Derby Day (2 page)

‘You aren’t telling me, McIvor, that Cheeseman is light on the tin? A man as had his own carriage in the ring at Epsom only this May past.’

‘It was the St Leger that did for him, Mr Mulligan. Took seven hundred pounds on Duke’s Delight at threes, laid most of it off on Antimacassar – Lord Purefoy’s horse, you know – and the animal, which everyone knew was a certainty, never came out of the ditch at the thirteenth.’

‘Seven hundred pounds at threes!’ Mr Mulligan shook his head, stuck his thumb into his mouth and bit off a piece of skin near the nail. ‘Couldn’t he have placed no more side-bets?’

‘Antimacassar was so mortal ’igh among the fancy, Mr Mulligan. He’d had Lord Purefoy’s man sending him intelligence from the stables, and you can’t say fairer than that.’

Mr Mulligan inspected his fingers again, but he knew that the beauty had gone out of them. The snowflakes had stopped falling and the wind was whirling a little pile of dirt around the nearside corner of the court like a dervish.

‘These are bad times, McIvor,’ he remarked. ‘Confounded bad. ’Ow a gentleman is to make an honest penny out of the game I hardly know. Why, there’s some publicans’ll split if they so much as sees a slip passing hands. And that McTurk has such a down on us.’ Seeing a look of enquiry in his companion’s eye, he went on: ‘The p’liceman. Regular down he has. Why, there was half a dozen peelers went into the Jolly Butcher in the Kennington Road the other night, and bless me if the landlord ain’t been summonsed. Lose his licence, most probably, poor feller.’

‘They’re terrible hard, them magistrates,’ Mr McIvor said, who may have had some dealings of his own with the bench. ‘But tell me, Mr Mulligan’ – this was said with an extreme deference – ‘what is it that you’ve been engaged upon since you last did me the honour of tendering some advice?’

‘What have I been engaged upon? That’s cheek, McIvor, and you know it. But seeing that you’re a respectful young feller – yes, I will ’ave another go of this porter if you’ll be so kind – I’ll tell you. Fact is, I’ve been working for Mr Newcome that has the Three Bells in Shoreditch.’

‘I’ve had dealings with Newcome,’ said McIvor, with perhaps the very faintest note of asperity, ‘and he never said anything about it.’

‘No more he would. You don’t think a man as employs a private detective to spot his wife in the crim. con. goes and advertises the fact, do you? No, I never come into the Three Bells. Leastways, not when there’s anyone there. Just this last month now, I’ve been up in Leicestershire.’

‘No meetings anywhere there this month, surely?’ McIvor countered.

‘No more there aren’t. But it’s where Mr Mahoney’s place is – he that ran Tarantella in the Oaks – and that’s where I’ve been.’

‘And what did you do there?’

‘I ain’t proud’ – in fact the expression on Mr Mulligan’s face suggested that he was as proud as Lucifer. ‘I can shift a load of muck with the best of them. No, I’ve been working in the stables.’

‘What – and picking up gen?’

‘That’s about the strength of it.’ Two fresh pots of porter, signed up to Mr McIvor’s account, had now appeared on the table. ‘Your very good health.’

‘Why aren’t you there now?’ McIvor wondered.

‘If we was brothers, I’d tell you. Seeing as we’re not, I shan’t. Besides,’ Mr Mulligan added grandly, ‘there’s nothing to do in Leicestershire save chase foxes. You wouldn’t catch me living there if I was made a present of forty acres. But see here’ – and he leant across the table, speaking in a more confidential tone – ‘this ain’t buttering any bread. I take it you think I’m tolerably downy, McIvor?’

‘I should think you ought to know what o’clock it was, if anyone should,’ said Mr McIvor admiringly, who had been very impressed by the excursion to Leicestershire.

‘Well then, here’s a dodge that might serve us. Seventy–thirty split, mind. And you’d have to do the work.’

‘It ain’t taking a shop for some auctioneer’s leavings?’

‘No indeed. Just opening letters. And sending ’em too. A child could do it. But the trick is pulling ’em in. Once you’ve got them you’re safe. And no one any the wiser. Now, you’ve a tip or two in your head, I suppose?’

‘Everyone has tips.’

