Mr Happerton’s stay continued, to the satisfaction of nearly everyone. He went to church on Sunday morning and sang the hymns and the responses very loudly. He won great approbation by stopping an old woman in the lane, as she laboured back from the village bake-house with her dinner in a pail, taking the dinner home for her and presenting her with a shilling into the bargain. He looked at all the tenants’ cottages, admired their design and admitted the cheapness of their rents. Captain Raff meanwhile lounged in the shrubbery smoking cigars and looked as if he were very bored.

‘Mr Happerton seems a very agreeable man,’ Miss Ellington remarked to Mr Glenister as they sat one afternoon in the schoolroom, where he had come to see Evie.

‘Agreeable? Eh – oh yes. Very agreeable, I don’t doubt,’ Mr Glenister said, with a rather peculiar look on his face, as if he thought her impertinent for saying as much.

‘Captain Raff, I think, is perhaps less so.’

‘Captain Raff!’ Mr Glenister laughed, as if she had said something amusing. ‘Do you know, I have asked Captain Raff half a dozen times what regiment it was that he sold out of and never got an answer? Here Evie, let us untangle this wool and see if it cannot be put to good use.’

‘It is very hard for Mr Davenant,’ Miss Ellington said.

‘Very hard. Here, miss – you will never unwind that knot by pulling it so. But there is some mystery about Mr Happerton, I think.’

‘A mystery? What kind of a mystery?’

But Mr Glenister would not say any more, continued to unwind the ball of wool with Evie, whose absorption in her work was very droll to see, and presently rode away to his dinner.

There was one more incident from Mr Happerton’s stay at Scroop which Miss Ellington noted, for it seemed to her almost as curious as Mr Glenister’s conversation in the schoolroom. There came an evening – perhaps it was on the day before Mr Happerton’s departure – when Evie disappeared. This was a not uncommon event, and by no means alarming, as she did not leave the house and was generally found hiding in the dairy or beneath one of the beds. On this occasion – it was about seven o’clock and growing dark – she was in neither of these places, and, growing vexed, Miss Ellington stepped into each of the lower rooms of the house in turn, calling her name, sweeping up curtains and peering behind doors.

There was no sign of her, and Miss Ellington was about to return to the kitchen, when she heard from Mr Davenant’s study what she imagined to be the noise of wood upon stone, and, remembering that she sometimes crept in there to sit in her father’s chair, the governess determined to roust her out. ‘Evie,’ she began, advancing into the room, ‘you are a bad girl to run off so, when everyone is looking for you.’ Only it was not Evie sitting in Mr Davenant’s oak-backed chair with a sheet of paper before him on the desk and the lamp burning at his side but Mr Happerton. Greatly embarrassed, Miss Ellington made her apologies and was about to retire, when Mr Happerton called her back.

‘A very natural mistake to make, Miss Ellington. You saw a light and assumed it was Miss Davenant. I suppose she has a habit of absenting herself in this way?’

‘I think she likes the upset it brings, though she is always very contrite when we find her.’

‘Is she? Well, who is to tell what goes on in her head, I wonder?’

He looked as if he might be about to say something else, when all of a sudden there was a tap on the door and one of the stable lads – whose presence in the house confirmed the urgency of the request – declared that Captain Raff wished to see him particular in the yard. At this Mr Happerton instantly quitted the room, leaving Miss Ellington in solitary possession. The sheet of paper at which he had been working still lay on the desk, and she could not disallow the curiosity she felt to see what he had been writing. Imagine her surprise, then, to discover that it was not a letter or a schedule of some kind but Mr Davenant’s signature – Samuel R. Davenant – in facsimile ten or twenty times down the page. And then, just as Miss Ellington stood with the paper in her hand – she had taken it up the better to inspect it – there came a cry from the kitchen, announcing that Evie was found, and she hurried away to comfort her, so that the question of why Mr Happerton should want to sit in his host’s study with his host’s lamp at his side contriving versions of his host’s signature vanished altogether from her mind.

Boulogne-sur-mer

No true Englishman goes abroad after the summer. Those that do are an obscure and extravagant breed. They can be seen slinking through the streets of Munich, Pau, Ostend and half-a-dozen other places. No respectable inn will take them; no gentleman wants them at his table. Their particularity is this: that each, singly and severally, has something to hide
.

John Bull: A Study in National Temperament (1866)

BOULOGNE OUT OF season is not much of a place. The wind tears in off the sea and sends the masts of the fishing smacks drawn up in the harbour all a-clatter, and, blowing in against the sails hung up for repair in the chandlers’ yards, makes the most melancholy sound ever known. The nursemaids and their charges who were here in summer have packed their boxes and gone home, and the sleek papas come for a month’s recreation from their counting houses or their offices on ’Change have all gone with them. There are no more fashionable preachers to delight the congregation of the English church, and the little circulating library with its three hundred English novels and its guinea subscription is in dusty hibernation. In fact the place is altogether deserted except for half-pay officers, a lady or two who is perhaps no better than she should be, and one or two strange, dilapidated men with devil-may-care moustaches and defiant attitudes in whose whereabouts the sheriff’s officers may possibly take an interest, but about whom nobody else cares a jot. Curiously the disappearance of the English – the English papas with their newspapers and their tall hats, the English children shrieking down to the beach at low tide, the English mamas taking the air on the promenade – has had a lowering effect on the indigenous population. Certain of the shopkeepers in the Haute Ville have closed up their shutters for the winter and gone. The fruit-sellers, whom half a dozen painters have so charmingly taken off, have no fruit to sell. The cobbles look as if they had not been swept for a month. It is all dreadfully dull.