‘Maybe they do. And there are fools out there willing to pay for them. But it’s hartistry as counts.
Widder with three orphan children in her care has sporting intelligence to communicate
– that kind of thing. And colours. Always mention the colours. There’s folk sets great store by them. Now, let us have pen and paper and set to work.’

These articles having been procured from the landlord, together with two more pots of porter, for which McIvor again paid, or rather said that he would do so, Mr Mulligan bent his head over the table top. Outside the shadows were crawling yet higher up the walls of Clipstone Court and the furious old man had rushed down his staircase and was angrily gathering up the packing-case fragments.

‘Shy kind of place, ain’t it?’ Mr Mulligan said. Plainly the act of composition did not come easily to him. First he scratched negligently with his pen at the foolscap sheet before him, only to obliterate what he had just written. Then he took heart again, dashed off a sentence, looked at it sadly and then drew his nib carefully through at least half the words. McIvor stared out into the court and amused himself by looking at an engraving of the Battle of Waterloo that hung above a poster saying that Jack Dobbs the Rottingdean Fibber’s benefit was coming off at John Dawdsey’s shop, the Horseferry Road, and all sporting gentlemen were respectfully entreated to attend. In ten minutes, and with several rendings of the foolscap sheet, the business was done and Mr Mulligan held up the surviving fragment of paper proudly to the light.

‘Here we are then.
A widowed lady, relict of a gentleman long esteemed in some of the highest sporting establishments in the land, is in possession of information pertaining to this year’s Derby race, which she will gladly divulge in exchange for the sum of one half-crown, to be remitted to Mrs Faraday, Post Office, Drury Lane, London W
. Reads well, don’t it?’

‘I should say it does,’ said Mr McIvor, who had been very impressed by the word ‘pertaining’. ‘But what do we do when folks start sending their money in?’

‘What do we do? Why, we send them the name of an ’oss. Mind you, it’s to be a good one, for if it succeeds, why, we can try the dodge again. That’s the beauty of it.’

‘What about Broomstick, Lord Mountfichet’s bay, that was of Tanglewood by Saracen?’

‘Gammon! They’ll be turning him into dog-meat come next Michaelmas, if what I hear’s true.’

‘Mariner, then, that did so well at Doncaster.’

‘Ah, but he’s no staying power, has he? And they say that Mr Ticklerton don’t care for the sport since his wife died. No, I say we go for that horse in Lincolnshire.’

Seeing from the look on McIvor’s face that he had never heard of any horse in Lincolnshire, he went on:

‘Tiberius. Mr Davenant’s horse. The one that ran five furlongs in a minute and five on Newmarket Heath last spring, and that Joey Bailey would have rode in the Ascot New Stakes if he hadn’t broke ’is collar-bone the week before. Was a feller talking of him no end in
Post and Paddock
the other month. I remarked it at the time. Mr Newcome is already offering tens on him, and nobody knowing whether he’s to run or no.’

McIvor said he was sure that Mr Mulligan was right; the piece of paper was folded up and secured in the back pocket of Mr Mulligan’s shabby suit, later to be conveyed in a dirty envelope to the offices of the
Holborn & St Pancras Journal
in Gower Street, two more pots of porter were called for, a few more flakes of snow drifted down over the sooty window-fronts, the gloomy doorways were gathered up in blackness, and evening came to Clipstone Court.

Belgrave Square

TIBERIUS
from Paduasoy, by Architrave, whose grandsire was Cotillion.
Own
. Mr Davenant, of Scroop, Lincolnshire. Captain Coker rode him very prettily in the Lincoln Trial Stakes. A dainty horse, of no size (15h) but strong in the field.

Fancyman’s Guide to the Turf
(1868)

MR GRESHAM, THE old lawyer who lived on the corner of Belgrave Square where it runs into Chapel Street, had but one disappointment in his life, and that was his daughter. He had married at fifty, and his wife had died very soon after, and the daughter had been intended to console him for his loss. Somehow this had not happened, and Mr Gresham had been made miserable by it. And then, afterwards, his misery had been increased by the fact that he could not quite understand why his daughter – Rebecca – fell short of the expectations that he had of her. She was a slim, sandy-haired girl of twenty-two or twenty-three, with features that, however placidly she composed them, hinted at inward calculation, and one or two people said that she reminded them of that other Rebecca in Mr Thackeray’s novel.