To little Mr Lythgoe, making his way gingerly up the path from the harbour – it had been a heavy crossing from Dover and his feet had a habit of walking off in directions where he did not want them to lead him – it seemed even less of a place. It was a bright, cold morning towards the end of January, with gulls screeching over the tops of the fishing boats, and Mr Lythgoe thought that he had never seen such a spectacle. The Haute Ville and its dirty cobbles had no charms for him. The famous ramparts he dismissed with a glance. He passed the cathedral, whose spire aggrandises over the town, and as a follower of Mr Wesley, was disgusted by it. The column which a great emperor had erected to honour his army disgusted him even more. He had a piece of paper in the breast pocket of his coat to which he kept referring, and this, together with frequent solicitation of passers-by – he would hail them with a
pardonnez monsieur
and thrust the piece of paper under their noses – impeded his progress, but he laboured on, shielding his face every so often against the wind, at one point losing his grip on the paper and having to chase it into a disreputable courtyard where an old woman feeding sardines to a cat looked at him enquiringly, and made his way past the cathedral and Napoleon’s column to reach the southernmost quarter of the town.

As Mr Lythgoe continued along an esplanade on which marram grass grew over the sand hills and bathing huts with rusting wheels lay waiting for someone to repair them, the houses of the town began to thin out, became no more than a series of tumbledown cottages, made out of wood and plasterboard, with gaps showing in their frontages and stovepipe chimneys tilting at crazy angles to their roofs. The air was decidedly nautical – there were nets hanging out to dry over upturned barrels, with the ends secured by stones from the beach, and rowing boats in need of caulking propped up on wooden stands – and Mr Lythgoe, consulting his piece of paper, thought that he had mistaken the way. ‘An odd sort of place, anyhow,’ he pronounced, looking at the fishing nets and the upturned rowing boats, and a pile of fish-heads – the eyes of which, to his horror, seemed to follow him as he passed – and other nautical leavings over which a couple of cats and a dog were squabbling. But then another habitation, set a little apart from the line of cottages, with smoke drifting from its tin chimney-stack and rank grass rising almost to its door, caught his eye and he moved hesitantly on.

The door of the cottage was half-open and there was a figure standing on the wooden steps, half in and half out under the lintel, so that the front half of his body was exposed to view but his face gathered up in shadow. Mr Lythgoe, squinting up through the wind, saw a tall man, who might perhaps have passed his fiftieth year, hatless, with iron-coloured hair, a protuberant jaw and very hard grey eyes. Mr Lythgoe thought that he did not like those eyes. The eyes and the hair gave way to an equally grey waistcoat, with a watch chain and some seals hanging out of it, a white shirt and a pair of black trousers. All this convinced Mr Lythgoe that the apparition was very probably a gentleman and almost certainly the person he sought.

Seeing Mr Lythgoe, the man gazed down curiously from the steps, and Mr Lythgoe told himself that he did not like that look. But then he remembered that he had been commissioned merely to deliver a message, that the manner in which this message might be received was nothing to him, and that whatever happened, the man could not eat him. Accordingly he put down the case he had been carrying and asked, with an air of genuine enquiry, but in the manner of one who wants an opinion confirmed:

‘Mightn’t your name be Pardew?’

The man moved out of the doorway so that the whole of him could be seen in the frame of light that glowed from the room behind.

‘No one of that name here,’ he said, shortly. ‘Arbuthnot or Harrison might serve, but not that other.’

A yard or two distant now from the grey eyes and the prognathous jaw, Mr Lythgoe could see that there were several buttons missing from the waistcoat and that one of the shirtsleeves inclined to raggedness. He had an idea, too, that the tobacco packed in the bowl of the pipe the man had in the corner of his mouth was of the very cheapest kind, that stevedores and sailors smoked. All this served to lessen his respect.

‘Gammon,’ he said. ‘Your name’s Pardew or I’m Lord John. Why, I’ve a letter in my pocket from the gentleman who sent me, taking you off to a “T”.’

‘Well, you and that gentleman are mistaken,’ said the man who did not wish to be called Pardew. ‘You ain’t a policeman, are you? Nor a sheriff’s officer?’

‘No, I’m not. And you know I’m not. Policemen and sheriffs’ officers don’t come all polite, or asking a person’s name.’

‘Well – perhaps they don’t. And what might your name be, Mr——?’

‘Lythgoe,’ said Mr Lythgoe, who was growing rather tired of this conversation.

‘And who might be the gentleman that sent you?’