Mr Gresham had heard something of this, and been wounded by it. He was a hale, thin, unutterably respectable old man of seventy-five, who had worked in the Equity Courts for fifty years, so old that he remembered the Prince Regent in his carriage racketing along Cornhill. He was anxious to stand well with the world, anxious for his daughter’s happiness, if what could make her happy could ever be found, but aware, however obscurely, that in the course of his dealings with her something had gone wrong. Watching her at a tea table, on the staircase at some Pont Street party, or even stepping into the brougham that carried her around the park, he was conscious that there was a – slyness was perhaps too harsh a word – deeper motivation that he could not quite fathom. Mr Gresham liked spontaneity in women, he liked smiling countenances, soft looks and meek attention, and he did not find them in Miss Rebecca. He supposed – and it was a subject that he brooded on – that she had been spoiled, and that he had done the spoiling.

Old lawyers, even those who have worked in the Equity Courts for fifty years and are as rich as Croesus, seldom come to rest in Belgravia, but Mr Gresham had married a marquis’s daughter and the house at the corner of Chapel Street had been part of the bargain. So, perhaps, had the daily carriage ride in the park. There were times when Mr Gresham regretted both the house and the carriage, and wished that he lived quietly in Manchester Square with a housekeeper and a couple of maidservants to cosset him, but the choice had been made and there was no going back from it. And so the pair of them went on in the big, draughty house, with the carriages rushing in the square beyond, irritating each other as only two people who are united by blood and detached by temperament can do. Sometimes Mr Gresham held out olive branches, and those olive branches were refused. Sometimes, thinking to appease him, his daughter revealed some part of her calculation to paternal gaze and he was disgusted by it. That was all.

All this had been going on for five years – certainly since that time when Miss Gresham had emerged from the schoolroom, been given her own maid and the keys to the pantry, and generally been charged with the upkeep of Mr Gresham’s household – and it seemed to Mr Gresham, when he thought about it, that the situation needed some bold stroke on his part. He was thinking about it now – it was about nine o’clock on a cold morning in November – over the breakfast table, with his letters before him on a salver and
The Times
newspaper opened on his knee, but he could not for the life of him imagine what that bold stroke might be. Naturally there was a chance that she might marry, but this, too, was fraught with peril, for she might ally herself with someone Mr Gresham disliked, or someone manifestly unsuitable, and neither of these prospects Mr Gresham thought he could bear. And so he buttered his bread, drank his tea, watched the carriages in the square and was thoroughly miserable. As he did this he thought of his wife, who had sat in this same room with him a quarter of a century ago and who was now lying in Kensal Green Cemetery, and whose grave he did not visit perhaps as often as he ought. He was privately resolving to himself that he would make that journey on the coming Sunday when the door to the breakfast parlour was jerked sharply open, there was a swirl of silks, and Miss Gresham came rapidly into the room.

‘Do you know, I never knew such a one for slamming doors as you, Rebecca?’

‘Did I? Well, I am very sorry, Papa’ said Miss Gresham, not, however, sounding sorry in the least.

Mr Gresham and his daughter fell into that category of people whose want of sympathy is made yet more flagrant by their inability to disguise it. They were not at ease with each other, and the civilities of the breakfast table only fuelled their displeasure. And so Mr Gresham read what
The Times
had to say about Mr Gladstone’s disposition of his Cabinet, and Miss Gresham spread marmalade on a fragment of toast and snapped at it crossly as if she thought it might get away from her, and neither of them, in the matter of temperamental unbending, would give an inch. All this made Mr Gresham unhappy. He was still thinking of his dead wife and the visit to her grave. There was a miniature of her on the mahogany sideboard, done however many years ago, which he peered at surreptitiously from behind his newspaper – thinking that he had failed her, and that a better man would have been able to conciliate the daughter she had left behind. At the same time, he had something very serious he wanted to say to Miss Gresham – something that touched on both their destinies – and he did not in the least know how to say it. And so the father passed miserably from Mr Gladstone’s Secretaries of State to some choice speculations about the income tax, while the daughter crunched up her toast like some white-armed siren feasting on the bones of drowned mariners, and the clock ticked on towards the half-hour.